Private Lifting Heavy

[Davik Haize]

Steam
Calodan, Corvus​

The thick fumes forming clouds across the whole cantina gave Steam its popular name. And Davik Haize absolutely detested it. His hands were on the table, itching to flip it up and throw it at someone.

He was early. Again.

The Underground had reached out, comming his dead mentor’s frequency, asking for help. One of their agents had botched up an assassination on the local Imperial governor, and now his face was plastered across the whole town. Stormtroopers were out in numbers, and speeder bikes and hovercraft were whipped on three shifts to sweep the streets and the forests outside. The agent needed an exfil, fast.

Davik was already in over his head, literally; with black sun bounty on his face, he felt reluctant to say yes to the rebels. Even more so when they’d told him they were sending another to join up with him. He worked best alone. But buzzing his dead master’s old frequency stirred his sense of duty too much to reject.

So, when the Underground operative who was to join him for the exfil came by his table, he grunted, eyeing the woman from head to toe.

“You the backup?”

Kaia Starchaser ​

 

[Kaia Starchaser]

She’d been around several blocks as a Warden of the Sky. A lot of it was work she’d always been doing, since her early youth. Piloting, helping other pilots, finding things for the adults to grab. Salvage, wreckage, resources. Every so often, it involved getting pulled into a mission or another.

Without her father around, and with Jared doing Force knew what, Kaia would take up certain missions, especially ones where she needed to fly.

Dark leather pants, an a torn shirt, short hair that was a dye job away from white or black, and a satchel across her chest on her hip. Aside from a small pouch on her right hip that held a datapad and a few other items, the young woman had no weapons.

Aside from the lightsaber hidden in her pouch, just in case.

She didn’t look like much, but it was the Force that really helped her out. She could move. Art of movement, navigation, and a very limited number of other tricks.

“I am. Name’s Kaia. You have the rest of the data?”

Davik Haize

 

[Davik Haize]

Kaia looked as ragged as your usual spacer as much as he did, maybe even more. For someone who looked like they took their baths with their astro droid, she did look charming.

And somehow, familiar.

Davik didn't know how or why. Rummaging through his memory, a holoprojection, held in his mentor's hand, emerged of a couple of faces but the haze of a distant recollection blurred them out. He felt like he knew her but was certain they'd never met.

"Davik." his tone slightly normalized from the earlier grunt, softened by the strange, faint familiarity.

"Yeah." he gestured for her to sit opposite of him and slid a small, discardable datapad, courtesy of the Underground, over the table to her hands. It had a privacy screen protector that shielded from curious peeks. That is if anyone could even make it through the fog of fumes drifting across the Steam.

The datapad read:

Name: Nami Orrenis
Rank: Agent
Species: Twi'lek
Current Location: Calodan, Corvus
Mission Brief: Failed assassination attempt on Imperial Governor Gahvor. Requires immediate extraction to Safehouse Ackbar. Code: Red.

Below the short text a holographic image of Agent Orrenis' face shimmered.

In the meantime, as Kaia read, the Force would flood both his and her senses with danger. Their reaction time would not be sufficient.

A bloodied hand slammed a disk on their table and a beat up face of a human male emerged from the thick clouds over their table. He was on his knees, panting heavy and coarse.

"Her… location… Nami… tell her I lo—" the sentence never finished.

A blaster bolt exploded in his back and the beat up man slumped dead on the floor with a smoldering hole in his torso.

The music was suddenly cut and the sound of heavy boots hurrying through the haze could easily be heard, along with the vocoder voices of sergeants barking orders.

Stormtroopers.

One found them and yelled their position for the rest of his squad before he started blasting at their table like there was no tomorrow. ​

Kaia Starchaser

 

[Kaia Starchaser]

She didn’t need to make any moves to impress anyone. And the amount of time Kaia spent sleeping behind the controls of her shuttle? That made it so she didn’t go wild in the way of how to dress. And damned if she would ever be dead in robes. Even though she wasn’t the premier child, she still was at one point a Jedi.

Now a fulltime Warden, she was here to help folks. Davik, huh? Her grandfather’s name. But fairly common, wasn’t it? Kaia didn’t even shrug on that but merely nodded. As he slid the datapad over, she surveyed it quickly, her personal implants taking the data in fairly quickly for later recall.

“Well, if there was ever anyone who needed a ride, its this on–” Cut off by the new arrival, Kaia looked at Davik then at the man who arrived. She barely had time to respond before it came up that there were stormtroopers.

Before she knew it, Kaia was acting on instinct, she moved low around the table, calling on the Force and throwing her hand out. Suddenly, there was a bright white flash, more the flash of a flashbang than anything, even if i t was completely from the Force.

Davik Haize

 

[Davik Haize]

The Force?!

Surprise may have crossed his face, but hesitation did not. Davik slid the dead man's disk into the pocket of his spacer leather jacket, then picked up the table, lifting it from its hinges with force-enhanced strength and hurled it at the blinded stormtroopers. It crashed down hard on three of them, pinning them to the floor. A movement at the corner of his vision, or rather at the vision of his mindeye since the smoke obscured nearly everything, unveiled several troopers moving around to flank them.

"C'mon, we gotta move!" he tugged her by the arm and led the way toward the back exit of the cantina just as blaster fire resumed once more. Seconds later, they barged out of the fire exit into a dark alley and a city drowning under a downpour. On their right was the main street, where the lights of repulsorcraft and speeder bikes grew larger and larger. He turned left instead and hurried into the maze of Calodan's back alleys.

"Can you check this?" Haize plucked out the disk and handed it to Kaia, his mind racing to map out by memory the small city he'd surveyed for the past few days. "You look too scruffy for a Jedi." he noted, glancing back at her; the word Jedi came out bitter. It carried a resentful past for him.

Kaia Starchaser ​

 

[Kaia Starchaser]

Kaia was no Jedi. She may have learned it once upon a time, but now? The only remnants of that tradition was her use of kyber in her lightsaber. She kept it on her person but understood it was only useful in certain times. The Force and a good fist could handle most problems for a Warden.

But stormtroopers? She really hoped they would have been ahead of this. The blaster fire started back up again as the other one, Davik, grabbed her arm. It pulled her mind to attention and she made her way to the alley with the man. He was right, they did have to get moving.

Pulling the datapad, she slipped the disk in and started to review its contents. Following Davik with about half her attention. “Its locked. You got a ship nearby? Mine’s on the outskirts.” She slipped her datapad, and the disk, into her bag. “Not a Jedi. Warden.” She corrected.

Davik Haize

 

[Davik Haize]

He had a ship, once. The Duchess; she had made her last flight ferrying Naboo nobles out of Wielu during the battle, after it had been chewed to death by several batteries of mynocks. Now Skip, the small slicer droid, was all he had left from his dead mentor.

“Yeah, at the port.” a nth-hand budget derivative of Sienar’s small Xi-class shuttles, courtesy of the Underground, “but I am pretty sure that place is under full lockdown.” Rookie mistake.

“Not a Jedi. Warden.” She corrected.

Boots skidded across the muddy alley, grinding to an abrupt halt. The lattices of his mind lit up, clearing the blurry memories into sharp clarity.

“Starchaser?”

Kaia Starchaser. A damn famous lineage of Jedi, Wardens of the Sky and explorers, Waylon had once told him about; of the same notoriety as the Merrils and Verin.

Wardens were of the rarest breeds these days, and Davik often felt like he was the last of a dying breed.

“Knew you were too scruffy for a Jedi. I’m a Warden, too.”

Or trying to be.

Kaia Starchaser ​

 

[Kaia Starchaser]

Right, her name was still a bit of a big player in some circles. Thanks Dad and Jared. She tipped her head as she came to her own stop, large combat boots covered in mud now. “Me? Yeah, sure.” It was as much of an acknowledgement as he was going to get of who she was. Really, if it was about the line of starships and equipment? Then maybe she’d be happy. Or even the racing team, something that this writer just created as a way to find something else for Kaia to do, then she’d be thrilled.

She could hear it in his voice, that simple word, her family name. He knew all about them.

Another Warden? Good. “Then we won’t be having to go to committee for every little thing.” She offered a wink.

“And with it under lockdown, we’ll have to head to mine.” The Mirialan hybrid nodded. Switching her datapad for her comm she called it up. “Porter. Can you prep the ship? Send Drifter to my location too. Weapons hot.” The small probe droid could do some damage, but really, having her Father’s astromech prep her shuttle? They’d be in safe hands.

“Follow me.” She said as she fell into the Force. Her droid knew how she’d move. Straight through.

Davik Haize

 

[Davik Haize]

“Then we won’t be having to go to committee for every little thing.” She offered a wink.

"You can say that again." Davik let a smirk pull his lips wide. Rarely—even rarer since his mentor's death—did he discard the grumpy grimace from his face. As lone as a wolf as he had become by his own volition, perhaps something about working together with another warden dug up buoyant memories of his adventures with his master.

He fell in step behind her as she darted straight through. She moved with far greater grace than he did, but Davik didn't fall behind too much; the Warden arts Waylon had taught him extended beyond just combat: one also had to navigate the tight and labyrinthine spaces of ships, ports and stations. Where she squeezed easily through compact nooks, he found a way around. They glided through the rain and gloom as two shadows: one straight through, the other in a patternless zig-zag maneuver, both constantly shifting between above and below.

"How far is it?" called out Haize.

An ethereal jolt shot up the hair on the back of his neck, but his body lagged a second too late. Without warning, laser bolts flared inches past both wardens, casting light across their immediate surroundings and exploding in fiery sparks against walls and roofs. Steam rose the points of impact under the battering rain.

By instinct, Davik tumbled to the side and unholstered his pistol. His crosshairs quickly found one of the two speeder bikes cleaving the air above them, then veering around to go for another fly-by salvo. Several, violent pulls of the trigger sent a volley of blaster fire. Most shots whizzed past the bike but two strick true. The speeder exploded and whirled out of control, crashing into the alley.

"Kaia, you got it?!" he shouted as he snapped his attention to where she was.

Meanwhile, a nearby checkpoint leading out of the city was alerted by the scout troopers of the fugitives' location. White boots thudded in a hurry to reinforce, along with others who aimed to form a noose around the Wardens' position.​

Kaia Starchaser

 

[Kaia Starchaser]

Technically, in the family’s company, she was the committee. Granted, it was a resource and research company, not a war fleet. She left that up to her brother. Kaia’s own shuttle was not much different than the T-6 Jedi Shuttles of ancient history. Some guns to defend, but depended on speed and staying quiet. But with another Warden? Even one who she didn’t know all that well.

Granted, a secretive bunch they were anyway. She knew maybe two others outside of her family.

Kaia traveled light, normally barely bringing her lightsaber along. As she kept moving through the port, and he asked how far, she just smirked.

“Ship’s up ahead.” She called back, sliding under a moving crane, lifting a hyperdrive into another ship. But that was when the blasters came in. Rolling further, to duck behind the crane proper, the warden grabbed her lightsaber hilt, holding it extinguished but letting the warm and familiar feel flood her senses.

“I’m good. I’m good!” She called. As the scout troopers noticed them, she nodded and responded to just herself. It never goes clean. Her blue lightsaber ignited just as bolts came flying in. She knew that Porter was going to be monitoring all the comms, the old droid was good at that, and as she reflected the bolts wide, she could hear the ship coming.

Ringed wing around the main hull, the white and blue ship flying low. “Our ride!” She called.

Davik Haize

 

[Davik Haize]

Davik climbed his way up to where Kaia was perched. Pulling himself up, one hand instinctively rose to shield his eyes from the sudden shine of a ship's headlights cutting the night and the chaotic currents of wind, wrought by its engines, hurling dust and debris all around the rooftop. The sight of a blue lightsaber, in Kaia's hand, smoking steam and crackling under the pitter-patter of rain, rose his brow both in glaring surprise and a tinge of deep-buried bitterness for what it symbolized to him.

He averted his eyes from its cerulean glow to Kaia and the ship instead, "Seeker-class? Nice ride." he smirked, but the ship connoisseur side of him would not be given time enough to be sated; the notorious screech of twin ion engines coming from the sky, followed by the blaster fire of stormtroopers from the ground meant they had to hurry into the ship.

With a deft step, he followed Kaia into the ship. "There's a canyon several klicks west of here," he called out, falling in step behind her towards the cockpit. "Think you can outrun them before they get a lock onto us?" Davik might be crass, rude, and very often cynical, but he still wouldn't sit in the pilot's seat unless invited to do so. Otherwise, it was a great indignation to the ship's captain. Even he followed some rules.

Kaia Starchaser ​

 

[Kaia Starchaser]

While her preferred home was aboard any starship, Kaia had grown to know how to move in environments she didn’t care for. Large open space, and places with elevation. Art of Movement and too many space-millenia HoloNet videos of parkour. Her lightsaber was sure to make a light in the darkness here, and make her a target. That was plenty fine by her.

“Years and years of R&D made this line.” She laughed, not knowing if Davik realized that she was in line with this company. CEO and all. This was the dream ship, this and its bigger sibling the Pathfinder, of her and her father. “Get in.” She said as she ran up the boarding ramp. Racing down the hall to the cockpit.

She slipped into the pilot’s seat. The Orange and White astromech Porter hooked into the engineering spot, knowing that the daughter of Starchaser did her own navigation. Pulling on a headset, she looked at Davik.

“We’ll see.” The ship was slippery, good at not being pinned down. In space. But here? “Porter, you’re on the Cap Drain. Davik, ventral turret, ion cannon.” She said as she punched the throttle.

TIEs were a pain in atmosphere.

Davik Haize