Tempest

[Milivikal k'Vik]

Naboo - Keren

The pale woman sipped tea in front of a small seaside cafe and watched the waves crash into the sea wall. She was mindful of the sun’s gaze, despite the large, dark sunglasses and dressed for the windy fall day. She held on to her tea cup with one gloved hand, and her wide hat with the other while the almost cold wind tried to rip it away. Gulls wheeled through the air, looking for morsels of opportunity.

A tall dark man approached her table. She did not look up. Her eyes were fixed to the horizon.

“You realize that they’re on assignment.” And you can’t go.

“I am aware.” she spoke while she drank the tea. The words came out in perfect clarity. Her prim accent only turned up in historical archives. “Tea?” She offered. The dark man nodded. Mili put her own cup down and poured warm liquid from a kettle into the empty tea cup. She topped her own cup off, and resumed her sipping.

“We have intelligence that says there are some items of interest in an Imperial vault on Ylix.” he said, and took a sip of tea. A slight nod and raised eyebrows in appreciation.

“Ylix?” She asked.

“It’s a mid-rim backwater. Not many have heard of it.” He offered her a data pad. She read through the first screen, but couldn’t make sense of the code. It was an authorized transfer document. The inventory sequences were alphanumeric based on a catalog system she had no knowledge of. She felt the pull toward certain numbers.

“Mmmhmm.” She hummed musically. He put a data card on the table that would have the critical details to the mission, and knew she was in.

“Good luck then. Thank you for the tea.” He set the cup down and paused to straighten his coat.

“Won’t you let me know if they turn up again? Either of them.” Her voice was controlled, but the veteran spymaster knew Milivikal well enough to know that emotion leaked through--concern.

“You’ll know shortly after I do, Miss k’Vik.” He said, and disappeared down the seaside walk.

Unlike the spymaster, Mili was on a loose timetable. She would finish her tea and stay until she tired of the crashing waves and gulls.

Naboo’s sun hung above the horizon when she returned to her well worn Lamda shuttle that she had parked in an empty field, with the blessings of Keren's tiny control tower. The craft had become her highly mobile personal apartment. Her first course of action was to start the navicomp on a path to Ylix. Next was to plug the data card into the reader, that had also been plugged into what was left of a RA-7 protocol droid. She had bought it for very little because the chassis had been damaged, but it worked well enough to read data text out loud, at four times the normal playback speed.

k'Vik liked this, because it meant she could do other things, such as the pre-flight sequence while reviewing reports.

The droid rattled through the report, and soon the shuttle's repulsors began to whine. The shuttle pushed skyward.

[Sarin von Metzger]

Contruum - Von Metzger Arms

"Boss! Boss!"

I didn't look up. Wali was moaning and cradling his hands to his chest while I stood over him, arms crossed and only half listening to Croan and Barba doing emergency first-aid.

"Boss!"

"He's hurt bad, sir," Barba said, pulling Wali's hand away from his body and spraying a bacta solution onto it. I glanced down at the destroyed rifle and frowned. The magnetic sealing chamber seemed to have ruptured, with explosive results.

"Take him to the medic, then," I said, kneeling down and picking up the pieces of the rifle to look at them more closely. Barba commed the medic and Croan set up a stretcher.

"Boss, I got news, somethin' from our guy in Imperial Customs."

I flicked a burnt piece of plastoid from the barrel's grip and hummed, encouraging him to go on.

"Turns out there's a lot of shipping going to a warehouse on Ylix. Arms, munitions, vehicles... you name it, it's probably there. Even some stuff Imperial Intelligence has flagged as important. Something about the Emperor and Darth Vader, signed off by the director herself."

I looked up.

"Esalis?"

"Yeah boss."

I glanced down at the remnants of the rifle and let them fall from my hands to the ground. Arya was off, but the scars and memories of what she'd suffered under Esalis were there. I could see them even as she attempted to keep them covered.

"Put out word to the Bounty Hunters' Guild. We'll require a team. See if Onashi's available, but warn him this might not be as destructive as he likes."

"We're sending people?"

"Oh, I'll be going myself. Have to make sure what we take is worthwhile after all."

"But, boss..."

I looked at the young girl, standing there and shifting on her feet, looking uncomfortable. I didn't say anything; telling her not to worry would accomplish nothing, and promising my safety was foolish as I had no idea of the circumstances.

"I'll speak to Major Callou personally. Thank you."

[Milivikal k'Vik]

Stormtrooper XR-41C was still trying to figure out how he ended up on Ylix. Sure, he had punched a Moff’s niece during a rather violent bar brawl, but how was he supposed to know who she was, much less in poor lighting during a fast moving almost-riot? The members of the small Ylix garrison had decided that this was where the politically inconvenient, unlucky or just plain stupid were sent to be punished. XR-41C felt. YL-833, on the other hand, was all three. He was the one who started the incident on Corulag. On days where the weather over the facility on Ylix was wet and awful, XR-41C’s mind would wonder where he would be if it weren’t for YL-833. Probably back on a Star Destroyer, where it was dry. He sighed. The tiny overhang guarding the blast door did nothing to prevent the steady beat of rain against the plastoid composite. XR-41C’s only small comfort was that YL-833 was just as miserable as he was, standing in the rain, guarding nothing.

Aside from the rain, nothing ever happened at the bunker. No one knew why they were posted to guard the bunker, either. About once every sixty days a shuttle with crates of something and a stuffy logistics officer would show up with a small team, go in the bunker with the stuff, come back out, sometimes with some other stuff and then fly off again.

--

Milivikal k’Vik was grateful for the cloud cover. The awful weather made casual observation of the Lambda shuttlecraft impossible, and the low flight approach into the nearby hills made it unlikely that she would be picked up by a sensor. She eased the Ikas-Adno Starhawk speeder bike out after donning matte grey camouflage rain gear and a scout trooper helmet, also matte gray.

Her chronometer said that it was early evening, but since closing the shuttle, it had grown dark. The helmet’s built-in light amplification was helpful, despite the visual distortion from the constant steady rain. Her speeder slipped silently over the five kilometers between her and the warehouse entrance. At 500 meters out she stopped, halfway up the hillside. Aside from the ferrocrete landing pad, and two stormtroopers, there didn’t appear to be anything else. She powered down the speeder and listened. Nature, rain, and the sound of a Rodian with a big blaster rifle keeping a low profile. k’Vik removed the helmet, but left the balaclava on. She pulled an E5 blaster carbine from a holster on the bike and moved silently until she was three meters from the kneeling Rodian.

“Hands behind your head, and no sudden movements.”

[Sarin von Metzger]

The Rodian slowly turned his head to look at the woman.

"Ou nopa d'emperiolo. Choy ou naga?" He asked softly, setting down the DLT-19 and lifting his hands behind his head. He hoped none of this was too quick for the woman, but often 'sudden' varied depending on who was doing the demanding.

[Milivikal k'Vik]

Milivikal was fluent in several languages, but Huttese wasn't one of them. His meaning was clear enough, though. She let his question sit for a moment. It dawned on her that the Rebellion may not have been the only recipients of the intelligence.

"Where is the rest of your group? Why are you here?" She asked.

[Sarin von Metzger]

The Rodian stayed quiet, simply looking at her for a few moments, before slowly lowering one of his hands.

"Mwa lorda ta chuba setta vopa," he explained. He stopped when one of the woman's fingers twitched, but slowly began to lower his hand again. "Ou taka do spika."

His hand removed the clip from around his right ear-stalk, and then moved lower to unclip the comm unit from his belt. Still with slow, deliberate movements, he tossed the comm unit to her.

"Taka do spika," he said again, gesturing to it.

[Milivikal k'Vik]

Mili caught the comm with her free hand, and narrowed her eyes.

"I trust I am not the only recipient of a certain document. Can we reach an agreement without blaster bolts?"

[Sarin von Metzger]

"Well, I would certainly hope so," the voice at the other end of the comm unit was a male's smooth low tenor. "I spent a fair amount of credits hiring Dubo there and it'd be shame to have him die before we'd even got into the place. Please allow him to arm himself. I can see you, so we don't need to do too much unnecessary talking."

There was silence for a moment, as he waited for Dubo the Rodian to pick up his blaster.

"Ah, good. There'll be time I suppose for questions and answers later. But there's a timetable we have to follow and consequences if it isn't adhered to strictly. So, we'll be going ahead, and if your objective is the same as ours, then I suppose we can be allies-in-circumstance, yes? Nod, please, and then return the unit to Dubo."

Once the Rodian had the comm unit affixed to his head again, there was once more quiet in the forest, and on some unseen, unheard signal, the Rodian rose slightly from his crouch, cast a look back at Mili with his large black eyes and then moved away, toward the bunker.

[Milivikal k'Vik]

Given the contents of the manifest, it was logical that the others were not concerned about demands for additional goods. Extra hands would be beneficial. She had originally intended this as a scouting trip. Mili followed. They navigated through the brush in unnatural silence until they got to a break in the treeline. Dubo leaned against a tree to steady the big DLT-19 and waited for the signal.

--

XR-41C had a sense of time, unlike YL-833.

“You checked your chrono 20 minutes ago. We still have another 4 hours of shift left.” XR berated his coworker.

“Three hours and fifty minutes.” YL corrected.

“Oh, now you’re going to mynock over 10 minutes?”

“Three hours and fourty-nine minutes.” YL added. XR-41C’s hands tightened around his E-11 blaster barrel and grip. He turned to face his squadmate, and put a hand on his hip and lowered the blaster to be safe.

“You’re insufferable, YL-833. I hope I get transferred and you rot here forever.” He turned back in time to see a flash of red light at the edge of the forest. No. There were two flashes, a split second apart. YL-833 and XR-41C both collapsed. The blasts had flashed through their armor, and the energy damaged all internal organs in the chest cavities.

--
Milivikal k’Vik was impressed at the coordination the mercenaries exhibited. She followed the Rodian out into the clearing at a steady jog, along with the other three mercenaries. They converged on the door.

“All clear, Dubo?” She asked. He nodded after he gave the bodies a poke with the big rifle. Mili adjusted the sling on the carbine to be behind her and out of the way.

“I have the codes if you have a pad, von Metzger.”

[Sarin von Metzger]

"Well, you seem to have me at a disadvantage," Sarin von Metzger replied, nodding to a swaggering Nautolan with two blaster pistols holstered to his belt. The Nautolan smiled widely, showing off rows of sharp teeth while he pulled a small datapad out of the pack he was carrying and handed it to her. "You know my name, but I don't know yours. Most rude of me, as a woman like you deserves to be remembered."

Despite the tone and words, von Metzger seemed to be more interested in the bunker than Mili herself; and there was the sense that he found her memorable not so much because of her beauty, but her silent stalking and neutralization of Dubo before anyone knew she was there.

"Bulbarra," he said, turning to a silent Wookiee carrying a Relby-V10 and somehow making it look small. "You, Dubo, and Mosska keep an eye out. Vip and our new friend will open the door."

Bulbarra nodded, sending his braided fur to sway, metallic beads and cylinders glinting slightly in the dim light, stepping away with the far more diminutive Rodian and a nearly as large Trandoshan to keep an eye on the tree-line with a set of electro-goggles.

[Milivikal k'Vik]

Mili contemplated lying for a moment. Her name might be valuable to the right person, but with an opportunity before her, she preferred to not need to juggle too many tasks.

"Milivikal k'Vik." She said when she took the datapad.

"What treasure brings you here?" Mili asked, and tethered the pad to the data port next to the door. While not a slicer by any stretch, she knew a bit more than the basics thanks to the espionage skills she had learned with Aurelias and Estelle. She hummed a tune as she worked (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aQ2InB4rhU). It did not take more than a minute. Mili had remembered the codes. She pressed the submit button on the pad, and the doors parted. Lights snapped on in stages. First the lights behind the door, and then progressively deeper into the bunker warehouse. She gave Sarin a self-assured grin.

"After you."

[Sarin von Metzger]

"My thanks," Sarin replied. "Balbarra, Mosska, Dubo, we're entering."

The bunker was classically Imperial, with metallic hues and all functionality. Balbarra took point, walking in with an assured, fearless gait. Vip the Nautolan was close behind him; as slicer, he needed to be ready to deactivate any traps or security measures the Imperials had set up to protect the warehouse.

Sarin followed along behind him, with Mosska and Dubo bringing up the rear.

"Ah! Machi de!" Vip called back in a carrying whisper. He jogged up to a panel in the wall just a few feet from a four way intersection, and pulling a jack out, inserted it into the computer access point. With a datapad out and connected to the jack, the Nautolan got to work. "Hm. Dificulte."

Balbarra stood in the middle of the four way, still as silent as he had been since Mili had joined them. In a matter of moments though, Vip's sharp teeth made a showing once more as his entered a string of commands into the pad.

"Mapa machi," he said to Sarin, who smiled in return and nodded. Vip entered the last command and waited.

"Meendeeya dis palza peetchi keeata," Dubo said. Sarin cast the Rodian a raised eyebrow, but said nothing, even when the lighting turned red and an alarm sounded throughout the base.

"Poodoo!" Vip hissed.

Sarin glanced up.

"I was hoping we'd get a bit further before things got complicated," he sighed. Balbarra roared, his voice temporarily drowning out the alarm.

"Chuba! Yachani!" Vip shouted back, frantically entering a string into the pad.

Despite the tension in the guards, Sarin seemed almost serene, with his hands behind his back and an expression of curious annoyance on his face.

[Milivikal k'Vik]

The sound of the alarm quickly faded into the background so that everyone could think again.

k'Vik's senses itched. She unslung the blaster carbine, and her fingertip caressed the trigger guard. She could hear mechanical devices whir and click into place behind the walls. The outer blast doors snapped shut. Mili gritted her teeth. It was coming.

"Everyone down!" She yelled, her voice laced with compulsion. She threw herself off her feet, landing on her back. The walls snapped open to reveal automated blasters. Mili shot one the moment the door slid away. The blasters locked in place opened fire. The room filled with red death, but above everyone who had gotten down.

[Sarin von Metzger]

Balbarra fell, roaring in pain and firing the Relby at the turrets furiously; other than that, everyone had taken cover quickly enough to spare themselves.

"Vip," Sarin said conversationally, pulling his pistol from its holster underneath his jacket. "Get rid of them."

The Nautolan nodded and crawled back to the hanging datapad.

"Dubo," Sarin said, and the Rodian nodded, rolling over and setting up the stand for his DLT.

"Mosska," the Rodian called. "Gotowee?"

The Trandoshan growled.

Dubo set his sights and fired a string of shots at the closest autoblasters while Mosska crawled over to Balbarra, who was smacking his overheated blaster with one massive paw. One handed, the Trandoshan dragged the Wookiee back to the rest of the group while still crawling, while Dubo methodically overloaded each visible autoblaster emplacement with a string of shots from his heavy weapon.

"Machi de!" Vip called, and with a final press of the command button on his pad, the lights turned from red back to its normal white.

[Milivikal k'Vik]

She didn't state the obvious, certain the garrison had been alerted. k'Vik rose to her feet limbo style and put the carbine back behind her. Mili examined the destroyed blaster blisters briefly, and took a slow glance down the corridor. She tilted her head sideward slightly, like a kath hound listening for something just below the threshold.

"This place will attempt to murder us again." She stated, and started down the rest of the twenty meters of corridor. She paused, only a few meters in front of everyone else and listened to the Force's whispers and felt its draw to certain places in the massive vault. There was a lack of direct answer, but she did feel a draw to one side of the warehouse, so she turned. She hummed through the Force and aloud as she walked. The feeling grew stronger as she passed row after row of 10 meter tall metal shelves. She walked past a shelf, and then suddenly turned back around. Mili noticed that von Metzger’s group had fanned out into the room, but she was mostly ignoring them.

“Hmmm.” She rapped her knuckles gently against the shelf’s steel upright that ran all the way to the ceiling. Mil paused and listened. She rapped again, a little harder, listened, and then grinned before she dashed along side the shelf.

[Sarin von Metzger]

"Nopa hagwa zofani da wanga," Dubo grunted to Sarin as they trooped along after her.

"Dubo, you are a ray of sunshine in these gloomy hours," Sarin hummed. "I don't think our goals conflict. Things would not have progressed as they have otherwise. Bulbarra, are you alright?"

The Wookiee grunted to him and gestured to the bandage over his upper left arm.

"Sar-een!" Vip called. Sarin walked over to the Nautolan who'd commandeered another access point and spoke to him for a moment while the woman of their group, other than the most deadly Bulbarra, knocked on the walls and hummed to herself.

Milivikal dashed around a shelf.

"Onward we go!" Sarin said, patting Vip on the shoulder and jogging after the woman.

None of the team, or even K'vik, was aware that the active defenses they were going to encounter were a squad of assassin droids that had activated at the first alarm, and were waiting for them in lethal programmed anticipation.

[Milivikal k'Vik]

Her fingers tapped out a playful Shullos KeyBed concerto against the shelf ledges as she gracefully danced down the aisle. The sound was almost pleasant, and each note was distinct.

She tapped a note before rounding the corner and paused, and tapped again. Something did not sound quite right. She put her head near the edge of the shelf and tapped one more time. Milivikal frowned, and then threw herself aside. The assassin droid's reinforced needle bounced off of the shelf with a sharp ping. k'Vik kicked the droid's durasteel midsection, which rang out with a surprisingly loud clang.

"Droids!" She yelled, and her voice unnaturally filled the warehouse.

The droid stumbled backwards two steps, and received a nanoplast throwing dagger into it's primary optical sensor. The droid's wrist flipped aside, which revealed a blaster barrel. She dove away, through a gap in the crates on the shelves. It snapped a shot off at Mili, but found only air where the Dark Jedi was a moment prior.

[Sarin von Metzger]

"Droida!" Dubo yelled, ducking to the side as an assassin droid fired down at them. Bulbarra roared in challenge and fired back furiously.

Sarin looked around, trying to get his bearings and situate himself. They were in a large cave, well lit, with large and sturdy shelving units spanning its length. K'vik was somewhere up ahead; as were multiple droids hidden among the storage shelves.

"Up!" he called, and shot at a pair of glowing ocular units above them. Vip turned and fired also, but screamed as a droid seemed to materialise behind him and ran him through with a needle. Mosska snarled and fired his scattergun point blank into the Nautolan and droid, who vanished back behind the shelves. "Mosska, Bulbarra, Dubo. Keep moving. We need better terrain."

He ran down the aisle, followed by the Rodian, the Wookiee and the Trandoshan.

[Milivikal k'Vik]

k'Vik and the air around her had become completely silent. She fumed at herself for letting the droid get so close, and for not anticipating further defenses. Secondary optical systems were active, but it was now no longer receiving an audio feed, so the droid automatically began a background diagnostic. An angry hum suddenly permeated through the droid while it searched for Mili. The droid upped the diagnostic level, but the noise only increased. It shifted in pitch abruptly, and the optical sensor lenses all cracked. It was never able to see the blaster bolt that cored it's primary processors.

While that droid was dead, it had apparently cried for help. From the top of the warehouse, two blaster bolts were snapped at the Dark Jedi. She threw herself through the shelf again to rob the droids of a sight line and hit the ground running.

[Sarin von Metzger]

"Bulbarra! Left!"

Any other sounds were lost in the Wookiee's roar and the sounds of blaster fire.

"Sa-reen! La! Da cheeka!" Dubo called, setting his feet and letting a string of fire out into one of the aisles. I turned, and sure enough, there was k'Vik, looking furious and running madly. "An la! Una coba!"

"Over here!" I called, shouting above the fire. "Dubo, Bulbarra, Mosska, let's go!"

The assassin droids were clambering along above and behind us as we ran for the alcove Dubo had pointed out. It was a small recessed room, holding some shelves along the walls. It wasn't a great choice for a defensible position being mostly open to the rest of the room, but it had the quality of forcing our pursuers to come at us from only one direction instead of surrounding us and attacking at will.

[Milivikal k'Vik]

Sarin's tactical shift presented k'Vik with an opportunity. The droids now were effectively fighting on two uneven fronts. The somewhat defensible, static location forced the droids into picking lanes of fire and cover. Mili had no such restrictions, and had the droids a sense of frustration, her unerring ability to avoid blaster fire would have been infuriating.

The absolute silence the droids were in was confusing. The systems self-checked successfully each time. Voltage and resistance were all correct, but the audio receptors always returned with no signal. Infiltrator droids used their silence and strong sound positioning properties to an advantage. They were, of course, designed to compensate in the event of a defective subsystem, so they worked around the problem.

They still had the advantage of effectively instant data communications, and elected a divide and conquer approach. Despite their theoretical firepower advantage, von Metzger’s group had more revealing sight lines than the assassin droid perched on the 2nd from top shelf. This afforded near impunity to pour fire into the entryway.

The open air and subsequent gravity did not convey the same advantages. Dubo, Bulbarra, Mosska and Sarin poured blaster fire into the falling droid. When the chassis fell over, it was mostly smouldering scrap.

[Sarin von Metzger]

"K'vik!" I shouted into cavern, eyeing my smoking blaster pistol and the shadowed aisles in front of me. "Any idea of how many there are?"

Dubo's DLT revved up and sang a staccato tune.

"Shiita!" Dubo spat, and waited while his weapon cooled down.

"Mosska, Bulbarra, see if we can't give ourselves some cover, hm?" I asked, gesturing to the shelving units. The two reached down to the bottom shelves and pulled out the bulky boxes and crates stored there, tossing them into the front of the alcove we were hunkered down in. I looked about, but in this environment I was relying on Dubo's superior dim-light vision to catch out our mechanical adversaries.

[Milivikal k'Vik]

UPDATE:
LOC (-2,+0.2,-3)m
DMG LA, FT, FT, LS, LL, RL, FT, RA, FH, FT, FT, LA, FT
CRITICAL SYSFAIL POWER SYSTEM
ERROR DMG MOTIVATOR PRIMARY (HIP)
ERROR DMG POWER PRIMARY
ERROR DMG POWER SECONDARY
WARN VOLTAGE LOW
CRITICAL VOLTAGE LOW

Milivikal did not respond. She was engaged in a deadly pursuit of an assassin droid caught between well armed mercenaries and whatever k'Vik was that seemed to violate physics. She did not hear any additional droids, and decided to direct her full wrath towards it. The blanket of silence was lifted from the area while she searched. She rounded the corner of one of the shelves. She heard the whine of the droid's visual system while it scanned the area.

Milvikal locked eyes to droid optics. An unearthly laugh filled the air. She yanked the droid from its hiding place. It aimed at her with a blaster hidden in the forearm, but a small throwing dagger wedged itself into the barrel. She grinned, and precisely shot the knee motivators with her carbine.

"Just one left now." She said with a very amused tone. Piece by piece, every droid part exceeded it's vibration specifications by a thousandfold. It started with the head, and worked it's way down through the left arm, back up through the shoulders to the right arm and then a spiraling circle toward the center of the droid.

With power failing through the unit, the last thing it observed was a gloved finger on the optical sensor, and then the roof of the warehouse.

[Sarin von Metzger]

Mosska and Bulbarra were angry. While none of the mercenaries had particularly liked Vip, a point of pride had been lost for the two of them in losing one of their teammates. I could understand the frustration, but given the ease with which k'Vik had taken down a number of our automated adversaries, I felt mostly secure in our position now.

"Dubo," I said. Dubo didn't reply, instead letting the barrel of his blaster drift to the right and up. Before I could ask if he'd seen anything, he shot off four bursts above a line of shelving. A droid fell to the ground with a loud crash. I glanced at him and he looked back up at me smugly and shrugged.

"I do hope k'Vik isn't dead," I grunted. With Vip at the very least seriously wounded, she was the only one who could hack into the systems with any sort of confidence.