Hunting Cin Vhetin

[Drop Shock]

____"How"—Tyral smashed a vase into the face of a security guard—"are we going to"—he ducked the swing of a stun baton—"get out of this!?" If Tyral were to be honest with himself, he felt like he'd thrown his life away in the past 32 hours; he'd gone from being a respected officer in a CorSec Special Operations division to a high priority fugitive, all because of—he punched the baton-wielding guard—a droid. Not just a droid. A person. If he were to continue being honest with himself, he'd have to admit that if he had a second chance, he do the exact same thing again. Tyral ducked another swing and cocked his fist for a shovel hook; the security guard raised his baton for another strike but instead choked suddenly and found himself several inches off the ground. A ceramic-plated arm tightened like a vise grip around his neck, cutting off arterial blood flow completely. Within a few seconds the guard lapsed into unconsciousness and crumpled to the floor, his body released by the droid behind him.
____"Cin vhetin." Beskar'ad replied to Tyral, beckoning him to follow as he jogged down the stairs toward street level.
____"I'm sorry," Tyral said irritably as he kept pace, "but I didn't speak your new language 15 minutes ago and I still don't speak it now."
____"It translates literally to 'white field.'" They emerged into an alley and Beskar'ad rolled down the sleeves and pulled up the hood of the sweatshirt he wore. "When you join a Mandalorian clan, your past is forgotten. You have a clean slate, a fresh start."
____"For some reason I don't think CorSec cares about Mandalorian customs." Tyral pulled a hat out of his back pocket and pulled it low, shadowing his face.
____"That won't matter once we're off Corellia."
____"Figured that out yet?" Tyral asked.
____"We'll find a way."
____They both slowed to a hurried walk and merged with the passing foot traffic. Coronet was a big city, but Beskar'ad knew it wasn't big enough to hide them from CorSec forever.

 

[Sisk_Renelo]

Sisk was in the market area of Treasure Ship Row, the red light district of Coronet, in full armor, the black plate making him stand out. Well, stand out as much as man over 2 meters tall in armor could. Which meant everyone within five blocks knew he was there. Although a loyal subject of the GA, Sisk had been invited here, to participate in the Grand Tournament of the Galaxy. He had finished his first round several hours before, acquitting himself well, having laid low an Alliance Captain. After the fight, he had made his way into the hustle and bustle of the city, looking for a trinket or two for when he saw Xotomi again. Although he didn't know where she was, he knew he would find her.

His audio receptors perked, and a harsh bleat drew his attention, his HUD lighting up with information. Someone had mentioned the Mandalorians, and it wasn't directed at him. Considering Corellia wasn't even in the Mandalorian invasion corridor, and the area he was in, it drew his attention like someone had thrown a dart into his ear. His buy'ce was running calculations, trying to get him a fix on the speaker. A small arrow lit up in his 360° display, giving him the best guess as to where it had come from. Sisk spun slowly, and scanned the crowd. According to the readout, the speakers were around 27 meters out, and Sisk watched, looking for someone doing their best to not be noticed. It would be an oddity here, and oddities usually meant people who didn't want to be seen.

There. Two figures had moved out of an alley, and were making a hard attempt to fall into the flow of the pedestrians. One of them was easily identifiable as human, by the size, the gait, and the unconscious body language. The other one... The other one wasn't recognizable. It was tall, and moved with almost a measured step, but there was something stiff about it. The taller one was covered by a hood, no visible skin showing. Sisk used a target marker, and set his HUD to follow the two. Although not infallible, his buy'ce now had the two in its databanks, and if they came into its field of vision, it would automatically lock on again, even after having lost sight of them for an extended period of time.

Sisk moved quickly to a dark corner, and with a quick burst of his jetpack, landed softly on the roof above. He always preferred to hunt from above. A quick check of his HUD showed him the two, and he set off after them, moving silently from rooftop to rooftop, making sure to keep low, not allowing himself to be silhouetted against the sky.

 

[Drop Shock]

____"The longer we're out here, the easier it is for them to find us," Damien Tyral whispered to Beskar'ad as the two of them snaked through the crowd.
____"There's a supply shuttle leaving from Coronet terminal N3 in 30 minutes," the AI muttered back, "two human pilots, both new to the job. Render one unconscious and assume his place; I can be aboard without setting off stowaway alarms. The shuttle is headed for one of the orbital resorts." They passed into a dank pedestrian tunnel that brought them underneath some of the high-rises towering above them, and toward the Blue District's shipping district, Tyral looking somewhat bewildered.
____"How can you know that?" He looked sidelong at his friend, who raised a gloved hand and tapped on the side of head.
____"The shipping logs I downloaded before being retired are relevant for the next 8 standard days." He pushed past an obviously heavily inebriated man covered in tattered clothing who was staggering down the center of the tunnel. The tunnels were full of people like him. Not necessarily drunk, but forgotten.
____"Right, sometimes I forget what you have under there," Tyral replied. He glanced at the drunk as they passed, then looked around at the others up and down the narrow passage, seeming to notice them for the first time. "Fierfek, you'd think with the technology we have, there wouldn't be places like this anymore." His eyes followed a gaunt teenage girl sitting along the tunnel wall as they passed. "Or people in this bad shape..."
____The tunnel ended and they emerged into the 'open' air, although the street was nearly just as dark; buildings towered overhead and speeders moved like ants through the sky above, oblivious to the ground below. Tyral looked around, his eyes widening at the slums they'd emerged into, one of the many forgotten corners of the Blue District. A few fires burned in small shipping containers which the destitute gathered around like altars. It was cold. Eyes could be seen peering out from the darkest places on the street, some Selonian but many not. Beskar'ad looked over his shoulder at his companion, jerking his head slightly to indicate they needed to keep moving.
____"We have a schedule to keep, we can't do anything about this now," he muttered to Tyral, something about his synthetic voice sounding more human than ever before.
____"I haven't been down here in years, since I was a rookie," Tyral said quietly, "I had no idea it had gotten this bad..." his voiced trailed off.
____"Not many do," Beskar'ad replied, "and of those that do, too few do anything. Crime rates are worse than ever down here, and as the cycle feeds itself it grows, pulling more and more people into this downward spiral."
____"Why doesn't CorSec patrol more down here?" Tyral asked, glancing at some kids from some alien species he couldn't place vandalize a boarded up storefront.
____"They're part of the cycle. They facilitate more crime here than they stop, whether purposeful or not," Beskar'ad's eyes seemed to glow brighter for a moment.
____"What does that mean?" Tyral stopped walking. Beskar'ad stopped as well and turned sharply to face the other.
____"It means that the officers who aren't corrupt and participating in criminal acts," he took a step toward Tyral, "are destroying lives in their own ways, with their state-sanctioned abuse of the public. Their methods of 'stopping crime' antagonize the public and the lives they ruin result in more criminals than would ever appear otherwise." He turned and continued walking down the street further into the shipping district, with Tyral following soon after. After a short time they stopped again, this time not to discuss the problems with CorSec but to witness them.
____"You can't do this!" a young Twi'lek woman shouted at a uniformed CorSec officer at the entrance of some mass-housing, "He didn't do anything, you don't even have a warrant!"
____"Get out of the way, schutta," the officer, a middle-aged human, growled, shoving her into the doorframe. The Twi'lek girl grunted audibly but moved to stand in the way of the officer again. The man snarled and backhanded her, pulling a neuronic whip from his belt as she shrieked and hit the ground. Before he could deliver a blow with the crackling weapon, however, something grabbed his wrist. Before he could react he found his arm being forced into a hammerlock behind his back, and then his world exploded into pain as the armlock tore apart his shoulder and elbow joints. He screamed. The Twi'lek girl looked up to see a hooded figure with glowing blue eyes now holding the neuronic whip while the CorSec officer whimpered on the ground between the two of them in pain. Her rescuer, keeping the weapon he'd confiscated, turned and ran down to the street where another man stood and looked stunned. Together they fled the scene.

---

____"I thought you said we have a schedule to keep?" Tyral shouted at Beskar'ad, "they're going to be all over us now!"
____"Something had to be done," the AI replied.
____It was at that moment that Damien Tyral understood exactly why Beskar'ad had fallen out of favor so quickly at CorSec. A wailing siren began to get closer.

 

[Sisk_Renelo]

Sisk watched from above, taking note of the odd pair. He had caught a glimpse of the unknown's eyes when he had rescued that girl, and the unsettling blue color had been alien to him. Possibly a droid of some kind? If so, it was a model he was wholly unfamiliar with. His audio amplifiers allowed him to catch every word from the two, and the unknown also had an oddly metallic tang to his voice. It lent more credence to the droid theory, but at the same time, it could be nothing more than a helmet with voice filters. But combine the voice with the eyes and the odd gait... It was looking more and more like Sisk had run into a droid of unknown manufacture, one that had unique programming. They would be worth following.

The unknown's words touched a part of Sisk, the part dedicated to true justice in its purest form, and he smiled slightly underneath his buy'ce. If this one was truly trying to get to the Mandalorians, he had a sneaking suspicion that they would get along quite well. After all, a Protector was nothing but justice distilled into its purest form, order made flesh, the law given purpose. With slow hands, Sisk dug into his pouch that rested on his right hip, and pulled out a miniature tracking device. It was a marvel of Mandalorian technology, the signal it gave off almost untraceable, using a specially programmed scrambler when it sent its intermittent signal, on a frequency that went unused across the galaxy. The tracker was also designed to adhere to any surface, and the delicate sensors inside read the material, and adjusted the cover of the device to match. Once in place, it was invisible and silent, the most advanced personnel tracker in the galaxy.

With a practiced eye, he measured the distance between himself and the shorter of the two, hefted the device, and with a measured lob sent it falling into the alley, where it stuck on the bottom of the shorter man's robes. Now he would be able to follow their movements anywhere within three star systems, but he doubted it would come to that. After all, he didn't care if he was seen, and could make it to the spaceport long before they did. Now came the time for patience, and Sisk dropped even lower, waiting until the two had disappeared around a corner, and with a small hop and quick burst of his pack, landed on the street, his helmeted head swiveling between the two that were there. He turned to the CorSec officer, and uttered a low growl.

"You got off easy hut'uun. If it had been me you would have died where you stood." His hands reached up, and found the familiar latches to his helmet. With a quick snap, unsealed, and Sisk pulled it off, allowing the air of Corellia to hit his nose. He sniffed, and took in the smells. Sweat, ozone, perfume, starched clothes, runoff from the pipes, and garbage all combined to form a malignant odor, but Sisk blocked them out, and took in a deep breath.

There. Hydraulic fluid. The type used in droids. Fresh. Strong. The taller of the two companions was a droid. Satisfied, Sisk turned to the woman, and pulled a large denomination chit from his pocket, tossing it towards her. "Use this to get you and your family out of the Row. There's enough there to make it happen." His gloved hands moved quickly, sliding his buy'ce over his eyes once again, and the familiar hiss as it sealed cut him off once again from the smells of this place. With a quick burst, he was back on the rooftops, and checked his HUD. A small icon blinked, and Sisk read the readouts. He hadn't lost much ground, the two companions having traveled less than 400 meters. Sisk took off across the roofs, quick and quiet, moving towards the icon, watching the numbers scroll quickly downwards...

 

[Drop Shock]

____The shadows cast by the looming skyscrapers were oppressive, a heavy black that blanketed the world in the pits of the Blue District. The speeder traffic overhead wasn't audible here, the streets dominated by the industrial sounds of the shipping yard. Industrial sounds, and, at the moment, sirens. Beskar'ad threw himself behind a giant metal shipping crate, grabbing Damien and pulling him behind as well, just as lights flooded the street in front of them. The crate shielded them from the gazes of the CorSec officers approaching from nearly 100 meters away. The three officers, who he had caught the briefest glimpse of before diving into cover, wore heavy armor and carried assault weapons, and were just a single link in the perimeter that materialized almost instantaneously around the neighborhood like a wall. He hadn't anticipated a coordinated response this quickly; he apparently was a higher priority than he'd realized. With all the countless files he'd analyzed and all the information he had stored in his databanks, he was always surprised when organics surprised him. He felt he should know better by now.
____The green lights of the officers' vehicles strobed in the darkness, their eerie flicker creating ghostly shadows while the officers themselves burned away the darkness with ultra-bright glowrods attached to their rifles. Beskar'ad was sure that at least one officer in the group also wore a motion tracking goggles; he was sure because that was standard CorSec containment procedure. He could hear the growl of the Corsec speeder quiet to a low hum as the officers took position in the intersection ahead. There would be more groups like this at regular intervals around the containment zone, with each team in view of the teams on either side of them so that nobody could cross the perimeter or engage an officer without being seen by others. In the highly vertical environment of the city, they would also have speeders or drones in the air to prevent any z-axis escapes. It was ultimately a very old, very simple, and very effective method of trapping fugitives: box them in. At this point, he knew that his initial method of escape was shot, because even if they could get to the landing pads of the district, their ideal flight had already left and the rest were sure to be tightly surveilled now. He had to come up with something else fast, before the final piece of CorSec containment could present itself: the hunters that tracked down the now caged prey.

 

[Sisk_Renelo]

This was curious. The targets had deviated from the course that they had been upon, and had moved towards the industrial district. It was a bad choice, in Sisk's opinion. The Blue District was always crawling with CorSec, and he had a sneaking suspicion that these two were the cause for the heightened security presence that he had encountered. Creeping along the roofs, Sisk moved silently behind a sniper, scanning the street below through a high powered scope. With deft movements, Sisk moved up behind the Corellian, and with several movements of his hands, the sniper dropped silently, unconscious. Sisk caught the man and his rifle as he went down, and lowered them both to the rooftop. Before he moved on, he pulled the firing pin from the rifle, and pulled the power cell from the radio. If the sniper woke back up, he didn't need an alarm being sent out.

He occupied the space he had just cleared, and peered down into the street, following his tracker, attempting to make visual contact. The thoroughfare below was stacked high with trash, trucks, and crates, and it was difficult to get a good lock. He thought he saw the hem of a robe ducking into a dimly lit alcove, striving to avoid the CorSec team stationed ahead. But it wasn't fast enough. The officer in the middle pointed, and the small team began to move across the street. They were all heavily armed, and Sisk knew that the team would be able to corner the two fugitives, and take them to whatever fate awaited them. If it had been anyone else, Sisk would have walked away, but the behavior they had demonstrated earlier showed that there was something deeper than what was obvious.

He ran through some quick calculations in his head, and with a quick burst of his jetpack, landed smoothly behind the team, his black armor blending in perfectly with the shadows cast by the lights. He waited for a moment, as the team passed out of the sight lines of the other teams, and then struck. He darted forward, and drove his closed fist into the back of nearest officer, sending a painful jolt and briefly cutting off the electrical signals from the brain to the body. The man collapsed in a heap, and as he fell, Sisk's beskar gauntlet found his temple, sending him into unconsciousness.

Moving quickly, he darted towards the next officer, who was turning towards him in what seemed to be slow motion. It was what always happened to him in combat. Perhaps it was his Force sensitivity, or his Mandalorian training, or a combination of both, but the world slowed to a crawl. As the Corsec member turned, Sisk gripped the barrel of his weapon, and squeezed, the motors in his crushgaunts turning the barrel into a piece of scrap, and turning the blaster into nothing but a club. And a club could be beneficial. Sisk ripped the blaster away, and then swung it with force at the officer's temple. It connected, and a small gasp escaped the man's lips as he crumpled.

Three more to go, and they were now turned towards the dull thumps he had caused as he had removed the other two. He couldn't let them fire their blasters, or it would alert every officer in the sector. This would have to be quick. He extended his left arm, and fired his rappelling line, the weighted end slamming into the gut of the furthest officer, and causing him to double over, gasping for breath, while his right arm extended and fired a small dart from his launcher, loaded with a potent hallucinogen. With a small hiss, the dart struck flesh, and the death stick compound inside went to work almost instantaneously, filling the CorSec officers head with strange visions, bright colors, and a distinct lack of care for the outside world. The blaster fell from his numb fingers with what seemed to be a horrendously loud clatter, and the man turned to look at the plain side of a building, his eyes filled with wonder.

One left.

Sisk moved in a blur, his hand reaching for the Vorcha Stun Stick strapped to his back, and as it came loose from its mount, he thumbed the activation switch, bringing it in a quick jab towards the last Corsec. But the man reacted quicker than Sisk thought he would, his rifle butt moving to intercept the silver wrapped wood, and knocking it to the side. As he did, he let the rifle go, allowing the sling to bring it to its stored position on his body. Sisk cursed, hoping the man wouldn't shout for help. But the last officer seemed confident in his ability to take on the armored Mandalorian, his hands already moving into the first stance of Teras-Kasi, an ancient fighting style. Sisk dropped low, and swept for the man's legs, only to meet nothing but air, as the man stepped over the swinging leg, aiming a punch for Sisk's side. Sisk recovered enough to step into it, allowing the punch to meet his plates, and he heard a distinct crack as one or more fingers snapped. The officer darted back, shaking his wounded hand, but then raised his arms and advanced again.

Sisk didn't have time for this. One of the other groups was sure to notice the missing team soon, and he had to get the two fugitives out of sight before they did. As the man advanced, Sisk reached out, and grasped his arms, dragging him in close. The other Corsec officer, the one he had hit with his line, was still gasping on the ground, trying to draw enough air into his lungs to shout for help. With a vicious snap of his neck, Sisk brought his helmet forward in a Keldabe Kiss, and with a sigh, the fighting officer's eyes became glazed, and he fell backwards, the 80 kilos he weighed bouncing on the permacrete. Sisk drew his left ripper, and moved close enough to the gasping officer to place the barrel into his unarmored midsection, and pulled the trigger, allowing the riot gear to muffle the stun blast.

He stood in the middle of the street, his chest heaving up and down in deep breaths. Sweat ran underneath his helmet, as the environmental control systems activated, drawing it away from his skin. Five men down, less than 30 seconds. Not bad.