Chapter Text
It should’ve been an easy mission.
Small planet, barely perfunctory separatist presence, data retrieval. Something they had done in simulations hundreds of times, in real life dozens. Echo, new arm and half-new mind, was good at data extractions. Perhaps even better at this new technological work than he was at his standard ARC behaviour, not that he would willingly admit that to anyone but himself. The Techno Union didn’t deserve to be the thing that made him as skilled as he was.
It should’ve been an easy mission.
The shaking of the building was growing worse under them by the second. Tech had said tectonic disturbance . Wrecker had said earthquake! Hunter had said hurry the hell up. Echo had said kriff . Crosshair hadn’t said anything, just tapped affirmative on his comm, but that was on par for him.
The building trembled again. Echo twisted his scomp, mentally digging through layers of data. The heat of it spread down the back of his neck, burning at his spinal implants, but he gritted his teeth and ignored it. His focus was shifting deeper into the data. Wrecker, Hunter, and Crosshair, all outside, were taking care of the droids that had awakened from a power-down cycle with their approach. Tech was at his flank, better able to keep an eye out for any potential dangers, so Echo focused on finding their data. His mind twisted into a living, crawling thing, sinking into binary code. The heat had spread from his neck to his back and down his scomp arm, eating away at the skin, but he knew by now that it was all mental.
“ This building was built on a computer-stabilised foundation, ” Tech said distantly. “ We should be safe. I am more concerned about the nearby hoodoos destabilising and damaging the ship.”
Echo wasn’t sure if Tech was talking to him or the others, but he grunted in acknowledgment. At least he thought he did. His hearing was all but gone, replaced by the non-sound sound of data scrolling past.
He broke through an encryption, finally hitting upon the base coordinates they’d spent a force-blasted week hunting through abandoned buildings near the mining outpost for. This had obviously been a larger separatist base at one point, but as the war moved to different quarters, it had been abandoned. It was sheer luck they’d found a building with a terminal that had high security clearance. Otherwise, they would’ve spent another week going through the rest of the buildings, making Echo and Tech hack into each and every terminal in an attempt to retrieve these blasted coordinates.
Yes, they were important, but his head kriffing hurt and so did his right arm, and the whole building was shaking and everything about this kriffing mission was making it hard to care much about the data.
Download complete .
Echo withdrew his scomp, giving himself a second to let his senses come back online. He took a deep, jagged breath.
“Done.”
“ Finally .” Hunter’s voice came over the comm, crackling. “ Get out of there.”
“Copy that.” Echo stood unsteadily, his hearing whining as he adjusted to the new input. Tech put a steadying hand on his arm. Echo took a second to compose himself, waiting for the room to stop blurring into code at the edges, then nodded.
Tech pulled up a blueprint of the building on his datapad. “No elevators. Too dangerous.” He started off in a sprint, leading the way. Echo followed, pulling out his blaster. The building creaked and swayed, too loudly to hear any approaching droids, so Echo fell closer in step with Tech, worried his little brother could miss an enemy while distracted in his datapad. It had never happened yet, but it paid to be prepared, and if there was one thing Echo was excellent at, it was preparation.
Tech slammed open the door to a narrow staircase and took the steps two at a time. Echo followed closely. The walls trembled.
An ear-splitting crack sounded, and for a second, Echo thought it was some weird adjustment in his hearing sensors.
Then the building shook, listed to the side. Echo yelped as he slammed against the wall, Tech landing beside him, datapad dropping from his hand and falling both down the stairs and along the wall.
Echo gripped the wall. For a second, it seemed they were stable. The building steadied. Echo held his breath.
Something creaked. The lights went out.
Darkness flashed. He heard Tech shout, felt the wall fall away from him. He free-fell, stomach in his throat, before something caught him. The impact drove in his chestplate, he felt something crack in his chest. Something bounced off his helmet hard enough to yank his head to the side. It was too dark to see, but he was tumbling. Roaring filled his ears.
This should’ve been an easy mission.
Dust filled Echo’s nose as he tried to inhale. He coughed, choking, and tried to sit up. Something pinned over his chest, keeping him against the ground. There was light, filtered through the dust, coming from somewhere far off.
His head pounded, ears clogged with the sound of his blood rushing through his veins. Sensations kept blinking in and out across his body. Copper filled his mouth.
He couldn’t move. He was stuck. Pinned. Trapped .
There was a fire. A shuttle. His legs were on fire, a piece of his arm a yard away from him and burning.
He screamed, fire and fear fighting in his chest. He shoved at the beam atop him. It creaked, his bones creaked, pain flared through him and he screamed again.
“-cho! Echo! ” A voice came from somewhere to his left. He tried to look in that direction. His head spun.
He had to get out of here. He had to escape. He was drowning, choking, he had to
There was a soft voice. It kept singing, a little out of tune but familiar and warm around Echo’s body.
He woke up briefly enough to notice his mouth was full of blood.
It was darker when he opened his eyes. The dust was settling in a thick layer on top of the beam over his chest. It looked odd, like grey-yellow snow, burying him alive. If he stayed here he’d be frozen forever, frozen in time.
He choked, writhing as much as he was able. His chest lit up with pain, ice cold rushing over him. One of his legs groaned, a servo seizing in his knee. He screeched, trying to grab a hold of the sources of the pain, but it only made it worse.
“Echo!” A half-familiar voice shouted in his ear. Someone grabbed his hand and scomp, squeezing his wrist until the blood flow cut off.
Trapped trapped trapped trapped-
“Echo. We are on planet XB-10039. There was an earthquake. The building collapsed. You are currently trapped under a beam, however, the others are working to get us out. They are close now. I told Hunter we should requisition an industrial grade plasma-cutter. It would certainly come in handy now.” The voice was wry, the grip tight. Echo fought the blur in his mind, trying to get a hold of his thoughts. Each heartbeat made it feel as though his brain was trying to pulse out of his skull.
“You sustained several broken ribs and minor cuts and bruises, as well as a severe concussion. Try to look at me.”
He tried. He really did. But everything was a blur, shifting and waving like some fever dream.
This couldn’t be real. It had to be a dream. He was trapped, choking, drowning in a cyropod and betraying-
“Echo, you are safe. I need you to look at me so I can further assess you.”
It said something about his health that he couldn’t wrench his hands from the grip, but what he couldn’t quite parse out. His thoughts fuzzed in and out, the only constant panic. He had to move, to escape, to get to the shuttle, to cut out his throat, to clean his blaster before the trainer found it, to-
“You should listen to him.”
The voice was warm. Familiar.
Echo blinked.
The only clear thing he could see was an auburesh five tattoo and the corner of an eyebrow.
“F-Fives?” He wasn’t sure why his mouth and tongue were so thick around the word.
“I am Tech, Echo. Hold your head still. I didn’t pick up any spinal injuries on my scanner, but I can’t be sure until I have access to an undamaged one.” The grip fell away from his wrist, a hand held his chin. “I am going to check your pupillary reactions.”
“Hold still, brother.” The auburesh tattoo shifted. A flash of eyes, a smiling mouth.
Echo blinked.
Tech came into focus, leaning over him. He flashed a penlight in Echo’s eyes. Echo flinched, blinking furiously.
Tech hmmed in an unpleased way.
“Tech?” Echo croaked. The blur of white-blue armour behind him crouched, but didn’t disappear.
“The others are almost here. They are cutting down to us as we speak.” Tech kept his hand on Echo’s face. The figure behind him was still. Fives flashed a smile at Echo.
Echo frowned. Something… something wasn’t right, but his brain hurt. He could only breathe shallowly with the beam pinning him, and he was getting dizzy.
“Echo, can you look at me?” Tech asked. “Are you able to focus on my face?”
With trouble, Echo pulled his eyes away from the figure to Tech. He was covered in small cuts, and his left wrist was at an odd angle that seemed wrong, but Echo couldn’t figure out quite why. Broken, maybe. Dislocated at the least. It wasn’t supposed to be that way.
“Are you okay?” Echo rasped, gasping for breath at the effort even such a simple sentence took.
“Nothing critical. I was lucky.” The tone of his voice seemed to imply that Echo wasn’t .
Echo glanced back at Fives. He shouldn’t be here. Echo wasn’t sure why, but he shouldn’t… he looked fine. No cuts, no broken bones. He looked entirely too clean, none of the snow-like dust clinging to him. “Tech. Tech, Fives…”
The beam shifted on his chest. Echo gasped. Darkness spiralled over his vision.
“Hold still, Echo. Do not talk.”
“Tech, Fives, he’s… look. Behind you.”
He didn’t get a chance to see if Tech answered before he was hurtling into unconsciousness once again.
Tech was behind him, his head held between Tech’s legs as a sort of neck brace when he was abruptly awake.
This wasn’t good. He knew the signs of bad concussion. He could hear the high-pitched whine of a small plasmacutter above them. Dust shook down on top of him, adding to the solid coat on top of his armour. His helmet visor was obscured, the light refracting oddly through the dust. He raised his hand and clumsily brushed it off. It was getting almost too dark to see.
“Tech?” He croaked, throat dry and mouth tasting like something had crawled into it and bled out and died.
“I am here, Echo,” Tech said. He put a hand on Echo’s shoulder. “They will reach us in-”
Echo blinked and Hunter crouched over him, a neck brace in hand. He was murmuring comforting things. It was getting to be evening, Echo could finally see the red sky above him.
His chest was being crushed. He couldn’t breathe. He grabbed at Hunter’s hand.
“You’re alright, Echo,” Hunter said tenderly. He pulled Echo’s helmet off, slipping the neck brace around him. “Hold on, vod .”
Echo blinked, and there was darkness again.