Maris Fero
Riff-raff, Street Rat.
Lower Precinct L7, Capitol District, Sector 3 [Condemned Block]
Coruscant, Core Worlds
The Core worlds, Coruscant, the further she travelled from Vorzyd, the more it seemed the universe conspired to stay the same. For one whose childhood was shaped on the slum levels of Efavan, a sprawling macrocosm was a welcome change from the claustrophobia of space travel and the agoraphobia of wasteland planets like Hoth.
As with any other city she had visited, the Jewel of the Coreworlds only truly glittered on the surface; And away from the thrumming whines of crisscrossing aircar traffic, the scent of ionised particles and the murmured hubbub of thousands of citizens used to living under the light of a nearby sun. Peel away that shiny surface of chrome and transpari-steel towers, and the rot begins just beneath the thin facade. Memories of generational carnage and galactic war, infrastructure and businesses ruined and forgotten, still lingered like scar tissue if you knew where to look. And so it was that Maris found the clinic she had been looking for, amongst the condemned properties of what might have been a fancy district for up-and-coming republic politicos, before time and the travails of galactic politics had blighted the project.
Half of a faded sign remained, surface peeling and edges shattered in jagged teeth of plasteel: Eostech Bio Clinic, though the remaining signage retained only half of those words. A severed and shorted holo emitter suggested there was once a holographic logo accompanying the title, but now it just produced a small shower of sparks every minute or so as some latent power backup system attempted another feeble reboot of this whole area. The doors had already been forced long ago, and when Maris had climbed her way onto this level she found the looter of distant past had already been through the clinic, shelving and storage spaces thrown open and emptied, dusty footprints still visible, though now through a layer of new dust themselves.
Though she suspected her prize might have long since been taken from this place, the Shrike still resolved to search what remained. Dressed in her hooded streetwear over the black bodysuit and equipment, the young woman appeared almost as a wraith, her ever-pale complexion contrasting with her ebony hair and dark eyes. She scanned the space and allowed herself a touch of disappointment, but cowled her anger as best as she could.
Looters, always looters. Ever the hypocrite, Maris never considered herself a looter. She was on a mission; she had objectives, she had a goal - and that goal was rarely financial recompense. The biomass would be long gone, but the technology might still be salvageable.
On the rear wall of the clinic's showroom, two doorways appeared to lead into antechambers; one had been forced open, the other appeared to have been partially cut open enough to reveal the space within, but on inspection had been avoided. The door was a heavy security model, and the hole had been cut high enough up that Maris had to pull herself up to peer into the dark space beyond. She saw a cavernous void; the blackened edges and curled, flaking metal of what once was a room structure appeared to have been boiled away in some forgotten orbital strike from the many wars over this world, coring a long, indiscriminate hole through various businesses and residences in its path. The opening of the wound to the sky had been long covered over by a world more eager to disguise the damage than to repair.
Almost anything of value would have been annihilated by that strike; The vivid destruction of the space beyond the secure door evoked a memory of the scent of vaporising metal and of a heat like a sunbeam. However, at the very edge of the destruction, there remained the half-melted remains of a servo-arm attached to an almost intact fixture that seemed to still be connected to a faintly glowing dataport. Bingo
In a futile attempt to proceed, the Shrike took hold of both edges of the secure door panels, braced her slight frame and heaved at the panels, feeling nothing shift. Solid, unshifting. Frustration - that would be her fuel as she focused on that dissonance and channelled the emotion into her strength, pushing it beyond the limits of her body, feeling the power flood her frame and redouble the power. At the same time, the mental guards she had raised about herself, cloaking her presence in the force, slipped enough to allow a fraction of her power to radiate around the apparently abandoned area.
The secure door creaked, causing a metal rasping sound to fill the passage for a moment. It didn't budge. Maris broke her silence with an exasperated hiss and stepped back to look at the situation again. The hole in the door was too small even for her slight frame to pass through; the wall was irritatingly absent any vents or ducts she might traverse, as she so often had in the past. She could go around, she supposed, and find access to the space through one of the other ruined units that backed onto the wreckage. Or she could go the way
Enyo Typhos
would have chosen - straight through.Maris sighed and stopped to listen, falling completely still for a moment, and focusing one more to cloak her presence in the force. This place had been abandoned; a little disturbance would not be noticed.
The shoto lightsaber was in her hand with barely a thought, and she pulled the simple reflective mask down over her visage as she ignited the near-silent blade and began the stinking work of slagging open the metal door panel to allow her access within…
Mercy