Private The Nightfly

[Cato Fett]

[{Inner Rim}]
[{Iseno Sector}]
[{Denon - Ecumenopolis - City World - Urban & Throttled}]
~ T h e N i g h t f l y ~

He was bleeding.

Behind Cato, the airlock doors to the rear seating compartments on the airbus sighed shut. With an effort, he planted his feet forward in a brisk trot and slid down the crowded aisles. The rear cabins were poorly, darkly lit, with fitful halogen bars recessed in the overhead bulkheads rimed with dirt, dust, and collections of desiccated insects. The rubber matting under his boots were disintegrating. Seating comprised of brushed steel 'cups' thinly upholstered in dirty leather, three per row, extending down the length of the central aisle bisecting the compartment. The evening foot-traffic, salary-folk and mid-town contractors, semi-chromed construction labourers and spats of hooded street-toughs aglow with acid tattoos and lines of cyber-augmentation, crowded every available seat. But the sight of the Mandalorian armour, the ronin-styled casement with the angled T-bar helmet shielding, was useful in forcing some of the crowd to part. He walked to the compartment's rear and took hold of an overhead loop handhold, stood swaying as the airbus rose and slid to starboard.

He was bleeding.

[The short vibro-punchknife slammed through a space under his elbow and punctured hard into his hip. Cato bit down on the pain, shut off the nerve-receptor with a Force-thought. Had to let go his katana. The sword clattered onto his boots as his grasp caught the Gran's arm, yanking curtly. Wet pop of multiple dislocations, inside the wrist bones, turning the elbow in on the wrong angle and shunting a modicum of further force into the manoeuvre. The elbow snapped. The Gran bellowed thickly and swung in with his good arm. Cato wove in, in with the blow, catching the Gran by the shoulder as he twisted smoothly on his insoles and hip. Pain flared, hot and red in his vision. Cato committed regardless, lifting and throwing the Gran off his feet, projecting him onto the apartment linoleum. A flat-hand atemi blow crunched the Gran's throat in. Cato loosed the tanto strapped behind the small of his back and drove it through a space between his enemy's second and third rib.

The Gran died a heartbeat later. Cato toppled off his corpse and fell against the dusty kitchenette floor.]

A small bank of hyper-derm needles sank and injected into the flesh round his hip-bone, where the torso lamellar plates separated above the armoured skirting to allow for movement. The punchknife had breached the armourweave. Cato waited for the anaesthetic to break the pain, allowing his concentration to ease from utilizing the Force to clamp the off the hurt. He stood swimming in a half-pleasant opiate fugue, re-channelling his focus. Stay awake, he thought. Focus! The Gran was unexpectedly acquainted with street-käsi and that was your first mistake. You bought cheap armourweave from that three-arsed Ranat and that was your second mistake. You are exhausted and starving and allowing those factors to cloud your harmony was your third mistake. You cannot afford a fourth. Cato silenced the growling frustration in the back of his thoughts, sealing and compartmentalizing it away. He'd meditate on its meaning later. For now, there was just the immediacy of the present and the absolute, stark need for self-control. The airbus pitched slightly and he felt the roll under his boots. Bodies ahead of him swayed with the motion, unperturbed. He kept a readied hand on his sword hilt.

He shifted his gaze and looked out a small wall-side porthole. Denon sky-traffic and arcology lights streaked by in multi-hued blends. Colossal holo-advert marquees scrolled across the underside of the night's overcast. The airbus was angling closer to the multi-level sidewalks, near enough to make out the bob and ebb of street crowds pooling and eddying around landmark shops, milling out of glassy corporate block-towers, or sweating in line at one of a thousand-on-thousand pulsating, neon-soaked nightclubs that supplied distraction from the humdrum routine. Cato could almost scent it through his helmet scrubbers: vice.

 

[Cato Fett]

[{Denon}]
[{Seven Corners : Baker's Row}]

The bolthole was a converted flat that, originally, had been composed of half-a-dozen capsule cells stacked three-by-three, alongside another three partitions that made up the breadth of the floor. Negligent management, steady infrastructural decay, compounded by disastrous water main breakages and sequels of stagnant but sickening red-mould damned the 'hotel'. Cato discovered its listing buried among a good few hundred classifieds published through local referral holo-sites, cheaper than pennies but so-worded as to leave out damages potential buyers would be billed to settle themselves. It was holed in the corner of the third floor, above what was nominally a pleasant stationary studio.

Cato entered via a back alley portcullis into a refuse-strewn courtyard, past an open set of transformed storage bays now piled with second-hand and ad-hoc chemical production equipment. Repurposed pharmaceutical consoles, distillate-rigs, infusion dowsers, a collection of radio-chemical microscopes hooked to an old Incom fighter power-plant. A trio of rebreather-masked Rodians worked nervously, tensely, over their small fusion ovens. The odour was a stinging pong. By morning in three days, he knew, the trio would have perfected their blackmarket version of whatever popular designer narcotic was making the club rounds. They nodded at him and returned to fussing over their chemistry.

He entered a cage built out of nail-scratched plasteel walls and ribbed with taped knots of PVC scaffolding. The cage was attached with rudimentary travelling cables and hoist chains linked to a rooftop traction motor and control system. Palmed the third button on a little, well-scuffed keypad installed within a cut in the plasteel walling. The elevator hurled him up roughly and stopped just as abruptly. A drip of dark blood followed Cato out into the narrow hallway.