Esper Core: Innocent Prologue

[Seydon of Arda]

Outer Rim
Spola System
The 3rd World from a White Hot Sun
Arkas; Rogue's Paradisaical

11 Months Ago...

A livid sun, so dryly bright and enormously warm that the Arkan sky didn't fade to blue or indigo. At all times of day, save for a pair of bruised twilight's that came and went at dawn and sunset, the hemisphere idled under silver-lit hues. Overcast weather, storms, squalls, typhoons, drizzle banks, and dry-lightning thunderheads were identifiable by curtains and bars of immense, shifting shadows. That season, looking out northward from the upper equator belt, columns of gull-white clouds rose up in cthonic shapes and glared with occasional lightning bursts. It would arrive approximately in twenty seven hours, if the warm headwind didn't pause.

Judah Dashiell clawed at his sleeves. The warmth was dry and crackling an itch up his arms, where it needled into his back and across his hips. The cordial invitation, a handwritten missive delivered in person by a junior scribe, asked for the pleasure of Salacia Consolidated's prime chief executive officer to attend a similar CEO for refreshment. A tongue-in-cheek request for an informal meeting. So he dressed with forced taste against the Arkan heat. A rolled up dress shirt and unbuttoned collar, shell-white matched with piped slacks that hung off his frame by thin-band suspenders. Black and white that glowed starkly against a lush archipelago backdrop. Behind him, a single-seat atmospheric lander slept hunched on the upraised deck.

He stopped, and looked out over a crescent bay. Forests of sea-bedded kelp were dripping up through sea-water surface tension, insectoid water gliders the size of small dogs skating on fanned claws through the lolling groves. One stabbed its barbed nose and speared up a dotted, overgrown clownfish. Clouds of beach finches, no larger than his open hand and plumed in matte red, flocked like in aerial, bloody mantles. Past the bridged lagoons and shoaled salt lakes was a hovering fleet of wave-skippers. Judah narrowed his gaze; raiders. 'Wave-skippers', defined by local nomenclature, were any kind of hodge-podged welded fighter vessles sporting oversized pontoon nacelles, with gunnery stations cut through the cramped hulling and usually trailing container floats that held their prized loot. Arkas was notorious for pirate crews that found a niche life cyclically damaging and killing each other over platinum bars and cherished weaponry heirlooms. This crew, flying banners of a naked skeleton reclined, clutching a knifed-through heart, was waiting out on the open waters some nine clicks out.

Their attraction was baited by the Odeon House. A so far impregnable architecture placed in one of Arkas most prime strips of malleable real estate. Judah looked from the raiders, to a long pearl-and-tan conch rising out of embedded support legs crunching into the beach sand floor. It was a bossy, art-deco tribute fashioned out of armoured walls lathered in plaster and stucco. Shelves of polished chrome glinted, bright as magnesium fire. One way orb windows cast back mirrored, tunnelled images of the surf washing up. The flash and pomp didn't describe the banks of WEB-turrets idling in water-proofed pill boxes hidden on either side of the property. Or entrenched missile platforms. The capital grade honeycomb ray-shields kept raised over the house faces. Judah could feel the awning energy spheres cooking the air just slightly. It made the hairs on his arms bristle, and he had to keep palming down his beard and mane. Carrying just a worn dress coat over a shoulder, he paced over the house landing pad for the portal entry.

Past sets of electrum-plated, fail-deadly war droids, through security scans, a gene-sniffer, and further measures, he entered into a temp-controlled mansion. Ostentation with a 'southern' flavour ruled the decoration. Judah made a fast stroll down a connecting hallway into a gilt foyer. Handing off his jacket to an awaiting keeper, he was escorted by a pair of archly-dressed majordomos into further inner sanctums. Though he couldn't sight them with a casual glance, Judah was certain of passive detection suites that were constantly gauging him. Out of habit, he palmed a nicotine stick from his pocket. The majordomos were wordless. They were also hairless and lacking fingernails, he noted. His host went to incredible measures to secure the talent desired, but he wondered what made these two hulking twins an investment.

The Odeon House eschewed with turbo-lift transport. Any visiting traffic had to make do with long winds of levelled staircases. Judah was glad for an air-conditioned habitat after sweating the brief jaunt outside the property but was disarmed by the give and jump in the felt carpeting each time he took a step. He spied servitor droids, tall, languidly motorized frames dressed in onyx and copper, tending to cleaning subroutines as they gently vaporized dust from the walls and hardwood flooring. The nicotine roll spun faster between his knuckles. His escort led up to a quartered third floor, turned down another deceivingly lengthy corridor, and deposited him at a pair of heavy wroshyyr doors. When the majordomos plodded out of sight, Judah swiftly tugged at his hair, beard scruff, wished he hadn't sweated so, then wrapped at the wood.

“Who's this I spy~?” Drawled a Mos Eisley shaded voice. It issued from a mesh-screened fish mouth bolted to the door as a knocker. “Well I can declare I love a man with a taste for punctuality. Mistah Judah Dashiell, you never disappoint~ Come along inside, pick up your feet, hun.”

He stepped out from the jamb at a tell-tale hydraulic click and audible blip. The entrance to Odeon House's most private sanctum-sanctorum parted open for his company. Wroshyyr wood panels hid a pair of seamless, monolothic auto-doors mounted on sidling frames. Each was an inches-thick blast slab, connected via anchoring mag-teeth and laced with anti-intrusion counter measures. It would take, Judah guessed, an entire garrison's supply of det-tape and entry charges before the doors even began suffering a dent. Cinnamon smoke and an air of aromatic fragrances wafted up his nose. Judah forced on a smile, bit his stim-stick between tooth and cheek, and strolled in.

There were a pair of shapes: one that lounged stretched on a leather chaise, another standing ramrod upright before a panoramic window. Both were smoking. Long, deep shadows cast by Arkas' silver sun completed the austere clime, where the walls were barren and continuous. The plastic heart of a commercial heart occupied by a woman few new personally and all recognized professionally. Dangeruese 'Danger' Arceneau, dressed in a breezy, tan mini that was almost too generous on her body, extended a hand when Judah paused at her recliner.

“I did reckon you'd be a terrible sight busy and all,” She sighed so much as spoke. “I thank ya kindly.”

Judah smiled. Danger Arceneau had modelled her success on an image of a feisty tycoon's child who'd struck out on her own to make it big. A five foot seven redhead with a notorious bombshell figure, who manoeuvred corporate habitats on a rostrum of incomparable business acumen and an understanding of sex appeal. Arceneau Trading Company, like anything cancerous and seductive, now commanded apex influence over immense capital and materiel ranging from the remote of the Tingel Arm through to far western galactic plains. Her word on a given deal could make it, or snap it. She knew it. Her competitors knew it. Some wondered why the Arceneau woman seemed to always wear the galaxy's most confident smile. Judah Dashiell wondered how they could be so daft.

“Drink?”

“Not yet,” He declined smoothly. Surf washed up across the armoured glass pane. They had an unobstructed view into the north east, watching that earlier typhoon storm slowly plodding its way south by west. “I thought Arkas would refuse any effort to be tamed.”

“Like anythin' worth keepin', it'll only give up a piece of itself. I doubt any fool will ever put those raiders under heel. ...But ain't no one gonna deny me this view.”

“Then why choose a conference at the opening of a local storm season?” Said the other, terse man.

Darell Irani, resplendent in a double breasted, three-piece suit ensemble, struck a suitably capitalist presence. One thin cigar in hand, porter on ice in his left, he shut out the Arkan glare with shades hugging under his brow. Out of the three, his business preferences resulted in a secluded persona, notorious for making regular appearances wherever military conflagrations popped up and spread. If Danger Arceneau was fashionably gregarious, Judah Dashiell understated but sharply adventurous, then Darell Irani was the cool operator. He posed against the seaborne backdrop with a boot on the wide sill, unmoved by the sight.

“Just a trust that a little symbolism wouldn't be lost on you gentleman. We require some candid conversation. And Arkas is as out of the way as is comfortable,” Danger tapped at her ash-tray, keeping to her backed sofa.

“If this is about the Etti situation we've discussed, I can assure again: the corporate sector faces no threat,” Irani said.

“So you say.”

Judah blinked, a wash of sea foam rapping up against the armour glass. “At least with the SSC, the frontier has an option of a military response against incursions. Primeval aggression can be stymied. ...That's the hope in the east, at any rate.”

“Your take?” Danger spurred.

“...This comes from a few privileged sources, to conversations I wouldn't have been privy of otherwise. We understand? It goes that there was dissatisfaction across a handful of major political entities in Levant space. A lack of first-strike capability versus a largely exclusive self-defence force. It was an unacceptable situation, which prodded said entities into... making overtures to the Silver Jedi. Alliance in exchange for an expansion of armed response options.”

“What matters is that we still have a kind of detente,” Irani argued. “The SSC still provides the Tingel Arm with deterrence powers. Neither the Mandalorians or these 'Primeval' are going to relish scrapping it out for meagre gains, so long as the SSC can mount resistance.”

“Mistah Irani, the Primes and our good contractors out in mercenary space are not comparable animals. Not with the Coalition. They will not pussy-foot around acquiring what they want, and if the SSC defies either force, I fear it's gonna be a lot of dead kids being buried under crawling artillery,” Danger said.

“The majority of forces idling on Mandalore are declawed,” Irani snorted. “The Mandalorians haven't enjoyed any headway since Monroe disowned the warbands. The only warriors that could possibly revitalize their momentum are the Protectors, and few give them any credence.”

“And that leaves us with an armed cultist regime that is slowly taking worlds one by one in the Tingel Arm,” Judah shook his head. “But the bottom line no one's said aloud is: will this affect business?”

“Between what?” Danger looked up.

“Either or? Let's face it,” Judah paced to the ocean-side window and leaned across with an arm. “I'll admit I enjoyed tremendous contractual freedoms when it was only the Levantine outfits. We all did. The east had starved under the old Sith Empire. When those outcasts came portaging out to Laekia, we followed on their heels and revitalized territories that were stricken. Why? Because the Levants needed our backing. And we needed their patrols edging out the raiders, the renegades. It wasn't fanaticism so much as a lot of fighters united under a kind of... ideology. One we don't think the SSC shares in the same vein. Cooperative independence. And when corporate space opened up, well...

“We are all very, very rich for it.”

“An understatement,” Irani dusted cigar ash off his cuff. “It's the end of Free Space. That much is certain. But not the end of opportunity.”

“A wartime economy,” Danger cut in with such blase, both men turned her way. “Playing either end down to the middle. The most borin' kind of play you can make these days.”

“A guaranteed play,” He argued. “That I know you'll agree with me on. For the SSC to arm against inevitable Primeval assaults, they're going to require materiel and a production capacity to keep up with a superior force. Likewise, the Primes may hold Dubrillion and Sernpidal, but they'd do well employing third-party developers to bolster their fleets and armouries. The only agenda's we have to take special care for is ensuring the Corporate Sector doesn't get razed in the firefights.”

“Etti IV stands tall,” Judah whispered. “And all will be well...”

“And that's the crux of it,” Danger stood, entertaining her own glass of washing porter. Chain lightning spidered as cracks on the horizon, slashing over and beneath cumulonimbus storm columns encroaching on the colourless sky. “For the east, anyway. I aim to keep up employment for my folks even in the wake of this SSC difficulty. Incorporated, I can sue for neutrality considerations between either parties. I recommend y'all each task your legal departments in drawing up the same declarations. Get signatures, in blood or ink, whatever you gotta do. It ain't gonna be no Silvers or Mandos or what have you that's gonna see the east through the next few years. It's gonna be us. Etti IV stands tall. So long as it does, we'll have lifeblood flowing through the Arm.”

“A patriot for commerce,” Irani raised his glass in mock salute. “Can I assume this is the same stance we'll take with the Core?”

“Why Darrell, if you haven't gotten your ducks in a row for that shid-pile yet, I'd fire your lawyers for trying to lick their elbows all this time,” Danger laughed, refilling her square-cut glass from a cabinet recessed in the seamless wall panelling. “Have you, Judah?”

“Have I what?”

“Made any inroads to getting Salacia on board with OS contracts,” Danger opted for a sprite cordial, leaning to pour Irani's own glass as he walked closer for a refresher.

“No. And possibly never.”

“I avoid using that word whenever possible,” Irani said.

“Are you glum there, hun?” Danger approached, brandishing a third glass of cordial. Judah only paused to switch round against the glass, thanking her with a nod and a long, heavy sip.

“...We should have known the climate we manoeuvred in would eventually reject us,” He sighed. “...Maybe I should have told the others that the Levantine Sanctum was just a pipe dream. Politics will never allow for that kind of freedom. Never.”

“That word again.”

“It did last. And it did flourish, Mistah Dashiell, you can be proud that Salacia Consolidated was there paving roads all the way,” Danger's hand closed on his shoulder. “Stick around. SSC is gonna need least one level knoggin' to keep those tender-heart Jedi from messing up their own itinerary.”

“I suppose I've been wanting to ask if they finally corralled any of those patrollers that were still holding out,” Irani lit up a second cigar, after deliberating between three brands that had been stowed neatly in a suit breast pocket. “Any Levant remnants left, Dashiell?”

Judah seemed to think a moment until he replied vacantly. “No one of consequence...”

 

[Seydon of Arda]

10 Days On...
Outside Common Charts
The Fifth World Following Kad, A Bloating Sun
Amidst a Heady Spring...

Seydon of Arda blew water from his nose, adjusted his soaked cowl, and checked his grip on the rock face.

Above, thirty meters of calcite rhombs pushing through weather beaten stone and packed top-soil. Below, another ninety meters, partially washed out by the evening's mist and rainfall. Behind and spanning to a coal-black horizon, an unbroken, sweating forest canopy waving with the wind. Light was just faint silicate phosphorescence glowing through wounds in the night cloud ceiling, where Seydon could spy hints of broken, salt-dyed moon fragments careening in a faithful orbit around Kad V. He shrugged against the stone and silty grit wall holding him up, loosening a shared ache between his hips and shoulders. Up he went regardless, palm by toe, jutting his knees in against sediment fissures.

Local sun orbit was just taking the world out of a chilly rain season. Precipitation had taken back summer warmth, however local storm systems under the orange daylight would yaw between sleet, hail, and piercing rainfall. Seydon was already scratched across his nape and bared forearms by odd-hailstones, and had staunched a small puncture over his nose when a nasty, windblown rock shot across his face. He breathed in through precise lung exercises timed to his movement, as he risked a pull up by an exposed root trunk. Another two meters to the mesa summit. The trunk-root in his gloved hands was greased in an anti-insectoid oil, pouring through a vacuous wood fibre make up. Hanging by just grasp alone above a hundred twenty meter fall, there was no entertaining the risk of falling. Seydon gritted his teeth and shimmied up just a foot at a time.

Gangly lagomorphs nesting under shrubbery by the mesa edge scattered as something big and rain-whipped hunched over drop off and climbed to his feet. Tall, powerful, albino faced and white haired, the Dunaan looked appropriately intrepid dressed in thin clothes strung up by kit and weapon harnesses. It was a poor looking ensemble: an armour-ringed jacket and cloth shirt, dark pants hoisted by a worn belt, a hatchet, a knife, and a single, modest blade holstered behind a strong shoulder. Slit cats eyes that were wide against the dark took in any meagre light. All there was for cover from the elements was a mottled cowl and hood pulled over his scarred brow. The best for electronics Seydon had been obliged to wear on his person were a wired ear-piece and a camera headband that connected into a battery satchel packed onto his hip. He crouched forward and tracked up to the cover of a heveinae bush-tree.

“Check in, Sundance,” Seydon spoke into his collar microphone.

“Check clear. Sundance reading. Seydon: how do you like your first Kadian spring?” Asked Jorus Q. Merrill.

Seydon ducked under a splash of sappy run off falling from tubed, latex frond-leaves. “No worse than putting up with shipwright discussions. Are we still secure on this channel?”

“I think so.”

“'Think so'...?” The Dunaan murmured, picking his boots up. Harassed by moisture invasion, gangs of translucent earthworms were wriggling up through the mulch loam and attempting to crawl up his soles and leather-clad ankles.

“You're just teasing the edge of the gunship's effective transmission range. Beyond that, it looks like foreign comm chatter. Encrypted, but running frequently, hopping between different transmitter relays.”

“Meaning we're not alone.”

“And meaning neither was Khado when he made planetfall,” Captain Merrill sighed and Seydon could hear him scratching at days old chin scruff. “Gotta cut this brief. You're just a click or so from where we picked up that telesponder signal. It's hopefully the Red-Crown Crane, or we've been duped by a bluff ID profile. Further north along the mesa, Seydon. I'll call again when your body-cam picks up anything.”

Their shared comm channel went off and hissed white static into Seydon's ear. He rose, retrieving a trusty longknife with its sheen dulled by charcoal smears. The Dunaan wasn't willing to entertain a chance of being given up by an accidental reflection, no matter how long the odds worked against that accident. North, Jorus said. North to him was roughly six meters of rain fogged visibility choked out by walls of swaying rubber-bark trees, stalks of three meter tall cotton flowers, sugar-apple brush hanging with sweetened produce the size of a basilisk's skull, and viscous lichen curtains. Striding forward brought him to a halt as a segmented, thousand legged millipede crawled across his path: as long and thick as his leg. He stepped out through gaps in the upraised root balls mangling the earth, virtually soundless, and began the careful work of gently traversing forward.

Fortune and progress depended wherever Seydon discovered pathways with lesser resistance to his passing. He opted for a tree-borne route, giving him every advantage with elevation. Saurian nightmares, like heavy raptor-anacondas and green-fanged lemur-esque hunters, waited in alcoves hollowed out in the guts of deadened evergreens and launched hunting sorties when they detected his body heat. Often trapped on narrow boughs, he was backed against whatever broad trunk was closest, holding his ground. Reptilian ferocity made for blood-lustful predators; a combination of hatchet and knife work staved off talon-fingers and whip-cord tails. And when a sinewy and hooded boa fell on his shoulders and wrapped a coil over his skull, raw strength wrestled its wedged head into his fingers and broke the bone and spinal cord with a crisp, savage jerk.

He ranged into mesa highlands, scaling bulges of moss-slipery iron sandstone. The abundance of surrounding audio, from minute spider cracklings on soppy wood shavings, to the pitched roars of ten-metre thick tree stocks, drenched his hearing. Seydon would pause so often and go rock still against whatever cover provided, picking out any off sound that ticked his weariness. Roughly east by sou'-east by another three kilometres was a six-legged ungulate, trundling on cushioned feet and shuffling a mouthful of tusks through the underbrush. Slightly south of that, a pack of canine haunters prowling. Entanglements and distractions; Seydon kept northward, passing the single click Jorus had predicted, still on the trail of a missing space vessel.

And then he had it: twanging branches drumming off a metallic hull beside a vulgar taste of stagnant nozzle emissions.

“Jorus. Got something.”

“What?” Said the reply, crackling.

It was shelved under a rock awning, where Seydon could see sustained turbo-laser barrages had blown out granite chunks and fused mineral veins together across the shallow cavern. For meters around, orb-fern bushes and pale, almost frosty grass blades were ironed and trampled by passing lander downdrafts, a handful of blue-cherry copses snapped to pieces where a vessel frame had sliced through overhead. A long, strut-braced shape of an arrowhead sat under layers of camouflage netting inside.

“...Little closer,” Said Jorus and Seydon obliged. “...Looks like a chopped down 'Slipstream', if the profile's any indication. Good. This is good. Gotta be Khado's Crane. ...Absolutely buried under all that sensor twine, though. Makeshift cover, I think. Khado landed and must have only had moments to spare.”

“Been holding your breath, captain?”

“You wouldn't believe it. If you still have that omnikey from briefing, I wouldn't object if you happened to poke inside.”

Anti-spectrum nets and sensor baffling leaf-drapes had been shrouded over the Slipstream inches thick. Seydon managed in cutting open a thin curtain to the starboard entry hatch, only visible thanks to the angled debarkation ramp still jutting from under the airlock seals. There was a palm-pad gene reader soldered adhoc to an eye-cam with a further keypad interface, to foil against unwanted entry. Seydon grimaced: his expertise relied far more on mechanical and physical disciplines than electronic countermeasures. His omnikey was a loan from Jorus' personal armoury: a shortened hydrospanner handle mounted with polished tool sets ranging from traditional lock picks to exposed silicon chip-readers. He knelt by the collected locks and began gingerly slotting through each opened aperture.

The palmreader was hardest to foil. Requirements for meeting its security challenge was a complete set of left-hand prints, skin cell samples, and a heart pulse rate. Eventually, Seydon managed in resetting the challenge parameters, defaulting the pad back to its initial factory memory banks. The iris-hatch parted as a folding aerator and Seydon ducked inside. He panned his gaze around, more for the benefit of his strapped camera, letting Jorus catch up to his cone of vision. On the right were levels of grill-walkways leading into a stout, cold engine chamber. Running left, twin ramps opened up a short, barrel-ceiling hold with personal quarters atop. Dust was settled on every surface.

Quarters were withdrawn into cramped modules, fit to inhabitable standards by a meagre, personal margin. Seydon sidled through a thin, open bedroom lying beside the mess larder and a bolted down fusion stove. There were half-opened meals devoured in just mouthfuls scattered on a counter space already greasy by troves of cannibalized pistols, rifles, and cracked grenade shells. Jorus whistled as he followed along by the camera.

“This is the Underground for you: weeks abroad on limited revenue, expecting to somehow pull through on your mission. Khado's not here.”

“No,” Said Seydon, peering into the cockpit. “...Controls are all slaved to another gene-reader.”

A veneer of crumbs and spent calorie-mate wrappings occupied the control dashboards. He wiped them aside and settled into the pilot's seat, noting the disparity in body mass and size distribution between himself and the shorter, slighter Khado. Spare room between switches and markings had been scrawled with shorthand mechanical notations. The fuel gauge had been pried out and then replaced with a crude digital display, showcasing the operative's differed opinion on what was full, low, and dangerously spent.

“Can you tell when he was last inside? Without forcing the control locks?”

Seydon breathed up through his nostrils. “...Two weeks at most, a week at the least. That's what all the stale is telling me. This hasn't been landed here that long, Jorus. We're just catching up to your man.”

“Yeah. ...What's that sticking out of the cup holder?”

“...Pictograph?” Seydon hummed, drawing out a grainy photo from the sticky caf residue. 'Picts' were antique polaroid photos developed utilizing almost antediluvian development processes, involving chemical baths, extremely low light, and exposure time. Most made do with cheap holo-capture devices and 3D constructs. The picture was either very old or just a quirk for flavor. Seydon held it up closer for his camera mount. A young, human male was smiling back through the miniature portrait. He looked refreshed and young, only broaching his mid-twenties, handsome with the way his thick blonde hair was combed back, modelling heavy pilot shades in a loosely buttoned uniform fatigue. Beside him, smiling in his weary way, was another human, older and scruffy, dark haired with deep, patient eyes. Jorus Quentin Merrill.

He sighed over the channel. Khado Daiya was his name, the man opposite the captain in to the pict, grinning under his shades. Jorus told that prior to volunteering for a fact gathering mission, he'd never seen an actual engagement. 'Daiyamondo' had been well liked and admired in a couple Underground circles, often acting as drill master and occasional training sergeant when newly christened guerilla's needed a sure hand when going through practice course runs. That easy grin belied a tempered intelligence. His coverage of various military sciences was exhaustive, more than once advocating that the Underground refocus its resources into development cells. Khado claimed to have had received instruction from both Republic and Omega Pyre programs, though was mothballed into overseer duties on pithy listening stations. A desire to see action was obvious. Jorus recalled suffering under an incessant lobbying effort by Khado himself to get a potent assignment, anything to have his mettle tested and proven, once and for all. Finally relenting, Captain Merrill briefed him on following up a handful of bizarre tips that had filtered through from agent nets in the Terminus system. Faced with communities of pirates, smugglers, recidivists, and Sith provocateurs, it would be demanding, time consuming, and wholly dangerous. Khado Daiya had already prepped for vessel launch. Their pict had been snapped together moments before he boarded.

Now Operative Khado was four weeks overdue for a needed debriefing on Sullust. The last word from him was a blurted audio file impaired with compression glitches, mentioning a 'doom on Kad V'. Captain Merrill anticipated the worst kinds of difficulties retrieving or at least finding closure on Khado Daiya's fate. Such was why he asked for an immense, risky favor from the only friend he understood wouldn't barter for concessions.

Seydon had stepped back outside under the boulder shelf, pocketing the memento. Rainfall had multiplied over its prior drizzle and fell in walled sheets. The Kadian wilds were a monochromic jungle, twisted and colourless. Animal sounds were drowned out by slopping droplets almost punching through the underbrush. The Dunaan had gone down on his knee, playing his hands over soggy leaf mulch and decayed vegetative floor rot. He'd already distinguished his heavier bootprints, and was chasing a second pair of older depressions. ...Adult, roughly ninety five kilogram weight, six feet or by the stride, picking their way out of the makeshift LZ on a northerly course.

“Got his trail,” Seydon radioed in. “...Captain?”

“...Just considering,” Jorus replied. “...Seydon, look, we've found his vessel and we can keep it marked down until I can send a proper team to go scouring for Khado. I'm antsy we've come this far, and worse so that we don't know what he encountered. It's time to regroup.”

“Captain, I have his trail now.”

“Please don't argue with me over this, Seydon.”

He stood, walking to the edge of the rain curtain. “It's a week's flight to Ithor from Kad. Add on top of that time required to piece together a scout detail. Another week's flight, Jorus, your man is already almost a month late. You know what the means.”

“Don't think I don't.”

“Let me ask: what does he have on the Underground?”

“...A lot. If he broke under capture... We'd have to undergo a top-down revision of virtually everything. It'd be pretty bad.”

“I can bring him home, Jorus,” Seydon insisted. “We already have deniability. And I'm not schooled in the Underground. Worst comes to worst, Rosa has my will, and Malvern now owns a small warehouse lock up with all I ever amounted to.”

It was all precautionary measures, and mostly at his own suggestion. Blades, armour, kit and further weaponry, an oversized war automobile and various stripes of equipment and memorabilia. All packaged away inside the safety of a well armoured warehouse keep on Etti IV, the Corporate Sector's recognized heart, and temporarily gifted to the ownership of one Khaleel Malvern. Ex-Levant, scoundrel, shooter, sometimes Jedi, gunrunner, smuggler, info broker, underground spy master. Jorus Merrill vetted him and Seydon was aware of his reputation. As a consequence, Seydon arrived on Kad V with bare essentials. A sword, hatchet, knife, a surplus issued Republic Army infantry harness, and a survival kit spread across various pouches and worn pockets. The kit itself he bought from a general store. Firepower would be procured on site, if there was any to be had. Small, hard to detect, armed with with generalized implements, unaffiliated. Traces made upon potential capture would take weeks if not months to follow, giving Captain Merrill and his crews well enough time to disappear. And then strike back. Jorus was clicking a thumbnail against his teeth, mulling over possibilities.

“...Just a warning,” He began, and Seydon couldn't help his grin. “Pursuing Khado's trail is going to take you into an anomaly.”

“Weather system, electromagnetism?” Seydon questioned.

“I can't tell you, because our sensors can't tell us. We've boosted the range on our gunship, and our cutter is supplementing with high orbital imaging, but past the Crane is a twenty kilometre highland of nothing. Topographical charts are all milked out. Sensor returns... just blank echoes. It's dark in the middle of Kad V.”

He stepped out from cover and let the rainfall bathe him, drinking in the storming night. Jorus' voice was a speaker whine in the midst of so much foreboding sound. Lightning shot with comet speed overhead, to strike at thousand meter tall bluewood trees, their higher tier branches cooked and burst by repeated bolt strikes. That brief light turned Seydon's fair skin as bright as silver before the darkness shot back into the jungle.

“I got a bad feeling about this,” Jorus said.

Seydon grunted, retrieved his battered hatchet, and gripped its axe-beard around a long branch, pulling up onto an old animal run. “We'll be okay. We'll be okay.”

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Khado Daiya had walked over ten kilometres, through a reach of canopied wilderness boiling with floral and fauna lifeforms. He'd trekked on cleat-fitted soles, utilizing a rugged vibromachete to cut through forests of bamboo grass. His efforts to leave a blaze in his wake solved most of Seydon's guess work, though he found it little easier. Kad V's soil fecundity and accelerated plant growth were already swallowing up all signs Khado had ever crossed up north in the mesa highlands; bryophytes grew in where his machete edge notched and cut against tree masts, with mushrooms bleeding a kind of milky discharge growing up in carpets over where his boot falls had depressed mulch layers. Rain had watered down his spoor, though Seydon still detected faint aftershave and body salts.

The trail wound up over flakes of local iron-banded shale and lead on as the mesa grounds rose in altitude. Deeper territories were impassable without resorting to rock climbs, or cavorting along tree-top boughs. Flood rivulets emptied over small butte faces into old, azoic pools. The waters were mineral clear and ice-cold. Seydon found Khado had paused at one pool lip to gather drinking water, before scaling up the stone with pick, spike-nails, and rope. He managed bare-handed, hoisting up through grim, small holds in the seams. The travelling pace was as quick as the Dunaan dared; mostly gruelling without pause. Kad V wasn't in the same strata as the Kashyyyk Shadowlands, but a false step could be just as unforgiving. Climbing up, Seydon then jogged into small dells of jutting, moss-screened feldspar and onward into further bush.

Vales were slowly giving way to chopped buttes and other slanted, tabled landforms. The mesa heights were a confusing ridge-back, arching in tectonic slabs that were either manageable slopes or severe curbs. Growth was beginning to limit to beds of leafed and crusted lichen, cactus-like reeds, and bevvies of sugar-leaf trees, rickety thin that knocked together in the wind. Beyond as the terrain grew mountainous, Seydon kept spying nimbus light. Faint radiance extending in a blue-white arc rainbow, at the foot of where a supreme upheaval of old sub-crust forces pushed an ugly saw-toothed palisade through the land. In the blank heart of unknown territory. Khado's muddy prints had since washed off in the downpour. Pickaxe and cleat-scrapes remained where he assailed hard granite bluffs. Seydon followed to each skimping hint, after Khado, deeper into the palisade foothills. Towards that unholy glow brightening murky weather.

He was clinging by his fingers off a bluff edge when he heard objects rushing south at his direction. Seydon swung his legs in, hugging to the stone, holding motionless as he clenched in his breath. First an echo of engine snarls, then the machines themselves. A trident patrol swung about over his head, cutting on search lamps beaming fire-bright into the downhill wastes. Seydon dared to tilt back his head. The patrol leader was an armoured air-car, wide at the undercarriage base, sporting quad anti-grav lift drums at each corner, its belly serrated with rowed head sinks. Escorting at its flanks were a pair of long speeder bikes, fitted with a dual-phase propulsion engine system layered under further hulling. Like the air-car, they were armed and armoured. Seydon glanced at long stabilizer lances laden with steerage wings and canister launchers. Their pilots were dark and hunched over the control handle-bars. One on the left took out a hand-held torch and played its beam along a rustling bamboo grass ridge. All three idled at their brakes, until Seydon heard barks of messy radio-noise and the lead air-car banked around and shot off west. In tow, the riders followed, throttles open.

The Dunaan threaded closer to the light. Darkness was slowly giving way to a grey, false dawn. He skirted east and broke from Khado Daiya's trail marks, dodging between the shelter provided from leaning palm fronds and overgrown fern rugs. It was an estimated five kilometres until the illuminate source was reached, air patrols increasing in frequency the further on Seydon crawled. He was covered in make shift colouring from mud and plant dyes, a stalking outline dripping in earth and sweat. Each occasion patrol lights ran over his path, Seydon dropped and went still, waiting for that stab of hard white to pass over and move on.

Going east put him against volcanic hillocks giving way to higher and higher rises. In a more cambrian age, lava bubo's had swelled 'till sheer liquid weight forced back against erupting gasses, pausing their movement for all time. There was no easy approach to making their summit: every round surface rose in a sheer curve, wreathed in stubborn acacia briars. One looked promising with a cut face of foot-deep crevasses. Seydon tucked in where the mound rolls offered shielding from the coming encampment glare and forced his hands against blocky, encrusted obsidian. It was fifteen minutes to a woefully bare summit, broken up with pauses each time heavy, sentinel airspeeders turned by. Atop, there was further bamboo grass for cover. Seydon trudged low in a crouch and dared to spy through a part in the glassy blades.

Down below, lit up by heavy flood lamps attached to telescopic ascent-rods, taking up at least a kilometre of cleared out valley floor hugging up the mountain side, was a massed, segmented military camp.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

“There's at least several hundred heads down there,” Jorus whispered over their channel, breaking comm silence.

“Mmn,” Seydon adjusted his monocular, twitching a dial with a finger. Jorus was similarly manipulating his camera rig via remote, constantly adjusting for light and dark contrasts as the broadcast feed switched between full colour and green-chromatic night vision.

They were peering over a sloping fall of some eighty meters, across another thousand yards of cleared ground, scoured and dug of verdancy. His monocular spun from construct to construct, counting out scores of barrack sheds and pre-fabricated garage depots and low, sulky hangar warehouses. A field hospital had been established under the guard of entrenched ray-shield emitters, slaved to petrol-cell generators half dug into insulated outbuildings. He spied magazine lock-ups and further armouries, all coloured under white-steel anti-bombardment plating, sectioned off by electrified void fencing. Foot and vehicle traffic had to wind through avenues modelled after interlocked zipper-teeth, forgoing broad thoroughfares in favour of more defensible byways. Bodies streamed out of mess tents hooting kitchen steams through stunted chimneys. Jorus noted fearsome arrangements beside the barbican outposts marking each possible camp entrance: sextet-barreled heavy las-cannons and self-propelled missile batteries, anti-personnel turrets, mortar guns, and drone fliers weighed down by rifle and grenade launch attachments.

“They can't be anticipating a siege, can they?” The captain said. “What's worth guarding on Kad V?”

Seydon glanced at the personnel themselves. A heavy majority wore infantry fatigues strapped by ceramic armour, further doused in camp camouflage patterns under glistening rain ponchos. Only officers held their weapons at holster. He spied articulate carbines and longer rifles, heavier units bearing up under sub-machine blasters kitted with angular ammunition cases, their belts packed and weighted with full dress kit. Telescopic stun rods were sheathed beside heavier combat kurki knives. A few patrols on the fence watch guided heavy, cyberized mastiff dogs. They were quadrupedal bull-hounds, masses of squat, vat grown muscle augmented with surgically fitted casement, blunt teeth capped by gnashing, metallic fangs.

Wedged snouts poked up through the rain, sniffing every time an aircraft guard made rounds over the camp. Now Seydon got a better look at their airspeeders. Power and lift were provided through interlinked turbo-fan engines clusters settled in the speeder nose, cupped in inches thick casement where control lines and coolant feeds ran back into a squat, four-seat cabin. Darkly tinted armour-glass shielded out view into the cockpit. Under-slung gunpods were slaved onto the carriage frame, Jorus guessing that targeting and firing controls were manned by either the pilot themselves or a co-pilot. The camp hosted at a squadron running on continuous circuit over the immediately outlying wilds and beyond by another five kilometres.

Putting the monocular aside, Seydon rubbed at the strain in his eyes. So much visual input was drawing up increasingly dire scenarios in his imagination. Besides troopers, he'd followed after powered exo-armours wading through their numbers like giants through wheat. A landing field looked partially occupied with resting gunships hunkered under anchored tarps. Cover looked difficult if not untenable, the way flood lights were installed every dozen or so meters. Skeletal watchtowers held vigil at the gates and along the perimeter, with spotter teams criss-crossing their binoc fields of view. Atop of already strenuous security measures, Seydon had eyed tell-tale packages that were buried across the outside no-man's-land; bushels of fragmentation mines.

“I've seen comparable security at max penitentiaries,” Said Jorus in his ear. The headband mounted cam clicked and snapped with subtle coalescing commands. “Impressive. ...Confusing, but impressive.”

“What's up?”

“...Bear with me,” Jorus paused, dimming his unseen comm-feed with a hand, Seydon hearing him turn to confer with his gunship officers. After a breath, he was back and with a voice that had taken on animated crispness. Agitation. “Seydon, we're under the gun here now. Commentary is going to have to wait. It's safe believing Khado chased his way here, and he's presumably in stockades. ...Now, the great trick is going to be letting yourself in, finding his whereabouts, and extracting without raising alarm. ...We ought to abort still.”

“Not now,” Seydon growled back.

“You still so sure?”

“Khado might not even be on site now. Just let me get in, root around a little, see what I can dredge up.”

“...Tsh, just walk softly. No guarantee if you stir that gundark nest that I can come in with cavalry. But you only have maybe... two hours before we might be in real trouble.”

Seydon paused as he was crawling back, hollow reed blades clapping at his ankles. “...Company incoming?”

“Trio of cruisers just entered the system before disappearing off our displays. Silent running, looks like. I've managed to cull together a few possible arrival windows, judging their brief impulse output. At best, we'd be looking at four hours until they entered orbital periapsis, and that's the generous outlook.”

“No time to lose,” He grunted, scaling down off the hillock to the mossy barrens below.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

There were points of ingress. Entrances that were possible were Seydon of Arda properly armed and backed by trained infiltrators seasoned by long years battling for the Underground's cause. At his insistence, he made planetfall, essentially, naked. Risking the razed tracts burned and tore out about the facility fences would have saw him detected, shot from high-powered rifle mounts, or if he was supremely fortunate and avoided post lamps and spectrum-scanning binoc scopes or augers, flash-cooked and burst into flailing pieces and limbs crossing the minefields. The sense of obsolescence pricked thickly at him, now too aware that his aversion to modern tech developments was costing him time and options. Dunaan weren't commandos. Nothing like the ARC specialists eight centuries prior, or the modern special service members serving in the mercenary Pyre. Seydon gave Jorus Merrill his sworn word they'd come away successful. The promise goaded him to tripple-time his efforts.

The camp nestled under the sleeping auspices of a grand set of spanning palisades. Seydon had eyed them prior, thin wraps of wandering stratas clouds breaking up across their rocky Arête ridges. They were a saw-toothed spine glowering at some three thousand meters above, and they drooled with sweating run off as rain made the hard, black stone shine in the long night. It provided a natural landmark and cover from western approaches. He could see temporary relay dish towers settled like broken toothpicks on the high ridges, beacons winking against a rushing, overcast sky.

Seydon withdrew to the tree line and lowered into hunched up crouch, skirting north where rubber-tree copses were especially thick. He blackened his shirting, face, and bare forearms with handfuls of soot-coloured earth compost, looking like another cavorting shadow that darted on a careful circle southward. By then, cold and exposure was knotting up gut-cramps and pushing a shiver into the Dunaan's bones. Warmth came when downwash jetting from passing airspeeders, rounding on patrol, flashed by over his head, forcing him into crawlspaces beneath or through fallen logs. Once, a lingering spot lamp had him paused over a trembling termite mound, his weight having broken the nest roof and depositing a wriggling army of irate and confused bugs onto his chest and belly. Seydon was still picking stragglers out of his armpits when he found the poleyns of the palisade heights rising up through the jungle crop.

He replaced his gloves for bare fingers and palms. Testing for holds showed that some ledges were merely accretions of slab rock held in place by a glue of mud and soil. Frustration compounded a sense of dwindling time. Across the vale, the encampment was beginning to seethe with increasing activity. Bulk repulsor-trailers were lining up in two-by-two rows, idling on stand by orders as lander crews prepped the emptying landing field. A quartet of gunships, heavy with armament pods and missile nacelles, rose and took up stations as the airspeeder squads increased their circuits. Seydon clinched on a make-shift cloak of bearded vine creepers over his back, sub-par camouflage but enough to fool just a cursory glance, and inched up the slippery palisade granite and mica.

Breezes coming across the rock turned to whistling gales and howled with shrill into his ears. Cold aches in his fingers had be to fought off while he slotted his knuckles into gristly slits on the stone. Choss and other shards of rotten anthracite loosed or broke beneath his palms. And when an errant search beam stroked over the mountain wall face, he went still, willing even his sweat to freeze, and waited for the killing light to pass. Seydon paused to suck moisture out of pulpy lichen growths hanging off pebble shingles, unwilling to let the shine off his old canteen catch a glare and give him up. Once, the swept underside of an on-station gunship paused just over him. Down-drafts generated by a combination of thrust-lift engines and a rotor-jet configuration nearly blasted him out of his bare perch. Seydon braced up, coiling up sheathes and hanks of muscle from his shoulders to ankles. And then leapt out to his left. A beat; empty and freezing air, rain whipping across, hard as hailstones, his body caught in a second of dead weight that roiled his stomach. His hands reached out and slipped across the stone, before catching into an open chimney, slamming his weight into the chute.

Directly below, by a fall of some ten meters, rose the administrative barbican that looked like the brain and spinal stem of the massed camp. It was a stocky, modular construction. An orphic cube of salient angles pressing out, with seeming little regard for rules of aesthetic. Tele-comm towers and forests of thistle-like radio needles quilled the roofs. Thickset e-web turrets peered over shielded bulwarks on most roof corners, besides a handful of unoccupied mortar stations. The throb of comm-signals crinkling the air caused a strange gyration in the rainfall, and made the skin on Seydon's molars tremor whenever heavier data packets were transmitted. Yet, from his stance wedged up in the stone chute, the command post looked inset to the mountain, posing like a sentient-made polyhedron.

Seydon spied on the guard rotation regularly patrolling the empty stretches of the roofing. Again, he couldn't make out any hint of a face. Under poncho hoods, expressions were guarded by firm balaclava's, compact helmets, and wedged on goggle-masks treated for light enhancement. Waiting for a break in their wandering formations, a chance came when one stopped to have a better look at the high palisade flanks. Seydon was a falling shadow, striding the air, landing atop a fan-shield set over a modular and large air-conditioner unit. He capered off, rolling into a crouched gait. The jump and touch down were both performed with virtual silence, but he had edged out his hatchet and knife, waiting on some muffled groan of alarm. ...But nothing. No stammering radio squawks or ducking against gun fire hammering at his cover. Seydon peeked around from his spot beside a utility shed, watching a pair of soldiers wander past. He could hear six different patterns of walking treads splashing across smooth metal siding. One was breaking their silence to inform the watch commander all was clear and uneventful. Seydon blinked against a web of lightning that clawed overhead. Thunder jittered each rain puddle.

Entry could be gained through a handful of openings. Two hatch-doors on the rooftop itself, emergency exit gates on the fire gantries welded down the module walls, and a heavy, sprawling offloading barn ramping down into the building's cargo basement. There'd been incessant traffic running transports from the camp admin barbican outward to the emptied landing fields. By now, a small fort was piling high out of flat-coloured intermodal containers, and watched over by a combination of on-foot infantry, power-armoured chassis, and the constant presence of alerted aircraft. In preparation for those incoming dreadnoughts, if Seydon could hazard a guess. He briefly toggled on his chrono-piece to check against his time. Damn, he realized, three quarters of an hour wasted just manoeuvring to infiltrate. No time to bother harrying the roof patrols or trying to overpower the digital locks or card readers.

He inched over to the AC tower. Widely necked circulatory ducts funnelled up through ceramic pantiles, looking so much like crooked nail heads poking up from the durasteel girders. Each had a face of linked grille-wires helping prevent a body or indigent avians from roosting in their mouths. Seydon crept up until face to face with one duct's cowling, easing up his longknife through the grille frame and began loosening it free from its nail brackets. It produced a grating rip of metal and on metal, so loud in his ears, all still dreading the plods of heavy, cleat soled boots approaching before and behind him. Finally, he loosed its bottom edging free; enough to peel the grilling upward like a can lid. Up came his legs as he fought to sidle in through the aperture and drop out of sight down the duct throat, hurrying. His fingers were the last to let go of the grille and vent mouth, twisting the screen back into rough place: a quarter second later, a guardsman's flashlight browsed over, then thankfully shut off.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

“You're inside? ...You're inside!” Captain Merrill quipped over their channel. “Alright... Alright, okay, time's still running. I can't tell to hurry any faster, but if you're holding out on me, I'd say to get the lead out, Seydon. I'd wave against anything like a comm room or command centre. Just... Just too much to try accounting for, bodies, security. ...Here's a risk: find an officer. Track them, get them isolated, and maybe they'll give up Mister Daiya.”

Inside the duct channel was cramped, shut in room that would have been totally unbearable for a soul prone to claustrophobia. Was it was, Seydon was constantly pausing each time a buckle or the crossguard on his vibrosword settled over his backside scraped or caught on the aluminium. The sound raked hard in his ears, though he could perceive auditory sensations to superhuman degrees, making even sweat drops that hurtled below off his brow plink with damning volume. He kept pushing out his limbs, 'stepping' a foot at a time down the long funnel.

There was no telling where he was in relation to the command centre's layout. Seydon was aware by vague impressions, granted by echoes penetrating the walling and insulate, he was passing down through several floors. The chute opened up into branching tunnels weaving out to connect over floors, chambers, and hallways, but it's plunge defied the building lines he'd noted on initial recon. Every so often, blasts of chatter found their way to him, pushed whenever the AC controls cued active and blasted heated or arctic wind up into his face. The words were indistinguishable garble but the timbre, cadence, and pitch said of stressed banter and curt orders.

The camp was undergoing breakup. Now deeper by three further floors, rubber wheeled trollies were squealing under packed weight, while industrial lift-wagons powered over the flooring, suspended by low-set repulsor plates, carried even heavier loads. Seydon dared to snatch a peak through a slanted grate. Monolithic server towers and detached interface terminals, computers of varied and exotic stripes, diagnostic tables, banded vats sloughed over with cushioning tarpaulin, smaller collections of encased samples, containers under armed and armoured escort emblazoned with warning labelling, next to common genera of construction material. Floor by floor, rooms were being stripped, packaged, and then sent topside to the surface loading bays and settled in reinforced transport cartons. A blank worry began turning Seydon's belly round in a metal clad knot. He was certain that above him lied the surface by at least a floor or two. Too far down, he thought, but no one was alone. Officers were in company of adjutants and logistical personnel, handling the weight of an impromptu relocation. He'd scaled through one branching duct into what he thought were more select rooms for an interior barrack. They were already stripped, teams of black-suited labourers turning plasma-welders to the walling and picking off the panels section by section.

Eventually, the duct chute bottomed out. Enough overhead enabled Seydon to land on palms and knees, crawling along now horizontally through a stuffy conduit, dreading when he had to sidle over open vent rakes and hope that speed and a cat's light touch would wriggle him out of sight. Just how, if he could be recovered, Khado Daiya would be extracted was growing significantly problematic with each meter traversed. Working off a rough mental diagram, Seydon guessed he was approximately nine floors down into the rock, going west now: further deep into the palisades buried foundations. Here, wafting up through the halls, the temperatures were chilled and a stale taste of metallic ozone parched his tongue. The personnel rush was an ant run. Increasingly, he saw fewer and fewer bodies dressed in anything outside sealed armourweave and zippered sterility gowns. More equipment was shuffled out, born up by servitor droids that handled the manual dexterity required to process the loads to awaiting bulk elevators.

He shuffled north and risked a little speed. Drum and clatter rising from laboratory industry aided keeping his overhead profile masked as he felt his harnesses rattle against the conduit skin. Hints of an extraordinary research and development effort plagued him tantalizingly. Save for simplistic diagnostician modules slotted into mostly emptied power junctions, most rooms were bare. Yet distantly, there were tell-tale vibrations occasionally threading down the metal piping. Seydon bore up an impression of a vast interior space that had been cut out of the anthragate and deep roots of bedrock, hidden further floors in. There was still precious little sign of a detention centre. Neither he or Jorus sighted any constructs that would have resembled a holding barracks for unruly personnel or prisoners on the surface, and the hidden depths to the command tower begged a closer glance. But exploration was sapping time. Seydon held up his chrono-piece in the gloom: fifteen minutes, and he'd be required to make an ascent back to the surface for their forecasted escape window.

And then a sound upset him. He'd been easing across another vent rake as a breath of distant conversation carried up into the pipe. Seydon froze and cocked an ear, ignoring all other sensoria to favour his ears. An echo effect was transmuting the voice into flat and indistinct atonal murmurs. He could pick out a second and third voice that replied or cut in, beside another dozen bodies that were marching in close proximity. An escort guard. Seydon hitched up off his belly and scurried on elbows, wrists, and knees. The conduit had to loop around before he could double-back on his path. It brought him out and over atop a broad, almost vaulted hallway running the length of the level. Hatchways to either side of the long hall were cycled open, more personnel jostling and pushing, laden with further trolleys or lugging boxed kit in their arms or struggling teams. Seydon likened it to a scene from drydock, simply reversed. Panelling was coming off the walls to be stacked, electricians switching out with deconstructors as they sized up the monumental issue of plumbing out the wiring. A smell of deep earth was beginning to seep through.

Seydon edged to a grate and brought his gaze against a marching force cleaving its way through the organized chaos. They were a small crowd counting out to sixteen, led by a man and woman dressed in dissimilar capes of matching ebony, shining almost jet blue in the light. At their backs walked a whole entourage, including second commanders, a circle of body guards that followed the fore pair, and an attachment of elite troops defined by sealed and heavily plated environmental suits, hefting rigorously modified carbines. All lesser staff and soldiers parted out of their way with rapt deference. They were hardly noticed. The woman and man were constantly halting their strides, turning in as their argument drifted up.

“...eary of your protestations and weary of this conversation. Assemble your warband and have them prepped for travel. Strata Thirteen is naked without a competent force helping rein down the populace. We've wasted time hosting you here, where I hardly need you, where you hardly matter,” Said the woman.

“I won't be shut out, Nepritov,” Barked the man back in fierce reply. “Without my labours securing resources from the UR, you'd have stalled trying to circumvent traditional channels. Maybe the Council of Seth yoked me to you as punishment, but you were backsliding on grand promises already. I deserve to see this fruition.”

Jorus hummed over the comm line. “...Certainly have all the bearings of Lord Commanders. Certainly know how to back-talk each other. Some partial facial scans are coming through, but nothing I can run through a database for reference.”

“Shhh,” Seydon hushed, watching.

She matched her compatriot for height in heel-less traverse boots, her body holstered in the grip of slender fiber-weave battle dress, that lent an edge of techno-savvy violence. Beneath her long poncho cloak were tell-tale outlines of strapped weaponry: the slender profile of a machined lightsaber hilt, a bulky auto-pistol with an extended mag jutting like an antiquated bookmark, pouched belting not unlike the rigging Seydon wore, and an ear-piece hardwired to a slaved and discreet transmitter case somewhere on her person. Her face was an unflinching crag, as formidable and saw-edged as the far away palisade fang-peaks. Eyes as deep, tempestuous, and blue as a Contruum sea eyed this rebellious element.

“Let me be succinct,” She began coolly. “You've lost face, clout, not to mention your hand in that last blunder. Your status amidst the Fourth Armed Group is whatever I wish it to be. If you hadn't come along, I'd have most likely seen to all my difficulties personally, without a loss for time. You're treading on my few, precious nerves, Lord Sennex, and I pay you some respect that befits the force you once were. But if you don't get on with the itinerary I've placed you with, then whatever graces you've rebuilt with the Council, your peers, and me will be for nought.”

“Sennex?” Captain Merrill started.

“As you wish,” Said Borja Sennex, peering at her with furrowed, enraged candour. “Have your day, then. But we'll have action when you come calling home, Khalanda. Black Annis is just as much my child as yours. Remember that.”

“Don't you know him?” Jorus pressed.

Seydon was silent against replying. His cat's eyes hadn't left the lead male. Borja Sennex. Sith Lord, self-titled Inquisitor, a chameleon mercenary that'd built a secreted power base and a shadowy might over two decades of seclusion. His form was draped in the dark cloaking that hung to his ankles and hid away his own attire, save for high, plate gorget that ran around his nape and throat like a stiff collar. A roughly handsome face, greyed silver and clothed with a well groomed beard, completed his almost overbearing presence. Somehow, his reality met, exceeded, and disappointed the notions Seydon had grown for him over the handful of years.

They had encountered one another midst the frigid dust winter on Dromund Kaas following its glassing by Mandalorian bombardment, not so long after the dissolution of the Old Empire. Sennex's prey had been a lowly Dunaan named Ajax, whom he sought out of a craving for his wizened lore regarding an esoteric legend. Seydon's interference in those traps and plots put them at odds, set them into an inevitable collision of blows. In the end, Borja Sennex had been beaten at his game. Triumphing through the Trials of Water and the dungeons beneath the foundations of Dark Temple, Seydon returned from the dead and chased Sennex down with whole vengeance. On Arda, they met blades. For his efforts and over twenty years of laboured work, Borja was denied the prize so fiendishly sought and lost his right hand. For Seydon, the triumph had necessitated a total transformation. An alchemical bath triggered cascading alterations through his body and transmuted him from an ordinary human into a mutant super-hunter. It was old drama, but the damages Sennex had wrought against Seydon's family, the corruption he sowed, all the temptation and arrogance the Dunaan experienced first hand, swore him against the Sith Lord with lasting enmity.

“Shae,” Borja said, turning from the woman. A man, presumably his Second, stepped forward from the following entourage. Like his masters, he was a tall specimen, a hint of Epicanthix features tucking his visage into a hard, exotic blade of a face. Well groomed mantles of long, battleship-black hair ran slick and polished to his shoulder blades. Small and vibrant eyes peered out under a sharp brow line. A formal suit-coat, tailored by military tastes and affixed with dagger bandoliers, ran off his frame and swirled at his boot heels.

“Boss,” He said.

“We're gone,” And Sennex began clanking down the hallway.

'Shae' raised a hand and cocked cocked up a half-curled finger. At his gesture, the trio of crimson robed, silver masked swordsman idling at their master's back broke into a synced gait. Seydon knew them too. Aay'gala; 'The Bitter Water'. Sennex's most trusted killer elite and the spine of his personal security. They were recruits culled from the vaunted, reclusive academies of the Sith Bladeborn, a surviving sect dedicated to mastering the language of longsword fighting. Each of them were a vetted Masterblade, to say the best amidst their peers. One such battler foiled Seydon from delivering a killing stroke to Sennex, challenging the Dunaan for supremacy. Their lethality could not be underestimated. But that they answered to Sennex's sub-commander was telling in of itself. Seydon glanced back to the woman.

“...ETA update,” She muttered, stroking fingertips round the soft of her temples.

“Ma'am,” A staff sergeant stepped forward, saluting tightly. “Reports from CC. Dreadnoughts Shackleton, Vallinast, and The Excruciator are due to reach close orbit in fifty three minutes. No issues reported.”

“And the surface work?”

The SSG turned over her hip and consulted her comm-set. “...Ma'am. Breakup is proceeding. Our only standing concern is an inclement system over our ranges. Patrols report no further incursions. All screens are negative for contacts. Relocation is still a go,”

“Good. I won't miss this jungle subterfuge. See yourselves to the command centre,” Their Lady said. “Report in to Commander Balisard.”

“Ma'am!” All six clicked in their boots and drew up their hands crisply, breaking into a quick march for the hallway's end turbolifts.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

It was a tiny shape, quite out of place in the techno-industrial environ, that hurried its way through busying dismantle teams towards the Lady Commander. Seydon had even risked a quick scurry up to the next vent rake to spy down when he thought he'd picked up chuckling over the high-pitched squeals of cutting plasma welders. Borja Sennex, his guard, and this Lady's staff had all made their departures for the surface, leaving her alone to ruminate whilst observing the hive activity swiftly stripping at the corridor and connected module chambers. Hearing the giggle too, Seydon believed he caught a small and temporary smile ghost over her inhospitable features. Like a parade driller, she turned on her toes, clapped her feet together, went rigidly tall with arms anchored behind her waist and put on her reviewing face.

A young girl coasted up to her, stopping to provide the needed salute.

Jorus swore through the ear-piece. “They have children on base? What's this game now?”

“Nikana,” Said the woman. “Why are you out of your pod? You're not scheduled to be out of VR until twenty-seven hundred hours.”

“Mum,” Said the girl. “I've been cycling through the advanced exercises over a hundred times today already. I wanted to come out and see. It's been so loud...” She touched her little hand up to her brow. “I wanted to see what everyone's up to.”

“I'll tell you when we've put to orbit. Until then, you're to return to your pod and continue with your practices.”

“If I refuse?” She stamped a foot with playful defiance. “You'll draw me up for court martial?”

“Tss...” The woman snorted.

Opposite her was a girl Seydon guessed could be no more than twelve years old. Her round face was still warm with impish juvenile energy, not yet wracked by adolescent hormonal rushes and all the itinerant drama that inevitably dredged up. Like her elder, her eyes were a kind of formidable blue, yet even more exhaustively bottomless. She wore a lose head of auburn hair, so curly it was virtually tasselled. Rather than any junior uniform or tailored officer fatigues, her clothing was a skin-tight undersuit, shining as emblazoned copper under the harsh light, and bristling with junction port connectors and diagnostic connection sleeves up and down her limbs and torso. For all her healthy youth, Seydon felt there was a clayish element to her pallor.

“Explain your absence from your studies then,” Commanded the woman.

“It's as I said,” The girl, 'Nikana', began. “I'd gone through the last start up simulation for what I counted as the hundredth time. It was all I could take, and everyone else's noise was beginning to push in. So I unplugged. And I'll not go back in today.”

“...Ahhh, very well. I'd rather not suffer your arguments, endured enough of those today,” The woman breathed out, clutching a finger and thumb over her nose. “...What's that you got there? ...Nikana.”

She bundled a cloth wrapped package around her back, trying to toe out of the woman's reach. A hand lunged out, with speed that would put a serpent to shame, and viced to her wrist with just as much unyielding effort. Nikana was dragged back into her waist, where the woman plucked up the small box. “Again, Nikana, what is this?”

“Nothing!” She protested, giving the woman's armoured greave a torpid kick. “Just... some lunch. For myself,” She added quick.

“Indeed. I scheduled your lunch myself, and what was presented to you should have been more than enough to quell any hunger 'till supper is rang,” Said the woman. “Is this another picnic?”

“Well!” Nikana shook out of her grip and put down her feet in a hurried stamp. “You have him all locked up! He's hurt and miserable and starving and I can't imagine why you've made him so miserable! Just because he got lost!”

“Nikana, that is out of question, out of discussion!” The woman put an octave of authority to her volition. “I've explained already, that man is our enemy. A saboteur and a spy. Give him an inch and he'll grab a mile. I won't have you risking facility security over your bleeding heart!”

“Please!”

“No!”

“Please, Khalanda, when have I ever asked for anything??”

Khalanda Nepritov stove in her ire and knelt to come eye to eye with her charge. “Child, by the privilege of your immense importance to me, I allow you a great deal of leeway. But I won't shift, not on this. Now listen to me.”

“Alright...” Nikana moped.

“Listen!” Nepritov added sternly. “Take your food and keep it stowed. You don't want to continue the exercises, fine, but you'll return to your quarters and rest until I call for you. Understood? ...Understood?”

“Yes, yes... Just don't sick those guards on me. You know I hate having nannies walking me about everywhere...”

“...In exchange for your complete cooperation, girl. Now repeat it back to me.”

“Put my food away and go to bed,” The girl sulked, but nodded as she scratched one suited calve with the edge of a foot.

“Good,” Nepritov arose, sending off the girl with a half observed wave.

She was already back to tending to a proffered data pad being held out by an assisting lieutenant, drawn to a logistical worry that pointed out issues between fuel depot shortages with maintaining their already tightened patrol screen. Nikana was sauntering off, looking wholly chastised, sending furtive glances back towards her surrogate keeper. Seydon was wholly mystified. A military camp set up in the midst of jungle wilderness, in a planetary system rendered isolated by it's shrugged off irrelevancy. A deeper facility cut into the buried loins of a palisade mountain range. The presence of not one but two potential Sith Lords making mention of a sequestered development project, 'Black Annis', was ringing a black alarm in his conscience. Now a child decked out in a miniaturized feedback exo-skin. One that this 'Nepritov' paid favour to.

At the next hall junction, Nikana paused enough to track a look back to her caregiver. Nepritov was exchanging between handfuls of signing orders requiring her digitized signature. Seydon had been crawling after her on a hunch. The child was twiddling her hands on the spot, playing with the wrapped up lunch pack between her gloved hands. Neither the Dunaan or Captain Merrill still watching by camera broadcast missed her low, tricky smirk.

“...Here's the long shot, Seydon. We're down to forty seven minutes. Their talk is tipping me off they have a detention centre somewhere at this level. And that child wanted to play a nursemaid with a prisoner... Follow the kid, alright? I raised Mara, I know what a disobedient kid looks like,” He said, as Nikana stepped out of Nepritov's sight and began half skipping, half jogging her way down the junction. “...Just don't let your guard down, now.”

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Keeping up with the girl proved easier thought than performed. Her slighter height and young, rakish frame made bending round crowds of passing labourers and standing guards not only an example of ease, but she was hardly bothered. Some took the trouble at noting her passage, mostly standing soldiers rocking to get the list out of their tired haunches, stuck at keeping guard over the facility packing. But Seydon believed Nikana was never out of electronic sight: that feedback skin could have been stippled with tracer buoys, her body itself hardwired with discreet tracking augments, and kept on surveillance feeds mounted throughout the long facility. Such was why she looked to love wandering with impunity, scorning an armed and combat-dressed escort. The girl was safe in an impregnable environment, surrounded by deadly security measures.

She coasted through a tight maze of interlocked passages, managing occasional security checks and stops composed of semi-erected iris shield walls. Again, none stopped her. Only paused to give one of her shoulder sleeves a cursory barcode scan, smile roughly, and shoo Nikana on her way. Apple of Nepritov's eye, some starling golden child that was in preparatory training regimes. Seydon struggled after her wake, squeezing through thinning sections of the conduit passages, hoping what light touches he could place against the sheeted metal wouldn't give him up. There was at least half a kilometre of formerly connected R&D module chambers, some no larger than a partial closet, others that took up a hanger span, all barren from stripped out console stations and other machinery that couldn't be identified, save for the faint, dented outlines their weight had depressed into the flooring.

The detention centre was stowed behind a heavy, almost vaulted set of recessed hatches. Each door was an armoured portcullis, five inches thick of folded duranium, shimmering under a skein of crackling energy. Nikana skipped up to the hatch frame, standing under cluster of tracking ball-cameras. The lapel ident chip on her suit-chest flashed as infra-vision grid scans laved over her. A voice from detention control gargled from an unseen speaker.

“Subject Null. Please state your business.”

“Detention Control! Brhanden, is that you? It's awfully busy everywhere, and they've gotten around to picking my VR pod apart. I've no more exercises today,” Nikana chirped, flashing the most winning smile. “So I thought I'd come about and visit you and your crew.”

“Hnnn...” Said a male from behind the door screens. “...Lady Nepritov know you've wandered over here, Niki? You know protocol: no entry unless on scheduled appointment.”

“Well yes and no,” She admitted with some guilt. “She was tied up with as much as you can imagine. I was only told to take myself some place and not be a bother. I thought I'd come hole up here. There's few places safer, you know, Brhanden.”

“That's Officer Casety, Niki. ...Hhah, just give me a moment,” He sighed over the speaker. “I'll double check it with Lady Neptritov.”

“I'd not do that. In fact, I really wouldn't,” Nikana warned.

“Why, have you snuck off again,” Said he in a chuckle.

“It's much worse. Mum and the Lord Sennex got into it again. More or less kicked him off the base, and she's in a foul mood for it,” She half-whispered, stealing up closer to the hatch. “She doesn't want to be bothered. At least not with anything she thinks is minor. ...Come on, Officer Casety, I just want to hang out of everybody's way. Is that so bad?”

“In the detention centre,” Casety replied in dead pan.

“Where could be better? Unless you've let the prisoners have the run of the place,” Nikana mocked.

“...If this is you playing hooky again with Lady Nepritov, I'm throwing you under the bus before you take the chance from me,” The officer groaned and could heard cycling open the hatchway entrance.

Nikana drifted inside, after a final, cursory glance looking up and down the somewhat emptied hall. At the far end, another labour team was setting up their cutting torches tied by piping to sets of heavy, wheeled fuel and energy cells. More siding to huck off the walling. More to have wheeled topside and loaded for salvage or reuse. Just simply more work. Seydon edged up to his latest vent grate and watched the young tester sidle into detention, out of sight, the hatchways clamping shut, toothed doors racking back into their armoured jambs.

“I think I've found him,” Seydon whispered into his mic piece, watching a patrol strut below him.

“Khado's in there?” Jorus murmured, sounding like he was busy at helm controls, from the sticky shifting of a pitch and attitude yoke.

“Or prisoners that can clue us in if he has or not,” Seydon said. “...It's going to be hairy for a little while, Jorus. I'll call you up when i get another chance.”

“Lightspeed, witcher.”

For security purposes, to lessen against possible escape attempts, the vent duct squeezed into impassable tubing winding out into the detention block like a wriggle of cephalopod tentacles. Seydon's current tunnel took him in as far as the initial answering and control station responsible for bodies entering ink, through, or out of the cell hall. Two guards sat at their post, occupying an array of console interfaces, aglow with holo-cam feeds peering inside over two dozen shuttered isolation cells. The Dunaan drew up, bunched in a curled up ball over a raked vent plate slowly distending under his weight. Two bodies to contend with. Perhaps another half dozen monitoring the cell wing in person. An alarm would be thrown immediately. Any action would have to be swift, final. He exhaled, forced his shoulders up against the duct ceiling, and dropped into the control booth.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

The grate flattened and went peeling out from under Seydon's boots. To his right rose the first guard, already drawing up a black-matte riot submachine blaster with army practised ease. Left, the second guard at his station was kicking out from his console, keeping settled on his rolling high-chair, racking his pistol slide to put a bead on the intruder's body mass. The Dunaan was already moving, hatchet and longknife in hand for the close quarters, smashing the axe-blade into the first man's gun frame. It was already beginning to jump with fire, stitching a shooting puncture train across the walling and through the locking mechanisms of the station door jamb. Seydon stepped close, shortening up his hatchet grasp until the axe-beard and aft-spike fitted over his knuckles, and punched it up into the guardsman's chin guard.

He began to trip back across the north console counter, poleaxed and spitting broken teeth out from under his face plate. That second shooter was plugging in shots that sang over Seydon's shoulder. Reaching, he grabbed the dumbed man and swung his nonsensical body around, letting his riot vest take the brunt of the next few shots, before tossing him off his feet at the other, seated guard. This one, to his credit, leapt out of the way of flailing arms and stumbling shuffle-kicks crashing onto his chair, trying to make a quick rise as Seydon's shadow blurred into him. He was accosted to the wall and had his shooting wrist, right shoulder, and a portion of his left cheek bone cracked under a snapping barrage. Seydon swept him to the floor and gave his helmeted skull a finishing quash to the tiling.

Alarm klaxons and revolving emergency lights had already gone off. Through the armourglass panes looking into the cell ward, another four guards were rushing the entry post. Seydon glanced about until he spotted a tell-tale interface panel with a particularly arresting configuration of heavy, cyan-aglow control switches. He thumbed down the central key, cueing aside the inner portcullis, spits of small-arms fire plinking and shattering across the resistant observation windows.

Rather than rushing his position in the station, the interior guard had sense enough to hold position and volley hissing chemical grenade canisters through the opened gate. For a moment, his air was fogged out with a sickly grey mist, pain and virulent irritation choking down his nostrils and oesophagus while his vision welled up with burning tears. Seydon exhaled and clenched up his breathing, ignoring that sudden congealing pinch in his lungs and listening. ...One set of foot falls stepping into the fog, their squad mates providing cover at the cloud's edge. Steps closing in: three meters, two. Bright cat's eyes shot open in spite of the irritants, seeing a stocky, matte-armoured shape sweeping towards him with their raised firearm. Seydon burled out, chopping and slicing curtly. A handful of axe and knife strokes took them apart and sent their broken frame colliding into another body.

He stepped from the gas cloud, barely pausing to take his hatchet through the second guard's throat. Blood pressure hosed gore onto the floor from severed carotids and a cleanly lashed open jugular, leaving the guard to choke on shallow breaths as their weapon fell from nerveless hands. Seydon was already turning, pinning the third guard in their face plate with his flung knife. The fourth, struggling under the body of their slain compatriot, managed in spraying his pistol wildly until one arrant shot scraped up over the Dunaan's brow. Seydon knelt and put his knee down to the gunner's forearm, crunching the radio-ulnar bones into a mess of loosened, contorted muscle and calcium shards. He reached over, tearing off both their face-plating and helm, skittering them aside. A woman's face, gritting through agony and snorting like a rage-teased bull, offered Seydon a dire glare while his hatchet blade rested over her throat.

“I'll give you maybe half a minute before back up arrives and they gun you down to shreds,” She spat.

“Which cell?” Seydon asked.

“You can go to hell.”

His knee jarred into her messed forearm. Pain popped her eyes wide and faded her pallor by at least a tint. “Aauuhh...”

“Which cell?” Seydon insisted.

“F-Fine... B-Nine... But you won't leave here... With Null... Alive...” She stammered. Merciful blackness stole over her vision, cracked by his forearm blow as Seydon arose and left her to moan unconscious.

Cell B-Nine down the right-hand row of similar cloisters was no better than a two meter by one closet, just spacious enough to allow ordinary bipedal hominids the room to stand, lean, or forcibly curl up on the cramped, bare floor when their stamina at last gave out. Drawing up to the cell hatch, Seydon felt rancid mixtures of spent fecal matter and bodily wastes roil up his nose. It was comparable to bolstered compost, ripe with fecundity and rotting breakdowns. He took in a bracing sigh and palmed open the hatch lock.

“Don't hurt him!” Said Nikana, standing over a partially seated form wincing at the sudden light.

She held out her arms as far as their reach could extend, barring off his intrusion, posed with her skinny legs as equally outstretched. Onerously blue eyes peered up at Seydon's bloodied, shadowed outline with razor ferocity, unafraid. Like a mother ursine keeping guard over her sickened cub, now pressed to a corner and dangerously ready to open this intruder's veins with her teeth if need be. The Dunaan nodded lightly, holstering his hatchet and knife, climbing down to a knee so they spoke eye-to-eye.

“Who's there?” Said the body in the dark, trying to shift onto his haunches. “Miss?”

“Just some bad man,” She murmured.

“Khado Daiya?” Seydon spoke over Nikana's shoulder. Now the shape was scrabbling with real effort, pulling himself up into a crouch.

“...Do you know Mister Daiya?” Nikana asked.

“Yeah. His friends want him to come back home. They sent me to retrieve him,” Seydon answered carefully. Something to this girl... Something disarmed him...

“You're with the Underground?” Sputtered a young and light voice in baritone.

Khado Daiya wore his youth handsomely in spite of sloven prisoner rags and a sick grime that darkened the edges of his face. The profile on record holding his physical specifics listed him as twenty five, an inch or so over six feet, barely shy of eighty kilograms and generally described as in the peak of fitness and dexterity. But for his stonewalled career into covert operations, he'd have been the brash, gutsy face of the Underground fighting movement. Luckily, Khado had retained most of his physical bulk in defiance of starving tactics and limited rationing. His voice still cracked, parched. Nikana had come to his side, trying to help him get steady on his trembling knees.

“No,” Seydon answered after a pause. “Just here on a favour for the Captain.”

“Merrill sent you?” Khado breathed.

“Is he okay, Mister Daiya?” Asked Nikana. It was plainly obvious that the girl had been spending more than a few visits checking in with comely prisoner. Seydon glanced at the half devoured luncheon left cooling on the floor, beside an opened flagon weighed by a draught of drinking water.

“...I think so,” Said Khado, blinking green eyes. “...We heard gunfire and I thought a squad had broken through. Where's the rest of your fighters? How many are on deck”

“It's just me, and Jorus is on station,” He tapped his collar mic.

“He's listening?”

“As we speak, yeah. But make it brief, time is anything but on our side right now.” Seydon said.

“Later,” Khado grunted and began to shuffle on his own, despite a notable limp in his left knee and ankle. “That noise you stirred up is going to bring this place down on top of us. What's covering out escape?”

“Mister Daiya, are you leaving now?” Said Nikana from behind as she followed them out of the cell.

“...Yeah, Nik, I'm afraid to say,” Khado nodded with real sorrow to his voice. “Nepritov's not going to take to having me hang around much longer. Uncooperative guests and all. I gotta take off – Nik...? ...Nik, what's – Oh no.”

She'd stepped into the cell hall, and saw the still forms lying bleeding on the floor tiles. Wordlessly, she breezed past both adults until she could break into a jog, sliding to her knees as she approached the first, still warm body guard. Deftly, she undid their facial plate clasps and pried their helmet loose. It was a middle-aged human male, his face patchy from reconstructive surgeries to repair hideous tearing on his cheek and nose. Nikana mumbled something to herself, to him, then rose and addressed the other bodies lying splayed over.

“Much as it's wonderful seeing a pre-teen face off with death,” Jorus panned over Seydon's ear-piece. “You both need to pick up the pace. We're down to fifteen minutes 'till those dreadnoughts reach Kad V's gravity well, and then things get especially hairy.”

Seydon paused to retrieve a felled submachine model off the floor and passed it into Khado's waiting hand. They were managing a fast hobble for the cell block exit hatch, when Nikana stepped out of the control station to block them. Her hands, palm up, were greased in blood. Pain and fear welled behind her eyes to escape as occasional tears. One arm gestured weakly to the carnage inside: the two on-duty watchmen rolled over and still murmuring in acute pain.

“You hurt them? Did... Did you hurt them?” She asked Seydon.

It was a fact that all violence carried burdens of consequence and aftermath, death and murder even moreso. Seydon had inured himself against that guilt as he'd come to terms with his abilities, his calling, accepting the weight of pain sown in his wake as conspiracy and foes reared their evils and asked that he draw his swords to answer them. However, he could not condescend nor offer up patronizing lies or excuses for what he performed. And not to a child that, out of most age brackets, demanded and required adult honesty.

“I did. I had to,” He said.

The pain in her eyes blinked away. Rage replaced the colour of her stare, from blue to dyeing red. Her ire turned from Seydon to Khado at his side.

“You said he was okay!” Nikana shrilled. “Look at everyone!”

There was a prickle of ozone beginning to waft. A strain of pressure, like the swelling of a blood vessel, was now throbbing with force behind Seydon's ears. It wobbled his vision, phantom duplicates of imagery and detail swinging and dodging like crazed pendulums. A haze darkened at the edges of his eyes, as he looked to Nikana trembling on her spot, raising both her voice and pricked ire. The armourglass view ports that screened in the hall control station were rattling in their frames, crackling as one flexed concave and began to burst clouds of keen debris mist. Khado was reaching out almost drunkenly, trying to touch at Nikana to placate her.

“Nik... Nik, stop... Remember when you last lost your temper?” He pleaded as he swallowed down his own blood, as vessels in his throat began to open. The weight of mental pressure was a collapsing force. Though his own extrasensory capabilities were dull and blunted, Seydon made a recognition. Force power... Immense and cyclopean, a nascent well that trembled with unchained emotion answering to a young girl's wrath. The strength of her unfocussed ability, now manifesting as a distorted singularity halo around her shoulders, neck, and skull, was growing in elephantine bounds. She was the center of a psionic tornado, rattling the ceiling arches until unseen blows bent at the steel, clubbed and rebounded off the near walls as crushing dents showed in the hard metal panelling.

“They were my friends and he hurt them, Mister Daiya!” She said in distorted tones. “I knew them! Now they're gone, forever! You can't hear them wailing from beyond, but I can! I can hear everything! And I want to hear this evil little man in pain!”

And at her proclamation of personal damnation, they would have died on the spot, save for one mercy. By then her overbearing mental pinches and scorning psi-pathic tantrum was shredding the detention centre. Panels had been ripped free and dazzled about in windless cyclones, shard fragments whipping free to stab or slice across his and Khado's backsides. Not even such fleshly pain could force their clenched jaws to loosen for a cry. Power in the feed lines fluctuated in strobes, caged light rods and recessed lamp strips going black as diodes and LED bulbs fractured. Static lightning balled over Nikana's head and stroked racking veins of electricity into any available surface. Seydon swore he could hear disconsolate voices moaning in a stiff breeze issuing from... from... from nowhere! Were it not for his alchemical fortitude, all that unseemly power and fortitude in his modified musculoskeletal system and organs, they'd have colapsed into dying uncsciousness. But the girl, as with any child, found that once her madness had burgeoned to its hottest, it couldn't be kept sustained.

At once, the air popped and went cold. Nikana blinked with drowsiness, her curls returning to their trestles after becoming raised by the static flux. Her hand patted over her nose and upper lip when she realized her nasal channels were quietly flooding with blood. To Seydon, still sobering after the gauntlet of neural shock, she looked to be mumbling. She was repeating a name, attempting to correctly manoeuvre syllables and cadence on her tongue. Nikana glanced up at the adults; her pupils were so widely dilated hardly any iris colour could be peaked at the edges. The Dunaan adjusted Khado's bleary weight and quickly squatted the catch her as she passed out on her feet. Through his glove and sleeve, her skin-suit was alight with almost blistering heat. Blackened skin capped her bare fingertips. With some care, he managed in laying her up with the inner processing hatchway jamb, and began half dragging Khado Daiya forward out to the junction hall on his scuffing toe steps.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Outside, soldiers writhed and crawled on the flooring. Auxiliary emergency lamps had kicked on in the wake of Nikana's flaring Force storm, coating the once pristinely florid-white gloss of the halls a daemon crimson. Secondary guide light strips in tongues grooved through the decking countered the gloom with austere, bleached light. Khado had to be half guided as his wits collected, pulled by arm and waist over clumped piles of inebriated bodies, all reaching blankly for purchase as they fought to regain their footing and answer the state of emergency.

Seydon rounded them up another set of closely identical hall junctions. Khado had forced a brief pause as he lurched from the witcher's grasp and went scrabbling to his knees, collecting up a soldier's discarded carbine and filching handfuls of spare mag-clips into half torn pockets. Their navigation was uncertain at best; Seydon recalled a handful of right turns that translated left, catching glimpses of small, iron plaques drilled to the wall posts showcasing laser etched diagrams describing the floor layout. He limped them right and made a beeline for the far loader elevators.

Steering around now abandoned repulsor-trolleys, a temptation to confiscate any of the now vulnerable electronics bloomed. Khado had tried reaching out and grab a cart-rail, just for Seydon to tug him along as he was shaken free from his stupor episode. About them, half-sobered personnel were beginning to climb off the floor, some only bothering to roll up off their sides to detach their helms and relieve their gorge with hot, bilious vomiting. Nikana's anguish had broadcasted like a scourge, flailing unprepared minds with impunity, driving the floor and possibly the whole of the command centre's on shift personnel to their knees. And all unintentionally. Bare focus had been treated to the fleeing pair. Seydon shivered, wondering how terrible their luck would have run if her focus had sharpened by just an iota, instead of running wild from hurt.

They dodged into the lift, pulling on a spare cart piled with siding to act as makeshift cover. Khado slid down and huddled in behind the cart, rubbing feeling back into his knees and hips. Seydon busied operating the lift controls, calling for the doors to shut.

“Se---n, if --- or --ado can re-- --is, r-----d. Sundance is ----- -- --------. R--eat, e--------ion is ---ll - --. We'll ma-- -u- -ith th-- dr—d----g--. ---don, Kha--, pl---- --ly,” Jorus burst communique was garbled by outside interferences, local jamming, weather anomaly, or an unknown element now awoken and operating against their mission. Seydon was willing to believe it was another side-effect built by Nikana and her monstrous outburst. They hadn't yet sent the lift up. A keypad was blinking and awaiting their input. The Dunaan turned to Khado.

“You have any idea of the building layout?”

The operative was massaging scabs of blood free of his nose. Khado blinked at further crusts where his tear ducts had welled over with crimson and hefting his pilfered carbine, glancing at his rescuer. “...I know that, maybe, we're on the ninth, tenth floor? What's the plan?”

“They have a docking garage somewhere above. I'm betting if we're quick enough,” Seydon explained. “We can make off with some sort of transport and break from the camp. If we're quick.”

“...Try the fifth floor then.”

Seydon thumbed the keypad, knocking the affirmation prompt with an impatient knuckle. The lift's servo-gears woke with a rattling hum, lurching them upwards. Khado slammed home a fresh magazine into the carbine's emptied feed, shifting into a working crouch beside the cart, training his sights for when the lift gates opened.

“You knew the girl.”

“Just a bit.”

“What was that?” Seydon asked.

“That,” Khado said, eyeing the counter: floor six and just seconds to go before the fifth met with them. “That I still don't know. Certainly not enough time to hash it out here. Just she's inherently potent, extremely dangerous, and we have to hurry before she wakes and they plug her into Black Annis.”

“They kept referring to her as 'Null'. Subject Null.”

“She's something both more and less than human. Some artifice bore her instead of anything natural, speaking of biological processes. ...We just need to leave. I... I need to debrief. Did you find my vessel?”

“Later, Khado,” Seydon stepped into what cover the lift's gate jambs provided as the lift arrived on the fifth floor and opened wide. Here, Nikana's psionics had ravaged the staff to a lesser degree, leaving most on their feet, undamaged save for absolutely splitting headaches. When their lift rose and discharged them, there were enough alert guards on hand to take stock of Khado lying in wait behind his cart. He fixed the stock in snugly to his shoulder and thumbed off the carbine's safety. He dropped a trio standing close, switched to a farther body now hosing the lift interior with burst-fire and shot them twice, through a break in the clavicle guard and blasting their face-plate and helm open in a flash of spinning brain matter and occipital bone.

“Help me push this!” Khado cried.

The Dunaan ducked and rolled in with him behind the cart and provided the muscle to keep it steadily progressing, as Khado exchanged shots with the armed crew roster within the garages. Bullet rounds careened off the packed steel and hot bolts struck and scorched off the exposed guidance handles, fusing the metal magma hot. More shots missed or went spinning over their heads, inching forward a foot at a time. The garages were a pair of high vaulted barrel-halls set in side-by-side. A single row of idling transport haulers, idling off the bay flooring, were parked nearly door to door, squeezed into each available servicing station. The supervisors quarters were an upraised office hanging by stanchion and support cords anchored atop, and where a gang of mechanics discharged potshots from the opened observation portholes. Khado popped up, scoring one as they tried laying down a cone of fire, catching them with a shot through the throat.

“Left, left!” He instructed.

Seydon adjusted his gripping on the cart's under-lip and began crawling them around towards the haulers. Each hauler was a robust and plate-sided design sporting an eight-hub anti-grav chassis, a lengthy cargo box that could comfortably support the weight of virtually any reasonable object, from pre-fab support beams to hefty, six thousand kilogram artillery emplacement turrets, to an infantry platoon. They stole up beside the left-farthest model. It's driver kicked open the entry hatch and leaned out, raking fire from a wire-stocked and apparently rapid-fire las-pistol. Seydon shunted them up closer, Khado worrying the driver with blind-fire arched over the cart packs, finally easing out for a better angle and gunning the soldier off his perch. The cart rolled up, over, and off his splayed corpse.

Alarmed at their progress, someone in the supervisor office had activated an oscillating ray-shield over the garage doors. Khado cursed, already climbing into the hauler cabin, trying to rapidly familiarize himself with the steerage controls. More blaster and slug fire pinged off the solid truck roofing. Below, Seydon was already throwing the cart aside and drawing his vibroblade free.

“Stay there!” He said at Khado. “Cover me as you can!”

“Just hurry!” The spy rolled down the plexiglass door port and braced a scatter of fire at the gantries running over the garage roofing. A soldier pitched over the protective railing, choking on the slug-rounds now lodged in his jaw and nasal bone.

Blade in hand, Seydon was cutting his way across the garage floor. He favoured a long, double-edged blade, but had opted for a simple, hand-and-a-half scimitar with a wide curl that thrummed with high-frequency molecular sonics. It did the job discouraging slug-bolts and blaster rounds from finding his body, clefting through any guard that tried, too late, to backpedal out of his reach. His style argued for economy of motion, curt and simple attack vectors that suddenly transmuted into complex arrangements of disabling blows. Speed rendered him bullet quick. In a blink, he'd carved through a gunner and had opened up both chest and abdominal cavities belonging to the squad partner behind them, turning and smashing his scimitar through a third gunner at their waist and thigh. Blood was smoking off the vibrating edge. But Seydon felt off his game. A double-edge granted him thrice as many killing strokes compared to a single and simply felt more natural, comfortable, lamenting all the effort to draw the blade length around for a sequel cut or block. A fourth soldier rolled out of counter and levelled carbine fire at the witcher. Who raised the scimitar to his chest-line and twitched his sword. A round went ricocheting off the strong flat, rebounding to a nearby chrome-chased tool chest, up and out from a scorched angle on the floor plating into the gunner's groin plate.

He was staggering in an unwieldy retreat and finally dropped when Seydon broke through his helm visor with a curled hilt butt. Next, he was up the stair rungs angling into the office. Across the garage, the cargo lift had been called and was on descent. Reinforcements and potentially even heavier fire power was going to be fast arriving. Seydon dispensed with technical pageantry and burled into the last pair of shooters holed up behind the officer door, cutting down one with a bisecting shoulder-to-hip stroke and poking his partner with the curled scimitar edge through their eye. Both dropped, washing the grate floor in blood. He addressed another hololith console interface, racing to identify the shield shut-off.

“Hurry up!” Khado called again.

Seydon found the shut-off but when he pressed to disengage the shield skeins, an flashing error code popped up and scrambled the console. A revolving input screen finally blended into a sharper image, making demands for an administrative login name and passcode. The Dunaan cursed. The only input he bothered with was hefting his vibrosword and punishing the machinery with a slagging hack. Bursts of sympathetic electric shorts, sparks, and hissing wire bursts struck up a fire in the enclosed office. Below, however, the garage doors had ceased to shimmer. Circumventing the stairway, Seydon made a small run and tucked up into a crashing ball, bursting through one blaster ravaged porthole. A brief fall landed him on the hard back of one hauler resting down the line of waiting, unmanned machines. He rose up to a sprint, fixing the vibroblade back into its shoulder scabbard, vaulting from one hauler to the next. At the last, sticking another neat landing from a launched flip, he found Khado gone from the cabin.

“What the hell?”

Without warning, the gate shutters began rocking up. Armoured blast-planks running the length of the servicing vaults combined were recessing up and across the roofing. Cold and wet air blasted across Seydon's ankles, rain flecks spinning in like snow flakes caught in the outside flood lamp glare. Khado was running back from a junction panel now beginning to slowly catch aflame, smoke pouring from a jerry-rigged power reroute. He slipped into the cabin past Seydon, having replaced his carbine for a heavier LMG blaster model, taken from a partially opened storage crate beside two score more hunkered in the hauler's box. The gun sat in the opened passenger window. Seydon jumped and settled in now, consulting the steering controls: paired joysticks bristling with second and tertiary knobs, beside a trio of chrome pedals and a comm unit packed into the dash. Angry, coded chatter was attempting contact with the now emptied loading bay.

Khado paused and risked a glance. “...You know where we're going?”

“South,” Said Seydon, disengaging the hauler's berth locks. It jutted forward, lurching drunkenly, his hands battling the stiff give in the yokes until it settled. “To the mesa edge. Jorus has a gunboat that's running silent and currently waiting on us.”

“Still? We have to be over the - “

Conversation broke. The shutters had risen out of their way and locked into place along their rail-tracks above. Kad V's foul, storming temperance gusted into the wind shield, swamping out their vision. Seydon growled, searching for the wiper controls with one free hand 'till he twisted at a dial and they began panning water off the forward aero screens. Winds roiled and wracked through the open garage and loading spaces, coiling up the walls, walloping aside unsecured tool and implement drawers and heavier storage chests, rocking the anchored hauler grav-trucks in their settled berths. It was not the weather exactly that shut both Khado and Seydon up.

It was instead a trio of looming gunships hovering before the bay, fixed wings laden with now-extended missile pods and charging rotary las-cannons. Across the packed courtyard extending out from the administration hub, two platoons worth of troops stood in cross-fire nests, aiming carbines, LMG's, short-stocked and disposable rocket-grenade tube launchers, and hastily erected heavy e-web guns. Target finders were running through acquisition protocols, as bright laser sights flashed through the hauler's forward screens. Spot lamps from the gunships rove across their idling position and kept blinding their eyes with temporary sun-spots.

No one had yet opened fire. Across a booming megaphone and over their cabin comm receiver, a gruff voiced negotiator laid down their commands in fixed, definite terms: “Surrender!”

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Seydon didn't give the speaker time to finish that last syllable. Feet dancing on the floor pedals and snagging an accelerator trigger in the joy-yokes, he whispered 'Rosa' below his breath, funnelling all major and ancillary power into their hauler's chassis-carriage. The cabin vibrated wildly, unused to sudden, reckless acceleration. They bolted forward, grav-plates and repulsor-engines screaming. Into the thundering night. Into the bright teeth and lances of enemy fire. Into the enemy's bared and snapping jaws.

Enemy fire screens woke up and socked into their forward cab. Windshield plexiglass cracked under whistling puncture wounds, until further punishment snapped the screens back out of their rubber seal and shattered the panes entirely. Seydon grunted as slug-chatter peeled into the door siding and punched a round into his left-hand ribs. A ragged and sore pain flared up as he breathed, a hot drip soaking and rolling down off his hips. He wrestled the control sticks until they were nearly flush with the dashboard, gunning the hauler for every iota and spare whit of speed. It was a heavy lifter, it's accelerate gain atrocious. But somehow and with misery, they ploughed through the small part made between each platoon position, as a hundred weapons trained on their plodding bulk kept up enormous fire.

Something came in with a whizzing scream of roasted air and ruptured into their back right flank. Immediately, the controls lost tension and Seydon found himself wrestling with slack in the steerage. Khado had gone white. Nerveless fingers racked his LMG feed and he braced the stock up, pumping rounds back into the scurrying soldiery running at the camp roadside. Sometimes he found his mark, blitzing bodies off their feet, stitching fire that sewed off limbs raggedly at the joint. One was felled as they tried priming a maglock grenade, spawning a blast that caught fire and then incinerated a nearby file of barrack sheds. Foot infantry trying to entangle their mad escape were soon outclassed by a different tier of threat: the gunships had come about and found them.

Rotary-cannons mounted under their cockpit chins flared bright and spat killing hail storms, irregardless of the tightened confines their prey were attempting to manoeuvre. Chainlink fences wrapped in coated razor wire were slagged into melted dross and pelted through their aft box. Holes perforated the cabin roof, chewing their seats until the space choked with upholstery foam. Seydon watched the central dashboard panel distort, then disppear under a tracer impact. He banked the hauler, all but slashing their way through tightened, zipper alleys that begged their wounded vehicle for impossible performance. They shunted up beside the mess hall, tearing up lengths of siding folding against their smoking cab-nose. Through a half-gnashed parking mirror, Khado watched flames tongue out wretchedly from under the chassis. The right hand aft had lost all floater power, and was dragging a ditch through the dirt and soil road in their wake.

“Ow,” The spy mumbled. Just now, he'd noticed a bolt round had pierced a torched hole through his left thigh.

Thin providence was staying their eradication. Khado observed the bright lance of a discharged air-to-ground proton missile impact into the road turn ahead, throwing up a cooked geyser of broiling stone, dirt, and heath. Regardless of taken wounds, the increasingly sorry state of their all-but-bleeding hauler, and the chasing guns of not one but three gunships that had them firmly locked, Seydon jumped them over the smoking crater, over and through more fencing, ploughing their buckled cab frame through another a row of storage and secondary comm buildings and onto the central thoroughfare running to the south gates.

Behind them, the gunships ceased fire. Ahead, through sheeting downpour, the armaments keeping guard at the entrance were turning on their profile platforms: two sextet-barreled heavy las-cannons next to a self-propelled missile battery, an anti-personnel turret, a mortar gun, and drone fliers staggered by the weight of rifle and grenade launch attachments levelled with them. Khado roared an oath. Tight-lipped, Seydon jerked at the stick controls. Their world bloomed with light and fire. The cabin yawed wildly as their weighted box-aft was nearly cut off from the chassis. He steered them left, trying with all failing speed and loosening fortune to bypass the weaponry emplacements and make a desperate run over the emptied fields for the tree line.

He forgot, though, the clustered sonic-mines buried around the camp perimeter.

The hauler, streaming wild with tapers of pallid fire, demolished the outside pylon walls, burying a patrol squad and their barking cyber-mastiff in rubble. Seydon begged the labouring repulsors and buckling grav-plates for velocity: leaking coolant fuel out of severed feed lines, power levels dropping as cell-batteries failed, they were beginning to coast to a stop. The cabin, resembling a sagging, crumpled fist of aluminium refuse, brushed its scorched nose over an irregular hump buried into the cleared loam. All Seydon and Khado heard to warn them was a single, tell-tale deep tone. And then their existence turned to deafening shrieks of curling metal and heat glossing their eyes with light and inferno.

Versus chemically super-charged RDX that required activation via a detonation charge, whether wired or remote, sonic minds, true to their name, utilized weaponized sound vibrations as their killing force. At three-point-six megahertz, a directed sound discharge could cause tears and other damages to the lungs and intestines of rodent and other pest vermin. There was no telling the gain utilized in the mines, but that their yield shredded the hauler into twisting fragments, rupturing from combination explosions of leaking hydraulics, coolants, exposed and damaged fuel-cells, and the stacks of crashing LMG crates now having their magazines detonated. The blasts picked up the splitting forward cabin and hurled it across the field in arcing cartwheel.

It turned, fell, bounced twice over dried rock barren and patches of loose grouse, finally settling meters away from the wind-harried jungle wilds. Steam and warping ribbons of heat rose from the crippled, pulverized wreckage, a sagging cabin door finally loosing free from buckled hinges. A body limply plummeted into a swatch of bamboo grass...

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Khado Daiya came to, believing he was dead. A soothing curative had taken the spiting agony that had seized up through his backbone and made the soft meat of his spine jump at every automatic muscle twitch. It still wracked his diaphragm and chest cavity each time he took in breath. His throat was scorched down to his belly. Luckily he'd been mostly starving over the last month, or else he'd have been making a concerted effort to roll over and puke. A shape was bobbing in and out of sight. Above was the wet jungle canopy, spilling rain collected in heavy frond leaves in long, splashing lines onto his face. It was refreshing, chilling. Now he could feel a cold rub in his joints. Aches stirred in his hips, knees, in his elbow ligaments. His hand rolled something out from under his wrist and he looked.

Injector tubes: a half dozen pneumatic syringes with their chemical resevoirs already discharged. Seydon came into view; battered, with haggard cuts ripped into his scalp, throat, and shoulders, ignoring his own treatment as he looked after his charge. The hole notched through his leg from that errant bolt had been laced up with a tightened band of salved bandaging. Further cloth had been wound across his brow, a head-band that was likewise stuffed with a chilly compress. Khado reached up, tentatively pressing where a nasty line had been gashed open by shrapnel.

“Still with me?” Asked Seydon.

“What happened?” Khado coughed, tasting blood on his teeth and gums.

“We rolled over a landmine and the hauler came apart. Can you stand?”

“Let's try,” He reached and took hold of Seydon's shoulder and a nearby rubber tree shaft. With some effort, though it pained gloriously trying to put weight on the injured leg, he came up into a stable stand.

Both turned to glance across the open moor. The enemy encampment was fully awake and mobilizing to give their escape an armed pursuit. APC carriers were jostling through the opened south partition gates, gunships hovering on station to provide awesome firepower and aerial back up, crowds of sleek-armoured tracker squads roving down the acreage with their barely leashed canid mastiff-hounds. Scanning binocs played in tandem with strobing torches. Smoke from the mine burst choked under fat rain drops. Khado had begun taking a head count and gave up after passing over sixty. The hurt in his leg began drumming a throb up into his brow.

“We won't make it,” Khado said.

“If I carry you?” Seydon offered.

“We'd be slowed all the same. They're turning out in force, even if we outpaced the infantry, we'd never outmanoeuvre the gunships. They'd shred the canopy to get at us. And then we either get turned to liquid under rotary fire or forced to give up the chase. ...How far is Jorus again?”

“Ten kilometres going that way,” Seydon hooked a thumb over his shoulder, undressing from his camera harness and clipping off his earpiece and comm-mic. Both were pushed into Khado's hands. “Put those on.”

“Why?”

“If those aren't too damaged, then Captain Merrill is still getting video from our end. That comm set is also slaved with a small transmitter, besides giving you a direct channel to Jorus. You put those on and you can give the Captain a situation update while you make your way to the landing zone.”

“I just said we'll never make it on foot,” Khado protested.

“Not together, no,” Seydon nodded, handing over his hatchet and knife.

“...What?” Khado blinked. “What, you're just going to draw their fire? With a sword and a ragged shirt??”

The Dunaan looked up. His grip was binding a make-do bandage around a gouge over his shoulder blade and arm socket, shirting and pants in lacerated tatters. Save for that hardy scabbard harness and the pouch band buckled round his waistline, he was destitute, ragged with wounds and soaked with wet earth and storming moisture. He'd lost the tie keeping his hoary-white mane tied back and the breeze kept whipping his hair back in wild flairs. Mutant cat's eyes, gold and slit in the dark, hovered on Khado.

“It's enough,” He said.

“I don't even know your name! This is insane!” Khado said, before being rebuffed from the witcher's side with an easy shove.

“Keep trying the comm-set until Jorus recieves,” Seydon raised his vibro-blade into a readied guard across his torso line. “...And for feth's sake, run.”

He stepped away and strolled to the tree line, stepping out into empty cover where scores of tight search lamps honed in on his position. Khado ducked away as bolts lanced and cut through underbrush ferns and chopped lesser rubber trees in half with coalescing fire cones. Seydon was a shadow pacing into their gun range, scimitar arcing, turning aside the firestorm. Tossed concussion grenade cans and shock traps went off around his feet. And hardly slowed him. Khado watched long enough for the first approaching guard to be cut down, scythed like ripe wheat. Then he turned, fixed in his borrowed ear-piece, and took off into the fastest, limping run his sinews could produce.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Seydon's distraction bought the enemy's attention, setting off chain-linked, subsonic blow outs that dawned a second sun against the overcast backdrop. An inexplicable detonation tossed a roaring tree of fire that bellowed in time with the thunder. Gunfire replaced midnight wildlife chatter, as their spats of bolt and slug ammunition grew distant in Khado's ear. Another concussive force went off, out of sight behind the spawning copses of immense deciduous sugar-sap tuber growths, shaking the underfoot loam and compost. Shale and anthracite slabs stabbing out of the mantle rocked loose of scree.

He was running heedless in the dark. Bulbous nettles stung across his forearms, tripping more than occasionally across exposed root balls and nests of fibrous creepers laying over his pathway through the Kadian undergrowth. Often, Khado paused to catch his air and lean against whatever close branch or trunk was in available reach. He'd come close to stumbling into a shale-adder nest occupying the inside of a rot hollowed stump; writhing, a knot of constricted bodies rose, banded with ghostly colouration that glowed in in low-light hours, counting as many as eight distinct, raggedly scaled spade-heads that hissed and tongued in agitation. Khado hobbled on with a prayer the snakes weren't trailing after his vibrant body heat, intent on gaining a hefty and nutritious flesh crop.

This exercise in extended field espionage had backfired abysmally. The long jaunting hunt carrying him from Dubrillion and the Corporate Sector down the Mara corridor to pick up clues trailing coreward and back north to the edge of One Sith territories was for virtually nought. Carrying after a phantom. Chasing a story telling the Sith were more fractious than interior propaganda and battlefield reports suggested. That something curious was afoot surround the affairs of a handful of hermetic commanders answering to an unknown but forceful star in the army ranks. Credits, bodies, materiel, resources, appropriated or stolen or bought. What sounded like a research and development cell gone rogue, pursuing a project that was titanically ghastly. ...All data he'd kept backed up aboard the Red-Crown Crane's main data cache's and flight recordings. His ship; misplaced somewhere in the Kadian gloom. Khado brushed mud off his eyebrows, blinking.

“Diamond to Sundance, over,” He dared to whisper into the mic. Static answered back in fizzing bursts. “Sundance, please read, over!”

The channel briefly went clear. Khado thought he'd picked out Jorus Merrill's gruff twang trying to voice through. The broadcast hissed out, warbling in indistinct electronic whines.

Khado was exhausted. Physical discipline and a bevvy of personal fortitude were powering his motions, as his belly had long since gone seized and raw with hunger pangs. Like a speeder finding charge on empty battery cells, he plodded on. He'd done half-well retrieving a downed length of stout, brackish ashpole and utilized the wood as both a walking stick and a makeshift crutch. By his estimate, Seydon's charge of the oncoming track-squads had bought a fifteen minute lead. Perhaps a minute more, or less. Khado had wandered out of ear shot of the fighting; it'd have been a credit to that stranger if he was still harrowing the enemy. The dim, explosive glow behind over the overgrown canopy was still flaring with occasional coronal roars of light.

But soon, he heard the echo-throb of gunship rotary jets oscillating in the near distance. Animal sound that kept growling and squawking in spite of his lumbering, clumsy presence stilled and ceased altogether. Khado dared a quick glance across the sloping hinterland waste, an unsteady and winding territory of fallen tree bracken and cracked shale boulders and jibs of arcing granite. Torches and rifle lamps were stabbing wildly about, a kilometre back yet gaining with their swifter pace and stronger fortitude. He couldn't help sighing, nor loosing a choked roar in his throat, frustrated at their chase. It was the first taste of bitingly fresh air and true, glossy cold he'd felt since capture. All that drama of escape, just to be run down while on the final stretch.

A voice called out from cover. Khado squinted, trying to catch a look at where the soldiers had paused. A shot cracked in the dark, exploding a supple flax tree at his side and hosing him in spraying, runny milk-sap. They found him. Calls went out and bounced from trunk to bough to stone. Flares rocketed high, dousing the underbrush in light and hard shadow, discolouring the mauve black that impeded Khado's fast progression into spears of beating ruby. Second and third sniper rounds bored into the trunks surrounding. Cursing, the agent wrestled with the ashpole and turned about, beating into a handicapped run.

Potshots and searching lamp rays followed at his heels with the same dogged will that pushed Khado into ignoring his leg pain and easing into a quicker and quicker lope. The landscape had begun tilting, a subtle egress that transformed his flight from a run into descent climbing. The ashpole was soon abandoned. One las-round cropped off its top by an inch and put Khado into a crawl. Soon, it wasn't hard picking out his chaser's bothered panting, labouring to keep pace with their former prisoner. Khado was using his gripping on any close object, rock, tree, mossy refuse, curtain vines, to catapult his body forward. He opened up the skin on one palm when he had the accident of slipping his touch on a whorl of old volcanic glass, hidden cleverly by a bedding of interwoven lichen and gorse. The cut bled deeply. Khado fought the yelp in his throat and bothered to rip off a hank from his tattered shirting, wrapping up his palm tightly to staunch the flow. Gods, at this rate, he was never going to make it...

He fought another hard kilometre to keep his lead. Suddenly, wrestling through a thin passage grown up between a copse of tropical larches and grey firs, he went tripping into an open clearing. Elevation fell sharply where the earth cut down into a blunt, long cliff. The upland mesa edge. The low vales running up the contours of ancient, wind-eaten Appalachians were an unlit infinity stretching to a glimtet horizon bar. Storming scenery shocked rushing tables of overcast clouds streaking overhead, with spidering lines of casting lightning that occasionally found connection with the valley floors. Khado watched the leafy skull of one proud and heavily ancient plane maple catch a falling bolt, splitting off a handful of nascent upper boughs and briefly aglow with sputtering flames. If Jorus and his cutter were waiting behind the wind currents and cloud walls, Khado couldn't detect him.

Wrenching the mic to his lips, pushing the transmitter buckled on his hip to its maximum broadcast range, he began calling. “Diamond to Sundance, come in, over! Diamond to Sundance, over! Diamond is at LZ, south, over! Diamond to Sundance! Diamond to Sundance! Jorus, do you read!?”

The chasing soldiers that had been tracking his progress since the tree line before the encampment were breaking through into the clearing. Warning blasts sang past his shoulder, hip, scudding the spongy loam. Khado looked around. Targeting beams were locked onto his throat and nape. Rifle torches burned illumination with scalding intensity into his eyes. A handful of gunmen were easing towards him in slow steps, faceless in their opaque blast visors.

“Put down the mic!” One screamed. “Get on the ground!

“I said get on the ground!”

The agent really couldn't hear them. Behind him, rising before the cliff with steely fury, the one-hundred metric tonnage of a thoroughly hybridized Peregrine-class gunship loomed into view, scramjets roaring hard. Underside flood lamps kicked on. Jorus Q. Merrill sat in the forward cockpit, framed by console light. His voice cut through on broadcaster speakers.

“Hit the deck!”

Khado dropped to his belly and clamped his arms tight over his ears and nape. The soldiers were slow on the uptake and didn't react to the cue in time. Paired repeating and heavy laser cannons spurted into the meadow, striking the search team as the fire cone traced up into the tree line. Bodies were pulverized to armour flecked liquid messes. Half a dozen and another nine trying to flee for cover in the undergrowth were slaughtered in a quarter as many seconds, shredded or scorched, ruptured into ragged pieces of limb and las-mutilated body trunks. The sound was overawing, a concussive report that shuddered the muscle and blood of his belly and lungs. Ears ringing, Khado looked high at the gunship.

It was settling around and lowering to the cliff edge exposing the flank of its starboard fuselage as a second flight attendant manned the passenger entry hatch . Jorus cut over the speakers once more. “Now get in!”

Khado braced up on his good leg and drove over the blast-chewed loam, pushing the last meter behind him in a scrabbling jump. The attendant, masked in his flight helmet and oxygen-exchange system, grabbed him at the shoulder and hauled him against the opposite wall-seat. He was strapped up by a trio of harness locks before the crewmen had yet shuttered the hatchway, calling at Jorus from the forward cockpit.

“Subject secure! Cabin is re-sealed!”

“Exchanging controls,” Said Jorus. The crewman doubled as a switch-off pilot and was climbing up a narrow ladder to the raised steering and flight dome. The incessant rain was peeling off the hydrophobic canopy, as the wing rotor-jets cycled to a shriek. Khado felt them turning about and beating a fast retreat west, making an ascent to cloud cover as they left the mesa and palisades behind them.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Captain Merrill dropped down into the passenger hold. Under the low-powered cabin lightning, his face was the colour of carmine and eyes jewel bright. His scruff of dark, unkempt hair was raked by worried sweat and he looked to have aged by another five years over the course of the long night. Jorus sat down opposite Khado in the other facing seat, dropping tiredly. Like an afterthought, he bothered glancing down the emptied hold.

“...Seydon?” He asked, sounding worn and hollow.

“...Gone,” Khado breathed. He'd closed his eyes, far too exhausted to bother even blinking. “Last I saw him, he was charging the enemy line to buy me time. So that was his name...”

“Mmmn,” Jorus reached, rubbing at his eyes.

“...I'm sorry, captain. It's on me, now.”

“No. No, don't start that, not right now, it isn't the time,” Jorus grunted. “...This isn't the first time he's gone off the radar. But he's married, too.”

“Oh shid,” Khado breathed.

“You'd be thrice as frightened if you understood who is wife is. ...I was expecting bad things tonight. I was expecting really bad things. But, mission accomplished. You're out of enemy hands. And you can tell me what exactly you may have told them under duress, and I can fix this feth up,” Jorus rose to glance out a view porthole. They'd pushed up and past the storm system, into a bright night coated with unnumbered stars. A peek of moonlight shone on his face through the armourglass.

“Not a word, Jorus. I didn't give them inch,” Khado swore. “But that's not what we need to talk about.”

Jorus turned and stared at him.

“We need to talk about how an enemy plans to kill a world.”

-TO BE CONTINUED-

 

[Seydon of Arda]

NULL DEBRIEFING SELECTION

Mission File 278: 12F:CC8:QeD

The Woman in the Mountains
Transcript File: Play/Pause Forward/Rewind Play Speed

-BEGIN PLAY-

J: You're awake and with me, Daiya?

K: Your people have a funny idea about what counts as a restorative.

J: Technically, I'm borrowing you from the hospital recovery ward. We're gonna have a chat for a little while, until I have all the specifics on record and it can be forwarded to our intelligence cells. ...Let's start with the woman.

K: ...Her name is Khalanda Nepritov. Supposedly has attained status as a Sith Lady of reliable note. And that's all that I can give you as concrete.

J: Just a name and maybe a rank? Come on, Daiya. Six months in the cold, another month in duress. What else do you have?

K: You want my impression of her? She's capable of doting but outside of that, her one care and worry is seeing results. Exact results. From what I've witnessed, she has a streak of alpha perfectionism. Her expectations are astronomically demanding, to the point where I have worries about her understanding of the realities of developmental progress. She pushes her workers to the brink, and if you break... You're gone. Replaced the next day. Nepritov wants the best and she'll have it, one way or another.

J: Leadership skills?

K: Brutally effective. Her command chain is designed, top down, to extract as much efficiency from each human resource as possible. And she understands how to run an army. Tactics from companies down to individual units, logistics, I could go on.

J: We could conjecture then, that she's had tutelage.

K: I tried looking her up. Every academy's lacking any record of ever hosting someone of her description. Checked for aliases: nothing. It's possible she's undergone physical modifications to alter her appearance, though. Plus, rumours of secret schools for promising candidates, those I couldn't chase down.

J: You can't because they probably don't even exist. Or are defunct and had all pertinent records shot into the nearest local star. Failed academies run by hackneyed operators. What else?

K: ...Surprisingly well funded but I've no idea where the money is flowing from. She also might have unbarred access to numerous agent nets and intel resources across most major galactic territories. ...Has little to do with Sith affairs, though.

J: The OS are careful about tolerating independent entities in their ranks.

K: She's paid off, has made promises to the inner councils, or the Dark Lord is easily duped by lipservice.

J: Don't even get me started. ..Anything else?

K: ...Nepritov is dangerously ambitious, powerful, martially minded, and intolerant of any opposition to her work. We need to tread lightly

-END PLAY-

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Nepritov's Unmarked Army
Transcript File: Play/Pause Forward/Rewind Play Speed

J: We've accounted for the majority of the OS's standing army and naval groups. Where did Nepritov acquire an armed legion from?

K: That I also don't know.

J: Then regale me with a theory, then.

K: ...I'm thinking she's culled her forces from various ex-pat groups across the war zones. Former Protectorate, Republic, Fringe, and a lot of mercenaries that survived the Empire's meltdown a decade prior. Varanin raised an effective killing force not seen since the Clone Wars, one that's, by and large, been travelling rudderless to wherever battles have turned up. They've just needed steady paychecks and a figure head that won't condescend them.

J: She's ignored OS recruitment efforts entirely.

K: She wants a scalpel force, not a blunt vibro-cleaver. They're all fiendishly dedicated to their work. ...I have some suspicions that she's enforced morale with hypnotherapy. ...Possibly genetic therapy, to weed out anything undesired.

J: ...You're suggesting this Nepritov has access to professionals in major biological fields. Yet that doesn't explain how she's arming them.

K: Most of their infantry weaponry I could tell were BlasTech, Browncoat, and Tenloss products, but otherwise shop modded. A few were toting some models and ordnance I did not recognize.

J: Stolen or bought through shell companies or fourth-party contractors, you think?

K: I'm thinking she organizers her arsenal the same way we do: leave as little footprints as possible, source for the best kit, tidy up any money trails.

J: A hidden army...

K: And it's certainly likely she has more than that lonely little company to call upon.

-END PLAY-

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Subject Null & Black Annis
Transcript File: Play/Pause Forward/Rewind Play Speed

K: ...You're going to ask me about the child.

J: I don't know if Seydon had the foresight to guarantee we'd get possession of the surveillance rig I strapped on him, but we've had time to make an analysis of the footage. ...So yeah, we are gonna talk about the girl. The kid that nearly boiled the pair of you where you stood.

K: I hardly remember that. Your man somehow managed to keep standing in spite of it. Felt like all the atoms constituting my brain were about to split out through my skull bone.

J: That's a, uhhh... That's an advantage of working with his... His kind, I suppose. Looks perfectly human save for the eyes, but isn't.

K: Captain?

J: This kid kept coming around to visit you, Daiya. Why was that?

K: I figured she was just... curious.

J: ...Curious.

K: Until your man, Seydon, made his play to disable my cell guard, she never seemed to perceive me as her enemy. Nothing like a threat. She just was not scared. And when rescue came, she believed someone had arrived to end me. ...Wanted to keep me safe. ...Because she thought I was something poor and lame and undeserving of being stuck in a dark prison bastille for weeks on end.

J: A sheltered girl.

K: Exactly like that. Either didn't know better or didn't want to. I don't know. She was only the decent visitor I ever had, even if it was being played nurse to.

J: ...Seydon's rig picked up some interaction between the girl and Nepritov. It seems, if it's anything to go by, that Nepritov allowed her some run of the place. Certainly didn't feel like she might be facing danger running off by herself.

K: Did you see the interior sensor precautions? There wasn't an inch that didn't have IR cams or motion nets or gene-readers. And I doubt they let her wear that getup without it being laced with bioscanners and tracking devices. Atop Nepritov's soldiers' conditioning, there was no danger. ...But I guess now, they'll be rescinding that. Time for safety reviews.

J: ... By her feedback suit, their referral to her as 'Null' or... 'Project Null', in tandem with something called 'Black Annis', and I'm thinking she was something either peripheral or integral to whatever R&D scheme was cooking.

K: Definitely integral. You don't keep a little girl around that can boil minds when distressed and treat her as if she's a side-show concern.

J: What did you turn up? You chased this for six months, you went bust with Nepritov, tell me there's substance behind this girl's story.

K: Now that I can be a little more helpful with.

J: Go on.

K: ...To start, her name is Nikana. She looks, acts and talks like a girl of around twelve years in Coruscanti cycles. However... Her farthest memory is still related to Nepritov, ages spent in infirmary units, examination sessions involving rotations of masked doctors, or sleeping suspended in developmental vats.

J: How was that ascertained.

K: She just told me.

J: In candid conversation?

K: Like I said, she didn't think there was anything risky to talking to a poor, shackled prisoner. Extremely sheltered.

J: Or just confident you'd never be able to hurt her.

K: Either or, looking at it. I grabbed at the chance. It was apparent no one had ever really engaged her in any honest talk, beyond asking if she was experiencing any off symptoms. Her only confidant was a detainee that wasn't going anywhere.

J: She opened up to you on that basis: she talked, you listened, and replied earnestly.

K: Like my life depended on it. She has no recollection of anything like ordinary parents. Just Nepritov, her keeper, and a revolving team of specialists. Virtually no contact with kids of similar age groups, species, or race. Her universe has been one confined base after another, broken up boredom and intensive VR sessions.

J: Virtual reality training? Doing what?

K: That she couldn't tell me and I was scared to pry. But the sessions were regular and I believe graded. Nikana mentioned Nepritov was just as demanding with her as anyone. Perfect performance scores for every session, or she'd be forced to repeat them. ...The girl was constantly exhausted. And she never looked healthy.

J: And then the incident in the cell block.

K: You saw more than I did. Your man, Seydon, too.

J: He hurt one of her other friends on the jail watch. Her reaction to that was a hurricane of Force-pathic telekinesis that almost imploded the cell block and came close to ravaging the pair of you to death. No mere child.

K: You want my analysis?

J: This is all for the record. Any comment, insight, I'll take it.

K: ...She's a product of genome tampering. A sliced together, vat-bred human specimen that, I have no doubt in my mind, is the working successor after many failed predecessors. Potentially a very carefully designed clone inheriting highly potent traits that have led to her Force sensitivity. A mutant, for all intents and purposes.

J: And one they're looking to weaponize?

K: That's where Black Annis comes in.

J: Which is?

K: Nepritov's gleaming, prototype weapon's platform. An embryonic, almost abortive, anthropomorphic death engine shaped to resemble hominid proportions. I glimpsed it once but it was colossal. And fortunately, still far from finished. How it and Nikana tie in, I'm unsure. Obviously, her VR exercises are being performed so she can pilot the thing. It doesn't explain her latent Force potential, terrifying as it is. Or why a pre-adolescent is Nepritov's lynchpin.

J: A warlord who doesn't exist, a child fashioned out of fused genetic material, a phantom army, and a doomsday project. ...Khado, you're describing something out of fiction, and if I hadn't been there to watch Seydon dive headfirst into this insanity, I wouldn't believe you.

K: I didn't aim to come back without concrete evidence. Nepritov's trail took me out of Terminus and across a dozen industrial worlds. I... I had everything you would have needed to see. ...And then I messed up on Kad V. And cost you your friend. You don't know how sorry I am.

J: ...We're gonna have a talk about that later. Just catch your rest for now, Khado. Gears are turning. And if you can pardon me, I have to go give a very worried woman some excellently bad news.

-END PLAY-

 

[Seydon of Arda]

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PLAYLIST​

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Tracks:​

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1. ORAX - Missing​

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2. Carpenter Brut - Obituary​

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3. Danger - 3h16​

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4. Dynatron & Perturbator - Volcanic Machinery​

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5. Dance with the Dead - Eye of the Storm​

 

[Seydon of Arda]

​

PLAYLIST​

​

Tracks​

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1. Opening: The Storm in View​

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2. Kadian Midnight - Solo Work​

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3. Rains Over Palisade Camp​

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4. Infiltration​

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5. Child's Dangerous Anger​

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6. Escape Rush​

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7. Khado's Run​

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8. Credits​