The Great and Powerful Rynar Hibiki, Planet-Hopping Part Timer
Chapter 1
Well.
That went to shit faster than I expected.
Rynar Hibiki hunkered down behind a particularly sturdy-looking plasteel crate, an inkling of regret for the actions leading to his current situation beginning to form in the back of his mind.
Then again, that could just be his lunch coming back with a vengeance. Damned Mon Calamari street vendors and their deliciously fried seaweed wraps. Heartburn, all wrapped up and ready for your overpriced consumption.
But back to the now, and the blaster bolts angrily melting their way through his impromptu cover.
Rynar risked a glance around the side of the crate, and was able to just make out the shape of his blaster pistol laying a meter or so off to his right, exactly where he had planned for it to land when the punch he had totally expected had connected with his face and sent him sprawling.
In that split second, he was also able to discern the positions of his aggressors, a pair of Rodians and a Human, the former taking cover behind the short durasteel crate atop which still sat the object that had brought the four of them together, and the latter poking his shiny bald head out from behind another, larger crate to his left and looking suspiciously like he was about try some sort of flanking maneuver.
Pulling himself back to avoid the worryingly well-aimed group of shots from the two Rodians just before they ionized the air where his head would have been, he reached back into the belt pouch on his left side and pulled out the rather expensive little surprise he had purchased for just such an occasion as this.
Because, clearly, he had planned for this eventuality. This wasn't just left-over equipment from that job on Sullust a few months back.
He grasped the handle-like grip of the Merr-Sonn C-14A Stun Grenade, thumbed the activator, and lobbed the bulky device up and over the top of his rapidly-melting crate, then quickly brought his hands up to his ears and squeezed his eyes shut. A brief second later he felt, rather than heard, the sound of the non-lethal energy weapon, and snapped his eyes open and sprang into a dive across the meter of open ground, wrapping his hand around his modified Merr-Sonn Model 434 heavy blaster pistol.
The dive became a roll, and he righted himself and spun to snap his aim at the nearest of the Rodians, the "DeathHammer" living up to its colloquial nickname as his first shot burned clean through the alien's torso.
The next Rodian had apparently had the sense to try and duck behind his cover at the sight of the stun grenade, though likely to marginally less effect that he had hoped, and the next shot incinerated a third of his green-skinned skull and at least one of his three eyes.
The human hadn't been so lucky, and was currently on his knees clutching his eyes and cursing in some language Rynar didn't understand.
It was the inflection. It doesn't matter what language you speak, pissed is pissed.
Rynar levelled his blaster at the man, but paused, rubbing his freshly-bruised chin in thought. This was, after all, the man who had given him that bruise and started the, admittedly short, firefight. It wasn't his fault the man was so sensitive about the light reflecting off his head.
Seriously, who actually waxes their head?
What to do, though? He had definite cause to just shoot the guy, especially considering the rather painful bruise he could feel heating up his lower jaw- damn, was it starting to swell?- but, at the same time, he was now clearly just a helpless noncombatant. So long as he didn't actually manage to level his now-rising blaster at Rynar-
That thought snapped the wandering oddjob's mind back to reality, and his finger back to the trigger. An instant later, the man was dead.
Well, I guess that solves that problem.
Confident he was now alone and unwatched, he sighed and holstered his somewhat-bulky sidearm with a flip and a flourish, just in case, and turned to regard the object of contention that had brought the four, now one, to the small, isolated warehouse in the first place. Sitting on the crate was a metallic black cylinder, about half a meter long, with a holographic keypad interface set into the top. Hibiki strode over to the crate and lifted the device, or… container… whatever it was, and gave it an appraising once-over before shrugging and hooking it to his belt.
Suppose I'll have to return this, then. Shame about that seller's fee, though.
A thought struck him, then, as he remembered the terms of the deal, discussed beforehand. The three thugs he'd been instructed to meet for the handoff were supposed to have been paying in physical credit chits rather than direct transference of funds. He hopped over the crate and searched what remained of the body of the first Rodian he'd shot, finding a pair of the ubiquitous energy cells used in weapons across the galaxy and a few small-denomination credit chits, but nothing else worth taking. He inspected the alien's dropped weapon, a well-used BlasTech DT-12, but discarded it due to its overly bulky grip.
Leaving the heavy pistol to clatter to the ground somewhere off in the shadows, he moved to the still-smoking body of the second Rodian. A quick search turned turned up a rather hefty pouch stashed in the thug's pockets, along with another pair of energy cells and a few packaged human hard candies, the sugary kind that the reptilian sentients seemed to love so much. Rynar unwrapped one of the little red candies, popped it in his mouth, and opened the pouch to find a modest collection of five-thousand-credit chits within.
Seventy-five thousand? Damn, whatever this thing is must be pretty valuable.
Without another thought, Rynar pocketed the pouch and crouched over the human, having ignored the weapon of the second Rodian as it was identical to the first. Half of the man's throat had been burned away by the high-powered energy weapon, leaving the man with a wide-eyed, surprised look on his face as he leaned back against the crate he'd been using as cover. Initial inspections didn't turn up anything worth swiping, and the idea of toting around the man's dropped blaster rifle didn't appeal to the young wanderer, compact though it may be, it was still larger than he could easily conceal on his person and likely wouldn't be worth enough to justify the effort.
Taking one last look around the warehouse, Rynar retrieved the rechargeable C-14A stun grenade and strode out of the room and back onto the dusty streets of Ord Mantell City.
"You shot them?"
"Yep."
"All of them?"
"Yeah."
"You killed my buyers?"
"I honestly don't see what's so hard to understand."
Rynar stood just inside the doors to the backroom of the Broken Circuit, a private, made-to-order electronics shop specializing in black market weapons fabrication and modification, walls lined with starship and weapon parts, and even a few unarmed proton torpedoes, leaning back against the doorframe as the irate Sullustan engineer before him turned a shade of red he hadn't thought the somewhat diminutive alien capable of achieving.
"I understand that you shot them, what I don't understand is why."
Rynar shrugged.
"One of them punched me, so I punched back. Then the other two drew their blasters and I drew mine, and it pretty much went downhill from there. Scored a few candies off one of the Rodians, though-"
At that the Sullustan's composure finally broke.
"I hired you to deliver a package to a man two blocks away! It was the simplest thing in the world, and you screwed it up! The only reason I hired you at all was to add an extra degree of separation between myself and my buyers to keep the feds and the Black Sun off my ass, and you couldn't even handle that-"
"I still got the cash."
"And to top it off, now I have three bodies to deal with, and you… you what?"
"I got the cash. One of the Rodians had it." Rynar withdrew the pouch and held it before the engineer. "How much were they supposed to be giving you?'
"One hundred and fifty thousand credits, cash, in five-thousand credit chits." The Sullustan responded, taking the proffered bag and rifling through it. "There's only sixty-thousand in here! Hand over the rest!" he commanded, accusingly.
"I don't have any more, it's all in there." Technically true, Rynar had taken a detour to pay the dockmaster to refuel his ship and stash the rest onboard. He really didn't have any cash on his person. "You already paid me and you promised me hazard pay if it went to shit, so why would I do something so obviously stupid?"
"Bah, 'hazard pay.' You Humans, always screwing up and wanting someone else to pay you to make you feel better…" his grumbling trailed off as he shuffled a few things around on the floor and opened up a small safe. Withdrawing the contents, he all but threw them at the young man in front of him, not even bothering to turn around as he did so. "Go on, take it, leave the package on the table, and get out of here. See if I hire you again after a job like that."
"Well, thank you so much for that fantastic endorsement, sir, and I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors, legal or otherwise." Counting out his "hazard pay," Five thousand? Cheap bastard, Hibiki turned to leave, stopping before he opened the door.
"Hey, what the hell was that thing, anyway?"
"Not that it's any of your business, but it's a high-capacity, high-output hyperdrive energy converter. It can bank twice as much power as the regular converters and funnel it into the drive at double the rate, allowing for faster and smoother jumps. Not that I've had much chance to test it, seeing as every lowlife in the city wants to get their hands on it."
There was a metallic thud and a faint hissing sound as the door closed behind the departing Hibiki, and the Sullustan sighed in relief, reaching over to the table to grab and inspect his creation for any damage it may have incurred in the hands of the incompetent man he'd hired.
Immediately, he noticed the difference. The cylinder was too thick, and the holographic interface was absent. Jerking his head around, he realized why.
While he'd been paying the man, Hibiki had pulled one of the unarmed proton torpedoes off of the wall and placed it on the table to distract him while he left with the device.
The engineer ran for the door, his commlink live in his hands, connecting to a Black Suns contact as he sprinted through the shop proper and out onto the streets, turning frantically as he searched the busy streets for signs of the thieving scoundrel.
Rynar Hibiki was lost in the crowds.
Rynar Hibiki was lost in the crowds.
Dammit, I should have paid more attention to the map at the spaceport.
Standing half a head shorter than the average human, Hibiki dodged and weaved his way around the various sapients meandering through the busy streets of Ord Mantell, periodically jumping in an attempt to see over the heads of the crowd and get some sense of where he was to orient himself back to his ship. Catching sight of the bright sign of the shipwright a few blocks to his left, he ducked back down into the crowd, picking up the pace to lose the tail he'd spotted coming from the right.
Gotta be Black Sun. Have to hand it to him, they got here FAST. I guess anyone willing to make a sale like that in a run-down warehouse must have some sort of pull with the local crime syndicates.
Distracted as he was, Rynar barely had time to duck as a large, hairy fist rushed through the air. Scrambling upright, he turned his head to see something that, in retrospect, he probably should have noticed earlier. The hulking, grey-brown form of a Whipid muscled its way through the crowd, its enormous jowls pulled back in a snarl as it bared its impressive tusks, thundering after him. At least, Rynar thought it was a snarl. It was so hard to tell with some aliens.
Then again, pissed is pissed.
As he neared the shipyards, the crowd thinned a bit and he broke into a run, making a beeline for dock seven and his own craft, the Whipid's thundering footfalls keeping him well informed of exactly how close to serious injury he was at all times. Weaving around humans and aliens alike, he rounded the corner of his dock, his ship coming into sight through the crowd.
The Nomad's Bluff sat between a pair of larger ships, a freighter and a commercial passenger liner, both in better repair than the rough-looking Corellian VCX-820 freighter. A typically-Corellian half-dome cockpit sat between a pair of metallic "wings" that swept five meters back and another fifteen forward, connecting behind the cockpit in a rounded body that harkened back to the ship's Imperial heritage.
Or would, if the majority of the black and silver paint on the craft hadn't been scratched, scorched, scuffed, or seared off over the years in any number of encounters, excursions, events, or exploratory missions. As she sat, the majority of the panels that hadn't been welded, beaten, or outright replaced carried little in the way of paint save the durable, white primer the Empire used on everything from spacecraft to Stormtrooper armor, and even that was so faded and scratched that it appeared a mere dull gray from a distance.
As he came within a few meters of the ship's bow, he ducked beneath the port canard and made a beeline for the loading ramp, withdrawing a small yellow remote from his inner jacket pocket and depressing one of the buttons on its widest face. Ports on the underside of the Nomad's Bluff hissed as the airlocks equalized the pressure of the ship's interior with Ord Mantell's atmosphere, and the loading ramp slid open, touching down just as Hibiki reached it. His heavy boots thundered up the ramp and he paused, turning to face his pursuer. The Whipid was emerging from ducking beneath the port canard he had passed only seconds before and glared at the thief with what he presumed to be rage.
A crooked smile, half formed, made its way across his face as his left hand found a control panel and the ramp began to retract.
"Better luck next ti-" he began, turning to jog around the corner into the cockpit. A loud thud followed by the whine of struggling hydraulics grabbed his attention, and he spun to see the snarling, hairy form of the Whipid, one foot on the edge of the ramp and the other inside with both hands braced against the ceiling, fluid leaking from the patchwork hydraulic lines running along the walls, forcing his way into the ship and preventing the ramp from closing.
Rynar fumbled with his blaster, attempting to draw it from his holster. "Damn," he cursed at the offending blaster as the top-mounted scope caught on the old, worn holster.
If anyone asked him later what motivated his next action, Rynar Hibiki would tell them that he carefully considered all possible options and, of all the choices, this one had the highest probability of success with the lowest possible chance of risk to himself. It was a well-thought-out plan and he was completely confident in its success.
"Uh, wait, no, um…" he stuttered, his mind completely void of ideas, "we can, uh, maybe, work this out, or…"
A single thought entered his brain, but the soulless vacuum of the human mind forced it from inception to expulsion more quickly than usual, bypassing the critical "processing and consideration" phase to which most thoughts are subjected along the way. His blaster hand rose as his mouth opened, a single finger extending to point over the shoulder of the alien even as his mind worked furiously to figure out just what his mouth thought it was doing.
"Look! Bounty hunters! They're coming for the hyperdrive converter!" he shouted, pointing to a pair of strangers walking past the ends of the canards toward the front of the ship.
Against all common sense, even the miniscule modicum of the stuff present in Hibiki's own body at that moment, the massive furred sapient halted in its attempts to pry the ramp open and turned to regard the strangers who, at that point, had taken their own interest in the goings-on near them. At this distraction, Hibiki lowered his shoulder and charged, slamming into the intruder and knocking him off-balance. As the surprised Whipid tumbled out onto the docking pad, Rynar turned once more to the control panel and re-engaged the ramp mechanism, this time grasping the large metallic lever and using the manual gear system to assist in closing it himself.
A few seconds later found him in the Nomad's cockpit, five-point harness haphazardly thrown over his shoulders as the departure process, already begun when the signal from the emergency access remote had opened the ramp, came to a close. The engines warmed up and the weapons and shields drawing power, he ran through the final process himself. The steady, aggressive pounding on the ramp from below stopped, and he assumed the Whipid had given up and backed off when he realized that the light escort freighter was about to take off.
Activity between the forward wings caught his attention, and he paused, his hand on the throttle, as he watched the two strangers he had used as scapegoats earlier draw blasters of their own and open fire on the Whipid, the large sapient taking several hits before turning tail and fleeing with several dark patches of fur smoking on his torso. The two strangers, whom he could see better now as a pair of human women in dark purple long coats, then turned their blasters on the cockpit and opened fire, their shots ricocheting off the now-active deflector shield.
Hibiki cursed and punched the throttle, the Nomad's Bluff lurching skyward with a powerful pulse of her sublight engines, throwing the two women backward in her wake. He pulled back on the control yoke and the light freighter curved upward into the rust-colored dusk of the smuggler's moon, soaring through the lower, then upper, atmosphere and out into the void.
Rynar input the coordinates for a relatively short jump to the Ithor system into the navicomputer and initiated the jump to hyperspace, the tension in his body disappearing as the brief, sharp whine of the hyperdrive transitioned to the low, soothing hum of lightspeed travel.
Speaking of the hyperdrive…
The wanderer spun his pilot's chair around to view the black cylindrical casing of the hyperdrive energy converter he had tossed into the cargo netting at the back of the cockpit.
"Now, what to do with you?"
There was the obvious answer, of course. He could easily run to the nearest seedy spaceport and sell the damned thing to the first smuggler he met. It would be a quick way to make some easy credits and, after this most recent botched job, he could do with a few extra.
Then there was the other obvious answer. He reached over and picked up the object. Incredibly lightweight for what it was, with a modern universal dataport on the side opposite the holographic display and ports on either flat face of the cylinder for the incoming and outgoing flow of energy from the ship's power supply to the hyperdrive.
Yes, he supposed, this would fit an early-Imperial Remnant-era Corellian light freighter-class hyperdrive quite well.
Decision made, he spun back around in the chair and leaned back. Mentally cataloguing the tools and parts he would need to make the swap, he crossed his hands behind his head and closed his eyes to catch a brief few hours sleep in-transit to his destination.
That's the fourth one in three standard months, fumed the irate would-be bounty hunter.
Syn Shalla walked quickly to keep pace with her older sister, Lyra, as the two of them trekked through the busy streets and alleys of Ord Mantell.
We wouldn't have even found him if he hadn't yelled at us, either!
Her inner rantings were interrupted as she collided with something solid. She looked up to see that Lyra had stopped and turned to face her.
"Stop that." The taller woman said, a stern look on her face. Damn, Lyra only had that look when she was going to lecture her.
"Stop what?" shot back Syn, "Getting mad? Being annoyed that some idiot nobody just made us look like idiots? Or maybe limping because I think that stupid backdraft broke my leg?"
"Oh, calm down. Your leg's fine, you probably just sprained something." Lyra rolled her eyes at her sister's melodramatic tendencies. "I mean it. Stop it. All of it."
"Easy for you to say," Syn replied, "you've actually captured bounties before. And your leg's not broken."
"No, my leg isn't broken, and neither is yours. Now quit being such a whiner and hurry up. We'll lose him if you don't." Lyra turned and started walking again, faster than before. Syn moved to keep up with her, the throbbing in her right leg flaring up again.
"What do you mean, 'we'll lose him,'" she said, "he already got away!"
"No, he didn't." responded Lyra, "See?" She held up her left arm and pulled back her sleeve, a small holographic representation of a sphere appearing from within. Hovering just outside the sphere was a smaller, strobing dot. As they walked, Syn saw the dot streak off to one side, replaced with a single line and a series of mathematical calculations.
"Is that… a hyperspace vector?" Syn recognized the formulas, but she didn't have enough understanding to understand where they pointed.
"Bingo." affirmed Lyra. "I tagged his freighter with a short-range transmitter before he knocked us over. It can't trace him out of the system, but with that vector we can narrow down the possibilities." Lyra stopped once more and turned to face the building closest to them.
"Now all we need," said the older woman, "is a ship to get us there."