Reeve Bralor
Member
PAR BUIR
He knew it was coming. But knowing, seeing and being able to do anything about the backhand sailing toward his face were very different things. The blow snapped his head to the side with an all-too familiar slap and sting of pain across his face.
Reeve could taste the trickle of blood from his split lip immediately. Of course Kurt had worn his rings today.
“You’ve done it now, you little reject,” his stepfather’s voice said triumphantly above him. “Stealing from the cartel? Nail in the coffin, boy. You aren’t going to skate by this time. The boss isn’t going to go easy on you because we are related.”
His stepfather may have been a hardened enforcer for the cartel, but today he was all smiles. Today was the day he would finally be rid of this bothersome child he had inherited. He nodded to the man pinning Reeve’s arm behind his back, and the boy was tossed unceremoniously to the floor of the holding cell.
It was a 8x10 force cage with a single bench built into the center. Reeve’s expression melted from stoic to fearful. There wouldn’t be any escaping this. Not this time. Not like this. It was all over.
Kurt saw the shift and laughed out loud, turning his back to Reeve and the cell for a moment. That moment was just long enough for the enforcers not to notice the vent on the floor behind the powered down cage opening and an object sliding across the floor to Reeve’s feet, just as the cage’s field flickered to life.
The fear of Reeve's features shifted to a dark smirk. He bent down to collect the gauntlet and secured it to his left arm, flexing his fingers into the glove.
No. There would be no escaping this time. But then, Reeve didn’t want to escape. He was right where he needed to be.
He popped up from the floor and sat quickly on his bench, flipping open the screen mounted on his customized computer. It had been easy enough to leave a program idling and ready for an execution command. And Reeve punched the command as soon as he had it in front of him.
“Hey Kurt?” Reeve called when the command chimed complete, “You sure I was the one that stole from your boss?”
His lifelong tormentor stopped and turned to look over his shoulder. “What did you say to me?”
Reeve’s smirk grew. “I’d check that account of yours, old man.”
He didn’t even need to look down at his gauntlet while he typed in another command. Kurt’s expression became clouded and he squinted against the cages flickering energy. “Oh come on guys.. who let him keep a kriffin datapad?”
Kurt walked back and swiped his badge at the reader to drop the force cage. But the reader beeped a negative and the cage remained powered. He tried two more times, and received two more denials. He looked up unamused, “Boy... I’m not playing with you.”
“Check. Your. Account.” Was all the response he received.
Reeve tapped out a few more commands and comlinks all over the security station began to chime. Another enforcer rushed over to Reeve’s stepfather, “Kurt, we’ve got a code 2 in sector 5. You stay and watch the kid!”
Before Kurt could protest, the remainder of his coworkers were rushing out the door, grabbing weapons and armor as they went to the turf war Reeve had just told them was real, seven blocks away.
And then it was quiet. Reeve stood in his fortress tapping away at his forearm, occasionally glancing up at his tormentor to see the horror spreading over his face as he looked over his personal accounts. “No. How are you.. How are you doing that. Stop it!”
At that moment, credits were being siphoned from various sources into Kurt's personal account. The money was routing through multiple shadow accounts to make it look like a rival cartel was paying Kurt. And the icing on top was an encrypted message to the man, with instructions on emptying his employers vault.
“Boy! You’re dead! You hear me! Soon as I get in there, you are DEAD!”
Reeve smiled one last time, but the humor did not reach his eyes. “No Kurt. you’re dead. And I just pulled the trigger.”
By way of showing his intentions, Reeve turned so Kurt could get a look at the screen. He wanted the man to see the blaster bolt leave the pistol. It was a message going straight to his boss, with details on how he’d just been robbed by one of his own men.
“Don’t you d-!”
Reeve hit the send command.
The howl of rage made Reeve recoil in his cell. So far, this was playing out exactly like he’d planned. But now came the hard part. This was the part of his plan he couldn’t foresee the outcome of.
Kurt rushed over to a desktop terminal and began slamming commands into the console. Instead of reprogramming the entry permissions to the security cage like Reeve had done, he simply cut the power and overrode the failsafe, dropping the field and leaving Reeve naked to his wrath.
Reeve Denaris was nearly a head and a half shorter than his legal guardian. Even with all of the fights he had been in, Reeve was missing half again as much muscle as his stepfather and lacked height and reach to use it even if he had it. He would need to remain calm if he wanted to survive the next ten seconds.
“You think you can take me on, you little thief?! I taught you everything you know!”
Kurt’s meaty hands closed around Reeve’s throat and lifted him from the ground. Or rather, that was what he intended to do. Instead, his open hand sailed past where Reeve had been an instant earlier. The smaller man slipped right into his defenses and jabbed Kurt in the throat with an open palm.
Kurt went down hacking and trying to suck in air.
“No. You didn’t.” Reeve said calmly as he snatched a pair of binders off of Kurt’s belt. He slapped one end around the man’s wrist and the other around the leg of the bench in the cage. “Now wait here a moment. I need to grab my things.”
He only had a few minutes before the cartel came back in force, having realized there was no turf war going on. But a few minutes was all he would need. He’d been in this security station more times than he could count, and knew the layout like the back of his hand. Now, he headed straight for the contraband vault. The vault was controlled by a series of redundancies that would make breaking in impossible.
“Ziggy, crack the door please.” Reeve said in transit.
Acknowledged Boss
The virtual intelligence Reeve had created years ago responded in an emotionless mechanical voice, and went to work putting all of Reeve’s creative and coding knowledge to task as algorithms began wirelessly tearing the cartel security protocols to digital ribbons. By the time he got within ten paces of the vault, the door was swinging open by itself.
“Thank you, Ziggy.”
The vault was laced with illegally modified weapons, explosives, drugs, and all manner of tech. But none of that was why Reeve was here. He’d been given a task and he meant to see it completed. The cartel had recently taken something that didn’t belong to them. Something more valuable than most gave it credit for. Something that had made instant enemies of people far more dangerous than a gang playing cartel on Nar Shaddaa. And finding the crown jewel of the collection was easy, as it stood out amongst all of the other contraband.
A brand new shining set of Beskar’gam armor. The cartel had taken the commission before it had been delivered, not knowing what they’d taken until later when they breached the container it was in.
Reeve just happened to be in a lovely position to be the instrument of their destruction.
It took him five minutes to get the armor on, as he was unaccustomed to the fit. But the helmet, he clipped to his belt and instead, gathered the explosives from the vault. He took as many detonite charges as he could carry and began setting them along the walls of the station as he exited the vault, priming them as he went.
“Denaris!! You’re signing your death warrant!! Let me out of here and we can talk!”
But his stepfather grew quiet as he saw the four armored figures standing in the doorway to his security station. Armor that Reeve now mirrored.
Reeve grabbed a datapad from a random desk and placed it on the ground in front of his guardian. The screen was blank, save for one single round, red icon.
He began swinging his balled fist into his father over and over again, two heavy punches to the temple to cause dizziness, and then fourteen more directly to the man’s massive forearm.
“Reeve Denaris is already dead, Kurt,” he said breathlessly. “He died when you jammed all that spice into his mothers’ body and killed her. My name... “
He forced his father’s finger onto the datapad and the button blinked acceptance. When it was complete, then and only then, did Reeve pull his new helmet off of his belt and slide it into place.
“... Is Bralor.”
And with that, Reeve turned and walked out, calling over his shoulder, “That’s a dead man switch dad, release it and all those noise makers I planted go boom.”
Reeve didn’t need to look over his shoulder to know his stepfather was suddenly paying much more attention to the placement of his finger, which was connected to a trembling and abused tendon.
The other Mandalorians nodded at Reeve and the lot of them left without a word. When they were exactly a hundred paces from the station, Reeve pulled a small cylinder from a pouch on his belt, also taken from the vault. It was a simple thing, fit nicely in the palm, and had one very specific function.
One of the other Mandalorians looked down at their newest junior clansman, “Thought you said it was connected to a dead man switch.”
Reeve didn’t even break stride as he thumbed the detonator connected to the explosives behind them. “I lied.”
The sound of the station exploding roared into the night. Reeve could feel the heat of the flames licking at his neck even from his relative safe distance.
He didn’t turn. He didn’t look at the fiery tomb he had left his stepfather in. It simply wouldn’t stand to have a man stepping into his future, trying to stare at his past. And then he uttered the phrase his new family had taught him, upon learning of his circumstances.
“Par Buir.”
Reeve Bralor refused to look, even if the others did. His revenge was complete. His mother could now rest in peace. And as he took his leave from his past, the rest of Nar Shaddaa would wonder that night just who in the hell the cartel had crossed to have earned such an explosive response. Few would ever know the truth. Reeve was very careful to cover his digital footprint. He’d removed himself from the closed loop of information flowing through the net.
But he knew. And his new family knew.
The cartel had crossed the Mandalorians, and the bright orange fire lighting up the sky was the only evidence they’d left behind.