Kaseide Itera's day had started early, but that was usual. The Boss was an early riser and that meant breakfast was an early affair, Kaseide preferred to have it ready to go the moment he appeared in the corridor. But today was different, today she'd have the ship to herself once the Boss and Niko had left, three straight days of the peace and quiet that she'd been hoping for. Everything on-board was a disaster, they'd been in near constant go mode for weeks and Kaseide's other skills had been more important than her 'official' status as ship's steward. The ship stank like a strill's ass, piles of laundry had taken up semi permanent residence in the corners, and she simply didn't have words to describe the heads... in either of the languages she spoke fluently. But she was going to have three whole days to remedy this situation and get the ship back into the shape she was comfortable with.
"Any plans, Kaish? Ice cream and vids?" The Boss had one of those voices, a voice to instill dread and panic or to steel resolves and inspire loyalty, depending on his mood and who he was using it on. He'd never used the dread and panic tone on her, but she'd seen him use it more than enough times to know that it was there, lurking under the surface.
"Laundry and the power cleaner. This place is a disaster." He'd called her Kaish for years, and although it seemed like it could be merely a shortened form of her name, she doubted it. The Boss spoke Sith, of course, and his chosen name for her was pronounced in the same swallowed, clipped sounds she recognized from it. She couldn't come close to saying it the same way that he did, and she'd never really tried. It wasn't her name, it was strictly the name that he chose to call her and she was willing to let him.
"You need a break." He didn't raise his eyes to her, most of his attention was locked on his datapad, but she knew he caught her shrug. "The ship can wait until Dromund Kaas."
Yes, it probably could. But the idea of letting it wait that long, when she'd had the opportunity to do something about it, made her skin crawl. "I'm your ship's steward. It's what you pay me for."
He moved very slowly, pressing the pad of his thumb down on a crumb and sliding it off of the table onto the floor. "I pay you to be a member of my crew, a member of my household, Kaish. I used to pay you to be my steward. Things change, life evolves. And I want you to at least take a day off while I'm gone. Whether you do it before or after you turn the ship upside down is up to you."
"Sure thing, Boss." Two days should be enough to beat most of the ship into submission, if she was left alone to get it done. His answering stare was dubious and she gave him a large grin in response. "Ice cream. Vids. I promise. Finish your breakfast, no telling when you'll eat again." Somebody had to take care of him, he was one of the finest examples of disinterested bachelors that she'd ever seen, and she'd seen quite a few in her life. He kept his lab and specimens in pristine order, his weapons and the ship were carefully maintenanced. Everything else was up to her... the care and feeding of a Sith lord.
"I know." He sighed in disgust, finishing his breakfast and caf and standing, brushing his robes down straight. He had a look that a stranger might consider to be uncertainty, doubt, but Kaseide had been with him long enough to recognize it. The force was whispering to him, but not strongly. And it could be saying a million different things that had nothing to do with here or now. Whatever it was, it hadn't been enough to make him pause for longer than a moment. "Give me a call if you need to." He stated, heading for the exit without a second glance back. She'd never needed to call him before, no reason to think she would now.
And then he was gone. One down, one to go. She whistled loudly to herself as she did the breakfast clean up, making a fair amount of noise as she did so. Then, for good measure, she kicked on the internal air exchange, filtration and ionization system full blast... just let Niko try to sleep through that.
"I get the hint, kiddo!" He bellowed up the hatchway. "I'm awake. I'm up. Geesh, you're worse than the ship's droid."
That was an impossibility. There was a reason why she was here, and why the ship's droid was powered down in one of the back closets. "I need to turn over the air. It smells like a barracks in here." She'd love to drop the plank, open the iris and completely exchange the air, but, difficult as it was to believe, this world's atmosphere stank worse than the ship air. Closed ship funk was preferable to aged eggs.
"Yeah, it does. But you wanted me to wake up."
That was a dangerous statement. She was usually truthful, but he was contrary enough to stay put just to annoy her. It was safer to simply stare at him as he came up from the starboard side. "I'll just clean over the top of you. You think it's noisy now..." It would be nothing compared to when she got the power cleaner out and things got real.
"Fine. Fine." He picked the carafe off of the table and served himself caf, leaning against it as he drank. "You are very annoying when you want to be, kiddo."
"Easy for you to say. I've got two days to get this clean."
"Three. Or you could just wait for us to get home."
What was it with the pair of them? Content as long as she kept them fed, no matter how deep the laundry got? "I've got to at least get his room done. And I have two days, not three."
"How so? I was told we had three days down... do I need to come back earlier?"
"No." Oh, no. Anything but that. "I'm supposed to take at least one day off. Sit around and eat ice cream. Watch vids."
He cringed at the very idea, shrugging into his jacket and checking the blasters at his side. "I could get you into a bar, I'm sure. Might be fun."
"You make it sound like I can't get myself into bars on a dive like this place, ba'buir." The idea that she would need him for that was almost hilarious, but his paternal streak was a parsec wide.
"That's Captain Ba'buir to you." He grumbled in answer, picking his way through the remains of breakfast and choosing what she had made for him. The Boss preferred her usual cooking, but Niko had a weak stomach, especially first thing in the morning. "Seriously, though, if you want me to babysit the ship so that you can get off for awhile..."
"No. I'm good." And she'd be better when he left. It wasn't that she didn't like him, in fact, she adored him...but they'd been together too much for this run. The Boss was much like she was, when he'd reached his fill of their companionship, he retreated to his room or lab and closed the door behind him. Niko did not seem to have a full point and often had issues understanding that the others around him did.
"Okay, then. If you change your mind, just give me a call. During the day, though. Not at night..."
And he was an optimist as well. This was an ugly, ugly place and Kaseide was fairly confident that went for the bar denizens as well, but if searching for companionship got him off of the Fury, she hoped it was a fine and time consuming hunt. "Good luck with that."
"Don't underestimate my appeal, kiddo."
"Maybe I overestimate your standards."
He laughed outright, flashing her a broad, white grin. "Maybe so, kiddo. But I feel lucky today, really do. See you later." And with that, he was gone and the ship was finally blessedly empty and silent when she turned down the air exchanger. She sat, just drinking it in for at least an hour before she stood up, stretched luxuriantly, and headed into the Boss's room. He'd at least made an attempt to keep things orderly, he'd done a decent enough job of making his bed and all of his dirty clothes were contained in a hamper.
She stripped his bed down, gathering up the sheets into a bundle and picking them up. They smelled like him, never a bad thing...he always managed to smell like something she could never quite put her finger on... maleness combined with incense and more, almost mysterious. Sort of like Korriban, only,not. Dark secrets and the unknown...
She snorted at her own flight of fantasy, carrying the sheets down the breadth of the ship, back into the workshop. A healthy dollop of her favorite soap, hot water, and she tossed the bundle into the wash. That started, she gathered up the power cleaner, kept in the same cabinet as the silent ship's droid, and hefted it back towards the port side. His room, then the meeting room...those were the ones she needed to tackle first. They tended to eat in the meeting room, and now it showed.
Years of experience had shown her that it took about the same amount of time to run the power cleaner over the meeting room as a single load of wash took, so she flicked it off, wandered back into the Boss's room across the hatchway, gathered up another load of laundry and headed back to the workshop.
She was half done with shifting the sheets over to the dryer when the first ominous thump reverberated through the Fury's superstructure. A second followed immediately after and she galvanized into motion well before the internal alarms went off. Of course, this had to happen now, when she was damned near naked and utterly enjoying having the ship to herself. At least they'd waited, a few minutes earlier and she had been on the opposite side of the ship, deafened from the power cleaner.
First things first, she'd die before she was caught in a shirt and shorts, and she crash mounted into her armor and racked rounds into her launcher. She couldn't go into combat load here, not on-board the ship...this ship. Between the Boss's questionable biological experiments and his prized fragile ancient Sith artifacts, she'd just have to get inventive.
"I got unfriendly company here." She spoke firmly into her chin mike, tying her HUD into the ship's main systems, bringing the airlock camera feed up on the interior of her visor. Five men, four in assault armor, one in robes... "And that's a force user."
There was silence on the link and she cursed. That was one heavy duty jamming device to cut her off without even the telltale hiss of static, she was on her own. And if she didn't act fast, they'd be grounded here... She smacked the airlock cycle button with the heel of her hand, hearing it begin to open while she charged past the entry, through the main bay and back into the port hatchway. That gave her twenty five meters of open lobbing space between her position and the point that these would become visible. There was no way around it, they'd have to step into the main bay and she'd have a good, clear line on them when they did. A moment later and the feed from the camera in the airlock died, no surprise there. She went to a kneeling position, bracing the launcher to her shoulder and talking a deep breath. She was a big, big girl and the beskar'gam she wore amplified her size.
"Who's still on the ship?" Well, the camera feed was down but the audio was still up. Good, good to know.
"The ship's steward. How much of a problem could she be? And she's sooooo helpful, I see."
Kaseide snorted under her breath. Hardly helpful, she just wanted to save the airlock. Replacing that, here, would be a disaster. A form appeared and she tapped the trigger without a conscious thought, lobbing the first round she'd racked into the side of his helmet, popping his head over into his neck cradle, a solid, echoing ring sounded for a second. A cloud of thick, pink gas erupted and Kaseide's HUD compensated, pinging the hatchway, as she moved her finger to the upper trigger. If she held him there, she had the first cowling edge of the engine compartment behind him...a stray round or five would mar the Fury's dull paint scheme but do nothing more than add to the ambiance. The target turned starboard, giving Kaseide a series of full on back shots, before he vanished from her sight, headed into the workshop. Well, there was precious little there that he could get into in a hurry, nothing worth having was there. She was wearing her combat load, Niko had been armed when he'd left, and the Boss kept his weapon on him. There was a startled yelp and then another ringing thump... It took Kaseide a second to realize that he must have fallen over the pile of dirty laundry she'd left just inside of the workshop hatch.
She racked the next canister, lobbing it a second later. She had no real target, but she didn't need one. This was going to wreak havoc on the starboard hatchway, but she needed to make fast decisions and run with them. The canister hit the back of the hatchway and bounced, adding its cloud of yellowish green vapor to the mix. Every atmospheric sensor within Kaseide's earshot, her helmet's system, the interior ship's system, all screamed in a cacophony of sound.
"Atmospheric hazard detected... atmospheric hazard detected. Breathing apparatus required."
There was a flurry of motion, somewhere in that mess, and Kaseide opened fire again, aiming at where the engine cowling was on just the other side of the entry point. It didn't matter how juicy a motion was, if she damaged the escape pod and its airlock at the end, it would be just another headache she wasn't in the mood to deal with.
"Mandalorian!" A voice in the haze shouted and Kaseide merrily ignored it, there was as much chance it was simply an unwelcome identification on their part as it was an attempt to talk to her. In fact, she was willing to wager on the first, not the last. Who tried to talk to a Mandalorian who was already shooting?
The third canister, again a good, solid thunk off of the escape pod airlock and a bright flash and earsplitting boom rocked the interior of the ship.
"You will stop!" A voice, weighty with import, rang from the fog and Kaseide growled. That was not going to be happening on her watch. She had been with the Boss since she was fourteen, been places, seen things, met people, all that were too important to risk like this. She'd been young enough to change under the Boss's tutelage, to flourish under his care and his training.
She answered the command with another flash bang and a hail of bullets, letting him know in no uncertain terms that she was not impressed with his Jedi mind tricks. It was a coward's route anyway, how could someone who'd spent their entire lives training to be a warrior insult her in such a way?
And then there was silence, the sickly pall in the starboard hatchway fading, with no sign of the Jedi. She didn't buy it for one second, taking up a defensive position in the port hatchway and waiting.
"Kaish. Permission to board." The Boss's voice came over her audio, clear, smooth and very, very deliberate. She knew the tone, it was the promise of violence, but he'd come too late for that. Kaseide had been the one to heap destruction here...
"Granted." She'd believe it when she actually clapped eyes on him, it could be another Jedi trick... Again, she lifted the weapon and stared down it, finger just touching the upper trigger.
He stepped into view, tilting his head to survey the damage and completely ignoring the weapon she had trained on him. "So we had visitors?"
She sighed, rolling to her feet and advanced, weapon at the ready but no longer pointed at him. "Yeah." The hatchway was a disaster, paint oozing down the walls to form viscous puddles on the decking, blood painted on the escape hatch, bright circular dings dug into the walls. The stench of the cocktail of agents she'd tossed into the space hung in the air, acrid and foul tasting on the back of her tongue. There were three bodies spreading pools of blood, one of them splashed liberally on the pile of quickly dissolving dirty laundry.
He began to laugh, a deep, full belly laugh and she stared at him in abject betrayal. "So, I suppose you're going to clean this mess up?" He managed between breaths and she glared at him.
"No. It can wait until Drumond Kaas."