Private This Particular Port in a Storm

[Jerec Asyr]

PORT 300
LORONAR

"Alright. So..." Jerec scratched his five o'clock shadow in what passed for deep thought on a Monday. "...two hundred a day, room and board at a no-tell across the street, and you get to keep and sell anything we find that isn't, like, solid aurodium. All I want is a rock-solid guarantee that there's nothing remotely Sithlike living in the ruins under my nice new port."

He leaned over from his chair and rapped the neared ancient stone surface with his knuckles. He and Jegy had gone through this whole area to make sure the five-thousand-year-old ruins were inert as could be. But the longer Jerec hung out here at Port 300, the more he learned about the deep city levels underneath. Loronar was a budget Coruscant, half a trillion people and layers upon layers of geo-ecumenopological detritus. Last thing he needed was for someone to delve too greedily and too deep and wake a hibernating terentatek or whateverthefeth.

He refocused on Cato Fett , the Mandalorian on the other side of the chipped secondhand desk.

"And I know that guarantee is a steep ask, but it's what needs doing."

 

[Cato Fett]

“I won’t fail you, Mr. Asyr,” Cato said, tipping his helm forward.

The office space was a hazardously furnished cell, composed of second-to-fourth hand thrift rescues ranging from a scratched wroshyyr-wood desk and a set of teak-and-stencilled-paper blinds, to a rare Esper console, a one-off high-density machine with quantum-rivaling capabilities and pre-holo three-dimensional imaging. Overhead turned an ancient ceiling fan, the nacelle a bowl of machine polished chrome. Nests of grease paper fluttered atop strewn datapads or struggled under the weight of tech parts. Past a lead-glass window, a speeder throttled by in the evening; slats of hard light briefly shone through, turning the black of Cato’s T-Visor bright and silver as a moon-face. He adjusted his paired swords riding over his hip and belly, at once looking at ease and still as a raquor’daan.

“The Corporate Authority encourages a lot of contractor outfits. Work is competitive. Hiring…” ‘Mandalorians,’ he was close to saying, swallowing on a dry throat. “Someone like me can be risky. I appreciate your confidence, Mr. Asyr.”

Jerec Asyr

 

[Jerec Asyr]

"Corpo contractor procurement is rigged. Heavily rigged. I can empathize." Jerec sat back in his chair and laced his hands behind his head. The casual posture matched his voice; it didn'tmatch his eyes. "I'm not interested in whether you've got the right watermarks on your RFP submission. I'm interested in hiring the Mando swordsman who killed Lawry Rake and Norris Ray on Denon. I knew a girl who knew them, let's say. Word got around."

 

[Cato Fett]

“Not about the money,” Cato said, in a voice like flint. He left his swords in their waiting scabbards and cycled his carbine to full-auto, pushing into the gunstock. He sighted up the pair of party-boys bleeding raggedly on the polished flooring. Black, bright eyes went wet with satisfying terror. “Not anymore.”

He squeezed tightly on the trigger and the carbine jolted in his grasp. Eventually, the magazine-well ran dry. The onlookers screamed themselves hoarse.

-

In the present, Cato couldn’t help a low, sardonic snort free itself. Something in his posture altered, just slightly. In the shoulders, the rigid line of his upright spine, the way his off-hand curled under the tsuba-guard of his longsword. Memory brought on the hunt. All he could feel was the hollow pulsation deep below his gut; his hara, empty save for anger and a killing rage. Cato breathed deeply for a moment and forced himself to gauge with Jerec’s wide, hooded eyes. The Ithorian’s tremulous, deep bass breaths were oddly relaxing.

“…CAD will go to the ends of the system to bring in a sub-contractor guilty of breaking his non-disclosure clause. But a pair of handsome kids, with good families and even better connections?” Cato said, now sitting still as stone. “And the victims being… nobodies? Mr. Asyr. I cannot work in that system. I can’t. The dead and the helpless deserve justice. I would rather work for you, here, than anywhere else. Just point me where you need me to go.”

Jerec Asyr

 

[Jerec Asyr]

"You may not have come as far as you thought, though, friend. The CAD rules Loronar now, as you know, and the Direx Board is happily tightening its grip. I don't know if this port will shelter the Spacer Guild for six months or six years, but it needs to be a friggin' warren, a redoubt, every kind of slip-away option known to man. To do that, I need - well, what I hired you for."

He pointed at the floor, and the many, many levels beneath. Not Coruscant, but not normal.

"The move-in deep clean."

One big hand flicked, and a wall panel squeaked open to show a cobbled-together weapons rack: his lightsaber, his scan dart launcher, a couple of blasters, and an extraordinarily nasty multispectral radcannon with radiation deflection badges hanging off it like dog tags.

"I'm not you, but I'd like to come along personally. I won't be a liability."

 

[Cato Fett]

The radcannon gave Cato pause. It was a beastly amalgam of heavily compartmentalized components better reserved for anti-infantry vehicles, long and boxy, its casing machine-chased duranium a stinging colour of acid-washed gunmetal and oily iridescence. It somehow fit Jerec Asyr ’s non-standard posture when hefted. He left questions concerning the silent lightsaber unsaid; anything outside wordless acknowledgement was boorish. Cato nodded curtly, rose from his seat, and swiftly gave his arms and armour a last check-over. Swords both long and short, tanto-knife, throwing knives secured to his greaves, muli-function gauntlets that fairly bristled with micromachinery. A modified close-quarters EE-3 and a compactly fitted jetpack completed the modest ensemble.

“Your credits, your rules, Mr. Asyr. I can accommodate,” Cato said, strolling with the Ithorian outside his snug office. Engine noise and nearby distract adverts and urban chatter began growing as a background hiss. Metropolitan white-noise. He briefly looked to the sky through a hallway window. The evening skyline was overcast and painted mauve and peels of wan, sickly orange.

Dead my old fine hopes
And dry my dreaming but still…
Iris, blue each spring​

Cato rolled his shoulders, brought his carbine closer across his torso trunk, knocking a finger across the trigger housing. “Has anything emerged from beneath the port recently?”

 

[Jerec Asyr]

"The smell of...know what, I don't even know what the smell is."

He unclipped the stock and forward grip from the scan dart launcher for pistol carry. The data got piped to a holo lens that settled over his right eye.

"Glad you're not the kind of merc who's precious about working alone."

The radcannon came with a stressed sling that age had worn down at the edges, just an uncomfortably slack strap that used to be yellow. The big gun settled onto his shoulder with a jolt.

"Merc - that's not offensive these days, is it?"

 

[Cato Fett]

“Depends on the mercenary,” Cato quipped. They briskly mounted down an angle of stairs and followed the bend of a sub-level corridor. Outside reverberations of passing speeder traffic and the omnipresent advertisement wails began growing thicker, duller in their ears. Sound became the low electric hum of power running along feed and exchange cables bracketed into the old, tan stone. Became exhales of recycled air pumping through rusting, dusty grates.

“My people have subsisted on contract work for millennia,” Cato said. At Jerec’s gesture, they stopped before a nondescript maintenance bubble-hatch. It was inset within a wider block of flattened and planed stone, and once secured with a bevy of mechanical and magnet locks. Half were semi-functional. The other half were cracked and slagged, pried to pieces from abuse by power-shears and fusion-cutters. He took a small key-fob from Jerec and passed it over a small cobwebbed plastic reader. Cracked sound notes briefly piped. The remaining locks jarred loose and threaded back into the stone jamb. Cato gripped the hatchway by a pipe-rung and pulled it open. Within, a half-lit stairwell, dripping in places where condensation poured through flaws in the stone, beckoned them.

“But it’s a complex conversation. For us, it’s tied up in what it means to be Mando’ade. To be Mandalorian,” Cato said. He drew his tanto and adjusted his hold on the carbine into a close-quarters grip, taking the lead ambling down the stairwell. A light on his helm blinked on and helped shine against patches of shadow. “These days, disagreeing can be lethal.”

 

[Jerec Asyr]

"Shattered."

Jerec leaned on an untrustworthy railing and peered down the center of the long, long stairwell. He unholstered his scan dart launcher and aimed straight down. A soft 'pthut' lobbed the miniature lifeform scanner into the dark.

"I don't follow Mando politics but aren't there like four Mandalores at this point?" He tapped his headgear. "Sharing signal coming in. You should see what I see."

All the way down there, fragmentary red outlines twitched together and apart in ways Jerec couldn't parse.

 

[Cato Fett]

“Yes…” Cato murmured.

The signal returns were echoing from a hollow landing below. He toggled his AR overlays off, funneling excess environmental information into a tight battle-feed. Sonic returns continued painting a handful of targets capering about below in the partial lighting, his audio gains magnifying irregular, phlegmy breathing and shuffling abrasions scuffling across bare stone flooring. Together, they edged downward until they stood a handful of steps above a ragged aperture. Bilious, roiling stenches of tainted flesh and other, rotten physical functions reached them. Whatever the landing had been, it’d been scraped and vandalized into a kind of den. Ancient furnishings were splintered and piled into makeshift nest-lodges overlaid with skeins of dried, cracking hide. Old spools of installed wiring, lamp strips, glow-globes, naked bulb sockets had been torn free of their anchors and brackets. Obscene glyphs, drawn with dried viscera, were painted all across the walling.

“We stay here, on the stairs,” Cato said lowly. “Bottleneck them, neutralize any greater numbers. Wait for it…”

He toggled his helm speaker to just over half output volume. And then clenched with his teeth and tongue and issued an ear-drum stinging whistle. The sharp report lingered like a note of tinnitus. The shapes stalking about just out of visual range stiffened and paused, hulking over onto all fours. A blackened mass of ‘half-things’ suddenly, wordlessly, slithered towards the mouth of the stairwell with alarming quickness. Limbs of exposed, sharpened bone, mouths split wide to the jaw hinge, talon hands and feet, scrabbled up the stone steps for them. Then, as their mass reached the aperture together, became briefly halted, struggling to maneuver their numbers. No cohesion, Cato saw. He felt for the hollowness of his hara, reined in the threads of battle rage, and toggled his carbine to burst-fire. The blaster crisply swung and jolted in his grasp, firing with barely pause, tending to each logged target in order of immediacy and threat. The smell of cooked bone and blood smoked across them. Cato grunted something like an oath under his breath and rapidly replaced a spent magazine, charging a shot and smoting a ‘half-thing’ off its feet.

 

[Jerec Asyr]

Jerec kissed his radiation deflection badge for luck - he'd given Cato another - and unslung the multispectral radcannon.

The radcannon was a karking inhumane and barbaric weapon, not to be too delicate about it. He knew it well enough to nurse eight shots out of its overcharged power cells, and he put five into the horde. Gamma rays, X-rays, and high ultraviolet weren't remotely visible. He tracked his aim by watching alchemized flesh fountain smoke and steam. Heavy stonework would prevent the hard rads from impacting the city all around, and in any case he was aiming more or less down toward the surface.

Good thing they were deep enough that nobody needed to come down here, ever. On the other hand, a radiation sign and a ticking Geiger would do a great job of covering a hidden escape route for the port, assuming enough radiation protection gear was available.

All that to say, while this particular area would be hot for months or longer...there was a bit of a silver lining.

 

[Cato Fett]

The air roiled with Vulcan heat and a floating metallic aftertaste. Cato paused fire, observing a handful of ‘half-things’ die on their feet, swept back with an unseen microwave punch that cooked their blood and burst the meat of their brains. Exposed skin seared with epidermal malignancies. Some just waivered on their feet and expired, suffering linear organ failure, killed by instantaneous cancers and degenerative carcinomas. Flesh corrupted, down to the DNA. Cato toggled the carbine’s safety, rubbing at his radiation badge.

“Hmn…” He vaulted a handful of steps and paused before the twitching mass now barring across the landing door. He toed a lolling, now eyeless skull, tracking his helm over knots of broken, snagged torso trunks and blistered, cracked, broke limbs. Body fats hissed and popped as oily steam rose and clouded overhead. There was an overwhelming pong of ozone, baked marrow, and the iron irradiation tang. With caution, he edged into the landing, training the carbine from nest to scalded nest.

After a tense, fraught beat, Cato motioned for Jerec. He couldn’t help eyeing the Ithorian’s slung radcannon as he ambled into the cone of his helm-lamp. “…At low-yield, that could still kill. Albeit slowly. If they ever solve the issue of component burn out, every ground fighter will be in trouble.

“Don’t know of any concurrent ‘Manda’lors’,” He went on, stalking further into the landing. “But there’s been so many the last couple of generations we’ve endured almost a literal handful. Each Mandalore increasingly and predictably unpredictable. The mantle has become a joke, Mr. Asyr. By and large, my people are too dull-witted to catch onto it. ...See anything worth salvage?”

 

[Jerec Asyr]

"Ugly gun. Ugly results. Days like this, I fething love it."

The radcannon would drain an oversized power cell in six blasts, eight if you knew your business and kept decent trigger discipline. This one was maybe seventy percent depleted. He swapped it out anyway.

"I can empathize. My people are a joke too. The doormats of the galaxy. Nice folks, don't get me wrong, but you haven't seen 'no true Mando' politics until you've hung out with pacifist Ithorian nature priests. As for salvage..."

He crouched over the nearest crop of dead things.

"...I'm no xenologist. But some of these teeth look..."

Absent a pair of pliers, he took out his plain, battered lightsaber and fiddled with the controls. It spat a precise little burnt-orange blade that snipped through teeth and claws just right. His gunbelt had a prospecting pouch that fit a double handful of small trophies.

 

[Cato Fett]

“No true Mando…” Cato echoed, mostly to himself. He was knelt before the largest of the adhoc nests and was nuzzling the brake-end of his carbine muzzle through the detritus. Little to note; a few crushed electronics, some bright odds and ends, soiled garments, bits and shards of skull-bone and a few gnawed pelvic bowls. He stood, watched Jerec neatly solder through alchemic jawbones and gum meat.

From the landing, they traced and gently egressed down another tight flight of well-worn stairs. There was an increasing sense of sepulchral weight amassing overhead. Lighting came intermittently from naked bulbs wedged into old-gen sockets screwed either to the stone or brackets of dirty plastic and grating. Décor was minimalistic, industrial. Every dozen meters, they stopped while Jerec launched clutches of sensor darts. Returns echoed back negative; Cato didn’t share a gnawing instinct worrying his senses. Once or twice, the holographic blooms all-too briefly caught a shade of red in its range that darted away soundlessly.

The stairwells grew wider, throatier. They passed dismantled rail junctions that twisted and tunneled away into further darkness. It was becoming labyrinthian, where Loronar’s undercity infrastructure cut and bisected with old-world mausoleums and bar-vaulted catacombs. Whenever they paused, skittering would briefly clack and ring in the passageways fore and aft. Cato flexed his hand tendons, constantly adjusting the ride of his gripped carbine and tanto, seemingly appraising a thousand details and vectors simultaneously.

“Handful of geo-survey drones could map these service tunnels. Very cheaply,” Cato added. His voice broke the deep quiet. “You could fashion any number of boltholes down here. Safe houses. Escape routes. If we could find one of the larger bore-shafts and if it led outside city limits, could even manage some limited hangar space. Stealth in small shuttles, one-man fighters. You could father in a very able smuggling world down here, Mr. Asyr.”

 

[Jerec Asyr]

"Spacious," Jerec agreed. He had other things on his mind: dark corners, warped shadows, and a steadily depleting arsenal of scan darts. He fired them more sparingly now that the scale of this place had become clearer. Red outlines flickered on the other sides of walls, sometimes standing as if they too could see through the walls. Those sensor contacts refused to stabilize.

On the other hand, gamma rays - a significant chunk of the radcannon's output - could waltz through anything short of lead plating. Jerec pointed at a wall and fired. It only scorched the wall and made his deflection badge beep, but behind the wall, a silhouette twisted away hastily.

"The rich boys you killed on Denon - I know what they did and all, I'm not blaming you by a mile. Was it the first time you'd gone hunting like that? If not, what made these ones push you over that vigilante line?"

 

[Cato Fett]

“Something… broke,” Cato admitted.

They had diverted from a main arterial tunnel and were gradually purging their way through ancillary. Cato snapped his carbine aside a fraction, blistering staccato fire into a darkened side-chamber. Hairless cretins sporting capes of keratin spines and protruding bone-spurs blew apart. He backpedalled a single pace, cocked the carbine up and braced the stock on his thigh, and fired up into a blackened patch suspended in a rafter overhead. A thing squealed, died, and fell into an ungainly, broken pile on the sandy floor. Cato briskly reloaded a fresh magazine; attrition was grinding his ammunition stores close to empty.

“We… are fighters. I have trained my whole life to kill well,” He said, taking the point-lead, slowly stalking forward to a split injunction installed ahead. “Kill honourably. The Resol’nare… The codices… The way of the warrior. All these disparate things I’ve tried to inculcate and use to create something whole. Something harmonious. We live in a veil of tears. Yet…”

Cato paused them at the injunction. Either passage curled away and halved their line of sight. Dislocated sounds echoed and reverbed off the high, narrowed walls ahead; wet cackles, flicks of metal like chain-links snapping together, chitinous stridulations that hammered the air like wasp-wings. They dared another sensor dart; the digital returns on Cato’s HUD briefly outlined bodies that appeared frozen. Trapped in the stone blocks wedged about them. The outlines blinked and shivered out of existence, and a deep, churlish throaty growl roared in their ears like a wind gust. Both braced, waiting for a physical assault that never came. Cato snorted behind his helmet and tossed an emptied magazine forward; its empty feed-end pointed to their left. They ventured on, ever more mindful of the long shadows cast on sections of bas-relieved pale stone.

“Yet, there was the civil war. I had to ponder what honour meant to us as so many bent their heads to Ra. Then to Yasha. It led to a moment where I was inconsolably lost, Jerec. More asleep than awake. And then Lawry Rake and Norris Ray entered the picture. I woke up. Honour is nothing if you cannot spare it for the defense of the weak and innocent. …Sorry, you get Mandalorians talking, they never shut up.”

 

[Jerec Asyr]

They paused in an inset niche that became a deep gallery once you looked into the gloom past the statuary. It offered limited angles of approach: they could keep an eye out while taking a drink, a leak, and in Jerec's case a vegan Ithorian protein bar. Not that he was vegan himself, but human protein bars didn't taste right and the diaspora merchant families preferred the agro-pacifist brands.

"Learning to kill isn't enough of a purpose on its own, is it. Big reason I'm not a Jedi. And once you've got the skills, there's an itch to use'em. Every problem looks like a nail and all that. Another reason I'm not a Jedi. Disappointment to my teacher, not committed enough. Selling used ships out of Seven Corners' red-light district instead of...something something power of the universe. I was lucky. Way I see it, when most Jedi see what's...what their life's going to be, they convince themselves they want it. Because breaking away means they're not who they thought you were. They were, I mean."

 

[Cato Fett]

“There’s a bit of terror when you catch yourself looking from the outside in, isn’t there?” Cato chortled softly. He took a seat on a cracked socle under the stern glower of a monkish effigy, settling his scabbards and firearm comfortably. “…Divorcing yourself from what… others believe or perceive you ought to be, ‘must be’… Is very agonizing. The Mando’ade equivalent is ‘dar’manda’. You risk complete ostracization. You were told that you’d tempt play with the… what? The ‘Dark Side’? If you failed in your studies? You’d be betraying your potential? Hmph. Do you know, Mr. Asyr, that even a plumber does more good in a forty-hour work week than the finest Jedi Knight?”

The shapes of four-winged bats scampered between the sections of the gallery’s high cloistered vault. Thin skeins of lambent mist slowly bubbled and warped across the knotted brickwork in the floor. He tipped the lid of his helm up to take a brief slake from his dented canteen; the water was brackish, bitter now, though it abated his thirst just the same. After, Cato stood, toggling off his carbine’s safeties, approaching Jerec while the Ithorian finished with his meal-bar.

“We gotta make a call, Mr. Asyr. We can go on, or we can call it for today. I recommend we fall back. No way to resupply ourselves down here. I can’t guarantee my swords will be enough to keep you safe,” Cato said. “Hard as I would try.”

 

[Jerec Asyr]

"Let's head back," Jerec said immediately. "I'm low on power packs and taste for tourism. I've got a few battle droids who can help you finish the sweep at your convenience. Thanks for humoring me." He cracked his neck, which is sort of a process if you're Ithorian. "Been a little too long since I was in the thick of it, and I felt the need. Guess I can't shake the idea that if I'm not good at killing, I'm not much of anything. Another reason I don't hold with the Jedi, though they don't all put that much focus on fighting skills and such. Truth be told, Cato," he said, standing up with a sigh, "if not for this old Anzati named Tiland Kortun I'd have written off the Jedi completely. I mean, I have - I'd never be one - but I'd be a lot more vocal about it. A few years back I was running soft spice off Kessel, which was neutral territory, and a Jedi crew showed up to harass ships. I made a run for it and they killed my first mate, an Apokka named Quekko. No jurisdiction, all kinds of insanity. So I spent a while waving signs and yelling at the Silvers, but in the end, being an anti-Jedi activist means being in bed with trash. And the Sith recruiters just clog the kark out of your spam filter."

He checked the radcannon's charge again - three or four shots on the current power pack.

"Shall we?"

 

[Cato Fett]

“I remember,” Cato said as he pulled his carbine and tanto into place. Consulted a small 3D geo-readout painted in a corner of his HUD, retreading a crumb trail winding back toward the port’s upper sub-levels. Between the broken rhythms of their footfalls, other echoes sounded and followed after their slow wake. They were soon ascending up the narrow twist of an unlit stairwell, flitting along a kind of arcade of empty gallery windows gazing out and down into an unlit bore.

“Holonet caught on fire over night.” He edged them round a pair of sharp corners, utilizing his helm’s limited on-board sonics, light enhancement, and infrared imaging. The sensor-darts were depleted to a scant handful. The tunnel vaults were cold stone, with mercifully faint heat pools and fading bio-chem spoors. Occasionally footfalls planted in the grout-less tiling glowed hot. Skirting one partially collapsed atrium, an ambush laid in the mouth of an unusually sunken apse savaged them. Combat lasted the span of a heartbeat; Cato’s carbine fire corralling Sithspawn into a messy tangle, slain as Jerec’s radcannon snarled to life and blitzed them with invisible x-ray bolts.

As they ventured homeward, the weight bearing down overhead began lightening. Cato risked a little chatter: “Yeah. Jedi were freshly vilified. It wasn’t just the poor Apokka either, all of a sudden everybody came forward with their stories. Seemed unreal but it was another sign of the times. Force users, out of control, capricious, and hard to hold accountable. Who watches the so-on-and-so-forth, etcetera etcetera. Then a fresh Sith atrocity overtook the talking heads and suddenly, we again understood the ‘lesser of two evils’. Maybe the Jedi are riven with hypocrisies and flawed methodology. But compared to face-painted butchers that devour the souls of worlds…?

“Here's a question, Mr. Asyr. Which is worse to you, a Jedi acting outside his remit, or a vigilante taking it upon himself to mete out punishment?” His face twisted ruefully behind his t-bar face plate.