Better now?

Chapter 10

When her small one-man scout ship came out of hyperspace near her target planet, she noted immediately that the planet Grievous was on was surrounded by a hodge-podge mix of all types of Confederate warships, from Geonosian-built and Vulture-class starfighters up to no less than four Providence-Class cruisers, though even without using active sensors she could tell that one of them seemed to be barely spaceworthy, probably still nursing damage from the battle of Coruscant. She would barely admit it to herself, let alone anyone else, but she was impressed at the fleet the general had managed to assemble. Unfortunately it was probably no coincidence that the system lacked any sort of asteroid belts or nebulae that she could have used to sneak close enough to reach the surface.

Yet another defensive measure, and a good one too. So while she decided what to do, she parked her ship in a crater on the planetside hemisphere of a tidally locked moon with a solid iron core, shut down all power except for emergency life support and waited.

She had learned a hard lesson on Byss, that even a Sith sometimes had to be patient. Her batteries would last about two days, and by then she would have a plan.

So she waited and waited and waited.

The patrol patterns they used were standard CIS procedure it seemed, and they never varied from that. At the same time there was the usual predictability that came with routine.

Patrols could be out-thought, but scanner arrays often not. With only her eyes and a few low-power passive systems finding out what sort of an orbital surveillance network there was on this world was next to impossible. Even if she coasted in to mimick a meteorite there needed to be a plausible place for one to come from.

Then of course there was the direct method, get as close as possible as without being detected and then shunt every erg of energy to the drive and the shields, blowing through and hopefully landing on the surface without being shot down. It threw away surprise, but at the same time it also would prove to be more of a challenge. The more she challenged herself during this final test, the bigger the chance that Sidious would make her a true Sith.

She waited another twenty minutes before the right window of the least density of patrols once more played out in front of her before re-activating her systems and throwing the ship into it's final run. She was detected as soon as she left the moon's magnetic field, but right now only a Wavecrest and a single Munificent were between her and the planet, and she smiled under her pilot's helmet. The marksmanship of the droid and biological crews on the ships was as good as ever, but her scout was barely large enough to house a hyperdrive and shields, being only about two thirds the size of an ARC-170, and she was having it in the sort of evasive manoeuvres that would make the best pilot in the Galaxy proud.

Even so, several shots came dangerously close or grazed her shields, and she was glad once she had reached the atmosphere where the ships couldn't follow and she was able to use the ionization of the upper troposphere to help obscure her. She made a mental note to have the best stealth systems possible fitted to whatever ship she left this planet with. As per the plans Sidious had given her, she saw the compound where Grievous was supposedly hiding at the end of a narrow, deep valley. The sides were peppered with AA emplacements and of course they all chose to use her as target practice. The sublight engines on her ship were brand new, she was fast enough that the targeting systems of the emplacements did not have time to lock on before she was past their firing arc.

She still took hits as the computers just did things the oldfashioned way and led her speeding craft as manual as they were able. As she approached the main gate to the complex she did not halt. She had no intention of landing the craft on the utterly explosed platform and then cross fifty metres of walkway with not even a hint of a railing all exposed to what were probably thousands of blasters in all sorts of forms and sizes.

No, if she had to drop in unannounced, why not knock at the door?

The ship's nose crumbled as it's own momentum and mass slammed it into and through the massive main gate and the company of B1 droids assembled behind it. What remained of the massive guard force on and around the walled-in square opened fire at once, but no one emerged from the shattered hull at first, so eventually they stopped. Overlooking the square was Grievous himself, standing on a platform made out of native stone from which the ancient rulers who had this compound constructed eons ago had once dispensed their form of justice. He took a tentative step forward as silence reigned.

This was shattered as the battered hatch suddenly flew outwards, smashing a few droids before clattering to a halt.

However universal attention was on the black-clad figure that came jumping out in a salto, igniting a deep red lightsabre and landing gracefully with one arm to steady itself in one fluid motion. The figure rose to it's feet and Grievous stepped forward to the very edge of the platform.

With it's free hand, the figure removed the cloak that obscured it.

"Who are you?"

The figure, a female human, spoke.

"I am Raik Muun, and you are dead, General." she replied, the last word dripping with sarcasm.

A droid came flying at Grievous, missing him only because one of it's arms got caught by the edge of the platform. He dashed back inside as fast as his body would allow, while Muun cursed his reaction time and began slicing her way towards the entrance to the old castle itself on the far side of the square, the space between it and her thick with droids.

Her sabre was swinging left and right, cutting her way through droids as she went. Some she picked up and flung back towards the others with the Force. The droids tried their best, but they could not stop the prospective Sith from reaching the doorway that led inside. There she was confronted by a durasteel gate that was of far newer construction than the rest of the place. Not able or willing to waste time both because the remaining droids in the square still attacked her, she turned to clear the rest of them out. By now only about a dozen or so B1s were still in fighting order, and it did not take her long to dispatch of them.

Once that was done, Muun turned and cut into the electromagnetic lock with her sabre. She turned it and cut a white hot glowing circle that melted the circuits that kept the door closed, both from the heat and the sheer, raw energy of her weapon. It hissed open and she ran through. The few droids on immediate gate guard were no match for her, and she moved deeper into the caverns and corridors.

From the scans she'd made during her approach she knew that the hangar and the General's escape shuttle were thirty-six floors up, so she had to hurry if she was to prevent him from fleeing the planet. As she passed a control room four flights of stairs up from the square, she ducked into it. Only a few easily killed native inhabitants of the planet were on duty, so she made one of them shut down and then fully disable the lift system before she broke his neck with the force and flung the corpse into one of the consoles.

She didn't delude herself into thinking that it would hold up Grievous for long, or that the lifts might stay deactivated, but it certainly gained her some time to reach the hangar. Before leaving the room, she called up a full layout of the place and transferred it to her datapad. The hangar was where she knew it to be, but the staircases that led upwards were both too narrow and to slow as a means of conveyance.

The plans showed an older spiral staircase, one that was about three times as wide as the others. It was earmarked for reconstruction into a freight elevator as it gave easy access to every level it touched. She went there, slaughtering droids and locals as she went.

As it turned out, the shaft was mostly stripped of what had remained of the staircase, but enough stubs and bits remained that the droids hadn't gotten around to yet, so she used the Force to jump from outcropping to stub to outcropping, making her way upwards far faster than any non-sensitive. It didn't help when half a dozen spider droids came walking down the shaft's wall towards her, firing as they went. They didn't pose much of a problem, but they were a critical delay.

She easily dispatched them, but they had still delayed her by almost a minute.

Upon reaching Level 37, she encountered no droids at first, as apparently whoever commanded the defences seemed to have missed her getting out of the shaft. That changed quickly, and soon she was back to destroying groups of droids that came at her from from seemingly every nook and cranny. She used her anger at their impertinence to fuel her connection to the Dark Side. Doing this had served her well in the past, and it did so now. Sensing the subject of her anger, the being who sent these droids against her, she found that Grievous was dangerously close to the escape shuttle. If he made it he would not only be taking his fleet and be on the run for the rest of time, it also meant that his fleet would reduce the place to molten slag, which he had undoubtedly already ordered it to do. Without using his shuttle, she would be destroyed with it.

Time to take proactive measures. According to the floorplan, she was only about a hundred metres away from the hangar, but the layout of the corridors meant that she would likely reach it just after the General.

So she made her own door in the wall using her sabre, stepped through and so cut her way through the maze of rooms.

The shuttle was still there when she breached the hangar, so she hid herself in the shadows, placed the piece of wall she'd cut out back so that it wouldn't be noticed immediately and waited.

Grievous appeared less than a minute later, flanked by two Assassin droids that functioned as his body guards. Or at least they would have, had Muun not used the Force to push them into the void of the hangar's opening the moment Grievous walked past her.

She snapped on her sabre and attacked.

Since she was between him and the shuttle, Grievous jumped back towards where he had come from, ignited two of his own sabres and said: "So, you are the Emperor's newest pet, I take it? A Jedi who survived the purge?"

"It's nothing to you, you will still die."

Muun charged him and Grievous only barely managed to block her first stroke with the sabre in his right hand. He would never know, but she had put those long months in the Emperor's fortress to good use.

For the next ten minutes the fight dissolved into a blurr of stroke, counterstroke, of feints and tricks that someone not experienced with it all could never have followed, but Grievous was still a very good swordsman. Muun restricted herself to Form IV for the moment, as she had yet to master the Form VII that the Order had developed in recent years. Still, she was so good at it that Grievous was unable to push his advantage. Both opponents realized that this could not go on forever, so he tried to jump back out of her reach, but Muun pulled an empty fuel drum from near the far wall and threw it at him. Grievous managed to dodge it, but to do it, he had to divert his attention for a split second. Muun used this and managed to cut off one of his arms near where it joined his robotic body. That left Grievous with his other two half-arms, but left his right side wide open to attack. Since he couldn't feel the pain of the loss, he merely jumped away out of her immediate reach.

"Surrender now, Grievous, and I shall make it quick. One slice of the sword, and it is over."

"Why should I do that, Child?" he mocked, "Even with one arm I can still easily defeat you."

Out came two more sabres, but Muun remained unfazed. She knew that Grievous was at a disadvantage, but she made a mental note to look into constructing a second one for herself. Right now she would have to make do with the one she had.

"Then come and try, General." she said, with an equally mocking, dripping tone of voice, "I am growing bored of this charade."

They went at it again and once again fought each to the best of their abilities. It was obvious to her though that Grievous was impaired. He obviously favoured his bad side, but he also seemed to be less co-ordinated than earlier. This could of course be because he was used to fighting in a different way, or because he had damage she could not see. In any event, she really was growing weary of this fight and decided to make an all-in push to end it. Taking advantage of Grievous' somewhat reduced reaction time, she feinted to the side where his arm was missing, then used the Force to jump over to his other one when Grievous began to turn to meet her move.

Muun somersaulted and turned in the air so that she faced his back even as he tried turning around. Her sabre was out before she even landed, cutting deep into the General's cybernetic body. He was dead before he fell to the ground.

She severed his head for good measure, and then everything went quickly.

Muun quickly cracked the security code on the escape shuttle, but before she left there was something she needed to do. Ignoring the danger from the orbital fleet and the droids alike, she made her way to the General's quarters. It was no coincidence that they were located on the same level, only a few hundred metres away. The security measures could not stand up to her sabre, and as she literally kicked down the remnants of the door, she immediately saw what she was looking for. The display case with the Lightsabres of Grievous' collection was more unwieldy than it was heavy, and it was only a matter of second for her to break it out of it's fastenings on the wall. Balancing it in front of her with the Force, she returned to the hangar. Grievous' body was where she had left it, and she only paused to gather up the sabres he'd dropped during the course of the fight. She placed them in their spots in the display case and stowed the collection in the small cargo bay at the back of the craft.

Inside she took a moment to adjust the seat so that she could reach all the controls before firing up the systems. As it turned out, the hangar was secured by a containment field that required a personalized access code to deactivate. Normally at least. Muun was more willing to use a permanent solution and used one of the chin-mounted laser cannons to blow away the emitters and pushed the throttles to their stops.

She shot out of the hangar just ahead of the explosion she had caused and flew away. She decided not to run the gauntlet again and instead rose out of the valley and fled north-west into the mountains, hugging the terrain as she went. Sure enough, seconds after she was far enough away, the first turbo-laser bolts came in from orbit as the now leaderless CIS remnant fleet began to bombard the compound. Muun didn't know or even care if they knew that Grievous was dead, what counted was that it seemed they hadn't detected the shuttle. Fife minutes later she landed the shuttle under a massive overhang and decided to wait for a few hours. By then parts of the fleet would either be shooting at each other to gain dominance over what was left or have begun to disperse into the four corners of the Galaxy.

It turned out that she had been right both ways. When she rose out of the atmosphere six hours later, the fleet was gone, save for the wreckage of several ships that hadn't been there before. She smiled. Those not of the Force were so predictable...

Hyperspace brought a welcome relief from danger and the chance to sleep.

She dropped back into normal space about six hours out from Imperial Centre and activated the hypercomm unit that Grievous had had installed as part of the refit.

The holo coalesced into a blue-tinted representation of the Emperor.

"Is it done?" he asked without bothering with smalltalk.

Muun nodded respectfully. "Yes, My Lord. Grievous is dead, his fortress destroyed and his fleet seems to have scattered into the four winds."

"Good, good. I would have preferred if you had not managed to create hundreds of new pirates for my fleet to hunt down, but at least you managed that much."

She ignored the jibe and nodded again.

"What do you wish me to do, My Lord?"

Sidious paused for a second. "Return to Imperial Centre and come see me in my office. We have much to talk about."

The figure dissolved and Muun leaned back in her chair. This was as close as Sidious was likely to get to actual praise, and she found that she liked it. Damn the Jedi, the Sith appreciated her.

tbc

What is it with the GFFA and the lack of railings? I mean is there a religious belief against them? Have they never been invented?

As for Muun, what I wanted was a female Character because it makes a better counterpoint to Anakin and canon!Vader. Besides, I have yet to see that one done, Ventress aside.

The fight with Grievous: It's not that she's a better swordsman than Obi Wan, (though she's very close) but more that she got lucky in a way that Obi Wan didn't when she managed to cut off his army by accident.