[Solved] Montitia Epilogue: Ringing Silence

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Previously: The Miners of Montitia; Lest We Forget: The Montitian Extraction

Montitia Epilogue: Ringing Silence 

As the shuttle took off from Gardille, Dracos settled into his cabin. After a trip to the refresher and preparing a cup of caf, he unwrapped the Jedi signet ring he'd received on Montitia and took a closer look. The band itself was simple enough, appearing as fused steel links. As he'd noticed when he was given it by a local Weequay, there were five small red stones set in a pentangle pattern. The ring looked a bit grubby - unsurprising given it had likely been hidden for 40-odd years. Dipping a napkin into his caf, Dracos began rubbing away some of the accumulated grime.

"Hmm, what's this?" As he polished, an etching slowly appeared in the middle of the ring. It was hard to make out, but it almost looked like the head of a tentacled Quarren. The symbol was completely unfamiliar to Dracos. Taking a holo to append to his data pack, he spent the next hour  preparing his report on Montitia. When he'd finished he plugged a small, inconspicuous code cylinder into his datapad to encrypt the data package.

“That’s odd,” he said aloud to himself. The last three data packets he'd encrypted and sent off had not been collected. Dracos wriggled one of this front incisors - its replacement already growing through. The data packets should have been retrieved by now. Was something wrong?

He immediately felt a dry itch under his scales. Dracos' data dumps were designed to be one-way only. His contact - one of the few surviving Jedi after a devasting attack on the Order several years earlier - could retrieve the data but their location was unknown to Dracos. It was a defensive measure designed to protect the scattered Jedi remnants, but now it just left Dracos feeling helpless. Could there have been another attack? Could something have happened to Consular Imani?

So many questions, too many unknowns. Even if Dracos knew he was prone to catastrophizing, he didn't like it. For the moment at least, though, there was nothing Dracos could do but hurry up and wait. "I hate waiting..."