Harvestmen

[Cato Fett]

“Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.”​

-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-​

​

-KRZZT-

“-day, due to a drastic rise in local crime rates, the municipality of Q'uwon-In-Krait has taken steps to disband its municipal police force in favour of -”

-KRZZT-

“-count sixteen unaffiliated Killik hivers massacred in -:

-KRZZT-

“-mass grave of over fifty five bodies uncovered by city workers-”

-KRZZT-

“Khard Loray, self-appointed Mayor of the M6, has been discovered dead in his public offices after a group of armed gunme-”

-KRZZT-

“-ourteen dead at a birthday party following a confrontation with-”

-KRZZT-

“-attacked with a combination of small arms and petrol bombs, inciting a riot spree lasting over-”

-KRZZT-

“-issued a statement with the body telling that supporters of the Ex-Oh cartel will be punished-”

-KRZZT-

“-enty-seven atmo-water farmers were discovered dead with signs of torture and mutilation, before deca-”

-KRRZZZT-

“-thirty for people slain over twenty fours in the-”

-KRRZZT-

“-deadliest year for the Potomo County-”

-KRZT!-

“-nine bulk-loaders discovered with the bodies of-”

-KRRRZT!-

“-ucting an investigation into prior beheadings, eleven private agents were ambushed and killed-”

-KRRZZT!-

“-ten dead in a shootout between rival cartels for control of Trevel'ka's lucrative smuggling routes-”

-KRZZT!-

“-gang rivalries reach an all time high and low with the discovery of over sixty mutilated remains left draped along a major speeder lane-”

-KKRRZT!-

“-being torn apart and there's nothing we can do. Nothing to be d-”

-KRRZT!-

“-one hundred sixty five migrants taken from the Bakeb Memorial Port in open dayli-”

-KRRZT!-

“-everal port towns have been entirely abandoned in the face of escalating violence between the Second Sons and-”

-KRZRZT!-

“-oordinated attacks across Reyloda appear aimed at damaging local infrastructure and neutralizing-”

-KRRRT!-

“-forty slain, including twenty at a rehabilitation centre-”

-KRZZZIT!-

“-graffiti left at the scene indicate a revenge killing aimed at goading-”

-KZZZT!!-

“It never ends. We just get more and more numb. 'Till we get tired of that and kill them back.”

The five minute summary precis clicked dead in his ear. Cato Fett adjusted the train of a rain poncho and hooked the hood and cowl forward, the edge of his polymer horn catching the inner lining and anchoring it against a slanting wind. Weather modifier stations in high orbit, built to aid in combating air pollution crisis', had gone erratic. Local comm.radio forecasted six days of downpour. An inch of grey and bracken water flowed, parted, and splashed across his boot soles. Ground-cars washed by, butting up against the sidewalks from meter deep potholes still full of foetid materials from the last rainfall. Cato turned aside from a broad-faced transit bus pulling up to a bent sign-post along his side of the boulevard, ignoring a cold drench running down both pant legs. Local time was 23:09 on the wrist-chron and three hours until cyclical midnight. He stopped under the cone of a street lamp broken, rusted, and scavenged, peering through a part in the rise of jammed architecture. The skyline was a dark vomit of acid yellows and mulch, lit by refuse piles burning at the city edges and the cram of two-hundred fifty million locals that required light sources at any and all hours of the day. Cato stepped out of the way of another swell of sidewalk traffic, standing under the dark offered by an abandoned shop front. Testing the door realized that it was kept locked by a thin magnetic strip and a bit of rust. The Mandalorian disappeared inside, into the black.

On Trevel'ka, as many as two score population wells demanded recognizance as the planetary capital. Only Jahrak, by dint of numbers in both census and developed hectares, stood virtually uncontested. The city appeared as a bruised ulcer or lesion growing out of the equator, expanding atop former marshlands drained to bedrock to make way for renewal programs that promised elevation out of abysmal unemployment and crime rates. Credits and fortunes wired into the city failed to generate the desired change. Business that was destined to reinvigorate a sprawling downtown sector shied away at the last minute, scared. Jahrak rooted down, retaining the grease of its hard won glamour: the pit of merging cultures forced to get along or fight for space and resource, under a constant, polluted twilight and distant refinery towers.

Cato settled behind the cover of a broken display case and rotten, fallen shelves. The floor was a carpet of shattered tiling, rubber shavings, peaks of exposed floor joists, and further detritus. He discarded the poncho: a cheap length of green plastic, bought for a credit handful from a child street vendor. Beneath that, a set of fashioned drab olive fatigues bound down by an equipment harness and field-ready fashionings, a shemagh scarf wrapped under the collar. He took the weight of a roped duffel sack off his shoulder, unzipping, rolling its contents out gently. A wood stocked sniper rifle operated with an oiled bolt-action, an effective relic. A salvaged Arma-Blast MRA assault rifle out of stamped metals and a temperfoam grip and a thick wire-stock. A pistol, with modest calibre, the grip worn in places.

Poor fair, by comparison. So backalley stories went, eight hundred years prior and nowadays, Mandalorians worth their salt walked dressed in contoured armouries of power weapons and beskar plating, untouchable. Cato hoisted the sniper around and over his shoulder blade, holstered the assault back behind the left hip, the pistol on the right. Ammunition, multi-tools, and other pieces of re-used kit were fitted into the pouches, satchels, and pockets sewn into the kevlar harnessing. His preference keyed towards light mobility and uninhibited motion, a longknife operator that could slide through urban and rural defences soundlessly, quickly. Otherwise, he'd trained and still worked to fortify his physicality. Beskar within. Beskar without. Cato rose, readied the slug pistol and slipped out through the shop's disintegrated back door.

Out into a tight alleyway, with a meter's give of span. Along the narrow tract, stepping along a carpet of white-plastic refuse bags that were all split and humidifying their contents. The stench combined roiling milk and hops, so sourly pungent and thick with fermentation it forced even the local ferro-rats to pause and heave. Cato did up his shemagh into a makeshift mask and climbed the rungs of a well-aged maintenance ladder. Up, along a back wall with crumbling stucco and air-conditioner vanes, onto a gravel-raked rooftop nineteen stories above the block. The overcast night bubbled and frothed overhead, soaking him through fatigue and under-armour. Cato sheltered under an abandoned squatting 'house': water-proofed tripleply cardboard with a slanted corrugated iron roof, the walls draped curtains of tarpaulin. He removed a roll of grease paper, smoothing it out over a knee: a topographical printout of 'Main Boulevard' and twenty kilometres going east, 'Hell's Basin'.

The printout came from a disused GPS satellite and an older on-board pict log dating before the rains. From the map, Cato freed his binocs and peered out from under the iron awning. It was an uneven landscape of dark roofs and staggered outlines, with an omnipresent lumen halo of white light banking up from labyrinth streets. Open, lit windows blinked back in the night. He panned for a long minute, wishing the binocs were fitted for tritium lenses. Natural night vision sometimes only went so far. There! A spindly shape or unshape, hobbling. Between a set of high rise, low income housing towers, pausing under a brief glare of sheet lightning.

A pale worm, manoeuvring on elephantine legs, grasping and flailing at wet air. It seemed to pause and suck in a lungful, swinging its head round. The skull was less bone and porous cartilage, more foot long open sucker lined with solid, jagged clusters of incisor-teeth constantly gnashing. Cato picked out brightened saliva trails running between rainfall streaks. The Lugubraa shouldered forward and hunched back into an even, plodding gait, swinging at the hip. And then gone.

Cato replaced the binocs away and edged out into the rain, leaving the squatter shanty behind. Hell's Basin overlaid his mind's eye as a partitioned map, dividing down in threes, segmented according to industrial zones ringing old factory spaces. The Hutt, the Rekali, confessed that the biding force leveraging control over the Basin had submerged its presence into the local underground. If the Mark could be anywhere, bent cred to a platinum bar, it'd be in one of those three strongholds. Cato made the jump to an adjacent roof and hunched into a hunting creep, climbing off a gutter edge down an air-exchange tube popping out a wall of exposed plumbing. Down, to the outline of a fire-escape, secreting past lit floors with woke denizens, and onto a sky-bridge. Somewhere was a dull sub-bass throb that couldn't have been his own heartbeat. Maybe Trevel'ka's own pulse, beating away through the night, lulling and waking in equal measure. The Mandalorian slid through a thin, high alley between high rise towers and beyond to another sky-bridge. Hell's Basin waited dressed in water and dirty light. An uneven city-scape burning fuel drums into the long midnight, with every shadow long, and dark knives waiting for one misstep.

Cato Fett snorted rain from his nostrils, hefted the easy rifle weight against his hands and shoulder, and began scaling sou-sou-east.

 

[Cato Fett]

Edna Reel Motors, ERM, drew media acclaim for its concentration on eco-friendly transportation production, and its factory space on Trevel'ka was fabricated in the aim of promoting healthier climate changes on a world besieged every day by worsening air toxicity. The production space occupied roughly five hundred ten thousand meters squared, a half kilometre tiered module representing fine cubist philosophy in construction. Public records pertaining to the ERM-TVK Works, the causes underlying its failure to both attract and cement an employee base, the scandals resulting, busied expense claims submitted before the Muunilist banking clans, and subsequent change of hands in facility ownership, were scrubbed and sanitized minor news features and guarded, censored review statements. ERM-TVK was a mistake. ERM would never attempt a profit out of Trevel'ka again.

From his perch, the manufacturing grounds resembled a chip board: the TVK main building, the fabrication floor, like a rectangle of processor silicon bulged with glued on oscillators, fuses, and diodes. A vast tarmac, a landing courtyard for employee parking, was meekly occupied by desiccated, rusting ground-cars and bulk-lifters hemming in close to the main plant. Light extended from a handful of glowlamp posts spattered haphazardly across the lot and search-torches mounted at six cardinal points along vantage points across the plant's roof edge. Loading bays, unseen and settled behind the north building face, hosted the most activity. Every quarter of the hour, single double-decker air-buses with armed speeder escorts came through perimeter the gates, parked for another fifteen minutes, then departed. Always accompanied by hoarse-voiced overseers shouting out commands and 'encouragement'.

Cato was settled on the lip of a nine story townhouse looking out across the ERM-TVK Works from the south and east. Rainfall had soaked him cold. He took a draught of canteen water and again checked his harnessing, going stone-still for a moment to listen. Taut thirty seconds... But nothing. Just out of patrol edge. He brought the binocs up, noting details across the plant space. The Mark had recruited local talents to crew the ground patrols: standard proportioned sentients, multi-racial, roughly organized into two-body units wearing cartel colours and chrome-plated blasters, running clockwise and counter-clockwise circuits round the chain-fence radius. Spotters and gunners waited in sheltered nests inside office spaces facing the outside lot or atop disused AC units and roof outcrops hanging from the plant walls.

“Doesn't like keeping the worms so close,” He muttered. Unless the Mark kept a pack of secreted Lugubraa inside the plant floor. Entirely possible. The 'worms', when in a controllable mode, were unorthodox but effective manhunters and stalkers. A tough hide and internal organ structure and musculature that was suitably adapted to standard atmospheres and hard vacuum, a lack of ocular sensoria but able to perceive surroundings through a combination of heat detection, echolocation, and touch. A mouth like a leech sucker, suctioned digit appendages that latched on and would hold until their prey wriggled free via tearing off their own skin, impressive physical fortitude, strength, stamina. An infantry nightmare.

The binocs secured, Cato stretched the cramps out of his legs and rose, descending down the townhouse. Via an erosion crack running jagged through the brickwork, wedging his hands, knees, and feet in and slowly cantering to the alley floor below. The townhouse itself was abandoned, the usual exception of squatters notwithstanding. His boots touched into a puddle of bracken and silt water, bringing the rifle up and edging to the alley mouth. A double-lane road ran and crossed the length of the perimeter fencing and represented several long metres of empty expanse. Beyond, past the chain-link and razor-wire, the vast parking lot was similarly barren. Even on a belly crawl, a stray glance and he'd be made. Approaching from the south was non-viable.

But the west flank... There, he saw the fence run close to the plant structure, littered with packaging detritus and the garbage of production left-overs. It served as a bottleneck and routine patrols whisked through on their jaunts every three to five minutes. Discrepancies that came with intrusion could be immediately noticeable. ...Sound. Cato crouched and ducked beside a row of aluminium trash bins, anchoring his rifle close as he thumbed off the safety. A speeder doubling as a 'troop' transport blared past, its modified muffler system bored out so its throaty approach could not be mistaken. Quick glance: nine bodies aboard, most leaning out the windows, more dirty uniforms and polished blasters. Cato waited another five minutes, noting the car making its patrol path round the boulevard surrounding the ERM-TVK. Something to consider on ex-fil. He ducked back into the alley and began stalking the back lanes. The west approach it was.

 

[Cato Fett]

Something came chuffing out of the gloom. A block before the fencing narrowed up against the ERM-TVK structure, amidst what had been a low 'cell mall' slotted under a trio of motel prostitution 'safe rooms', Cato stopped at the sound of plodding trudges. Still in a crouch, he edged back, tracing a hand along a length of bare concrete wall and slipping into a narrow cleft. He peaked down the garbage lane.

The Lugubraa had extended its first set of arms and was using the fine needle-teeth lining its sucker-fingers to feel the breadth of the alley. It was no taller than an average baseline human but its worm-like, intestinal appearance dredged up old fears inculcated by evolution. Eyeless, it 'tasted' the surroundings with a combination of touch, echolocation, heat, and vibration. It swung its sucker-head forward and panned with the neck, sucking thickly at the air. Cato weighed the option of combat versus distraction. Armour-piercing incendiary rounds chambered at 5.56 for the MRA would defeat its void-hide. Give him away to all of Hell's Basin and the small army of the Mark had on station.

Slowly, he knelt down onto his haunches and opened a set of pouches. Cato withdrew a small, bare powercell and a small plastic baggy. The contents of the latter were upended onto the cell: a fine coating of copper dust. He thumbed the cell on and held until the vague heat registered through his false-hand became blistering. And threw it, hard, back where he'd emerged along the far lane. The cell smacked off a shuttered portcullis and cartwheeled along the pocked paving. The effect was akin to tossing out candy: the Lugubraa reared back, stiffened, tantalized by the 'smell' of cooking thermo-conductors. It ignored Cato in his alley cleft entirely and loped on all-fours, charging over. Cato watched it pick at the discarded cell with its sucker-graspers, 'tasting' the mineral overlay. Their kind were adapted to ingest organic and inorganic materials, prizing ore as finer meal. The Mandalorian edged out one foot at a time, ducking through an opened disposal hatch and into what had been a line-kitchen.

 

[Cato Fett]

A felinoid and her brood of six kittens laired in the cannibalized parts of a range stove. She eyed Cato's shadow stepping past the opened lid, treading between refuse piles of broken ceramics and glass, picking his way into the forward dining halls. The majority of furniture had been stolen, broken up for make shift fires dug into the carpeting, or left to slowly crystallize under dust. It was a sight of old violence: Cato glanced over broken skeletons splayed on the felt carpeting, felled by erratic blaster fire. Another kitchen and prep hall behind the serving pits was gone, more or less, vaporized black by low-yield barridium charges. A body had been cut in half across the bar, another crumpled in the mouth of an unlit bathroom hall. Bare hands had painted sentences across the plaster in crusted condiments: 'We Chill-Dren Seddle All Akkownts.'

ERM-TVK was a flat of corrugated siding and matte grey colouring through the lobby windows. Cato took care, gently sweeping handfuls of broken frost-glass out from under his knee and boots, looking out onto the wide boulevard over the shattered sills. It was still four lanes across to the perimeter fencing. The patrol car whisked past on un-greased axles, running a little faster with each circuit. Someone aboard tossed a case of emptied bottles and flattened drinks cans out before the driver geared up and throttled away. Wouldn't be long, Cato thought, before boredom and drunk recklessness caused them to overturn the car and go flipping into one of the building faces. He took out the binocs and watched the guard.

The time between the concentric patrol teams had swelled: seven minutes over the prior five. Cato observed a pair of patrols pass by along the west face, pausing briefly to light fresh lho sticks. The night's rain hadn't let up and a swamp of runny water was beginning to pool and soak out of puddles. A guard shuddered through a coughing fit, dropping his lho stick in the mud, cursing sourly. Cato checked the local time: an hour past midnight, three away from a dull sunrise and a changing of the guard. He waited for the sub-roar of the pacing patrol car to fall at its quietest, trying to sync its absence with a break in the perimeter crews. ...Five minutes until the next units passed, three minutes to when the ground car guzzled by. Cato rose, jumped the broken restaurant window sill, and went across the boulevard.

The ferrocrete divider offered a limited bar of cover. Cato paused against it briefly, moving in his crouched stalk, taking a fast glance across the 'aisle' between the building face and the outer fencing. Clear. He sped to the chain-link and slid a sturdy vibro-knife out of its secret sheathe. The blade edge heated. Glowed. He stabbed the point forward through a link of steel and watched the alloys melt with a hiss, drawing the knife down until it cut a neat, cooked furrow through tarmac and stone. Cato disengaged the hilt battery and secured the blade away, reaching with his false-hand forward and parting the tear in the fence aside like a curtain. He stepped in, still crouched and low, now snug between a set of old cargo palettes no one had bothered stealing, salvaging, or destroying. Oil and a more retching residue seeped out of broken plastic drums nearby. Ahead was the outline of a thin maintenance hatch below a narrow window shelf, looking in on... On what and where, Cato didn't know. It was 'inside', regardless, and the first true step to be taken in his...

Not a mission, he thought. This was... something like vengeance, the way the Rekali Hutt described it. No. Just a bounty killing, Cato decided, laying his back softly to the left palette, holding utterly still. A quick check on his wrist-chron: two minutes until the expected patrols passed. Cato was on ERM-TVK grounds but not inside the Edna Reel Plant proper. The maintenance hatch looked sturdy enough to inhibit a vibro-cut and the damage inflicted on the joints, the seal, would be too glaring. Think faster. Minute thirty. ...The ventilation window? Too thin and secured from inside, and the glass held a telling plasteel sheen. Sixty seconds. As a precaution, Cato slipped a suppressor over the barrel end and screwed it in. ...And then, two floors over head, someone muttered in thick Cheunh and opened an office porthole, leaning out to smoke in the cold air.

Another chron check. ...Forty five seconds. Cato risked it. All weapons were holstered and he picked up the weight of a refuse barrel, leaning it as inconspicuously as could be next to a row of overflowing garbage pails. He climbed up, hands over boots, scaling the bare corrugation along rivet lines popped in where the siding pieces met. All the while weight-shifting, careful how the motion rubbed his fatigues and rocked his belted equipment, staring up with his one good eye at the hole of shadowed light and the gunner casually smoking against the rain. The Chiss was occupied glancing over the surrounding high rises and the Trevel'ka 'gloomscape' beyond, unconcerned with whatever could be below. Less than a yard, Cato appeared hanging suspended against the wall, clutching by a single boot toe and prosthetic forefinger and thumb on the rivet bolts. He loosed the pistol, cocked the safety off, and aimed under the gunner's chin -

Ten seconds.

Footsteps below, four bodies, the patrol units converging along the west-end aisle. If just one bothered to look up.

Nine seconds. Eight -

A sweet, thinner tone called the Chiss back from inside. He cursed and flicked his lho-butt. It trailed a breath of ash and bounced off Cato's eye-patch.

Six. Five seconds. Four -

An inner door closed, shut and locked in. Cato replaced the pistol back to its holster and took care with the final handholds. His hands gripped the sill, pushed, folding his weight in and over, tucking into a graceful curl that rolled him out and back onto his feet inside. The porthole sank back into place, and he pricked a small mag-latch down into a lock fastener.

One second. The chron-count defaulted to triple zero. The two-man patrols coming round the ERM-TVK's opposite ends met under the single lamp post overlooking the lane. Cato cocked his ear to the walling, listening while keeping an eye on the far room door: just brief pleasantries, in a patois of mingled languages, laughter, lighters flicking on, death and lho-sticks being exchanged. The patrol car raced past, blasting heavy Gran 'gun-dub', and hurtling their trash at the fencing. Oath-laden rebuttals in a half-dozen languages. The guard was slowly getting itself liquored in time for the shift change. Cato stood away from the porthole and drew his side-arm in the same motion, steadying into a striding gait. Time to find the Mark. Or someone who did, at least.

 

[Cato Fett]

Five bodies patrolled the west end, separated by as many floors. By a faded emergency evacuation plaque mounted next to a broken fire extinguisher case, Cato read off and memorized pieces of the wing's layout. Second floor, research marketing, ERM-TVK's in-house investigative committees, office modules circulated according to focus goals. Half the rooms had lost lighting; he ducked into a hollow boardroom, picking his steps through squalor, the carpeting tore up in favour of creating a neat 'nest' in the corner, emptied wine bottles and cheaper beer cans arranged in drug-fuelled geometric patterns spreading out from a crack of water staining running down the hallway wall. The shadow of the patrolling Chiss crossed the doorway; he was bored and oblivious. Cato didn't risk a flashlight in the murk. According to the plaque, the second floor ended and opened out into the plant's production floor. He knelt, jimmied an electronic spike-key into an auto-door lock, crossed inside and fitted under a crazily leaning desk.

The Chiss had wandered into the boardroom behind. He stumbled on a wine bottle, swore, kicked it into the nearest wall. A shatter of dusty, emerald glass, plinking off the lines of aluminium cans. The torchlamp swept into the next module and panned about. Cato held still, willing himself into a piece of shadow under the desk. Never mind it was missing two support legs and his own were sitting out, half bent. He drew the vibroknife. The guard, in spite of his light, still managed to nearly trip over a naked swivel chair. That too he kicked out of the way, looking to entertain the notion of blasting the plastic and wheel rollers with a burst from his hip-SMG.

“Tsh,” The Chiss hissed, rolling an ache out of one wrist. [Fething dinosaur. Paranoid. This is the Basin. No one's coming out here. So hungry. Fething double shifts. Next time, I'm getting on the car. Fething dinosaur...]

Cato observed him plod forward a little more gingerly and disappear back into the connective hallway. He went to the open auto-door jamb, peeking his eye out: the Chiss reached, tugged the bulk of an old comm.radio off his hip and broadcast his status. Someone blared back with static and gross, misshapen words difficult to make out. Local security, for all it's amateur trappings, was running a tight ship. Holes detected in their communication netting would rouse suspicion. HUMINT was out, save for anything he could glean indirectly. Dinosaur., he thought.. The Chiss swept back down a second hall, separated by a deep aisle of cubicles, bouncing his lamp through tears in the partitions.

Slowly, the infiltrator edged into the hall, crouched and rifle held. Broken halogen and glowlamp fixtures sputtered intermittent hails of sparks. The few lights working were grimed over, brown and smoky. Cato went to the hallway end and checked the T-junction before the hatchway leading out into the plant assembly. Right: clear. Left: clear. The Chiss was stalled somewhere in the back of the wing, cursing again, with faint sounds of a chemical-lighter being flicked. Another smoke break. Cato went to the hatch and pressed against the jamb, listening for a guard post outside. Only vague 'machine' echoes, doplar warbles coming from below, shouting in the same local patois, and rubber boot soles smacking hard against cement. Cato briefly froze when he looked out onto a duriron staircase, seeing a boxy CCTV camera screwed into the underside of the third floor landing.

But the camera lens, the shielding and housing, and the running connective feeds snaking into the wall were damaged, severed. Relieved, Cato crawled forward under the neat, lattice shadows of the overhead landing, peering down over the railing.

The assembly expanse was a dwarfing hangar, cold, grey. Below, the ferrocrete decking was barren. Before the first assembler droid-arms had ever been ordered, ERM-TVK represented to stock holders a sinking credit singularity. Edna Reel Motors convened at an emergency review that doubled as a false 'vacation'. Trevel'ka was labelled a 'fruitless and financially impotent project.' What stalled funds from recycling the facility's building materials, Cato didn't know. He checked his rifle, ammunition caches in their sternal pouches, re-daubed his face with a bit of split camou paint out of a 'shoe tin', and glided up to the third floor landing.

 

[Cato Fett]

In place of automated mechadendrite production aisles, lanes and lanes of chemically sterilized plastic 'fold out' tables were arranged in strict rails taking up roughly two quarters of the sprawling floor space. Power feeds wired to and from hastily modified industrial outlets, powering scores of compound mixers, ran underfoot, duct taped in place every two to four meters. The tables resembled miniature chemist labs, recalling holo-net news reels of criminally amateur operations meant to produce viable quantities of entertaining narcotics. Four bodies laboured to each table, handling a rough process and refining system, ending in large clear bags fattened with violet powders or octagonal chew-tablets that glowed with indigo. Cato counted two gunners per table lane, pacing along and convening with an unseen controller through waist-belted walkie-talkies. The finished product was handed off to small, half-naked 'runners' pushing old steel trolleys back toward a set of open bay doors, then loaded onto the single cargo hauler with its ground-car escort: the activity Cato had spotted earlier while perched outside.

Upstairs was a black raft. Immense skylights were covered over in dark tarpaulin and sections of spray-painted plastic sheeting, staple-gunned in place. Light fixtures had been removed or destroyed, by scavengers and vandals. A night crew of five spent their shift with legs slung over the grille-flooring, resting against the guard-rails, watching figures darting across the immense floor below. Bored, they noted nothing, reported nothing. One smoked. Another bobbed their head against a beat, ears plugged up with bud speakers. Two had their flashlights on and played a testy game of Chambers. At the far catwalk end, opening into a maintenance stairwell running down to the production level, a single gunner leaned against the wall and fought off exhaustion. No one noticed a low profile creeping in between the thicker portions of shadow.

Cato had bought a fifth rate cottage industry silencer and a barrel-end adaptor for his MRA rifle. It was weighty and ungainly. He compensated choking his grip up forward, all while crouch-walking toward the maintenance hatchway. Passed the smoker, passed the players, easing behind the sitting music player and noticing he was reading something off on a cracked data-slate screen. Cato paused and slung the MRA back onto his hip, grappling the gunner into his hold. Pinched the mouth, nose shut. The thug wriggled a moment and he feared his shaking against the grating would wake his comrades out of their stupor. ...He shrugged and went limp. The Mandalorian carefully laid him back into a pose suggesting a nap. If the gunner woke too soon, Cato chanced he'd consider it just a rough nap, distracted by an inevitable headache. The Chambers players argued under their breath over a hand play. He passed them, crawling belly-flat, hunched up just so to keep his kit, harnesses, and holster from scratching against the grilling.

As for the hatchway guard... A sole bridge led up to the door and a small landing with space enough for a body and chair. The gunner had taken a seat, drawing a lho stick, smoking and glancing out into dark spaces. Looking at nothing at all. But, Cato felt, he'd noticed a presence coming along the bridge. A quick shoulder check: music guy was out cold and unconsciously grunting. The second smoker at the far end was changing out for another narcotic. Chamber players were on to their umpteenth round. Cato exhaled, double-checked his harnessing, and then soundlessly jumped the railing. He kept a hand on the bars and flipped round, lowering until he was hanging off by the grille-flooring. A sick feeling of weightlessness where his toes should have felt solid purchase sent a shiver up his legs and into his prostate. Gritting back nerves and teeth, he looked down: forty meter drop. Instant death or close to it on impact. Cato took in a shallow breath; training and a lifetime of steel-trap nerves did the rest. He shimmied left, unseen by the hatchway gunner.

Hanging from the landing plate, Cato let a hand go and hung by his prosthetic. The servos wound and clenched the steel digits in, locking up. The weight made the strapping holding the arm in place dig in meanly across his chest. Only briefly. He hurried, digging through a pocket, balancing a small decicred on his thumb. It flicked and flipped, curling a neat throw, 'tinking' off the fine grille mesh on the bridge farther down. The guard blinked out of his musings and stubbed out his lho stick. His lamp torch swung down the bridge length and highlighted the discarded coin.

“Huh...” The gunner rose off his chair and sauntered over, bemused. Spare change pulled its weight on Trevel'ka. Pulled its weight nearly anywhere. In smooth succession, Cato pulled up onto the landing, tucked his rifle up, ducked in through the hatch frame and covered the long stairwell as he quickly jaunted down. The shaft was a long hollow, a dizzying ferrocrete and iron vertice, only partially lit by dust encrusted emergency lamps glowing blue rather than red. Cato covered each unlit jamb opening into the east module wing, checking for the entrances displaying light, sound, or hints of motion. The industrial ambiance of drug manufacturing reverberated up the shaft. Overseers barking orders at the escort guards, naked feet slapping across the floor, vials and beakers clinking, whirring mixers. They crossed and echoed, rebounding off the bare paint. If Cato couldn't hear his own bootsteps as he snuck further and further down, neither could they.

At the first floor rising off the ground level, he paused at a half open hatch. A thin stroke of dirty light peaked out from inside. Cato slung the rifle, brought up his pistol, covering the hatch-door while easing it open by an added inch. Inside: fuel canister jugs piled beside a running generator, pulsating electricity to strung lamps screwed and epoxied into the ceiling or off cubicle partitions. A length of particle board stacked on rotting cardboard boxes with neat arrangements of data-slates, flimsi's, and laser-ink wells. Product samples splayed out across a second desk, rough lines of sugar-white powder, octagonal tongue-candies, and a bad of glowing tablets hued like indigo. Six bodies inside, Cato counted. Two at the left wall, three at the right, one pacing about a broken pathway through the cubicles. ...No, he thought. Seven. Something big in the back, sucking up air and drool.

Muscle tensed up his shoulders. That breathing... From two pairs of small lungs that were more or less auxiliary organs, beginning to atrophy. A Lugubraa. Damn.

“Nothing reported,” Said the pacing one, inside the module. “...Yes, feth, I'm sure. ...Well you would know before I would, either way. ...Yes. ...It's good but lacking. You get those mixers from the Far'd End? ...Why not? ...Vongtech's like that. Should have let me negoti – Right. Alright. ...Alright. ...It's here right now, yeah. ...Soon. ...An hour. ...Yes, it's fine, it's all fine. Why jittery? You been taking product? ...So what? ...Boss, this is the Basin. Even if that 'Fat One' tries muscling in, we've got the wyrms.”

The conversation moved, treading to the hatchway. Cato retreated back, up the staircase to the second floor landing, pushing back into a low lit corner. A creature in a jacket matte of stitched silk squares and dirtied slacks emerged, trailing a pair of thug guards and the lumbering Lugubraa. He tracked them along the iron-sights, gently tensing the rifle safety free. The lieutenant had a hot-wired hand held communicator, a brick of plastic, exposed silicon and a hair-nest of wires. Cato watched him adjust a scrolling thumb-diode, hissing animatedly into a microphone mesh speaker.

“I can't. ...Well then who's gonna cover the shop here? I leave, the boys will - - There is nothing, boss. Nothing. ...What's that mean? ...Can't be serious.” The lieutenant stubbed out what was left of a cigarra, stamping down to the ground floor. Cato followed, easing gently, wary of how well the wyrm could pick up on errant sound, heat, and motion. The roar of outside winds, rain, and engine noise trembled up through the stairwell, louder than ever. The lieutenant paused before a wide set of double slide-doors, lit by hard flood lamps dangling from steel chains disappearing into the rafters. More partially dressed footpads swung their trolleys up to the waiting cargo hauler. Cato felt chemical stenches singe and curl up his nose.

“It's some bullshid. ...Whatever. ...I can't ditch. I just said that. ...Or what?” The lieutenant paused. The lho stick hung slack between thin lips, whetted by his tongue. “...You made your point. 'Kay. I'll... I'll be over shortly, Boss. Shid.”

The mood was broke. A front of easy defiance and casual dismissal of the voice across the comm.channel crumbled into nerves and jittered steps. The lieutenant spat the lho stick free and tugged out a spice-pocky, a length of sugar coated 'death stick', and sucked hard on an end. A thug-soldier traded glances between the other escort gunners and gingerly approached their employer.

“Chief?”

“We're going now,” Said the lieutenant. His eyes were slitted enormously and rung with tortured blood vessels. He raised a hand, rife with tremors, and sucked on the death stick. “Boss says so. Radio if you have guys you want. He - “ Now the lieutenant gestured at the silent, hard breathing Lugubraa. “ - is also coming with.”

The lieutenant left them jogging to catch up as his fast stride took him across the ERM-TVK floor. Cato followed down the stair well and took up a spot in the jamb opening into the colossal production space, staring after the 'middle man', his armed entourage, and the lumbering, disconcerting bulk of the wyrm-thing, trudging out toward the loading bay doors. Cato hoped he was reading the situation correctly: ERM-TVK was a production plant, pure and simple. The ex-OS, their controller, was folding several high tier captains back into his reach, as insurance and protection or just shielding fodder. He was not present in the plant itself but an opportunity was opening to follow the chain of command back into his headquarters. Otherwise, he'd have to trawl the plant grounds and secure intel through a paper trail or an impromptu 'interview'.

He wondered what Khado would recommend. What Yuna'sif would advise. ...Say, 'Cato, the call's yours. You have situational control. Act as you will, but act now and carefully,' he thought.

...Back. Not the plant floor. Too much light, heavy exposure, little cover, either guards walking circuits in the production aisles or the bored gunners atop in the rafters would should him to pieces. Back. Up the staircase by two floors onto the second level module, through a blacked out hatchway into the guts of what had been ERM-TVK's marketing department. Cato was running. His pistol was tight in the right fist, fighting knife in the left, sprinting headlong toward a partially ajar porthole opening out onto the east side. A brief chrono-check: bare seconds to arrange himself to hitch a ride with the departing lieutenant in time. The porthole cracked off its hinges by the force of his weight, jumping and diving feet first. Out into a fast moment of weightless fall. ...And then down. He crunched onto unbroken tarmac in a knelt landing, turning right: north. Tracked with the pistol, raised in a classic CQC guard, hugging the bare ferrocrete and aluminium siding walling.

The loading dock was a backlit portal framing the rainfall like hail falling out of the night sky. By his wrist-chron, time was 01:30. Approximately thirty bodies manned the product hand off, loafing by the speeders and ground-cars, or piling on heavy double-sheathed plastic sacks into the back of the long bulk hauler. Cato knelt in behind the shadow of a palette stack, rubbing water out of his eyes, breathing just slowly to keep his exhales from misting and raising a fog over his head. Security was lax: bored thugs standing cold in the rain, playing with torch lamps or arguing with the dock overseers to try practice shooting with the empty store crates and cans left along the pre-fab plant walls. Cato found the lieutenant through the chill and moisture fog.

His ride was the forward ground-car running lead before the bulk hauler, a four wheel model modified with riveted duraplast and a mounted pintle gun. The Lugubraa climbed atop the hauler and sat between brace arches folding the spine of the vessel together. The driver waited until the lieutenant was seated and his guard belted and readied. The signal to debark were two fast air-horn blares and a flicker of headlights. There was a general sound of relief and blaster safeties being latched, shaking excess wash out of their much used, supposed 'all-weather' ponchos. The bay doors slid out of their cradles and closed the ERM-TVK plant floor out of sight. Floodlamps nailed and stapled along the siding died. Fifteen seconds of cold, heady shadow, where the guards bumbled into their speeders and argued to turn up the cabin AC heat.

Cato sped from cover. The run was in his patented partial crouch, rifle coasting from speeder window to window. He crossed along the loading dock and down over soaked and puddled tarmac, careful to pick his steps up over pieces of metal detritus, spars of girders left discarded and rust devoured. Paired speeder idled just behind the bulk loader, covering the rear flanks. Both had mounted pintle canons heat-glued to the cabin roofing, both manned by heavily dozing gunners shivering themselves awake every few moments. Cato slung his rifle back onto its hip catch and went low. Crawled, ever gently, conscious of every scrape his fatigues and harnessed kit made occasionally on the pavement. He went in under the repulsor pylons juddering warmly along the undercarriage, the left most vehicle, twisting round until he had lifted his weight off the ground and hung gamely to the speeder's framing.

Another handful of raw moments stretched by time and nerves. ...And then the pylons woke, coasting the speeder up gently from the tarmac floor by a half meter, sliding forward on a smooth cushion of buffeting energy and air. Cato gritted his teeth and hooked his arms and heels in against the undercarriage frame. And prayed he'd not fall off. He'd be seeing this 'boss' tonight after all...

 

[Cato Fett]

They drove for what felt like too long. Slowly, Cato entered a kind of entranced state where he became a piece of the speeder's undercarriage, no more obtrusive then the pans of duranium and looping tubes running between the individual anti-grav pontoons. He was old metal, flaking with rust and doused in oil and rain. Cracked and broken pavement sped by below, a greyed out blur striped with faded dividers like skipping epoxy. Muted conversation managed to occasionally overpower the repulsor roar. He tensed and relaxed selections of musculature stretched along his back, shoulders, and hips. Tension cramps were threatening his mobility and Cato had little wish to be handicapped soon as they stopped.

Suddenly, the pavement and aged tarmac fell away. Cato craned his head around and noticed smoothed durracrete, a smear of olive and grey, slowly coming into focus as the speeder throttled down. Sound became close and echoed dully and metallic. The vehicle cantered about, piloting over a landing square, striped patterns of industrial-white paint heat-glued onto the deck. He noted the ever present thrum of the bulk hauler was gone; it swung away to his left with a bank of sloughing rain water, taking a sizable portion of the running escort with it. The speeder had diverted off somewhere else, a smaller garage or parking hangar. Part of a larger complex, he guessed, though maybe more concise than the grand spaces offered by the ERM-TVK plant. The speeder extended hooked landing claws and eased onto the decking with a hydraulic breath.

Cato inched onto the flooring. Couldn't take the ambient machine racket for granted. He loosed one boot free, tensed and loosened the other, settling his lumbar down before his shoulders and neck canted back. He took a moment's rest, then checked the ageing wrist-chron. Two hours away from local dawn. Time was bleeding out. No guarantee the Mark would stay immobile until system sun-rise, either way. He eased the MRA rifle off his hip and took a customary ammunition count. And then waited a little while longer, listening against the backdrop of someone working a piece of duraplast with a fusion cutter, a mechanic grinding out the floss from their latest piece of welding, and stereo blasts of bootlegged synth-drop.

...Nine bodies, in a compact garage big enough only for a pair of moderate ground-cars or air-speeders. Cato peaked out from the undercarriage, spying at least three armed. Assumed the rest were packaged with firearms too. And one, at least, within reaching distance of pulling a fire or emergency alarm. Combat was crossed out. He needed a sense of direction, foremost. Cato checked and waited for the lazy garage patrol to pause and accrete near the stereo, a crowd of loud chatter drinking over lidded fuel barrels. ...Six bodies by the music player, two by his cover, another relieving themselves in a makeshift toilet built out of glued PVC and a drilled can in the far room corner. Cato eased a handful of decicred coins, edged out from the undercarriage, and tossed his wrist.

The change bounced and jingled along the ferrocrete. Assuredly, immediately, those two bodies closest glanced up. Despite perturbed whispers, they tried casually aping over, lured by the bright platinum finish of money. Where'd it come from? Mattered little. Someone was out by a couple full credits, to his loss and their gain. The one relieving their self in the bathroom corner bitched loudly of a urinary tract infection. The stereo gain boomed even louder. Cato checked his rifle was silencer-fixed and rolled out, crouching up into a hunched walk, gun raised and going through an unlocked swing-door nestled to his immediate left -

 

[Cato Fett]

Into a snubbed hallway. Bathroom facilities on the right wall, a custodial closet on the left, under cold halogen fixtures recessed in the bare ceiling. The flooring was scuffed laminate worn through into exposed floor joists at places, rife with odour. Rifle raised, Cato eased along, willing a nerve-induced rictus out of his locomotion. ...A bathroom stall in the men's facility gargled messily before finally rushing its plumbing along with physical refuse. Tap faucets squealed and started running water. He hitched the rifle back onto its catch, gripped both his pistol and knife, and slid inside in through the swing door.

A dreadlocked Kiffar with bandaged arms and red tattoo-scarring washed his face in an overflowing sink. Individual toilet stalls were lacking any dividers or partitions and an incredible smell of effluence rose out where several latrines had been shattered our pulled out of the floor. The kiffar ducked his face into the cold wash and the runoff fell between his boots, through a crack in sour-coloured tiling. Cato's reach gripped him out of the water and nearly off his feet, locking up his shoulders and leaving the bright point of a knife scratching at his larynx.

“Oh shid, chill, chill!”

“Shh,” Cato murmured. He drew them to a far corner, out of line with the entry. His grip clenched in, reminding the kiffar of pain. Real pain. The knife rose and threatened the meat of his throat.

“L-Let's talk, man...”

“We will,” Cato growled. “What's your outfit here?”

“S-Serious...? Aagh!! Horde! We're Horde!”

“And what's 'here'?”

“S'like... Uugh... S'like a uh... uuhh... whaddya-call, old dock stuff. Like a... like offices... garages... Lotsa hangars, sub-basements, that s-sorta shid... ”

Incomplete but a better impression of the environ then before. Cato relented from needling out exact floor plans, doubting the gunner possessed the memory or gumption. His eye hovered on the short space between the washing sinks and the unseen entrance. Everything and anything could go wrong in the next half minute, if someone intruded...

“Your boss is ex-OS.”

“He is...? Ugh!”

“So tell me where to find him.”

The kiffar blinked, drawing up shallow lungfuls. “...'K-Kay. Easy, man. He's here t-tonight. Got the whole pl-place jazzed... Find him... In w'onna the... w'onna the warehouses... w'onna the cold basements...!”

“Which one?”

“Don't know...”

“Which one?” Cato insisted.

“Aargh! Don't know! Boss's here but he's gone! Jus' hiding out 'till the day breaks or sumthin'! Got his captain's on alert and the wyrms off their leashes! 'Cuz o' you!”

“Then put me on my way. Warehouses are...?” The knife knicked a flake of skin off his throat.

“J-Just... Keep goin' out this way. Coupla floors, get onta th'first, back through the yard and past some gates...”

The blade receded. And then Cato's weight and strength pressed in and grappled a hook round the gunner's throat, tight enough to nearly reel him off his heels. The kiffar scrabbled, greying out across his cheeks while dark eyes bulged in breathless panic. The light didn't quite fade but he was assuredly out in the next handful of seconds, allowed to slump over in a stunned fugue beside one of the few remaining privys. Cato knelt, rummaging through pockets and shirt sleeves. Candies, narcotics, keepsakes, a loop of electronic chubb keys, a digital 'spike', gas-clips for the gunner's heavy blaster sidearm. The keys and spike were pocketed, and the gas-clips doused in the still running sink. For intents and purposes, the bathroom scene resembled every other hold up and robbery, a prank or rumble to settle scores. If the kiffar woke, whether or not he'd ring alarm bells was fifty-fifty. Either intimidation would ensure silence and an attempt to preserve dignity, or sheer wrath would spite him.

Outside, a clear hallway. Pistol was replaced for rifle, the Mandalorian stepping up to another door frame. He fished the kiffar's chip-chubb key ring and slotted each piece until an archaic lock finally gave. Going low, Cato cased the next room: old office space converted into empty storage converted into general use. A dozen packed crates lined one wall on plastic shelving, a low line of terminals mounted on buckling plasteel desks, divided centrally by a narrow table. Two guards, one seated, one at the next hatch, both half at attention. To the right: an open window over a grille porch, looking out to a muster yard. Through rain and darkness, scores, hundreds of shapes milled and jogged. Lightning crashed onto a luring rod and lit the scene with hard colour, a cold overexposure like a pict taken in airless vacuum. Past, the boxy outlines of the Horde's vast warehouse holdings briefly blinked into visibility.

“Tha'hell...?” The guard at the next hatch stretched out and yawned, too casually picking at his slung blaster. The silencer coughed twice. Gunner One, table, jerked out of her chair. Gunner Two slumped against the wall and smeared his way into a crumpled seat. Cato fished another electro-chubb key into the second hatch, listening against the durasteel, then daring the hatch open, leading the rifle forward.

 

[Cato Fett]

He'd made it to the yard, a quarter of an hour past, when the compound woke itself. There was no alarm or siren klaxon. Cato slid into shadow, beside the profile of a tall outside air-conditioning unit bigger than most fridges, letting its sound and heat blend him out of extra-sensory sight. Issue wasn't the guard contingents, per se. The issue was the Lugubraa. Now, from the low office cabins by the west fence wall, bodies were running to and fro. He spotted the dreadlocked kiffar, half-awake, looking like hell, dragging himself with support along feet that didn't want to work. The kiffar spat and coughed, rambling loudly and thickly. The two guards shot at their posts were carried out by arm rather than wheeled. Floodlamps broke on across the yard and framed the rainfall in cool stripes, reducing droplets to winks of white hail, searing detail into the thousands of muddied puddles churned from hundreds of footsteps. A rich, velveteen, and utterly chilly voice crackled aloud over barely serviceable speakers. Cato listened:

“I did not expect success. But I did not expect a foreign element to be allowed to kill so brazenly under my nose. You, each of you, has failed me. The consequences of that wholesale ineptitude will be felt. To mitigate those consequences, you will all exercise supreme vigilance. I want my entire compound searched until this element is discovered and killed. Bring me their body. Do not taint their belongings. You will want my attentions to be on where I will send my rebuttals, rather than whipping the bleeding piss out of you for being so lax in the first place. I'm taking my wyrms off their leashes: don't get in their way. Now: go.”

The Mandalorian was up. Moving. A low and throaty gargle was rising across the warehouses past the long separating wall. Against the tumult of beating voices and shouts, the compound waking itself out of a near constant drugged stupor, were wet howls. He could even feel the psionic controls on their behaviour patterns being relaxed: a hard ache in the centre of his brain. The facility, if it could be called so, was arranged much like a blocky 'C': the open section between tapering points was the No Man's Land leading into the rowed warehouse holdings. Beyond that, Trevel'ka's urban maze magnified into a rise of interlinked skylines and the untold alleys and streets within. That harlequin-red chemical glow in the sky, further west at the chemical plant domes, was leering brighter.

In their en-masse rush to flush him out, the line of stiff-necked gunners keeping guard at the foot of the wall were gone. Cato crouch-walked toward the west pocket where the durracrete retainer was flush with the high chainlink and razor fencing surrounding the compound. It was featureless besides graffiti and oblong Asahi kanji. But for a small, thickset door locked via a rare piece of functioning high-technology: a bio-spoor reader. Cato hurried to the auto-door and read where its bulk would swing into its storing recess and then waited. A squat gang of heavier gunners lined up on the other side. Impatient exchanges, one of them replacing their rotator-cannon with a full energy ammo-drum. They did not want to be caught about the warehouses with the Lugubraa loose. Cato flattened against the duracrete, the auto-hatch whisking open, gunners filing through in a fat-waddled jog, stepping up soundlessly behind the last body and throwing his body in against the slamming door.

He couldn't beat the speed in which the hatch was going to close. Currently, he was stuck with the thick edge of the door striking up against his spine, boot planted into the frame, both hands on the jamb and grunting with effort. Servo-motors were exerting force enough to sunder bone if resistance didn't slacken. An electric whine accompanied a sour odour, the servos nearly working themselves into a melt, Cato gritting his teeth in a rictus snarl, inching his body out. He exhaled and seemed to go limp, throwing himself to the side out of the way of the hatch frame. The door cranked shut. The Mandalorian lied breathless in the mud for a moment until his the darkness fuzzing round his one cone of vision. He was up, rifle braced up once more, quickly patting down his web-gear with a hand before advancing. The warehouse parcel yawned open.

 

[Cato Fett]

It was a Lugubraa nest. The warehouses were fitted three by three: nine constructs total, twenty meters tall, thirty long, ten wide. Light pooled from vast spot lamps sprouting out of the durracrete on stalks of black metal, faces latched with thin grills and bright bolt studs. The Mark's order had vacated whatever ordinary muscle had been waiting on shift, guarding over the vast holdings of the Horde's coalesced wealth. Cato wondered how much tonnage in fuel he'd need to set the district alight. Would it wound the Horde? Put them back off their heels? Give locals that fighting moment to slit throats that needed to be knifed? Maybe not.

He peaked over the ceiling of a lonesome garbage bin. The wyrms, that he could see, liked to congregate under the cones of the street and aisle lamps. Natural attraction to the heat sourced by the industrial bulbs. There would come a niggling pain inside his skull again, dispersing the wyrms. The Mark had released mnemonic parameters constraining them to patrol routes but left them otherwise barely supervised. Master's whip, instrument of free-falling short order remembrance, prodding the creatures into action through terror. The Lugubraa were searching but they couldn't identify or know what they sought. Cato hesitated to near any of the buildings. The kiffar mentioned the Mark had gone to ground in a sub-basement but didn't or couldn't know which warehouse specifically. It was a moment of frustration, and the rain was pronouncing aches across hid body.

...Warehouse five. A gut tickle of intuition kept hinting at warehouse five. In terms of symmetry, it centred the district round itself with a perimeter of like-buildings that aided in camouflage. A best guess. Cato reached and tugged his scarf-shemagh, twisting water out of the fabric, wrapping it up as a bandit-mask across his mouth and nose. Then raised the MRA gun and ensured the safety was well toggled off, twisting off the poor, cottage-made silencer. Conventional slug ammunition, despite its armour-penetrative qualities, was replaced with a red-striped magazine stamped in dark steel. Incendiary armour-penetration 5.55smm and the cheapest brand Cato could afford. The Lugubraa boasted tough skin. With three magazines to spare, the Mandalorian bet he could prove otherwise. He didn't bother with crouching: Cato stood and began stalking through the rainfall.

Toward the south face of WH 1. Bothered by a pair of Lugubraa chewing their way through collections of trash. Something to their demeanor made it suggestive of malnutrition, or close to starvation. At Cato's approach, sensing motion, the soft touch of rubber boot treads against ferrocrete and tarmac, they tensed up and sniffed the air. He palmed another 'distraction': powercell with a lump of ore. It flicked off his thumb and went sailing, super-heating in seconds and sizzling a trail of bright steam through the air. The Lugubraa pounded over, scrabbling at the ground for the cell, hissing when their suction feelers connected with the heat and burned, motivated by raw kinds of hunger. Cato slipped by, into the alley between WH1 and 2, covering with the end of his rifle.

More wyrms shuffled along the tall roof edgings and hung from eavesdrops, apelike. A throaty, mucus-like patois of language barked between them. A few seemed to notice pats of sound over the rainfall, raking their sucker-faces back and forth, serpentine. Cato didn't hurry. Compensating for a lost eye, his other senses at times operated on the verge of painful acuteness. Nothing yet behind him. Before him, the broad lane separating the first warehouse row from the second. More Lugubraa, a full two score as he counted, shuffled and plodded with strange unison. The water fall was soaking and dulling their senses, the cold beginning to mute their heat sensitivity. He checked a harness pocket. ...Three more 'distracters'. Cato paused. Looked up at the ill-formed, pale crowd of ringed, almost translucent skin.

...Thought of half-dead men he owed in blood and coin.

The powercells went skittering. The metallic aroma of heat and mineral rich epoxied ore overrode the rain. A mass pause ensued as the Lugubraa got their bearings and went to all fours, their second sets of almost vestigial arms hanging off their ribs like obscene mammaries. A trio of dog piles rushed, clawed, bit, and fought to get at the heat sources. What else but the master's intruder could be that 'bright' and warm? Cato's bootfalls were unheard and he quickly jaunted for the forward entry doors settled off-line of the warehouse's broad, gated face. This door, too, required gene-spoor to move the lock.

He took out his one knife and thumbed a power stud. The vibro-edge glowed white. Cato speared it into the small, blocky module attached to the spoor reader and wrenched the blade about, until silicon and melted rubber poured out the slagged rents. On ordinary systems, the loss of a relay would trigger a locking cascade and shunt bolts into the jamb, effectively sealing the hatch until an executive switch on the inside was tripped and the door labelled 'safe'. This was Trevel'ka. Cato anticipated another outcome. After a moment, a short rocked the hatch and dripped sparks along the edging. Sheer grunt strength pulled it back against locked, whining servos. Inside, just briefly, Cato saw tall pallet racks and dusty, orange light. Turning round, he backed into the warehouse, then shouldered the hatch back into its jamb.

The Mandalorian heard nothing. It was quiet enough to ring his ears. Turning about, his rifle-end accosted a mint-olive curtain sheet strung by thin chrome rings on a aluminium pole. A divider that had not, had not been there prior. Cato blinked. That spot in the very middle of his brain was aching terrifically and pressure was popping inside his ears. Cato reached. Tugged the curtain gently aside. Staring into a white, sterile hospital corridor...

 

[Cato Fett]

“Perfect timing.”

The corridor was like a tunnel of wrapped sheeting air-suctioned to the walls, flooring, and ceiling. There was a detail of plastic and gloss to every surface, save the bare halogen lamps, long strips of too cool illumination inserted into muted metal frames drilled through porous, webbed sheeting. Sounds dripped and echoed, disconnected. Not an end but a featureless white halo where the corridor stretched on. Cato had gone into a crouch with the MRA aimed in his hands, sweeping his sight along for targets that didn't materialize. The headache was now terrific.

“Absolutely perfect timing.”

“Where...” Cato breathed. Knots of pain shrieked inside his brain matter.

“In here.”

He got up, edging forward. Vision and logical faculty were battling one another. His eye believed he was in a too-familiar hospice corridor. Even the soggy artificial gravity effect that pulled on his boots was near perfect. Yet, this was impossible. He was on Trevel'ka in a fourth rate warehouse complex, searching pallet racks for a way into the sub-basement. After the Mark. Ex-OS. Torturer, slaver.

“That and more. What are you, though?”

Definition began splicing details, fleshing out the environ. Piping, painted the same ghastly corpse-white as the walling, clustered. Vent spaces filled with fluted stripping. Emergency lamps, EXIT holo-neons, navigation paint running thick lines on the walls to departments that didn't exist. Cato passed an empty hover-chair and a gaggle of IV cranes left wrapped together in an awkward bundle. Silence was filling with ambiance: crisp footsteps, muted bundles of conversation, drip lines and a sound like a bass hum, beside the flutes and pings of scan-units and vital monitors. His foot slowly tore through a printed EEG readout sheet and sent ribbons of paper fluttering, transforming from shreds to pale moths and butterflies chasing away down the corridor into shapeless light.

“Your mindscape is a wound, boy. Like putting a finger against a hot iron.”

“Stop touching then...” Cato snarled, mustering up concentration. Briefly, the illusion wavered and industrial racks piled with drug crates lingered, half formed in the white walls. Matter bunched, waving like thick water, the pain in his grey matter accelerating to higher and higher degrees. Red welled and fuzzed in the edges of his eye.

“I am not sorry. You're an aberration come to destroy me. That can't be allowed. You won't kill me. But my training instilled a dislike of physical confrontation. It's crude and uncivilized. This is better. I'll make your mind kill itself. A heart can go quiet of its own volition, if there's enough will for it. I will show you.”

An auto-door. Not unlike a hermetic pressure hatch meant to keep the difference in air density within. In brightly stenciled hologram lettering, 'INTENSIVE CARE UNIT 00-84'. A list of doctors and nurses stationed or attached to that wing was posted on a basic datapad slate hooked into a frame by the jamb. The names struck Cato as too familiar. Beside him, that light was gone. Solid walling with a row of waiting chairs had appeared, barring him any further. The hatch into Intensive was all that was allowed and the harder he attempted wresting himself out of illusion, the meaner the agony grew, piercing in, plucking out detail he was surprised he could remember. A thumb stain on the jamb from toffee, from his last visit. Worn scuffing, traces of brushing on the steristeel plating, smells of powerful antiseptic and... and bacta. Cato paused. No. Not in there. He couldn't bring himself to visit them amidst the recovery stages, illusion or not. Scared of what he'd damned them to over an inability to... To...

“A fine nugget of guilt. Right there. And here's something like obligation. This word that keeps repeating: verd'ika? What does it mean? Go in. Go on now...”

Tension boiled in the muscles of his neck. Urges of caution and flight kept battling an inexorable need to go on. To go in. The Mandalorian reached and depressed his prosthetic fingertips against a wall switch. The hatch quietly whisked open. Cato stepped into what was a vacant airlock and listened to the air pressure cycle up. More details: orange tiled walls stripped with red characters and green lighting. A dull bass roar rose out of the floor. Palsy tremors shook inside his joints. Blood swept inside his ear drum. A threnody made the enamel of his teeth sing inside their sockets and his heart clenched with a vice. Guilt, fear, obligation, duty, loyalty, they had followed him and Yuna'sif and Raexir and Khado on their idealistic crusade into fire and hell, grinning, happy, because it was family and purpose. The best he could do now was pay bills that would restore them out of a state of crippled half-life. He had not looked at them since they each were sealed in the hyperbaric chambers, on their way to intensive bacta treatment and regrowth.

Another electronic ping from unseen speakers. White light flooded in from the chamber exit. ...Cato made-safe his rifle but kept it firmly gripped. Willed the vicing panic around his chest and lungs to ease. Breathed, deeply, two lungfuls, hold for a few seconds, exhale for as many. The Mark said 'go on'. Fine. He'd 'go on', fighting it all the way, disbelief his weapon against Force magics that strayed his senses. That voice within his skull loosed a more throaty sound and seared in, beating at neurons and nerve-ganglions, tensing will power against Mandalorian stubbornness. Inside...



...A spaced chamber filled with vital monitoring equipment linked via thickened tubing to vat chambers leaning against the wall. Each chamber was connected to expansive plumbing sluicing and drawing out bacta and oxygenated fluids, allowing whatever and whomever was within to breathe without the need for apparatus or gills. Lights were lit low. A constant, charging hum sounded from the twenty ERC vats spread evenly from wall to wall. The primary diagnostic station was on its raised platform before banks of winking console towers. There was a shifting, phantom outline, the on-duty BMET hovering without true form. Cato could never remember them. Just that there was one and they were supposed to be here. He dared to lean close by one of the ERC vats and blinked, looking in -

- To a formless lozenge of writhing flesh, stump limbs wiggling in agony. Horrified, Cato dodged away, bumping into the vat behind. Another 'thing' banged against the viewing plate, gnashing lipless teeth, glaring out with emptied sockets. Soon, vat by vat, the room filled up with thrashing cripples thumping against their constraints. The low bass roar returned. The lights flickered and real darkness started unfurling from each room corner, faintly coloured by the blue bacta wash sloshing against the vat glass. Cato stood rigid as a thousand fears hemmed in on his mind. Should have done the right thing. Put them out of misery. But couldn't. Saw the chance, so thin, to make amends. Stole twenty years of time from them regardless. No guarantee of proper recovery, going month by month, killing to make the payments, listening to doctors report progresses he couldn't confirm in person. Hoping their enemies were satisfied enough were dead to leave the living alone. What would the say, when they woke up? If?

“Memory can kill, bounty hunter. This I discovered when I put down my Master to assume her holdings. I worked to operate and exist without regret. I don't think you can. Not at all.”

The roar beneath his boots reached up through cracks in the tiling. Fire came in tonguing scallops and began eating up the walls, churning the lining and material into burning sludge. A cooked, plastic smell reached inside and singed his nostrils. Threat of torching heat made it seem as if his cheeks were scalding off, flesh peeling away from blackening bone, leaving him a skinless framework of ebony rib. A horned demon. He turned and watched the bodies in the vats braise from the scalding bacta, transforming into chunks of blistered meat. A part of his conscience and logic, though, knew something else. That it was mind games. He was fine, in one piece, looking like a fool standing still in place and breathing too loudly. ...Cato reached and touched the metal sticking out above his right eyebrow. It was warm, sharp, and real. With an effort, he began walking against fire.

The Mark couldn't understand what it was that broke the spell. How Cato's mind was hardening up like beskar, laced with something too venomous to touch. He began plugging away at the library of memories, a wordless jeer that taunted the Mandalorian of better times. Through a corridor of smoke and washing flame, shapes and scenes fusing, blending, combing and recombining, poured out of the walls into phantom constructs of image and sound. His bootsteps echoed like artillery fire. Faces of smoke with eyes of diamonds worked soundless jaws, twisting expressions like facsimiles, dolls of remembrance that reached out with raking claws and cut through his soul.

Nine years old. Holding his first weapon: a dart gun. Finishing with work on the range, now running with the other children through squad drills, listening to a young woman shouting from on top a bunker hill.

Much, much later, down a nondescript corridor, soldiers in custom balaclavas adjusting their kit pausing to stand at salute with his passing. A few stopped him, asking for pointers and demonstrations in close-quarters-fighting. Tossing, rolling, smashing them off their feet. Breathless. Laughing. Further salutes.

A door opened and let in cold midnight air. Decked for infiltrator operations. Khado Daiya over the radio with Yuna'sif, another last second briefing, stern orders. Be better than good. He would, Cato remembered promising. Looked back at the trusted squadron of like operators, personally selected. Their gunship set down and they were off into madness.

Badges were being fitted. The company name was Khado's idea, again. Brilliant man. Head for war and business. Liked him. They all did. Yuna'sif reined him in with more concise focus. Company was hers, after all. Dangerous Days. PMC. Raexir sauntered over and showed off his arm band, boasting. Cocky ranger.

Roar of blaster and slugfire, some planet, some battlefield, against some insurgent force and or half legitimate government. Either way, there was the mission. He was running through craters and smoke, firing as he moved, felling bodies in his path. Among the enemy, killing in seconds, young and fast and deadly.

A bar. Carousing and singing. Troops practising their handle on a Mando'a marching tune. Raexir playing Khado for platinum bars over regicide. Yuna'sif, off somewhere a little distant but watching regardless. Everyone's mother. His mother. She looked over. Smiled.

Nar Shaddaa. It was Nar Shaddaa. It was the Smuggler's Moon and he was fighting a ninja. A half-cloaked shadow with knives and a long, wicked sharp blade. Hand-to-hand fighting was ferocious. Looked into the other man's eyes: icy blue. Echani. Stalemate. Wounded and breathless. He remembers the name: Arto Kool.

A string of successes. Something's not right, though. He feels it, Yuna too, Khado's coming around but Raexir is nowhere to be seen. Running work for Alor Yuna'sif. Suspicions. Something in the dawn.

Burst of bomb fire. Concussive blast. Armoured walls give out and figures emerging, alight and dying on their feet. Paradise Home is being gutting by bomber fire. Shocktroops moving in. Desperate gun battles. Dozens falling. Can't see Khado, nor Raexir. Just a handful of captains and their fighters. Retreat. Make for the gunships.

Later. They are aboard. Yuna'sif in his arms, soaked in blood. He is shaking and it won't stop. Says something. Khado and Raexir look away from their views through the monitor screens. Yuna smiles almost too gently. And then he is screaming, yelling. Fire takes off the tale of the gunship. Control is lost.

Spinning. Face of a mountain rushes in. Spinning. Closer now. There is no fear. Just grief. Resignation. ...Anger.

And then he is awake in a foreign hospital. Told the coma has lasted six weeks. He is weak and will be so for a time. Not all the shrapnel in his body could be dislodged. Near his heart... The spike of durasteel in his skull... Looks down at the arm he no longer has, at the hooked prosthetic.

Where are his friends? Where's Khado? Raexir? Did they recover Yuna? ...They are gone. He is number twenty one among the other survivors recovered from the base massacre. The others... Will not make it. Not without intensive, extreme treatments. Next day, he is gone with a number to a wired account. His savings. The first payments. Got... Got to work. Got to save them.

They are all that is left. They are worth saving. No matter that it takes a lifetime. And the feeling of anger and rage unabating...

The Mark silenced himself in a static roar. Cato blinked the ash and embers out of his eyes, hands and fingers automatically toggling off the rife safety, raising the butt-stock back into place. The hospital construct faded, sloughing off the warehouse pallet racks into dissolving puddles that ceased to be anything but afterimages. Antiseptic was replaced with sawdust and a rankling edge of much too old spice. He felt himself breathing heavy and stopped. Incendiary armor-piercer rounds still slotted in? Check. ...A warm coal in his centre beat in time with his heart. The rage, anger, and a colder edge of loneliness. Cato Fett snorted out through his nostrils and fell back into the familiar hunting mode, casing from aisle to aisle with care and attention to detail. Until finding a platform with directions promising to lower into the lower basement storage bays. He hopped aboard, wrestled with a set of toggling levers before keying the servo motor. The plaform began lowering, into a musty black space left featureless, for a pair of large, bloodshot eyes yellowed sick that stared from the farthest corner.

“Your name, bounty hunter.”

“Couldn't read that?”

“Your name.”

“...Cato.”

“Well, Cato. You've come to kill me?”

The platform settled down and disturbed old cobwebs. The Mandalorian was faced with a sense of broad, emptied space. Sound clamoured off austere but unseen walls. The sickly eyes belonging to an equally hulking shadow. It rose onto four haunches and ambled forward, shaking off a crust of inactivity. Cato stared up at the bulk of the Tchuukthai.

“Yeah.”

“Well,” Former OS Master Joran blew out through broad, ring-pierced nostrils, tossing his headcrest. “We'd best get on with it.”

 

[Cato Fett]

A beat. A mechanical, sharp click.

Light flooded in from sunken glowlamps posted along the ceiling expanse, colouring the sub-basement grey and epoxy-blue, a barren holt the Tchuukthai had taken up as private residence. A nest of expansive blankets and temperfoam piled one corner, partially cordoned off by surveillance equipment and communications with power lines stapled up the wall to a bent maintenance vent. Now there was animal smells: sweat, hunger, hate. Joran had retreated to where he couldn't look on Trevel'ka and manipulated his cartel with all the deftness of a hologram performer.

Tchuukthai themselves were incapable of operating standard interfaces or UI without significant modification. Joran had a thickset duranium girdle fitted and weighted across his broad midriff, bolted to the skeleton in places, and implanted with augmetic ports and junctions across his throat and scalp. The girdle bore the weight of a shield generator unit mounted on his long spine. Cato could guess control was issued synechdochic gestures. A set of manipulator droid-arms were strapped against his forelegs. An air of necrotic entropy hung over the boss's bulk. Both raced for the first move.

The shield bubble snapped across Joran's skin and Cato squeezed a trio of hot shots, burning out as many HEI rounds into the kinetic absorber. He was moving, a fast and dodging sprint, throwing forward onto the floor and rolling into a crouch. The boss hurtled forward on a short dash, turned, and began running the Mandalorian down. More HEI ammunition scattered and burned off the web-face of shielding. Joran grunted with savour and lowered his muzzle-horn, crunching durracrete under his hooves. Cato was up, leaping, crunching onto hard decking. The Tchuukthai was skidding into a weighty turn and trying to stay righted. The rest of Cato's magazine was spent bashing into the dinosaur's flank, to no effect. The shield flickered just briefly, coalescing. He could almost see the flat line of a blunt mouth on Joran squeeze into a tight smirk.

Boss had speed, physical power, and comprehensive protection. Cato's chances were down to manoeuvrability, improvisation. Or if he could wear the shield down. Conventional armour-penetrators replaced the HEI's momentarily, Cato lighting into Joran's charging bulk, briefly blinding the ceratopsian with muzzle and impact fire. He briefly wavered, blinking sparks out his sight, piling acceleration to be sure he ran his opponent down. His muzzle-horn gouged a meter-long furrow through raw durracrete, literally grinding his pace to a blunted halt.

“Your memories were supple, Cato. You were a brain dead cripple they should have left to die. How you woke I don't know but rest assured, this is the truer death. Rage won't save you now.”

Cato's reply was a wicked slice of nerve-hot pain along Joran's flank. He backpedalled and paced out of reach, vibro-knife flicking back into a pick-grip. The heat-edge cauterized some of the torn flesh but not at all. He watched the tchuukthai regard his own bleeding mortality for a moment.

“Particle shielding. Not bad. But it has to drop before you can interact kinetically with your surroundings,” Cato said. The Mandalorian stood at ready, with just pistol and knife in either hand, waiting on the boss to collect himself. Joran shook with temper, the aug-ports bulging on his neck, necrotic skin and pink muscle beneath contorting from rage.

“Such small things can kill me!?”

His weight ambled into a trot, plodding over, square-peg teeth bared. Unseen, a concussive burst clocked into Cato's sternum. It rocked him off his heels, into brief falling, the same power reaching and putting a vice-clasp around his clavicle and throat. He hung suspended with blood rushing to his toes, vision fuzzing with pain as his windpipe closed with protest. Then Joran's hard muzzle smashed into his belly, ignoring the frail protection offered by his webgear, tossing his body across the sub-basement space. Cato stopped when his shoulders and backbone crashed through the small rotund of spy monitors hooked in beside the boss's meagre 'bed'.

Pain visualized as a spiral kaleidescope fractal on the inside of his eyelid. The automatic response was getting up. Training. Sheer muscle memory. Cato hooked his fingers round the monitor screen resting brokenly against his horn and tore it away, collecting where he recalled his blade and pistol landed. Joran stalked over, flickering corposant and haloed dark light round his spined crests. He gave off death in a cloud.

Gloatingly, “We endure the 'all-knowing' disdain of bucketheads. But you're not up for much comment, when 'superior firepower' humbles you. The Force isn't a deniable asset. Now, please: die.”

A clawed paw scratched and stamped for his face. It pushed through the casing of a crazed, leaning comm. Tower, raking cheap metals and interior electronics, racing ebon claws and a paw-sole stained almost black by old, spent blood. The particle shielding surrounding his scale-flesh petered out as Cato let the claws rake lines down his chest, tearing out skin and leaving shallow wounds, even as he leapt back at that final moment. Rifle in his hands: he'd exchanged magazines, HEI rounds, 5.56mm armour-piercing tips. Time slowed to a mute crawl, drawing sound into a thick rush of pounding blood and scraping breaths.

And then fast-forwarded into gunfire racket. Cato brought the barrel end to the brow plate across Joran's sloping skull and triggered a three second salvo. The chuukthai shivered on the spot, jerked aside, trembled on failing muscle motors and dove what was left of his features into the durracrete. Phosphor heat lit and burned from within, glowing hot enough as flesh bubbled and burst off charring bone. A once arrogant and so proud skull popped free from a set of smouldering shoulders and cratered, pooling sizzling body matter past a roasted tongue. White-bright augmetic ports hung from the throat, trailed by fused wire-shielding.

 

[Cato Fett]

Cato settled into a length of temperfoam bedding hissing with still cooking flesh. The HEI rounds had burrowed through the bone and skipped inside the interior organ cavities, ribs and midriff primarily. An odour of cooking fat and ligament gristle went with the over all scents of slow concrete rot and recycled air. ...Stratagem for dealing with contacts significantly larger in size called for appropriate firepower and personnel support. The contest between himself and the chuukthai had been a punishing, amateur episode. Low ammunition count, little in the way of grenades or proper kit. The only succour was he chanced on a triumph and Joran was no more. What constituted him was fried grey cells and a flash-burned skull. Cato hefted it onto his lap, staring into the collapsed vertical plate and empty sockets. Somewhere, conscience perhaps, came admonishment. Simply better next occasion, Cato Fett. Do not shame the skill sets and training imparted.

He reached for a chemical cigar that wasn't there. He paused, scratching through his torn harnessing. Several already empty: equipment that couldn't yet be afforded. Others ripped aside, in spite of toughened textiles and belting. Spent brass casing glittered brightly at his boots as the cadaver popped and a brightened sun of chemical fire peered through grilling ribs. Reminding of the skinless capsules floating in deep somatic recovery, nameless until they woke. Cato felt for the little ember of anger that had stayed behind his heart for so long. The loss of his eye, forearm, generated a drive to compensate rather than despair. Prove he'd operate just as well if not an edge better handicapped than whole. Even the sense of abandonment from Raexir and Khado's disappearances was just another weight to bear. His own burdens, without complaint nor comment. ...The survivors pulled from what remained of the gunship and HEX bases were examples of ordinary infantry that followed their commanders on an impossible endeavour. Not even aliit or vod but a different facet of family. ...Cato promised he'd make them better. By hook or by crook. Stemming from Yuna'sif's example, an unfailing devotion to the soldier, mercenaries regarded as void commodities that were faceless and obedient. Dedicated to an ideal of nation-less warriors answerable to set codes, patterned after the Resol'nare to include any fighters willing to bear arms for their own causes.

A dead dream, killed with Yuna'sif and drowned with the lost Paradise. Cato pulled the velcro on a thigh-pouch and pulled a slim, battered datalsate out. The on-board pict camera centred on Joran's smoking hulk and snapped a capture. In a moment, it was attached to a curt text-line, forwarded on to a certain mail address, bouncing off old relay buoys past Mandalore and into the half-private h-mail store maintained by the Oyu'bat staff. In a moment, he'd stand and leave the company of the corpse. Exfiltration was the final task. Without Joran's subtle meditation coaxing efficiency out of his 'Horde', discipline would begin rapidly disintegrating. Antagonized by the fact that a company's worth of Lugubraa slaughterers-for-hire were off the leash. Cato managed a smile, rubbed a thump up his single horn, stood and changed out mags.

Mission succeeded. Right, boss? He thought.

-END-