Shard nods. "I can handle that.  I think," she finishes with a wry smile to the pilot.  Green button, red button...about the extent of her technical expertise.  Sidling up to the monitor, she eyes the ramp, searching for any signs of movement.

It's not implausible that whatever Rhijans has spotted will have friends, after all.

And then, moments later, confirmation (though not on her camera). "Maybe warning shots first?" she suggests, but that's all it is - a suggestion.  Rhijans is the Person Behind The Gun™, and she's not going to second-guess him.  After all, Shard can't even see what's happening.  "Your call, mind," she clarifies just in case he takes it wrong.

The monitor gives Shard a very limited field of view - just the access ramp and a couple of square metres of rock and scrap metal.  It isn't even a clear image.  But it does seem to show that there's nothing moving in the area that she can see.

Which could be good.  Or it could just mean that the pickup isn't sensitive enough to detect anything smaller than a bantha.

Juragga wanders through to wait with her.

From the turret, Rhijans watches as the astromech droid cuts away a section of metal and drags it to one side, before returning to the newly formed opening to retrieve the beacon.  The creatures immediately move to swarm around the piece of discarded metal, clustering as close as they can without actually touching it.

In the cockpit, Haarmon is running diagnostic programs which talk with the ship's computer in an effort to find out exactly what's going on with the hyperdrive.  "Jalt, you might want to check the port side cooling systems, there's been a lot of overheating own that side."

The turret tracked minutely...as long as the creatures were interested in the scrap the astromech was discarding, and not the droid itself, things were fine.  But Rhijans kept an invisible line between them and the Artoo unit...

"So far, they're more interested in what the droid's throwing away than the droid.  As long as they keep acting that way, the guns will stay quiet..."  They weren't here to start trouble, after all...and it was a little late for that, anyway, as the wreckage in his field of view mutely testified.

They might be able to fix some trouble, though...just which trouble would depend greatly on what happened with the droid.

The creatures, whatever they are, cluster around the piece of discarded metal, pushing as close as they can without actually touching it.  And R2-O0 pulls a short cylinder out of the freshly opened hole in the metal plate, and starts back towards the ship with it.

"Good call Haarmon." Jalt responds, "The coolant compression system looks to be shot.  I'll get it fixed as soon as we get back to base.  If they have the parts."

The monitor near the ramp door shows R2-O0 rolling on to the bottom of the ramp...

Haarmon smiled and nodded. He liked being useful. "You think maybe there's anything salvageable out there? I mean, R0's already there."

Rhijans tracked the droid back toward the ship, keeping a wary eye on the...whatever-they-were, watching for any sort of rush at the droid.  An individual didn't last long in his career field by drawing attention with needless weapon fire...the trick was to be fast to fire at the right time.  And when nobody was actively threatening you or your team was not the right time.

"Well, Oh-Oh just arrived at the ramp," Shard states.  Her finger hovers near the green button.  "Just need him to get in the airlock, and we're home free.  So to speak."

Assuming, of course, that nothing ELSE has snuck into the airlock, say from outside of the camera angle.  That would be pretty much the norm for their luck, she sourly considers.  With that in mind, Shard employs her other hand in the readying of her best, close-range weapon and the one she least prefers to use.

If she can be said to prefer to use any weapon, that is.

Shard lets R2-O0 into the ship, and the droid enters, dragging a short cylinder with rounded ends.  There is a flat box, about ten centimetres square and two centimetres deep, on one side of the cylinder.  Moisture is already condensing out of the air and forming a layer of frost on the metal surfaces.

It looks like the box was attached as an afterthought, and welded on in a hurry...  There is a row of numeric keys on one side.

The astromech droid studies the cylinder, then extends a manipulator to tap the box.  He gives a distinctly puzzled sounding whistle.

With the droid aboard, and no indicator of hostile intent from the denizens of the asteroid, Rhijans extricated himself from the turret,climbing back to the crew area.  In his own way, he was itching to know what was on the retrieved message buoy.

Well.  That's a plus.  Relieved, Shard ensures the lock is sealed and turns to Oh-Oh.  She doesn't foolishly reach for the buoy, not wanting freeze-burns on her hands.  Instead, she squats down and studies it.  "Yeah...that's interesting.  And worrisome.  I hope this isn't a bomb."

An unpleasant thought.

"If you can keep it coming until it warms up a touch, I'll take it after that," she continues.  "Thanks, Oh-Oh, and great job."

Haarmon ambles over to the group when the droid returns. He was curious and a little excited about whatever it brought back and he was not disappointed. He loved a good mystery box. Especially the sorts with numeric keys on one side.

He almost grabbed it before Shard spoke and he jerked back his hands.

"Yeah, good work, Canned Goods. That's some quality extraction. Hey, can you hold it up there and spin it around a little? I wanna have a look at it."

And he inspected it for access ports or entry points of any kind. He was pretty sure he'd be able to crack it open and mess with it if he had to. But that required waiting for it to no longer be a frozen ball of skin-sticking horribleness.

And he wanted to mess with it now.

Oh-Oh props the cylinder up for Haarmon, and others, to examine.  It's hard to make out details beneath the layer of rapidly forming ice crystals, but the numerals on the keys are in Aurebesh, which is probably one of the galaxy's most common written languages, and there is a groove that forms a rectangle on the top surface of the box.

There don't appear to be any breaks in the surface of either the cylinder, or the box, apart from a row of five tell-tales, winking seemingly at random, on one end of the cylinder.  The droid whistles and chirps quietly as it adjusts the angle of the beacon on request, so that everybody can see it clearly.  At one point, small characters in Aurabesh script becomes visible on the cylinder as the light shines upon it at just the right angle.  A serial number, and a couple of words...

Phoenix Ascendant.

"Phoenix Ascendant?" Rhijans read the words out loud, then gave a small snort.  "Whoever they were, they apparently picked the wrong time and place to ascend..."  His tone made it apparent...he wasn't expecting anyone to find the comment humorous.

But it gnawed at some corner of his mind.  He didn't like things that seemed out of place...and a crashed spaceship in a should-be-abandoned asteroid field was way up there in terms of things not feeling right.  He craved some explanation...

Haarmon was just about to open his mouth and make a crack about the irony of the name, but Rhijans beat him to it. But that's cool, he had another layer of snark just waiting. "Yeah, and why are pilots all so dramatic? Just once I want to find a ship called the big metal thing I cart crap around the galaxy in."

He peered at the box more closely, trying to determine if he'd ever seen a thing like this, and how to get into it, and if it had logs, and how to access them, and whatever else.

"Good idea.  Remind me to change the name of the Bantha as soon as I get back to civilisation." Jalt says as he walks into the room in time to hear Haarmon's remark.  "What's that?  Has anybody thought that it might be full of baradium nitrate?  Might make a mess of the ship if it does."

He crouches to examine the cylinder and its attached box.  "Some sort of lockbox.  Beacons are usually put in a compartment in the hull, between the inner and outer layers, so putting something with the beacon might make it hard to find if somebody boards the ship.  So smugglers maybe?  Though I don't recognise the ship name."

"The name's actually familiar, somehow...Something I heard...I don't remember when.  I don't even remember what was significant about it...some old spacer's tale or something?"  He scowled.  The fact that he almost remembered the name annoyed him more than it being a total enigma...

He gave a miniscule shrug of frustration.  "Whatever it was, it wasn't recent...from well before the Empire's rise, maybe even before the Trade Wars..."

Haarmon nodded. "Yeah, I never heard the name, but I've seen this kind of lock panel before and it's old, old, old. So old we might find a womp rat inside powering it by running on a little wheel."

He peers at it.

"I think I could pop it open. See what's what. Doesn't look dangerous." He looked up at his teammates. "You game?"

"If it's something they hid with a beacon, it probably wouldn't be explosive.  Unless you have a really weird personality and want to kill people who potentially come to rescue you," Shard notes.  She purses her lips, listening to the others consider.  Rhijans might actually know the name...Haarmon says it's old.  Really old.

"I don't know about womp rats -" why does everything come down to them, anyway? "- but I doubt it's going to be immediately dangerous.  I'm good for opening it.  Though if it turns out to be something that looks like some kind of round stone the size of a couple of fists, I request it goes out the airlock immediately."

A brief shudder.  She had one experience on a ship with Locus Navis Varicellovirus, and it wasn't pleasant at all.  Though the pilot's hair had kept her amused for days*.

* Gratuitous reference to temporally congruent SF movie.

Jalt considers Shard's words, then, "So maybe something that was valuable to them, so they hid it in a secure location.  Then the ship crashed, or it was deliberately crashed, or somebody shot it down.  And something kept the owners, or their friends, from coming to collect their... whatever it is."

"Sound plausible?"

Oh-oh makes a rude noise, and lays the beacon on the floor.

"Anyway, I'm going to lift us off this rock, and get clear before we make the next jump."

He moves towards the cockpit.

"Hang on..."  He held up a hand, looking down at nothing in particular, his brow furrowed in concentration.  "I think...I'm not positive it's connected to this, but I'm remembering more of a story I heard.  Back before the Clone Wars...some transport that disappeared.  There was a cargo they were desperate to keep away from the faction that became the Empire...an Old Republic ship.  If this is it, we may want to make sure before we take off."

He shook his head, a look of frustration in his eyes as he wished he'd paid more attention to the story when he'd heard it...he wasn't even sure the details he wished he could recall had ever been mentioned.

"Agreed."  Shard's eyes narrow. "If there's something else here - something from the Old Republic - we need to check that out.  Who knows?  It might have some importance, beyond historical value."

But that means...

"Do we have any pressure suits?  Clearly this rock is big enough to have SOME gravity," she continues.  "So we might be able to go outside and check around."  A slight grimace crosses her razor-sharp features.  With her luck, they'll end up finding a small crate of lightsabers.  Though Haarmon would no-doubt be ecstatic.

Mental note; make sure Haarmon knows it's a Very Bad Idea™ to try to use two.

Haarmon put the black box down and stopped noodling with it. He looked up at Shard and made a face. "I'm, uh, not real sure I'm all that excited about going out there, measurable gravity or not."

And then something hit him, his thoughts jogged by Jalt heading to the cockpit.

"R-Zero? You wanna double check the hyperdrive? Make sure it's not going to explode out from under us if we try to lift off?"

He picked up his terminal and started running diagnostics and stress tests to exactly that effect. He wasn't much good at fixing things, but he was a whiz and knowing how bad they were broken.

The droid emits an angry-sounding series of chirps and whitles, finishing with a noise that sounds like something that from the wrong end of a Hutt with stomach problems.  Then he turns and rolls away, following Jalt towards the cockpit.

The beacon, and its attached box are left laying on the deck, with ice-cold water trickling off their surfaces to pool around them.

Haarmon's terminal starts making much friendlier sounds as it starts its diagnostic processes.  A call echoes back down the bridge corridor.

"Two!  Last I checked we had two pressure suits!  Not sure what state they're in now, it's been an age since they were used."

Rhijans 'hmph'ed softly.  "I'm game..." He'd feel a lot better covering anyone that was looking around out there with a blaster in his hands, as opposed to relying on high-powered ship's guns that he had little experience operating.  He also considered himself lowest on the pole of priority for survival...good shooters weren't hard to come by.  Kourene was at the top, of course...Alliance command personnel were few and far between.  Jalt had to fly, Haarmon could do things with a computer that Rhijans couldn't even envision...and Shard was...well...he'd overcome a lifetime of skepticism about the existence of Jedi and The Force, far enough to accept that they did exist, and Shard had some ability.  And that was another thing he could never envision himself doing.

So, to his mind, he was the natural choice for the high-risk assignment.  "Where are the suits?"

"Don't worry, Haarmon," Shard reassures him.  "We'll risk the less useful portion of the group.  That means me."  An odd dovetail to Rhijans' own musings, that, though she hasn't considered the bounty hunter to be such.  Planning, tactics...they need him.  Badly.  Another thought occurs to her, then. "But in the future, we're going to need to talk about you doing a little EVA..." She leans closer, studying him.  "You're going to need to face your fears at some point, I suppose."

Then away, turning to Rhijans, the bounty-hunter already looking to go.  "Can check the pressure seals on the suits, then head out.  No sense waiting.  Haarmon should cover us from the turret...and can, as he has so aptly demonstrated."

A quick side glance at Juragga follows. "Not you either, Juragga.  Suits are the wrong size, I'm guessing." Then she's walking past Rhijans, tapping him on the shoulder - in his sightline, of course.  It's not a matter of worrying about him drawing on her out of reflex, no (there's no question about his control); it's more courtesy. "Let's go find some old stuff."

A pause.  Then, "No cracks about my age," Shard throws over her shoulder.