Private Deep Maze Echoes - A CIS Story

[Eight]

DEEP MAZE ECHOES
Kaminoan Quandry - Chapter 1
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TAG: Shen Crell | Victra Rinnel

OPR​

KAMINO

Diplomatic annexation is not an instantaneous process. It’s slow, deliberate. It slithers in, infiltrating pieces by pieces until one day you realise that you are in a chokehold and you have no escape.

Ever since the planetshift, how it threw The Rishi Maze away from the rest of CIS heartland, ripping away family, friends, lovers, eternal allies. The Hypergate, what supposed to be a saving grace, might turn out to be the one thing that doomed the Kaminoan. It offers a direct access to the heart of the Confederacy.

The Kaminoan Hegemony, which was established soon after the planetshift isolated the planet in a nebula-filled, dwarf galaxy new, peculiar neighbours, has been hearing whispers of interest, of the leering eyes of an even bigger hegemony. It was inevitable from the moment that the Kaminoan were awake on the other side of the galaxy, yet the predictability doesn’t reduce the difficulty in any substantial scale.

That’s where Eight, and the rest of the Confederacy State Security came into play. The brief was clear: confirm the rumours and their actual intent, map the network of loyalists and dissidents, and prepare the foundation for a future reconnaissance infrastructures. The execution is where things might get tricky.

Eight and Victra Rinnel arrived in the Maze in a small stealth ship, just after Shen Crell made her way in a CIS diplomatic convoy heading towards Tipoca City. That’s their cover to get in, no one on the CIS side knows how infiltrated the Hegemony government is at this point. While Shen will touch down with the delegate’s entourage for an early observation, Eight’s and Victra’s ship immediately dive in Kamino’s wrathful ocean, entering Tipoca City through an underwater entry point, near an abandoned warehouse that would be the mission’s meeting point.

<All clear. Proceed to area recon,> Eight announced after he cleared the warehouse. As it was planned before, Eight was to set up the aquatic and aerial surveillance droid, and keep their meeting point clear and secure at all times, while Victra was to map and clear the lower-ground facility and pathway for Shel’s access in and out.​

 

[Victra Rinnel]

CIB Operative Victra Rinnel
Kamino
TAG: Eight | Shen Crell
GEAR: X | X

Victra slipped beneath the ocean's skin without a sound. Kamino's water pressed in like a held grudge, the pressure equal parts physical and historical. She liked it here. Quiet. Heavy. Nothing loud survived long.

She moved through the entry duct with surgical grace, each movement premeditated, mechanical, as if her joints ticked with timers instead of tendons. The abandoned warehouse was rotting above her, corroded by salt and time, but it made for good cover. Tipoca's polished spires gleamed somewhere far overhead, oblivious to the ghosts sliding in below.

<All clear. Proceed to area recon,> came Eight's voice in her comm. She didn't reply. She didn't have to.

Her HUD flared with nav overlays, she'd already memorized the floorplan, but she let the system breathe its artificial breath over her anyway. A kind of ritual. Old pathways, abandoned labs, forgotten infrastructure curled under the city like a parasite's roots. She liked the symmetry.

No guards. No alerts. No mistakes... yet.

She descended into the lower-ground access corridor, pulse rifle tight to her spine, slicing pad pre-warmed in her palm. The corridor was narrow, rusted, dripping Kamino's signature melancholy. She smiled at the moisture, it was the kind of cold that worked its way into bones and secrets.

These were the kinds of places that bred revolutions. Or buried them.

She began mapping. Silently. Thoroughly. Every sealed door, every decompression panel, every echo logged and tagged. Every camera she killed with a whispered kiss of malware, subtle enough that even the watching wouldn't know they were blind until they stumbled in the dark.

When she reached the relay point beneath the northern aqueduct, she paused. Something old had been waiting here, graffiti under grime, unreadable and ancient. Not CIS. Not Kaminoan. Not hers.

She touched it once with gloved fingers and left a sensor tucked in the paneling.

Then she vanished down the next tunnel.
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