D-M0N // KILL_PROCESS
OBJECTIVE II | BEASTIE BOYS
Location: Rust Haven Station | Maintenance Crawl → Logistics Subnode
Ship: Modified Vanguard-class Gunship | Hyperviolet Drive Retrofit
Tags: OPEN | Ronhar Tane | Saram Kote | Saltare Dothon | Karkosuchus | Hanna
PROCESS UPDATE: RUST_HAVEN_CONTRACT.EXE
CURRENT LOCATION:
MAINTENANCE CRAWL NETWORK
PRIMARY OBJECTIVE:
LOCATE LOGISTICS CORE
SECONDARY QUERY:
RONHAR TANE // LIVE CAPTURE VALUE
LOCAL CONDITIONS:
POWER GRID: UNSTABLE
SECURITY LOCKDOWN: ACTIVE
PRIMARY BREACH: HIGH-CONFLICT ZONE
PARALLEL CONTRACTORS: EXFILTRATION TRAFFIC DETECTED
DIRECT ENGAGEMENT:
INEFFICIENT
Rust Haven Station did not die quietly.
Sound traveled strangely through maintenance spaces, stripped of battlefield clarity and reduced to pressure, tremor, and distortion. Blaster fire became a stuttering pulse inside the walls. Sonic discharge rolled through the station’s old metal bones as a low vibration. Heavy repeaters struck distant bulkheads and translated through the crawlspace as dull, animal thunder, while somewhere beyond the cramped service passages, organics shouted commands at one another as if volume could impose order on failure.
D-M0N moved beneath it all with the silent patience of a thing that required neither comfort nor air. The maintenance crawl was too narrow for most soldiers to use effectively and too ugly for most intruders to choose willingly. Cabling hung in uneven bundles overhead, pipes sweated recycled condensation, and dust mixed with old particulate waste drifted in the thin motion of the station’s life-support circulation. None of it mattered. The route remained viable.
He did not move toward the loudest fighting. The loudest fighting had already become the least efficient path.
A service junction appeared ahead, half hidden behind a pressure conduit and a nest of bundled fiber lines. D-M0N stopped beside it, one clawed hand braced against the crawl wall while the other extended a narrow interface spike from his wrist. The spike pressed into the panel seam, split the locking plate with a soft mechanical click, and lifted the cover loose.
The station resisted him immediately. That was expected. Rust Haven was damaged, locked down, and frightened, its security architecture tightened around itself like a wounded animal curling around exposed organs. D-M0N did not attempt to seize full control. Control required time. Control invited countermeasures. Control was unnecessary.
He only required answers.
MAINTENANCE ACCESS:
PARTIAL
SLICING PROFILE:
PASSIVE SCRAPE / LOCAL INDEX ONLY
ADMINISTRATIVE CONTROL:
DENIED
DATA EXTRACTION:
ACCEPTABLE
QUERY PARAMETERS:
- RECENT COMMAND-LEVEL TRANSMISSIONS
- SECURITY LOCKDOWN ROUTES
- HEAVY WEAPON DEPLOYMENT
- ACTIVE EVACUATION PATHS
- TK-3301 / RONHAR TANE
- UNREGISTERED DROID SIGNATURES
The first returns arrived in fragments, scattered through emergency routing and combat relay traffic. IFF data had been pushed through the station under pressure and in haste, carrying Mahporeenian tags, contractor tags, friendly designations, and partial unit identifiers. D-M0N watched the packet unfold across his internal display, not as an organic reading a report, but as a predator watching tracks appear in wet soil.
Ronhar Tane. TK-3301. Command authority active. Movement profile forward-deployed. Associated unit: Salvage Team Six. Associated hardpoint: G-Web Ultra Heavy Repeating Blaster.
There was another signature threaded close to the same movement profile. Smaller. Mobile. Unregistered. Not included in the allied IFF package. D-M0N isolated the anomaly and held it in active memory for one exact second before filing it into the target model.
The droid companion was not the target. It was not the contract. It was not the payout.
It was still useful.
Companion-pattern machines followed habits. Habits formed trails. Trails produced intercepts.
TARGET TRACE:
RONHAR TANE // TK-3301
CONFIDENCE:
72% / RISING
LAST CONFIRMED INDICATORS:
COMMAND-LEVEL IFF TRANSMISSION
FRIENDLY DATA PACKAGE TO INFERNO SQUAD
SALVAGE TEAM SIX MOVEMENT
G-WEB HEAVY REPEATER DEPLOYMENT
UNREGISTERED DROID COMPANION SIGNATURE
LIVE CAPTURE VALUE:
HIGH
CAPTURE WINDOW:
UNSTABLE
A tremor passed through the station. Then another followed, deeper and more violent than the first.
D-M0N withdrew the spike from the panel and locked every limb into the crawlspace with insectile precision. His left hand clamped around a support bracket while his feet magnetized to the inner plating. The vibration rolling through Rust Haven was not weapons fire, not a grenade, and not the heavy, distant pulse of a corridor engagement. It was structural. Internal. Large.
Somewhere inside the station, a reactor began to scream through the bones of the facility.
The scream became lightless violence. The crawlspace bucked around him, metal flexing in a way metal was not meant to flex. A pressure conduit ruptured three meters ahead and vomited steam into the cramped passage, while sparks burst from the open service junction and cast purple-white reflections across D-M0N’s skull-like face. Emergency shutters slammed in distant sequence, one after another after another, the sound traveling through the station like coffins sealing shut.
Organics would have flinched.
D-M0N recalculated.
REACTOR EVENT DETECTED
THERMAL SPIKE:
EXTREME
STRUCTURAL SHOCKWAVE:
CONFIRMED
AUTOMATED CONTAINMENT:
ACTIVE
BLAST DOOR CASCADE:
IN PROGRESS
CONTRACT CONDITION:
SABOTAGE / DESTRUCTION CRITERIA LIKELY SATISFIED
LIVE CAPTURE WINDOW:
DEGRADED
EXFILTRATION RISK:
RISING
The contract had changed shape, not failed. Sabotage was no longer a projected outcome. It was a live event propagating through the station in heat, sealed doors, emergency routing, and panic. Destruction was no longer a goal to be approached; it had become an active condition. The primary objective would require validation later, but D-M0N did not waste processing power on attribution while the station was still tearing itself apart.
The secondary and tertiary conditions remained. Recover value where practical. Ronhar Tane alive if economically justifiable.
Practicality narrowed with every blast door that sealed and every corridor that burned. A captured target was valuable. A destroyed hunter was not. D-M0N released the support bracket and continued forward.
A small maintenance drone rounded the crawl junction ahead of him, its chassis twitching beneath the weight of overloaded instructions. Repair. Seal. Reroute. Report. Flee. The competing commands left it spasming in place, manipulator arms opening and closing as emergency lights strobed over its casing.
It detected D-M0N.
Its alarm routine began to initialize.
The PS-118 came up low, fired once, and put an ionized burst through the drone’s center mass. The little machine folded inward and struck the deck without a cry, limbs twitching twice before going still. D-M0N stepped over it without slowing.
No additional shot was required.
A tight transmission pulsed from D-M0N to the Vanguard, narrow enough to be swallowed by the broader storm of emergency traffic and combat interference.
<Vanguard. Maintain cold drift. Prepare emergency retrieval vector. Do not break passive profile until called.>
The reply was not verbal. A confirmation glyph appeared in the corner of his vision.
Acceptable.
The maintenance crawl widened into a service spine overlooking a lower logistical corridor through a slotted grate. Below, emergency lights strobed across abandoned crates, broken loader tracks, and the long black shadows of sealed blast doors. The route toward the main fight was ugly with smoke, obstruction, overlapping fields of fire, and too many combatants pursuing too many different definitions of victory. The route toward the evacuation and service systems was longer, less direct, and less populated.
D-M0N selected the second route.
Ronhar Tane had moved forward with soldiers and a heavy weapon system. That made him difficult to capture in the moment, but it also made him easier to predict. Heavy weapons did not retreat through vents. Shielded repeaters did not vanish through maintenance shafts. Teams with command assets either pushed to secure a breach or fell back toward protected evacuation routes when the station began to fail.
Either path could be modeled. Either path could be hunted.
The unregistered companion droid remained the cleaner thread. Small. Mobile. Proximity-linked. Likely overlooked by frightened organics now tracking larger threats. If D-M0N could not seize the target, he could index the target. If he could not index the target fully, he could preserve the vector for later pursuit.
Live capture was not abandoned.
It was deferred until profitable.
CONTRACT STATE:
PRIMARY CONDITION:
SABOTAGE / DESTRUCTION // SATISFIED PENDING EXTERNAL VALIDATION
SECONDARY CONDITION:
RECOVER VALUE WHERE PRACTICAL // TIME-GATED
TERTIARY CONDITION:
RONHAR TANE // LIVE CAPTURE ACTIVE / DEGRADED
TARGET PROFILE:
ACQUIRED
ANOMALOUS DROID TRACE:
INDEXED
ROUTE UPDATE:
LOGISTICS SUBNODE → SERVICE / EVACUATION SPINE
ENGAGEMENT RULE:
INTERCEPT ONLY IF EXFIL WINDOW REMAINS VIABLE
STATUS:
CLOSING.
D-M0N moved deeper into Rust Haven, away from the obvious war and toward the places frightened people used when they thought they were escaping it.
Hanna
_
Karkosuchus
_
Ronhar Tane
_
Saltare Dothon
Drego Ruus
