Rhijans sat, waiting for the ship to reach the surface.  He wasn't tense, he wasn't antsy, he wasn't slouching.  He was just...ready.  He found that mental and emotional state where he was willing to wait for events to happen for him to react to them...and maintained it.  If he had been a body of water, he would have been a pond, undisturbed by any but the minutest of ripples that were only noticeable if you were really searching to see them.

For the moment, at least, there was very little he could do.  So he would do nothing, until there was a time where he could do something.

Shard paces.

Unlike Rhijans, she isn't placid; instead, she almost vibrates with nervous energy.  The older woman struggles to keep herself from making a snippy comment to Haarmon regarding his training, from snarking at Rhijans for his calm, from firing yet another question regarding ETA at Lund.  And worse, from quietly asking of Juragga if he happens to have a drink on him.

It's eating at her, now; the waiting, the preparation for having her team walk into danger, it's why she started drinking in the first place.  Well, that and the coming home without the team, or with it in tatters.  And now, away from the alcohol for quite some time, it's all she can think about to still the hitching in her breath, to lighten the load in her chest.

To keep her hands from seeking out the void-cursed murder-stick; cold comfort, that, but security of a vicious sort, to be sure.

Sadly, the one similarity with Rhijans' reaction is her knowledge that there's nothing to be done, not by her, not until they land.

And thus, Shard paces.

Bold Gambit drops into the atmosphere, amid the increasing whisper of air playing across the hull.  Flocks of colourful avians rise into the sky as the ship passes, decelerating, and Vekkis Lund studies the navigation display, currently showing a map of the terrain they are passing over.  Mostly it seems to consist of low, rolling forested hills, interspersed with marshland.

"There it is." Lund announces, and corrects the Gambit's course a little to port.

Flying over the destination reveals a small, forest covered island in the midst of a bog.

The YT-1300 lands, settling slightly into the soft ground.  A short distance away, a Lambda class shuttle can just be seen, parked among the trees, and shrouded with camouflage netting.

Having grown up in a domestic environment steeped in authoritarian disapproval, Haarmon was on tenterhooks during the whole approach. He knew, logically, that Shard's whole deal had little to nothing to do with him. But the crackling energy she gave off just made him feel like he'd missed curfew. Or messed up at school. Or talked back to the babysitter or something.

So he stewed in silence, stopping only to talk to Rags a little to calm his nerves.

He thought he'd feel better once the ship landed and they could go outside again. But he was wrong.

He stepped one foot on the swampy humid forest floor and scowled. "This sucks."

Rhijans was, as always, pragmatic.  "Keep your eyes and ears open.  Let's not get any surprises out here...by either side."  The fact that they were grabbing an Imperial shuttle out here could be misconstrued by their own people...especially if they were searched and ISB IDs were found.

"Let's get this thing ready to fly and get out of here.  I'm sure someone watched us come down.  If it's a slow night, either side...or both...could send someone out to see where we landed and who we are.  Let's not be here when they arrive."

Slipping up beside Haarmon, Shard grins.  "Yeah.  It does.  Makes walking hard."  Giving him a pat on the shoulder, she squelches through the mucky ground on her way to the ship, tension still rippling through her body.  But when Rhijans speaks, her shoulders slump, relaxing.

They're in the middle of it now; too late for tension.

"Keep your eyes peeled," she murmurs.  "And Haarmon?  Do more than that, if you get my drift."  The young man is a natural; no Child, but still showed more promise than she ever did at his age.  That thought puts a sourness into her expression for a moment.

He's lucky; has nobody to teach him to be a ice-hearted murderer.

Well, not with the Force, in any case.

Continuing on her way, she allows her mind to slip into that curious, controlled delirium between heat and cold, dark and light, fear and calm.  The Axel, as Shard thinks of it, around which all of her emotions turn.  Or perhaps just a balance point, but she dislikes considering the complexity of the universe as binary.

And she lets her senses reach out.

Apart from the sucking squelchiness of the ground beneath their feet, and the gentle rustling of the long tape-like leaves of the trees, the area seems quiet.  Which makes it easier to hear the almost continuous faint rumbling sound far off to the east, where the sky is lit with an equally continuous flickering red light.

Veckis Lund steps off the ramp, and curses under his breath as his feet sink into the ground.  Then he reminds everybody, again, about the locals' penchant for booby traps, as he seals the Gambit...

The distance to the shuttle isn't that great, but the going is hard, with the rebels occasionally ploughing through spots where the muck is almost knee deep.

The shuttle, luckily, sits on one of the more solid places, and looks to have been there fore some time - the netting is partly overgrown with vines...

It was a measure of how obnoxious the swampy surface was that, by the time they reached the concealed shuttle, even Rhijans was showing visible signs of distaste and impatience.  "Let's hope we can find your ship again when we get back," he muttered as they finally found themselves on more solid ground.  He took a moment or two to scrape what muck he could from his pants and boots with a hand, just to be rid of the excess weight of it.  "This stuff is like the waste from an incontinent bantha..."

Cleaned off as best he could in a few moments with only his hands for tools, he started looking around at the netting.  "Hard to guess how long this has been here...every kind of vine I've ever seen grows fast, and in this environment, I'd guess faster than most.  But it's been a while..."

He looked at Lund.  "What do you think?  Cut or pull one side clear and toss it back over the ship?  Or are we clearing it all to put over the Gambit?"

And in the course of the question, he had slipped back into the cold professional again, aside from a slight look of distaste at the prospect of having to hike back to the Gambit to spread the netting over it, and then come back.  Not a pleasant prospect...but it was the smart move.

"Well, that's a happy thought," Shard sourly muses.  "Here I was just thinking it was muck."  But then again, so is waste from an incontinent Bantha; after time in the mines, Shard is somewhat inured to disgust at such things.

It all comes off in the shower, either way.

It's interesting to see Rhijans upset, though, and more importantly showing the signs.  Fastidious; not a word Shard would have considered before, but in some ways it makes a certain amount of sense.  She can't help but smile.  The smile dies as Rhijans muses on the growth speed of the vines, a memory of a green hell bubbling up to put caution in her heart.  "I'm not feeling anything out there," said with a wave toward the verdure. "Nothing other than animals.  But animals -- and plants -- can kill."  Silverslith.  Acadi.  The void-cursed furcots. "So we should be careful with the vines, whichever way we go.  And that's on top of the booby traps Vekkis is going on about."

Stepping back, she studies the shuttle.  "How long has it been here?  Seems to be a weird place to put a cache."  Warily, the older woman moves around the shuttle, hunting for signs of danger.  "If the locals wanted to put a trap somewhere, I imagine 'On the Alien Stuff' is a number one place."

Lund shakes his head, "The Colonel didn't say anything about that.  It's an Imperial design though, so it can't have been here more than twenty years or so."  The pilot grins.  "Probably a bit less."

"I'd say get it free, then use it to cover the Gambit."  He reaches out and grabs the net.  "It's damp though, so it's probably a bit heavy to drag about, especially across this muck."

There is a brighter white flash to the east, which causes the pilot to look in that direction.  "I wonder if there's a battle going on over there?  It doesn't really look like lightning."

A few seconds later a dull thump rolls across the area...

Haarmon wasn't super excited about much of anything going on here. Not the muck. Not the vines. Even watching Shard and Rhijans play Space Forensics couldn't put a smile on his face.

"If I got inside, I could scan the logs and find out how long it's been here," he said quietly, and then winced at the dull thud, "But maybe we should go find out what's exploding?"

He didn't sound happy about either option.

Rhijans  shook his head.  "Whatever it was is about five kilometers off."  He looked up into the distance, toward the flash and boom, scanning the terrain in between. "Through this muck, that would be a couple of hours, each way, unless we called more attention to ourselves by flying there.  That's not our mission..."  He continued following the edge of the net, slicing vines to free the camouflage from the undergrowth, trying to stick to the more solid clumps of ground where he could.

Shard nods her head with Rhijans' assessment; she'd calcced it roughly the same.  "I will say, doesn't sound a lot like thunder," she muses.  "Some kind of local atmospheric anomaly?  Geo-instability?  Or...artillery?" The older woman shrugs. "Normally, I'd be haring off to see and assist, but Rhijans has the right of it; it's just too far.  We'd need to fly, and for that we need this shuttle."

"So first things first." Still keeping an eye out for any possible booby-traps - the locals would find a grounded shuttle to be a prime place to set those us - she begins to assist with stripping the camouflage from their ride.  "But I like the idea of figuring out how long this thing has been sitting here."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rhijans stops in his work, peering at the lower edge of the net.  A loop of thin black filament runs from the ground, over the bottom strand of the net, and back into the ground.  Had anybody simply pulled at the net, they would have yanked on the loop...

A moment later, Juragga hoots that he has found a similar filament a little further along the net.

Vekkis Lund peers at the loop.  "It could be to secure the net in place, I suppose, but given the situation here, I wouldn't want to risk it."

Juragga slogged ahead, keeping his head down. He was playing his role. He was a slave.  He nugged ahead, seemingly defeated.

Inwardly, he was coiled.  Ready to spring.

To make sure no one else accidentally stumbled onto one, Rhijans called everyone's attention to the filament, gesturing for them to hold up any efforts to clear the netting.  Without pulling at the filament, Rhijans followed it as best he could, to see where it ended up...whether it was just a securing tether, or if it was a tripwire of some kind...

Rhijans carefully parts the undergrowth and carefully scrapes away a small area of topsoil.  Beneath the moist dirt he finds corroded metal - a disc some 5cm wide an 1cm thick.  The wire loop enters two small holes on the upper surface, and between the holes a red telltale flickers faintly and inconstantly.

Rhijans nodded grimly, then gestured to the device he'd located.  "I don't recognize the design...but there's a good bet that it's not intended as a friendly gesture.  Could be some kind of alarm, could be an explosive.  I'm inclined to think the latter...an alert beacon could be triggered by an animal stumbling into the net,  leading to a lot of false alarms.  A mine could just as easily be triggered... but they wouldn't feel the need to investigate every time a mine goes off."  There was no condemnation in the analysis...just a statement of why he would consider one implement superior to the other.

"Everyone step back a moment.  Let me check a little closer..."  Moving with deliberate care, he did what he could to assess whether the devices would be triggered by a release of tension, of it it was a pulling of the tripwire that would trigger them.  If the mines(?) were triggered by a pull, then they should be able to cut the tripwires as they found them,  still allowing the netting to be removed and spread over Lund's ship.

Haarmon stopped dead in his tracks when Rhijans alerted them to the possible (probable) explosive booby trap. Sweet void, that thought hadn't even crossed his mind. He was once again struck by how out of his depth he was. Even with all this Jedi stuff going on, that just made him a Jedi out of his depth.

He froze. Afraid to take even a single step, imagining bombs and mines and linked planetary networks of insidious traps.

"Rhijans," he said, with a tense laugh, "I don't think we tell you how much we appreciate you often enough."

Rhijans carefully examines the device, tuning out the distant sounds and the flickering lights, an even ignoring the nearby forest sounds...

Rhijans' gaze flickered up briefly to Haarmon.  "Well, if this works, you can tell me a bit more about it in a moment."  His voice was the dry, measured tone that could be recognized, after so much time together, as his 'working voice'.  The tension it was hiding was betrayed only by his additional comment...

"If it doesn't work, then the words won't be of much use..."  He carefully gripped the tripwire, avoiding any sort of sudden tug on it, and folded it into an open loop, into which he inserted a vibroblade...and cut the wire...

Void.  Hot void.  Shard stands as still as a statue, waiting for Rhijans to make his move.  Sweat slicks her forehead, while her mouth is drier than her worst hangover.  Desperately she tries to think of something she might do.

Don't be an idiot.  Fumbling around with the Force is far more likely to cause disaster.  Leave it in the hands of skill.

Or skilled hands, as the case may be.

Rhijans cuts the wire.

There is a brief moment of perfect stillness and quiet.

And then...

Another one.  And another.  Followed by more nothing happening...  The telltale doesn't even wink out.  No boom.

_{No boom today.  Boom tomorrow.  There's always a boom tomorrow.}

Rhijans slowly let out the breath that he'd been holding, then looked around.  "Okay.  Now you can express appreciation."  The delivery was so dry and deadpan that it was impossible to tell if he was making a joke.

"Everyone make your way around the perimeter of the net...look closely for these.  DO NOT pull on them.  Shard, your lightsaber might be a safer way to cut the tripwires...virtually no chance of accidentally pulling a wire while cutting it.  But we need to get rid of these before we move the net, and we need to move the net before we get in the shuttle, unless we want to try sneaking under the net and boarding the shuttle and detonating them all at lift-off.  Since we don't know how heavy the charge is on each one, I don't recommend that."  It was the typical cold, professional assessment he typically offered, without any obvious humor or concern beyond what was readily apparent in the words.

Appreciation permission granted, Shard stumbles over to where Rhijans stands, facing the ship.  Carefully she puts a single arm over his shoulder from behind and squeezes.  Once.  As hugs go, it's incredibly awkward and tentative -- and slow, to ensure no uncomfortable reactions occur -- and she releases him immediately, sweat clearly standing on her brow.

"Thank you.  And thank you for living through it."

Moving back, she listens to his further instructions in silence, her breathing slowly relaxing.  Eyebrows twitch momentarily at the mention of the murderstick, and Shard's fingers fumble in her cloak. "Right." She grimaces once again as they return, small steel cylinder in their grip.  "If anyone sees another one of these -- marketplace, bodyguard, Nimadda's stiffening corpse -- we could use a second."  This said with a pointed glance toward Haarmon, and a cough to catch his attention.

For a long moment, she studies the tool in her hand: cold, impersonal, nicked and scarred by years of use.  Then with a sigh, Shard snaps the blade into life.  It doesn't change the weight one whit.

It should.

After that, it's a matter of slowly pacing around the perimeter of the ship, wiping the air with the humming blue fire, pointedly making sure to reach partly under the ship as well.  Without hitting any landing gear, of course.