The Doctor Duels
"Ciaran called your crew Team A, Doctor, and said I had field command. That's you, Dani, and Arla, right? We're setting a trap for Ahsoka's pursuers, the ones tapped into the Dark Side of the Force," Ventress said over the comm, giving us an address.
My stomach dropped. Ventress. I'd seen the reports. Ventress was dangerous. Terrifyingly capable, both with weapons and with the Force. Rumors were that she'd fought Kenobi, Skywalker, and Ahsoka in varied combinations in the past and come out better in at least one of these scraps. With how much time she spent around Thrawn, I wasn't sure I liked my odds in a theoretical matchup against Ahsoka, much less Ventress. Fortunately, I didn't have to fight her. Just find a way to balance the whole Mandalore's sister thing with the Thrawn's orders thing with the Ventress' orders thing.
Give me three traumas that needed care in a level 1 facility with the resources of a level 5 facility, and they'd come out alive. It might not necessarily be pretty, but I'd make that one work. Combat work like this? This was a long way from taping up ankles working with Kaleesh.
I wasn't sure how I felt about it, other than nervous as hell and pulled in about three directions.
Well, I had a pretty nice life. Then I got in way over my head and got dead. But what a way to go. Not many people end up in it this deep. It'll either be Jango for letting his sister get in trouble, Thrawn for losing her leash, or Asajj for not falling in line. Uh. Right. Let's see...Jango's persistent, Asajj was Sith-trained...guess I get to take my chances disappointing Thrawn.
"You okay, Riphath?" I heard Dani ask. I didn't remember gathering the crew, or telling them, or getting into the speeder, but here we were, on our way to the trap.
I smiled weakly. "I always get nervy before a combat op, but once we meet the enemy I handle it all right."
"I knew a lot of people like that, way back when..." Arla started. "Just don't get so keyed up you do something stupid and you're fine."
I laughed. "If I made it through trauma residency and fellowship, a few years of being a trauma surgeon, and this long with the Watchers...I know how to not do something stupid before I get my feet back under me."
I didn't remember getting out or setting up in the warehouse. We saw the decoy start coming towards it. They were good. If I had more time, I might have been able to figure out what was different, if there was something different, but in the flash of the moment my eyes were telling me Ahsoka and I didn't have anything to tell me it wasn't.
"Decoy has entered the warehouse," Asajj said over the comms. "Do not move until I give the order or you see one of the targets try to make a break for it.
I raised my comm. "Roger." Don't move until trouble comes. You wouldn't think it was possible to take a nap in the middle of an emergency room waiting on imaging while a patient who had an industrial accident was in serious condition but stable, but I'd learned. I watched as the two pursuers talked between themselves--a smaller one, female and mostly humanoid I thought, and a larger one, tougher to discern.
"Targets are becoming suspicious, be prepared to move," she reported.
I fingered my scythe, lowered my mask.
Show time.
The female, the smaller one...she fled. The bigger one went into the warehouse.
"One of them is onto us, but the other has fallen for it," Asajj rapidly said over the comms as she began to run after the other figure. "Strike now, I will handle the runner."
"Understood!" I replied, stepping out from behind the shipping container to get eyes on our mark properly. Arla was safely up on one of the catwalks in a corner. She was our bomb expert, and we really didn't need her risking herself.
The warehouse door slammed down behind our big guy. He was big all right. Probably somewhere in the neighborhood of two and a half meters tall and all of it muscle. The guy made Grievous look small and wiry.
"Right, we set a Ranat trap and got a Gundark instead. Look, any of you got experience fighting something five times bigger than you? No? I do, so I've got point. I don't plan on fighting him fair, or straight up. I made that mistake once and lived to tell the tale, I don't plan on trying my luck again. You get a good clean stun shot, you shoot him in the back. He won't know what hit him."
I really hope I know what I'm doing.
I stepped out from behind the shipping containers. "You came to this warehouse thinking you'd take down a Jedi," I started, flipping open my scythe. "No Jedi here. Just Death, come to claim your soul."
The big guy cast the cloak aside. Bald man with tattoos.
"It's the apartment guy," Dani confirmed.
"Well, this is about as close as anybody ever gets to showing up and shouting 'I'm a terrorist, please arrest me!' " I quipped back.
He drew a lightsaber from his belt and lit it. I was expecting a lightsaber. I wasn't expecting a lightsaber with a handle more like a crashball bat and a blade longer than my entire scythe. I also wasn't expecting him to roar at me.
There's a time and a place for theatricality, so I'm learning. This? This was a time to fight. I locked the scythe open and whipped it at him to buy myself time to grab my lightsaber, throwing a little Force Push behind it.
He caught the scythe out of the air and threw it back at me, the telekinetic wave of the push the only thing keeping it from killing me as I had reflexively lit the green blade and dropped into what parts of Djem So I'd picked up from Masha, calling upon the Force to strengthen me and feeling the fire in my limbs as I heard my scythe finally clatter back to the ground and saw the big guy take a single step back from my push, the same push that would throw durasteel crates around a room.
I just have to stall him long enough for Asajj to get back here. Best way to stall someone is to wear them out, and the best way to wear him out has to be forcing him on the defensive.
I had failed to realize one thing: Apartment Guy had probably twenty centimeters of reach on me and at least as much in height. Plus he was ripped and probably using the Force for additional strength.
I swung to attack, and found my attack blocked easily, a counterattack coming down at me that I spun away from. His blade struck the floor and swept up flecks of duracrete before he returned to a ready stance. The blast hit him then, and he shook once, his eyes widening and the yellow in them coming out.
Sith eyes. This isn't good.
He spun towards the source of the blast. "Ah, ah, ah," I called, "I'm not letting you go that easily." I rushed at him again, making my footsteps loud and obvious and he spun to meet me, swinging his blade around horizontally to force me to block. I caught the block low on my blade and forced it down with leverage, using the spin to propel a kick at his kneecap. His knee locked and he took a step back and roared again.
I felt the Force around me go putrid and oily, a wave of hatred and anger and pain emanating from the big guy, the door of the warehouse bowing out and the shipping containers all shuffling away from him, the searing rage of it all forcing me back into a squat and holding my lightsaber out horizontally above my head to ward it off somehow.
As it turned out, that was the only thing that kept me alive.
The next blow was a classic Djem So chop, looking to cut me down the middle. It forced its way through my block but the block held long enough I could jump away.
"Shoot him, shoot him, shoot him!" I called.
The air went thick with stun blasts, as both teams followed my instructions.
I really hope I haven't just signed everybody's death warrant here.
Shooting him seemed only to fuel his rage, as each blow came down harder than the one before it, and it was all I could do to keep blocking, keep moving. I drifted out of Djem So into something faster and more mobile. More improvised.
One lucky stun blast caught a bit more of his attention, so I was able to stab him in the shoulder. Another scream, worse for my being at ground zero. His attack came fiercer, stronger despite that not being possible with wounded tissue.
Apparently reality didn't care about all the rules I'd learned in med school. The blows hammered down again and again, his rage making him stronger but more clumsy, allowing me to stab him in the other shoulder. It didn't even faze him, as a kick I didn't see coming knocked me flat on my ass and the next swing of his lightsaber sent mine sailing across the room.
I grabbed my Dragoneye blaster, swearing to myself I'd take this guy with me or die trying.
I didn't see or hear the shot. I smelled it first. Burning skin, burning hair, burning bone. The smoke rising from the hole that had been burned into his head. The red lightsaber extinguished as he fell to the ground, limp.
I followed the vector of the shot and saw Kolikya behind a long blaster rifle, probably a sniper. I waved a hand in thanks and picked up the lightsaber to hand to Kolikya as something of a trophy.
The comm crackled to life. "Report."
Well, time to get in trouble for your stupid plan that someone else had to save you from.
"Haaah, h-he's dead. We
had to kill that bastard," I responded over the comms. "He just would not die."
I've seen people die from far less, and he had to have taken at least a dozen stun blasts full-on, not to mention the lightsaber wounds.
"Apparently you can fashion lightsabers to resemble clubs," Kolikya commented. "We learned this as he attempted to beat Master Riphath to death with it in a berserk fury"
Attempted indeed. He was doing a damn good job of it too.
"and that is what forced me to take a killing shot. Stun rounds were used, but the man was able to resist them enough that lethal force was necessary."
They made him more mad and more powerful. That's not how stun rounds are supposed to work. None of this is how anything is supposed to work.
"What they aren't telling you is that it was the same guy we saw casing the apartment before," Dani said. "So...that's good. Aside from the lack of information-"
Asajj cut her off. "Not an issue. I was able to get a name of the ringleader from the other one."
"Y-you did!? Who is it?" Dani finished.
"Out of your league and above your pay grade. We're working on it. Fall back to your safehouses and await further instructions," Asajj informed over the comm. "Ventress out."
I shook my head, closing my comm. "Right. We get out of here, I'm buying the first round. Next time, someone else gets to fight the giant." I waited until Kolikya got to the ground floor, handed over the lightsaber. "Here. Anybody earned this it's you." We looked at the bowed-out warehouse door, the scattered shipping containers thrown about like a child had kicked blocks around, and I realized just how outmatched I had been from the moment he walked through the door.
I don't remember much after that, other than being relieved Arla was driving us back.
People backed me up. Asajj isn't upset about that guy needing to die for me to live, Mandalore's not going to kill me, and I haven't failed Thrawn. All in all, not a bad day. I'm not sure whether I fell asleep or collapsed on the way back to the safehouse, or if I drifted off and then dragged myself to bed once we got there.
A/N: This was a fun scene to expand.
