Amos grunted, muscles straining underneath his shirt as he heaved another of the heavy crates from the crenelated stack that lined one full wall of the Astral Queen's cargo bay, and lugged it with a scowl across the few feet that separated its current location from the cargo elevator. The pile that had grown there was haphazard at best, and certainly wouldn't have conformed with Jaden Luka's totalitarian health and safety obsession. But Jaden wasn't here, and couldn't critique; off gallavanting with Rogue Squadron, or somesuch. Hell, his droid Trip wasn't even here to nag him as a surrogate; he'd gone AWOL back on Cloud City, his transponder totally off the grid, and Amos' efforts at recovery had gone fruitless.

Not that the stubby little droid could have done much to help moving boxes; not unless Amos managed to balance them atop his pancake of a head, anyway.

The container was one of the number he'd picked up on Cloud City in the hopes of selling it elsewhere. The Supply Officer aboard the Valiant had kindly offered to take it off his hands at a fair price. Unfortunately, he hadn't arranged for any personnel to help with offloading the cargo, unlike the suppliers back on Bespin; just designated a zone in the landing bay where he could leave it, so that it would be collected on logistics' next sweep.

One last grunt of effort deposited the crate with a thud atop the rest. The stack shifted unsteadily; Amos sidestepped, pressing his hip against the latest crate to keep it balanced. "Okay, hit the lift -"

He stopped himself, half-way. No one was there to activate the controls on the cargo elevator for him; no droid, no pilot; no one. It was just him, alone, rattling around the galaxy on someone else's ship. He sighed, and fumbled atop one of the other containers, grabbing the remote that he'd left there for exactly this reason. Aiming it towards the control pad on the wall, he jammed a thumb into the symbolled key that represented down and, with a metallic clunk as the magnetic locks disengaged, a mechanical whine as the servos kicked in, and a disconcerting groan from some other component that he'd no doubt need to fix in a few lightyears time, the floor beneath him slowly descended, opening a hole in the belly of the ship and allowing the landing bay air - chilled by the vacuum of space that was only a magnetic shield away from sucking out all of the ship's oxygen - to rush up at him, ruffling his clothes and peeling at the patches where sweat had plastered them to his back.