Private Don't Forget To Stop And Smell The Subglacial Pseudo Algae

[In Rhan]

Problem. The guardians of the vault were wearing power armor, making them immune to all of In's offensive options and the coma gas. It also made it incredibly difficult for Niysha and Tilon to handle them. Further, they NEEDED to get through these guys to get to the armory, and if they withdrew then In suspected that the power armored guys would follow. After all, the three of them were the invading element to which these five (now three) pirates were the effective antibody. It only made sense to In. It's what she would have done, anyway.

In scrambled for solutions. She finally realized that she had one when she glanced at Niysha. The truest solution of all, perhaps.

Rather than withdraw, In followed the armored pirates down while digging a roll of Fab-Grade Grav tape from her toolbelt. She tore of a strip as the first swung, keeping him between her and his comrades. By ducking under his swing, In was able to slap a patch of tape over his visor. When his arms closed to try and crush her against his body, she darted backwards just enough to step back in and place another strip of tape. And another, and another. Part dance, part pugilism, In reduced the armored pirate's visibility to only a couple glimpses of light between layers of adhesive tape.

He tried to click his visor up to open his helmet, but tape prevented it from sliding open completely. And while the coma gas was THINNER down here, it wasn't nonexistent.

She just needed to keep dancing out of his reach until he passed out or joined his friends in trying to climb back up onto the catwalk.

 

[Niysha]

Tilon took a reluctant swing and found the metal resistant. Doonium, nyix, a low-grade phrik alloy, something serious like that.

By ducking under his swing, In was able to slap a patch of tape over his visor.

The phalanx of cultist heavies continued to push on. As they were already being pushed back up the stairs they'd come down, Niysha didn't feel the need to retreat any more than strictly necessary. Instead she took her time from the back of the pack and waited, watching closely. In was slowly dismantling one of the men while Tilon managed to literally disarm the other... with some struggle. It seemed like, through either composite material or raw thickness, this wasn't a problem that would be easily solved by a few swings of a laser sword.

Niysha had already decided against that as her solution anyway. Resistant heavies were the sort of thing that one had to get creative to deal with. Sure, that creativity would eventually boil down to "hit it with a lightsaber," as many things often did, but the path she chose to get there required a bit more finesse.

When In had properly safety danced around the remaining power armored guard enough to thoroughly throw off any kind of visual access he had, Niysha focused slightly on his legs. The man inside's legs ended about three or four inches before the ground, which was good enough. Mass and momentum were the key to handling things like this, and the power cables certainly weren't plated thickly enough to be resistant.

The Miraluka ignited her weapon, focused hard, and found a rage point to draw from. Rage specifically was far more useful in combat than fear, so she concentrated intently on the frustrated inadequacy that she felt every single time she was in the same room as Valery Noble and leapt forward. With a quick twist, Niysha landed behind the remaining power guard and made two furious slashes to either ankle. As the suit began to wobble with its own gravity, she brought up her very obviously, could-not-mistake-for-any-other-color Sith lightsaber in a third slice, taking off power cables.

She finished by gracefully taking a step to one side of the big metal man and reaching out with her free hand as her saber hissed into dormancy. She gave only a single, minor pull with the Force, calling together the destiny of that armor's back and the deck, and it collapsed onto its back like a weighty, limp turtle.

With her contributions handled, Niysha took a moment to observe how the other two were handling the final guard, and parse whether or not she needed to help.

Tilon Quill In Rhan

 

[Tilon Quill]

In's tactic sparked embarrassment for some reason, and as Tilon got his lightsaber smacked from his hands by partially-resistant claws, he realized the reason just fine. The thing about a lightsaber was that when you had a hammer everything looked like a nail. In had handled this like a spacer in an authentic way. He'd tried the Jedi approach and found it, or himself, lacking.

Embarrassment wanted to turn to anger, and his mental image involved putting that saber through the zealot's faceplate. He was a Jedi Knight and these people were just—

No. Definitely not.

All this was as he backpedaled. By the time he caught his balance he'd settled the old stormtrooper rifle into both hands and sprayed some deterrent around. Nobody said his authentic self had to be good at this.

In Rhan Niysha

 

[In Rhan]

One of the armored pirates was succeeding in climbing his way out of the sliced section of the catwalk - and we couldn't have that. While Tilon's blaster rifle had a bit more punch than In's SC-15, she wasn't comfortable waiting for it to penetrate. Not while the encased man got closer to her business partner and romantic partner.

In took two great steps forward and leaped onto the back of the armor-clad pirate as he climbed the sliced catwalk, throwing her legs around his midsection and her hands over his visor. In wasn't a small woman by any means, but power armor was power armor - her ability to throw him off balance or weigh him down, she realized, was nowhere near as much as she'd reckoned. And it'd be relatively easy for him to just lean her against a wall and squish her against a bulkhead.

The Pantoran woman bore her teeth, scrabbling a screwdriver at he smooth visor - looking for a gap, a hole, anything she could exploit. Thanks to Tilon's blaster fire, she got it; a notch in the glassteel. In drove the driver in to the gap and wedged, yanking the screen open enough that she could get her fingers under the lip of the thing and pull back with both hands. While the power armor itself had enough motors and servos to resist her yanking, the motor that controlled visor-go-closed was NOT stronger than her.

"Tilon! GETTEM!" In shrieked, holding on to the bucking pirate for dear life.

 

[Niysha]

Niysha was sorely tempted to simply finish off one last guard. Two were already uselessly squirming on the ground without power, so what was a third? But by the looks of things, Tilon and In probably had him relatively well in hand. She decided to take extra effort to trust her team to watch her back, because there was something else that required her immediate attention.

They had been taking a very long, very loud time to handle three men. The corners of Niysha's sight swarmed with a dozen more. Down the hall in front of them, through at least two doors in their immediate vicinity, and at least two coming from behind. Whatever the problem had been a few seconds before, adding to that was "rapidly becoming surrounded." Niysha decided to focus on one thing at a time. Right now, that was getting the three of them into an area where they wouldn't be overrun.

She took stock of her surroundings. Stairway, hallway, three doors. Two of them - the nearest and the farthest from their position - had men inside trying to get out. The middle one, then, would be enough to keep them from being completely encircled. Niysha didn't know the code, but she did have a skeleton key. The Miraluka took off at a dead sprint, Huttball slid to a stop in front of it, then placed her hilt to the door and flickered it on and off. She was rewarded a moment later with a hydraulic hiss.

The path on the other side was someone's bunk, but it was currently quite empty. As she took in the whole room - all at once, as she had no other way of seeing anything - Niysha noted a very large vent in the ceiling with a grated fan... and that three men were approaching the door between her and her friends. In order to keep it closed, she'd either need to know the code (again, not in the cards) or otherwise break it. The latter was the easy option.

Niysha hurried back down the hall and placed her hand right above the security console. The situation was a complete panic, so that was an easy point to draw from; her body served as a conduit, turning the stifling emotional density in the air nearby into raw, crackling lightning. Just one or two sparks was enough to fully overload the lock, and the stench of ozone in the air reassured her that that particular door wouldn't be spawning any more adds. The other... would. Very quickly.

"Need to move, guys!" Her voice was about as loud as it got... which meant she might well have been drowned out by the screaming, crackling, whirring, sparking, or blaster fire. Hopefully, the two of them had managed to deal with the last power guard, because they were out of time.

Tilon Quill In Rhan

 

[Tilon Quill]

"Tilon! GETTEM!" In shrieked, holding on to the bucking pirate for dear life.

"Need to move, guys!" Her voice was about as loud as it got... which meant she might well have been drowned out by the screaming, crackling, whirring, sparking, or blaster fire. Hopefully, the two of them had managed to deal with the last power guard, because they were out of time.

Out of the corner of his eye, Tilon saw Nysh's nifty bit of utility trakata, and maybe that was what guided his instincts to do the same, which was the obvious move anyway if you were possessed of a certain pragmatism, which Tilon found that he apparently was. On-off, right through that gap that In had forced in the faceplate, and the man died and started falling. The death made a small, discrete, firm impression in the back of Tilon's mind, like pushing a button or maybe a faraway doorbell.

He was fairly sure he hadn't killed anyone here until now, for what was fundamentally a selfish mission against a morally palatable enemy. But regardless of motive, acting with less than full promptness in this moment's situation could and would have lethal implications. He had to act as quickly and efficiently as he ever had, to the limit of his honestly pretty significant training and experience, and save the reservations for later.

Not the first time he'd had that thought in the last five minutes. Not the fifth time either. This time it sank in better in a way that felt like maybe he'd put something important to bed.

As that last one clanked down dead, Tilon made sure In was disengaged, then hurried to join Nysh in the room with the fan overhead. He twirled his simple lightsaber up just so, the amber blade inscribing a cone, and an irregular half-spiral ovoid of protective grate sagged aside. The saber went closer to vertical and froze there, and the fan blades tore free to hammer around inside the shaft for a long loud moment. When the severed blades jammed and froze inside the ventilation shaft, the drive axis kept spinning. The hole he'd made in the grate - which was now sagging with the mass of those blades - gave enough space to get up there alongside the spinning fan head. Probably.

Was this actually progress? Debatable. But it was at least fast, loud, and transformative, and that combination had been known to work before.

 

[In Rhan]

In moved quickly, climbing up into the hole with a dancer's agility. She jumped, grabbed, and pulled until she was laying under the spinning fan head, trying to not get burned by sizzling fan blades.

In wasted no time in just tossing those back out of the vent.

"I think I can get through ahead! I'll be right down!" She called back to her team. Skinnier than both of her companions, In had little difficulty sliding herself belly-first into an increasingly tight HVAC disaster, though she did reach a point where she had to wiggle. A bit of mental orientation told her that after a hard right turn she was roughly where the armory was, or at least on the other side of the door they THOUGHT was the armory - and that idea was supported by the face that the ventilation grate was heavily armored.

The exact sort of heavily armored that would likely not be an issue if she had a lightsaber. Or a few more minutes and a plasma cutter. Though that second plan would require there NOT be a man with a very large gun on the other side of that grate, guarding the door and looking as though he were hyperventilating. Likely due to a combat steroid or the like, In reasoned.

After a moment's thought, In backed away from the grate, cupped her hands over her mouth, and gave the most unearthly, cursed, haunted-ship shriek she could. The heavily armored man turned and obliterated the grate with a fusillade of blaster bolts, and when the smoke cleared he felt brave enough to get closer... until a can rolled out. He reflexively fired on it, rupturing the spray paint and blinding himself in the process. In slithered out of the vent as quickly as she could after that, trying to weave around the man.

He got in a good shot despite being blind, kicking one of In's legs out. She nevertheless managed to dive and slam her hand on the controls, opening the armory door.

 

[Niysha]

Tilon's aura looked profoundly dented. Taking life wasn't something most people were prepared to do, so he could probably use some support. Niysha would have to bring that up to him later, when they were safe. Until then, she noted the exact problem and her immediately actionable solution: if people had to die, from now on, it would be her who killed them. She wouldn't be losing sleep over it.

More immediately relevant, In was making headway into getting them into their actual goal. Even after she disappeared up into the ventilation system, Niysha could still keep track of her pretty easily. She'd also committed the sound of In screaming in pain or shock to memory, so when she heard the first scream, she knew not to be too concerned. That was just her partner faking it.

The second, quieter scream after someone physically hurt her sent Niysha hurtling full-tilt around the corner, saber blazing.

The further door - the one she hadn't sealed - had spewed forth a half-dozen men. A wall of blaster fire stood between her and In, and she did not have time to deal with it at the moment. The two or three that caught her air on her way into the armory weren't hard to send harmlessly off into the durasteel walls of the corridor.

The few meters between the door she'd opened and the armory door In had opened were gone in a breath, and the Force was roaring inside her so loudly that she barely even felt her left arm strain as she hooked her way inside to preserve momentum. She sailed over In's prone from, tapped her feet to the ground long enough to shift into a crouching uppercut, and used the momentum to slice the man's blaster arm clean off at the elbow. The same motion carried Niysha into a spin, and she cleanly delivered her lightsaber to his center mass.

Focus. Improvise. This man was large and heavily-armored. He could attone in death for the sin he had committed against her partner in life. With a moment of breath, the Miraluka stood a foot or two back from the freshly-smoking corpse she'd created. She held out both of her hands - one still holding her lightsaber in a backhand grip that was much safer for her fingers - and consciously removed the knowledge of how heavy a full-grown, relatively large man. Without a soul, the matter that remained of him was much lighter, so it wasn't so difficult to sling his body outside and hold it aloft to provide a decent shield down the hallway.

"You're covered, Tilon!" Her voice was getting hoarse. Too much shouting today.

Tilon Quill In Rhan

 

[Tilon Quill]

The second, quieter scream after someone physically hurt her sent Niysha hurtling full-tilt around the corner, saber blazing.

The further door - the one she hadn't sealed - had spewed forth a half-dozen men. A wall of blaster fire stood between her and In, and she did not have time to deal with it at the moment. The two or three that caught her air on her way into the armory weren't hard to send harmlessly off into the durasteel walls of the corridor.

The Jedi had an anodyne term for variants of dismemberment and amputation: 'marks of contact.' Even defensively-oriented Soresu, the combat style that Tilon had trained at the most frequently, used the same term and the same goals. Most of it aligned with the Jedi philosophy of preserving life: you'd likely survive losing a hand or a leg. The rest came down to butchery or, if you liked, efficiency. So maiming and killing were muscle memory for him in a trained but mostly theoretical way, like learning a language as far as you could go before an actual conversation. And compared to that context, killing came with all the same nerves and more.

He'd killed before. Infrequently and only at great need. Seeing that body used as a shield gave him a wince, a pause, that he could not afford. A blaster bolt glanced off his lightsaber at a bad angle and, half-dissipated, hissed across the outside of his right arm. He had tricks of mind for handling pain, but they all took time. Just now he bulled through and joined the pair of them as the armory door opened.

He was the last one in and he slapped the controls, then remembered where the control pad had been on the other side and put his saber clear through the wall to knock it out. Breathing hard, he turned and got a better look at the armory.

A decent amount of the gear in here had been taken and used, in this incident or others. Trained manpower, at a guess, was the limiting factor for some of the fancier and more valuable material that remained.

Including, in what seemed like a maintenance bay, two suits of gleaming white-and-gold power armor.

"...either of you rated on things like those? I've done a lot of spacewalks but that's about it."

Shavvit, those could carry a lot.


In Rhan Niysha

 

[In Rhan]

In pulled herself upright and fiddled with the control to the door. Locked, sealed, deadbolted - for a moment, they had peace. It was something of a pain to do one-handed. Her right arm didn't seem terribly agreeable. Even a glancing blow from that power armor had been enough to dislocate her shoulder. Or at least, that's what it'd felt like.

Stupid. Sloppy. They were in over their head on what they'd assumed was going to be an easy run. Every minute they took meant that they got that much closer to the men near the coma gas waking up. Worse, things were getting increasingly chaotic - and that meant that they were less able to make the decision to not kill. Pulling your punches was a privilege of the advantaged, and their advantages were rapidly drying up. Tilon had taken a hit, her arm was out of commission. Unless In wanted to let things devolve into a full-on bloodbath (and it might be too late for that) then they'd need to move quickly. Preferably towards the exit.

"I'll take one." The Pantoran woman promised, getting to her feet. "If it's anything like a powerloader, I'll figure it out. If it isn't, I'll still manage." The slightly more serious timbre of In's voice and the way she moved across the armory with purpose suggested that she was attempting to take control of the situation, direct the team more efficiently. "It'll take them a few minutes to get through that door. Niysha, make sure nobody tries to get in through the vent like I did without our knowing it. Make sure we know what's going on out there. Tilon, I need you to load as much of everything you can onto that hoversled as quickly as possible. Every metal box, shelf, or container. I'll weld 'em together as you do."

It'd be a rickety tower of ordinance, guns, and tech - but it wouldn't move much, and that's what they needed. A mobile wall, a barricade, the fist of a juggernaut. "Niysha's more effective out of the armor. Tilon - I'm not as sure for you. You make the call." She added. "Once we open the doors, we rush for The Dancer. I'll take point in the armor with the sled. Pick up everything we can, we'll figure out if it's valuable later. Cause as much chaos as possible. Don't get bogged down, don't stop moving, and we all go home tonight."

A pause. "...do either of you know that trick in holofilms where they yank somebody's arm back into place? Is that a real thing? By the way."

 

[Niysha]

Casualties were piling up. So far Niysha was the only one who wasn't wounded, and two of their injuries were arms. That was especially bad, considering how much they needed them to Do Things. Despite everything she'd done to prevent it, every minute this went on, Niysha was faced with greater and greater evidence that she'd need to go loud, and loud was not her forte.

At the moment, though, at least she didn't have to take the lead. That was a small mercy. Instead, In had stepped up and sussed out a whole plan, as per usual. She was brilliant, and fantastic at clawing her way back from bad situations. Reassured that she and Tilon were in very good hands, Niysha deactivated her saber, dropped quietly to her knees, and steadied her breathing.

Rather than dissociating completely, Niysha allowed herself to slip into the currents of this nowhere ball of dead mass and electrical signals dotted with life and spinning rapidly through the infinite void. No matter how much power was running through them, doors and walls simply weren't as real as people, which meant that it wasn't difficult to pick out the eight men who were gathering outside with blasters trained on the door, or the half-dozen who had managed to cut through the path that Niysha had sealed off earlier.

No one had found their secondary path yet, but that was likely just a matter of time.

Niysha had been given a direct task, so her focus was pretty ironclad, but so immersed in the swirling Force around her, it was basically impossible to miss the fracturing lines of pain crackling through her companions. Without saying a single thing to indicate her intent, she quietly resolved herself to the task of circling the wagons. In and Tilon had been through enough today, and it would be very easy to focus everyone's attention with a scary red lightsaber and a bit of showy lightning.

Hmm... something was particularly bright over there.

After a minute or so of sitting quietly on the floor, Niysha pushed herself up and wandered over to a large pile of assorted, disorganized mess. She dug through the stockpile for a moment, then hauled out a mass of chaotic wires attached to the occasional projector and one janky old generator. There weren't any visible screens, so it would've been pretty easy to mistake for the pile of junk it effectively was. "Is this good for anything?"

Tilon Quill In Rhan

 

[Tilon Quill]

"It'll take them a few minutes to get through that door. Niysha, make sure nobody tries to get in through the vent like I did without our knowing it. Make sure we know what's going on out there. Tilon, I need you to load as much of everything you can onto that hoversled as quickly as possible. Every metal box, shelf, or container. I'll weld 'em together as you do."

A pause. "...do either of you know that trick in holofilms where they yank somebody's arm back into place? Is that a real thing? By the way."

Having done his Jedi pain-management trick and loading the hoversled rapidly, Tilon paused. Shame spiked through him. He'd fallen prey to the ultimate in Jedi cliche: navel-gazing about the state of his own spirit while overlooking the real needs beside him. "I can help with that," he said, and he could; he'd had the training and more than once the experience, out on the raggedy edge of a whole different galaxy. This was a case where getting it wrong could hurt without helping, so he drew on the Force pretty well to bend probability in his favour and suppress In's pain, and torqued her shoulder just so. "Sorry I didn't lock in on this earlier. You've been carrying that around for a while."

"Is this good for anything?"

"Toss it on for sure-" Tilon broke off, broke from In's shoulder, and hustled over for a better look. "Shaaaaavit. That's the shield tech we were talking about, like the exact module. If we wind up needing to sacrifice the weapons sled to get it, this'd be the take. Shavvit, I hope they haven't breached their way to my ship yet. Can't imagine they'd treat a garden with much respect."

The door squalled. He was out of time to get into the other set of power armor. He fired up his amber lightsaber and resolved to have their back a little better.

"Chaos, right? Don't stop moving?"

 

[In Rhan]

In, situated firmly in an uncomfortably snug set of power armor, gave an affirmative yawp that she wasn't sure was audible through the closed visor. There were a few buttons down by the fingers in the armor, and most of the time they didn't seem helpful and the HUD was in a language she didn't understand. Rather than let Tilon think she hadn't heard him, In followed her muffled noise with a thumbs up. With the arm that didn't hurt. Thankfully, the way the power armor was squeezing her applied some pretty consistent pressure to her injured shoulder and that wasn't so bad.

Feature management aside, In knew how to use heavy equipment to move boxes and so that's what she was going to do. Stomping over to their makeshift ram, she pointed to the door and held up five armored fingers. Then four. Then three. She let Tilon Quill and Niysha surmise the rest.

When the door swept open - either because one of her saber-weilding allies opened the way or because the pirate slicers breached it - In charged. Leveraging the full weight of both the sled and the armor, the Pantoran woman barreled directly into enemy fire. They had neither the time nor the advantages to be overly nonlethal, so In could do no more than hope as she drove the sled and armor over the three men closest to the armory door and caught another with a vicious backswing that sent him flying across the room. He slammed into a fire control panel in a likely-deadly way, causing the old module to rupture and begin spraying centuries-old fire control foam through the room. Thick, curdy foam - like old milk. Smelled about as nice, too.

Her movement never stopped. Running as fast as the power armor would allow - which was rather fast, all things considered - In began an ascent.

She had no idea what she was going to do when she got to the part of the catwalk they'd sliced. Jump for it or try to find a way around, most likely.

 

[Niysha]

Thank Ashla Tilon had the slightest hint what he was doing, because Niysha absolutely didn't. He was an exceptional hydrospanner of a person: pilot, navigator, marksman, fencer, and medic. He'd done some slicing earlier, come up with a couple of plans that'd worked out pretty well, covered them from security... Niysha might have found herself quietly jealous, if he hadn't taken fire earlier and found himself operating at diminished efficiency because of it.

Fortunately, while she couldn't stage an escape, fix her girlfriend's shoulder, or fly the three of them to safety, Niysha was pretty confident at the thing that they were about to have to do. She could apply herself there and work on her various deficiencies later. In the moment before the door was breached, Niysha endeavored to get Tilon's attention.

"Run, Mr. Quill," she directed simply, her voice as calm and serious as it ever was. "Run and don't look back."

With a mighty, sizzling crack, the armory door was breached. In was already in motion, charging into the hall by the time a single person on the other side had even fired a blaster. She was well-protected for now, so Niysha directed her attention to the squad of men directly outside. Tracing lines of aggression through the air, she leveled her fingers at the first man who intended to fire back into the armory and gripped tightly to the pure, freezing loathing she held for the smoking, disarmed corpse of the armory guard who had hurt In.

The effect was immediate and visibly dramatic, arcing lines of electricity drawing a crackling path from her fingertips to one of the men outside. Force Lightning had a curious amount of concussive force to it, which tended to result in people going flying when they took a direct hit, even if all of the actual harm was because of electrical burns.

To improve upon the drama, Niysha rushed forward into the post-breach, post-electrical dust cloud, dipping past three blaster bolts as she made her way to the main corridor. Then, standing in the center like a shadowed figure in the vague fog of a haunted space hulk, she very dramatically ignited her blood-red lightsaber. In the same moment, articulated as cleanly as possible for maximum theater, she brought one hand gently but Forcefully down to her side, dispersing all of the smoke and dust from the breaching explosion.

The message was clear: if they wanted to chase her friends, they'd need to make it past The Sith.

Tilon Quill In Rhan

 

[Tilon Quill]

Running as fast as the power armor would allow - which was rather fast, all things considered - In began an ascent.

She had no idea what she was going to do when she got to the part of the catwalk they'd sliced. Jump for it or try to find a way around, most likely.

"Run, Mr. Quill," she directed simply, her voice as calm and serious as it ever was. "Run and don't look back."

A poor combat practitioner by the varying standards of multiple Orders, Tilon had survived more than his share of serious Jedi and Sith encounters by running or swimming faster than the other guy. He outpaced In, slipped his lightsaber through a pair of catwalk legs, and turned a portion of that scaffold into a groaning ramp that started at chest height. As he scrambled up, he did in fact look back.

Having walked the worlds of multiple galaxies, Tilon felt qualified to state that nobody in the length and breadth of the universe had ever obeyed a command to not look back. When told to flee and given the impression that what was behind you would give you bad feelings, be they grief or terror or whatever, you took a glance over your shoulder. That instinct separated actor from object, motive from moved, agentic from inert; it was hardwired into sapience itself.

What with the lightning snapping back there, really he'd held out as long as he could.

He paused on the catwalk ramp, off to the side so In could climb up easier, and unexpected guilty envy stabbed him through the heart. Not that he wanted to go back to being a Sith, of course, if he'd ever really been one, but the power Nysh had to make change, to bend a situation, to protect people, to stop running and be immovable... He'd thought he'd come to terms with the fact that the Force was, and always would be, weak with him apart from his specific and situationally applicable gifts. Frankly he'd thought he'd come to terms with that years and years ago. But feth, what she was doing was magnificent.

The Ashlan cultists, being of a certain persuasion, gave her their complete attention. She'd made herself into an absolute choke point. He tore himself from the sight and ran again, the advance guard. If the entrance to his ship was still secure, they'd need to get in and blast off quickly. If it wasn't, that need remained, compounded by the need to deal with whatever waited there.

It wasn't too far after all that, just a couple of junctions. The breach area was a ruin of mercifully-unconscious locals, thrashed droidekas, and variously-ruined doors. There was the breach they'd cut into the hull, and there was the ship's armored airlock, torn open.

Heart in his throat, he got his saber on again before he realized that the inner airlock door had held. Scarred but intact. Whoever had pried open the outer door had gone off to the bloodbath.

The access panel was a ruin, but there was a backup and it took the code just fine. He verified he was alone on the ship, thumped into the pilot's seat, and started running the most abbreviated preflight imaginable. Outside the viewports things were just as they'd left them: asteroidal rock to one side and dead ahead; derelict to the other side; darkness; reasonable hope.

 

[In Rhan]

In pounded through the ship, barrelling up the ramp Tilon had thoughtfully provided. It was only by the grace of some manner of heightened intuition that she managed to not step on or run over any of the many unconscious and comatose figures in the hallways between the armory and the hole she'd made in the hull. Getting the hoversled through the hole was a bit of a trick - and no doubt some of the components were damaged as In made the power armor strain to get through the gap - but one did what one had to.

In was so convinced that she was home free as she engaged mag boots and went out into the black that she yelped and reflexively fell to the ground when a blaster bolt spang'd off of the visor of her power armor. One of the would-be pirates was hit by the hoversled, the other advanced on In to try and finish her off before she could get her bearings before she could make it into The North Ridge.

Unfortunately for him, she wasn't THAT out of sorts. In grabbed him by the collar and threw him off with Armor-enhanced muscle.

Very unfortunately for him, being thrown meant being thrown into the vacuum of space. The sort of scenario where hitting one of the many mines around the station would be a mercy. Being left adrift in a sealed suit to die when oxygen or or water ran out was a horrible, horrible fate.

In was moving before she processed this information. The Power Armor, thankfully, was sealed. Two steps towards the poor soul and In threw herself after the would-be pirate, capturing him before he drifted too far. It was relatively easy to toss him back towards the hole in the station.

This, In realized after completing the rescue, meant she was now adrift.

 

[Niysha]

Niysha was keenly aware in the quiet moments of her life that being a space wizard-slash-martial arts master with Special Eyes not infrequently distorted her view of things. A normal person, for instance, would look at a fifty-meter drop with abject terror. A normal person would flinch when a blaster was pointed at their head from just about any distance. And, of course, a normal person probably wouldn't look at a dozen armed cultists all aiming at them with zealous hatred and think "nah, I'd win."

To date, Niysha had probably met a single trained Force-user who wouldn't stare down a squad of blaster rifles with the confidence that it was an even and totally survivable fight; his name was Tilon Quill, and he was hopefully getting the ship ready.

In all fairness, it had been a while since Niysha had had to deal with so many people at once, so she endeavored to be careful. The only grandstanding she needed to do was to keep their attention on her, stall for a bit, and either break the resistance or make pursuit impossible. For the moment she focused on the first part of that: survive ten or so men shooting at her and only her.

Everyone had things they were lackluster at and things that they counted among their talents. This included spacers, Miraluka, and Force-users. Niysha had a small amount of experience with showdowns against fireteams, but more importantly, she was exceptionally good at seeing energy. Momentum and motion lines weren't so much her wheelhouse, but energy always blazed bright and true. As a result, she could see every single blaster bolt from the moment it came into existence until its terminus, from every angle. The tiny pulses of aggression that shot through every man's aura the moment before he pulled the trigger, likewise, weren't difficult to spot.

These little talents added up to ensure that Niysha was extremely confident when faced with blasters.

The absolute firestorm of blaster bolts that entred her space were far more dangerous than she was generally comfortable facing, of course, and they only had one target in a single, enclosed area. Niysha made careful use of her footwork to ensure her body was never in one position for more than a moment, and kept her lightsaber in front of her body as a shield. She didn't bother moving it to cover any space outside of her own biological bubble, and didn't attempt any form of offense until she noted a break in the action. Two men moved to find cover... one more stepped forward aggressively...

And with a flick of her wrist, Niysha sent a bolt flying directly towards him. The man fell back in a dramatic flailing motion with an iconic scream, cut down by his friend's fire. This caused only another single moment of hesitation before the squad redoubled its efforts, and that wasn't enough to break Niysha's focus. She dipped, stepped, defended, and deflected in a comfortable flow state, seemingly content with the stalemate... until she found another opening, and once more caught a man who was a bit too brave with someone else's shot.

As their second brother in faith fell to the ground, the survivors seemed to slow their fire to try to find another way to deal with The Sith. Niysha, after two quick taps to clear the air immediately around her, found that opening she had been looking for. Her hand shot forward, reaching through That Which Connected All Things to tap the activation button on a detonator one of them was carrying.

All she had to do then was outrun the explosion, which came seconds later, ventillating half of the hallway into space. Niysha barely made it to the other side of a door before the first rush of vacuum tore through the corridor behind her.

Tilon Quill In Rhan

 

[Tilon Quill]

This, In realized after completing the rescue, meant she was now adrift.

ventillating half of the hallway into space. Niysha barely made it to the other side of a door before the first rush of vacuum tore through the corridor behind her.

Tilon tried jabbing repeatedly at the North Ridge's inertial dampeners between more critical elements of preflight. When In jumped out into his field of view, a clunky flailing shape in the gloom, Tilon felt the momentum of that power armor as a moment of shiver in the control panels.

When the hull of the derelict blew out in a white-hot baradium sphere, the precise burn of a thermal detonator, tension released in its torqued bulkheads, and a rush of air came along half a heartbeat later. The North Ridge drifted marginally clear, a meter or two from the derelict and growing steadily. Debris rattled against the exposed inner door of the compromised airlock. And without that airlock, getting In and Nysh back aboard...

For a dizzying, stupid moment he couldn't recall whether he had a tractor beam. He did. You could do an awful lot with a utility tractor beam if you knew all the right settings.

Problem one was that Nysh needed to get back onboard. Problem two, In. Both of those problems had the same sort of reasonable awful solution.

He slewed the North Ridge, switched the tractor beam to wide-angle mode as if pulling in debris, and pointed it at the precise, glowing-edged, fog-fountaining hole the thermal detonator had bitten out of the derelict's hull. There was no way he could move the derelict appreciably, but tractor beams worked just fine in an equal-and-opposite-force sense. The North Ridge pressed itself to the gap, detonator crater as improvised airlock. That ought to give Nysh a clear path - and In too, if she came back inside the derelict some other way. If that proved impossible, she might be riding home strapped to the bumper in the super trooper suit.

 

[In Rhan]

Tumbling top-over-bottom further and further away from the station/ship-lodged-in-an-asteroid, In had a moment to reflect upon the decisions that had led her to this point. Here, now, in the moment. Piloting power armor with a HUD that she couldn't read, hoping that she'd hit a rock or the side of the ship and be able to make her way back to The North Ridge. It wasn't that she thought she was going to die out here. She knew either Niysha or Tilon would be able to pick her up. Figure something out. It was important to not panic.

Panic used more air. She had no idea how much she had, so it was very important to not be wasteful with it.

The inside of the armor's thick arms had a few buttons. In had experimented with them before. One might be the 'radio friends' button. One might be the 'switch language' button. Unfortunately, one was probably the 'open visor' button, and In ABSOLUTELY didn't want to find that button. Not right now, when she was so busy not panicking.

Not that there was any reason to panic. Really, this whole thing was mostly just embarrassing.

And In could HANDLE embarrassing. She'd danced on stage in seedy clubs. She'd lost a spelling bee to a boy two years younger than her. She'd tried to rob a lone Rodian and she'd beaten the tar out of her. Really, this was nothing. No reason to panic. None whatsoever.

In was so relaxed that she hummed quietly to herself as she flipped deeper and deeper into the void. Just a normal day at the office.