The Dunaan

[Seydon of Arda]

Jet-rotor craft were a resurgent technology, favoured on the frontier especially, where shoestring budgets disallowed deployment of trans-atmospheric gunboats but unsettled, politically dicey locals and unrest required fast response air vehicles. The one approaching the ranch house at blistering mach speeds was a black-matte dragonfly, floodlamps arranged across the cockpit nose like compound eye-cells, stretched with weapon-nacelle wings bloated with secondary fuel tanks, a compliment of rakish air-to-surface missiles, chain-slug cannons. Downdrafts generated by its passage flattened the pine tops, parted the fields of weeds like sea water. It slowed, the sonic bow wake overtaking its hard body, washing across the ranch house.

Seydon ran. Razorlight was replaced back into its sheathe and hands were kept empty. He sprinted the length of the second floor. Search lamps swept after him like an angry glare from window to window, glimpsing him between empty door-frames. Didn't need the lamps, Seydon figured, the jet-roto was an ablative insect fresh from a military contractor assembly line. It could see him across thermal and infra-red bands, utilize a host of overlaying sensoria to map him out and the structure too. Pilot was probably delighted at levelling the wood architecture: more satisfying, more psych-damaging, then plinking ricochet sparks off durasteel beams. Seydon heard the paired chain-cannons click and spin up. The Dunaan threw himself down.

The craft pitched itself low and banked with the length of the house, tilling left to right. House siding and timber offered no resistance. It poured on fire and hosed a line through the second floor with the precision of a hydro-cutter. Slug rounds fatter than his wrist and half as long as his forearm buzzed a meter over his prone head, drenching him in splinters, plaster, metal shavings from the plumbing and heating pipe arteries. The roar of carnage was immense. Seydon crawled on, propelling off the flooring with wrists and knees, snaking down the stairwell. The jet-rotor pitched lower as it tried following its cone of fire. Light spearing from its underslung compound search lamps, bright, cold, sickly. Savaged and holed, the second floor supports folded. The broken sectioning of the third floor compressed down, flattening a story, sagging the first floor ceiling.

Seydon had reached the kitchen and was scurrying after a backdoor screen. He balled up, clenching his teeth as the jet-rotor smashed down the outer living room wall with another cannon blitz, raking the kitchen into rubble. Cupboards clipped in half and piled with tile debris across the floor, shot thrice through before the wood had dropped. The kitchen sink fell in with the plumbing, churned into warped, unrecognizable dross. He reached and shattered the screen latch, lurching onto the porch. It was a twenty meter run to the nearest cover of a high grain elevator. Behind the slowly flattening ranch, the jet-rotor reared back. The cannons had cycled off and Seydon scented the pungency of spent ammunition. Now, the black dragonfly took on the scorpion's sting. Shock and awe tactics held prime psychological values, crushing an insurgent forces' morale by show of sheer, explosive might. The vehicle didn't seem to even shudder as it loosed a nacelle missile. A flash of vaporizing housing materials, a swatting burst of concussed air, the Dunaan flying forward off his feet and being gouged across the weeds and snow. Behind him, the ranch vanished in another blooming fireball, smoking ash and jet-ink clouds over a roaring timber fire. In spite of the wetness of the year, the weed and wheat surrounding the property caught the embers and cooked.

“Uggghh...” Seydon spat stone grit out of his teeth. Quick check: kit still in place, somewhat, everything dishevelled and slathered in mud. Something in the ranch basement detonated, a potent fertilizer or old gas canisters. Like a hellion, the jet-rotor washed through the roaring fire, peeling ash and flames off its faceted hull.

“This isn't even funny.” The cannons whined on and traced across the snow. Missed. Seydon rose, hurled himself aside, rolling with the bend of grass reeds. The stitching fire roared on and split through the hulk of a discarded grain hopper, continuing through and knocking down an old wood and ferrocrete brick outhouse. He was up on his boots then, as the pilot wrestled with the yaw and rotor pitch, racing in a dead heat toward precious cover offered by the nearest grain elevator. Fifteen meters. Seven left. Close now, smelling the vomit-inducing mire of stored wheat heads gone rotten. His hand reached out and touched a support girder dressed in a heavy patina of rust and soggy moss.

And then a familiar sound in his ear, roar of a subsonic booster nozzle glistening with spritz of washing rocket fuel, a smell of packaged explosives neatly wound into a rigged spiral in the missile nose-cone. Was the jet-rotor pilot simply having their fun now? The single rocket salvo launched and sent the Dunaan into another sprint. Even with physical augmentation, he'd only run so fast. Force power welled out of the heat in his belly, and he blurred for the acreage fence. Behind him lit a false dawn, throwing stark shadows strobing across the fields. The grain elevator toppled in like a broken leg, its ankles of old steel blown to wreckage or melted into slag.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Dunaan, per guild attitudes, treated the Force as another extension of kit. Like esoteric equipment, an item of operational contingency, disdaining psycho-spiritual treatments that painted that Power as anything beyond an occasional tool. Useful in a difficult bout, at making a pliable mind dance to a bit of suggestion, or widening the bind in a bad moment. Not to be wholly trusted. And never entirely depended on. Witchers needed to showcase physical function and adaptability, a widespread caste flexibility in spite of differing schools of training and thought. The Force couldn't be wholly discarded. But dependency could get them slaughtered.

Seydon panted and leaned against a splitting fence post. The 'Speed' strain had been like holding onto a slipping piece of taut wire, fighting to keep his grip. He'd forced the sensation to wrap and knot around his body, before he reached the acreage perimeter and felt the Power give out. Maybe he was out of practice. Maybe the Force just wasn't with him. He spied over his shoulder at the jet-rotor banking around the fallen grain elevator in confusion, stabbing at the smoke with its chin-mounted search lamps. Fire and heat spill from the missile detonation was probably screwing with their onboards, milking out the site. He took his chance and wedged open a gap in the razor wire with his hands, ducking through, and hotfooting it past the treeline.

The night drew every trunk and bough long. Shadows leapt and jerked, swinging with the slashes of flood light crossing through the pine-needle canopy. Seydon counted twenty meters, sprinting hard, somehow in better shape for it than the momentary rush of Force exhilaration. Twenty five meters, vaulting a bed of fallen logs. Thirty and he climbed up a low incline, pawing through snow with fingertips smashing against hard dirt, sliding down the opposite slope. It was taking the enemy a moment to reorient and decide whether or not their prey had gone up with the grain tower. Suddenly, the turboshaft engine wined on loud. More frosty, intense light swept the forest floor. Seydon could see the jet-rotor was canted forward and chopping its blades through the tops of the pines, angled low, burning through its fuel reserves in a blitzing attack run.

Fir and cypress exploded. A towering grandfather cedar lost three quarters of its trunk base and the top-heavy weight of its total height did the rest. Young junipers, larches, hemlock pines withered and detonated into char and kindling, spraying Seydon with coniferous needles and splinters. A spar whipped through the air, smashing across his temple. The thud of innumerable heavy calibre rounds made the snow floor vibrate with false drizzle, pluming a thousand impact squibs. He blinked through the momentary double-vision inlaid inside his eyes. When the cannon fire began, he was still running, ducking up the side of a gnoll down its next steep roll, putting as much tree and granite mounds between himself and the charging jet-rotor. Its pilot was done playing. The fat ammo drums soldered in behind the twitching rotor-barrels were being exhaustively, tracking Seydon's white-dot body heat dodging through the trees. It still had a nearly full compliment of missiles. In a moment - - -

The cannons cycled off and went into cool down. The exertion of sustained fire had heated the linked-in barrels almost sun-white. Seydon could see their glow over his shoulder, vibrating in their underslung mount carriages. The jet-rotor angled the wedge of its body forward, twitching as pitch and altitude controls were finely manipulated. He heard the lock-on tone, an ultrasound shriek over the flesh of his ear-drum, and felt his eyes widen. With insect coolness, motionless like the mantis, the air craft loosened off any lingering fire-safety protocols and launched the whole of its missile compliment.

The effect was having a tract of nuclear light and furnace heat chase down the length of a gravball field. Seydon hadn't stopped running, half-blind in the night's dark from the constant sway and strobe of the jet-rotors search lights. Only a split milliseconds time to react against impediments in his road, utilizing the extensive repertoire of gymnastic moves dead Ember Rekali and Shev Rayner had taught him. He ducked, slid, balled up and jumped over a dried up creek ditch, putting a twisting flip into his aerial gain, reaching out to catch the thick elbow of a crooked bluewood and swinging back to the forest floor. Another false morning raced after him across the uneven terrain. Concussive bursts ruptured louder than close thunder, smacking him with bow wakes of rushing air. Missile cores detonated brighter than lightning. For a moment, as the last explosive warhead jammed into the frozen soil and turned a twelve meter diameter into a brief lake of super-heated melt water, Seydon swore he could see forward out the back of his eyeballs. The leather at the back of his boots fizzled and cooked with smoke.

Seydon was just out of range of instant vaporization. No Dunaan had ever tested to see if their organs could withstand the shock-wave generated from a high-grade missile blowout either. But a force like a bar of lead clubbed into the middle of his back and lifted his feet free of the snow and earth. It carried him for a little while, Seydon's consciousness dully processing the time. A few seconds. He banked off a handful of stout trees, each consecutive impact a wet sound of meat and bone colliding across barked wood. The world decelerated. Face first, the Dunaan plummeted into a tall snow bank and furrowed a shallow trench with his chin.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

A disorienting moment of wake up. Seydon blinked, understanding that he bled from his torn lip and cut temple, not quite sure of a nagging feeling of lost time. ...Of course. Black out. Pain and the labours of living racked up his backbone and put an ache at the base of his skull. He tested distal mobility one finger and toe at a time. No great rush. The jet-rotor could come kill him now, if it so desired. Relief flooded with another endorphin/adrenal discharge out of his endocrine glands. Sitting up took a moment, but sureness and physical speed were returning. Fight it, he told himself. Fight through it or die. Second best efforts never cut it.

Inventory: the gig spear was gone. The make-do axe haft was cracked and partially splintered through the trunk of a nearby syrup maple. His bow and quiver were wrapped around a frosty boulder crown with the whole of his arrow stores neatly snapped in half. He felt for the punch knife and flint dagger: both intact. The buckskin rucksack lied buried under one booth after having somehow slipped over his shoulder and wound across his ankles. Its contents, though dishevelled, were more or less in one piece. Seydon bit through a mouthful of deer jerky, needing the protein for later hours, taking a sip of ice-melt stored up in a makeshift waterskin. Food brought a kind of clarity.

He shifted against the snow and peered over the drift. A kilometre's share of open forestry had been razed into a clearing blanketed with still aglow char and cooked rock. Naked trees, anchored by scorched root balls, teetering beside exposed blast pits generated by missile impact, swayed and tottered with the breeze, shorn of boughs and bark, were still burning. Ash intermingled with falling snow. The result of super-heating the foot or so of snow was a yellowed fog bank filling the burn snow with the speed of ink through water. Smoke had overcast the night's darkness. Hellish tones lit the forest, shadows cavorting beside licking fire pits, underbrush smouldering.

Slants of hard light peered through the opened canopy. The jet-rotor sluggishly panned along, sweeping its lamp-clusters. Seydon could guess the enmasse impact and burst of its full missile compliment had temporarily burnt out its thermal feeds, the temperatures below through the razing milking out infra-red scans. He watched its silhouette canter back and forth, attempting a visual inspection. The matte shielding over the forward canopy had lightened and revealed a teamed pair of pilot and their auxiliary engineer, working secondary systems in time with weaponry and scanner suites. A neon lumen glow from instrument panels at their laps painted them like ghosts. The jet-rotor whined harder and canted forward, whisking back down the blaze trail. He dared in hoping they confirmed his possible vaporization and were vectoring back toward whatever airfield launched them. It paused at the thousand metre mark down the exploded vale, adjusting into a brief hover mode. Without the benefit of macronoculars, Seydon could still pick out sharp details, focusing in. ...A smooth, low section slung behind the cockpit along the rotor tail opened a thin panel. Shapes rappelled out, swinging onto the smote forest floor. Hard laser-finders began sweeping over the terrain, as he snapped back behind the cover of the drift. The jet-rotor drew away and began running a circuit round a three kilometre radial.

“Shid,” Seydon slid back down the incline and paused against a fallen beech log. Clenched his eyes shut and listened. Six hard returns, individual heart beats, deep breathing patterns, stepping in time to try and confuse his hearing in spite of individual weight variations. All were within a short metre's reach. Close arrow formation, pinging off ultrasonic and infrasonic waves as they looked for inconsistent motion detection. Given their equipment range and potential sensitivity, chance was they already had him. Seydon looked down at his hands. Felt a cold very much unlike the winter frigidity surrounding him. Nearby were a few smouldering logs that still looked red hot to the touch.

An idea gestated. He rolled and began crawling, skinning off hanks of spare leather from his armour and wrapping it about his gloves. Piece by piece, the Dunaan removed a log and used Razorlight's curled flat to crudely hack a thin slit into the snow. The heat scalded pain up into his elbows, followed by an ache of cold. Either excitement or hurried exertion was causing a sweat. And the trick was making the displacement look accidental. Foot, palm, or knee imprints would give it away. Give him away. For added measure, his hands flared a sign, scalding the wood with pyromancy. And then he was shovelling with palms and knees, piling and shifting ice flakes. It buried over him. Light dimmed to a faint blue. Seydon shrugged in deeper, into as much cold as the snow could give him. If this fouled up, at least he'd have dug his own grave. Now to hope the coming commandos had their thermal-imaging set a modest gain. Seydon fell into temporary meditation, slowing... everything. Darkness hemmed in...

 

[Seydon of Arda]

...Darkness receded.

Cleats thudded briskly. Heartbeats pounded loudly through the coffin of ice. Seydon blinked awake, held his breath. Keyed his hearing to almost deafening levels of sensory gain. ...Three footfall patterns striding forward, other three picking up the formation rear, providing comprehensive firing coverage. Second man in the forward left, beside the point man, barking gravelly orders over a static-laced throat mike. Hard plastics and metal clicking and scratching with movement. As best could be deduced, all six had paused. Point man was muttering something unsure under his breath, mentioning adjustments to his binoc-goggles. Weird heat displacement all around them. Fading returns in the snow. Another read off seven, eight 'glows'.

“Relax,” Someone said, high pitch with a bit of nasal, cocky. “Just debris. Fething coals got thrown out by the light show. It's nothing. See?”

Four rounds shot into the snow. “Say we go another half-mile, then call the rotor in for pickup if nothing shows. Come on. Nothing runs from an attack ship. Nothing lives against an attack ship. Not bucketheads, not even Sith, not this shidhead little hunting club these freaks have set up. Come on, cap'n.”

“Shut up,” Said a harder tone. “We want a body. We go until we're satisfied nothing got through our first sweep, then we return and see if we can't drum up some bones.”

“Think he hotfooted it?” A woman now, little older than the rest.

“If he did, it's thousands of square miles between here and the habitable zone. Give him bad odds against that. Nah,” Said a second female. “I'm gonna get that skull goblet I've always wanted~”

“Tighten it up back there.”

“Sir.”

The flint knife eased out of his belt.

“Huh?”

He gripped the punch-knife through his knuckles, clenching and releasing the cramping musculature up his legs.

“...Sir, getting motion returns.”

“Where? Show me!”

Snow heaved and ruptured. A blur struck into the first body, lashing out. The punch knife drove in, snapping a round, flailed hole through body plating and the ribs behind the steel. The flint blade lunged into the space between the throat and shoulder, another armour gap, plunging to the hilt. It twisted in place, a wet glove reaching over and deftly breaking the right humerus. Between the soldier's wet 'pop' gasp and the breath it took to scream, he was already launching head-first into the nearest diaphragm, bowling over his squadmate back a few meters into a waiting snow pile.

No room to draw Razorlight. Those four still on their feet were discarding their rifles aside in favour of electro-batons and vibro-knives, wading in close, forming a diamond circle round Seydon, lunging forward with practised timing. A baton cracked off his shoulder, a knife point slicing in past his midriff. He smacked his elbow hard into a near face, grappling their arm around and twisting meanly. Bone broke, auguring inside the muscle sheathe. Seydon bundled the soldier around, deflecting another baton stroke off the mercenary's skull, snapping a knee into their gut that pushed their lumbar out of alignment. Another thick, mucus scream, howling pain over the now open comm. channels. The punch-knife shunted into the base of their neck like a key driving through a lock. At once, limbs went slack and a wet cough escaped the body. Seydon hurled the dead weight out of the melee, into another soldier that staggered under the sudden dozen stone weight. The Dunaan reached over, nicking the flint knife through their throat guard, opening the carotid. Stumbling and bleeding profusely, the wheeled away.

Someone had a thought to draw their side-arm. The first slug-round shot past his ear and took a dime chunk with it. Ringing so violently intense he could feel it through his teeth, temporarily deafened. Then a rush of blood, bodily chemical reactions induced by unconscious, automatic brain responses, causing sound to come piping through the fade while his face went flush and hot. He slapped at the pistol barrel with the flint knife flat, pushing the second shot out of the way: into the belly armour of the mercenary just behind his right flank. And then buried the knife up to the antler grip into a pale throat, ripping out, spilling volumetric blood out onto the snow. The side-arm clattered between their toes. He saw wide eyes through a matte-visor go wide. Then go blank. They stopped clawing at their savaged neck... and fell.

The flint blade finally broke under abuse. The stun-baton wielder, a man Seydon was assuming was the squad controller, was hemming in. He parried two low thrusts and then a side-long bash, the knife shattering when it briefly arrested a long under-hand swing aimed at his hip. The controller grunted, pacing into a routine kata that put Seydon on the retreat. Air burned and fizzled from passing static arcs. Waited... biding tautly. The commander went in for a grapple, to bring the electrified baton-butt in to bear. All at once, motion exploded back into his face. The Dunaan headbutted the visor plating, slam-punched a combo across his clavicle, sternum, navel, kneed into the abdominal cavity with such force solid organs bruised before bursting. Seydon caught the baton out of his hand and clubbed its haft across the sleek helmet. Just once. The head crazed and bounced, rolling like a ball on water.

Distant firelight from the burning wood was already beginning to cool and return the forest to an air of ice blue and black evergreen. Smoke and the melt fog still hung in close, choking oxygen with smells of wood char, cooked dirt, the ash taste of fried underbrush turned into a natural composite of gagging aromas. Time re-spliced itself to a crawl. Seydon was slowly turning about, looking from body to body. Six accounted, six knocked off their feet. Expired, or unconscious. Their fatigues and combat dressing were identical and designed with the same attentive care as the fuselage of a starfighter, streamlined with subtle angles, hard matte black auto-mail over baggy underarmour coloured for arboreal environ operations. He knelt and pried a helmet off: middle-aged face gone pale and chalky, lines of bleeding veins running out of the crow's feet at the eyes.

Symptomatic of dark Force overuse or overexposure. Not necessarily endemic to Sith alone, given the dozens of diverging, splitting, and reassembling sects and their sub-tenets retreating out of the Core. Seydon reached and closed the beige eyes over. Murmured an old prayer that he remembered out of childhood, sending the dead on their way. At least two bodies still breathed. One, judging by heart-rate and clammy, sweat-like-gelatin countenance, was in deep shock. The broken arm. The other was moderately undamaged. Only poleaxed after being socked by a hundred eighty five pounds flooring them into the snow. Seydon was about to wake them, readying a 'Denon-dagger' slid into the housing of one arm vambrace, when sudden, dislocated light flooded down.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

The search lamp was so searingly white it was nearly colourless. Down draft generated by the combination rotor-turbine and nacelle wing jets was immense. There wasn't any shape to the jet-rotor hovering above: light obscured its vectors into a strange, tutelary vagueness, the visions of mad hermits of the gods they saw in the clouds. Seydon put a hand over his brow, glaring back. Should have known, he thought. Dispatching mercenaries on their own terms could have all been distraction to get their heavy firepower into position. The jet-rotor turned, levelling over the tips of pine canopy.

It'd wasted compliments of munitions and manpower in its singular quest to erase this single thing away. The vessel had canted forward, pulling the cone of light off Seydon's shoulders, almost revelling in the black lines of insectoid shape and the angular protrusions of waiting machine-cannons. The cockpit was a shielded knife. It seemed to wait on ceremony. Seydon could hear infrasonic exchanges as targeting lines swung and coalesced onto his position. For a gesture, he drew Razorlight and stood at guard. The jet-rotor kept minutely adjusting, savouring the blitzing kill. Servos in the nacelle-wings tracking the heavy machine cannons with the man on the forest floor.

...Rosa was never going to forgive this one. Their agreement was he'd come home. Not in partials, but whole, well, healthy. If they never saw a cred again and lived to an infinite age spear fishing the long Ardan lagoons, Rosa could give a shid. She argued that was a deserved heaven. Couldn't they have it? They could, Seydon felt, but then one day, they'd wake up mad on a too-warm night, swarming their vessels for spare parts, at once desperate and craving the exultation of choice, action, and rare adventure.

“She'll kill you...” Seydon whispered behind his teeth. The jet-rotor replied with engine noise and the scream of cycling wing cannons. The cockpit matting went translucent: twin pilot and engineer saddled in the staggered seating, lit below from their consoles, staring back. One, quite mockingly, gave the Dunaan 'thumps up', and reached to depress something on their switchboard. A higher pitch whined in his ear: safety disengage, target lock rejoining on his heat signature. Any moment now.

“Dreamed a dream. And I found that dream was you,” And his sight went warm with sunlight, seas the colour of Aegean blue, sand on her skin like gold dust over tanned silk. Dark hair, touched with wind, mysterious eyes, a forever 'knowing' expression on her lips.

“Come on! Come on!”

A burst of sub-bass notes, thundering jive bars of screeching trap-electronico music, nearly split a seam up his back. Seydon snapped his head around, at a second approach of bright search-lamps careening through the forest fire smoke screen. It was a gaudy, brightly spray-painted and stenciled Orzu-tug, refitted for sub-zero combat with armatures of missiles, mine layers, and heavy blaster cannons. Contruum militia. The jet-rotor turned and juddered about, as if in confusion. If the pilots had an afterthought to open fire, they reacted much too late. A cyclone torpedo ripped for the forward cabin into a dirty wound, heavy blaster fire smashing its spinning bulk out of the way where it touched into a copse of bluewood pines, ignited, and spun on its axis for half a kilometre. Seydon felt the climbing fireball implode before he saw its light blossom up against the smokey overcast.

The Garvel Aninoi took station overhead. A side-hatch opened and an air-car chugged out of its moorings, crewed with drab 'marines'. Insurgent fighters. The guise of nonprofessional attitudes and a convincing air of inebriated courage hid a cool confidence, inculcated by labourous attention to Pash Cracken's treatises on insurgent tactics. The speeder lander and debarked its crew, nine armed fighters bearing bright yellow shoulder patches and well-oiled slug rifles, regarding both the fallen mercenaries and their feller with upraised barrels. One, a young woman no older than seventeen, Seydon was sure, edged forward and delicately relieved him off his swords, punch knife, and rucksack. Another, bundled with medic kit, passed from body to body, a miniature vital monitor in their hands. Diagnosis was pronounced: four dead, two wounded.

“Sir,” A captain said, gesturing at the speeder. “Would you like to accompany us aboard?”

Genteel courtesy. A breeze brought ice flakes and a cold drag across their shoulders. Seydon felt the raw air pinching at his exposed face. He was covered in bruised scabs, unshaven. Something in his blood still ached for violence. A beat: hands unfurled, relaxed, cat-eyes dilated out of their tight clench. The Dunaan nodded and plodded after the captain, under escort by three rifles that didn't breathe easy yet. He took a forward seat on duct tape patched upholstery with temperfoam puffing out from breaks in the stitching seams. He thought of asking after the dead but a glazing fugue slowly numbing through his faculties put out the inkling and another dozen ideas. Seydon was half asleep when the speeder docked in with the Garvel.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Captain Brae Ghelds met with Seydon in the medical cell. It was a cramped module, able to accommodate three lying patients at max, dressed from wall to wall to ceiling with anchored white plastic equipment running off power feed lines stapled into the bulkhead panelling. A doctor and her care assistant worked at dressing him down to his skivvies. An IV line had been drawn into an arm, switching out nutrient bags, slowly replenishing lost body salts and exhausted fluid reserves. Scanner paddles were swung over his torso and extremities every few minutes, the doctor's muttering in hushed talk rife with impenetrable terminology. Had to do with boggling scan returns, blood work, stool samples, having expected baseline statistics and instead facing an organ, cardiovascular, nerve, bone and musculature structure showcasing years-old heavy mutations. Seydon reached and took a draft from a brushed steel canteen propped up against the cot railing. Captain Ghelds found him, more or less naked, and staring off into nothing.

She was holding on to his blades. “Said you weren't gonna take long, Relentless. We came by after picking out your coordinates to see what the hold up was and found your ship slagged. Thought you were slagged too, 'till one of the boys found your get-together all dead inside that old camp. And then that fire show went off and had us come running. We're more than a little pissed with the whole situation: armed, off-the-book paramilitary force operating on our turf without sanction or jurisdiction. Kind of want an answer or three, Relentless.”

He looked up into her face. “You got me too. I was trying to put together a little memorial. And then I'm nearly shot to death. Blew up my ship, forced me to high tail it through arctic country. And then an assault copter decides to raze half the forestry to kill me.”

“So why?”

Seydon sucked another mouthful of warm water out of the canteen. “Did you pick up anyone at the log camp?”

“No. Found one guy pretty mauled dragged his way down and died in the snow.”

“Huh,” He hummed, feeling an odd twinge. “Well, according to that one, I or someone like me tampered or acted against their 'interest group.' Whatever that is and whatever they are. Whole exercise was retribution. I had to die. Lesson had to be taught.”

“That it?”

“Look, Captain,” Seydon pushed up against his cot until they were more or less eye to eye. “I'm in the dark right now. Just spent two weeks and then some navigating hard bush wilds. Tonight, I nearly got killed by a gunship for reasons I don't yet know. I'm trying to catch up as much as you are.”

“Easy,” Ghelds held up a hand. She passed Winterfang and Razorlight in their scabbards onto his lap. “Just wanted to get your take. Did some reading up on you: Seydon, coming out of the east spinward, get mentioned a couple times with the old Levant outfit.”

“Yeah...”

“...Put in a quick word to see if any of those names would vouch for you. Turns out, a few were surprised you were alive. Seems you're alright, witcher.”

“You pick up those two wounded?” Seydon now asked, swinging his feet over the cot, swords bundled in one hand.

“Got them in emergency. My lieutenants are seeing how cooperative they are but doesn't look like they'll say much, even with chemical - “

The Dunaan was up, striding past Captain Ghelds with his blades slung over a shoulder, dressing on a patient gown and tearing free of the IV lines. “I want to see them.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Garvel kept its brig forward, third level down, a compact cell space not unlike converted janitor closets, modified to open individual jail rooms out into open vacuum at the drop of a switch. Seydon followed after Captain Ghelds, spent a rough ten seconds in a closed lift. The gown was drafty and three sizes too small. Though, a piece of his quiet anger wanted there to be some discomfort for his would-be assassin's to suffer. Ghelds' composure was admirable if nothing else. A few crew paused to briefly gape before consulting their commander over an issue, dismissed with a curt word, salute, marching off into curling, grey and black tubed corridors.

Four of her more senior captains had settled their charges into room TN-85, designated with white slashes, plastic warning labels, and a hermetic seal. Air was pumped and extracted through exchanger vents mounted across the ceiling and floor. Seydon looked in through a view port: both mercenaries were dressed in heat gowns, the one with a broken arm stabilized in a transparent cast running down his arm, showing off terrifically ugly bruising. His other hand was clamped to the table top with a mag-cuff. His partner, a woman, looked ahead coolly, similarly cuffed, trying not to sweat in the re-heating blanket thrown over her shoulders. All four interrogators paced, animated and cagey.

Ghelds reached over and clicked the audio feed for an outside speaker on.

“...-been a piece-by-piece job.”

“Otherwise, how do you get a jet-turbine rotor onto Contruum, without lighting up boards from Ringhail to Kholdlee?”

“Got these neat scanners, courtesy of Mister Merril and his gremlins in Silk. See, we can use them and tell just where you all stand~ If you got some mean inclinations we don't know about.”

“You two have been in some bad company.”

“And thought that bringing a one-sided war to our backyard would go off without a hitch.”

“Almost did, gotta admit. Rotor-job was a fine piece of stealth. Hardly knew it was there until that pilot went gung-ho.”

“Aim was shid if they couldn't fell a single target on foot.”

“Maybe there's something to those 'Dunaan' stories after all. Maybe you are a lot of jack-shid mercenaries in over your heads.”

“Or maybe your gear and kit says otherwise. All expensive, all tailor-made, all virtually untraceable. You got some hairy tailors.”

“Between your weapons, your illegal stealth jet-rotor, weeks spent chasing down just a single man through high country with uncanny dedications... You're part of an outfit with some nasty credentials.”

“Contruum understands nasty. Better believe it.”

“You have a group. You have a mission. We have half a gallon of truth serum. And if we have to pipe all that through you, we will. Contruum knows nasty. You're gonna find out by how much, if you don't start cooperating.”

The far entry hatch opened. Muted light framed Seydon in the isolation lock, peering in. Captain Ghelds reached past him and grimly snapped her fingers at the interrogators, who divorced from their procedure with cool immediacy. At another gesture, Seydon stepped inside, the hatchway swinging back into place, two dozen locking 'teeth' shunting back into the jamb frame. The isolation chamber smelled like chlorine, bleach, and steel. An acute sense of 'presence' interrupted the feeling of privacy, the Dunaan knowing that Ghelds and her insurgent fighters were eyeing the scene. He sat down behind the table, facing the cuffed prisoners. Where before, their gazes had been focused on nothing at all, both the man and woman couldn't hide a seething glare aimed his way.

“I'm very tired,” Seydon said, after a beat. “Also, out of patience. I don't have time for this 'wall of silence' crap. So let's start with the obvious.”

Reaching into a gown pocket, he withdrew a needled hyper-derm patch coloured in blue plastic. It slid to about a centimeter within reach of the man. He was still hobbled by the peculiar arrangement they'd set his broken arm, propped up at an angle with a cast running from wrist to hip. The Garvel doctors hadn't bothered setting up intravenous pain-killer feeds to help numb the pain. The man's face was grey and sweating. Dark eyes flickered, from the derm to Seydon.

“Why did you try to kill me?”

Nothing. The woman licked her lips and seemed to smirk, just so. Both exhaled at once and leaned against their bolted chairs. He was still in the dark. It lent their position a wonderful modicum of power, an ability to frustrate his already exhausted nerves and give them a little pleasure. A small victory. Both were prisoners facing prosecution for unlawful paramilitary activities on a sovereign world. Seydon read it in their eyes: he could go feth himself.

“Alright,” The Dunaan rose out of his chair.

He lifted the man out of is chair and forced the mag-cuff to tear a section of table top metal free, holding the soldier still buckled to the once floor-bolted chair more than effortlessly by the neck in one hand. His other grip had done likewise, sweeping the woman off her naked feet, tearing cuffs, chair, and some ragged discs of floor panelling free, all but pushing her skull and shoulders through the isolation module wall.

“Why did you try to kill me?” Seydon asked again, pulling his grip away. Both made a clumsy fall and crashed hard, rolling with their chairs, choking for breath. “Friend of yours. Froze to death out on the steppe. But before that, he got around to saying this was all just reprisal. You're gonna elaborate on that.”

“Or... what?” The woman hacked bloodied spittle.

“You're trying my patience. Really, I'd love to leave this to the boys and let them snare the tidbits out of you, but you're made of something sterner. Something frightening. I don't know what I did to who, why there's a vendetta out for men and women with viper-eyes, but if you've fethed up, I gotta stop it. I gotta know why. What's going on?”

“It's like this,” Croaked the man, through an immense corridor of pain. “We have... vested interests! Got... our own... wars... to fight! Then your – your kind – came along... interfered. Messed up. Forced us... to declare... war.”

“Messed up how?” Seydon knelt and tugged the man's face up by a fistful of hair. “One of the schools?”

“You really are friendless,” The woman coughed into a mean snigger. “And clueless. You got nothing... to barter us with. Get anymore rough, I'm sure those little twints and tweaks outside trying to play like they know what they're doing will race in here and toss you out.”

“Killed... friends,” The man gritted. “Better men and w-women, then you. Don't gotta tell... shid!”

“That's fine,” Seydon rose. “I think I have it straight, from the hints.”

He strode away, leaving the pair floundered across the steristeel floor, pausing before the exit hatch. He turned an eye back over a shoulder. “You're all club members of a paramilitary outfit, something with access to material, manpower, and a lot of resources. You don't act strictly like mercenaries but you're too angry to be career soldiers. You're each tainted. I'm thinking ex-OS. Which means you're an insurgency yourself. The rest I can figure out for myself.”

The hatchway shut behind him. Ghelds and her interrogator crew waited in the small observation cell, standing under the sole AC grille in the ceiling, sharing day-old caf while penning, revising, and cross-referencing notes. The captain idled in an old command chair rescued from storage retirement. She rocked, half in thought, glancing at the pair of characters still struggling against their moorings on the floor.

“When you started flexing in there, we all thought you'd tear them apart before we'd stop you,” Ghelds said.

“...Tempted to,” Seydon admitted, a little darkened. Dozens of impulses had nagged at him to loose all restraints, peel the mercenaries apart inch by inch, until they sobbed the truth out. Justified turn around, for week spent in arctic isolation, surviving off dried animal meats, brittle spiralheads, and mouthfuls of water drained from trunk cuts made into birch and ash trees. Conscience won out, troubled at the implications that came with abusing shackled, unarmed, and helpless prisoners. That initial stunt had been enough. More than enough...

“Thoughts?”

He stared through the one-way screen, into the module. Half broken forms wriggling across the floor, cursing through the audio feed. “That I have some idea what's going on. Not the whole picture. I just... I deal with contracts. Kill bad things that hurt people, need putting down. This is all outside my scope of practice.”

“Not really 'you' at fault here, though. Like as if some friends of friends of yours fethed up miserably, now there's recriminations being sent down every line,” Ghelds rose, sipping her caf from a stained foam-bead cup. “Reminds me of the mafia clans they have, out on Asahi. Ever been?”

“Not yet.”

“There's an entire criminal infrastructure that runs parallel with traditional, normalized stratas of power there, intersecting with and through those stratas as it needs to. They've rules on how to deal with virtually ever break made in protocol. Example, a thief takes something of value belonging to them and tries to sell it through the fence. Thief dies, his family dies, the fence dies and his loved ones too. By association. A lesson is taught, in essence. Sometimes? They just wait, with spider patience, until they decide you have enough for them to take away.”

“They brought on men, heavy weaponry, a stealth rotor of all things, to ensure I would die,” Seydon turned away, adjusting the ride of his still-waiting swords. Violence was a tension in his frame, wound like a whipcord bowstring. “...My guild is very small. And it's very old and we're all hidebound to traditions. It won't be long before things take their course, and the times replace us and we fade aside. I don't want that to be from... this, whatever this is.”

“So what now?”

He started toward the corridor and the short lift ride that went up the stacked tug decking. Captain Ghelds cursed, putting aside her caf to follow, cantering into a jog to keep up with the Dunaan's long stride. “What now?” She asked again.

“Terminus.”

“What about it? Middle of nowhere. You don't have anything left for these two?”

The lift doors parted aside and admitted the pair, Seydon partially bowed in thought, face shadowed from the recessed glowlamp overhead. A slight gravity inertia tugged at his belly as they rode up. “No. Not now. Need my things and then I need a ride to Terminus.”

“What's out there?”

Nothing and everything, he thought. Terminus was a nexus of Outer Rim trade, one of the few reliable hyperspace gateways opening into the Unknown Regions. Nar Shaddaa bragged it possessed the single greatest concentration of 'free enterprise' in known space, and Terminus was it's sister equivalent. Opportunity and chance were on in the same thing. That 'everything and nothing' concept, hum of forbidden or alien 'biz' that made sense only to the eclectic and tightly wound net of communities stretched like filament and webbing across the planetary face. It represented an ancient time and place when Dunaan, numbering more than just a pathetic handful, absorbed information and tracked their prey to forgotten haunts.

“Information,” Seydon said. The lift braked to a halt on a smooth air cushion, ejecting them onto the medical platform. His belongings, what were left, had been catalogued and neatly stored in a gene-locked bench locker, inside a former custodial room. Ghelds left him to dress. The Dunaan emerged in his ragged leathers and chainmail, still scenting of pine and wet underbrush, applying the last of his harness belts. Razorlight and Winterfang looked contented in their scabbards across his back.

“I'll also need time with a holonet terminal.”

“...We can arrange something out of our encryption gates, sure,” Ghelds nodded. “But just that. If you're looking to borrow this tug to go gallivanting, it's not happening. Maybe a trader or private vessel can take you out to the Hydian. Contruum is stretched thin enough as is and we don't need an extra complication of some underworld war escalating in our system. It'll be best if you take this mess with you when you go.”

“Believe me,” Seydon tested his reach, feeling Razorlight glide half an inch without friction or drag. “I am putting this down.”