Talking About Last Night
The safe havens for Coruscant's underworld, fittingly enough, is located well underneath the city itself, where the geothermal taps sullenly dip far into the planetary core and the Coruscant Security Force is far too unfamiliar with the dilapidated layers of the depths to actually mount more than the occasional sweep in force. It's in one of those safe houses, where you slept the night away along with the six-person strike team that took out a Nemoidian and his droids just to find a shipment of droid parts that should not have been on Coruscant
. The raid itself is seared into your memory at least for now, from the tense, hurried infiltration of a decaying factory complex using outdated plans to the achingly long wait until the order was given to snipe out the overseer and his droids followed by a mad dash for the underlayers of Coruscant with a heavily overloaded speeder full of highly illegal combat droid parts.
Even Redvers Buller was nervous that evening, and it showed. The rest of the team was jittery as well, and seeing the unflappable monster that was Redvers Buller nervous was enough to shake all of you a bit. The trip itself was uneventful, but you can still remember the tension in the speeder, every single thug there with blasters ready just in case. Buller himself was icily controlled, driving well under the speed limit and as safely as possible to avoid some random Judicial asking to take a look in the back. And when the speeder and its cargo – not to mention your team – got to a safe house well underneath Coruscant and far, far beyond the casual reach of the CSF, the entire strike team mechanically ate their rations and collapsed asleep. Even you.
You blame that exhaustion collapse for the headache when you wake up, the throbbing ache just behind your forehead an irritating accompaniment to your commlink's alarm tone. The first thing you see as your eyes crack open is the gray metal surface of the bunk above you, and the second thing is the spare barracks-room where the six of you are housed. Three pairs of bunks, one to a wall, with one door out of the place and a single place to freshen up. You smile a little as you head for the bathroom, thankful that you're up early.
Unfortunately, there's already someone in there. Checking your commlink tells you that there's a message from your cousin, and it's terse and to the point.
MEETING IN HALF AN HOUR. COMMAND POST, YOUR SECTOR. The timestamp reads as being sent ten minutes ago.
Goddammit, cousin.
The barracks washroom is fairly spare as it is, and a quick shower to get rid of the crud along with the time taken to armor up is more than you'd like to spend. You tear out of the barracks even as the Weequay who took the bunk above yours – Chers Im is his name – slowly rouses himself and lets out a yelp on seeing the message that your cousin sent. Even as he scoots for the washroom before someone else can claim it, you're out into Coruscant.
Or rather, out into the depths of Coruscant and in front of the bar where the safe house rooms are. The command post is somewhere a few klicks off, and that just means you're already late. You take a long moment to just look around, trying to get your bearings in the teeming mass of colourful life and ramshackle scrap-metal habitation deep below the galactic capital, and it takes longer than you would have preferred. At least the armor and the weapon give you some space and keep the worse of the urchins and touts from harassing you.
It takes you a minute or two to get your antique armor's computers querying the holonet and projecting a path to the command bunker's coordinates on your helmet HUD, a bright blue line tracing its way in your vision through people, vehicles, and the occasional building towards your destination. There's a crunching under your boot as you start out, and a moment later you stop to look over your shoulder. There's a honking from some sort of small two-person scooter-speeder, and the other human on the strike team besides Buller is on the driver's console. They take a look at you, armored up and ready for a war, and throw back their unmasked face to laugh. "So, Mando, you want a lift?"
"I could use one, yes." You sit on the machine a little gingerly, the speeder sagging in flight as the weight of your
beskar armor makes itself apparent. "Where did you find….this thing?" You can't quite keep the incredulity from your voice, and you're pretty sure that some of the bar's patrons are staring because it's so damn rare to see a Mando in armor on a bright pink two-person scooter.
The human giggles as you ask, gunning the engine enough to shift you backwards a little despite the weight of your armor. Brissell – if you remember their name right and this is indeed Brissell – leans forward into the stale, greasily warm air of the Coruscant underlayers as they drive, their words carried to you on the wind as they dodge between pedestrians and the occasional speeder. "Oh, here and there. Everyone needs a few secrets, Jaaing. Especially ones as terrible as this."
"Of course." You answer as best as you can with one hand gripping the seat's edge. Your tone's as dry as you can make it, memories of your father staring down your brothers and their tall tales until they actually told the truth. "And I suppose the pink paint makes it go faster? Or perhaps the pink paint is to deter Mandalorians."
"I don't know, you tell me?" They half-turn to look at you from one cybernetic eye, too-pale underdweller's skin a stark contrast to the sleek black augmetation. You can't help but flinch as Brissell expertly swerves around a mother and her child, past a food-vendor selling unidentifiable meat, and underneath a crane's half-raised arm, and they laugh at your tense body language in that bare, split second of insanity. "I don't know if you
can, Mando, looks like you can't deal well with Coruscant driving."
"I've piloted worse than this, Brissell. I've piloted
ships, and nobody's as insane as you are." There's a trace of wounded pride in your tone that you can't quite crush, and the human in front of you seems to giggle again just they turn to face the road, the scooter speeding up before taking a turn. Your fingers press harder into the seat's edge, and you're pretty sure the armor's combat sensors are engaging just from the repeated heart rate spikes. "How long before we get there? You been to this bunker before?"
"Mando, dear, I've been almost everywhere." They throttle back as the scooter hits a more upscale part of the under-layer, pink scooter and armored Mando drawing no fewer stares here than where the bars and junkies dwell. "All the same, though, this particular bunker isn't somewhere I've been before."
Their hair parts a little as the wind – the ventilation, you suppose, it isn't wind down here – picks up, and for a moment you can see what looks like a barcode on Brissell's neck. Your helmet HUD cheerfully chirps as it matches the barcode's partial snapshot to something that your grandfather saw from his time as a bounty hunter.
Judicial deserter's marks, confirms the armor computer, in all to satisfied a tone.
Time of service tattoo with no discharge stamp. Judicial deserter.
Well, then. You're probably silent for a little too long, because Brissell suddenly turns again as they slow the scooter again, and they can see your helmet turned to face them. They're not stupid, and they can put two and two together. "You saw my little tattoo, then?"
"That I did." Your tone's neutral, your hand's clenched on the seat cushion, and the armor's servos are humming again. The subdued lighting and more upscale clothing on display underscores the glinting eye of cameras that you can ever so barely pick out in this sector of the area, and Brissell knows as well as you do to avoid a ruckus. "Seen those before."
"That you have, hmm?" Brissell turns back to drive, nodding at a half-armored bruiser cradling a cheap blaster who seems to be the representative for sector security on the beat. "Well, I suppose it's visible enough. They give it to you as a mark, a medical status and an ID marker when you enter, and they stamp it again when you leave – and if you leave early then you keep the mark. The Judicials like to do that sort of thing."
"Some of my family were Judicials."
"And I'm sure they joined out of idealism, clansman." You duck your helmeted head a little at Brissell's suddenly tart tone, a sharp contrast to their earlier erratic, light and playful voice. "You and yours joined the Judicials to kill. The same as you coming here and your cousin doing what he did."
The scooter's hum is suddenly loud, slowly trolling along past what looks to be a checkpoint and scanner setup. There's a single sleepy man in CSF blues here, and behind him is 'private security' to keep him in line. It takes a moment to think past what Brissell said, and you're curious – what
has cousin Rhaj been doing, exactly? Asking that question gets another laugh from the human, this one far more bitter.
"Oh, you might as well ask what he hasn't been doing." They throttle up again, "Buckle up, we're five minutes away. The one thing I can tell you is that he's got better healthcare than the Judicials do, and doesn't fuck us over as much. And he's harboring deserters."
You snort at that, "The pacifist Republic is so, so vengeful about those deserters, yes. I can see that." You can hear Brissell's wry chuckle, an edge of bitterness in it, and you turn to look at where you are instead of staring at the deserter's tattoo. Harboring a deserter isn't a death sentence - the only major penalty for a deserter is a hearing and fine. Of course, it can take an awfully long time for someone to
get their hearing after they get ID'd and picked up. You remember your grandfather complaining about those laws, about how the policing infantry were able to up and leave if they started getting the shakes and the nightmares.
You had a nightmare, last night. You're not about to hassle Brissell for having the same. You shut up after that, and decide to take a look at where in the scenic under-layers of Coruscant the team driver has taken you today.
Coruscant's under-layers are less of a dump than you'd thought, and you're pleasantly surprised as the scooter nears what Brissell tells you is the same neighborhood as your cousin's bunker. Here there are more eyes on you, but more and more of them are unsurprised ones. Some of them outright nod at Brissell, and eye you with more curiosity than incredulity. The area where you cousin has one of his 'command posts' is an upscale one, but it's the upscale expensive ambience of a high-class nightclub rather than the quiet, understated, insanely expensive dignity of the Republic's elite. You suppose that cousin Rhaj is taking advantage of the fact that it's always night when you want it to be, here on Coruscant, as the area lighting dims to 'twilight' and what Brissell calls 'Layer 43A' is kept far from the harsh revelations of daytime.
You can still pick out some things, here and there. There are the loud and chattering forms of what you can safely assume are brothel touts, and there's the wafting smoke on some corners of deathstick vendors. One of the elegantly dressed humans on the road who passes you by has an injector in one pocket, his eyes staring all too wide under impeccable makeup. The IR signatures of cameras and eyeball droids are commonplace, floating here and there as if voyeurs to vice.
And then there are the tattoos.
They're not like Brissell's former-Judicial barcode. They're the curling forms of old Mando'a runes, some of them, inked in the dark, dark blue of the lost seas of Mandalore. They talk about reliability and faith on one bruiser's knuckles as he tosses someone out of a door. They sing of loss and sorrow on the bared shoulder of a woman who doesn't want to be here, her fixed smile and the black runes on her skin telling a tale older than the Republic itself. They are in more places than you'd expected, and you don't know what to say.
Those are Mando tattoos. Those are your people's runes. Those are marked on the bodies of trafficked chattel, on the fists of thugs who've never seen a battlefield. Your cousin, it appears, has been busy.
When you ask Brissell about it, they just shrug and shake their head.
It's always been a thing, they say, and you shake your head as if denying it. You're not sure what to think about that.
Luckily there isn't the time to brood. The scooter pulls up in front of a building with a heavily armored human at one side of the door, and Brissell tosses the human the keys as they get off. You follow them inside, past a series of stark steel doors labeled as
SOUNDPROOF for purposes you're not paid to think about – so you determinedly don't. The bunker itself is gray inside, metal and composites built to weather a heavy weapons strike and belying the exterior's cheery faux-wood facade. Brissell leads you past most of the doors and past what looks like an office room, to a single open door.
You enter, down a short flight of stairs with what your armor tells you is an IR camera staring at you, and you're greeted by your cousin's familiar, smug voice. "About time," says cousin Rhaj's half-meter-tall miniature holographic projection, smiling that same smile he always does. "We were just about to start."
"We took the scenic route." Brissell slips past you in their dark robes and with what looks like a brace of pistols at their waist, their voice sardonic as your cousin's projection just raises a single brow. "I thought it best to give your new sniper an introduction to things."
Some introduction, you think, and stand next to Buller as Rhaj begins to speak. The rest of the team – all six of them with less morals than the rats outside – do the same, and you force yourself to focus on your cousin rather than on what you saw and heard outside. Your cousin starts off with the usual sort of congratulations that he's given before to your older brothers, when they announced a successful hunt or a good harvest, and you mentally tune that one out while safely under a helmet where Rhaj can't see you roll your eyes.
The rest of the team around the table where the holographic projection is talking pay varying degrees of attention to your cousin, at least those that you can see. There's Redvers Buller, dourly nodding along to your cousin's analysis of where things went right and occasionally interjecting with a correction of what to your ears is a fairly standard, amateurish tactical analysis. It looks like it's been a while since cousin Rhaj has been behind a blaster. Buller himself is as massive and as focused as ever, a solid block of human on your right that's dressed in flak armor and with an all-up blaster rifle on his back that you're pretty sure is meant for antimaterial work. How that got smuggled under here with the CSF traffic cops not fifteen minutes away is something to do with bribery. Probably.
Then there's Brissell, their face as bored as yours, but unlike yours only half-hidden by long hair and facing the back of your cousin's hologram. They make a face as he continues, burn scars faintly visible on one cheek under the harsh lighting of the ops room. Brissell nods at you from across the room, somehow aware of your scrutiny and as gracious as a Senator at a ball – you're damn thankful for your helmet in that moment.
Next to Brissell and again behind your cousin's hologram – you're pretty sure there's a pattern here – is the one that was introduced as
Saumuph Koffib, former clerk and auditor for the Trade Federation on Cato Nemoidia. He said all of that with the same dead eyes and closed expression he has now, and you're damn well sure that no Trade Federation auditor learns to use a grenade launcher with a bayonet on the underbarrel while at work. Koffib, however, somehow does. You know he does. There was Nemoidian blood on the bayonet when the heavy team breached that warehouse where you sniped the Nemoidian overseer.
The tall, thin form of Fel Tephe is next to Redvers Buller, the slender Muun hidden from you by the bulk of the human team leader. Tephe is probably exactly as punctiliously attentive as you'd expect from a Muun slicer when they're paid well, and you know from experience that they're very, very good. On the other hand, that sheer mercenary attitude and the Muun's general demeanor tend to grate on you. With luck there won't be much more involvement of Tephe in the next series of ops.
Cousin Rhaj's hologram suddenly claps its hands, your cousin changing the subject and garnering the rest of your attention. His holographic robes are smooth and well-cut, and you can't help but notice how damned hard they'd be to move in. Your cousin didn't learn that on Concordia, for sure he didn't. "So. Now that we've all assembled and gone over what happened yesterday, I can tell you some things. For one, the parts that you recovered were the real thing. Techno Union stamps, materials analysis points to actual Techno Union work. And the emitter designs are bleeding-edge. The sort of thing that gets put on a VIP's Lucrehulk, not deployed in the Coruscant underworld."
"So we interrupted...what?" Chers Im, the Weequay with abominable body odor and the by-the-book training of an Outland Security infantryman, seems more than a little unsettled. "We're fucking with the Techno Union now? I get that we have muscle, but…" He shrugs fluidly, trailing off before he says the obvious. Nobody here is paid to tangle with the Techno Union or the Trade Federation proper. Nobody has the muscle.
Your cousin just smiles, "You're not. I have enough contacts in the Federation to smooth this incident over, especially since they know that we run this sector. What I want to know is why those contacts didn't tell me about any testing being done. I could have been their facilitator, for a nominal fee." You're sure that the testing he's talking about is live-fire, and you're not sure what to think of that. Rhaj's soft hands have acquired a cigarra, the smoke wafting up a little before the holoprojector cuts it off. A little bile rises in your throat. "What we want to know is who has been using that genuine Techno Union gear, and why it was to lightly guarded. A few B1s? Pah."
Buller makes a rumble of agreement, backing up his employer. The big human's blond ponytail swings a little as he moves to look at each member of the team, "Techno Union don't fuck around. I know that. If this was a Union operation, we would have known, and if we went in anyways we would've been mulched. This wasn't something the Federation is doing on its own."
"So droids are falling off the back of the speeder, so to speak." Rhaj takes over the pitch smoothly, his mannerisms almost predatory even in the miniature hologram. "I have other teams handling the fallout from this – we have a few franchisees missing – but I think that the first order of business is information."
Buller nods, scarred and calloused knuckles rapping on the table. "Who this is, what they're doing here, why they're
here." He pauses a bit theatrically, and you're sure it's for effect. The enforcer is a menacing man, bigger than anyone you've seen except the Wookiees who came into Mandalore starport now and then. He knows how to use that. "We get all that info, and then we put the hurt on them."
Chers Im just nods at that, "Yessir.
But…" He gets a nod from your cousin, and continues. "But. If things get out of hand or we're fucking with the Union, I'm out. Sir."
"Of course." Your cousin smiles, and the Weequay relaxes a little before he speaks again. "Remember though, if you break your contract I'll make sure you die. Understand?"
"Yessir."
Rhaj then turns to face you, and you think he's smiling a little more genuinely as he does. "So. Information. First, I'll tell you what we have." His hologram rotates to look the others behind him in the eye, Koffib the Nemoidian and Brissell both looking bored. "We know that these are top of the line droidekas. Close quarters combatants, sold to private military corporations as shielded gun platforms. They have better composites than the droideka we have at base, and better shield emitters. They have enough heat shielding to look normal on IR, so heatseekers won't work. Their armor's good enough to require antimaterial weapons or a military-grade blaster. This isn't some kit that's fallen off the speeder, this is the real deal straight from Mustafar."
"So we want to find out why they're here, that's obvious." Brissell interrupts helpfully, their voice bright and perky and making your cousin grimace. That mission accomplished, they then lean back a little and smile.
You grin under your helmet.
Rhaj's hologram nods, the lighting flickering for a moment as he does. "We want to tap what contacts we have. Due to some...issues...with the rest of you on the surface, two of you will meet one of my acquaintances while the others will be looking around here."
"Quarie's gang." Buller grunts that out with a satisfied expression, "They went dark two weeks ago. When the shipments began."
"Then that's where you will start." Your cousin points at Buller, Brissell, Chers Im and Koffib, "One of you is wanted for more reasons than I can list, two of you are deserters, and the last is wanted for, again, things I won't say. You four get to look into our delinquent franchisees the Quarie Killers who haven't paid dues in two weeks. Section 44-C."
"Sir." Chers Im nods sharply, military precision underlaid by a palpable nervousness. Clearly your cousin's threats are ones to be taken seriously. "And the other two?"
"The other two are our surface men." Rhaj faces you and smiles, "Cousin Jaaing, you and Fel Tephe," He indicates the same Muun that you dislike, the Muun peeking around Redvers Buller to eye you with no small degree of dubiousness, "You and Tephe will meet one of the sources I've managed to comm. They owe me a favor and I've called it in. In the meantime, I'll handle the inquiring with our Trade Federation contacts."
You nod, gut roiling with a combination of nervousness and irritation at having to work with the Muun. "Where do I meet them? Any description of the contact?"
The hologram pauses for a moment, checking something on a datapad before raising its head to look at you. "There's a place called the Outlander Club. It's fairly well-known. Look for…"
Pick one:
[]The robed man: He's in a plain, spartan robe of gray and his eyes are utterly calm despite the complete chaos of the Outlander Club. Before him is a single glass of the finest wine, untouched. At his waist is a blaster pistol that's heavy and used, and his bearing is one of wry amusement at being where he is. He introduces himself as
Mr. Green. The name is almost certainly false.
[]The pale, pale huntress: She is tall, slim, and hairless, her eyes betraying nothing of her thoughts. Among all the renowned names at the Outlander Club, her reputation is exceptional. It is shown in the great bubble of space around her at the bar, where you sit down and are met with a measuring gaze.
It's a long time since I saw a Mando, she says, and you think she killed the last one she met.
Discussion is rewarded, and feedback is welcome. I have taken liberties with canon, and I am indeed aware of that.
