Quarantine Moon: Orbital Drop on Orsonian

[Flint Michigan]

Flint stretched his arms as he got out of the cockpit, making sure nothing was broken and getting rid of some stiffness. His right shoulder hurt, bruised by the looks of it, but he'd make it do. He had to if he had to escape this hellhole. The sound of Corellian curses told him that Kitt hadn't gotten hurt, or at least not hurt enough to stop her from moving.

"Don't be like that. You love fixing the ship." Flint replied as he found himself a shotgun and a blaster pistol on his way to the loading ramp. She asked what they'd gotten him into.


"Hopefully a lot of credits." He opened as he did a weapons check, ensuring the weapons were ready and loaded. "Remember those weird enviro-crates we got from PharmaTech? They're paying a ton of durasteel's worth in credits for every one of these infected horses we can bring to em." Infected. Flint thought to himself Better get the envirosuit. "They didn't say anything about them flying though. I'm gonna shoot a few down, until things get hazy our that other ship starts priming their engines. I want us to ride their tails on the way out of this rock." He said as the sound of the loading ramp lowering could be heard.

"I'll be on channel alpha-seven-echo-four. Keep in touch."


[member="Kitt Solo"]

 

[Kitt Solo]

[member="Flint Michigan"]

She scowled at Flint's back as she peaked out of the ship's inner corridor. "Yes, I love fixing crappy-freighters with infected, horses flying around." The deadpanned-sarcasm was thick enough to slice through with a lightsaber. "Just buy me a solid hour or two."

She jimmied her hair back into a sloppy ponytail and grabbed her tool-belt.

"'Cause we're gonna need it." She set her comm to the designated channel and left Flint to his business while she tackled the problem of repairing the fething ship enough to get them off planet.

Force signature was cloaked and a red-bandanna tied across her nose and mouth - protection from smoke and any other leaking fumes as well as recognition from possible strangers. She didn't feel like messing with sith or jedi today.

 

[Flint Michigan]

"Just buy me a solid hour or two." [member="Kitt Solo"] says. If Henrietta was here she'd say "M'am yes m'am." and that'd be the end of it. Woman was a marine through and through, crack shot that could hold a position better than a wall. Flint though? Well, he'd do what he could.


"Get in done in less than 45 minutes and you're next parts order will come with a hyperdrive made out of chocolate." He said on the comlink as he examined his surroundings. The flying horses, the trees, the ground, every part of place looked rotted and dying. Something wrong had happened here, this world wasn't something Flint thought of natural. Or perhaps nature merely wished to kill him, and everyone else too. Would explain all the gorram Force Users running around after the Gulag Plague cleared out of the galaxy. At least nothing had noticed him yet. There were a trio of horses flying at his two o'clock, a couple at his nine. Turning around he spotted three at his five o'clock, and a mynock on the back of his ship. Giving in to his first instinct he took out his heavy blaster and shot the vermin, getting rid of the problem rather quickly.

And of course, inviting another. The trio of horses on his five heard the shot, and flew over in a hurry, His heavy pistol shot the centermost unicorn once, twice, thrice, four . . . ice, before the beast finally went down. The other two were still flying towards Flint, emitting a painful shriek that gave Flint a terror that reminded him of the time he spent with the Sith Fleet, serving the wizards who reigned there.


Why the hell did I sign up for this job?

 

[Yasha Cadera]

"Kitt?" I stumble onto the ship after getting out of [member="Ashin Varanin"]'s speeder truck and turn my head to the side. I'd know the empathic fragrance of [member="Kitt Solo"] across a star system, if I'd try that is. Been too busy keeping a bunch of killer plants from turning more flying unicorn monsters into zombies. "I don't think they're charging into danger with joy in their hearts. . . where's Bucket?"

A muffled whine starts up from the back of the truck bed, the dirt and flora shifting like sand. The flowers in question are in a state of abject shock, detached from the ground of the valley, they're upended and confused. This is good for us! For the moment, anyway. I sigh and glance at Ashin. "Didn't shut up, did you, Bucket?" Bucket's headlamp pokes out from the sod, it slaps the side of its droid head until dirt pours out of its face plates. "Sorry, Bucket's working on conversational skills. Too much, I take it."

'Kitt Solo, you blessed wonderkind. What are you doing here? Who's with you? Head's up for crazy flying zombie unicorns!'

[member="Flint Michigan"]

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Anders Sivas"]

Ashin caught little of Anders' meaning, but that was part and parcel of working with an empath, someone who knew the Big Picture instinctively. Kitt Solo's Force presence being masked, Ashin missed it entirely. As Anders worked on the extrication of Bucket, Ashin moved to the MAAT's cockpit and finished the preflight her droids had begun. Anders' voice filtered in through the door, but Ashin's focus remained on the upcoming blockade run.

"Sensors show that other freighter isn't doing so well. Doubt it'll be able to contribute to our exit, and this system's swarming with knockoff Jedi who'll have sensed what I did back there." The horrified deaths of millions of Force-sensitive sentients, specifically. The MAAT rose on its repulsorlifts as she worked on the last of the preflight routine. "It's time we left."

 

[Kitt Solo]

[member="Flint Michigan"] [member="Anders Sivas"]

"It better be kriffin' dark chocolate," she grumbled across the shared comm channel, yanking open the door to the main engine generator. There was rocket fuel in this room. One leak and one wrong move and they'd all go BOOM.

An audible sigh of relief left her lips as she surveyed the fuel cells and found no damage. Blowing-up really wasn't on her agenda today. She cracked open a floor panel with the hydro-wrench and let herself drop into the floor, mindful of the steamin' coils. With her tools laid out in the cramped space, she began to fulfill her role as senior grease-monkey.

She heard a thump that sounded like it was from the back, outside of the ship. Her knee jammed against the transmit switch of the comm. "You doin' okay boss?"

She nearly missed tightening a busted widget as Andra's voice rang in her head. Chit. Gorram friends.

I'm working a job with my new boss that involves these horrible creatures. Reminds me, gotta check on my health plan. What the feth are you doing here and why does this whole thing smell like Ashin Varanin?

That or she'd guess Rave Merrill. But the list of folks she and Andra knew that would be involved in something like this was short. This was way too dirty for [member="Lucien Cordel"] and not enough snark or sex for [member="Mikhail Shorn"].

 

[Flint Michigan]

The flying unicorns offered Flint no quarter, shrieking as they came one tried to skewer Flint with it's cylindrical horn, the other going towards the mynock corpse, smashing against the hull as it flew. WIth one of the unicorns preoccupied he took the moment to open fire on the one that was still trying to impale him. With each shot Flint put out the unicorn lost a limb, but it didn't stop the charge. The beast was unaware, unfeeling of the pain it should be feeling.

"I'm . . . managing." Flint replied to [member="Kitt Solo"] as the creature finally stopped on the ground, mangled and burn into several pieces. He was beginning to think he might not have the ammo for this. Turning to look at the other unicorn he found that it had made a friend. That mynock Flint shot? Killed? A gorram zombie. Holstering his heavy pistol he pulled out his shotgun, laying finger on the trigger to unleash a storm of blaster bolts. The mynock, close enough to the flying horse, had taken the brunt of a couple bolts taking out one of it's wings. Though it still crawled for food it wasn't much of a threat now. The Flying horse kept it's wings however, and charged at Flint horn first, cutting through the edge of Flint's envirosuit before he let out a close ranged blast at the creature's neck. That was three down, and a mynock for good measure.


"I've got three and a half bodies we can use, how are the engines coming? I think the other ship is taking off."

 

[Kitt Solo]

[member="Flint Michigan"]

Another thump against the hull and she wondered what exactly he meant by I'm managing.

"The ol' girl can't take much more of a beating so stop fooling around out there, boss."

Freckled-nose twitched at Flint's report. "What're we running now, a hearse service?" Hot steam from one of the pipes blasted her face. "Chit!" The open-comm to Flint was still on. A slightly red and sweatier face grimaced as she tightened up the nozzle.

"Engines will be ready. The jumping to hyperspace will be ready by the time we get past atmo. Hopefully."

Either that or we'll all end up deader than dead.

 

[Yasha Cadera]

"We can't leave them behind. They're not cannon fodder. . . one of them's not cannon fodder." I put my hand to my forehead and groan. [member="Kitt Solo"] took one heck of a moment to turn into the worst merc job in current history. With Silver Mooks no doubt realizing what we've been up to and the blasting projectile fire of the one loopy idjit who thought going after the zombie unicorns was a good idea ([member="Flint Michigan"]), I should be more concerned with our getaway than Big-Girl Kitt-Kat down on the surface. The plants in the bay are beginning to lose their shocking flavour, I push the nearest thing to a floral lullaby into their root systems and push my fingers on either side of the bridge of my nose as I hear Kitt's empathic voice rear into my pert and popular head.

'That's 'cause I'm standing beside [member="Ashin Varanin"] right now. Kitt, you've got to get out of here. We're cleansing this place. It's too gorram dangerous, sweet pea. Get out before you get 'vaped. . . and then stimcaf later? Stimcaf and cheesecake? There's this place in the Sanctum with the best cheesecake you've ever tasted in your life.'

"That ship's taking a job about those zombie ponies. . . in like, the worst timing in the universe. Seriously, now? Not last week or say, tomorrow when this planet is a crispy flake on the horizon but now? What are the odds? What can I be doing to help?" I skip past Bucket (who is still knocking dirt out of his joints) and look outward to the horizon.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Anders Sivas"] [member="Kitt Solo"]

With a grimace, Ashin slewed the MAAT into a flat slide around and above the grounded freighter. "I don't feel a thing, but whoever this non-cannon-fodder friend of yours is, tell her she's got...six minutes to get airborne, or the quarantine patrols will pin us down. We'll still be able to escape, but it'll get bloody."

 

[Kitt Solo]

@[member="Anders Sivas"] @[member="Flint Michigan"] @[member="Ashin Varanin"]

Of course it's dangerous. Andra would feel the emotional grumble. And if I survive this - it's a cheesecake date.

And Ashin Varanin? That woman still scared her more than a million angry naked mole rats. Knee jammed the comm switch to Flint as coolant squirted her nose. She scowled, feeling their window of safety and survival rapidly ticking down in the force. "Captain. I've got a really bad feeling that if you don't get your butt back on board in the next minute we may be staying here. Permanently."

Andra, we should be airborne in the next two minutes. Can you guys buy us some cover time?

She peeled herself off the floor and jammed the panel shut. Coolant still dripped from her face as she ran down to the cargo area to help the Captain with whatever it was. Fingers curled around the MK2 bolter.

 

[Yasha Cadera]

'Please survive this. You're already read in to being my friend and that's hard. I'm too lazy. Stay alive.' Hoping to make her snigger in the grumble, I hold on to the back of the co-pilot's chair and glance over to @[member="Ashin Varanin"]. I don't know why Ashin can't feel @[member="Kitt Solo"], it's then that I realize 'wait, I can't feel Kitt in the Force either'. Yay empathy. Go me.

"She needs two. We're golden. . . relatively golden. Okay we're Rhodium-plated with a butter yellow colour." I babble when I'm nervous, can you tell Ashin Empress Varanin!? Hah! "Bloody I can fix, dead's a bit over my pay-grade. Working on it."

'You've got your two minutes, Kitt. Three minutes not so much, but two? Yes. You've got it. Prep for bloody.'

 

[Flint Michigan]

Flint began dragging dead, or perhaps undead, bodies into his cargo hold when he spotted a familiar S90 MAAT hovering right above him, as if to tell him to hurry up. [member="Kitt Solo"] chimed on the comm and told him to hurry up, as if the old Sith dropship wasn't hint enough.

"Got it. Putting cargo in the bay now." He said, throwing the smaller mynock corpse into one of the sealed containers and throwing the horses in one by one. It was a difficult task, but Flint was a strong man, the horses were nowhere near as heavy as they'd be if they weren't half-decomposed already. Frightening how fast and powerfully they moved with such diminished weight, but facing them was over now, hopefully anyways. A bit sad that his cargo only contained four bodies he headed to cockpit, eager to get out of this hell hole.

It had been about a minute and forty-three seconds since Kitt told him to hurry when he had the sublight engines up and going.


"Hailing Friendship is Magic, we are ready to go." Flint sent a message to [member="Ashin Varanin"] as his ship left the ground, ready to follow the MAAT's tail.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Flint Michigan"] [member="Kitt Solo"] [member="Anders Sivas"]

"Friendship is Magic to Detroit Nexu, time to make a run for it. System defenses won't make this easy, but we've got some tricks up our sleeve."

She pulled back on the yoke and accelerated for space, scanning the quarantine patrols. Unpleasant comms traffic was unpleasant.

"Anders, you're close enough to a Master nowadays, and you do what you do. Those ships coming for us? Any chance you can make them thing it's a bad idea to shoot? Here. Let me give you something to work with." She commed the incoming patrols. "Quarantine ships, this is Ashin Varanin. Shoot me and I'll rip a hole in spacetime just for you."

 

[Kitt Solo]

[member="Anders Sivas"] [member="Flint Michigan"] [member="Ashin Varanin"]

The force-user turned incognito-mechanic nearly peed her pants from nerves as she waited for Flint to start the engines. OHTHANKTHESTARSITWORKED. She breathed a little easier and sent a silent message back to Sivas. Thanks for covering my back. For cheesecake I'm buying.

Nose crinkled as she walked past the cargo-hold.

Nope, she didn't want to know.

A bit frazzled, she finally found her way just outside of the cockpit. She parked herself on the cold-floor and unscrewed the panel to the hyperdrive, hydrospanner ready. She could just see the back of Flint's head from her position. "Glad you're alive, Captain. hyperdrive still needs some work. Just don't crash again, okay?"

 

[Yasha Cadera]

"Yeah, they're adrenaline-bound and emotional. Easy grabs. I can work with that, [member="Ashin Varanin"]." I buckle myself into the co-pilot chair as Bucket taps on the cockpit door. "Bosses? You got an extra gunnery station? I can do cover fire. Barring that, I can hack their sensor arrays and numb their target ratios."

I shut my eyes and hold my hands in front of my chest, fingers curled as if holding a ball. As the sounds of Bucket's fingers clinging to the back of my chair fade off and the pings, beeps and bristling rushes of the cockpit slide to a balmy silence, an orb of yellow and white light whistled into being in my hands. Rays of light beam into the ball as one by one the personae of the pursuing folk are beaded together. I hear nothing but the inner channels of their minds and as they whirl and push into the sphere. 'Shhhhhhhhhhh'

The colours burst and fire like explosives, minds bucking from the first attempt at emotional control. I pit the easiest of emotions to conjure up into the sphere, boiling it over with the white and electric green substance of confusion and doubt. Thrown minds are confused enough, all I have to do is pull into the confusion, add to it. Brush it up with a corresponding slick of doubt and I begin hearing the pilots plot odd courses away from the Friendship is magic and [member="Kitt Solo"] & [member="Flint Michigan"] 's Detroit Nexu. The leads in their Quarantine vessels are second, third, fourth guessing their plans of attack and whether they want to attack at all.

Ashin's basis of strength and solidarity I shore up. We've got this. 'Run away. Is this our fight? Are our engines working? The stabilizers, do they have what it takes? Weapons are malfunctioning. We can't win. Can we?'

Confusion is a beautiful cacophony, a glorious display of chaos theory. The minds begin to falter. I keep up the all-encompassing pursuit of imbuing them with doubt.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Kitt Solo"][member="Anders Sivas"] [member="Flint Michigan"]

Ashin's eyes flicked from the viewscreen to the sensor readouts. Sith battle coordination, the instinctive awareness of all gamepieces' relationships that came after one made certain sacrifices and passed certain milestones, told her the general implications of their trajectories. "Nicely done, Master Sivas." She toggled the comms. "Detroit Nexu, we've got a mostly-clear vector and a calculated jump to the nearest Perlemian Trail onramp. Patching it over to you now. Somewhere in the nearest few sectors, the Silvers have some kind of military-grade power. Let's be gone before it shows up."

 

[Flint Michigan]

[member="Ashin Varanin"] [member="Kitt Solo"] [member="Anders Sivas"]

"Copy that Friendship is Magic, we're on you're tail." Flint said, and the ship followed a close distance behind. Perhaps too close a distance to make a stop should the Fringer stop, but Flint knew how to swerve if he needed to. Luckily he didn't hear the next comm, or he would have freaked the kark out once he figured out Ashin Varanin was on the other end of that MAAT. Flint wasn't exactly a man that was 'in the know', but he had heard that name before.

"I'm a little harder to kill than that Kitt. Only a little though." He said, with a bit of a grin. Chances were she couldn't see it, but Flint always found that the ability to smile in the face of death was important. Lightened things up. "And just how bad is that hyperdrive? Like spotty bad or can't-make-a-jump bad?" He asked, before getting a hail from the Friendship is Magic. A calculated jump to Perlemian Trail.

"Setting up jump now Friendship is Magic." Flint hailed them, before Flint shrugged somewhat to himself.

"Guess we'll find out about that hyperdrive real soon." He said, as he prepped the jump and headed to hyperspace . . . hopefully.

 

[Kitt Solo]

[member="Ashin Varanin"] [member="Flint Michigan"] [member="Anders Sivas"]

The good news was, the hyperdrive board lit-up when Flint hit the switch. The bad news was, the sound it made was like a dying bantha. "I'm working on it!" She yelled to Flint before he could state the obvious.

CHITchitCHIT

"The PCV valve is busted and jammed. Hold-up." The hydrospanner wasn't budging it. With a little nudge of the force it came loose. "Got it. Give me five seconds, Captain!" Luckily, life support controls were right next to the hypderdrive control panel. And it just so happened, some of the non-essential systems ran on a very similar part.

The ship's interior lights flickered as she pried loose the PCV valve twin from one system and re-rigged it into the hyperdrive.

"Try it now, Flint. I hope this is a short jump 'cause we had to sacrifice some of the comforts of life-support - like temperature control. It's about to get a heck-o-a-lot colder in here."

 

[Flint Michigan]

[member="Kitt Solo"] [member="Ashin Varanin"] [member="Anders Sivas"]

So after putting in the calculation and engaging the hyperdrive, all Flint saw was the familiar bleak Silver quarantine, aided by the sound of what might have been a dead mynock stuck in the engines.

"Kitt!" He started to scream, before the mechanic assured him she was fixing it. Unable to do much to stop their current predicament Flint sat there in his pilot seat waiting for Kitt to signal that they could jump. She talked about a valve of some sort bein busted up, before telling him to wait five seconds. More time he couldn't do stuff. Man, Flint loved flying ships but the helplessness of it sometimes was grating on him.

"Try it now, Flint." He heard Kitt and engaged the hyperdrive, letting him see the familiar sight of stars, passing by so fast as to become a myriad of lines on the horizon. He heard 'temperature control' and felt it at the same time, kark it was cold. Still, they had some cargo and were home free. Could be worse. Letting the autopilot take over he began heading to the back of the ship towards Kitt and punching his arms out of his jacket as he got over there.


"Good work Kitt." He said as he put his jacket over her, leaving him in a simple white T-shirt. Flint wasn't a real fancy man when it came to clothes. "Quick thinking after that whole uh, accelerated landing thing. You weren't lying when you said second-best in Corellia."