A Sum of Lies: Dragonfly

[Cato Fett]

“In these dark waters​

Drawn up from​

My frozen well…​

Glittering of Spring”​

-R I N G A I​

It was twilight dawn.

Greyed out sunlight, obfuscated by the sharp fangs of a long and architecturally discordant skyline, glowed just dimly through a high tower of nimbus cloud. The Tinwitch Burroughs, a multi-sectional and multi-level habitat block, slept in stupor. Automated rickshaws crewed by slouched servitors sat dead, fed into recharging stations by sheathed cabling up and down public walkways, the length of the long Logan Road parked fatly with darkened speeder canopies. Shop fronts were shuttered and black. A few shivered with shielding static. Mince-rats scuppered away from the incoming dawn, down trash-plugged storm drains and through refuse-piled alleyways, bellies heavy from a long night spent feeding on Tinwitch’s scraps.

A man in dirtied blue overalls, head capped by a wide-brimmed straw hat, pushed a stubborn trolley up Logan Road. His face was ageless, neither young nor ringed or sourly old, drawn into an easy, implacable expression. Not quite traditionally handsome; the face sharp like an axe and twice as bold. Green eyes, shot through with blazes of lightning-white, ran across the myriad alley entrances, taking in bolted apartment patios and littered balconies, watching virtually every street-level detail and yet nothing at all. His trolley was laden with bulging trash sacks, reinforced plasteen bags zip-tied closed. Available space was reserved for a handful of brooms, a packing crate of sterilizing chemicals. One hand easily played with a pronged ‘picker’; stabbing and snatching sidewalk waste.

He tossed fruit peels into an open bag, stopping the cart beside an overflowing trash can and fixing on a cracked set of leather working gloves. The scent was nauseating, combining the worst of rot and fermentation. Made nastier by the seasonal heat. He stuffed and decompressed what soft waste he could, discarding metal and broken appliances onto the cart and tying the bag off. Fruit flies rose in a cinnamon haze over his hat. The can was readied with new lining, sat upright, and then chained to a reinforced bus-stop pole. The Street Sweeper checked his cracked chronometer against the fitful dawn and pushed his trolley forward.

-

When the sunlight peaked a little fuller, brighter now, washing Logan Road with saturated blue-stone brick and chalky ferrocrete, the Street Sweeper saw the Hoods walk out. Three lean bodies, each tall, dressed street-smart in skin-thin black synth-textiles. Emptied eye-sockets were replaced with ninth-generation ocular implants, brutish and square. Their heads were shaved, hair dimmed or faded, what hair remaining plastered upright or woven into incomprehensible gang weaves. He couldn’t guess if they were hotwired; modified for street combat with black clinic cybernetics. They looked sleepless, literally shivering from caffeinated narcotics. Dry spittle dirtied their stitched vests.

One produced a combi-blade: his right arm split wide with a perfect seam, revealing tightly compacted synthetic musculature and alloy bone, and ejected a length of vibro-steel. The sword began humming, coated with a honey energy sheen. “Trash Man Xhilin.”

“Old Trash Man Xhilin.”

“Old Trash Man Xhilin, we play?” Said the third, unfolding a brutal truncheon. Its nail-stubs sparked electrically. “This is Tinwitch. It always dirty.”

“Ah yeah. Dirty! Dirty all the time, every moment. Cleaning’s an affront!” The second Hood piped in and showcased a pair of gruesome vibro-knives, the knuckle-guards rimed with dried gore.
“What do you want?” The Street Sweeper asked. He’d taken off his work gloves and was holding the stem of a long broomstick. It was still anchored against the trolley.

“…Nothing,” The First Hood said, over emphatically. His expression had tapered off from soft glee to soft despair. The arm retaining his combi-sword shook more and more. “Nothing at all.”

The Hoods charged. The Street Sweeper twisted the broomstick hard and yanked its brush-head free. A long, thin spear-head emerged, attached now to a shortened haft, pulled from the trolley and spun once in the Street Sweeper’s hands. He throttled his grip about and effected a high guard, peering from just under his hat brim. The haft wood itself was cheap and well worn, but the spear-head’s tang reached deep into its far butt, the steel itself dulled by soot yet immeasurably supple and unyielding. He drove forward, meeting their charge, spinning a low chop from the combi-sword away from his thigh and snapping the spear-haft up into an unguarded face. The Second Hood reeled; his implants were gnashed back into his facial bone and tender nerve connections were now grinding excruciatingly against each other.

In came the electro-truncheon, missing his shoulder by a hairs-breadth. The Street Sweeper harried the First Hood back with a delaying assault on his guard, pacing back now. The Third Hood hefted his truncheon again and broke into a sprinting ram; his arm swung out to crash the Sweeper’s yari from the attack line, putting his opposite shoulder forward and ducking. The Street Sweeper let the youth gather his momentum. And then met him with nothing. His footing glided aside, his body following, tripping the Hood into a tumble, subsequently turned into a deft throw that tossed him off his heels.

“Old Trash Man…” One of them croaked. Second Hood, the Street Sweeper noted. His knives ground and skated together, lighting off sparks. Trying to goad a reaction from his widened guard. The Street Sweeper didn’t miss the First Hood skip to the edge of his peripheral and dart forward at his flank. The attack was a heavy joust, aimed for his ribs, with enough power behind the blow to skewer through plate and ceramic casement. The Sweeper plied his spearhead forward. It steel met and skinned just beneath the combi-blade, running the length of its grooved fuller, its point slipping over the Sweeper’s shoulder to meet warm, thin air. He drove in, piercing the spear on through the gap just beneath Hood One’s sternal plate. In and through his heart, puncturing tender lung bronchi and severing a host of mortally critical arterial blood streams. With a shrug, he ejected the spear free and left the Hood to sway and die on his feet. Blood slashed the morning-warm sidewalk.

Again, the Second Hood waded in close, chopping at the Sweeper’s wrists and elbows. The vibro-knives buzzed, nicking the air with ozone trails. The Street Sweeper scented the close, sour tang of unwashed body sweat and halitosis. He choked his hands up further along the spear haft, its wood gouged and burned in a dozen places, retaking the initiative. Now he harried back. The Sweeper sent the yari’s edge across the Hood’s chest, across his hip, reversing low and leaving a stinging stroke over the bone of his knee-caps. Shallow, distracting wounds that would heighten any agitation or panic preying on the Hood’s wits. The Sweeper back-stepped, accepted a trio of hammering over-head cuts, countered the fourth with a neat disarm that took a knife and several fingers away.

Second Hood screeched. The yari spear suddenly filled his mouth. Its blackened, folded steel went up through the tissue and bone of his soft pallet. His brain pan split at the top of his skull. The Hood slackened dumbly as his knees fell out from beneath him and hit the street dead before he could know he was dying. The Sweeper turned to the last thug; the Third youth hunched on his boot toes beside a locked airspeeder. The truncheon leapt and juggled between his thin palms.

“Old Trash Man~” He sang. The Sweeper saw his teeth were dyed very black. His tongue was split like a viper’s, the back of his throat etched with a laser’too. “Old Trash Man~”

“Copikla…” The Sweeper muttered, waiting the low-stance. He could have, should have, optioned for the offensive. Counter-attacking was lethally risky and while the Tatsutora and Niten-Ichi schools were exhaustively comprehensive on their application, still the sensei argued: offensive! Finally, goaded by the Sweeper’s posture, the Hood gathered himself and bounced up, sprinting down the sidewalk.

The electro-truncheon would be trouble. It spat electric arcs and the Street Sweeper’s short spear nakae, its haft, wasn’t shielded against conductive charges. At low-gain settings, he knew, the pulse would be enough to numb his hands and knock the pole from his grasp. At high-gain, where the electric yields were almost lethal, there was a chance one good connection would send so much volt and amperage his fingers would implode before the shock knocked out his heart. The Hood’s lips were pulled in a rictus grin. Snarling, he swung for the Sweeper’s chest, glad the spear haft would get in the way. His thumb twisted a dial in the taped grip and the truncheon bolts began shaking with increased charge.

The Sweeper dropped his spear. It clattered aside, kicked away by the Hood’s hurried feet. He then broke forward and intercepted, grappling the youth in a hold that twisted the truncheon free, broke every bone in his wrist, popped the elbow at a terrific angle, and opened the Hood up for further punishment. The Sweeper’s hand knifed into a spot on his rib-cage. The atemi-blow snapped the bone in. He felt the puncture of heart tissue and muscle. The Hood shuddered appallingly in his grasp, his right arm dangling and liquid. The youth’s mouth softly popped open. Blood and flecked spittle oozed past his black teeth. When he was certain, the Street Sweeper lowered the boy by the mouth of a near alleyway and propped him up to sit.

-

He retrieved the spear, its broom-head, affixing it back into place on the waiting trolley. Mercifully, Logan Road remained fitfully sleepy during the short melee. The trolley began to wheel along, the picker returning to snagging plastic wrapping, food packaging, and iho-butts from cracks in the ferrocrete walkway. High in the hab-block levels, street side windows began clapping open. A smell of cheap food stuff breakfasts, mingling with nerf back-bacon deshi-quail egg patties. Song began playing, the morning radios of a thousand on thousand families tuning into Tinwitch’s pirated broadcast band.

A store front unlocked and slid its shutter away into a rolling housing installed in the jamb of the door. The owner beetled out into the morning light. The Street Sweeper watched him take in the dry heat, smiling imperceptibly to himself. They noted one another with polite bows. The Sweeper paused as the owner receded into his shop to bring out the prior evening’s garbage. He slaked his thirst with brackish tea from an old and well dented jug, waiting. The owner saddled an extra three bags onto the cart, again bowed just politely enough, and palmed the Sweeper with a few ‘blue note’ creds for his service. Man and trolley trundled along, equally filthy with the long night’s trash collection.

A part in the stained nimbus striations over the Tinwitch Burroughs suddenly filled long Logan Road with glare. Cato Fett stopped his cart, bowing against the brightness. When the clouds re-exerted their choke on the dawn, fading the colours out until the high street walls took back their drizzly greyness, he undid the knotting of his hat. He stared up where the local sun burned as a fuzzy discus stuck behind curtains of drifting industrial smog. Simply stared, briefly lost in the cacophony of thought-filled quiet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCprKGg_VYM​

 

[Cato Fett]

‘Home’ was holed deep behind the Lop-Sing Restaurant, off the corner of Fleet Street where it slashed across Logan Road and went on for another half-dozen habitat blocks. It’d formerly been a modest storage closet that had underwent successive expansions, as the Lop-Sing drew notoriety and began working covetously to retain its fickle patrons. When Cato rediscovered the closet, it had been roughly transformed into a working studio space. The combination of bedroom, kitchen and bathroom in what amounted to a lengthened hallway. Regardless of housing permissions, he went about reconstructing the given corridor into a proper den. Walls were hacked apart, opening onto previously condemned suites left forgotten, immense care take in rerouting the plumbing, entire sections of natty wiring trashed and subsequently replaced. There was room enough now to sleep in cramped privacy, use the privy, and maintain sanitization in the spare kitchen space.

The trolley was left outside the entry door. All that Cato removed were a pair of false ‘broomsticks’, camouflaged yari spears, and a hidden set of various tanto longknives bolted underneath the cart’s top drawer. Reputation guarded the rest; such as a rumour that those that attempted to siphon cleaning chemicals from their unguarded packing crate went into spasmodic fits, the seizures violent enough to tear them apart. ‘Old Trash Man Xhilin’ had his evil eye fixed on his property. And Nar Shaddaa taught a certain respect for the power of a good hex.

After arriving, he undressed and showered under arctic water. The chill, extreme even for him, woke up fire in Cato’s veins and flushed his skin with blood. He emerged, scuffed rawly from a steely brush, taut and supple as a waiting bowstring. Properly sanctified and rid of the world’s greases and grime, Cato turned his attentions to ceremony. First, he crawled to a special alcove he’d built into the farthest wall of his tiny dojo. In the tokonoma he’d hung a pair of inked scroll-works. Each were scrawled in the characters of his parental schools. Niten-Ichi, Two Heavens as One. Tatsutora, the School of Heaven and Earth, the essences of the Dragon and Tiger respectively. He prostrated until his cool brow touched the matting. Next, then, he went to place of the funerary tablets. They were polished jet-stones carved with Asahian ideograms, ultimately Atrisian in origin but like so many things that’d take root on Asahi, the Asahian simply made them their own.

First was Yuna’Sif. Adoptive mother, mentor. Second was old Kenichi, the wizened Tengu of the Holy Peaks, that most influencing and diabolical instructor. Both long departed. Cato lit the incense sticks in their little, lion-pawed iron wells, adjusted the batons holding up the holy paper ribbons. A last touch was adding a new floral arrangement to a blue-washed vase posed between their tablets. Cato rose, bowed over his waist, never taking his eyes off their carved-in-stone names. Then he trained.

-

Firstly, with bare hand and foot, exercising the tremendous powers of proper body mechanics. Jujutsu, the Art and Sciences of Suppleness, Aikijutsu, the Art of Coordinated Spirit, Daken Taijutsu, Kempo, Koppo, percussive schools of Fist and Body Striking. All integrated under the Asahian umbrella of Taijutsu, the Body Sciences comprehensively governing both physical movement and the necessary mental state to motivate action and reaction. A constant condition of easy combat readiness, so crucial to the Asahian bujin centuries prior. Perhaps most integral was the concept of haragei; the word held various definitions depending on context but within the Bujutsu canons guarded jealously by the Asahian ryu, it was an almost preternatural ability. A way of sensing intent without having to witness any telegraphing action, informing a warrior of attack, ambush, etcetra. Cato understood it as virtually esoteric but worked as he could to inculcate the skill.

Next came the sword, the short-blade, independently and in harmonious tandem. Both Tatsutora and Niten-Ichi emphasized skill with edged weaponry, supreme being the various tachi or swords. Tatsutora ruled eminently with the single longsword, while Niten-Ichi was a devastating and pioneering school devoted to mastery of paired tachi, from the lengthier blades down to the ever-so-modest tanto knives. Cato never knew what artifice Yuna’sif must have exhibited to have him inducted into both ryu, never mind the sacrifices and formidable political cunning necessary to see him enter even one of them. To what end, Cato was ignorant. All that felt left to him was to continually exhibit gratitude, as was only natural in a child to their parent, continuing on their familial legacy so demanded by precepts of Mandalorian and Asahian filial piety.

There was yet more that formed Cato’s daily curriculum. A great deal he admitted that seemed unable to fit into a single afternoon, no matter how long the hours waxed and drew. The art of the knife and spear, the way of the bow, all the many mighty and miniscule arts of Bujutsu that were so very critical in completing the ouroboros of his skillset. Not even mentioning the many diamond facets that structured Ninjutsu, the survival arts that ran as an auxiliary compliment. Combined with the training he received at the gnarled hands of the matronly Noghri, it drew Cato into a shaded world of skullduggery. So very much, he thought, and perhaps not enough time in a given life to master it all.

He bent his back to it regardless, hefting the scarred bokuto wood-sword into guard. Phantoms of imagined opponents darted over the dojo flooring. Shadow-play didn’t hold the same visceral danger as actual opponents but it was all Cato could afford. There weren’t local students or adherents or even enthusiasts to recruit for the daily work regimes. He could only will himself to feel the lash of danger on his nerves. He warded off a set of sequential kata and slew the mental apparition with a counter-stroke through the heart. Turned, clashed with a vertical slice and then wound their paired swords together, his edges sliding along his foe’s with speed while keeping their ability to strike immobile, slicing into a chest-that-was-not-there and putting a narrow hole through a phantasm heart.

Again, he went on. Perfection was impossible. Practice beget practice and then, Cato understood, there was still that equation of chaos prevalent in every martial contest. He panted and toweled the sweat off his ribs and throat. He toed into the matting, curious if there were given defects already sewn into the dojo’s flooring. Stepping onto a hidden splinter, now momentarily off his fighting kilter, enough of a fraction of a second’s tenth to give his myriad opponents their much-sought opportunity. He replaced the worn practice sword on to its attendant rack. Listened to the oxygenated thrum pulsing thickly in the drums of his ears. For a moment, at the furred edge of his peripheral sight, he liked to imagine catching a head of red hair running behind the far screen doors.

-

For supper, he barbecued pork over a smokeless coal brazier beside the stove. The heat warmed his jaw and cheeks, watching with care fat collected on narrowly packed steel rungs and the flavour fermented itself in the meat. Helped along by garlic cloves and rosemary. Cato felt it was an indulgence but between the rigors of street work and back alley duels, his musculature and brain-matter were highly demanding of the necessary nutrients ensuring their peak performance. He readied a bowl of cold ‘greens’: cucumber, orange and red pepper, sweet and hot onion, tomato, dashed with brined curds.

Afterward, meal perched on his knees, clapping a pair of chopsticks between his fingers, Cato tuned to a small box with a crystalline display. The holonet transceiver was a gutted bridge console taken from an old Corellian YT model. Cato flicked a side-catch, listening to power hum in from its wall plugin. The screen bounced with ghosting artefacts. He scowled, made adjustments with a set of archaic dials, until finally he began receiving imagery. The GNN figure was monochrome and boxed in, all fine detail smudged. Cato keyed up the volume.

“…series of stunning rebukes, the Confederacy of Independent Systems has added its voice to a growing number of denouncers calling for, among other concessions, immediate debarkation of any Mandalorian presence from the Halori and Ploo sectors. Response from Mandalorian space has so far been unforthcoming.”

Cato muted the vid-stream, turning to consult a rough grease-paper printout. It was a copy of a roughly segmented galactic plane, zoned and divided under varying and current powers and institutions. Again, he noted, the Core was beginning to crowd. Corellians and Imperials pooling around one another, nearby the demure Silver Jedi with their all-but-in-name hegemony guarding the eastern sweep of the galactic flank. North, the Mandalorian Empire, looking chipped and haggard. Still further North on the plane, the great swollen bulk of the Sith.

Obroa-Skai. Tanaab too, he noted. Lost. Even if the Clans held out, both Onderon and Hapes would have rallied to sue for secession. With cries denouncing Mandalorian occupation, damning the Mandalore herself, the Hapan system alone would have gone for the throat and mauled their way free. As it stood, the Clans had lost their bridge to the Inner Rim and if the actions on Kiros were correct, if the scrotal Tanomas Graf was leading his own separate charge, the Clans would be pushed out into the rough beyond of the Mid Rim. His finger traced along, touching the mote of Azure. Now the Silver Jedi were testing themselves here in reply to what had been done on Eshan and H’ratth. If they could carry forward through Mandalorian defense lines, on through to Velmor, another limb of territory would be axed free.

Or, Cato thought, and swept his finger upward. Touching Mandalore. Or they’d join into a pronged assault on the Mandalorian heartlands and help skewer through Mandalore itself. Much of it depended on the coincidence of desire between the Jedi, Confederacy, and Imperials, and if their various ambassadorial agents could cement, even temporarily, an alliance of convenience to finally muzzle the Mandalorian threat once and for all. Ultimately, there was Sith intervention to consider. If they would unleash their war machine to devour the Clans and open up their holdings along the Hydian Way and the Darragon line. Since coming into possession of the Etti systems, even the Emperor’s office would have to contend with demands from the corporate sectors. Dark ritual was all well and good but an empire fueled itself with commerce. For all their promises and show, the Mandalorians had not proven themselves competent or even willing venture partners.

He sighed through his nose, putting cold dinner leftovers aside on a low table. It would take just a pinpoint cleave from Dathomir and the Sith would lop off the head of the UCM’s flailing ‘empire’. Did the Infernal see it? Were her senses instead preoccupied with burgeoning issues piling at her boots domestically? Cato stared across the map, conceiving possible scenarios and the Mandalorian response in turn. The promise of making a virgin galaxy tremble at their coming sounded all the more hollow. Now hard won years of domestic growth, demonstrating the possibilities of a Mandalorian renaissance, was at risk of wasting if not outright destruction. Even if military reprisals were halted, Cato wondered how long the Clans could hold out if the great Banking Houses simply closed their doors.

Like that, he clapped his hands. Their shipping lines, their bulk trading, property, their storage facilities and business ventures, stocks, virtually everything. Rendered worthless, if not destroyed and crippled outright. Did anyone within the counsels of the Mandalore understand or even ken the subtle ruination that could come from a simple board meeting? Or how weak their people were rendered by ironically banking everything upon the successes of a sustained empire? Eventually their doom would be woken from beneath occupied worlds, Cato knew. Patriotism was not a strictly Mandalorian trait. Every naturalized citizen under Mandalorian authority knew it their duty to resist and, ultimately, buy back their independence with so much blood. He rose and paced to a spot between his small bedroom and the privy. A filthy skylight looked up at foggy evening sky, through a narrowed tunnel boring up through the hab-block.

It came down to poison, so he believed. Nameless toxins roiling in their blood and encouraged by long decades humouring the lead of the old guard. Passion had soured to hate, initiative to stagnation, direction had foundered while personalities battled for the title of Mandalore. So much effort had been spent trying to reclaim the old spirits of the gods that nothing had been readied for the souls of those yet born for their tribe. They were left with authorities at odds with change. And always, always! The coups and revolutions, declarations of manifest destiny, opposing narratives about what was needed to breathe life back into their Resol’nare. The bloodying and toxic debates as to what construed a ‘true’ and full Mandalorian.

“…Certainly not me,” Cato murmured. He unfolded a small flimsiplast pict fished out of his robes. A young woman with a garishly daring smile, hair twice as bright and red, laughed at something past the picture frame. Young, buxom, beautiful, nearly impossible to deny. Cato smoothed a crinkled edge, looking again up at the skylight. He hadn’t answers to their dilemmas either. …Save a feverish pipe dream, ending on a name that’d stuck with him since Yuna’sif first uttered it.

“Noble House…” Cato whispered.

A knock rapt at the door.

 

[Cato Fett]

The door hissed on stale air turned by the greased jamb servo-motors, whisking aside into the hollowed walling. The boy outside waiting in the dim, brackish must and sulphuric gloom paused, peering into an empty, cramped vestibule. A pair of worn and duct-taped boots, encrusted with permanent mud and trash rimes, were neatly laid on an earthen pit before a raised cedar floor. Again, the boy struck his knuckles against the outside frame and waited. So much for the Old Trash Man’s supposed promptness, he thought, spitting onto the ferrocrete.

Ahh but it was too much to expect from some dung-eating waste collector, that many were strangely terrified of and yet simultaneously dependent on. Devil-eyed he may be but surely just another self-fornicating offworlder and all offworlders were desperate fleas clinging fast to Nar Shaddaa’s underbelly with their urgent thirst. They possessed no manners and no grace and certainly no finely bred wisdom that enabled true locals to gauge the monetary flows running just beneath the planet’s urban crust. Why did he have to pay this one such an inopportune visit? The mah-jong games run by Second Cousin Gol Twice-Removed were well along. His pocket felt heavy with NS notes; illegal cash notes that were nonetheless accepted tender in many of Nar Shaddaa’s back alley circles. The boy knew he was due for good luck this evening. If only this self-fornicating Trash Man Xhilin would do him the owed courtesy of showing up!

He rapt the jamb again, time beginning to coalesce as sweat dampening his holed-through shirt. The boy blew noisily out his nostrils and ducked his head past the door frame.

A steely hand pressed down over the boy’s nape, the fingers digging in against a handful of nerve-points. Cato felt the boy go nearly limp in his grasp. The lad’s eyes were wide as sauce-plates, the sclera marble bright. Warily content now, he altered his hold and depressed a small knot of muscle and tissue beneath the boy’s neckline. At once, the boy was perked up and alert, jumping back from the entrance. Cato stood framed by the low vestibule light, dressed in a shortened men’s kimono and modified mountain-hakama trousers, corded with predatory energy. Green eyes sparked with that thread of unholy lightning.

The boy quickly spat the loose torrent of spit that’d welled up in his cheeks. Then extended his hand forward, fingers clawed around a crumpled note. He deposited it onto Cato’s waiting palm and dashed back along the narrow alleyway, tripping over cracks and juts in the broken concrete. Cato allowed a low chortle, taking care to unfold the note as he retreated back inside. As the door closed at his back, the note plied open. He scanned over thick but neat print penned in bright ink.

“To the Honorable Old Trash Collector Xhilin,
Of Much Lauded Tinwitch Borough,

May this missive find you in good health and better luck. I ask for your presence today, where Artstone and Teleray meet, for an urgent matter. Please visit at your earliest convenience.

-L.F.W.”

Last Fang Willie? Cato reviewed the message; certain it’d been drafted by a secretary or at least a learned flunky. Last Fang Willie was a xeno of an indeterminate people. Few were certain to when Willie had first come to Nar Shaddaa and set up his ‘Brotherhood’. Cato was sure he was a refugee that’d taken the long space-lanes through the Outer Rim from the Unknown Regions. ‘Willie’ was just a Basic affectation, shortening his given name from an incompatible knot of smashed consonants. The ‘Honoured Uncle’ relied on translation modules, protocol droids, and a great many interpreting intermediaries to manage his affairs. No less lethal or expansive for it, as magnanimous with rewards as he was with meting out punishment whenever his henchmen performed underwhelmingly. Cato had dealt with him once. Recovering a stolen and then fenced precious-stone carving that was L.F. Willie’s most prized knickknack.

He went to the small dojo, refolding the missive as he stalked the mats. The alcove hanging the ryu scrolls held staid as he paced, the flower arrangement in its pale ceramic vase pleasing. His hands began itching to hold the bokuto, mind racing over the implications and possibilities of LFW’s summons. Cato paused by the weapon racks, running hand and eye over the well-worn training swords and tanto. Two distinct scenarios came to the forefront. It could perhaps be just another errand LFW wished to contract out, Cato thought, picking up one wood sword and riposting an unseen swipe at his flank. Or the gangster wished to court him closer into his dealings. Cato’s skills were proven, without the standard showboating or palm-greasing that came with so many Nar Shaddaa free-agent mercenaries. He stepped from the wall and ran through a beginner’s kata drill. Footing, posture, economy of motion, the relation of body and blade, cadence and physical rhythm. Simple truths but nonetheless foundational, Cato thought, recalling one of Kenichi’s admonitions. ‘Ignore them at your peril.’

Yes, Cato thought, and ignore Last Fang Willie to your especially peril. He walked to the bedroom, disrobing as he did. A freshly laundered overall suit waited on a wall peg beside a well-abused wide-brim straw hat. Cato reached for them, ruminating as he dressed before a long, silvertine mirror. Go as Old Trash Master, he decided. Never mind anything about Mandalorian or Asahian heritage, never mind that you are trained in the deep, biblical intimacies of combat, don’t think of the danger of presenting yourself to a known neighborhood boss, that you are far more vulnerable than you ever wish to admit, don’t think that you may very well be dead before the stroke of midnight this eve. Cato dove into his self, into the surging hara well where rested all his physical and spiritual power.

Fear, anxiousness, desire slowly atomized. His eyes opened, sharp and bright as a katana. Flexed the tendons of his hands and wrists, the outer edges of his palms thickly calloused. Though he wanted for even basic armament, he opted against carrying any of his standard tanto or shaken knives. They wouldn’t slip past even a basic security screening anyhow. Cato exited from the bedroom and went for the far doorway, pulling on his tattered work books. What does LFW really want? How to intuit that? He stood and went out into the new evening, pulling and locking the servo-door into place. An airy zephyr carried Nar Shaddaa’s odour of septic, petrol, and ozone down the long alley. Light, pale and dirty with the day’s pollution, shone at the far end. Leaving his cart chained in place, he went to hail an aircab.

-

“You have come. This is good.”

Last Fang Willie finished breathing against a steel-grilled microphone. It was bolt and mounted to a wing-swept, high-backed chair, upholstered lushly with warm Alderaanian nerf-leather and propped up by squat pegs carved into lion’s claws from Kashyyyk wroshyyr wood. Sound amplifiers framed the throne from behind, and all were exactingly settled on a modest dais, overlooking a kind of audience chamber. Willie kept the light off his seat, draped beneath long rugs tossed over his brow to effect a shrouded countenance. A heavy, boney jaw jutted out from under blocks of shadow, nearly skinless and sharp, rowed with long and nearly glassy teeth. Each of his four hands were three-fingered and covered in keratin growths. His eyes were deeply recessed, lost in the shade created by the rugs and the contours of his pitted skull.

“I trusted you would. Your character has been proven, Old Trash Man Xhilin. You would come and listen,” Willie said. His voice had the timbre of crumbling bark and sounded oddly atonal paired with the translator unit’s synthesized “I would ask if you wish to sit but my manners are awful and anyway, you won’t be here for too long. Time… Time is not enough.”

The aircab dropped Cato off thirty two hab-block levels above, the place where the Tinwitch Burroughs began to see more of the natural sun, the high-rises more neat, tidy, slowly beginning to needle into the void armoured space-towers leering so very, very high overhead. LF Willie kept himself to a camouflaged mansion, built into what still was the first six floors of a middle-class apartment rise. To enter, Cato had to navigate a switchback filled backalley maze and pass no less than four checkpoints, all the while under near constant surveillance, satisfy the platoon of disguised security droids idling like beggars under cardboard, corrugated siding and tarpaulin. To at last at what looked like just another maintenance porthole cut in to the buildings ferrocrete and siding. He was shown through, patted down in a quiet coatroom brimming with further electronic counter-measures and smelling of pleasant smoke and aged fabrics, and then on to the audience chamber proper.

Willie adjusted himself in his seat, peering down at Cato. His chunky hands were rubbing something between their fingers. Cato raised his hat brim a tad and saw it was locks of cut blonde hair. Willie nodded, to his guest and himself. “I know the Clans adopt frequently. Why should a thing like blood get in the way of looking after the family? It’s the same with my people, and for myself, an opportunity to spend something of all the materials I have saved and locked away.”

Cato had to wonder: which was he referring to? The Mandalorian families or the great houses of Asahi, where adoption and name changes were frequent, their genealogical tables fastidiously recorded, as infuriatingly complex as they were. What did Last Fang know of him, really? He waited politely for Willie to come to the point. The gangster held the hair up to the light, letting its woven threads dance with motes of honey-gold.

“She was beautiful. My daughter. Lost like me, fair, brilliant, a diamond this muck and pox-ridden place somehow managed to squeeze out. I won’t say her name otherwise the rage will come on and I will be useless to everyone. Just know that she was dear, Old Trash Master Xhilin.”

Willie set the hair down on his lap and fell back deeper against his chair. The weight of the room engulfed about him. “I did my best protecting her. Never was there a moment where I was not sure her that even her blindspots were tended to. How that security was breached I don’t know, though I will, but too many good servants were destroyed and then… And then she was slaughtered. Slaughtered. Your ‘Basic’ does not describe the… the obscenities… That she underwent. This,” And he hefted the lock of hair once more. “Was all that was left untainted.”

After a long pause, Willie went on. “It took no great sleuthing tracking down the culprits. Their boldness was almost an affront. Your concern is not that excrement; those ones I visited myself on. No, what you will be tasked with is wrenching the heart and soul out of their keeper, the persona responsible for bankrolling the spies that dismantled my daughter’s security. That now plants their gaze onto Tinwitch and seeks to pry me from my perch as ‘Boss’. Yes, for all its poverty and shid-stained modesty, these Burroughs generate substantial coin. The impoverished are anything if not staggeringly ingenious in accruing enough NS notes to wager in on back alley dice. However, I digress. Tell me, Trash Master Xhilin, what you know about Viola Rosecroft.”

“Only gossip and only snatches and fragments,” Cato said, shrugging, silencing the uneasy pangs knotting in the skin of his lungs. “She holds court from inside the Golden Nautolan in C-Sector. That she’s a canny killer, viciously cunning, that she’s rumoured to have killed at thirteen and went on notching her belt well into her dancing years. The Red Ravens couldn’t touch her during their tenure. She’s had seven husbands and innumerable lovers, so they say. The Hutts despise her but know she’s got the men and materiel to hold off even a professional army. For a time. It’s no secret she’s bragged of one day holding the system in her hands. And she just may do it. If the other bosses and clans and hongs and tongs don’t stymie her advances, she’ll wring Nar Shaddaa for every spare bent decicred it has.”

“Yes. Well put. Indeed…” Willie rumbled, then stabbed a fat forefinger toward Cato. The ronin watched the heavy cowl shielding Last Fang’s face from the light. “Save that she will not. I forecast that within seventy-two hours, Viola Rosecroft will be dead and her line wiped from the face of our good moon. Within twelve hours following, her territories and bullion will be picked clean.”

“You believe the gods will come down and strike her dead?” Cato asked, voice just a low murmur that carried well in the almost ringing quiet. He’d quieted his prior uneasiness, surrendering to karma. Electric vigour was beginning to prick the length of his musculature.

“In a way, perhaps.” The boss reached over to an end table waiting beside his chair and hefted a heavy, string-tied pouch. He tossed it, Cato catching it easily in a hand, his fingers clenching against the solid bars of silver tucked inside. “That is ten taels. You are holding more than most Coruscanti make within a fiscal year.”

“A down payment for services potentially rendered.”

“…The romance of Nar Shaddaa is that most who come to stay bring with them pieces of mystery. No one’s ever quite certain where a stranger has arrived from, or who or what they were in a life prior. I do not care where a certain Old Trash Master Xhilin has appeared from or the why. I know that he is dangerous. The Wylo’s of 906 Block 18 asked him to help avenge themselves on the couple that robbed them of their eldest. Miss Albery of the Güyer Hall paid him handsomely to stop a local racketeer from siphoning her accounts dry. Just last night, three hotwired joeboys of the Flying Fifty-Fours, known in circles as the Three Midnight Sons, attempted to kill a street sweeper coming home from Logan Road. They are dead. I believe your craft is death, Old Trash Master Xhilin. I would like to hire you.”

“…There’s a thousand assassins you could bring from offworld to put Viola Rosecroft down,” Cato began, weighing the tael pouch in his grip. “If you want the absolute best for your silver, Last Fang Willie, the Supercommandos of Mandalore. Or…”

“Or the Asahian Shinobi,” Willie finished. A ripple ran through the room. Modestly statured, Cato’s presence seemed magnified, thrumming with cold power. LWF again shifted his bulk, a slight palsy tick showing in the corner of his jaw. “Or those Imperial killers out of Bastion or Serenno. Yes. They would bring a certain technological edge. The Mandalorians especially.”

“So why then a street sweeper with makeshift broom-spears, Honoured Uncle?”

“Because the gods of Mandalore and Asahi do not strike down the wicked with depleted uranium rounds or orbital bombardment. They do not kill from behind high powered rifle scopes. They reach down through fate and the elements and let ruination come with the rain,” said Last Fang Willie. “Because such assaults are precisely what Viola Rosecroft has planned contingencies for. And because few things would please me down my sack more than knowing Nar Shaddaa’s Belle of Bedlam and all her Mean Seed were struck down by just shadow and steel.”

“…Then so be it, Honoured Uncle,” Cato said, using the honorific for a last time. He tied the pouch to his belt and pried his straw hat off, bowing but never taking his gaze off sitting LFW. At the latter’s nod, he stood up and walked from the audience hall.

 

[Cato Fett]

The metropolitan skyline had dyed from grey to jet to a backlit ash glow by the hour Cato arrived home. Some fitful, pale stars, the brightest constellations in the nearby celestial yards, broke the night’s overcast mist. He scented a wet note accompanying a low, humid zephyr slowly wafting up Logan Road. Rainfall? Then rumours of environmental controls failing in the south-western hemisphere bloc were potentially true, he thought, and some Hutt or another’s been negligent in keeping up with infrastructural upkeep. Cato’s mouth drew into a grime line, recalling the last time Nar Shaddaa suffered a haywire squall eviscerating through tracts of urban buildup. Two entire walled-in hab-blocks, lost. A third so damaged it was soon abandoned, reclaimed within the week by a squatters’ horde that cared not at all for living amidst water-logged wreckage. If the controls fail and downpour rails through, then that’s karma, he thought.

Karma, the night, and three days worth of time weighed on him. Cato unshackled the bolts locking his tiny home away and stepped inside, into the blackened vestibule, shuttering the door in his wake. The fitful light from the outside alleyway waned and finally blinked out. He stood waiting, pupils blooming wide, deciding not to bother with the lights. After a beat, he steered himself through the kitchen, retrieving a small brass candleholder and lighting its wick with a flint snap. Long shadows the colour of oil cavorted and played across smudged plaster walls, marionetted by the little candlelight flame teetering like a broken metronome.

Cato padded on bare feet into his dojo after a sharp left turn. He went to the centre of the bare flooring, taking care with the candle wax slowly bubbling and lumping. By its fitful light, he edged his fingernails underneath one particular floorboard and tugged. It came away with a dry snap, then the next, another, until seven boards had been pried loose in succession. Revealing a shallow storage space, packed with a pair of narrow trunks covered in green silk cloth. Cato selected the chest to his right, pulling gently at the fabric and folding it promptly once it loosed and slid free like grease on ice. The chest itself was an heirloom built and fitted from Asahian maple, stained the colour of rose blossoms though age had added a certain husky blackness at the edging. An etched metal plate was recessed imperceptibly dead centre on the top lid. Cato read the partially eclipsed characters drawn on the plaque, leaning the candlelight closer.

Blade Over Heart. He undid the clasps and pushed the lid back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czv8J1W4yYU​

Packed neatly in the long trunk were the uniform and preserved tools of a mercenary agent. Cato kept from running his hands rudely across the selection. He looked to the long-sleeved cotton shirt that opened like a robe, the kobakama trousers tailored to be more flexible in the waist but tighter in the leggings, both dyed to midnight blue, the under-layer of long chain mail running from wrist to collar down to the ankle, light-armour kote sleeves that fed into leather-strapped gauntlets. Nestled closely by, idling with predatory promise, was the arsenal itself. A pair of longswords gentled with elegant curvature, Asahian katana that complimented his height and reach, sleeping fitfully in pallid grey scabbards. Then the shorter tanto knives, the throwing stars and hardy climbing irons, lengths of silk rope, a compact quiver housing a score of fletched shafts, and finally an asymmetrical longbow fashioned out of bamboo and hardwood. All beautiful, all aged, and all, Cato knew, were little match against a galaxy harbouring lazer-blades, portable blaster mini-guns, fragmentation grenades that could shred duranium, and other hardware that had left such relics firmly behind.

He disrobed quickly, putting the overalls and starchy straw-hat aside in a thrice-folded pile. On slid a clean loincloth and a long under-shirt. Next the chainmail, the kobokama trousers and the cotton shirting, fitting the kote across his arms and shoulder blades, kneeling to fasten a pair of modified sune-ate greaves. Tabi socks over his bare feet, tied to steel-and-rubber soled waraji sandals. The ensemble fit closely yet with flowing ease, allowing a flow and cadence of motion Cato found lacking when rigged with standard Mandalorian armour. A heresy to say, he thought, tightening a gauntlet strap. A Mandalorian’s a Mandalorian and that was that, any variation or deviation or criticism against the Canon of Beskar grounds for the sort of ostracization that could force even the hardiest grunts to suckle on the end of a heavy blaster pistol. For all the ache Mandalore’s current troubles brought his heart, Cato was glad of his absence. He did not need the incessant cantina gossip or the sidelong stairs following him going up the long Keldabe boulevards to the Obsidian Gates. Too many questions lingered. A great lot of personal doubt. And the Resol’nare, so ironclad, ringing coldly and hollow in his thoughts.

One sword was buckled with care over the blade of his right shoulder, the second wedged firmly in his obi-belt over the right hip. Cato tested several drawing cuts, wanting to assure himself he could drag either blade free when so needed, and that either motion, shoulder or from the hip, would interfere with the other. The tanto followed, stuck into his waist-belt, the inner pockets of his shirt inventoried with shaken stars. He hauled on the weight of the quiver and again went about testing its heft. Last was the longbow. Cato stroked his thumbpad on the long stretch of its bowstring, before resting it crosswise across the broad of his torso.

Under seventy-two hours, he thought. Of that, I’ll need more than a few for rest and surveillance, which really cuts the limit down to perhaps only twenty-four hours total. Not even counting the myriad possible cock-ups, delays, mistakes, small moments of chance that always held inexorable and immense consequences, and whether or not his luck would hold. Cato sat before the dojo alcove, his own takodana, and knelt on the floor. His hands came together, fingers and knuckles forming through the nine-syllable Kuji-in mudra. Errant thought and emotion were distilled, crystallized into purpose, direction.

Never mind Last Fang Willie had essentially plied him into a suicide task. Forget that Viola Rosecraft had her beckoning six-thousand confirmed foot soldiers, another twenty-thousand unconfirmed ancillary lackeys, had tenuous connections to several ATC hardware and security-mongers, never mind she held court from within the armoured heart of the Golden Nautolan Casion enjoying every resource left over from the insolvent Red Ravens’. Never mind she had just one legal heir and probably at least three other bastards she’d bequeathed luxurious job posts and local titles, and they each possessed their own armies and fortifications. Did Willie wish for just the one or all? Why did he accept the informal contract at all?

“You’re stalling…” Cato whispered at himself.

He rose out of the seated trance and strode to where the dojo met with the kitchen. The overhead skylight was wholly darkened. He leapt, clinging by finger and toe to the ceiling, easing the skylight’s hinges upward. He crawled up through the gap and eased the plexi-dome back into place, testing to ensure the latches had properly caught. Up, up high overhead, the transom opened into a narrow stack just ten feet wide. With a deep sigh, expelling final poisonous doubts, Cato drew a breath down into his hara well. Then jumped high and back, kicking off the stack wall, twisting and charging forward before the balls of his feet caught the opposite walling and kicked up and away once more. The wall-jumps carried him upward, tempo increasing. Until the top, where Cato cut into a neat, wrenching flip that stood him upright on a tarred-and-pebbled roof. He sped off into the night, vaulting off a twanging gutter, all but flying now as he began navigating the mazes between habitation towers.

 

[Cato Fett]

Viola Rosecroft recognized just one bastard as her legalized heir and kept the boy showered solidly in material favour; allowances, virtually unimpeded education from some of the Inner Core’s more prestigious and choosing colleges. If the brat had a fancy, Viola had the good humours in securing it, from art to sports-speeders, to music and the finer, almost askew edges of gourmet, overlooking whatever deviousness he got into on his own time, more than likely encouraging her designated inheritor to gorge himself until her personal databases held just enough destructive particulars to blackmail him into shackled subservience forever. He and his eventual heirs and so on. If there was one great prize Viola Rosecroft fought and bartered for, Cato knew, it was legacy.

The winds soaring from south-southeast were strong. Cato flexed the muscle, tendon, and sinew in his cramped legs, hunched deeply in the shadows between a set of immense, shuddering air-con units. He’d made a staggering forty metre drop from a higher perch off a neighboring high-rise, landing on the balls of his feet, pulling into a brief single somersault and stopped with his toes. Now he was crouched in inky slants of shadow, hopefully masked thermally and sonically by the tumult of the vibrating air-con towers strut-bolted through the bare ferrocrete roofing. Their proximity and racket made him vulnerable to ambush, he knew. They were the only appropriate cover for a half-click radius surrounding his target: a lean residential spire segmented beautifully across its outer walling with chevrons and winged polygons fabricated with industrial glass, silhouetted by pastel spotlamps.

The spire posed above a long club quarter spanning the breadth and width of the block. Cato shifted his small monocular down at the thrumming after-hour crowds. It was body surge, compact currents, floes, eddies where the crowds oddly parted, every individual dressed dapper and gaudy in to-the-hour cutting edge fashions. Cliques were obvious, and bold. Old money gangs, the nouveau riche kids staking their claims to prestige, sneering pseudo-punks safe behind their shocking facial modifications, nervous youngsters in denim and leather on their first trip into the Promenade, all thrilled, thrice more terrified, wishing after things insubstantial but could yet be bought with enough NS notes or actual, hard currency.

At street level, Cato watched a twice-lengthened repulsor-limousine ghost up to the sidewalk. Pulsating hammer-bass rippled the carriage roofing. A door opened to the curb, showcasing red-on-black-on-velveteen carmine Corellian leather and glossy, pearlescent interior furniture. A ramp extended, a tidy handful of bodyguards in pressed suits and belt-mounted shield generators stepping forward onto the walkway. He spied a youth emerge next from the limousine, tailed by a lengthy entourage of handsome, vapid creatures. Cato fixed his monocular on the young man. Sycophants were crowding the boy, jostling discreetly to stay closest in ear-shot and flaunting the week’s last fashion discovery. Bravia ‘Bravo’ Rosecroft kept his face frigidly smooth and patient, bored. Cato found a kind of ersatz quality to the boy’s features, at once vacant and achingly handsome, with stony cheekbones cut like the edge of glass, heart-shaped, ending on a blocky chin bearded sparingly with darkly curled hair. His skull was closely shaven and, with the fashion of the month, subtly faded to produce a mesmerizing lozenge pattern. It was impossible telling where clinical alterations to enhance his natural symmetry began or stopped. But his ice-blue eyes were flat with contempt. Cato observed him regard the Promenade with vacant antipathy. Bravia gestured and the small crowd hemming at his elbows moved, escorting him through a double-door entry leading into the largest of the block social clubs.

Cato waited, discounting his luck. The Promenade was one of half-a-dozen social locales and in spite of its prestigious and altogether lurid pedigree, was losing ground to the more alluring Nighthawk and Green Alley Denways, where flesh, narcotics, and other distractions were in plethora and fiercely advertised. It was gossiped to Trash Man Xhilin, though, that the Promenade was the preferred grounds for enacting off-the-cuff and unregulated business and political arrangements. Cato gambled ‘Bravo’ Rosecroft would make a cordial appearance, thinking of Last Fang Willie’s seventy-two hour contract provision. Had Willie’s informant network forecasted an auspicious opening in the Rosecroft’s defenses, vulnerable only for those approximate three days, after which they’d be forced to weather and bide the months until routine and arrogance again reopened holes in their security?

Cato briefly scanned the surrounding rooftops gutters neighboring overhead, reaching out with haragei, trying to track the nearest danger. Nothing returned. It was humid for a Nar Shaddaa night, the south-southeast wind still blowing. The air was thrumming heavy with threatening moisture. Distantly, an immense sky-spire was backlit by strobing lightning bolts. A little reverb of thunderous bass gently quivered the ferrocrete beneath his sandals. Bright, flashing colour and action from within the forward club snatched back Cato’s attentions. He swung his monocular back up and looked for Bravo Rosecroft’s platinum white party suit. The target was navigating several pools of over-sexed young adults trying to dance and hold their drinks simultaneously. He noted the target’s brusqueness, bordering on rudeness, how Bravo looked about the mezzanine and next disappearrf into a clear-plexisteel elevator with his guard detail. The others were left to mingle, drink, and potentially fornicate, as the lift rose in a blue-lit conveyor tube to the upper penthouse floor. Cato kept up his watch until the elevator car finally paused, tiny pin-pricks of telling light activating as the outside doors opened and shut. The boy was now roosting.

The ninja regarded his options. Too few, he summarised. To properly smash or undermine Bravo’s penthouse defenses, he’d have needed a week’s worth of given surveillance and time enough to muster the necessary resources. If he went about it methodically. The other route was to defeat whatever shielding was active with ship-borne weaponry, explode the rooftop with a proton torpedo for added measure, wade in afterwards with heavy carbines to smote whatever was unfortunate enough to be left alive. Latter being characteristically Mandalorian. Cato felt the small, archaic cache of old-world tools tied and belted to his torso trunk, hips, and thighs. Swords and small bladed weapons. He was self-conscious of a way of life mostly abandoned in the current millennium. Save for outlier groups verging on extinction themselves, few approached tactical quandaries with anything less than a blaster.

A way of life, he knew. Cato thought: And it’s my karma to be so dedicated to the old schools. Karma, because a rifle feels like lead poison in my hands and I could never accept the way the armour fits so chokingly. Because I’ve a preference for Songsteel and proper alloys over the inflexibility of beskar, which marks me a heathen amongst Mando’ade but I can’t bring my heart to care. Haar’chak, and what do they care? Manda’yaim’s never wanted nor needed me.

When he was certain Bravo Rosecroft hadn’t taken his leave aboard a rooftop aircar, Cato emerged from the lee of the air-con towers. He’d drawn up a short cowl and partial mask over his head and mouth and gauged the windspeed, loathe to trust a Nar Shaddaa breeze. It was a hundred-meter gap from his side of the speeder canyon to the 350st block supporting Bravo’s penthouse spire. After quick deliberation, he decided against the jump, unable to guarantee the wind would balloon underneath his makeshift suit wings. He rose out of his crouch and lithely scaled up the long building face he’d initially leapt from, agility and power propelling him upwards at speed. Cato doubled back, tracing a route across a handful of adjacent rooftops alternating thin and solid wells of darkness, before scaling a disused power cable strung high above an arched pedestrian bridge. He clung doggedly to the cabling, all but skipping along the taut line, kicking off into a brief, tight aerial and landing balanced on the flex of his toes. He was across the long gulf, nestled out of sight, he hoped, on a shallow bricked outcropping between a set of short, terraced townhouses. The sound of throbbing, nerve-shredding chemical club-bass reached him from the streets eight stories below.

The base of Bravo’s privatised tower was a pentagon ring of smoothed, imported Kashyyyk granite, black panelled siding, and slats of polished glass arranged asymmetrically in accordance to an unknown architect’s esoteric blueprint. The most upper penthouse suite, a quadrilateral arrangement of sharply acute angles, obsidian-silicate windows, fashioned from the same offworld stone but subtly glazed with mineral red. Vague washes of light blanketing the heavy overcast shaded the suite with odd, Euclidean patterns. It was difficult telling if the lower support stanchions were rigged for video and audio scanning. Cato had little way of knowing. He knelt by a curled girder, checking his kit was still secure, pulling a pair of heavy iron-kunai from his waist belt. They were old, converted from Asahian masonry trowels for martial application. Leather thongs were looped and knotted through their hoop-pommels, as Cato slid and tied them against his forearms. Then he stood, took a short jog to the tower’s baleful walling and jumped. He punched one kunai through the granite, the second blade up a hand’s breadth higher, pulling himself up while the hard soles in his tight sandals ground and stuck for purchase. Cato climbed, managing a smooth gait while sinking the kunai through stone and lengths of camouflaged steel. He peered up; another thirty floors to go before he reached the penthouse’s foundations and substructure. The ninja exhaled, banished fatigue, drew up from the deep hara well residing down just beneath his belly, and mounted onward.

 

[Cato Fett]

Dewy rainfall had begun misting gently when Cato reached the underside of the penthouse’s patio. The platform jutted freely from the suite’s main superstructure, anchored via unseen counterweights, appearing starkly airy in spite of its brutalism and austere profile. He was climbing the east face where the night’s dark waxed thickest, another shadow amidst a dozen others. His shoulders and backbone were torrid and flushed with aching blood and equally strained muscle, fingers grasping into narrow handholds where he couldn’t risk the sound of the kunai ripping through the stonework. Cato jammed his toes in to a tiny shelf created by running support stanchions, steadied, then kicked himself upward, pulling his arms in tandem, leaping a heavy metre before clutching and cementing his palms to the patio’s hard edge. He held there, suspended against empty air.

Did the terrace have motion sensing? Seemed so very likely, he thought, neither Bravia or Mother Viola chancing leaving out even the most elementary security packages. Which meant video replete with thermal and sonic imaging wired to close-circuit monitors policed either by droid or a dedicated operator, a creature simultaneously sifting through audio feeds and all-band scanners looking for even remote evidence of possible intrusion. Cato’s heart was in his throat, soon in his belly and soon pounding in his toes. He chose to shimmy along rather than risk hauling onto the terrace decking, pulling along until the elliptical porch met and smoothly transitioned into the penthouse walling. He reached, caught his hand on a disguised power junction box, pulled his weight up until he wedged a knee into place and took some of the stress off his shoulders. Perspire soaked him through his undershirt and dark tunic, chainmail clinging like a lead cape to his musculature.

With an effort, he clambered atop the condo’s roof. It was bare and inclined, slick with now steady rainfall, grooved with deep, narrow trough that swept the majority of runoff into a wide-paunched gutter. A gust blasted into his face, wetting his cowl and mask. The weather was beginning to foul quickly now, that squall from the sou-sou’east where climate controls had malfunctioned blowing into Promenade Central. Light ambience generated by the plethora of holographic and old-world neon graphics, the ten thousand street lamps stitched across the district, was being doused out by the rainfall. Cato wiped at his eyes, gloom encroaching. He blinked again, the rooftop all but gone save for what he recalled in detail. He groped carefully, going to his belly, elbows and knees, crawling away from the east edge to the south where the roof bearded over the terrace and the patio entrance opening into the suite’s main living room.

Lightning spidered above, striking a bare antenna mast atop one of the local broadcast towers. Thunder broke in seconds later, briefly smashing the downpour into mist before the rainfall returned. Cato gauged his chances at a direct breach; ‘Bravo’ was taking cover within, he felt. Bizarre instinct painted the living room interior within his mind’s eye, something he attributed to haragei, knowing instinctually and without prompting where the six guards were arrayed throughout the pricey condominium. Direct breach, he again thought? No. The windows were doubtless reinforced and shielded, would foil any physical breach save for the most extreme kinetic blows. Physical power he did not possess. He doubled back, checking against the ventilation grille covers, foiled each time by their durable welds and reinforced alloy. Not that way. Without a mental blueprint mapping the penthouse ducts, Cato couldn’t be certain they’d even allow him to fit. He considered the very real possibility of prolonged observation overnight, wind cutting into his back, the rain drubbing across his prone profile.

Where’s the vulnerability, he thought? And have I been detected? The rising storm weather would provide some cover but the increasingly prolonged exposure would hamper his abilities, and it only required an astute passing speeder driver or curious drone to disrupt what meagre cover he possessed. Cato felt entirely exposed over the suite’s roofing. He fought direness and impatience and fatigue and a thousand other poisons threatening to turn his blood to sludge and his body wooden and useless. He crawled palm over knee toward the north face, groping against the hydrophobic finish coating the slanted roofing. A cage of lightning fell overhead, cascading down communication towers, lightning masts, striking several unwary speeders in mid-traffic. Chaos reared briefly, the speeders hurtling out of the air and colliding with the closest building faces. Cato waited, lying still as stone, eyes forced open against the rain smarting off his cornea. Waited… And nothing. Sirens began echoing between beats in the following thunder blasts, and the penthouse wasn’t agitated.

At the north face, a kind of bartizan jutted from the armoured panelling. It cradled the penthouse’s private lift, now mag-locked into place and coded against unauthorized usage. It’s presence broke with the aesthetics of the loft and Cato thought it was perhaps an oversight, supplemented when the original design disallowed for interior alterations to accommodate the elevator. Perchance a weakness in Bravia Rosecroft’s little fortress. He eased over the roof’s steel edge and swiftly scaled down the bartizan, hanging for a moment before swinging his legs forward, grappling his toes into a shallow groove and holding. Underneath, where the elevator shaft met the reinforced cell was the broad transparisteel tube. Bands of durasteel anchored it to the spire’s trunk, the tube lined with recessed lighting playing on the smoky stone. Here, shadows were puddle-thin. Cato took care climbing down the tube’s siding, knowing so much of his effort would be eased with a cheap climbsuit.

Perhaps but what if you hadn’t a climbsuit? Or anything to ease the effort, he asked himself? You’ve no need of them, not that over-reliance on technology when our ancestors meted out their wrath with just bone, muscle, and sinew. Cato clenched on his molars, braced up under the bartizan. He tested the sealant closing the tube to the cage, feeling concrete epoxy, then tugging the durasteel banding ringed about the tube itself, the metal well anchored and not easily tampered with. The ninja cursed, knowing there was somewhere an oblique angle to upset Bravo’s unassailable perch. Where! And think fast, he told himself, the weather isn’t easing and you’ve got more yet to surmount once you’ve slain the boy. On cue, a gale blitzed into him and nearly tore Cato from the spire. He clung to the tube, his fingers caught round the small screw-divots of the banding. The lights of the Promenade glowed up at him from below through the slanting downpour. As the winds quieted to more tolerable KPH, he scrabbled lithely back up to the roof and laid against his back, trying not to pant.

Then his eyes noted the lightning conductor. Last Fang Willie’s words roared to the forefront of his imagination. Gods and their wrath. Cato stood into a crouch, fighting the wind shear ripping across the roof slats, steadying his footing with each low step until he reached the pole. The conductor was a four-metre copper-aluminium mast set into the high corner of the polygonal rooftop blackened with flecks of spent metallic pitch, scarred from numerous electric arc strikes, thrice as thick as Cato’s wrist. His hand went to the sword at his waist, wrist cocking the scabbard outward while gripping beneath the tsuba guard. He drew and sliced with exacting finesse. The sword edge sheared the rod free from its base. Cato caught its weight in his free hand and planted it over his shoulders, reversing the sword and re-sheathing its steel, turning about.

Air-circulation blowing up from the penthouse was funnelled through grille-locked and sealed ventilation ducts built into the roofing itself, rather than mounted boxy atop and ruining the hard-angled aesthetics defining the private suite. Cato hefted the rod, turning its sheared end to one of the vent mouths and spearing it through. It caught and twisted a fan blade, yanking about in his grip, till the fan spokes gnarled and split. He tested the give and yaw on the pole; it held solidly, plunged through the duct and into bundles of attached cabling. And free of its crucial grounding connection. Without that wire, the rod was an almost lethal attractant in the storm. Cato ground the grips of his sandals against the slanted tiling and risked sprinting. Speed carried him to the farthest roof edge, Cato throwing his feet out and sliding against his hip. Over, over the roof edge into brief, ball-twisting weightlessness, before he was turning and gripping his hands in a vice over the edge. And waited.

It took a moment and the time between breaths for the storm overhead to oblige the ninja’s wish. A roil of sour-black clouds overhead roiled and spun on themselves, steered by high winds, bruised thickly from the weight of caustic moisture. A beat. And then cold light fell from the sky with vengeful haste, twisting into meandering bolt jaggedly hurtling downward. Lightning struck the attractant rod and Cato felt it. Though his ears were stuffed thickly with wet cloth to the point of deafness, the colossal report of the sky splitting wracked his frame. He saw vessels throbbing on the inside of his eyelids, reeling with after-images bought by the flash. The penthouse jarred and convulsed on its base. All lights and power and junction boxes, defense grids, sensor suites and anti-intrusion countermeasures, every system and sub-system tied to the power network died, pouring smoke and cooked silicon. The forward windows looking onto the terrace shattered.

Cato was up, running across the splintered roof and pulling his yumi­-bow free, knocking an arrow to the bowstring. His toes found the line of the roof’s end, put power into his knees and hips, and jumped for the black terrace below. He was twisting in mid-fall, dominating the brief imbalance that nauseated his stomach, drawing tightly on the bow-knock until the arrow fletching was tickling just past his jawline. Landed, driving his knee and back foot to the decking, immediately steadying his posture and facing the open, darkened maw of the penthouse interior. Bravia ‘Bravo’ Rosecroft was seated on a white-suede loveseat, partially draped over the armrests. The cushions were stained a vulgar indigo in places where evening fire-wine had spilled in the lightning crash. Cato saw his impeccable face; dark, sculptural, eyes like jet that made the sclera stand out like marble against ebon, surgical modifications altering his resting expression into a constant, cruel sneer.

He loosed the shaft. Now was zanshin: the final pause. His heart, soul and mind, the totality of his fighting being, travelled with the arrow. The arrowhead took Bravo through his brow, snapping back his elegant skull, spattering red mist, bone, and gray viscera. The momentum and brutal force crashing him back over the spine of the loveseat. Bravo Rosecroft twitched spasmodically in a few pitiful throes, wholly dead and somehow looking beautiful for it. Cato was casting aside the bow and drawing swords as the target’s guard detail broke from their shocked fugue. Vibro-swords and snub-nosed blaster pistols ventured out after him.

In turn, he tore through them with Niten-ichi. One liquid riposte robbed a guard of his sword, his hand, his arm in three places before an unseen blow knocked his head across the terrace. Cato whirled, guarding left, snapping aside a blow to his temple, parrying a fellow to his right before receding the longsword and jabbing a hole through the man’s hip. The guard coughed against crying out, smarting richly from the wound and bleeding. Watched the man attempting an oblique flank on Cato’s backside die before he could make a strike, eviscerated across his torso trunk, pelvis, thighs, literally falling to pieces. The Mandalorian a liquid-steel blur, snatching a sword from one guard’s hand with his own paired blades before impaling him through his sternum. Asahian Songsteel made ribbons of their Kevlar. One tried hefting a Durasteel vambrace, trying to parry Cato in mid-kata. He didn’t feel the steel cut through the metal or the musculature beneath. He did not feel much of anything as Cato sliced in, taking the cap of his skull off. Three and four and six died, shredded. Cato’s blood was up, strength and speed immense. One guard gaped as the shots from his pistol rang off the flat of one blade. Impossible! Only those witchy Jedi could pull off such a feat and this was surely just a man, a dung-eating mercenary killer that had robbed them all of their livelihoods and now their very lives.

He cursed foully and vigorously in Huttese, throwing aside the pistol and charging in. Cato caught his flailing strikes, almost gently, turning the guard’s assault around him. Wind, water, and willows. He made a final diagonal blow across the guard’s back, opening him from the bone of his shoulder down past his hip. The xeno fell away, hosing life and gouts of bright ichor.

With an effort, Cato divorced himself from the combat rush. He cleaned off his blades on the inside of his elbows, replacing them into their waiting, faithful scabbards. Gashes were open on his brow, cheeks, a cut weeping on one bicep, one leg showing a few close incisions. Ceaseless, biting rain washed the worst of the blood away off his shirt and tight kobokama. He strode into the apartment past the splintered window panes, padding onto fine Zeltronian-styled carpets littered with plexglass and bachelor flotsam. A small fire burned fitfully in the kitchen alcove, flimsiplasts and plastics and shattered table ceramics strewn about the floor. Light fixtures overhead were all imploded. Cato knocked aside the loveseat and peered down at Bravia Rosecroft.

The boy laid brokenly in pose, head angled all wrong and pinned through by the arrow. Cato knelt and gripped Bravia’s skull, picking the arrow free; the shaft wasn’t yet broken, the fletching wet but still pristine, and the arrowhead itself unmarked for its passage through skull and brain-matter. Waste not. And don’t leave a calling card, he thought, amateurish as you are and as you have been this whole rotten evening. He pressed on the corpse’s carotid, checked for any unlikely distal traces. The legitimatized bastard was gone.

And so was Cato. He took a last look at the youth and felt nothing. He sped off out the terrace windows back under the storm-fall, undoing the knotting holding gossamer-like silk rolled staunchly against his pits, ribs and sides. Rapidly, the miniature ‘wings’ filled with the night’s high winds. Cato broke his stride into a full sprint, to the edge of the long terrace, and leapt free. The wings briefly fluttered emptily before they swelled taut and pulled at his frame. He adjusted his bearing, half-flying, half-gliding, crashing through sheets of almost solid rainfall. Promenade was a bright labyrinth below him, all the colour and light distorted like mixing paint from the hazing storm. He tucked in slightly, sped up, went hewing past a lane of air-traffic. Get away from here, he thought, and do it carefully. The night and the racing storm felt far from done.

 

[Cato Fett]

The Golden Nautolan Casino complex encompassed two-hundred-thirteen acres of C-Sector real-estate. Cato was nested atop the Inzer-Brine Co. communications tower, a half-and-half hab-block supporting the naked stanchions and bare girders criss-crossing a heavy spire bristling like a pin cushion with attached masts, antennae, slowly swivelling dishes aimed to the overcast heavens. He ate from a poly-styrene plate, hot noodles with beef, carrots, and cabbage in a pleasant black-bean sauce, slurping over cheap plastic chopsticks. Washed it back with sips of cold if brackish water bought from the same street-level vendor six miles back, his only stop since putting an arrow through Bravia ‘Bravo’ Rosecroft’s brow.

He tied his trash off in small plastic bag and knotted it to a girder, watching its misshaped ball toss and bounce with the gale. Winds were shrieking; Since midnight, the ill-effects of the rogue weather controls in the south-east had spilled over into neighboring sectors, the effect exacerbating and snowballing, as other control matrix’s failed to adjust to the sudden inclement onslaught and subsequently adding to the storm system. It wasn’t tai-fun, Cato knew, not yet. Not yet hurricane grade and understood the cartels would throw as much bought expertise as needed to stem and then choke the issue down. Until then, winds were high and yowling, rain falling in twisting curtains, making visibility akin to squinting against a cataract. Cato steadied himself against a girder strut, noting its slight quiver in the wind, and returned the monocular to his eye.

Plainclothes mercenaries were laced along the walkways wrapping around the casino’s long perimeter, each entry gate manned by a uniformed trio idling in squat gatehouses sharing space with power-generator sheds. He couldn’t detect them outright but Cato felt certain the stuccoed walls tracing the edges of the sprawling compound were installed with automatic drone-turrets, along with particle and ray shielding that would activate at a moment’s notice. Elsewhere were covert garages containing interceptor-speeders and retained-as-needed squadrons that could converge on the lengthy parking lots, the casino-complex itself. Beyond that and a small fleet of air-cars ducking in and out of overhead sky-lanes, keeping up a constant circuit patrol, he couldn’t note any further assets. Where were the droids, the autonomous defenses? How impregnable were the interior gambling dens, spas, hotel floors? Where were the stopgap measures and the choke points and the bottlenecking security barricades, the traps, false ends, body doubles and holographic facsimiles? The GNC’s demure fortifications were just as blinding if it were hidden behind opaque shielding.

Cato shrugged, rubbing the tissue in one shoulder. Karma. He considered an impromptu interrogation, deciding against alerting Rosecroft unnecessarily though it was doubtless a moot point. If Viola Rosecroft was not immediately alerted to her heir’s sudden, inexplicable demise, the details would be reaching her momentarily. Cato envied that; information, its vast, reaching power, how it could be used combatively as killing leverage. Ahh but that was a virtual pipe-dream, he thought. Disregarding the more elder intelligence networks, both active and ‘defunct’ currently at work across the galaxy, it’d require funds, time, contacts, favours, and blood. Gold and silver and blood. His imagination wove back to the first halcyon days following the Emergence from the plagued Dark Age. If he could transplant himself then and there, go into merchant fleeting and mercenary work, collar a few of the banking guilds by the balls, expand trade, manufacturing, master the ebb and flow of goods and services, together with a vetted and detailed intelligence branch scouring for clues and hints as to how best keep their great venture afloat… Commanded by a syncretic combination of Mandalorian and Asahian lifeblood and culture. Forever prosperous! Beyond the Manda’yaim politicking and inter-clan rivalries, all those explosive civil wars, able to see to their own affairs, their own clans and families, build for a future not so dependent on obvious ‘empire’. The ultimate dream: Noble House!

But, his conscience niggled, would it ultimately be Mandalorian? Cato stuffed the worry aside and cocked the monocular up at the top floor of the Red Diamant Hotel. It’s upper suite spanned the central and flanking wings that folded around the central San Luca courtyard, converted into office and living spaces, with a private dining hall Cato could spy, numerous guest chambers, unseen stairs or even a short lift that took Rosecroft and her staff to the exclusive rooftop landing pads. A slight, static haze drew murky curtains over the high Alderaanian windows; anti-surveillance screens, more than likely paired with variously calibrated and concentric shield layers. The generators powering her most private defenses would be divorced from the main batteries keeping the casino sprawl operational. Cato nixed disabling the central power, knowing Rosecroft would be untouchable regardless.

He wished, most privately, he had Laira Darkhold still on call. Her resources were impromptu and carefully scattered across the Rims, and Cato knew she’d have an ace-in-the-hole covertly established somewhere in Nar Shaddaa’s power stratas. An agent or their company, thoroughly masked, with a crucial ‘in’ to all the great fortresses across the moon. And it didn’t hurt at all, Cato thought, that she was young and lovely, able to make the most mundane conversations veer from ‘bore’ to fun. Beautiful, buxom, infatuated with you and you had the fugyougi brass-neck to leave her hanging by her red hair. Cato clamped down on his own guilt and refocused. Again, where! There was a given weakness inherent to every security screen. Where was Rosecroft’s oversight? If not the casino’s infrastructure then the fault lied somewhere in the working staff. Would it be too much risky effort trying to take advantage of a compromised employee, assuming he could even sense one from his perch, so far away?

The monocular roved over the courtyard, across the four gambling halls grouped behind the East Lobby and the concierge, the hood of the in-door theatre, a stone’s throw from the six swimming and leisure pool gardens usually so crowded but emptied in reply to the downpour and wind roar. Workers were busily attempting to close to the great hatches meant to shield the fenced and walled sports arena just behind the Red Diamant, although the roofs were so rarely used their maintenance had somewhat atrophied. You’ve guns and eyes and so very many cameras, Viola, but no one can see everything at once and even a system needs organic interpretation to properly enact the designed security strategy. An outward assault would irrevocably fail, he decided, least by one poorly armed man.

A little patience, he cautioned himself, remember Old Tengu Kenichi’s admonitions. Through mastering the principles of sword work, the ability to triumph at will over one man means you can defeat any man [or number of men] in the world. The mindset for defeating one man is the same as for beating one thousand or ten thousand. And always patience, self-control, self-discipline, to be his own pilot rather than allowing outside forces to wrench that power away. Cato stared across the whole of the Golden Nautolan, willing himself to piece together it’s jigsaw, taking it to pieces section by section, overhauling his review and understanding of Rosecroft’s defensive layers. Her approach favoured grim modesty, fangs corralled as it were, needing to project gainful enticement that was the key attractant for the resort. Military hardware propped up everywhere would spoil the old-world Alderaanian-Spira-Hapan ethno-fusion and further cement her already clouded reputation as business woman-cum-mobster, disregarded by casino clientele in favour of tax-free winnings or at the very least treated as ‘local flavour’.

Swordplay was a combination of initiative, pressure, leverage, angles, speed and cadence and technique married to strategy, physicality, mental power, and the dominating will to triumph. Cato wiped rain from his eyes, picturing Rosecroft with the GNC held close and demurely as her own blade, guarding herself with an uncertain posture that made telegraphing her defense and attack techniques like trying to read oil against water. Knowing her measure required deathly risk. The battlegrounds were of her choosing and so were all the particular requisites of victory. Perhaps worst of all, if he couldn’t reach the boss in time, Rosecroft would evacuate herself from the hotel landing pad and drive off to another even more secure abode. Cato meditated a moment, locking his legs about the girder supporting him in the heights of the communication mast. What was the one element outside of Rosecroft’s controls? What could throw all her strategies off balance?

It came to him with the next peal of thunder, eyes lit with striations of lightning white. Risky. So deathly risky and if he committed, it would come down to speed, surety of his steel, and immensely fortunate karma. Cato unspooled the suit-wings sewn into the lining of his arms, ribs, hips, and legs, standing up from the girder and waiting for the wind to change. The gales eventually turned and socked directly into the small of his back, filling the silk wings out taut. He waited, waited, to the exact moment the wind was fiercest. Cato smiled hellishly into the shrieking, stormy night. Then let go of his hold on the mast and fell away into the air. The wingsuit bounced uncertainly and then caught fast to the wind, carrying Cato forward in a perfect glide. Faster than the rain could fall, he hurtled in a dead plummet towards the Golden Nautolan Casino. Down, across the perimeter walls and the enlarged parking lot to the bright golden doors opening into the East Lobby.

Gamblers, patrons, party goers, feasters, security and civilian personnel started as a soaked-through bolt of jet and blue shadow came hurtling into the hall, landed in a heavy roll over the Scipian carpet rugs. Cato drove himself to his feet and sprinted for the concierge’s desk, ran past the counterspace and the large huddles of jaw-dropped vacationers, to the painted and wainscoted wall. He reached out, knifing his fingers through protective emergency sugar-glass, and yanked hard on the fire alarm. A single, terrifyingly shrill klaxon note began sounding throughout the floor level. In a moment, following on its heels, the rising, frightened moan of ten thousand casino guests crying out. The lobby exploded into motion. Cato was already vanished, tanto-knives gripped, barging into the onrush of a panicked humanoid stampede.

 

[Cato Fett]

Pandemonium rushed down the transit hallway, carrying gamblers and vacationers bloated with pilfered cash looted from the quadrant of neighboring casinos, thronged with security guards and deployed anti-riot droids that were carried off their feet. The throng blitzed into the hall of the East Lobby, scattering and grinding concierge employees underfoot before gnashing against the entrance doors. Rain and wind shrieked, wetting the precarious few that managed to hobble and crawl out into the open plaza.

Elevator lobbies and secondary stairwells were choked. Cato was bounding down the long transit corridor opening to the Great Hall, sprinting through the margins of the crowds fighting to make it to open air. He put on speed and climbed, running stretches of finely decorated walling thrashed and clawed by the surging mobs. Casino guards, henchman employed for their brute frames and predilection for easy violence, fought to stem the humanoid tide. One, a nondescript xeno of slab-like grey flesh acid-tattooed and bulged with vat-enhanced synthetic muscle, turned and saw Cato’s sharp blur skirting through the eddies roiling between mobs of panicked casino players. He started, trying to shoulder a path through the torrent towards the interloper. Cato never paused, just snapped out his left hand, hurtling a four-star shuriken wheel into the meat and bone between the guard’s eyes. The guard fell, twisting about, smashed under heel as patrons galloped across his corpse for the far doors.

The Great Hall intersecting between the four great games parlours was a madhouse. Cato skidded on his toes and side-stepped behind the cover of an abandoned customer-service desk, agape and watching three thousand riled and panicked revelers choke the tall escalator wells and go tripping, sometimes lethally, down the stuttering escalator wells. Screams broke through the din, erupting from the fourth mezzanine floor; bodies fell, taking sections of buckled railing with them, trailing clouds of cash notes and ripped luggage. Puddled blood pooled and ran in the grout between floor tiles, scattering fallen GNC tokens. Stun rounds shot off intermittently, security embattled and having long surrendered any notion of crowd control, vying for breathing room as they edged about in linked squadrons. Handfuls of hornet drones rode overhead and doused portions of the mob in capsicum aerosol, bringing swathes of rioters to their knees. The fire warning was forgotten even as the alarm klaxons reverbed and spun in odd echoes off the mezzanine floors and the distant, storm-blacked skydome on the Hall roof nine stories above.

There were no easy lines of ingress going up through the Hall. Cato edged carefully out into the open mezzanine floor, toeing past crumpled and pulped dead lying fractured and irregular from their long fall. Haragei buzzed his senses; Cato turned, drawing a longsword and cutting, bisecting a Hornet-drone sporting taser-pincers and an abdominal mounted web-launcher. Its husk tottered and fell away, retching sparks and hydraulic bracken. The tiling began juddering under his sandals. He felt the onrushing crowd come barreling down a nearby escalator stair, before he turned or even heard their pitched, frightened bawling. Again, haragei, preternatural warning that came with proper combat attunement. Cato sheathed the sword away, spinning on foot and hip, senses dialed up to razor sharpness. The mob swept at him, into him, then about him. Rather then damming their oncoming weight, Cato worked at deflecting and redirecting their charge, rerouting with subtle projections that pushed and stumbled civilians out of his path. He cuffed a body to the left, knocked another aside and past his right hip, stepping in time to the irregular cadence. Energy thrummed in the muscles of his belly, enervating his limbs. What few that could not be so easily redirected he swept and ducked around entirely, keeping with principles of suppleness, bending where appropriate and prudent. Suddenly, the pressure on his shoulders and profile eased. The mob had passed and left a semi-barren escalator in their wake, clear but for a few tripping stragglers dragging belongings and armfuls of pilfered casino loot.

He sprinted up the railing, disregarding the stalled staircase motors, a fistful of shaken stars bound tightly between his knuckles and a longknife drawn in the other. The second floor was tightly congested with further throngs scrapping and brawling, the air overhead fogged from spent pepper mist and the flooring swamped with messes of vomit, blood, rent clothing, trampled suitcases and luggage carriers, looters and partiers skidding on slick credits wet from the underfoot gore. At the north end of the story, the mobs worsened the closer they surrounded the elevator lobby. Two of the four lift wells had failed, stuck fast with seized cars shivering from too many passengers jostling inside to get free. Cato paused, hunched on the outer story railing, considering the options. The elevators rose directly into the first stories of the Red Diamant, into a primary reception hall and concierge space. But getting to the lifts made dealing with the crowds compulsory and afterward, he’d to chose between either one well that was choked or another that was still functional, braving getting torn apart attempting to enter the carriage, cut the ceiling panelling, and then either climb or wait atop the carriage and ride upwards.

And what of those hidden defenses I know Rosecroft has hidden away, he thought? The carriage wells could be their own trap; stuck to a handhold, unable to escape, electrocuted or shot or gassed or disintegrated, or just left to fall and be crushed and impaled against the carriage drive system. Not for the first time, Cato wondered the point Last Fang Willie was hoping to make destroying his enemy like this. Thrusting his hired ninja into Rosecroft’s heart with all the blunt subtlety of a wooden baton, versus a mercenary company properly crewed, properly kitted, slick and sharp as glass and far more effective. A Mandalorian squadron would just level the upper suites, he knew. Tag Rosecroft’s vitals from orbit and bombard through her shields, finishing the mission with a penetrating bunker-buster missile. Very messy. Even more costly. But effective.

Cato weighed his knife and throwing stars before replacing them with a length of knotted silk-rope, tied off with a hooked climbing iron. He gauged the third story floor above, calculating the distance and metre, swinging the hook-end in a tight, thrumming ring. When the speed and angle were just right, he let the hook fly. It sailed high and pulled along the stretches of make-shift rope against Cato’s palm, until it flew past the third-floor railing, paused and then fell, Cato pulling tight on the roping until the hook’s prongs caught into the ferrocrete and held fast. He bunched and wound the silk against his hands and caught it between his knees and ankles, hauling himself up lithely, a fast metre at a time until he reached the lip of the next floor. There, he grasped the space beneath the railing and pulled, hard, shooting his entire frame up with enough speed to land gracefully on the rail hand-bar. Another six floors stared back at him, as trash and restaurant litter floated on staid air.

 

[Cato Fett]

By the seventh floor, the crowds were thinning. The upper stories were scenes of just barely collared chaos, the GNC’s security corps engaged in viciously one-sided corralling tactics, beating lead-footed stragglers and the more obdurate thieves-of-opportunity down the broken escalator stairwells, electro-baton’s discharging errant static, armoured transparisteel shields herding bodies along, air-rifles booming hollowly and pelting gamblers with bruising rubber slug rounds. Now Rosecroft was allowing some of her ‘muscle’ to show and flex: bipedal UAV’s reinforced the security infantry, called MULEs and built from synth-titanium musculature, topped with armoured weapons platforms hanging with machine-blaster barrels and short-range missile clusters, all prohibitively non-lethal. Cato felt their bladed heels sink and cut through the flooring as they stalked past, hanging suspended beneath the eighth floor’s rail lip, stuck to the ferrocrete by his palms, knees and toes. Hornet drones hummed by somewhere, out of sight. He had a shaken star gripped in his teeth, hissing air through the gaps. A long beat went on and he was up again, climbing a decoratively fluted column, slipping up and over the final pane of plexglass and guard rails to the ninth floor.

Blue-gold guards patrolled in twos and threes, augmented by a pair of MULEs stalking about on their own, their flat armoured shoulders bristling with sensor nodules while serpentine camera stalks protruded and spied from beneath their upper carriage. The story was virtually bare; some bodies were left where they’d fell, trampled underfoot into barely clothed pulp by heedless guests panicking to reach ground floor in the Great Hall. Shop windows were shattered and hollowed out, some sooty from actual fires that’d sprung from the madcap looting and evacuation. Cato hunched down into a low crouch, speeding through the broken jambs of a clothing outlet looted bare. He circumvented the outer ‘ring’ of the story wholly, navigating along shop by shop, taking sure care with his cover while gleaning what he could of the guard and MULE movements. In places, he cut through the gypsum board partitioning the stores, crawling belly down past cashier tills and abandoned registers, effecting brief camouflage pulling torn packaging and clothing across his profile whenever the guards paced by.

The choice of further egress was between the elevator carriage wells or daring to scale the ceiling and attempt at prying open the great oval and glass-blued skylight glaring down through the plaza. Cato slid into a thin bend of shadow, still, breathless, a tanto free in his hand as a pair of GNC guards sauntered by. He waited, counting his heart beats as they passed his cover behind the stanchion column, then stepped in behind their wake and timed his footfalls to theirs. It was ten metres to the elevator doors, much of the distance openly exposed. Cato kept low as he could, crouched almost to his haunches, treading over pools of scattered glass and rubble upset by the rioting. From below, he could still hear the droning and nauseating reverbs of the crowds still trampling and bucking, the tiling under his sandal soles jittering. He trailed a dozen paces back behind the guards, only slowing when he finally made it to the lift carriage doors. Far too much light, he thought, going to work on the set of doors second from the right.

The doors were all recessed under a kind of portico and lit brashly with high lamps driven into the ceiling, washing the pseudo-lobby in a brassy glow. Cato put the kissaki, the point, of the tanto-knife to the seam of the lift doors and shoved his muscle against its flat steel butt. It bit through metal, hard rubber and sealant plastics, sliding inexorably in. Then he pushed and yawed with the knife, wedging the seam open until he could get his fingers to purchase. Cato snagged the knife by its flat with his teeth and grunted, dragging open the panels, hurrying his effort knowing it wouldn’t take long for the guards and MULEs to notice his dark shape labouring out in the open. He pried until the seam was open just enough to let him by if he exhaled, shouldering into the well. His toes gripped the edge of the lower jamb and caught enough traction, springing and propelling through cold air to the far wall of the well. The entry doors gnashed back into place behind Cato, and he held suspended by his toes and fingertips above a many-metred fall to the distant ground floor below.

He climbed. The well was lined with cabling and bolted bracketing, hand and footholds plenty. The light from installed fixtures mounted periodically above slim junction boxes and diagnostic panels was grey, chilly, and swept long granular shadows. Cato felt cool drafts bustle down the long well, keyed to the ventilation ducts, surrounded quite suddenly by heavy quiet. All the bedlam of the Great Hall, the screams, hoarse shouting, riot hardware resounding like thunderclaps, the falling glass and ferrocrete and bent and ripped guards rails and the pitched over bodies cartwheeling helplessly through the air, the rhythmless galloping of thousands of feet charging to make it out into open air, now disquietingly far away. Thoughts crept up on him as he climbed; doubt played on his conscience, tiny pricks of guilt, aware of the vast gamble and incredible irresponsibility in stirring the Golden Nautolan up like a Kashyyyk stehl-bee nest. For all this training and faith in Asahian songsteel, he lacked against modern defense screens that laughed at a small man waving a sword, requiring him to hack and swing from oblique angles and trust the shadows would stay their detection. He wondered if miniature cameras were recording his ascent now; any moment, the well walls could electrify, laser grids could activate, even hidden anti-infantry turrets could very well spring out of disguised mounts. Cato paused, adjusted his hands and feet, resumed his climb after a beat. Very well, he thought, it’s been a shoddy night, some of my very worst work and to die here, now, would not be out of place. Yet if I see through these three days and nights, acquire Willie’s silver, maybe something will finally be proven. A new energy renewed the muscle and sinew in his limbs, the ninja considering the coming combat. Cato hauled and pulled a little faster up through the carriage well, hoping to reach the Red Diamant’s ground lobby in time before the alarm’s disarray had been quelled.

 

[Cato Fett]

The carriage well topped out after a long climb in ringing silence, ending where the Red Diamant’s guest lobby began. Cato held to the lip of the lower jamb framing the last set of steel-panel doors, pressing bare fingers against the metal. He felt warmth soaked into the seams and steady rhythmic quivers shaking and juddering through the jamb, collections of low sounds breaking over each other like surf, broken up static wails, stolid footfalls that crashed against carpeted ferrocrete and made the bones in his palms tremble. He left the doors alone and clambered around its frame, propping himself against where the well walls met with the high, flat ceiling made bulky from machine cases. There weren’t shrieks or screams or the feeling of ten thousand pairs of panicked heels trying to beat down through the hotel; the lobby beyond the elevator doors felt still, muddy in a way, Cato trying to reach out through haragei to discern more. Some inner eye played images across the back of his eyes. GNC guards in their blue-gold livery, armed for siege, MULE’s and hornet drones and riot droids, commanders with their staff using the lobby as a converted centre to coordinate the evacuation and find the perpetrator that had set off the fire scare initially.

It struck him that he could feel what he couldn’t perceive directly. A kind of deft situational awareness that informed him of the dimensions of the lobby beyond, the two score bodies inside, a dozen droids including the MULEs, the rows of further elevators leading up through the hotel proper all locked and thoroughly disabled. Danger glowed red in the back of his conscious, blood aching in the vessels of his fingers. Patience, he thought, and remember the Tao. Cato worked to quickly void his thoughts, emptying away any considerations or foibles that would draw in doubt, panic, or haste. He looked about the carriage well; there was a narrow aperture just below the doorways opening onto the lobby, a thin vent duct covered by a screwed-on and slanted grill briskly. He climbed to the grille and took measurement, feeling the air pull past him as it tunneled away down the duct. It was little bigger than the breadth and width of his shoulders, cramped, and the metal felt icy to touch, though it looked to span past the lobby above. Cato freed a throwing star, fed a sharp blade-end into the grille plate screws, twisting and freeing them one by one. The screws fell away, rattling faintly down far below, the grille plate following them in the next beat and twanging jarringly off a wall. He snorted sharply through his nose, peering at the small vent tunnel, wondering if this way too was trapped out. Nothing for it, Cato thought, the lobby’s hobbled and I can’t access the roof. Saying nothing of the time wasted or if Rosecroft’s evacuated from her offices or if I’ll have time enough afterward to pursue and gain back lost ground. I’m fumbling blindly along, no map nor schematics, every play a guess and a woeful gamble that someway I’ll keep ahead of the game. He tucked in his shoulders, put his arms through the duct’s mouth, and gently pulled the rest of his frame in and through.

He crawled belly-down below the lobby floor, separated by a good foot-and-a-half of insulation, support joists and wiring. The pace was dead-slow; Cato constantly shifted and adjusted the straps holding his swords, knives, and quiver, aware to not let the bowshaft knock against the duct walling, an errant slip of weird sounds enough to give him away to anyone potentially listening overhead. He hoped against directional microphones and heartbeat detectors, wondering how much shielding the flooring afforded. Ahead was darkness. He felt the way forward, challenging every inch of the duct with testing hands, prodding and groping and gently sliding his hands in case of obstruction. Footfalls overhead drummed bluntly, humanoid mixed with the weight of the heavy MULE’s tracking in circuits about the lobby, muted snatches of indistinct conversation, the hum of energy cartridges rammed home into laz-stock rifles, and the metallic, constant purr of unseen air-con units pushing stale wind down the duct. The dark began warming from black to a kind of stone-washed grey. Ahead, the duct ended abruptly, peeling off into smaller shafts only mouse droids could navigate. Cato craned his head round, peering up where the clinical light glowed down.

Through another slatted cover, he traced details of an elegant dropped panel ceiling, muted lamps suspended from brass hooks, warm ochre walls and refractive hints of long mirrors. Plumbing creaked nearby through the duct walling, rushing with water and septic. He could smell soap and detergent traces on the air. With care, he slowly twisted about until he could bend at the waist and sit upright, his brow nearly pressed to the duct cover. He gripped a shaken star, worked its iron against the covering, prying against the screws and glue-sealant holding the cover in place. The screws Cato broke, wincing at the sharp rapport, sliding a star-end through the hardened glue that parted like gelatin. The cover came away and was pushed up, aside, laid against a white wainscoted wall decorated in Kuati low-relief. Cato climbed up and knelt low, backing to the closest corner. He’d emerged into a lavatory, lacquered cells of private toilet stalls lined up along one side of the long chamber, silvertine urinals opposite, shallow sinks with swan-necked faucets and coloured marble counterspace at the far end. Cato’s eyes slitted, staring at the bulb of a small camera installed up in a far corner above the sink basins. He was inching a tanto-knife from its scabbard when sound tore his gaze to the stalls. A toilet flushed wetly; cloth rustled against leather boots, zipper teeth buzzing together as someone redressed and unlocked the stall door. The GNC guard did not see Cato descend on him. The ninja crossed the metres in a single skip, crashing onto the guard, atemi-waza strikes pulverizing into his plexus, belly, throat, and temple. He fell slackly and sputtered bloody phlegm. Cato loosed a length of silk rope, beginning to grip the GNC by the wrists and ankles and roping the guard’s limbs together. He’d just completed the final knot gagging the man silent when the door to the bathroom squeaked on its servos.

Four guards chatting and grousing entered, adjusted their belts and bee-lined for the closest urinals. One rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, glancing absently, tired from the night’s work fighting then herding then calming thousands of panic-spurred vacationers. He blinked; an incapacitated man tied by discoloured rope laid slumped beside a half-opened stall. The guard managed one sharp cry, then a shadow jolted into view. Cato closed in, forearm risen, sliding and hooking his tanto to the inside of the guard’s arm. His off-hand snapped forward, struck the hinge of the guard’s jawbone where it hung from the skull. Bone splintered. The guard fell poleaxed, toppling off his heels, rebounding off a urinal bowl.

“Spast!” Someone snarled, trying to retie their belt and loose weapons simultaneously. A guard unfurled an electro-baton and stepped around his squad-mates, swinging at Cato’s shoulder. He stepped close, catching the guard’s arm with both hand and tanto-edge, twisting the blow down, down and away, raising the knife and slashing the guard’s throat to the vertebrae. Blood hosed, spattering the ochre wall, staining the silvertine urinals like oil on steel and jetting into another guard’s eyes. The man loosed a low moan, jerking a sleeve across his face, before all breath left him; Cato punched the knife through a part in his torso armour, pinning his liver, ripped up through plating, cloth, skin and muscle and bone until the knife’s steel split his throat and cleft his jaw apart. The last guard pulled up his pistol and fired, blasting a cluster of close shots, the gas-clip half-emptied and pouring bolts through his friends’ still upright, still twitching corpse. Cato held the body up by collar and belt, using it for partial cover, throwing its weight forward. The guard had enough cunning to step well out of its fall but failed training his sights back onto the ninja in time. Cato sped by, blade flashing, taking the guard through his neck. The blow went deep, slicing spinal meat and bone. The head fell away and hung, kept attached by a thin flap of rapidly paling skin, the guard loosing a last few spasms before collapsing and falling across a near urinal, tearing it from the wall. Water erupted from the burst plumbing and rapidly began flooding the tiling.

Nothing for it, Cato thought and unsheathed his second longknife. Shouts and boot-steps were hurtling down a close hallway toward the bathroom, accompanied by weightier combat droids galloping close behind their wake. The bathroom door slid open. Cato stepped out, darted left, and melee began boiling in the hallway.

 

[Cato Fett]

The hallway was a broil of kineticism and ozone, blood mist and the smoke of spent blaster discharge, howls, weapons fire, steel scraping across casement, meeting flesh, cutting bone, battlefield cacophony condensed into close-quarters as the corridor shook. The dead piled at Cato’s back in twos and threes, in some spots two or three corpses high, all slackened, bloodied, limbs hinged at wrong angles and mouths stuck open beneath spattered visor plates. He’d lost a knife somehow; it’d lodged against a chestplate, stuck deep through the sternal bone beneath and lathered slick with gore, slipping easily through his fingers. And then he had flattened the hand like a blade, spearing his arm forth, rigid fingers and knuckles hard as Songsteel punching through armour and into the hot meat of a guardsman’s plexus muscle, on through the gristle and bone of the spine, the whole arm reversing and chopping his elbow into an unguarded face. The visor broke and the guard dropped, his face embedded with armoured plexglass shards. Cato reached, snagging the longer plexglass slivers from the air and knotting them tight between his knuckles. His tanto sliced, guarded away an electrobaton, creating an opening that he drove his off-hand for and speared another guard through his throat.

Momentum was forward, always forward. Regardless of the bodies trying to pack in at every flank, while the hallway bristled and filled tight with armed GNC goons pressing down on all angles, Cato kept moving. There wasn’t room for the longswords. His combat was tantojutsu, crisp cuts intercepting attacks in mid-motion, simultaneous attack and defense, sliding blows aside, glancing strikes off their vectors, countering with ferocious strokes slashing and parting through thigh and brachial arteries, opening carotid vessels, or deep, lunging jabs that buried his tanto up to the hilt, bisecting the foe’s heart. Cato struck and severed the sinew inside the elbow of a guard, reversed his hold on the blade, rammed it through the throat and withdrew. Another he grappled, allowing himself to be drawn into a closing hold before suddenly undoing the strength in his foes grasp, pinching nerves, veins, chopping his hands down at angles the wrist joints couldn’t resist. Cato killed the guard with a curt atemi­-hack that cratered the temples of his skull. And then he was up and shouldering the weight of another dozen bodies that’d come hurtling down the long hallway. Always forward. A shuriken wheel left his hand and cleaved neatly through a GNC’s face-guard.

The fighting spilled into an intersection. Cato worked to gauge direction, collapsing his guard and backpedalling furiously from a three-pronged blitz, the hulking profiles of MULE servitors rearing high against the hallways ceiling as they trudged forward through the security guard crowd. They bayed hoarsely, transmitting millisecond croaks of strangled sound and data. Underslung heavy-rubber round cannons swung and tracked him, waiting for rifts to show in the melee to fire safely through. Somewhere, hornet-drones were buzzing down on miniaturized repulsors, swooping in close. Closer now. The clashing din melted and fused sounds into a solid cacophonous roar. Cato’s senses spun, trying to filter so much input, parrying an electrified jab, reaching close to grip the perpetrator up by their elbow and driving his knife in through throat, rib, side, and groin. Their body dropped and four more leapt forward to replace their comrade. He just vaguely recalled pulling back at the intersection, back to the right, toward a far doorway that wasn’t yet shuttered. A heavier, sub-sonic howl joined the mixture of human roars and steel-on-armour crashing together; the carpeting by his feet tore up in shredded gouts of thin textile and pieces of hard floorboard. The cannon-howl boomed again, tracing fire across the decorated walling and over the ceiling panels just above his head, showering micro-debris and splinters. The MULE’s guns briefly quieted, bladed hooves stomping against the compact horde of bodies crowding its lanes of fire.

His back struck and rebounded off the far hallway door. Cato spared a hand to slap at the ‘open’ mechanism, not daring to take his concentration off the tumult trying to reach at him. He skewered a guard through their visor-plate and the eye socket beyond, tugged his knife free and reversing the hilt in his grasp, jammed it hard into an unwary temple. The tanto stuck for a moment too long. Cato let it go, planting his hands to either side of the door jamb behind, lifting, tucking up, and pistoning his legs. His heels shot out, connecting with the forward row of GNC guards now renewing their surge, bowling them over backwards. Enough room to breathe was bought; Cato’s fist hammered until it found the door’s open/release keypad. Servo’s grinding, the door slid up and away, the ninja ducking back before he keyed the mechanism again and the door fell back into place. Shaken stars gouged and ripped the open/close switch. Sparks, pieces of hastily melted plastic and pried buttons, showered onto the carpeting and rugs, slowly began to burn.

The entry led Cato to the pit floor of a long, spiralling stairwell. Landings and marble steps anchored to the immaculately cubed and celled walling spun almost endlessly up and up. Glow lamps hovered individually with each landing, lending warm lambency, the light softening the hard angles of the stairs and attached railing that bent and curved with long stairway. He couldn’t detect automatic security measures, not yet initially. The stairwell struck Cato with its stateliness and well-groomed ornamentation, the walling panelled for sound-dampening, the staircase itself an architectural relic relegated to occasional use if and when the primary turbolifts failed. From far above, shouts and auto-doors slamming open began to echo. Cato tracked near and distant shadows pouring onto the floor landings, racing down the well toward the hotel’s ‘ground’ floor; behind him, at the sabotaged hatch, plasma-torches were beginning to cut through whining metal.

Counted forty separate floors from outside, Cato thought, drawing his swords. At least. I won’t know what other countermeasures Rosecroft has installed until I trip them individually. Presuming I don’t give out on the climb, assuming the guards or MULEs don’t kill me. Any other task, so many presumptions and guesswork, I’d have aborted. Should still abort, but no. Now… Now I am committed and too much blood and sweat’s been drawn to let all the effort fall in vain. Old Tengu Kenichi would exhort me to pursue the enemy with every last vital fibre. ‘There’s glory in losing, if…’ …If I die well.

If I die well. Cato exhaled, expunging the last motes of thought as he refocused. He gave his swords a final testing heft before breaking into long jogging strides, taking the first flight two steps at a time. GNC security came rushing down, pausing against the balustrades as their eyes clapped to Cato, levelling pistols and compact, snouted SMG carbines. Blaster and slugfire roared, as more bodies raced and poured down the long flights.

 

[Cato Fett]

In spite of the numbers hurrying down the staircases, the fighting was sparse, selective, and over so quickly necks cracked trying to keep up with the sharp, bloodied shape sprinting up the landings. Cato was in a dead run, head and shoulders thrown forward, feet in a smooth pump that seemed to barely press his toes or the balls of his tabi-feet to the steps. Both his blades were wet with fresh gore, trailed misty carmine beads in his wake, that splashed on the cold carpeting and hand-polished rails. One whipped out, parrying a baton stroke, but stayed from any further action. It was enough the attempt was thwarted. If he paused, they’d kill him through attrition, cornering and isolating him on a landing and pouring in as much manpower, firepower, and droid-power as needed until the intruding threat was stymied. Cato paced his breathing and delved thickly into the stomach-well of hara. He mounted the tenth landing, rolling past another squadron falling on their heels trying to reverse their own running and chase him up the stairwell.

But the ninja was burning; wailing sinew and muscle clung to aching bone, lungs shrieking with breath, his heart and every blood vessel sewn to it throughout the long network of his body thrashing from the strain. Blackness furred at the edge of his vision. At times, the colours faded out, replaced by monochrome palettes as the lines of the world seemed to briefly vibrate out of place. Even hara, the spiritual wellspring that empowered the best and greatest of Asahi’s warriors, had finite limits. Cato gritted his teeth, remembered he was up by the fifteenth landing, and forced his wits to resynch and re-establish tactical control. Up! He cut a guardsman through his ribs without pausing and leapt high for the stairwell railing, his feet touching down briskly on the smoothed handrail. A dizzying fall opened to his right and the pit-floor of the high stairwell down below looked no larger than a chess-board square. Cato sprinted up the handrail, tautly balanced, taking three steps now instead of two, thrilled at the growing torrent of challenge facing him. Twenty stories, then thirty, extremities numbing as the ache verged on overpowering him. He willed his body to motion when danger reared, slicing wrists, elbows, and shoulders, slashing down through helmets and visorplates, killing without pause and leaving bodies and blood to wash down the staircases. Sloppy as novice work, he knew, ugly, stupid work, but there’s not time, you’ve no time, and Rosecroft could be well away by now.

Very soon, he could make out the angled peak of the staircase, another ten stories above. Sweat and body heat soaked through every thread of his tunic and trousers, slipping inside the soles of his sandals and made his tabi grind friction-blisters to the tops of his feet. His sight had dangerously tunneled. Cato trusted he moved yet swift enough to keep out of reach, weaving breathlessly through gaps in the GNC mobs; he ducked and managed a painful upward slide between a MULE droids heavy-set legs, riding against the bumps of the steps, standing and racing on even as he hamstrung the droid’s armoured heels with a sword-flick. The guardsman numbers were oddly thinning the higher Cato climbed, just sparse pockets of waiting squadrons that individually failed keeping the shinobi from advancing. He scattered shaken, the stars catching GNC in their armour gaps, twin-swords simultaneously offering parry and riposte when baton attacks swung and jabbed.

His feet took one more bound up a pair of steps, jumping him to the sixtieth landing. An unassuming set of double-doors, coloured cream and tan and gold and dazzled with the brand sign of the Golden Nautolan Casino, waited, left jarred open, leading onto a long narrow passageway lined with more wainscoting and gentle light. Leading to the upper suites and offices occupied by Viola Rosecroft, her select entourage and agents, whatever employees that saw to the running of her licit and illicit businesses. Cato sped through the doorway unheeding. Without warning, they fell and locked fast into place. Even as he heeled to a complete stop, inches-thick emergency blast-doors slid into place on either side of the lengthy corridor. With a snap, the light fixtures went out all at once. The darkness swam in, complete and suffocating. Cato paused himself and went still, swords hanging by his waist, listening against his own ramming heartbeat and the deafening thrum of blood pouring through his skull.

In the black, farther down the hall, he felt some motion. Panels and sections of the walling slid aside on tracks and admitted something into the corridor before closing up. He sensed heavy, metallic weight; reached out with haragei to sense the threat, gauge its mettle and potential. Durasteel and electricity, like ozone on the air, stung his tongue with phantom taste. Droid, he thought, a droid! Crimson red photoreceptors, slit and jagged like the edge of a wood saw, woke and blazed in the inky pitch blackness.