Indigo Run Execute

[Seydon of Arda]

Indigo Run Execute​

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Now
[Mid-Rim/Y'Toub System]
[Hutt Space/In ugly orbit over Nal Hutta]
[Nar Shaddaa]
[A place they called...]

New Vertica.

Mr. Green abstained from providing transport. On a budget as whipcord thin and scrawny as ours, I couldn't hardly fault him. Mobility was provided by a gypsy taxi, responding to local calls and, usually, local destinations. The driver, a slightly jowled twi'lek bearing two prosthetic lekku and a plastic digit on her left hand, balked at my destination. I prodded her courage with a handful of spare plat-chits. Thankfully, she took my change and tucked it into a small security-deposit ring box fitted in a jockeyed space in her gear console. I could see a day's worth of on-hand cash, grease-paper vouchers, shifty cheques, validiun coins, ration stamps, an I.O.U. Her air-speeder was a trembling mess of after-market modifications that had been weld-sewn onto the undercarriage. It stank in the cabin. Seating was unwashed, fabric a caustic burr on exposed skin. I bumped my skull against a fiberglass ceiling; insulation and lining were ripped free and replaced with wiring nodules. The driver depressed a nipple-switch on her navi-screen, and a plasteel shield erected between us over the driver and forward passenger seating. For appearances, I made a show adjusting backseat AC vents and the power windows. Otherwise, I was occupied processing through a dozen attachment files, stealing into the speeder's navicomp system, and pouring over personal logistics.

I can do this, because I'm not human. I'm a Series N6 Military Armoured-Cyborg Proto-Chassis. My frame was developed in an austere Tenloss tank-laboratory, before visiting half a dozen interlinked departments for fine tuning, stress testing, and labourous hardware clocking. My conscious is a combination organic thought and a revolutionary quantum OS. Put simply, I can think faster. Information processes at a rate just under lightspeed. Combined with ocular suites, tactical AR vision, a synth-steel musculature, and my own memories now broadly stuffed with flash-trained add-ons, I am the definition of a modern cyber-commando. I carried along a stuffed duffel-sack propped beside me on the seating. Running through Green's debriefing for the umpteenth time, I re-checked the kit: one battle-carbine rifle with three spare ammunition mags topped with anti-armour slug rounds, a CQC-modded auto-pistol with an extended magazine feed chased in black camo paint, another back up heavy revolver chambered for blunt slug-manstoppers, my favourite long knife, webgear, shock-knuckles, a pair of fragmentary and gas-cover grenades, PX-paste, plastek ring-cuffs, and general urban survival additions. The sensor-cloth lining the duffel-sack ensured they were virtually undetectable.

My driver had no clue, definitely. I flicked a tether into her onboard navi-systems and rifled through her itinerary. She was going to take us down through the Hylian Re-Route before taxiing onto NW 784th. Long way around. Wagered I looked like I could afford it. I guided the tether onto keeping tab on the ride-faire counter and returned to Mr. Green's briefing. Nar Shaddaa's Rodian Sector whipped past. Light strobed in on globule rails, spinning intermittently. Neon-holo adverts taller than some neighbouring structures seared the dry-season night. We drove up into a line of hover-traffic, wedged neatly between a bulk-vatgrower hauler and a school transport, and began idling.

“Just fifteen minutes, I guarantee,” Said the driver. She had braked the fair tally, watching for a part in the temporary gridlock.

Thirty minutes on, we flowed to a stop. The taxi gusted onto a generated pocket of cushioning downdraft. Parked. I slithered out of the air-car's interior network, recombined that piece of my conscious back into its place amidst the whole. Reading the time, I was a quarter of an hour late. The bolt-proof glass encasing rider from driver wasn't even retracted fully when I threw a bundled wad of voucher papers and exited onto the sidewalk. Next time, I would argue for personal transportation. An unmarked cruiser, with my selection of on-board modules. If tonight worked favourably, then Acer and Mr. Green would have their much needed warchest.

My driver let me off at the proverbial gates to New Vertica. I stood outside the wide pavilions of the Proverb's Station, New Vertica's public railsystem nexus. It vaulted two hundred stories overhead, an architecture of bluestone arcade faces and sprawling colonnades tall as the prow of a Star Destroyer. Lamp-strips ran past vaulted glasteel portals, lending to the scope of height. In the smog overcast draped over its roofing, fogging down in fingers of smoke, Proverb's Station was New Vertica's primordial gateway to a metropolitan labyrinth of dubious commerce. I shouldered my duffel-sack, reinforced my firewalling, and walked up the fifty steps through an archivolt band doorway. Heat was thick, clinging. Scores of bodies pushed down past me on the steps. I turned my collar against the damp, and simply disappeared against the throng.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

New Vertica was a byword for exclusivity. It'd been built on a prior construct referred off-hand as the Stair; a super-architectural habitation block originally fashioned as cheaply expedient worker housing for several scrap-reprocessing unions. In the times since the ousting of Chancellor Contispex XIX, the Stair changed ownership, at times a soaring poor-folk's republic, others a terraced fortress guarding and confining the worser of Nar Shaddaa's petty gang underbelly, before Hanguur Xchilia Giurre brought his savvy to the projects. Prior tenants were ousted, either through lucrative or violent coercion. A six year running struggle from hardline gangs resisting the Hutt's influence temporarily halted the Stair's repurposing. Until those perilous gunfighters ran afoul of Hanguur's impatience, and were subsequently massacred to a soul by a bought out Supercommando warband taking up the Hutt's bounty contracts. The Stair became New Vertica, and left the poor behind.

It was a city of gold, glass, and steel, a sun on earth built to push the endless pollution night away. Proverb's Station laid at the foot of a kilometre wide thoroughfare: South-on-South 001. The thoroughfare ran like a splitting blemish, a symmetrical scar of grain-basalt paving laid in crazed angles and filled with faux-silvertine mortar. Planted avenues of Asahian cherry bloom serrulata trees stitched along the roadway, fed by excessively microbe-scrubbed liquid moats. The bark scent and pockets of refreshed air off-set the clinging, stale odours of sealcoat and rubberized asphalt, and draughts of diesel ozone. Despite the virtual serenity of lace-pink petals drifting over the crowd-heads, New Vertica was anything but quiet. Footsteps were an uneven chatter on the pavement, accented by metal hoofs of excessively augmented minders tailing their excessively monied employers, stiletto boot heels, steel capped designer-sneaker soles, rich cloth brushed together by quick strides, and conversation. Crowds conversed with themselves. Virtually no one walked by themselves and if they did, they spoke aside into collar-microphones wired to interspersed commlink thatching wired invisibly, discretely into their clothing. Nar Shaddaa was maybe lawless, but it was not poor. Visitors needed only to spend a moment standing in New Vertica to see where sweat and blood gained credits poured upward to.

Exiting Proverb's Station brought me beneath the Arch of Han: a replicated arc-of-triumph styles in Hutteese esthetics, with fattened passageways embossed on the greasy shalestone with glyphic caricatures describing Hanguur Xchilia Giurre's prominent biography. Through vandalized etchings that gave the dead Hutt's stony features exaggerated eyebrows, lips that drooled out coins, and a tail ending in various examples of human male erect genitalia, I read him as a 'rogueish' urban planner, moon patriot, militarized businessman, and commerce innovator. Private histories said, in rebuttal, that Hanguur the Hutt was plagued by vanity, flamboyancy, paranoia, and imperial complexes. Looking up at the Arch of Han some fifty meters overhead, I couldn't imagine where they got that impression.

I was late to rendezvous. Mr. Green expected me on Level Arg-36 fifteen minutes ago, and I'd be another fifteen just spent manoeuvring to position. Walking out onto South-on-South 001 was stepping into diamond sunglow. Pale illumination played through back-lit window plates spanning up the haunches of five-hundred level building faces. The sky was a den of congestion: air-lanes crossing beneath and over skyway's, blotted with heavy Mag-9 transport-delivery semi's and hosts of Mo5Qu1to rickshaw bike-runners. Every so often there passed more stately luxury cruisers, fitted with propulsion sails rather than repulsor or raw-output fusion engines. Hard light holo-banners, some thirty meters long, burned guild sigils into memory. I kept on SOS 001, faceless and unnoticeable, walking in careful step with a lazy current of lagging window shoppers.

My reflection greeted me each chance I stopped and 'rested' against a boutique window: dark haired, eyes behind blocky, uncomely shades, dressed in a loose and darkly teal long coat, booted up to my knees. The ensemble was statically unforthcoming. Passing me were exambles of Nar Shadda gentry in true finery. Stately women of a hundred differing races, dressing for the subtle effect, for shock, for scene, for expression. An avant-garde tapestry that evolved past me with each step. They lit up on brief, passive scans as a sea of differential ID tags, gaudy broadcast fonts wrapping around them. Everyone was pinging back and forth in private chat-groups kept securely logged by reams of encoding. It looked like a morphing ceiling of bright, thread-narrow causeways firing overhead like bracketed comets. Some flew to other individuals in the crowds, most went upward to route through connecting satellites. I closed down the scan and simplified my Augmented-Reality view. I checked a HUD chrono: still late, and getting later. Trying to blend with nonchalance and pseudo-interest was costing me minutes further. My pace hurried, and I pushed onward for PT lift to ascend me.

There was a public express elevator recessed off the street. Advertisement fliers helped in unintentionally disguising it, and I'd never have spotted it if not for a regular outpour of civvie traffic. The lift was a jaw of pig-steel pleated with frame ribs and an interior skin of flat plasteel. Vendors cooking from colourfully imagined stove trolleys surrounded the entry oarticor, and hawked food into the passerby's. I stepped in behind a pair of Solustians nattering animatedly about a potential in Fondor gem stecks. Each of them were chewing through faux-meat hotdogs in bleach-white buns. We jostled into the crowding lift. The Solustians kept to my fore, a wide-set Anarrian on my right, a rare Ketton left, and behind a near half-dozen Drells on vacation. The lift gates sighed closed on repulsor-servos, as a droid conductor saw to everyone's differing transport level destinations. It was an ancient UY-521 Diplomatic model, a refurbished fossil, standing in a chased skin of pearlescent and jade, photoreceptors bright as silver coins. Everyone heard it announce in an overly cheery vocal-track where they were bound on its track routine. Levels Aaa to Arg. To stop on a preferred story, passengers needed only ping the cage by yanking on alert cords hanging by brackets in the sheeted ceiling or pinging the conductor directly via app. Without further ado, it raised a skeletal manipulator-limb and gently cocked a retrofitted activator lever. The lift began its rise. Conversation dulled to silence as everyone peered out at the passing sights of New Vertica.

[Status report, Sharpe,] A curt if melodious voice broke in on burst-transmission, audio only. I toggled off speech protocols, and let my thoughts run through a conversion algorithm.

[On my way up.]

[Speed up the process. We're running behind our optimal window.]

[Roger that. Mister Green?]

[What?]

[Next time, I'm arranging for transportation. The cabi took me around for an extra quarter of an hour before we reached Proverb's Station.]

[Why didn't you upbraid them?]

[Nondescript, remember?]

[When tonight finishes, we'll have enough capital to allot you a spending wage. You can get your speeder then.]

[Roger.]

The line closed and bled off into a silent cadence. Mister Green was a ghosting presence over New Vertica, for tonight at least. He and a scant handful of technical operators hired on from prior stations in the GIA were bundled in an enclosed apartment space two thousand kilometres east of the raised city. Paltry personnel numbers, compared to what I heard rumoured of full Republic operations, but he assuaged my questions with several guarantees. Quality over quantity. Each technician was vetted, and cyberized specifically for their information process, analysis, troubleshooting, and intuitive skill sets. Hard-wired brains. Prosthetic manip-hands. A twelve core CPU capable of running parallel, intensive processes, without latency or degeneration. The latest in anti-viral and anti-intrusion software and physical safeguards. Dummy barriers, shut down/reboot protocols, the like. I hadn't met them. Mister Green assured I didn't really have to, that each would be a separate voice on our call screen, to advise me through particular difficulties beyond his own ken.

Not precisely reassuring. Everyone aboard the lift kept preoccupied glancing through the armoured plastek acting as safety flooring and walling in the cramping lift. Someone was suffering with almost gangrenous flatulence. The protocol droid concierge I noticed wore a permanent, friendly smile expressed on his face plate. Behind his tapered skull ran a data line fixed into a port outlet in the lift's control panel, like a fiber-optic leash. Obedient programming slaved his gesture to just an occasional pump on the brake lever, and we slowed up whenever someone rang the stop-bell. Streets of running aurudium gold spidered out down below. Above, through the elevator shaft, I saw a naked ceiling of bruised clouds. The weight of my kit-bag drew heavier against my shoulder.

I hadn't seen action yet in a combat-chassis. I had never fought as a cyborg. For all the presence of empowering hardware and sublime electronics fine-tuning my pseudo-body applications... I was nervous as hell.