Alex Mercer had decided that today had been a very good day.
The assessment may have come as a bit of a shock, had he spoken it aloud and had anyone been alive to hear it. Indeed, it seemed rather atypical and ill-suited to anyone else who had found themselves in his predicament. Then again, the key words were 'anyone else'. They always were; it seemed to have become a defining property of his existence over the years. Anyone else would have been completely screwed over, but he was having a much better time than usual.
He was, after all, one of a kind. And as he watched the clunky machines patrolling the central terminal below him as he dug his barb-tipped tentacles into the natural ceiling, he found himself quite pleased with the fact.
It had been a long time since anything interesting had happened. Leaving Earth hadn't exactly been a difficult decision, all those years ago. Dana was dead, and Blackwatch was hell-bent on making his life miserable wherever he went. It was just the obvious choice - he had no ties left to that rock, and leaving it was convenience.
There'd been no shortage of wars to be found on an intergalactic scale, but he had found himself shying away from them rather than leaping into the fray. It had nothing to do with self-preservation - there was simply nothing like the thrill of wreaking absolute destruction - but rather pragmatism, something he'd picked up during his years. At first, he considered it prudent to not draw attention to himself in case Blackwatch was setting its sights outside their home planet, but time and information he gleaned through his rather unique means both proved that trepidation null and void. However, Blackwatch was hardly the only organization that would have a problem with him. Keeping a low profile was the best way to stay alive and unhindered.
He'd drifted from planet to planet and system to system over the centuries, shedding names and identities like day-to-day clothing. Whenever complications arose or anyone displayed more interest in him than he was comfortable with, he would simply vanish, and several hours later, another person would step out of the ether onto another planet and start anew.
Peragus was one of the less pleasant lives he'd settled into. That wasn't to say it wasn't a convenient one. Here, nobody knew anyone, nobody asked questions, and nobody cared. He was hardly the only straggler who'd come to the mining station, keeping his head down and kicking dirt over a past he'd rather not share. Plenty of the other miners had things to hide. He knew the look, knew the way they walked. And for once, he was actually wearing his 'normal' form - it hardly looked out of place here, and he honestly preferred his old jacket and face for some sense of nostalgia. No, a sense of identity.
He'd been mining low-grade fuel for about a month and a half now, keeping himself in line and uninteresting. Already, he was considering leaving. He certainly didn't need the meager credits his job raked in, and a closed facility on a dead planet made his diet rather difficult to sustain. The only living beings around were people, and when people went missing, investigations followed. And besides, he was bored out of his mind.
Then today had happened.
Things had been going on as usual - scouting the rock faces for any signs that might betray a deposit, while suffering several ambient annoyances. The heat was sweltering, the usual dull roar was echoing in his thoughts, and two of Coorta's self-styled group of retards were discussing in obvious whispers about the Jedi that had just been taken into the medbay. That was another reason why Mercer was considering packing up. Passing as a human - or whatever alien of the day he found prudent - was child's play in most situations, but past experience had taught him the hard way that Force-sensitives could see right through his guises. They didn't know what he was, but he seemed to stand out like some sort of abominable beacon to whichever Jedi were nearby. And most of them had seemed to want to kill him.
Personally, Alex Mercer neither understood the so-called Force, nor really cared about it. It was inconvenient for him in some situations, and he couldn't use it to his own advantage - even after consuming a few Jedi, he still hadn't found himself able to harness it. A shame, since the idea of shooting lightning bolts out of his hands appealed to him.
His own self-preservation aside, Coorta's group was bothering him simply because they were a pack of idiots. He'd killed many Jedi, but he respected their prowess, and he doubted that the mercenary's gang of two-bit pistol thugs could take on whoever this Jedi was, even if he or she had both hands tied behind their back. It was just going to fall apart, and he really didn't want to get thrown into the spotlight.
One of the conspirators had started screaming. A quick look behind him showed him that one of the mining droids was hacking him apart. Alex was amused.
The other miners were not so amused as, one by one, the helper droids ceased their routine functions and began to execute their mining programs upon the workers. At first, Mercer just punched the droids into so much slag, but when it became apparent that none of the other miners were alive to watch him, he decided to toss his apparent humanity to hell and proceeded to carve a bloody - in this case, oily - swathe through the mining tunnels in a manner that was far more befitting of his style.
Somebody had obviously rewired the droids, meaning somebody wanted everyone dead. Maybe it had been the Jedi. Mercer doubted it - the regular Jedi were ridiculous pacifists, while Dark Jedi usually preferred the visceral feeling of rending their foes in half with their own lightsabers. Either way, it didn't really matter. Somebody was behind it, and that somebody was going to die.
Regrettable that all of the miners - the ones he'd seen, anyway - had died, but Alex Mercer liked trouble. It had been too long since he'd had a good fight.
There was only one little snag to his current good mood. Upon reaching the southern entrance, he found it magnetically sealed shut. Five minutes and dozens of scrap heaps later, the easternmost hatch was discovered to be in the same state. If he listened hard enough, he could faintly hear the warbling of the alert sirens from the floor above. During the lockdown, the mining tunnels had been sealed off in the standard emergency sequence; a great protocol for anyone on the upper floors, but less than helpful to anyone in his current location. Even with his prodigious strength, the massively reinforced doors were beyond his capacity to tear open. Had he been more... well-fed... and less blunted with time, he probably would have been able to force his way through. But he'd lived the life of a drifter for far too long - centuries, even, following some intangible current that wound through the galaxy. Never settling down, but never rising up to the all-consuming war he had once known and lived. He wasn't keen enough to break his way out of the lockdown, and he lacked the tools to help him. Peragus had a very strict no-weapons policy, as accidental blaster fire was more than enough to ignite nearby fuel. The mining lasers he had access to were weak and generally useless. Even if the mining droids still responded to his commands rather than futilely attempting to chip away at him, they were far too feeble to do so much as tickle the door, metaphorically speaking.
As things stood, he was stuck down here, and the only way to have the seals lifted was to access a terminal that was handily located on the floor he was cut off from.
He briefly considered tearing his own tunnel through the rock and burrowing up to the main floor, but Peragus's entire consistency was notorious for its pockets of isolated and highly flammable gasses. One wrong claw and the entire facility - hell, the entire asteroid cluster - could go up in flames. Mercer liked explosions, but they were more enjoyable from a safe distance rather than at the heart of one.
So no, there had to be a more subtle way. He wasn't going to write off the tunneling option entirely, but it was a last-ditch thing, the sort of plan he'd pull off only if he was certain there was no other way to get out of the tunnels. The obvious way was to contact somebody on the upper floors, provided any of them were still alive. He'd found a commlink from another miner's body, but the thing couldn't get a signal - the wireless feed was jammed with static. He needed something connected to the facility's mainframe.
Of course, there was always the terminal below him. From experience, he knew it hardly had any functions granted to it; it wouldn't do to have any miners being able to sneak off with fuel or shut down the facility. But even with its utter lack of security clearance, it would be able to send messages.
It was surrounded by a contingent of haywire mining droids, machines made to hew ore from deeply compressed rock. Machines that had mowed down his fleshy co-workers like so much meat.
Alex Mercer loved breaking things.
Perhaps the droids had turned against the miners on the higher floors already. It seemed like the logical explanation, but he wasn't overly worried about that particular turnout. Everyone died at some point, and he'd seen far too much death to be overly bothered by fallen strangers nowadays. Besides, these droids were by no means combat models. Any experienced soldier could dispatch groups of them with ease, and he was optimistic that at least one person would remain alive to get his message.
After all, there was a Jedi in the facility.
"I'm back," he whispered to nobody in particular, and dropped into the midst of the droids with an unhinged grin that was just a shade too wide to be entirely human.
Gears whirred and mining lasers trained themselves on him. He flicked his wrists, loving the metallic rasp as impossibly long claws extended from his fingers and spiky black chitin coiled around his arms.
"Oh, hell yeah. I'm back."