ds i: independent forces
this has nothing to do with the question of mitsu's-dog-pocky's gender. (which, by the way, does anybody know if pocky is a boy or girl? :D i was thinking boy, though have no idea why. male, ey? 8D awesome. ♥) neither is it nano, though i did start writing that at work today. :D
focus fail, but in any case: dinner squadron/Star Wars 'verse. 8D aliens! lol. extrapolated from the X-Wing series of novels by Michael A. Stackpole, and Aaron Allston. :D good reads~ especially #5-7, which are a standalone arc, and i like to think you don't have to be a star wars fan to enjoy them. (*opinion comes with no guarantee of truth or relevance to reality. |D)
this is basically only going up because i told snowqueenofhoth i'd post in the middle of the night again just to be a dick. but the nano didn't stop anywhere sensical. /fool. [consider this star seeker ii, because the two skeleton plots have already melded in my head. ;; they even start similar, lol.] set a couple of years after 'a fine start.'
anyway, ABC have codenames because i felt like it. :D number designations are both boring and reserved for when there is going to be twelve of them. also, i think destroying kawai's arm is just going to be one of those bad habits like picking on nikaido and killing iida. 8D ←though iida is not going to die this time. :D :D in fact, nobody is!~☆
i: independent forces
Totsuka ran like his life depended on it.
Half because it actually did at that particular point in time, but also because that was what his undercover act required. A blaster bolt scorched the air by his leg, the heat of it burning through the sheer fabric of his current getup. A second shot slammed into the trunk of a tree just ahead, showering him with splinters as he ducked past with a convincing shriek.
Sometimes, acting didn't take a lot of work.
Behind him rang one man's raucous drunken laughter, the cackling of a psycho with a blaster on a morbid hunt, Totsuka his prey. Totsuka ran.
Before him...
He closed his eyes for a moment, his feet finding their way of their own accord through a higher sense. Time slowed as he slipped into the stream of it and the forest around him congealed into a map in his mind's eye. The terrain greeted him as his mind reached out to feel every low-hung bough and prickly patch of grass to avoid.
Before him Tsuka'da and Goseki waited in position, alert as ever, just beyond where the forest fell away down a sheer cliff-a wide canyon carved by thousands of years of rapid waters. Approaching fast.
Reaching back, he couldn't feel Kawai-not Kawai's usual self anyway, but that was okay. The actor changed minds the way a chameleon changed colours, and just because Totsuka couldn't sense him now didn't mean the other wasn't in place and doing his job. They all trusted each other. They had to, or they died.
Nearly there, nearly there...
Totsuka skidded to a halt at the edge of the precipice, breathing hard, and blocked out the sting of his bare feet. Dirt tumbled over the ledge, and it was a long, long way down to the water. He looked around, desperation on his face, right and left, lekku flailing out as he turned his head, but the trees ended a few metres back and there was no other way out. To run along the ledge would make him a sitting duck for a shot between the shoulder blades, with no foliage to shield him-
It was too late to run anyway.
His pursuit's swoop bike broke from the brush, swinging into a broadside braking slide that kicked loose forest debris up everywhere. Totsuka shielded his eyes, shying his face away by instinct, only to be brought up short by the sound of a power pack being loaded and locked, and the madman's infuriating, antagonizing... no, terrifying laughter again, low and rumbling.
Terrifying. Terrifying. It was terrifying.
Totsuka felt his pulse speed up as he looked slowly up, boiled down to despair, into the business end of the man's gun, wavering drunkenly though it was. He stared wide-eyed and wordless, backed up like a cornered feline. One slow step took him half a pace from the edge. Another slow step, and he was a quarter-pace there. He stopped, now with truly nowhere to go.
The madman dismounted his swoop, coming around it with the steady swagger of a lifelong predator with too much lum in his system. He was an ugly human, with stained teeth and blood-shot eyes, and the cocksure grin on his face ate at Totsuka's patience. Still, he remained tense from the balls of his feet to the tips of his braintails. This was it.
Taking one final step back brought his bare feet up to the very edge of the gorge. He could feel the drop under his heels now, and the closeness of the distant rushing rapids below.
"I've gotcha now, pretty thing," the drunk man slurred, stepping up once. Twice. "Wasn't too smart t'run away now, was it? Got anythin' t' say?"
Totsuka shook his head. Ah, that was a lie. He wanted to say a great many things, just not aloud. His lekku twitched, utilizing the sign aspect of his native tongue, just because he could: 'May your body rot under a thousand desert winds.'
The drunk man smiled, and took another step forward.
Totsuka took another step back.
And fell.
*
Two hundred metres away amongst the trees across the gorge, Goseki watched Totsuka's tiny form tumble over the edge of the cliff as if in slow motion.
Calmly, he activated his collar commlink. Set to a very specific, narrow-band frequency under encryption, it transmitted Goseki's instruction to only two other commlinks on the planet.
Just one word: "Boomtime."
*
Three things happened, then.
A square of slate-coloured webbing sprang out from the mouth of a small enclave a few dozen metres under the cliff's edge. Totsuka landed deeply in it, rolling into the cave to keep from bouncing back up, and pulled the net in after him so it wouldn't be seen should his pursuit chance to look over the edge.
At the same time, Tsuka'da cut a slab of rock-roughly human-sized-from a sling beside the cave mouth. It fell the rest of the way down the cliff, splashing loudly into the rapids below in Totsuka's stead.
And several kliks away, back where it had all started (weeks ago by now) at the madman's den, Kawai hit a trigger and set off a bomb.
*
His body language showed agitation incarnate, shoulders tense, movements jerky-but that wasn't out of place. Around him, people were shouting, and starting to run as small-scale explosions peppered the building from the direction of the vehicle hangar.
Kawai paced in short, heavy steps, breathing laboriously as he waited-a few seconds passed. "Boss!" he shouted, as soon as the madman answered his comm. "Something big's going down! No, the-" A particularly large explosion rocked the den's stone walls, and Kawai eyed the ceiling with some consternation. That would have been the reactor of the shuttle in bay five. Two more of those larger explosions were due in forty seconds and then three hundred twenty seconds exactly. He had to get to his speeder within that window of time, because the last blast was going to bring down the hangar roof.
"Target eliminated," Goseki's cool voice came across the commlink pressed to Kawai's ear, where the madman's demands had been just moments ago. "Hellboy has Accel. Get to the alpha rendezvous, Marion. Advise ETA when you know it."
So, Tsuka'da had caught Totsuka and both were out of harm's way. Which meant everything so far had gone to plan. No change. Kawai sent two clicks across his comm, signalling confirmation, then pocketed his commlink and ran to the hangar, fighting clouds of mercenaries and slaves and shady dealers streaming in the other direction as he went, shouting into the frantic cacophony: "He's dead! Run! The boss is dead! The Imps are coming!"
He enjoyed the ensuing chaos with a smile on the inside. Sometimes, the job had perks.
*
Calmly, Goseki swung his long-range laser rifle back over his shoulder and dropped lightly to the ground from his perch in the tree he'd chosen to snipe from. Across the gorge, the crime boss was dead, motionless on the ground, shot through the head while on the commlink with Kawai. Zero witnesses.
Toggling to a second preset, narrow-band frequency, Goseki said, "King to Valor."
"Valor reads, King." The young voice of their transporter, Fleet Captain Yamashita, crackled over the comm. "Let me know where you want her."
"Follow my beacon in," Goseki said, activating a small homing device on his belt as he spoke, for three seconds before disabling it again. "Accel and Hellboy are in the cliff face opposite. Winch them up first. We'll meet Marion at the rendezvous and jet after that."
"I copy, King," Shoon said. "ETA two hundred thirty seconds. Stand by."
Goseki said, "Standing by." And switched back to the secure frequency their squad shared. "Accel, Hellboy: heads up. Valor's ETA two hundred twenty-seven seconds. Pack up. Stand by to be winched aboard."
"I copy, two hundred twenty-four seconds ETA," Tsuka'da echoed.
While in the background Totsuka said, "I hate winches."
Goseki laughed. "Accel, you're welcome to levitate yourself up instead anytime you like."
'Maybe I will,' Goseki heard in his head, right between his ears in Totsuka's voice. Followed by a chuckle just as audibly silent. 'Wouldn't that be something?'
"I'd like to see you try," he replied. "King, out."
*
The hangar was empty of life, which was to be expected. People generally didn't stick around when bits of wall and machinery and transport ship started blowing up in a random pattern for no discernible rhyme or reason. Or run in the direction of said explosions. Kawai sprinted over to the corner of the hangar that he knew would be the last to blow (if he'd set his thermal charges right, anyway), where he'd broken the land lock on one of the hangar's fastest speeder bikes earlier that day. Now, it would be able to fly if he could only get its engines running without the appropriate ID.
Eighty-five seconds left on the chrono, one speeder to hotwire, and one daring escape to make. Was the valiant hero going to make it? Kawai grinned to himself and set to work, popping the small access panel just in front of the speeder's single seat. Hell, yes.
Well...
Maybe.
Over the rumbling of the crumbling hangar, his ears caught the very distinct sound of a blaster being cocked, and he spared a millisecond's glance up at-ah. The tough-looking specimen that Kawai had dubbed "Ugly" during his time around. The boss's head of security-though the title was really nothing more than an acknowledgement that Ugly was the highest-paid mercenary in the den, and probably the longest surviving.
But title or no, he was standing right there. With a blaster. Pointed right at Kawai. While the seconds ticked down. "I told him he never should'a hired you," Ugly said.
Kawai kept working. "You know," he told Ugly, lacing the slack-jawed drawl of a two-bit mercenary through his words. "I hate t' postpone our little meeting'n all, but this ain't really the best time for me."
Ugly shot him.
Blood of the Sith- Kawai gritted his teeth as he half fell, half staggered back from the speeder, putting its bulk between himself and the head of security. His jaw clenched against the pain even as his vision threatened to white out for a moment, and his left arm hung limp, jacket charred black around the bicep; he couldn't really feel it past the burning sensation. Well, he'd survived worse before-much worse, many times before. Still, the past was little consolation at the moment. He kind of needed that arm.
"I say what we postpone in this schedule," Ugly rumbled menacingly like he'd watched too many holodramas as a kid.
"Y'know he's dead now, right?" Kawai said, forcing his tones all casual. Ah, it was sad. So sad. His jacket was ruined as well. "The boss? You're not gettin' that next paycheck, so I'd say running's your best bet too, before the Imps get here."
"The local Moff has no interest in us," Ugly growled, while repeatedly, Kawai's dizzied eyes tried to trick him into seeing the man's large, flat nose as an earthslug. He tried to focus and not laugh, though for some reason the thought was hysterical just then. "We kept his pockets well lined. Tell me how you know he's dead."
"Oh~ the boss?" Kawai shrugged his good arm, and couldn't suppress a grin. "I was on comm with him when it happened, you know. About the explosions and stuff?" A wave indicated the crumbling hangar around them, chains of tiny blasts continuing to pepper the structural beams and smaller vehicles. "Since he was out huntin' that runaway Twi'lek of his he bought recently."
The window of opportunity for escape before the last large explosion was closing fast. Tick, tick~ tick, tick~
Ugly narrowed his eyes. "You had friends in on this. That Wormhead part of it, too?"
"Ah, such a pity," Kawai sighed melodramatically, despite the sweat beading his brow. Deep breaths. No pain. None at all~ "You're kind of astute, but I've gotta go now." His chrono beeped the start of a fifteen-second countdown.
"You're goin' nowhere 'til I say so," Ugly said, the aim of his blaster dropping to Kawai's left knee.
Kawai didn't wait for him to pull the trigger again, taking the opening. He threw his weight shoulder-first into the body of the speeder bike between them. The one-man craft, though light, was equipped with strong repulsorlifts on the bottom as well as down both flanks in order to keep it upright and steady-and also to avoid collisions as perceived by its rudimentary onboard computer. They kicked in now, knocking the security head back with an invisible broadside a metre out from the craft's physical body.
Kawai vaulted the speeder's seat and kicked out at Ugly's head as the big man staggered, and Ugly fell heavily, dazed. Time bought, Kawai stomped on Ugly's elbow and kicked the man's gun away as he raised it again-sluggishly-to fire. Right foot, then left; without missing a step, right again, Kawai connected solidly with Ugly's temple as the blaster clattered away across the hangar floor. Ugly's arm flopped, bent at a useless angle, and his head flopped, too.
A stellar performance by the little man. ☆ Injured, too!
Kawai mourned momentarily the fact nobody was on hand to hack the security cameras (or what were left of them-ah, come to think of it, Kawai'd wired them to blow early) and grab the footage of his resourceful, killer knockout to show the ladies in the officer's mess. But it was time to get back to business.
Really time, or he was going to be just as roasted as the big lump of meat on the floor in a bit.
As his chrono started beeping the countdown from ten standard seconds, Kawai dismissed Ugly from his mind and swung onto the speeder, twisting two final pairs of wires together-seven seconds remaining. The bike's twin engines roared to life-six. Sputtered-five. "Come on, come on, you piece of junk..." Kawai urged, and wrenched the throttle open full.
Finally the bike shot forward and it was all Kawai could do to hold on tight with his good hand and not get thrown.
*
A short time later, all four of them were aboard the YT-2400 light freighter dubbed Valor. It wasn't a bad ride. Smaller than the Millennium Falcon (because that was the yardstick for any YT series craft in the New Republic these days) at just twenty-one metres across, the Valor was nevertheless designed for a crew of three and passengers up to six. Currently, it held a crew of one, and just four passengers.
Her captain and pilot was a Corellian by the name of Yamashita. Although the ship had originally joined the New Republic fleet with more crew members, two had since been promoted to captain ships of their own, while a third had retired from active duty altogether, returning to the better-paying and less-risky world of non-military freight. For all that Taiyou had always been picked on as their resident less intelligent life form, Shoon had to wonder sometimes.
He missed the old crew on occasion, but was alright with running light support missions for whoever needed it these days. Like now.
"There doesn't seem to be a need to keep the turrets manned," he said over the internal comm, glancing between Valor's sensors and path to exit vector. "No pursuit detected; Lieutenants, you're welcome to stand down. Nothing planet-based will be able to catch up with us now 'til we enter hyperspace, so we should be fine unless a Star Destroyer drops in on our heads." In which case, a couple of gun turrets were hardly going to keep them alive any longer than none.
"Thanks, Captain," Totsuka's voice came back. On Shoon's console, the topside gunning station powered down.
But Tsuka'da remained in the Valor's belly turret. "I'll stay, if it's all the same."
"Hey, don't you trust me?" Shoon chuckled. "My baby's engines are primed for speed, yo."
Tsuka'da laughed. "No, no it's not that. I know you Corellians are very competitive with the speed thing, given a certain other famous YT-series freighter..."
"Infamous, infamous," Shoon corrected, grinning. The Millennium Falcon wasn't so much a freighter as a flying bathtub made of paper mâché, according to some. Shoon included. The Valor was newer, smaller, faster. "Then what's the problem, Lieutenant?"
"It's just because Kawai's in the hold," Tsuka'da said, with a note of complaint. "He's all crispy and the smell makes my teeth itch."
*
Kawai was indeed in the hold, collapsed dramatically in the centre of it.
"You're getting grime and grot all over Captain Yamashita's floor," Goseki chided, nudging Kawai's useless arm with the toe of his boot on the way past.
"You mean my precious lifeblood and spiritual energies," Kawai said, eyes closed in some sort of Zen despite the pallor of his strong features. "They are draining from me, staining the hold... You know if I die now, I'm going to haunt you. All of you."
"If you die now, it'll be because you're weak," Goseki smiled, preparing bacta patches and pressure bandages from his medkit as Totsuka emerged from the hall, down from the gunner's turret. "Accel, just in time. Sit on this one for me, will you?"
"Ahh~ I love a caring doctor," Kawai said, unresisting as Totsuka clinically flipped him over to pin his good arm behind his back, and sat himself between Kawai's shoulder blades. "Oww... you learned that maneuver from Tsuka'da, didn't you? He's got a better ass, padding-wise, but at least you're not as heavy."
"Is that so, Lieutenant." Casually, Totsuka leaned back and squashed Kawai's face into the durasteel floor. "Take your time, King."
"Oyy, mby fnsh'b ggttn gld..." Kawai protested.
Goseki shook his head. This was how things went.
Their squad being only four members, each of them was capable of playing several roles and rotated among them as necessary. All four were trained to a fairly high level of hand-to-hand combat and general weapons expertise. Goseki and Totsuka knew basic hacking; Totsuka and Kawai were insertion pros, specialists at going undercover; Kawai and Tsuka'da knew wired systems and explosives; and Tsuka'da and Goseki knew basic mechanics-all in all, making their squad a small pizza of versatility and adaptability. Practical for low-support missions.
Unfortunately this meant they had no fully-trained corpsman, and Goseki was the only one with a qualification in the medical field higher than basic first aid. Even so, the fact the squad hadn't had to bury any of its members yet was more a testament to their general competence rather than Goseki's aptitude for medicine: he couldn't apply much more than bacta and anaesthesia, and wasn't looking forward to the day Kawai's mouth got someone irritated enough to shoot him in the face instead of just a disposable arm or leg.
Limbs were easier to fix than faces, after all.
*
"It's a sign, you know," Goseki said, and turned around to stab Kawai in the shoulder with a needle full of numbing agent.
Kawai hissed between his teeth for a moment, but then said, "Ah, lovely. My arm's now been amputated from the nerve network. What's a sign?"
"That you're always the one that gets shot up," Goseki told him.
"Now, hey. That's not fair, picking on the underdog," Kawai protested, trying to crane his head around to see where Goseki was and what he was up to, now that the pain wasn't draining his immediate energy reserves so much. The smell of antiseptic wafted through the air, but Totsuka's hold was unforgiving and Kawai flopped his head back down. "See," he continued, "Tsuka'da's indestructible..."
"He broke his leg back on Oricer," Goseki reminded. There was the sound of ripping duct tape. Duct tape.
"Right," Kawai deadpanned, determinedly unconcerned. "From jumping out of a third-storey window onto the back of a moving flatbed. How could I have missed such carelessness?"
"You wanted to try it, too."
"Well, he looked really cool."
"Instead you got shot going down the stairwell."
"See, that's exactly what I'm saying," Kawai reiterated. "Tsuka'da's indestructible, Tottsu's a Jedi boy, and you're..."
'My Force sense isn't that strong,' Totsuka's mind told Kawai's.
"I'm what?" Goseki prompted mildly. Two flicks of a syringe brought Kawai's attention back to the audible.
"Hey, wait. Aren't I numb already?" he asked. "That's a needle, right?"
"It's a needle," Totsuka confirmed.
"I'm waiting for my answer," Goseki said.
Kawai forced a laugh around the feeling of unease flopping around his stomach like a dying Quarren. He was well acquainted with such feelings, and their common consequences. "Right. Your answer..."
"It's to do with profile surface area, right?" Totsuka said, a casual smile in his voice. "Smaller targets being harder to hit?"
Kawai said, "I'm going to go to my bunk now and sleep."
"Yes," Goseki told him with a smile in his voice. "You will."
*
"...you could've waited 'til he'd actually made it to bed, King?" Totsuka said, sliding off of Kawai now that his teammate was nothing more than unconscious deadweight. They'd have to drag him to his bunk now, when Goseki was done. (Well, it was really more like Tsuka'da would have to drag him there.)
Goseki shook his head. "I should have put him out properly to begin with. I thought he was more tired than that."
"He was."
"Still not enough to pass out," Goseki shrugged, flicking open the medkit's laser cutter. "He'd have made the job difficult by trying to save this ghastly jacket."
"Ahh." Which was the problem, of course.
"Yeah."
Sitting back cross-legged on the hold floor, Totsuka watched Goseki at work. The sleeve of Kawai's precious mercenary jacket fell away in neat strips, the laser cutter's focused beam making short work of even the blaster resistant material.
He couldn't help a wince at the exposed wound though. Ugly or no, the jacket's energy dissipation weave had probably saved Kawai his arm, if not his life. Most cheap and dirty mercenaries-the kind their target den had been filled with-toted heavy blasters, capable of penetrating stormtrooper armor with ease. Any of those guns should ordinarily have taken any human limb clean off.
Totsuka's eyes began to water as the strong smells of bacta and antiseptic filled the hold, and he pressed the sleeve of his jumpsuit over his nose. "...on the upside, Tsuka'da will be able to come back through here without thinking he smells roast meat."
"More power to the sentient creature who gets a whiff of bacta and can still think of food," Goseki chuckled, tightly binding a large bacta patch over the blaster-cooked part of Kawai's arm. The all-purpose medical liquid would work its healing magic over the next few days, with any luck restoring Kawai to full health. But in the meantime, nobody in his immediate vicinity would be able to so much as breathe without involuntarily recalling times they'd been injured, too.
It was the rare soldier worth his weight in derring-do who hadn't been submerged in bacta at some stage or other in his career. Though arguably less nasty than dying, the bacta tank was still not a pleasant experience by any stretch of the imagination.
Goseki crossed his arms thoughtfully for a moment, regarding his handiwork. Then said, "Might as well cut his hair while I'm at it. It's singed around the ends, and he was overdue for a good trim anyway." Decided in his own mind, he flicked a switchblade out of his boot and set to work on the back of Kawai's head.
"...remind me never to get injured on your watch," Totsuka said, watching Goseki's knife flash under the hold lightstrips with a fearsome precision.
Goseki smiled his approval. "You learn well, Young Padawan."
*
"Hyperspace in five," Shoon announced over the ship's comm. Not that he really needed to-he was a good pilot, and the Valor was well-maintained from thrusters to dampners and thus unlikely to jitter on entry. And even if she did a bit, he'd worked with this intel squad in the past enough to know that they weren't liable to be surprised by anything much.
"What's the in-flight entertainment like for the next two days, Captain?" Tsuka'da asked, his teasing tones crackling over the speakers from the belly gun turret. "It's a long way back to base."
"Oh!" Shoon said, "hang on." Running a final check of their exit vector and re-entry coordinates, he engaged the hyperdrives and threw the Valor to lightspeed. Stars elongated outside her viewport, before melting into a gentle swirl.
"Pretty," Tsuka'da observed.
"Right, I forgot. It's only six hours," Shoon said.
"What?"
Shoon shook his head, leaving the cockpit on autopilot since there wasn't anything for a guy to do while his ship hurtled through hyperspace anyhow. "It's just six hours to your stop," he said in person, dropping to sit in the accessway between the gun turrets and the hold proper, resting his back against one durasteel wall. Despite not being particularly tall, he was still unable to stretch his legs out properly across the width of the corridor. Space was a premium when one's ship had cloaking devices, augmented hyperdrives, and sublight engine upgrades to accommodate-even on a transport freighter like the Valor was supposed to be, light on weapons though she was.
"What's six hours away, Captain?" Tsuka'da said, popping his head up from the ship's belly, curious. "There's not much in this backwater sector."
"They promised us shore leave," Totsuka said, poking his head into the corridor's end from the hold. The Twi'lek looked kind of irritated, Shoon thought. Understandably so, perhaps, if the skimpy outfit he'd been winched up in was any indication of the attire he'd spent the last few weeks wearing while undercover.
"I think Intel's sold you guys internally instead, this time." Shoon gave an apologetic shrug, not really knowing the details. "I got the message enroute to picking you guys up. It wasn't from your handler, but his partner..."
"Yara?" Tsuka'da blinked. "What happened to Old Scary?"
"Um. I believe the Colonel's words were: Yone and Maachin got pulled for Prince Escort and they frelling left me stuck with this bastard on his flying pile of bantha dung," Shoon reported, in his best Pissed Off Yara voice.
Goseki snickered, "Nice one."
"Thank you." Shoon cleared his throat, wondering if he'd been spending too much time in Intel company of late. "Anyway, the ship in question is Commander Takizawa's Revolution. Our rendezvous with her is in six hours; Colonel Yara will debrief you, and also pass on details of your new assignment from there."
"...there goes the shore leave," Totsuka said, flopping over onto the hold floor. "At least Tackey's nice."
"That's an upside," Shoon agreed with a smile. "And hey, you get to stay together, too."
"True."
"...ah. Well," Tsuka'da joked into the muted silence that followed. "That plus point has arguable merit. I mean, Kawai..." A high-pitched laugh grew from the hold at the mention. Shoon glanced at Tsuka'da, who raised a brow before calling, tentatively: "...Goseki?"
"I think he's high on antiseptic," Totsuka reported.
"No, no~" Goseki waved, giggling up a gale. "No, rendezvous's in six hours but I put him out for forty-eight. He's not going to be awake to greet his favourite senior officer~"
"Oh," Shoon said, deadpan. "Well... that's a shame."
"I'll just carry him," Tsuka'da said, but winced when Goseki just laughed harder.
"Seriously, King," Totsuka sighed, lekku flopping over his eyes against the hold's fluorescent lightstrips. "Six hours. Please get some sleep."
focus fail, but in any case: dinner squadron/Star Wars 'verse. 8D aliens! lol. extrapolated from the X-Wing series of novels by Michael A. Stackpole, and Aaron Allston. :D good reads~ especially #5-7, which are a standalone arc, and i like to think you don't have to be a star wars fan to enjoy them. (*opinion comes with no guarantee of truth or relevance to reality. |D)
this is basically only going up because i told snowqueenofhoth i'd post in the middle of the night again just to be a dick. but the nano didn't stop anywhere sensical. /fool. [consider this star seeker ii, because the two skeleton plots have already melded in my head. ;; they even start similar, lol.] set a couple of years after 'a fine start.'
anyway, ABC have codenames because i felt like it. :D number designations are both boring and reserved for when there is going to be twelve of them. also, i think destroying kawai's arm is just going to be one of those bad habits like picking on nikaido and killing iida. 8D ←though iida is not going to die this time. :D :D in fact, nobody is!~☆
i: independent forces
Totsuka ran like his life depended on it.
Half because it actually did at that particular point in time, but also because that was what his undercover act required. A blaster bolt scorched the air by his leg, the heat of it burning through the sheer fabric of his current getup. A second shot slammed into the trunk of a tree just ahead, showering him with splinters as he ducked past with a convincing shriek.
Sometimes, acting didn't take a lot of work.
Behind him rang one man's raucous drunken laughter, the cackling of a psycho with a blaster on a morbid hunt, Totsuka his prey. Totsuka ran.
Before him...
He closed his eyes for a moment, his feet finding their way of their own accord through a higher sense. Time slowed as he slipped into the stream of it and the forest around him congealed into a map in his mind's eye. The terrain greeted him as his mind reached out to feel every low-hung bough and prickly patch of grass to avoid.
Before him Tsuka'da and Goseki waited in position, alert as ever, just beyond where the forest fell away down a sheer cliff-a wide canyon carved by thousands of years of rapid waters. Approaching fast.
Reaching back, he couldn't feel Kawai-not Kawai's usual self anyway, but that was okay. The actor changed minds the way a chameleon changed colours, and just because Totsuka couldn't sense him now didn't mean the other wasn't in place and doing his job. They all trusted each other. They had to, or they died.
Nearly there, nearly there...
Totsuka skidded to a halt at the edge of the precipice, breathing hard, and blocked out the sting of his bare feet. Dirt tumbled over the ledge, and it was a long, long way down to the water. He looked around, desperation on his face, right and left, lekku flailing out as he turned his head, but the trees ended a few metres back and there was no other way out. To run along the ledge would make him a sitting duck for a shot between the shoulder blades, with no foliage to shield him-
It was too late to run anyway.
His pursuit's swoop bike broke from the brush, swinging into a broadside braking slide that kicked loose forest debris up everywhere. Totsuka shielded his eyes, shying his face away by instinct, only to be brought up short by the sound of a power pack being loaded and locked, and the madman's infuriating, antagonizing... no, terrifying laughter again, low and rumbling.
Terrifying. Terrifying. It was terrifying.
Totsuka felt his pulse speed up as he looked slowly up, boiled down to despair, into the business end of the man's gun, wavering drunkenly though it was. He stared wide-eyed and wordless, backed up like a cornered feline. One slow step took him half a pace from the edge. Another slow step, and he was a quarter-pace there. He stopped, now with truly nowhere to go.
The madman dismounted his swoop, coming around it with the steady swagger of a lifelong predator with too much lum in his system. He was an ugly human, with stained teeth and blood-shot eyes, and the cocksure grin on his face ate at Totsuka's patience. Still, he remained tense from the balls of his feet to the tips of his braintails. This was it.
Taking one final step back brought his bare feet up to the very edge of the gorge. He could feel the drop under his heels now, and the closeness of the distant rushing rapids below.
"I've gotcha now, pretty thing," the drunk man slurred, stepping up once. Twice. "Wasn't too smart t'run away now, was it? Got anythin' t' say?"
Totsuka shook his head. Ah, that was a lie. He wanted to say a great many things, just not aloud. His lekku twitched, utilizing the sign aspect of his native tongue, just because he could: 'May your body rot under a thousand desert winds.'
The drunk man smiled, and took another step forward.
Totsuka took another step back.
And fell.
*
Two hundred metres away amongst the trees across the gorge, Goseki watched Totsuka's tiny form tumble over the edge of the cliff as if in slow motion.
Calmly, he activated his collar commlink. Set to a very specific, narrow-band frequency under encryption, it transmitted Goseki's instruction to only two other commlinks on the planet.
Just one word: "Boomtime."
*
Three things happened, then.
A square of slate-coloured webbing sprang out from the mouth of a small enclave a few dozen metres under the cliff's edge. Totsuka landed deeply in it, rolling into the cave to keep from bouncing back up, and pulled the net in after him so it wouldn't be seen should his pursuit chance to look over the edge.
At the same time, Tsuka'da cut a slab of rock-roughly human-sized-from a sling beside the cave mouth. It fell the rest of the way down the cliff, splashing loudly into the rapids below in Totsuka's stead.
And several kliks away, back where it had all started (weeks ago by now) at the madman's den, Kawai hit a trigger and set off a bomb.
*
His body language showed agitation incarnate, shoulders tense, movements jerky-but that wasn't out of place. Around him, people were shouting, and starting to run as small-scale explosions peppered the building from the direction of the vehicle hangar.
Kawai paced in short, heavy steps, breathing laboriously as he waited-a few seconds passed. "Boss!" he shouted, as soon as the madman answered his comm. "Something big's going down! No, the-" A particularly large explosion rocked the den's stone walls, and Kawai eyed the ceiling with some consternation. That would have been the reactor of the shuttle in bay five. Two more of those larger explosions were due in forty seconds and then three hundred twenty seconds exactly. He had to get to his speeder within that window of time, because the last blast was going to bring down the hangar roof.
"Target eliminated," Goseki's cool voice came across the commlink pressed to Kawai's ear, where the madman's demands had been just moments ago. "Hellboy has Accel. Get to the alpha rendezvous, Marion. Advise ETA when you know it."
So, Tsuka'da had caught Totsuka and both were out of harm's way. Which meant everything so far had gone to plan. No change. Kawai sent two clicks across his comm, signalling confirmation, then pocketed his commlink and ran to the hangar, fighting clouds of mercenaries and slaves and shady dealers streaming in the other direction as he went, shouting into the frantic cacophony: "He's dead! Run! The boss is dead! The Imps are coming!"
He enjoyed the ensuing chaos with a smile on the inside. Sometimes, the job had perks.
*
Calmly, Goseki swung his long-range laser rifle back over his shoulder and dropped lightly to the ground from his perch in the tree he'd chosen to snipe from. Across the gorge, the crime boss was dead, motionless on the ground, shot through the head while on the commlink with Kawai. Zero witnesses.
Toggling to a second preset, narrow-band frequency, Goseki said, "King to Valor."
"Valor reads, King." The young voice of their transporter, Fleet Captain Yamashita, crackled over the comm. "Let me know where you want her."
"Follow my beacon in," Goseki said, activating a small homing device on his belt as he spoke, for three seconds before disabling it again. "Accel and Hellboy are in the cliff face opposite. Winch them up first. We'll meet Marion at the rendezvous and jet after that."
"I copy, King," Shoon said. "ETA two hundred thirty seconds. Stand by."
Goseki said, "Standing by." And switched back to the secure frequency their squad shared. "Accel, Hellboy: heads up. Valor's ETA two hundred twenty-seven seconds. Pack up. Stand by to be winched aboard."
"I copy, two hundred twenty-four seconds ETA," Tsuka'da echoed.
While in the background Totsuka said, "I hate winches."
Goseki laughed. "Accel, you're welcome to levitate yourself up instead anytime you like."
'Maybe I will,' Goseki heard in his head, right between his ears in Totsuka's voice. Followed by a chuckle just as audibly silent. 'Wouldn't that be something?'
"I'd like to see you try," he replied. "King, out."
*
The hangar was empty of life, which was to be expected. People generally didn't stick around when bits of wall and machinery and transport ship started blowing up in a random pattern for no discernible rhyme or reason. Or run in the direction of said explosions. Kawai sprinted over to the corner of the hangar that he knew would be the last to blow (if he'd set his thermal charges right, anyway), where he'd broken the land lock on one of the hangar's fastest speeder bikes earlier that day. Now, it would be able to fly if he could only get its engines running without the appropriate ID.
Eighty-five seconds left on the chrono, one speeder to hotwire, and one daring escape to make. Was the valiant hero going to make it? Kawai grinned to himself and set to work, popping the small access panel just in front of the speeder's single seat. Hell, yes.
Well...
Maybe.
Over the rumbling of the crumbling hangar, his ears caught the very distinct sound of a blaster being cocked, and he spared a millisecond's glance up at-ah. The tough-looking specimen that Kawai had dubbed "Ugly" during his time around. The boss's head of security-though the title was really nothing more than an acknowledgement that Ugly was the highest-paid mercenary in the den, and probably the longest surviving.
But title or no, he was standing right there. With a blaster. Pointed right at Kawai. While the seconds ticked down. "I told him he never should'a hired you," Ugly said.
Kawai kept working. "You know," he told Ugly, lacing the slack-jawed drawl of a two-bit mercenary through his words. "I hate t' postpone our little meeting'n all, but this ain't really the best time for me."
Ugly shot him.
Blood of the Sith- Kawai gritted his teeth as he half fell, half staggered back from the speeder, putting its bulk between himself and the head of security. His jaw clenched against the pain even as his vision threatened to white out for a moment, and his left arm hung limp, jacket charred black around the bicep; he couldn't really feel it past the burning sensation. Well, he'd survived worse before-much worse, many times before. Still, the past was little consolation at the moment. He kind of needed that arm.
"I say what we postpone in this schedule," Ugly rumbled menacingly like he'd watched too many holodramas as a kid.
"Y'know he's dead now, right?" Kawai said, forcing his tones all casual. Ah, it was sad. So sad. His jacket was ruined as well. "The boss? You're not gettin' that next paycheck, so I'd say running's your best bet too, before the Imps get here."
"The local Moff has no interest in us," Ugly growled, while repeatedly, Kawai's dizzied eyes tried to trick him into seeing the man's large, flat nose as an earthslug. He tried to focus and not laugh, though for some reason the thought was hysterical just then. "We kept his pockets well lined. Tell me how you know he's dead."
"Oh~ the boss?" Kawai shrugged his good arm, and couldn't suppress a grin. "I was on comm with him when it happened, you know. About the explosions and stuff?" A wave indicated the crumbling hangar around them, chains of tiny blasts continuing to pepper the structural beams and smaller vehicles. "Since he was out huntin' that runaway Twi'lek of his he bought recently."
The window of opportunity for escape before the last large explosion was closing fast. Tick, tick~ tick, tick~
Ugly narrowed his eyes. "You had friends in on this. That Wormhead part of it, too?"
"Ah, such a pity," Kawai sighed melodramatically, despite the sweat beading his brow. Deep breaths. No pain. None at all~ "You're kind of astute, but I've gotta go now." His chrono beeped the start of a fifteen-second countdown.
"You're goin' nowhere 'til I say so," Ugly said, the aim of his blaster dropping to Kawai's left knee.
Kawai didn't wait for him to pull the trigger again, taking the opening. He threw his weight shoulder-first into the body of the speeder bike between them. The one-man craft, though light, was equipped with strong repulsorlifts on the bottom as well as down both flanks in order to keep it upright and steady-and also to avoid collisions as perceived by its rudimentary onboard computer. They kicked in now, knocking the security head back with an invisible broadside a metre out from the craft's physical body.
Kawai vaulted the speeder's seat and kicked out at Ugly's head as the big man staggered, and Ugly fell heavily, dazed. Time bought, Kawai stomped on Ugly's elbow and kicked the man's gun away as he raised it again-sluggishly-to fire. Right foot, then left; without missing a step, right again, Kawai connected solidly with Ugly's temple as the blaster clattered away across the hangar floor. Ugly's arm flopped, bent at a useless angle, and his head flopped, too.
A stellar performance by the little man. ☆ Injured, too!
Kawai mourned momentarily the fact nobody was on hand to hack the security cameras (or what were left of them-ah, come to think of it, Kawai'd wired them to blow early) and grab the footage of his resourceful, killer knockout to show the ladies in the officer's mess. But it was time to get back to business.
Really time, or he was going to be just as roasted as the big lump of meat on the floor in a bit.
As his chrono started beeping the countdown from ten standard seconds, Kawai dismissed Ugly from his mind and swung onto the speeder, twisting two final pairs of wires together-seven seconds remaining. The bike's twin engines roared to life-six. Sputtered-five. "Come on, come on, you piece of junk..." Kawai urged, and wrenched the throttle open full.
Finally the bike shot forward and it was all Kawai could do to hold on tight with his good hand and not get thrown.
*
A short time later, all four of them were aboard the YT-2400 light freighter dubbed Valor. It wasn't a bad ride. Smaller than the Millennium Falcon (because that was the yardstick for any YT series craft in the New Republic these days) at just twenty-one metres across, the Valor was nevertheless designed for a crew of three and passengers up to six. Currently, it held a crew of one, and just four passengers.
Her captain and pilot was a Corellian by the name of Yamashita. Although the ship had originally joined the New Republic fleet with more crew members, two had since been promoted to captain ships of their own, while a third had retired from active duty altogether, returning to the better-paying and less-risky world of non-military freight. For all that Taiyou had always been picked on as their resident less intelligent life form, Shoon had to wonder sometimes.
He missed the old crew on occasion, but was alright with running light support missions for whoever needed it these days. Like now.
"There doesn't seem to be a need to keep the turrets manned," he said over the internal comm, glancing between Valor's sensors and path to exit vector. "No pursuit detected; Lieutenants, you're welcome to stand down. Nothing planet-based will be able to catch up with us now 'til we enter hyperspace, so we should be fine unless a Star Destroyer drops in on our heads." In which case, a couple of gun turrets were hardly going to keep them alive any longer than none.
"Thanks, Captain," Totsuka's voice came back. On Shoon's console, the topside gunning station powered down.
But Tsuka'da remained in the Valor's belly turret. "I'll stay, if it's all the same."
"Hey, don't you trust me?" Shoon chuckled. "My baby's engines are primed for speed, yo."
Tsuka'da laughed. "No, no it's not that. I know you Corellians are very competitive with the speed thing, given a certain other famous YT-series freighter..."
"Infamous, infamous," Shoon corrected, grinning. The Millennium Falcon wasn't so much a freighter as a flying bathtub made of paper mâché, according to some. Shoon included. The Valor was newer, smaller, faster. "Then what's the problem, Lieutenant?"
"It's just because Kawai's in the hold," Tsuka'da said, with a note of complaint. "He's all crispy and the smell makes my teeth itch."
*
Kawai was indeed in the hold, collapsed dramatically in the centre of it.
"You're getting grime and grot all over Captain Yamashita's floor," Goseki chided, nudging Kawai's useless arm with the toe of his boot on the way past.
"You mean my precious lifeblood and spiritual energies," Kawai said, eyes closed in some sort of Zen despite the pallor of his strong features. "They are draining from me, staining the hold... You know if I die now, I'm going to haunt you. All of you."
"If you die now, it'll be because you're weak," Goseki smiled, preparing bacta patches and pressure bandages from his medkit as Totsuka emerged from the hall, down from the gunner's turret. "Accel, just in time. Sit on this one for me, will you?"
"Ahh~ I love a caring doctor," Kawai said, unresisting as Totsuka clinically flipped him over to pin his good arm behind his back, and sat himself between Kawai's shoulder blades. "Oww... you learned that maneuver from Tsuka'da, didn't you? He's got a better ass, padding-wise, but at least you're not as heavy."
"Is that so, Lieutenant." Casually, Totsuka leaned back and squashed Kawai's face into the durasteel floor. "Take your time, King."
"Oyy, mby fnsh'b ggttn gld..." Kawai protested.
Goseki shook his head. This was how things went.
Their squad being only four members, each of them was capable of playing several roles and rotated among them as necessary. All four were trained to a fairly high level of hand-to-hand combat and general weapons expertise. Goseki and Totsuka knew basic hacking; Totsuka and Kawai were insertion pros, specialists at going undercover; Kawai and Tsuka'da knew wired systems and explosives; and Tsuka'da and Goseki knew basic mechanics-all in all, making their squad a small pizza of versatility and adaptability. Practical for low-support missions.
Unfortunately this meant they had no fully-trained corpsman, and Goseki was the only one with a qualification in the medical field higher than basic first aid. Even so, the fact the squad hadn't had to bury any of its members yet was more a testament to their general competence rather than Goseki's aptitude for medicine: he couldn't apply much more than bacta and anaesthesia, and wasn't looking forward to the day Kawai's mouth got someone irritated enough to shoot him in the face instead of just a disposable arm or leg.
Limbs were easier to fix than faces, after all.
*
"It's a sign, you know," Goseki said, and turned around to stab Kawai in the shoulder with a needle full of numbing agent.
Kawai hissed between his teeth for a moment, but then said, "Ah, lovely. My arm's now been amputated from the nerve network. What's a sign?"
"That you're always the one that gets shot up," Goseki told him.
"Now, hey. That's not fair, picking on the underdog," Kawai protested, trying to crane his head around to see where Goseki was and what he was up to, now that the pain wasn't draining his immediate energy reserves so much. The smell of antiseptic wafted through the air, but Totsuka's hold was unforgiving and Kawai flopped his head back down. "See," he continued, "Tsuka'da's indestructible..."
"He broke his leg back on Oricer," Goseki reminded. There was the sound of ripping duct tape. Duct tape.
"Right," Kawai deadpanned, determinedly unconcerned. "From jumping out of a third-storey window onto the back of a moving flatbed. How could I have missed such carelessness?"
"You wanted to try it, too."
"Well, he looked really cool."
"Instead you got shot going down the stairwell."
"See, that's exactly what I'm saying," Kawai reiterated. "Tsuka'da's indestructible, Tottsu's a Jedi boy, and you're..."
'My Force sense isn't that strong,' Totsuka's mind told Kawai's.
"I'm what?" Goseki prompted mildly. Two flicks of a syringe brought Kawai's attention back to the audible.
"Hey, wait. Aren't I numb already?" he asked. "That's a needle, right?"
"It's a needle," Totsuka confirmed.
"I'm waiting for my answer," Goseki said.
Kawai forced a laugh around the feeling of unease flopping around his stomach like a dying Quarren. He was well acquainted with such feelings, and their common consequences. "Right. Your answer..."
"It's to do with profile surface area, right?" Totsuka said, a casual smile in his voice. "Smaller targets being harder to hit?"
Kawai said, "I'm going to go to my bunk now and sleep."
"Yes," Goseki told him with a smile in his voice. "You will."
*
"...you could've waited 'til he'd actually made it to bed, King?" Totsuka said, sliding off of Kawai now that his teammate was nothing more than unconscious deadweight. They'd have to drag him to his bunk now, when Goseki was done. (Well, it was really more like Tsuka'da would have to drag him there.)
Goseki shook his head. "I should have put him out properly to begin with. I thought he was more tired than that."
"He was."
"Still not enough to pass out," Goseki shrugged, flicking open the medkit's laser cutter. "He'd have made the job difficult by trying to save this ghastly jacket."
"Ahh." Which was the problem, of course.
"Yeah."
Sitting back cross-legged on the hold floor, Totsuka watched Goseki at work. The sleeve of Kawai's precious mercenary jacket fell away in neat strips, the laser cutter's focused beam making short work of even the blaster resistant material.
He couldn't help a wince at the exposed wound though. Ugly or no, the jacket's energy dissipation weave had probably saved Kawai his arm, if not his life. Most cheap and dirty mercenaries-the kind their target den had been filled with-toted heavy blasters, capable of penetrating stormtrooper armor with ease. Any of those guns should ordinarily have taken any human limb clean off.
Totsuka's eyes began to water as the strong smells of bacta and antiseptic filled the hold, and he pressed the sleeve of his jumpsuit over his nose. "...on the upside, Tsuka'da will be able to come back through here without thinking he smells roast meat."
"More power to the sentient creature who gets a whiff of bacta and can still think of food," Goseki chuckled, tightly binding a large bacta patch over the blaster-cooked part of Kawai's arm. The all-purpose medical liquid would work its healing magic over the next few days, with any luck restoring Kawai to full health. But in the meantime, nobody in his immediate vicinity would be able to so much as breathe without involuntarily recalling times they'd been injured, too.
It was the rare soldier worth his weight in derring-do who hadn't been submerged in bacta at some stage or other in his career. Though arguably less nasty than dying, the bacta tank was still not a pleasant experience by any stretch of the imagination.
Goseki crossed his arms thoughtfully for a moment, regarding his handiwork. Then said, "Might as well cut his hair while I'm at it. It's singed around the ends, and he was overdue for a good trim anyway." Decided in his own mind, he flicked a switchblade out of his boot and set to work on the back of Kawai's head.
"...remind me never to get injured on your watch," Totsuka said, watching Goseki's knife flash under the hold lightstrips with a fearsome precision.
Goseki smiled his approval. "You learn well, Young Padawan."
*
"Hyperspace in five," Shoon announced over the ship's comm. Not that he really needed to-he was a good pilot, and the Valor was well-maintained from thrusters to dampners and thus unlikely to jitter on entry. And even if she did a bit, he'd worked with this intel squad in the past enough to know that they weren't liable to be surprised by anything much.
"What's the in-flight entertainment like for the next two days, Captain?" Tsuka'da asked, his teasing tones crackling over the speakers from the belly gun turret. "It's a long way back to base."
"Oh!" Shoon said, "hang on." Running a final check of their exit vector and re-entry coordinates, he engaged the hyperdrives and threw the Valor to lightspeed. Stars elongated outside her viewport, before melting into a gentle swirl.
"Pretty," Tsuka'da observed.
"Right, I forgot. It's only six hours," Shoon said.
"What?"
Shoon shook his head, leaving the cockpit on autopilot since there wasn't anything for a guy to do while his ship hurtled through hyperspace anyhow. "It's just six hours to your stop," he said in person, dropping to sit in the accessway between the gun turrets and the hold proper, resting his back against one durasteel wall. Despite not being particularly tall, he was still unable to stretch his legs out properly across the width of the corridor. Space was a premium when one's ship had cloaking devices, augmented hyperdrives, and sublight engine upgrades to accommodate-even on a transport freighter like the Valor was supposed to be, light on weapons though she was.
"What's six hours away, Captain?" Tsuka'da said, popping his head up from the ship's belly, curious. "There's not much in this backwater sector."
"They promised us shore leave," Totsuka said, poking his head into the corridor's end from the hold. The Twi'lek looked kind of irritated, Shoon thought. Understandably so, perhaps, if the skimpy outfit he'd been winched up in was any indication of the attire he'd spent the last few weeks wearing while undercover.
"I think Intel's sold you guys internally instead, this time." Shoon gave an apologetic shrug, not really knowing the details. "I got the message enroute to picking you guys up. It wasn't from your handler, but his partner..."
"Yara?" Tsuka'da blinked. "What happened to Old Scary?"
"Um. I believe the Colonel's words were: Yone and Maachin got pulled for Prince Escort and they frelling left me stuck with this bastard on his flying pile of bantha dung," Shoon reported, in his best Pissed Off Yara voice.
Goseki snickered, "Nice one."
"Thank you." Shoon cleared his throat, wondering if he'd been spending too much time in Intel company of late. "Anyway, the ship in question is Commander Takizawa's Revolution. Our rendezvous with her is in six hours; Colonel Yara will debrief you, and also pass on details of your new assignment from there."
"...there goes the shore leave," Totsuka said, flopping over onto the hold floor. "At least Tackey's nice."
"That's an upside," Shoon agreed with a smile. "And hey, you get to stay together, too."
"True."
"...ah. Well," Tsuka'da joked into the muted silence that followed. "That plus point has arguable merit. I mean, Kawai..." A high-pitched laugh grew from the hold at the mention. Shoon glanced at Tsuka'da, who raised a brow before calling, tentatively: "...Goseki?"
"I think he's high on antiseptic," Totsuka reported.
"No, no~" Goseki waved, giggling up a gale. "No, rendezvous's in six hours but I put him out for forty-eight. He's not going to be awake to greet his favourite senior officer~"
"Oh," Shoon said, deadpan. "Well... that's a shame."
"I'll just carry him," Tsuka'da said, but winced when Goseki just laughed harder.
"Seriously, King," Totsuka sighed, lekku flopping over his eyes against the hold's fluorescent lightstrips. "Six hours. Please get some sleep."