The doors of the drop pod creaked open, and Tylo Ringbey stumbled out.
His first breath of Avidich's wracked atmosphere felt like inhaling broken glass. He coughed, eyes watering, throat burning, but it didn't get any easier. Cracked, poisoned soil shifted beneath his worn shoes, and suddenly his feet flew out from under him. He tumbled down the hill, smashing into the twisted wrecks of shattered trees, feeling splinters of wood dig brutally into his flesh. He wanted to cry out, to give voice to his pain, but he had too little air in his lungs to do more than wheeze a pathetic little whimper.
Tylo lay there, curled in a fetal ball, for quite a while. But no matter how hard he squeezed his eyes shut, he couldn't force himself to wake up back in his Coruscant apartment. Before he'd become a prisoner of the Maw, he'd been an executive chef at the 500 Republica. There had been long hours, but Tylo loved his craft. He had the ability to look over ingredients from a dozen different planets and combine them into something quintessentially
Coruscant, something that truly represented the cosmopolitan capital of the Galactic Alliance.
The closest thing he had to fighting experience was impressive knife skills.
With a sniffle and a cough, the gifted chef accepted reality. This was his life now, and if he didn't get a move on, he wouldn't have
any kind of life for much longer. He could hear howling echoing in from the horizon, a sound that chilled his bones and brought him uncomfortably close to voiding his bowels. He did
not want to find out what kind of throat could unleash such a howl, half savage beast and half unyielding machine. So he pushed himself to his feet, wincing as splinters dug deeper into his palms, and stumbled forward.
Not far from where he'd landed, just over a series of low hills, Tylo could see a plume of green smoke. Much further on, at the center of
many such green plumes, was a
much larger blue one. Part of him wanted to avoid it all, to run in the opposite direction, because he was pretty sure that doing what these barbarians wanted would only get him brutally killed. But what chance did he have on this ruined planet, besides whatever bait the savages dangled in front of him? There was no other chance for escape. He would have to take a risk.
Just like when he'd dared to serve the senator for Bartorine a
vegetarian dish.
Breathing into his elbow and shielding his eyes with his other hand, Tylo stumbled across the windswept wastes. Sand leaked into his shoes as he struggled up and down each dune, chafing his feet. The skeletal wrecks of derelict Chiss military vehicles, crippled and their crews killed during the Catharian bombardment, rose up all around him, but he didn't stop to investigate any of them. He had eyes only for the closest pillar of green smoke, and the small chance it might represent for him. Finally he struggled up the last hillside.
A battered, slightly-scorched supply crate greeted him, resting on a bed of heat-glassed sand. A green smoke canister on top of it was the source of the towering plume. Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Tylo slid down the slope and headed over to the crate, stepping tentatively as he approached. Hadn't he heard of tripwires and landmines and all sorts of booby traps that the barbarians liked to employ? Maybe this was all just an elaborate trap. But the chef did not explode. He reached the crate unharmed.
The first thing he found, bulky and ugly and dangerous-looking, was some kind of gun. Tylo had never fired a weapon - never even
touched one, in fact - and this looked to be a slugthrower, considerably more complicated than a blaster. He had no idea how to use it beyond what he'd seen on holovids... but he took it anyway. It might be the only thing standing between him and death. Maybe he could at least ward off his pursuers from attacking him with the
threat of the gun. And if he had to shoot, how hard could it be?
The second item was more practical: a sturdy cloak, patterned in the browns and tans of the surrounding wasteland. Tylo pulled it around his shoulders and tugged the hood up, giving his sand-scoured face a bit more relief than his shielding arm could provide. If he dropped low, he found, he could blend into the landscape pretty well. As long as no one got too close, anyway. Going unnoticed was definitely his best hope for staying alive, but it was going to mean getting as far as possible from this tall beacon of smoke. He turned away.
That was when a rusty survival knife sank deep into his throat.
----------------------------------------
"Sh, sh, sh," said Kasan Vane, clamping her hand over Tylo's mouth.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry." She couldn't look him in the eyes. Thankfully, they glassed over quickly anyway. Kasan slid him gently to the ground, wiping her knife on his trousers. She knew Tylo; she'd been private security at the 500 Republica, and had exchanged perhaps a dozen words with the chef over the past several years, mostly just pleasantries. She also knew that he was never going to make it out of here. He knew
nothing about fighting. He was a liability.
He would only have gotten her killed, or so she told herself, over and over.
From his cooling body she took the cloak and the scattergun, quickly checking the ammo count. Only three shells.
Sithspit. These savages had certainly rigged the game in their favor, even while appearing to give the hunted a chance. Kasan pulled the cloak from Tylo's shoulders and fastened it around her own, then quickly moved up the hill of sand, her utility boots far better suited for it than the chef's simple shoes had been. She left behind her the body of a man who'd done her no wrong... perhaps just the first kill she'd make today.
Kasan was a survivor. She was
going to get out of here, whatever it took.
