Solo missions

[Manuk Gagak]

Manuk activated the remote control she had tuned to the frequency of the insect transmitter.

“Listen carefully,” the bug sent a synthesised voice to the earpieces worn by the conspirators, all of whom traded wide-eyed looks.

“Here’s what you need to know. There will be no negotiations. No petitioning. They’re going to start a shooting war.”

Absorbed in what she was hearing, the woman used her right forefinger to tilt the ear cuff for clearer reception. Manuk replayed much of what she’d previously recorded.

“This will escalate. Someone with real foresight could build a better organisation from the dregs. There is information in their hands of the hyperspace route your ships are going to take and the precise re-entry coordinates.” She repeated them for proof of her intelligence.

The four agents were continuing to stare at the bug they themselves had installed. The woman’s mouth was slightly ajar.

Manuk was pleased to hear the woman say, “This has to go directly to the top and I mean now.”

 

[Manuk Gagak]

“We’re ruined.”

Lovingly crafted, the listening device was a perfect facsimile of a fire flitter. It sat on a low table in the security chief’s home – where Manuk had left it. She’d ensured it had the recording of both sides of the conversations she’d eavesdropped.

Manuk never doubted that the mercenaries would enter into contracts with both mining companies. Nor did she think that they would fail to deliver on their promise to sabotage the ships. Thus she had had no need to witness the fatal collisions.

Surmising correctly that their betrayal would unite the corporations against the mercenaries – she’d spent her time identifying who the mercenaries were – and she tracked them to their base.

 

[Manuk Gagak]

So, she found herself on a small, ice-covered world. She’d found them relatively easily. Perhaps they were convinced that even the combined security forces of both mining corporations wouldn’t be a match for them. Whichever, Manuk’s next task was to make certain that both sides learned the location of the sanctuary by planting evidence to lead them here.

Manuk spent a full day waiting for the first corporation to arrive. In establishing a base, the mercenaries had found the warmest spot on the small world. It was an area of active volcanism, with immense glaciers pocked with ice-blue light, and patches of coarse grassland, through which bubbled dark pools of magma-heated water. The base itself was a series of interlinked semi-cylindrical bunkers.

 

[Manuk Gagak]

Manuk had landed her ship a kilometre from the base. She found no evidence of a radar installation and watched as the corporation’s shuttle dropped from azure skies, fly over the complex, and set down on a circle of permacrete, alongside a disk-shaped freighter and a gunship of equal size.

The mercenaries could not have been unaware of the shuttle’s arrival, but they had managed to catch them unprepared nevertheless. A force of twenty emerged from the shuttle aboard a troop carrier equipped with both repulsorlift engines and weighty tracks for surface-effect locomotion.

The forces of what she now realised was both mining companies fanned out and began a methodical advance on the bunkers, finding shelter behind boulders that had been carried down the mountainsides by glaciers.

What they didn’t know, however, was that the base couldn’t be taken by a frontal assault – not, in any case, by a mere handful of men wielding twenty-year-old weapons. The lead bunker had been fortified with blast doors, and the coarse grass apron that fronted it was impregnated with fragmentation mines and other traps.

Manuk decided that she had to show herself.

 

[Manuk Gagak]

She appeared briefly on a rise, east of the base, a two-legged stranger dressed in a long cloak, deep black against the snowfield. The assailants took her for one of the clan and immediately opened fire. Manuk propelled herself over the rise with leaps and bounds, though scarcely of the sort of which she was capable. The attackers did the wise thing and split their team, figuring, as Manuk predicted she would, that the lone enemy knew another way into the base.

Manuk kept herself in plain sight, dodging the blaster bolts fired by her pursuers, without using her lightsaber. She couldn’t have been a better guide if she had been one of them. Briefly hidden by a snowdrift, she called on the Force to twirl herself deeply into the white wave. From the depths of her self-excavated tomb, she heard men dash for the relatively undefended entrance to which she had led them.

 

[Manuk Gagak]

Manuk waited until she was certain that the last of them had disappeared through the entrance. Then she corkscrewed out of the ice cavity and followed them inside. The sound of blasters and the acrid smell of fire and cauterised flesh had brought her blood to a near boil, and she came close to drawing her lightsaber and rushing headlong into the fray. But slaughter was not her intent. Her mission was best served if the miners and the mercenaries killed each other, though Manuk might yet have to dispose of the ultimate victors.

Judging by the way the assault was progressing, it was the attacker’s forces that would be left standing at the end. Despite being outgunned and outnumbered, the miners’ assault was invigorated by the wrath of the betrayed. Even with a third of their group already wounded or dead, they persevered, continuing to bring the fight to the mercenaries, which held the rear of the bunker.

Explosions from the front bunker indicated that the remainder of the mining corporation’s men had blundered their way into the minefield. Shortly, the survivors were turning their weapons loose against the blast doors in an attempt to burn their way through.

 

[Manuk Gagak]

Manuk scampered along the long wall of the central bunker and found a place from which she could observe the fighting. To contain her eagerness, she gave herself over to evaluating the combat techniques of one contestant or another, making something of a game of anticipating who would be killed by whom, and at just what moment. Her predictions grew more and more accurate as the opposing sides drew closer together.

A powerful detonation rocked the front bunker. The blast doors slid open with a prolonged grating sound, and five assailants stormed through a swirling cloud of dense smoke. Two were cut down before they had gone ten metres. The rest angled for the sides of the bunker and began to work their way forward.

The ferocity of the fighting made it apparent that neither side would tolerate surrender. It was a battle to the death, as Manuk preferred it.

The combat led to a final charge, the combined forces going hand to hand with mercenaries, whose weapons were exhausted. The miners showed them no mercy, and in moments the battle was over.

 

[Manuk Gagak]

Manuk wondered briefly if she could leave things as they stood. The security men would report back to the executives that the mercenaries had double-crossed both companies, and that they had paid with their lives for their betrayal. But it was unlikely that they would let it rest at that. They would want to know who had supplied the intelligence. Then they might to think again about the cantina bug, and perhaps they would scrutinise whatever surveillance recordings were available. For all Manuk knew, images of herself might appear in one them.

Manuk had to finish what she had begun.

She drew her lightsaber and leapt down to the floor of the prefab bunker.

The survivors spun around when they heard the resonant thrumming of her weapon. But no one fired. They stood staring at her, as if she were some hallucination born of bloodlust or snow blindness.

Manuk realized that she would have to goad them into doing what she needed them to do. She began to march forward, and at last someone fired – one of the Rodians from the cantina. Manuk deflected the bolt straight back and kept coming.

Crouching suddenly, a woman fired, and Manuk twirled, deflecting the bolts with her crimson blade. The woman and another security man dropped.

Then the rest opened fire at once. Manuk leapt and jinked, spun and rolled, an acrobatic wonder, impossible to target.

She turned blasters against each other and wrenched one fighter down onto a table with enough force to snap the man’s spine.

His hand weapon depleted, one man rushed her. Manuk spun through a fleet kick, breaking the man’s arm. Then, without lowering her leg, she broke his neck.

Gaping at Manuk in disbelief, the one remaining security officer, let his blaster drop from his rigid hand. Manuk continued to approach, her lightsaber held off to one side, its blade horizontal to the floor.

 

[Manuk Gagak]

“I don’t know how, and I don’t know why,” the security chief began, “but I know that you must be responsible for everything that’s happened.”

Manuk decided to hear him out.

“You recorded my conversations. Then you altered the recordings to trick the saboteurs you had identified in the cantina. You probably arranged for us to find this place.” He gestured broadly. “Can I at least know why before you kill me?”

“It is something that had to be done for a larger purpose.”

The man cocked his head, as if he hadn’t heard Manuk correctly.

Manuk gazed at him. “You needn’t dwell on it.”

She raised her saber, preparing to thrust it into his chest, then restrained herself. A lightsaber wound wouldn’t do, not at all. Deactivating the blade, she raised her right hand and made a fist of her fingers. The man’s hands flew to his windpipe, and he began to gasp for breath.

 

[Manuk Gagak]

Manuk was a pawn. Yes, she was a valuable one – but she knew her place in the hierarchy. And progress would come from delivering – not by asking too many questions.

She could not answer the man’s question about the larger purpose because she truthfully didn’t know what it was. No doubt someone would look to profit from buying the mining corporations – or maybe just providing security or even transport.

Or maybe all three?

 

[Manuk Gagak]

SOMEWHERE IN THE INKY BLACK OF WILDSPACE

“I am taking them…to imprison them. In prison.”
― K-2SO

Manuk had been at the mercy of others before. Sometimes she’d even deserved her troubles. But today was different. Today she was where she was through choice – or at least because she felt obliged to fulfil a mission. She’d had rifles pointed at her, felt stun prods deliver jolts to her spine, and generally suffered the worst a prison guard was authorised to deal out.

What made her circumstances different to other missions was that, for the first time, Manuk had no obvious escape route. No partners outside the prison waiting to bust down the doors; no connection with a greedy security officer that had been paid off; not even a knife she could hide where the guards wouldn’t find it.

Nor did she have any allies. She'd come to the prison ship alone.

 

[Manuk Gagak]

She opened her eyes, as a drop of filthy water smacked into her forehead and took a circuitous route down the side of her nose. She smeared it away with her palm and glanced about her cell as if it might have changed since lights-out. But there was no gap in the wall, no blaster tucked discreetly beside her slab. The blanket-draped lump of her cellmate moaned and wheezed, loud enough to wake Manuk even if she did manage to sleep.

She waited for the guard on patrol to pass her door, counted to five, then slid to her feet and crept to the bars. Outside was an endless march of more cell doors, more prisoners sleeping or, in a few cases, feeding their own private demons – clawing their arms or sketching invisible mandalas on the floor. Prisons didn’t care about treatment or rehabilitation any more than it did about punishment. Order and obedience were the priority; everything else was left to rot.

“Bad dreams?” The moaning and wheezing had stopped. The voice sounded like claws on slate.

“No,” Manuk said.

“Then you should not be up,” her cellmate huffed. The tentacles protruding from her pinched, wormlike face writhed in irritation.

They both fell silent as the patrol came around again. Manuk returned to the slab that served as her bed, considered rising a second time solely to irritate her cellmate, then decided against it. She had a fight due, but not here and not now.

“Do you want a warning?” her cellmate asked. “Before I do it?”

“No,” Manuk repeated.

Her cellmate grunted and rolled from one side to the other. “I will give you one anyway. Next work crew we are on together. I will kill you then.”

Manuk laughed without humor. “Who’s going to keep you company?”

“I like a quiet cell,” her cellmate said.

“What if I kill you first?” Manuk asked.

“Then I hope you like a quiet cell.”

 

[Manuk Gagak]

Wham!

The first punch came at Manuk sideways, spinning her upper body around with the sheer force of the impact and driving her back a half step before she fully recovered her equilibrium. Somewhere under her feet, the alloy plates of the cell’s floor seemed to shiver and quake, threatening to give way.

She spat out a tooth and wiped away the blood.

The creature in front of her was a walking trophy case of previous kills. Two and a half metres high, its massive shoulders and upper torso encased in jagged plates of primitive armour that clearly had once served as the jawbone and carapace of a much larger predator, it seemed to occupy an entire corner of the prison cell.

Manuk stared at the thing. The grey slope of its face was a surgeon’s nightmare of ritualistic scars, organic rings, loops, and fibrous hooks, with bluish sacks pulsating beneath its eyes, all of it siphoning down and inward toward a gaping, razor-toothed mouth. Even its arms seemed to have been plucked from two different organisms. The right hand was a blunt-knuckled fist, the left an elongated spider-fingered claw. Together they formed a mallet and blade, one made for pounding, the other for slashing. It was the right that had come careening out of nowhere just seconds before, slamming Manuk backward and knocking out one of her teeth.

 

[Manuk Gagak]

The thing reached down and picked up Manuk’s incisor from the floor of the cell. Straightening up, it shoved the tooth into an empty space in its own mouth, twisting it until it lodged in place. Then it grinned at Manuk as if asking how she liked the sight of one of her teeth in its mouth – another trophy for its collection.

Manuk gazed back at it.

And then the rage came.

And the rage was good. Very, very good.

The uniform they’d given her was a standard orange jumpsuit whose heavy fabric cut off movement in most directions. Manuk heard its seams strain and then rip as she sprang at her opponent, closing the half-metre gap between them in a split-second. The thing responded exactly as she’d hoped, lunging up eagerly to meet her advance. Its mismatched arms pinwheeled wildly before it, swinging and clawing through the stale air of the cell, its voice screeching at her in a guttural, choking language she’d never heard before.

Let those be your dying words, Manuk thought. Right here. Today.

 

[Manuk Gagak]

Close enough now that she could smell the corpse-stink pouring off it like rotten meat, she fell into a reflexive series of moves. Both hands shot out and grabbed the creature by its throat, hoisting it up over her head and squeezing until she felt the deep tendons of its neck beginning to give and weaken in her grip. There was a wet, muffled click from somewhere inside the thing’s chest and a sudden glut of warm, thick, sticky fluid began spurting up from its throat.

Blood.

Jet black.

The sight of it gave Manuk no satisfaction, only the vaguely annoying realisation that it never should have taken her this long to turn the battle to her advantage. Still, ending her opponent’s life quickly would restore a certain necessary balance to the encounter – if not honour, at least vindication. She tightened her grip, and the screaming sound got louder, becoming a broken, birdlike squawk. More blood leapt up, inky black and viscous, and started pouring from its mouth and eye sockets.

 

[Manuk Gagak]

Enough.

Executing a perfectly balanced spin, Manuk swung the creature around and slammed it to the floor with a sharp clang, connecting hard enough that she felt the steel plates reverberate under her feet. The thing’s head drooped on its broken neck, lolling sideways to expose the throbbing vessels beneath its grey flesh.

Only now did Manuk allow herself to exhale. As anticipated, she hadn’t needed her lightsaber staff or the Force to dispatch this waste of flesh – not that either was really an option. Staring down into the thing’s face, she raised her foot and planted her heel in the exposed throat, ready to pulverize the trachea, or whatever the thing used for an airway, with one decisive stomp. For an instant she met its sagging, inarticulate eyes.

Now, she instructed the thing, which seemed to be realising that it was destined to finish out the final pathetic seconds of its life here in nameless obscurity.

Die!

 

[Manuk Gagak]

All at once, with blinding speed, the creature yanked loose and burst upright, reaching behind its back to produce what appeared to be a long bow staff. As the staff blurred toward her, Manuk realized that the weapon, which she’d first taken to be a piece of wood or some kind of biomechanical hybrid, was actually a living organism – a serpent whose head lashed out at lightning velocity, latching onto her face, slashing at her eyes.

Manuk recoiled, but it was too late. With a jolt, her vision was gone, burying her in instant darkness. This was the second time in as many seconds that the thing had caught her off guard, and now she knew why: the creature was somehow cut off from the Force, utterly detached from the deep field of heightened sensitivity from which she was constantly drawing information about her surroundings. The intuitive sensory abilities that she took for granted in any normal battle were simply not there.

 

[Manuk Gagak]

An acidic heaviness took hold of her optic nerves like a slow drip, seeping in, sinking deep, and she realised that she could already feel the poison taking control, spreading out in concentric layers of numbness through the muscle and tissue of her face.

Now the thing’s shrieking laughter was everywhere. Wilful. Triumphant.

You must end this now.

Manuk straightened. The voice in her head was her own. But the cadence was unmistakably born of her training – an echo of pitiless instruction, hours, days, years of unyielding pain and discipline. The evocation of the mantra snapped her back instantly into the moment with total clarity.

Reaching up through blindness, Manuk took hold of the serpent, grappling with its fully extended length. Somewhere in the void she could feel the rippling leathery sinew of the staff looping around her neck, felt the hundreds of small muscles twisting and constricting over her windpipe, pinching off her airway like a living noose. The next few seconds would be crucial.

She flexed, bent her head, and jerked it forward, but the thing would not release. It kept encircling her, looping round and round, defying every attempt to take hold of it.

Manuk willed herself to be absolutely still, a study in perfect rigidity, allowing the serpent, in its moment of fatal overconfidence, to draw tighter still, stretching itself until she sensed its head coming back around in front of her once more. Still she waited. Above it all she could smell her opponent’s fetid stench, could feel the claws of her opponent raking her skin, twisting into her face, gouging for purchase. It shrieked at her, and this time the cry was pure victory, what might even have been laughter.

Starved, insane. A warrior with nothing to lose.

 

[Manuk Gagak]

You are no warrior, Manuk thought. You know nothing of the Dark side.

The moment had come. She grasped the head of the serpent-staff, seizing its blunt nose and fanged mouth. Her fingers took hold of its distended upper part, twisting, wrenching, until she tore the serpent’s head off its body with a moist and meaty pop.

The results were instantaneous. With a twitching galvanic shudder, the snake loosened and fell slack, the coils already beginning to slide from her neck, and Manuk allowed herself a single, unobstructed breath before finishing her work here.

Somewhere in front of her, the attacker had already responded to the death of its weapon with a howl of cheated rage. Manuk no longer heard it. Primal as it was, it was still only emotion, a cry of weakness no more instructive or relevant than the pain she’d willed away moments earlier. She had no more use for it now than she ever did.

 

[Manuk Gagak]

She did, however, take advantage of her opponent’s scream just long enough to reach into its open mouth, feeling the moist warmth of its breath on her hand as she retrieved her tooth, plucking it from the thing’s gums. Holding the mouth agape, Manuk crammed the serpent’s severed head inside, then clamped the grey lips tight to keep the snake’s head from falling out. She ripped three of the larger piercings from the thing’s right arm and jammed them upward through the lips, bending them back into barbed hooks and fastening the mouth shut with the serpent’s head still trapped inside. With her hands flattened against those lips, Manuk could feel the head twitching around inside the mouth, sinking its fangs in reflexively, squirting out venom while her attacker jerked and spasmed and tried in vain to scream.

End it.