Coruscant's Underworld

Ronin accepted the hand, the skin to skin contact brought about a bad feeling. Releasing it he turned and left. Everything felt wrong, something was up. Yes the object in the cargo bay would be sought after but what if there was more. Even Don felt different. Entering the location that was his room Ronin brought up a small pad from his jacket which illuminated his face with an artificial light. Punching in some information the pad set about working and soon a wanted list popped up of bounties. Some were crossed off, others were not. Punching in several more names the face of Vee H'rel appeared as having been affiliated with Exchequer; in turn this carried a rather nice bounty on her head

"Should have played nice princess"

Ronin mumbled these words under his breath as he knew was he had to do, we'll more like what he wanted to do. Grabbing his bag Ronin made his way out of the room and out of the ship in the same direction as Vee and Don. It was nothing personal, if he had his way Ronin would buy the bounty keeping her as his own sassy play thing. Alas this was just business, simple, non decriminalizing business.

Bloodshot was off the ramp the moment it skimmed the pad, and Sev only a step behind. Immediately, he cast out with his mind's eye, searching for any sense of hostility or malice from the lone being that occupied the space before them. What he found was not promising.

Keep close and prepare to provide cover if needed, Captain. The sith are already here.

As if on cue, the lone individual raised his left arm to speak into a mic on his wrist at the same time his right reached for a blaster hidden beneath his clothes. Unfortunately for him, Sev was the faster of the two and blue-white lightning cascaded from his raised fingertips to strike the man full in the chest, throwing him clear of the pad to plummet to the depths below.

Bloodshot never stopped moving forward throughout the exchange, though he'd only covered half the distance to the target vessel before a trio of hooded figures appeared at the ramp, followed by half a dozen more men in civilian garb. That'll be the sith and their puppets. Time to go to work. His right-hand slug pistol was free of its holster before they reached the bottom of the ramp, and he immediately drew aim on the heart of the lead sith, waiting the span of a moment to deduce the direction of his evasion before correcting his aim and squeezing the trigger.

There was no need for a reply (aside from the obvious.) Fel's considerable stick time as a drop ship pilot had never really left him, and he was only marginally more comfortable hurtling through space at break-neck speed than hovering between impossible obstacles with scant inches clearance between his solar arrays. After dropping off his cargo, Fel had banked steeply away and braked hard. To the untrained (or busy with a firefight) eye, it would have appeared as though Fel had placed as much distance as possible between the landing pad and his ship. That would have been the textbook, smart play. But Fel had descended a mere sixty feet, and waited until the fit hit the shan. 

And he needn't have waited long. Seconds later, a robed figure, crackling with violent electicity, descended past the cockpit, on his way to damnation, and the outlander knew it was time. Whtther the mercenaries were outnumbered or not, there was a good chance they could use some assistance. Powering up and feeding steady power to the maneuvering thrusters, Fel backed off from the platform by a hundred feet, and ascended. Just as the comms came to life with the winded voice of Bloodshot, the business end of a YV-545 grew up from the depths. Fel didn't bother sweeping the deck for targets. There was only one target. Anything that was a direct threat to their transport off-world was the tactical play. Fel realized it had been awhile since he had fired on another ship, longer still since he had strafed surface targets. 

But it didn't distract him from the job. Not for long. 

A light rain fell on the landing pad. 

Flipping the tactical readout over to missiles, he loosed two pairs of high-ex concussion missiles at the sleek bird on the pad. Poor bastards were fully powered down. The explosion engulfed the landing pad, and the bodies of two men - one of whom was stirring at the base of the ship's ramp. The second impact neatly removed the majority of the burning wreckage from the landing pad, which screeched with twisting metal and secondary explosions as it fell to join the robed figure a hundred levels below. Now Fel brought the bow around, slowly strafing the landing pad with the main cannon, pulping the duracrete with laser-fire, and causing (by the looks of it) the last remaining robed figure, who was just picking himself up off the concrete in the wake of the explosion, to dive for cover, or lose his life. 

All yours, team two. Descending in ten. Over. 

Fel gained altitude and fed power to the forward thrusters. One medium turn to port would take him around the structure and back in less than twenty seconds. He dropped the landing gear. Having provided a nice, clear spot for himself to land, he was sure his 'cargo' would appreciate a lift in a few tics. 

As the ship moved, smoothly as it could given the maneuvers Fel was pulling, the former Liannan operative turned as ghastly pale as she continued to retch into the sickness bag. This was not good. Not that she thought he would try it, but if Fel knew how to incapacitate her with her stunt flying then he could get away and she could be powerless to stop him. Given the gauntlet of sithspit they'd been through, she almost wouldn't blame him. Playing his warden was no easy task and as the time had dragged on, she had begun to abandon hope that she would ever see Taung again. His stunts hadn't helped.

Considering the red in her ledger from her earlier life as an assassin, it almost seemed a fitting penance. The keep a man alive long enough to become the demon she saw herself as. When this was all over, then what? Fel was going to die, one way or another, a loose end tied up neatly. And what of her?

Another wave of nausea as he whipped the ship around removed the thought from her mind as well as the last bit of caf she'd had that day. Right now, she would have gladly sucked on a barrel to stop the heaves as the ship touched down. She would have run out on the pad herself if it wasn't for the fight already on the deck. She cast him a look that could have melted steel but still carried the incredulous question of "Really?" with it.

Galdaart Fel

Sev! The Holocron!

It was all Bloodshot had time to say before their transport's missiles tore into the parked ship and the surrounding pad, reducing the vessel to slag and scrap metal and launching the last remaining sith through the air. He hadn't intended to have the Captain destroy the other freighter, in fact he would have liked to fly it out of here intact. All things considered though, it was probably better this way. If half the stuff the dossier said about their secondary objective was true, the vessel was more than likely a death trap for anyone else that might try to fly it. Somehow, Sev managed to latch onto the bodies of the deceased sith and hold them where they were with the force, and Bloodshot closed in on the prone form of the one still living. When he started pushing himself off the deck, two slugs in his back and one in his head dropped him permanently.

When their transport landed and the Captain descended the ramp to do the do-diligence with the other sith, Bloodshot almost had to admire the efficiency of his training. Almost. Not what I meant when I asked for an intervention. Next time don't blow away an asset when the threat is already clear of it. You almost cost us our objective. Surprisingly, there was no anger or bitterness in his voice, and his tone was just as calm and flat as it had been every other time he'd spoken to the captain. What's done is done. Meanwhile, Sev had made it to the corpse of interest, all but ignoring the captain, and begun to rifle through the dead man's robes for the Holocron they sought. He pulled it free a moment later.

"Got it."

Bloodshot's attention shifted.

Good. Load up and let's go grab team one.

Fel nodded at Bloodshot's assessment. Nothing more. Time was, he'd have bristled at the cutting remarks, but facts were facts. He got the job done. None of their people were dead. As far as Fel was concerned, that was a mark in the 'win' column.

Very well. Liftoff in a few tics. Get your people aboard, Bloodshot.

Galdaart shot Melia a look, and started back up the ramp, barely giving Coruscant's underworld a second glance. One more thing done was one less thing to do before he got home. Or so he told himself. Walking back to the bridge, Fel checked in with himself about how fervently he was clinging to that hope. He passed through the hold, through the tiny galley, and was just about to turn into the cockpit of the sleek freighter, when he paused. It was rare that Fel devoted thought and attention to anything other than what was directly in front of him, or at the outside, just around the corner. Usually, his life didn't allow for a plan to span longer than a few weeks, max.

...and usually, as much for self-preservation as anything else, Fel tried not to think of the crew that often. But the thought arrived, unbidden. Malora, Wade, Jace, Liya. Sinistra. Bateman... Alistair... Sinistra was shrewd. Calculating. No word of a lie -- she made Fel's blood run cold. But the others... he operated under the presumption that Sinistra couldn't be everywhere at once, and that Bateman and Alistair were her pawns, just like Necktie had been. But there was something off. Not just here, ferrying mercs. No, Bateman's job, being courier for drugs... none of it made sense. I mean, you could convince yourself of anything if you tried hard enough. The drugs were an Imp move to subvert the local authorities, gain a foothold in the underground, blah blah blah... No, suddenly, Fel was acutely aware that things were not as they had been...

He whirled, quickly enough that Melia was still moving toward the cockpit when he was suddenly in her face, face intense, close.

pausing a moment until her demeanor had gone through the stages of 'the hell is this sithspit?' and 'don't make me...' and settled on 'what?' ...Ask yourself something. And get back to me when you've decided what the answer is. What would you do if you discovered it wasn't the Remnant, and Sinistra pulling our strings anymore? he stepped just a little closer Tell me how angry you'd be. Who you'd be after for blood. Where you'd go... and then tell me why I wouldn't feel the same way.

Bloodshot appeared in the passageway behind them, and Fel smiled over Melia's shoulder.

Just getting her warmed up now. What's our course for team one? Same extraction point?

Holocron Days

It had been nearly a year since a certain young woman had gone missing from the surface of the city, vanishing into the dark caverns of its bowels. The woman stalking along the dark pathways now was nothing like that woman. That woman had been sheltered & soft, perfectly willing to drift through life. This woman was hard & driven. A jagged scar crossed most of her face, healed roughly & uneven, though hidden beneath a cold metal mask marked only by three lens. A brutal blaster rifle was strapped to her lower back & a lightsabre hung openly from her belt. Strapped to her thigh opposite the sabre hung a shortsword that looks like it had once been a much larger blade before having a length of it melted off.

Before she was the one hunted, hiding afraid in the dark. Now she was the hunter. The Zabrak she was tracing didn't know it yet, but he was the prey. He had been sent into the underworld to find her, kill her, & take a pair of rare & valuable crystals from her. Instead he would die & Mary would take his very nice hat as a prize.

She had been following ever closer for nearly two days now. Watching as he visited one after another of the 'clue sites' she had set up to draw in her foes. Watching him walk at last into the building she had chosen as the trap drew a grim smile to her face. Making her way quickly to one of the several ruined skywalks that had once connected to the build, she stood very carefully. Gathering her strength, she shoved hard against the walkway with the Force. It had been a difficult trick to master & in the end it wasn't true flight, instead it was more like keeping something in the air by hitting it with a metal rod. Arcing through the open air, Mary fell through a crack in the side of the building, with less than a meter open on either side of her.

The sound of blaster fire came from deeper in the building as the bounty hunter faced the first of several booby traps that littered the structure. She could she him now, even without line of sight. She had figured out a while back how to patch video streams into her mask. He had already lost one of his pistols into the pitfall trap by the old theater. She would have to go collect that later, a good pistol is hard to come by.

The bounty hunter manged to avoid several of the next few traps, but failed to noticed the poisoned pin attached to the bottom of the latch on her tried to open. Now was the time to strike, the poison would kill him, slowly paralyzing more & more of his body until death. But there was info Mary wanted that would be rather difficult to get from a dead body. By the time she reached him, the bounty hunter was already slumped against the wall & breathing heavy.

-Mary
Wonderful, you are still alive. Let's have a little chat about your boss.

The bounty hunter had a panicked look for a moment. In a surprising show of movement, the hunter raised the remaining pistol to his temple, attempting to blow out his own brains. There was a Snap-hiss as the silver-green blade of her sabre clipped easily through the weapon & the hand holding it, unfortunately carving a gash into the metal disc like hat.

-Mary
I said it is time to talk, not act.