Faction The Blood Price | TSC Faction Thread of Metellos

[Varin Mortifer]

Metellos​

The city drifted lazily into the sky, overlooking its denizens below, wallowing in the slums and their own filth. Crime ran rampant while their overlords ruled above.

Rak Tuban Grimmin stood at the railings of the outskirts of his home, looking down in disgust at his people as he then looked at the datapad that sat within his palm. Gilded and gaudy, it was a sign of his fortune, fortune that had yet to be shared with his new rulers.

There was always a bigger fish.

The Sith Covenant had violently and completely taken over Coruscant along with its neighboring planets. Soon the core trembled to their knees to their new Empress and her Triumvirate. Demands were simple: offer tribute to The Sith Covenant and protection would be yours; withhold what is to be given and you will be replaced. The message was clear to Rak, but his pride prevented him from spending his funds on petty tribute and even pettier ultimatums. Instead, he invested in security and weapons for his capitol. His own floating city was now a floating fortress in preparation for who would dare challenge him.

He had already been visited by a member of The Sith Covenant just days prior. Lysander was clear on the matter that Rak was to offer tribute to his new rulers; he would have only a week to do so.

Such a being of Rak’s capability could have easily done so within the timeframe. Taxing and garnishing of wages happened to be truly effective. Yet, the tribute never came.

One week had passed by; Rak stood at his place ready to negotiate terms. Ready to declare a battle for what he believed was his. But when Sith Covenant ships tore through the skies, and the speeder landed that belonged to the Covenant, he was not greeted by the blonde hair with a voice of reason.

No, before him was a mountain of a man who stepped out of the speeder clad in dark armor that bent the wind with heat.

Varin had come, and he was not here to negotiate. He was here to claim.

His eyes pierced towards the Neimoidian, silencing any voice he would have given, any words of greeting. It was then that Rak knew voices of reason would not be heard. War had come, and he gave the word for battle to begin.

Objectives

In the chaos that ensued with the Sith Covenant’s arrival, the Governor of Metellos, Rak Grimmin, had temporarily escaped to the safety of his main office. Protecting the governor by means of men, machines, and traps. Turrets lie in wait for unsuspecting intruders while battle-hardened soldiers with advanced weaponry, mainly rifles, await an ambush. The goal is simple: locate and kill the Neimoidian.

Chaos has run rampant upon the capitol, security and military personnel move to intercept incoming Sith and soldiers, and artillery and heavy weapons fire at the ships, suppressing air support. A squad is to be sent down to sneak about and find a way to disable their defenses.

While the squad is in the guts of the city moving to disable weapons, another crew is sent to distract and overwhelm enemy forces with any means necessary. All-out battle runs within the streets of the Capitol city, buildings crumble from enemy fire and explosions. Let them see what it means to declare war against The Sith Covenant.

BYOO​

Whether it be in the poor streets below the splendid floating cities or aboard the cities themselves, Metellos has much to offer in opportunities. Seek your own path and rewards that lay within the planet.

 

[Varin Mortifer]

VARIN MORTIFER

Equipment: Durum Mantle | Black Blade of Chandrila | Eye of The Dragon | Heavy Sith Mace | Cross Guard Broadsaber | Wyrmfang​

Blaster fire erupted from behind the Governor as Varin watched him cower towards the heavy bulky doors that shut him inside. Enemy troops already moving forward towards the Sith as his light shield erupted from his bracer. He held it in front of him, taking the brunt of the blaster fire holding his ground.

Raining from above was the heavy suppressive fire of artillery from Varin’s dreadnaught that hung from low orbit. Explosions rung out in dull thuds as impacts rung out from the ground below the city. The firing of heavy artillery was not concentrated on a specific spot, but more sporadic, offering unpredictability among the enemy forces.

As Varin held his ground his stride towards the enemy troops started slow. His gaze looked back towards his speeder. The presence from within rather familiar.

“The negotiations were short. Best to come out now and have some fun, all of you.”

He spoke through his comms and into the ship to the four individuals that had come to accompany the Sith Knight. Two he knew, the others that had yet to prove themselves to him. To his knowledge, untested. Perhaps they would surprise him.

Varin drew his Black Blade and swung it with vicious momentum, the blade met nothing, but the momentum of the swing sharpened the winds around the blade, sending forth an invisible blast towards a few standing guards, bisecting them instantly, their screams cut short.

Battle had started immediately before them, something Varin had expected.

For now he would hold the blaster fire until his company had acted.

Lysander von Ascania | Kaelyr | Sorc Nenn | Ayrith Drayen​

 

[Sumire Raiza]

COVENANT FIELD RECORD // SR-30

SUMIRE RAIZA

EXECUTIONER

LOCATION // Metellos

OBJECTIVE // NO DEFENSE

TAGS // OPEN

Bloodlust had never been one of her particular proclivities, though she had never been especially inclined to shy away from it either. Evidence of that lay unmoving, sprawled across the passage into the cockpit of the medium-sized cargo vessel.

What had passed for its crew had been sparse. A skeleton complement between contracts, most likely, waiting out a short layover on Metellos before taking on another shipment and whatever additional hands the work required. None of that mattered particularly to Sumire except for what their circumstances had provided her. Transportation.

Sumire settled into the pilot's chair and worked through the unfamiliar controls, finding what she needed quickly enough. Metellos dominated the forward viewport, the first signs of battle already crowding the planet's approach. There were boots on the ground already. Some would probably call her arrival late. Sumire preferred to think of it as deliberate. Time had a way of becoming useful when one stopped treating it like an enemy.

The vessel shuddered beneath her as the engines struggled to comply with her demands. Ahead, the floating capital had become considerably less inviting. Defensive fire reached upward from the city in intermittent flashes, heavy batteries answering the Covenant ships hanging above while smaller craft competed for whatever gaps remained between them.

Fortunately, Sumire had very little interest in joining that contest. Her attention shifted instead to the navigation display.

Cargo vessels required somewhere to go. Somewhere to unload, somewhere to refuel, somewhere for maintenance crews to disappear beneath the visible parts of the city. Defensive networks were no different. Guns needed power. Targeting systems needed data. Ammunition had to reach the batteries, orders had to reach the crews, and all of it depended on relays, substations, service corridors and control points buried somewhere beneath the armor and duracrete. Arteries, in other words.

And arteries could be cut.

Sumire marked a freight servicing platform beneath the city as her point of entry, close enough to the defensive infrastructure to avoid wasting time crossing half of Metellos once she was on foot. From there, the work would be simple in principle, if not necessarily in execution: get inside, identify whatever was feeding the guns overhead, and make sure it stopped. Whether that meant severing power, crippling a targeting relay, sabotaging an ammunition feed or putting a blade through whatever command structure coordinated the batteries remained to be seen.

That was a problem for once she was on the ground. For now, she opened a Covenant channel and transmitted the landing coordinates.

"Raiza. Heavy Artillery Batteries. Rally at the attached coordinates if you're coming."

The transmission ended.

Anyone inclined to join her would be aboard the cargo ship or know where to find her. The rest could find their own way into battle

 

[Shade]

Objective: BYOO | The Shade of a Ghost
Investigating: Allan Alhune

Metellos had survived the transition from possibility to pattern, and that distinction had taken time. Shade and Varin had sifted through everything recovered from Allan Alhune's network, looking for the kind of repetition most people eventually stopped noticing. Individual shipments meant little. So did isolated payments, changed routes, unfamiliar companies, and names appearing once before disappearing beneath another layer of intermediaries. Taken together, however, they had begun describing something larger. Metellos kept returning. Resources moved through it too consistently to dismiss, connections converged there too often to remain incidental, and eventually Shade was left with a conclusion she trusted enough to act on. Allan had something here, and she was finding out what had brought her to Metellos.

She had arrived ahead of the worst of the fighting, though she had never expected to remain quiet for long. Varin had his own reason for coming to the planet, and subtlety had never been the only tool available to either of them. Shade had chosen hers. While the Covenant concerned itself with the governor and the defenses protecting his floating capital, she had followed Allan's trail into the city without announcing that the two investigations had anything to do with one another. Then the shooting started, and the first distant impacts reached her as vibrations through the structure beneath her feet.

Alarms followed soon after, and whatever order had existed within the floating city began breaking apart as security personnel were redirected toward the Covenant assault. Shade paused beside a window long enough to look toward the distant flashes marking the beginning of the battle, already possessing a fairly good idea of who was responsible for at least some of them. "I did tell you not to get hurt." The observation was meant for a man nowhere near enough to hear it, and Shade suspected Varin would consider that a technicality rather than a reason to behave himself. She allowed herself the faintest smile before turning away from the window and continuing on.

The chaos outside wasn't her objective, but it was useful. Security was looking outward while people who ordinarily had every reason to behave normally suddenly had reasons to move quickly, protect things, erase things, or abandon places they didn't want associated with them. Shade didn't know precisely what Allan had established on Metellos yet, and she wasn't going to pretend otherwise simply because the evidence had brought her this far. Nor was she interested in announcing her presence by attacking the first suspicious person or terminal she encountered. For the moment, watching what happened when Allan's quiet little corner of Metellos discovered the rest of the city was at war could tell her considerably more.

Until now, Allan had enjoyed the advantage of forcing everyone else to respond to him. He had taken Varin and built his network behind other names, other businesses, and other people, leaving Shade and Varin to reconstruct its shape from whatever fragments they could recover. Metellos was the first opportunity they had found to change that. They knew something important existed here. The people responsible for protecting it didn't yet know Shade was looking for it, and the battle outside had given them plenty of reasons to reveal what they considered worth protecting.

Shade disappeared into the city's movement as another distant explosion rolled through the floating capital. Somewhere ahead was the reason Allan's trail kept returning here, and she intended to find it, learn everything she could from it, and then decide exactly how much of it Allan would be allowed to keep. For once, he could be the one left wondering what they'd do next.