Smuggling Woes

[Malia Afredane]

"It's ok, I may not have my chaperone, but I still have the cuffs on. Here, I've got the master code for the table to turn off the money bets. My mother has one of these tables in her place, it's how I learned."

They made their way to the back of the place, where it was kinda quiet but then again, it was midweek and even bars on Shaddaa had slow nights. Mal took it easy on Kairon and gave him a couple pointers as they played a few hands, and she casually sipped her whiskey to keep her buzz level. No need to get rip roaring drunk if they were going to work in the morning.

However, she was getting used to the back and forth of the conversation, she found that she was brave enough to ask her more timid questions, now that she was wearing her whiskey armor.

"So how long have you and Jarrick been partners?"

That was pretty straight forward, right?

[member="Kairon Rees"]

 

[Kairon Rees]

“Ah what, about eight years now?” Kairon replied. They’d actually settled into a good conversation now and he was feeling much more relaxed. He’d ignored his terminal buzzing a couple of times now, whatever it was Jarrick could handle it. The night was still fairly young and the two of them still had plenty of figuring each other out to do. After all, she’d been the one to manoeuvre the situation so that they could spend some time alone hadn’t she? She’d asked him to buy her a round. Even feeling more settled alone with her, a neurotic part of his mind still recapped their conversations. Unfortunately his memory was easily capable of playing tricks on him, and putting different inflections on conversations for just minutes ago. His terminal buzzed again, and again.

“Started out I was looking for someone who could stand up for themselves in business dealings, organise the crew and handle themselves when it hit the fan. Couldn’t get rid of him when the others had to be laid off. We often trade in stolen good and when we’re purchasing we play a game of good cop, bad cop with the seller,” he explained. Before he could make it crystal clear that the pair were not in a relationship and just business partners, his terminal vibrated two more times.

“I’m sorry, let me just see what that is,” he said with a smile. He made an overt show of placing his cards down carefully and giving her a suspicious look. His smile evaporated when he looked at the terminal.



Heard you were in town. Come for a chat. Got work. Urgent


What, not even a “hello” for you old pal?


It's a good job, promise


Really Rees, this is getting rude


Beshall saw you heading into Lucky’s place, do I need to send someone to collect you?


Need to talk Rees, losing patience



His stomach sank. He swallowed deliberately. Feth. He actually felt nauseous. He looked up to Mal, enjoying her smile, then back to his terminal. This is one of those moments where you’d look back and wonder what could have happened isn’t it? He thought to himself.

“I’m really sorry,” he said quietly, holding up his terminal. “This isn’t someone I can ignore. He’s the kind where if you don’t come when called, you end up an urban legend for what he did to you when he tracked you down.”

He pushed his chair away from the table. Coward. Say something else. But he didn’t, he just started to get up.

Then he balled his left hand into a fist and some part of him rallied. “Dinner!” he blurted out suddenly. “When we get to Sullust… I mean you and me…go out for dinner…alone…if you’d like?”

Well if that’s the best you can manage. A sarcastic voice added at the back of his mind. He stood there, a strained expression on his face. One foot already pointing to the door, the opposite hand clinging to the table.

 

[Malia Afredane]

The look on his face went from easy and relaxed to sheer dread in 1.5 seconds. It caused her to look at him warily, but then he started to make his excuses as he stood to go. She rose from the table too. Unsure and trying to figure out what just happened.

"Um...I guess...I mean, yes. That'd be nice."

He looked like he was about to bolt out the door at a full run, so she just waved him to go, she would take care of the last round.

She huffed a sigh, sinking back into the chair at the table. Even more confused. He asked her to dinner. Alone. That was like a date. Right?

Mal took a swing directly from the bottle as she settled up with Zaur and headed back to Gracie. Alone but with the faintest hope that maybe Rusty didn't know what the heck he was talking about.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

She never saw Kairon the next day during loading, just got a message with coordinates for meeting up in orbit. The cargo was delivered, loaded and packing lists and manifests were exchanged for her to hand over at the other end and for any customs inspections. When she arrived at the rendezvous point, she radioed that she was ready and it was Asmus that answered her with an enthusiasm that was almost infectious. Almost.

If the Quin was flying, he had to be on it, but his sudden departure worried her. She'd get answers on Sullust. Maybe. It could have been a throwaway line said just to make her think he wasn't ditching when he was doing exactly that.

These were the thoughts bouncing around in Mal's head as they followed the Quin through hyperspace for hours, the blue streaks lighting up the cockpit where she idly played a silly matching game on her tablet.

[member="Kairon Rees"] [member="Tmoxin Temi"]

 

[Kairon Rees]

“You still look annoyed,” Jarrick said from the adjacent chair.

“Mhmm,” Kairon replied, glowering at the controls.

“Look if you’re not sure you were clear: Just. Call. Them. We’re close enough you could probably get a point to point signal to them,” Jarrick said, clearly amused by the whole situation. It nearly made Kairon want to go back to pretending he didn’t need a social life again. “Still, probably shouldn’t have punched Kyla’s man,” Jarrick grumbled.

“Probably,” Kairon agreed. However, he’d left the bar in a foul mood. One of Kyla’s men had made a rude comment and he’d floored him. Kairon wasn’t a particularly talented man when it came to fighting, but he did know how to hurt people. The worst part of it, was that Kyla just laughed. The underworld kingpin found the whole episode amusing. He’d even put three hundred credits in Kairon’s pockets to ‘treat the lady’ when they reached Sullust.

It had made Kairon feel like a speck of dust. A sudden reminder of how small he truly was in this Galaxy. He had to suck up his pride and deal with men like Kyla because he had no other choice. Times were hard, that meant working for people he didn’t want to. But Jarrick was right. If Kyla had been in a different mood, he might have had the pair flayed alive before him. Apparently it was an old cybernetic implant that had been bodged. Caused his violent mood swings they said.

What was he going to say if he contacted her? ‘Sorry, just to check, when I said dinner, you understand I meant dinner right?’ He couldn’t shake the mental image of her face: confused, suspicious and a little sad. He’d preferred her pretty face when she’d been smiling.

Then again three hundred credits was a lot for a meal out. Instead of contacting the Grace, he made a reservation at a very nice restaurant and silently vowed that one day he wouldn’t be working for men like Kyla again.

 

[Kairon Rees]

No available bookings for four months

“We’ll see about that,” Kairon grumbled. Brakur’s was an infamous restaurant in the popular tourist city of Piringiisi. The restaurant itself was several hundred metres below the city, in a wide open sphere made of a transparent material suspended in a lava chamber. Diners could watch the majestic procession of the lava flow as it parted around the bubble, entranced by the red and black swirls as the magma cooled on contact with the sphere.

Undeterred, Kairon logged into his old account at Schmidt & Rees Trading. The company, of which his father was still CEO, even though his brother-in-law mostly ran it now, had en extensive freight network. The Quintessence had once been the Harlequin, before Kairon stole it from his own family. If one looked carefully enough at the logo, the hat and leg of the scantily clad female harlequin who had once graced the hull were still visible.

Checking into the “entertaining clients” section, Kairon found the right holonet portal to make a business reservation. The kind that didn’t get publically published. He had a table for two booked for the following evening. His neuroticism idly wondered if this was too much. He started playing out conversations in his mind, considering what he would wear.

He was broken from his brief reverie by an alarm. The console lit up. Before he could even investigate the cause, a groan reverberated through the hull, followed by the whine of tortured metal. The intertial dampeners were pushed to the limit as the infinite cerulean tunnel of hyperspace reverted back to the pin cushion of white stars.

Asmus appeared in the entrance to the cockpit, only half dressed. Kairon didn’t even turn to acknowledge him, he simply pointed upwards frantically. “Dorsal cannon!”

He slapped the intercom onto broadcast. “Mai, get to the ventral cannon! Hague, get up here!”

Yanking hard on the controls, he pulled the Quin hard to starboard and gunned the engines hard. She protested, but yielded. Dammed pirates, must be, he thought to himself as he looked to the sensor readouts. He’d installed an advanced CEC sensor package after a successful job and it immediately picked out the heavy Techno Union cruiser in their path, and an escorting interdictor. In deep space, he couldn’t see her hull, but the sensors quickly identified the model. Pillar-class. Heavy patrol ship used by the TU and armed to the teeth with long range ion cannons. There was no outrunning that quality of military hardware from this distance. The Grace might make it though.

Still keeping his ship flying on an orthogonal vector, he hailed the TU vessel. “Techno Union vessels, this is the registered freighter Quintessence. Sorry for the sudden turn, but we assumed it was pirates out here in deep space,” he said. He wanted to buy some time if he could and try to dissuade them from the notion that they were smugglers. They were on a perfectly legitimate run, but the TU had been holding Alliance bound transports for the legal maximum of three days.

poodoo, my booking, he thought to himself. The company had probably already logged the use of his corporate account and locked it out.

“Mal, you might be able to get out of the interdiction field if you go full burn, but we won’t make it,” he called down a directed signal. Any encryption he could use would be easily broken by the TU, so directing the signal down a narrow beam was the only way to keep them from intercepting. Another warning light came on. The cruiser had launched fighters. He cut his own engines. The computers didn't lie, there was no way he could make the edge of the gravity well before the fighters reached him, or the ion cannons disabled the Quin. Potentially three days of interrogation at the hands of the people with the most nefarious intelligence agency in the known Galaxy. Kark.

[member="Malia Afredane"]
[member="Rusty"]
[member="Tmoxin Temi"]

 

[Malia Afredane]

The Wicked Grace was not a fan of interdictors, and as the TU vessel pulled them back into real space, the hull sang it's displeasure with tremors, grating, and creaking until the fwoosh of lines giving way ignited panic on Mal's face. She had been standing in the common area, making a caf when the violent departure from the hyperspace lane threw her to the floor. That was going to leave a mark. She wrested herself from the floor and made her way to the cockpit to see her sensors lit up like the entertainment district on Coruscant.

She slammed into the seat, and took the controls back, easing the engines and watching the Quin peel off to starboard. She heard Kairon's voice tell her to run, but running made you look guilty. This was a legit load, there was nothing to hide. Besides, with the alarm flickering on the panel, she wasn't sure she could make back into hyperspace. The jerk into normal space had fried something on Gracie.

She hailed the patrol vessel outlined in her sensors, but there was no answer to her inquiry and more bogeys appearing from the patrol cruiser. She killed the engines and waited, just to the port of the Quin.

She didn't want to risk contacting Kairon, even point to point. Instead, she rubbed her hip and looked back over her shoulder at Rusty.

"I karking hope the TU doesn't have a bounty on either of us.

[member="Kairon Rees"] [member="Rusty"]

 

[Rusty]

"We should both be clean, Captain," Rusty said.

He sprinted through the ship, checking and double checking that all their papers were in order and that there wasn't anything illegal. The guns were all registered, and he was registered as a gunsmith with the major guilds and unions. Anything truly heinous had been left on Dressel, since this was supposed to be a legal load, but that didn't mean they were completely helpless. The Shard had enough concealed weapons on his person that the only way to truly disarm him would be to dump him in an incinerator.

He sincerely hoped not to go down that route again.

"I take it we're not planning to lure them aboard, peel off their skins, and use them as disguises so we can blow their reactors and escape?"

 

[Malia Afredane]

"The blood trail would be a give away." She grumbled under her breath as the fighters surrounded them and a curt voice rasped from the radio.

::Wicked Grace, you are to rendezvous with the Union's Fortune along vector 125. You are cleared to bay 3, slip 2. Any attempt to deviate from this pattern will be taken as an act of aggression and you will be fired upon.::

Mal sighed deeply, an extended stay in the brig with the Techno Union was not her idea of a good time. She flipped the radio switch.

"Acknowledged, Union's Fortune. Adjusting course heading to 125."

She fired the sublight engines, and Grace matched the speed of her escort fighters, guiding her along and peeling off as she piloted the freighter into the open bay of the cruiser. She set the ship down gently, powering off the engines and opening the ramp to allow TU officials to board. She idly wondered if they would let her have a bottle of whiskey while she chilled on the cruiser.

She met them at the ramp with her manifests and flight logs, the ship registry on top. Surely they could be reasonable if they cooperated? It was almost a laughable thought Mal dismissed as quickly as she imagined it. She saw the Quin sitting down across from her slip and she stared at the Space Master until her attention was grabbed by a short, pinched-faced man with a uniform and apparently no hobbies.

She presented the ship logs, which he didn't bother to look at before he walked past her into the cargo hold and started to look at the crates.

"We must verify the validity of your shipment. You will be held as pirates until these records are confirmed by the seller of record. Lt. Holcomb will see you to the brig."

And suddenly there was a blaster rifle on each of them and Mal put her hands up. Mal had been ready to argue the pirates assertion until the barrel of the rifle was waved in front of her face and she relaxed her anger, heading down the ramp the hangar floor, her hands wrenched behind her back and cuffs slapped on her.

Steal stuff, get away with it. Do a legit job and end up arrested for crap you're not doing. Made total sense.

She managed a last look over to the Quin as they were lead out of the hangar towards the brig.

[member="Kairon Rees"] [member="Rusty"]

 

[Kairon Rees]

Kairon powered down the Quin's shields as a cloud of droid fighters closed on the ship and swarmed around them.

"Vessel ID: Three Seven Auresh Six Nine, designation: Quintessence. You are being held in accordance with Techno Union legislation for suspected smuggling. Please open up your slave interface for us to bring your vessel in for inspection. If this cannot be achieved please follow the designated flight path and you will be tractored into position."

"Understood. Apologies for changing vector, my first assumption was that we'd been brought out of hyperspace by pirates. I'm transmitting our freight documentation now. Could you let me know how long you're expecting an inspection to take?"

"Understood freighter. Please have every crewmember stand by the docking port, unarmed and without any type of electronic device," came the response. The lack of clarification on timescales was telling. He knew they could hold them without charge for up to three days. That was three days not moving, not moving meant not earning. This was how the Techno Union was strangling the arms trade to Sullust, but he hadn't expected a patrol out here.



All four crew members stood on the deck of the port cargo bay. The mood was glum. There was a palpable tension as they heard the docking ring clamp to the vessel. As the doors slid open they were greeted by a row of battle droids. This doesn't bode well, Kairon thought to himself. The machines quickly surrounded the crew and formed a neat circle around them. A pair of drones floated in, shimmering fields indicating that they were activated scanning the crew and then their surroundings.

Only after this was complete, did a pair of officers in black and green uniforms walk into the hold. After a quick glance one of them lifted his comm to his mouth: "Four to be processed. I want them searched, dressed in scrubs and placed in adjacent cells with the other crew."

"Excuse me?" Kairon started, raising his hand. "Will this take..."

"You will be questioned and your vessel searched until we are certain no illegal activities are being undertaken," came the curt response. Kairon found himself held by the upper arm and led out of his ship.

 

[Rusty]

Rusty tried to follow the Captain as she was led away, but found his way blocked by a blaster rifle.

"Don't even think about it, big guy."

The soldier pointing the weapon, to her credit, looked genuinely sympathetic.

"Look, sir," Rusty said, raising his gloved hands to show he wasn't going to go for a weapon. "I know you're just doing you job, but I've got one myself. I'm her bodyguard, and the law requires that, until legal counsel is provided, I remain with her."

The officer in charge of the squad that held Rusty at gunpoint at the base of the Wicked Grace's loading ramp

"That's not Techno Union law, and even if it were, you're suspected of smuggling and piracy. That's a military matter, not a civil one, and as such, you fall under military law. You will remain separated. You will not be allowed to communicate with her, or with legal counsel, until either your ship is cleared or you are brought up on charges of smuggling. If we find sufficient evidence of piracy, you will be shot without trial, in accordance with military custom."

"Look, sir," said the Shard, turning on the officer, "that's a crock of-"

Someone, one the soldiers, probably, attempted to sink his fist into Rusty's lower back, where the kidneys would have been if he had any.

The man collapsed, screaming, his hand visibly shattered.

"[bleep], and you know it."

"Even if it was," the officer retorted, pointing his pistol at Rusty's forehead, "you just assaulted one of my soldiers."

He gestured to the others.

"Take this man to processing."

That was apparently code for proceed to beat the hapless target senseless with the butts of their rifles. It took them a good five or six seconds for them to realize that it wasn't working.

"Ow. Ow. Oh, the agony," Rusty deadpanned as they backed away and went back to menacing him with the shooty ends. "Seriously, you've probably just knocked those things out of alignment. First one to pull the trigger loses a hand."

"What the hell are you?" the officer demanded, throwing back the hood of Rusty's cloak. He gasped at the skeletal droid head. "It's a droid!" he exclaimed.

Rusty sighed and began to reach for his ID. The female soldier who had first stopped him startled and began to pull the trigger, but the Shard cut her off.

"Easy now, I'm just grabbing my ID. I'm not a droid, I'm a shard. Sentient lump of crystal in a droid's body. That's a thing, look it up."

The soldier let him fish his wallet out of his back pocket, and he presented his credentials to the officer in charge.

"Afforded all the rights and privileges of organics, per intergalactic custom. Now if you're quite through with leveling false accusations and breaking your weapons, how about we all just mosey right along so we can get this shindig over with?"

 

[Malia Afredane]

Mal sat in the floor of the cell, her back to the wall, arms draped in her lap. She was barefoot, the cheap little prison issue loafers were in a pile by the large whole in the wall that passed as a door. The faint golden glow of an energy field separated her from the corridor, and she watched the members of the Quin crew trickle in one at a time to be deposited into the identical cell across the hall. Thankfully the head in each cell was hidden from the sight of the prisoners across the way, on the same wall as the door.

Rusty was not with her yet. This did not make Mal very pleased and as time wore on, she grew more anxious that they had done something irreparable to him. She tried to shake it off but her mind was pulled in too many direction to illicit calm at the moment. For starters, she was angry. At the job, at the TU, at the jerkwad who wouldn't even look to see that all the paperwork was in order. She was angry that Rusty would be in jeopardy. And with a long hard look at herself, she was angry at Kairon. This job was his idea. Somehow in her irrational brain, that made it his fault.

Second, she was worried. She may not have warrants but there was nothing innocent about her and the jobs they had been pulling, nor Rusty's side work. Getting pinched could be an in and out affair or they would throw enough dirt at you that something would stick. They weren't pirating now, but they had from Shaddaa not a month prior. That made her skittish.

She was about to hop up and yell for someone to answer her questions when a tall, slender dark skinned zabrak appeared with a pair of guards. She paused in front of Mal's cell and nodded.

"Bring her."

Time for questioning, no doubt. Mal rose, slipping on the shoes by the door and standing as instructed. She figured they'd have a ways to go but the door slid open down the hall and she was escorted into a dark room. There was a small grate above the door into the corridor, but for the most part there was nothing extraordinary about the room. There was a table and two chairs.

Mal took the seat that was pointed at, and slid into it. The zabrak took the opposite, while a rather large and menacing officer stood near the door.

"You are accused of pirating cargo from Nar Shaddaa. How do you plead?"

Mal looked at the dark skinned, horned woman and stayed silent.

"Who is your buyer?"

Silence. Malanara took a tablet out, swiping a couple moment before she laid it out.

"Perhaps you'd like to talk about your past convictions? You already have a couple strikes against you. We could make this the nail in your coffin."

"We haven't done anything wrong."

"You're in Techno space. You're a convicted felon. Who's going to care?"

Well that certainly took the wind out of her, but she stayed defiant.

"If you're just going to make it up in order to satisfy your need to kill something, do I really need to be here?"

Malanara clucked the inside of her cheek, glancing to the officer. Malanara stood from the table, and headed for the door. Mal was standing at the same time, when the officer swept her leg and she fell forward, smacking her face against the table edge.

"Clumsy one", he murmured as he escorted her back to her cell. She slid down the wall, pinching her nose, a smear of blood on the back of her hand and her lip. Nothing broken but it hurt like hell.

She could see the full crew of the Quin across the hall now, Malanara paused in the hallway between them, speaking to the guard who tripped her up.

"Bring the other captain."

It was going to be a long night.

[member="Kairon Rees"] [member="Rusty"]

 

[Kairon Rees]

[member="Malia Afredane"]
[member=Rusty]

Impotent rage filled him as he watched Mal slide to the floor of his cell. This was his idea, his fault. A cold chill crept up his spine and he sneered at the guard. Not now, he thought. If that anger turned into a cold rage he wouldn’t be able to hold it back. Then they’d stop playing nice. Taking a deep breath, he forced his emotions back down. Just a few days to hold out and they’d be slapped with a fine at most.

The burly officer stood waiting. He looked like he could snap Kairon in two if he needed, and Kairon wasn’t the smallest man. They’d passed plenty of TU battle droids on the way to the cells. Most of the naval crew were droids as well, such was the automation of the TU fleet. He’d noted ray shield, blast doors, auto-blaster emplacements - the full works. Even if all those systems stopped working, he’d run out of power packs before gunning his way through the ship’s complement.

As the field shut out and he stepped out of his cell, the speakers crackled to life. An odd discordant music started to play. It grated on the nerves like fingernails on a chalkboard. The tempo and key frequently changed. It seemed there would be no sleep whilst they were kept here. Thirty six hours without sleep. They’d change things up he knew, rather than trying to simply beat something out of them. Keep them mentally off kilter, try to catch them out. Crap.

 

[Malia Afredane]

[member="Kairon Rees"]

Malanara was waiting for him in the small room. She was dressed in a form fitting black combat suit, her hair style to accentuate her horns. She pointed the chair, with her free hand, the other holding a remote control. The room was several degrees hotter than the hallway outside, and the chair was warm. There was still a smear of blood on the edge of the table where Mal had just been sitting.

"Sit." She said, watching him carefully. The strange music was slightly softer in here, but still annoying nonetheless. She watched him intently for a few minutes, silence uncomfortable and heavy. She needed the time to probe him, to ferret out his fears and insecurities. The heat in the room seemed to increase a few degrees but neither the zabrak or the guard appeared to sweat.

"What are you carrying and who are you fencing to?" She peered down at him, as the air started to feel oppressive in the small room.

 

[Kairon Rees]

[member="Malia Afredane"]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Kairon tutted, reaching out with one sleeve to wipe the smear of blood from the table. He tried to hold the officer’s gaze and look mildly disgusted as he did so. In reality, he didn’t want to have to look at it any more in case he gave something away. It made him feel nauseous to know what they’d done to her already. The scarlet streak had been like an accusation. Nothing could be given away to these investigators and – as Mal had found out – he didn’t have the best poker face. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]He thought back to some of the things he had done to get the crew of captured vessels to open timed safes, or blast doors. Knowing that their civilisation kept them from doing anything that heinous was a slim consolation. There air was close in the room, even with the thin yet scratchy scrubs, he was starting to sweat.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]“Nothing is being ‘fenced’. Legal purchase as you’ve already found from the paperwork. Which begs the question, what is the Techno Union doing out here bothering legitimate businesses? I thought the capitalist Union was for industry in all its forms.”[/SIZE]

 

[Malia Afredane]

"Legal purchases from actual customers hire bonded freight companies to haul cargo. Not some smuggler who works for underworld crime bosses. So who did you steal the goods from?"

She peered down at him, but from the dark corner, another voice sounded out, this one very familiar.

"What have you gotten Asmus into?" Her tone was frantic and accusatory, almost screeching at him.

With a press of a button on the remote, an LED incapacitator started to go off, positioned directly at the spot where he was sitting. The faint smell of vomit started to waft through the air, the temperature rising.

The light was real, the rest was Malanara pouring her mentalist Force powers into causing him the most discomfort possible until she got a response. The woman captain had a tolerance for pressure but that was to be expected with a felon who had a gambling addiction. Her next session would be wholly nightmarish, but first Malanara was enjoying the show here.

[member="Kairon Rees"]

 

[Kairon Rees]

Knuckles whitened as he dug his nails into the flesh of his palms, almost breaking the skin. The light almost immediately sent a hot burst of pain from the back of his eyes to his temples, disorienting him. He closed his eyes and turned his head away.

Already queasy, the hot stench of vomit offended his senses even further. Kairon grit his teeth together and held his head high. He focussed on the sensation of his finger nails against his palms.

“The details of the traders are on the manifest. You can contact them to confirm,” he replied. There was a hot stab of pain in his gut. The image of his sister flashed across his mind constantly, flickering through different colours just like the LEDs as she levelled more accusations at him. Drugs, they’ve used drugs.

 

[Malia Afredane]

Everything abruptly ceased, the temperature returned to normal and the puke light was turned off. He looked rather sickly at this point, and was clenching his fists so tightly, Malanara expected to see rivers of red running through his fingers. She gestured towards the prisoner.

"Take him back to his cell, bring me the young one."

The guard jerked him up out of the chair so quickly and with such force, it threatened to toss him clear across the room but he kept a firm grasp on Kairon's arm as he drug him back to the cell and retrieved the boy.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Mal's head hurt, bridging across her nose and into her temples. No [member="Rusty"] yet. It'd been hours now. Or seemed it. She couldn't tell the time. The crew of the Quin seemed to be not handling the situation well. Jarrick was in soldier mode looked like. POW was written all over his face. The kid was freaking out at the screeching noise but the Cathar was crying from the pain, her hands over her ears rocking.

She watched the guard who tripped her drop Kairon in the cell and drag the boy out. She really hoped Kairon didn't have any secrets, the kid was going to sing like a bird. The crew over there had kept quiet, there was no talking back and forth, but as the guards disappeared with Asmus, she grumbled at them under her breath.

She looked around, rubbing her temples and fighting back the nausea that came with a pounding headache. She keeled over on the floor and pushed one ear to the floor, in an effort to drive out the sound of the music, her finger pressing her other ear closed. That was fine until Asmus started to scream in terror down the hall.

She opened her eyes from the bliss of darkness to look over at Kairon, her voice low.

"What are doing in the room?"

[member="Kairon Rees"]

 

[Kairon Rees]

[member="Malia Afredane"]

Kairon pulled his hair back, and then rubbed his eyes with the balls of his palms. They were going for short sessions it seemed. He imagined they’d try and mix things up, keep them disoriented and always guessing.

He looked up as Mal spoke, his eyes turning sad as he saw the blood dried to her lips. Those eyes turned dark and cold as Asmus screamed again. “I think we might have been drugged,” he replied. He tried to smile, but he knew it would look weak. “Boy’s tougher than he looks, but it doesn’t matter. They’ve nothing to find out and when this is done, I’ll have my lawyer on the line,” he said, trying to sound optimistic. It was too early in the process to be losing hope. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, before looking back down at his lap, his expression full of guilt.

He looked across at Jarrick, there was no point engaging him. The vacant expression showed he’d mentally retreated from their surroundings. They wouldn’t crack that tough bastard in a year. Mai was losing it already, but she had nothing to tell. Her lashing out was of greater concern. Asmus was the weak link and he knew it.

 

[Malia Afredane]

She shook her head, as the screaming down the hall subsided.

"Don't be. This isn't your fault. Wrong place, wrong time. Story of my life..."

She chuckled and found that laughing made her nose hurt worse. The quiet coming from the interrogation room was disconcerting but faintly, the boy's voice could be heard whimpering. She had been pressing her hands on the cold metal floor then holding them to her nose, as the coolness of them felt good for a bit. She noticed the blood on her hand and tried to clean it off, the coppery taste of it dried on her lips.

"At least you have a lawyer to throw at them. I've an angry mother. I don't think that's going to frighten anyone here."

Her mind was fixated on [member="Rusty"]. Why wasn't he here with the rest of them? Had he done something drastic?

The hours pressed on. They came for Mai, and the howling caterwauls were even less unbearable than the screams of Asmus. Hague registered some painful grunts but they deposited him back fairly quickly.

Malanara had seen everyone once by now and she was back in the hall, looking them over. She smiled a bit before she issued her command.

"Grab the convict."

Mal shook her head, biting her lip. That was something she didn't need advertised to Kairon. She refused to meet his eyes as they drug her out of the cell and down the hall.

This time there were no chairs, the table was a vertical slab and she was cuffed into it, defiantly staring down the zabrak. For her, it was cold. Like ice on her skin to the point she began to shiver. The zabrak was standing right next to her with a disturbing set of knives as the table laid out horizontal and Malanara began to fill her mind with the illusions that her flesh was being carved from her arms and face. The pain of the mind projections overwhelmed her as she watched skin intricately sliced off and discarded. The deeper the cuts seemed, the more pain until eventually she passed out all together.

She woke up screaming in her own cell, feeling her arms as tears flowed down her cheeks, whole and unblemished. She scrambled across the floor to the corner, hugging her knees to her chest.

[member="Kairon Rees"]

 

[Kairon Rees]

Kairon was sat against the wall, starring at his hand. He kept turning it over and occasionally touching the finger nails gently. Holding both hands out in-front of him, fingers splayed, he considered them both against each other. His eyes looked up as he noticed Mal awake again. Recognition seemed to dawn slowly across his face. The noise kept interrupting his thoughts as they formed.

"I thought they were drugging us," he said quietly, again playing with his finger tips. "This isn't drugs," he stated flatly.

"Pull it together," came a voice from the side. Kairon looked over to see Jarrick giving him a stern glare. The old veteran had emerged from his shell to snap him out of his reverie momentarily. Kairon gave him a curt nod, acknowledging his gratefulness. The vacant stare was back in a moment. Mai had managed to find some sleep through the music, so had Asmus; their ordeals clearly draining enough to send them off.

He wished he could rest. He looked over at Malia, saw the tears on her cheeks. He focussed on that, let the seething core of anger build silently. He clenched his fists and put them down by his sides. He tried to smile. He half got there. "My lawyer's a very good one," he announced, lying. "Shame about the date though, the compensation claim should cover an even better meal," he said. Just talk about something else, don't think about how that thing violated you.