The young Twi'lek girl with the green lightsaber turned out to be far smaller than the crew had expected—blue skin greyed by the cold, underdressed for the depths, and clearly exhausted. She questioned them carefully, asking things only a rebel would know, and once she was satisfied they weren't Imperials she deactivated the blade, though she kept the hilt in her hand. She introduced herself as Ven'ari Syndal—Ven—and told them the rebels had sent her. Her companions were all dead, she said, and she had fled deep into the ruins, fighting off Ice Borers along the way. Tharal said little. A child alone in a sealed temple with a Jedi weapon didn't add up, and he decided to keep a close eye on her.
Ven had a problem she couldn't solve on her own. Deeper in the ruins she had found a mechanized door with a rune-covered terminal beside it, and nothing she tried had gotten her through. If the crew could open it, she would lead them the rest of the way down. They followed her into the dark.
The path led through a vaulted chamber carved with spiraling reliefs. Hooded figures were depicted with their hands raised, channeling something between their palms while stones floated in the air around them. The carvings were older than anything in Twi'lek record, and yet one of the robed figures looked, to Tharal, almost like a Chiss—though he couldn't say why such a thing would be here at all. Ven lingered at the murals a little too long, her lips moving as if she were reading them.
The door was exactly as she'd described—a heavy mechanized seal with a rune-covered terminal and no obvious way through. Echo jacked into the port and fed it power while Thrar worked the controls, and together they reached the same conclusion: the terminal wasn't locked, it was dead. Whatever had powered the temple had failed millennia ago, and without its own power source the door wouldn't move.
Frenki and Thrar volunteered to fetch a power source. They climbed back out of the temple mouth at the foot of the spiral and made the long trek to the speeder bikes parked at the rim, planning to bring one down to use as a battery. While they were gone, Tharal sat with Ven. She had read the runes on the terminal as easily as Basic, and he asked her where she had learned a language the galaxy had forgotten. Her grandfather had taught her, she said.
Up at the rim, the still-warm engines had drawn a crowd. By the time Frenki and Thrar reached the bikes, a large pack of Ice Borers had surrounded them. They opened fire, dropping the beasts that charged, but there were too many. Thrar broke for the bikes while Frenki held the pack off, got one running, and drove straight through the swarm to pick the Besalisk up, throwing a thermal detonator behind them as they went. The blast was enormous—enough to scatter or kill the pack, but also enough to catch the rest of the speeder bikes in the fireball. They rode their one surviving bike back down into the pit.
They brought the bad news and the single bike down together. Wired into the terminal, the bike finally gave the door the charge it needed, and it ground open onto a great hall. Four robed humanoid statues stood inside with their arms outstretched. As the crew entered, Echo detected energy flowing out from those hands toward each of them, and toward Ven—and they all felt it: their strength draining away, their life being pulled toward the statues. On the far side of the hall stood another great door, and this one had no terminal at all.
The small door behind them had sealed shut. Ven went pale. She admitted she knew what she had to do but wasn't sure she could manage it. Tharal—by now certain of what she was—told her she could, and to do it now. She turned to the terminal-less door and, straining visibly, lifted it with the Force. The crew scrambled through underneath it, out of the room that had been draining the life from them.
Beyond it lay a room that didn't belong. Where the rest of the temple was carved stone and impossibly old, this chamber was full of advanced technology—sleek and deliberate, as though it had been installed long after the temple was built, or by entirely different hands. Here Ven finally told them the truth, or most of it. Her grandfather wasn't her grandfather at all; he was her teacher, and he had sent her to Ryloth. The rebels had never sent her—she had befriended them and joined their mission because they were her way into the temple. What she had come for was a device that communicated across an energy the galaxy's networks couldn't touch—untraceable and impossible to intercept—with a glowing orb at its heart that gave it reach across the whole galaxy.
She didn't want the rebels to have that kind of reach. Instead she offered a trade: the crew would quietly help her smuggle the device's core off Ryloth to her teacher, while she kept her cover and finished her business with the rebels. In return, the rebels—and the crew—would keep the device itself. Stripped of its glowing sphere (a kyber crystal, though none of them knew the word), it would lose its galactic range, but it would still give Free Ryloth a communications channel no Imperial listening post could crack. Both sides came out ahead, and the crew agreed.
She placed her hands on the housing and it opened for her, panels sliding back that none of them had noticed. She lifted out the glowing sphere and tucked it into her pack. While they had the run of the place, the crew stripped the chamber of what they could carry—including a cache of plasma-based weapons—and then Tharal stopped short. A planetary hologram hung in the room, a star map that mattered to him for his own reasons. He had Echo pull the galaxy data from it. The droid managed it—but tripped something in the process. An alarm sounded somewhere deep in the stone, and the temperature of the whole facility began to rise.
They ran. Ven lifted the great door a second time and held it while they scrambled back through the draining hall and up toward the surface. When they climbed out of the temple mouth at the bottom of the pit, the molten pool at its base was bubbling higher than before, threatening to spill over its edges. And when they looked up the long spiral toward the sky, they saw the rim crowded with dozens of Ice Borers—and, hovering above the pit, something far worse: an Imperial spy droid, watching them.