Flotsam and Jetsam

[Ashin Varanin]

The view out the skyhook window was something else. Skyhooks were beautiful, terrible things in the wrong hands, or just intrinsically. There was something awful and sublime about staring down at Coruscant from orbit -- from something other than a starship. A ship, or a star-shaped station like the abandoned Krayt one out there, at least had the capability to move away, but a skyhook could either stay tethered or it could fall. Her gut said so, anyway. A broken skyhook could land itself safely with repulsors; she knew that on an intellectual level.

In a cocktail dress, at probably the fanciest restaurant and social function she'd ever infiltrated, she stared out the viewport and challenged herself with vertigo. The starscape thrilled her; the long fall chilled her. Grav wells were death. Any spacer knew that. Out there at the distant star-shaped station, ships moved freely, unconcerned with the grav well or the Sith presence that controlled this world. She envied their freedom. The cocktail dress felt like chains.

So did the company. That was another reason she sat alone by the viewport with a glass of liquor, watching lines of thematically opaque comm updates scroll down her datapad.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Low-key music from instruments she couldn't name. Subtle perfumes from a hundred worlds. Vine-silk and shell-spider and all manner of rare textiles. And the jewels -- oh, the jewels. She turned away from the tableau window and tried to keep herself from salivating. She wasn't here to steal jewels...was she?

She focused on her glass and her datapad. The comm updates kept scrolling through, a hundred little things that she had to watch. Not coordinate, though. She wasn't in charge of the Thing, the reclamation of a forgotten asset three kilometres by three kilometres by one renamed and traitorous corporation; instead, she had her own objective. Currently, that objective involved putting her datapad away and actually interacting with people. She slugged back the last of her glass and wove through the social function, replacing her glass on the way. She made a note to limit how much of this one she actually drank.

 

[Arage Bao]

[member="Alec Rekali"]

[SIZE=10.6666666666667px]Khal shifted uneasily in his tux, if there was one thing that didn’t fit him? It was walking around in some kind of rigout, but a job was a job and this would probably be one of the more exciting jobs he had ever pulled in his life. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6666666666667px]Which, granted, didn’t mean all that much.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6666666666667px]In the grand scheme of things he was here to keep an eye on things, make sure that everything went smoothly and if something, anything happened? That they would be able to punch through any defenses and get out quickly.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6666666666667px]Sometimes it was apparently a pretty good thing to have someone like him on the team.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6666666666667px]He scratched his collar again, before sighing and walking over to the counter. A drink would probably make him forget about the scratchy thing, maybe a cigarette while at it… yeah, that sounded like a pretty solid idea.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.6666666666667px]For sure.[/SIZE]

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Khaleel Malvern"]

She'd had her eyebrows threaded for this job. Gotten familiar with wax, spent three hours a day in a myostim for the last two weeks, bought the really expensive hair dye. And even if she hadn't exactly paid for the dress, suffice it to say: she'd wasted a metric crapton of time primping. Like, almost Darth Kryptus level, minus the brylcreem.

Unlike her associate at the bar, she'd also spent time getting comfortable in the ensemble. She didn't wobble in the shoes, but that was just the start of it. Khaleel exuded discomfort. Alec was, if not at east, then at least capable of going unnoticed. One more youngish woman in a cocktail dress, snagging an expensive drink as she sidled up to the bar. She couldn't resist another glance at her datalink. The drive infiltration team was reporting systems nominal and proximity adequate, so that was something. Not everything, but something. She slipped the link back into her purse and refrained from chugging Whyren's Reserve.

 

[Rexus Drath]

[member="Alec Rekali"]

Obsession was a nine letter word, and it was stained across the mind of James M Parker. An old world psychopath who was in love with chaos and destruction, who wanted nothing more than to see the world burn beneath him before putting the gun to his head and pulling the trigger. But before he could do that there was one person he wanted to see break, he wanted to see him die, or the other end of the spectrum. He wanted to see him fall, come down to the dirt and grime of madness and death before he finally put James out of his misery. And there were obstacles in the way of that, there were people, places, pets, these were what stood in the way of the fall.

Most people think having loved ones and friends make a person weak, you capture them or threaten them and you can provoke a reaction that you want. But that just wasn't the case, people, good people weren't like that. The fact of the matter was that loved ones made a person stronger, they had everything to lose. And there was nothing more dangerous than a man with everything to lose. So how do you twist that man to fall? How do you bring him down to your level so he can finally become the monster that has chased him? It's simple, you kill everything he has to lose.

Parker was across the way from the fancy smancy dinner party, they were never really his thing, at least not always, maybe there was a time where they were? But that didn't matter now, none of that really did. What mattered was the woman at the bar, since their little run in at the nuclear power plant Parker had been doing some homework. He had established the woman as a member of the sanctum and he didn't have a last name, but he knew she was a comrade of a particular individual. Start slowly, first a comrade, then friend, then their family.

Parker sat back against the roof of a building looking down at his hands laughing at them with a loud cackle. A robotic arm next to the organic, a constant reminder of what he had done to him. He could of cloned a new one, sure. But he wanted that arm this way so everyday he could think about him, and everyday it would bring him one step closer to ruining his life.

"You saw what he did to us James, he needs to know what it's like to be us! He needs to know what it's like to be me." Parker said then let out a few little muted cackles of laughter.

"It doesn't have to be like this Parker! We can stop this please!" James said as the man spoke to himself.

"No James, it has to be like this. We have nothing to go back to, they're all dead and all I see now is me. Me me me me me! Glorious me! And you don't fall into that picture James. So buckle up and watch as I tear down the foundation of a life with my hands!" James exclaimed aloud as speeders roared by the building in air lanes.

Looking over to a nearby briefcase Parker snapped open the locks and a disassembled sniper rifle lay inside of it. A cold sick smile ran across Parker's rotted teeth and he began to take the pieces out of the box.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="James M Parker"] was pretty clearly hallucinating. For one thing, Alec was on a skyhook -- a small space station over Coruscant. For another thing, Alec was here undercover, on a covert op she'd been prepping for a couple of weeks now. But it wouldn't be the first time Parker had hallucinated like mad.

So to speak.

A couple of thousand kilometres straight up from the place where Parker was playing with his rifle, Alec sipped her drink at the bar. She checked her datalink again; couldn't help it. Because about twenty klicks away from her, the prime team, for which she was playing overwatch, had just plugged a mobile backup generator into a derelict's motivator system. Stable class three estimated. Enough to get the star-shaped station moving; good thing the antimatter was all gone.

The countdown started. She caught the eye of [member="Khaleel Malvern"] and started winding her way through the crowd again, in the general direction of the nearest door. So far so good.

 

[Rexus Drath]

Parker continued to be hallucinating and not be at the party, oh but he would wait, he would wait...

 

[Ashin Varanin]

People's comlinks began to go off, most of them subtly and with classy ringtones. First one or two, then a handful. As they checked theirs, Alec pulled out hers openly, and typed as she made her way back toward the window. She wasn't the only one headed in that direction.

But first, she passed the punchbowl. And surreptitiously spiked it with half a flask of liquid pentacircarpous haemodilitirion, pre-doped.

-alert is now. bail.

At the window, she joined a group of well-informed civil servants and businesspersons. Well-informed, but not obligated to do anything about it. That function was relegated to the patrol ships homing in on the station out there. The few ships that had been floating around it were retreating into its massive hangar bays.

As the first blasts of ion cannon fire sent lightning rippling along the other station's hull, it seemed to accelerate. Pseudomotion, it was called. Those in the skyhook murmured appreciatively, or with disappointment, and went to get fresh drinks.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

In conversations half-overheard, Alec got the general picture. It seemed that a certain corporation had willfully consigned itself to disgrace and absented itself from One Sith territory, choosing to build new space stations rather than go to the trouble of moving this one. By careful intel and good solid use of public licensing data, Clan Rekali had learned that Krayt Industries, now Aurora Industries, had recently built every Mark One emplacement it currently operated. This was of interest because the clan father, Ember, had infiltrated a Mark One over Coruscant and returned with a good deal of data on its internal structure and operations.

It was, in the end, a question of priorities. Krayt/Aurora had been focusing on its restructuring, relocation, reallocation of stock, and staying one step ahead of the One Sith. And the Mark One over Coruscant was an old facility, deep in now-hostile territory, hardly worth the trouble of moving -- or, if you were a Sith, claiming. There were a lot of Mark Ones. This particular little station appeared on no model nor roster of Aurora's operations, all of which were new-built. It had, in short, fallen through the cracks for quite some time.

Until a Clan Rekali infiltration team had plugged a backup generator into the Class Three hyperdrive and hightailed it for neutral territory.

Already, pursuit would be a thing. More to the point, once comms intercepts were analyzed, someone would realize that there'd been an accomplice aboard the nearby skyhook. Someone in position to verify the jump and the One Sith response times via the other guests.

The empty station was gone, but might be catchable. Alec headed for the hangar.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Today, her ship of choice was an old Sith Empire shuttle, ubiquitous but nice enough to validate her stolen invite. She wasn't the only one leaving; a heist like this meant a response and an evaluation. Responses and evaluations for this sort of thing had implications for some of the other guests.

She would be pegged as a problem in the aftermath of this. There was no question about it. Any competent security apparatus would be able to put two (the comm chatter) and two (the security cam feeds of her farting around with her comlink) together. What mattered was getting off the skyhook before they realized there was something to notice.

The Clan Rekali crew had the shuttle all the way through an abbreviated preflight by the time Alec got aboard. With other personal ships, it accelerate out of the hangar -- and unlike the rest of them, then accelerated to hyperspace in the same general direction as the vanished station. Specifically, Soulstine.