Tandori Police HQ

Vhetin slowly dropped his rifle, pistols, and lightsabers to the ground, aware of Jay doing the same next to him. Once he had made it clear to the oddly dressed soldiers surrounding them that he was completely disarmed, he raised his hands in a placating motion. The last thing he wanted was for these guys to believe he meant them harm.

The first being shouted at them again, speaking faster than before and gesturing with his Imperial rifle. Jay stared at him and shook her head. "I'm sorry, but we have no idea what you're saying."

Another being hopped down from the rock-pile monument and stepped toward them. He was wearing heavy welding goggles like the rest and had a ratty cloth mask covering the lower half of his face. He kept both of them in his rifle sights as he approached.

"Who are you?" he growled in accented Basic. It almost sounded to Vhetin like a Corulag accent.

"Who are you?"

"I'm the one with the bleedin' rifle," the man said. "Answer my question."

Vhetin glanced at Jay before saying, "We're soldiers. We were split up from our main troop force. We're just trying to find them."

"And who are you working with? The karking lizards?"

Vhetin shook his head. "We're fighting them."

Another soldier behind them laughed. "That's a good one. We all know the Empire wouldn't have sent in troops. The first thing they did when Tandori came under attack was pull all their fighting forces out of the city. They must have been afraid they'd lose valuable assets that could be put to use not defending another city."

"We're not with the Empire," Jay said. "They just hired us to eliminate the Trandoshans."

Quiet mutters spread through the assembled soldiers. The man standing in front of them glanced at one of the beings nearby, his face unreadable behind his heavy welding goggles and his ragged facemask. Eventually he stared at them and cocked his head.

"Who are you?"

Vhetin gestured to what remained of his armor and said, "I'm a Mandalorian."

"A mercenary?"

"He shrugged. "Occasionally. I work most of the time as a bounty hunter. But our leader called for soldiers and I answered."

The man nodded, thinking over that, then turned his scrutiny to Jay and said, "What about you?"

"I work with him," she said. "I decided to help him on this deployment."

"You volunteered to get shot at?"

She smiled weakly. "I've never had much common sense."

"Apparently," the man muttered. "What are you doing in Tandori?"

"We told you," Vhetin said, "we're split from our group. We're trying to find them again."

"How many soldiers were deployed with you?"

Vhetin glanced at Jay again, who shrugged. He sighed and turned to the man in front of them. "About three hundred and fifty."

More excited murmurs through the crowd. The shabby-looking soldiers whispered among each other and pointed at Vhetin and Jay.

"Air support?" the soldier in front of them asked.

"Yes. And artillery support from heavy tanks as well."

The man was silent, nodding to himself. He turned to the soldier standing on the top of the rock pile and shouted to him in the same language the first man had spoken earlier.

The first soldier snapped back at him, gesturing with his rifle. The man nodded and looked between Vhetin and Jay. Then he jerked his thumb over his shoulder and said, "Follow me. Leave your weapons. They will be returned to you if we say so. You will stay with our group. No wandering off and no 'exploring'. Clear?"

Jay nodded. "We understand."

The soldier nodded, satisfied. Then he turned and strode toward the police building. Jay glanced at Vhetin and murmured, "He's the first stranger we've met who hasn't shot at us when he first catches sight of us. Should we trust him?"

"I don't think they mean us harm," Vhetin said and cautiously began following the man. "I think they're just cautious of any Trando allies."

He picked up his pace and fell into step next to the Basic-speaking man. "I noticed that some of your men are wearing Mandalorian armor. Where did they get it?"

"They took it," the man said, "from soldiers they've found during patrols around the city."

"You've found the Supercommandos?" Jay said, jogging up to them. "Where are they?"

"We've run across a few here and there," the man said. "We thought they were mercs helping the Trandoshans."

"And they just gave you their armor?" she said skeptically.

"No," he said. "But it wasn't like the soldiers we found really needed it any more."

"Oh. So it was an old battlefield?"

The man nodded silently.

"What about the spaceport?" Vhetin asked. "Did you find any working vehicles there?"

The man shook his head. "We couldn't get in. There were Trandos swarming over the place and something was going on inside. Our guys aren't wearing fancy karking armor, so we didn't really investigate further."

The man opened the front door of the Police HQ and gestured for them to step inside. Vhetin held the door for Jay before stepping inside.

Just inside he saw a long central hallway with tiled floors and branching halls leading deeper into the building. There were equipment packs scattered across the floor and bare cot mattresses pushed up against the walls. A few humans and humanoid species looked up as they entered, their eyes dull and their skin and clothes dirty.

"What is this place?" Jay asked, frowning as they passed a family of Twi'leks huddled around each other. "A refugee shelter?"

"This is the last bastion in the entire city," the soldier said. As they stepped fully inside he pulled his hood and facemask down and pushed his goggles up his head. Vhetin saw that he was bald, with a dark black beard and bushy eyebrows. He had dark bruises on his face and forehead and an old scar running down over one eye.

"When the Imps pulled out their stormtroopers," he growled, "it was up to us police officers to keep order. Got orders straight from the karking Governor, saying that we would know the terrain better. Kriffing idiot."

He paused, then said, "It took us a long time and a lot of good officers to realize that we weren't soldiers. Eventually we just holed up here and broadcast that we would protect any citizens who could make it to us."

"Where did everyone go?" Vhetin said. "This place isn't big enough to hold eight million city inhabitants."

"In a minute," the man said. "Keep your karking space boots on. We still have questions for you to answer."

"Okay," he said slowly. He didn't sense any true animosity from this man. He didn't think giving them information was a bad thing if it bought them some intel as well. "Shoot."

"You said you were deployed with a group of other Mandalorians? Where are they based?"

"We don't know," he said. "We were cut off from them early on in the offensive. We were trying to find them when your guys found us. Have you seen any starships overhead? That might have been them."

He shook his head. "The skies have been quiet. Trust me, we've been watching."

"Why?"

"During the first few days of combat," the man explained, "the Trandos used some type of modified troop transport to round civilians up and take them off planet. We still don't know what happened to those poor souls. Since then we've been careful to monitor the skies for any sign of the ships coming back."

"I'm glad we didn't run across any of those," Jay murmured. "We wouldn't have had any idea what they were."

"How long have you mercs been on the ground?"

Jay shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe two days?"

"How much progress have you made?"

"Us personally?" Vhetin asked. "Or the Supercommandos? Because I already told you we haven't been in contact with them for a day at least."

"I meant you personally," the man said.

"We're not sure. We haven't been able to link up with the citywide HoloNet to download a map. We've been manually scanning buildings with my helmet's systems for a while now, but that ran out of juice a few minutes before we found you guys."

"You backed up the map, I hope?"

He nodded and the man let out a sigh of relief.

"Finally some firsthand info," he muttered. He motioned for them to follow. "This way. Let's compare your map to ours and you can tell us what areas you've secured."

He led them into a spacious computer room with a large round holoterminal in the center of the floor. The power was still on in this sector of the city and the holoterminal was projecting real-time video feeds from the security cams set around the outside of the building.

The man closed the holographic video feed with a wave of his hand, then gestured for Vhetin to hand over his handheld projector. He reluctantly gave it to the man, who examined it and plugged it into the terminal.

The holoterminal buzzed for a moment, its projectors going dark. Then it threw up the rough map that Vhetin had been scanning since they started exploring the city earlier that day.

"Okay," the man said, resting his hands on the edge of the holoterminal, "this is the area you documented?"

"Down to the last building."

He nodded, looking slightly impressed. "You managed to scan quite a bit. Which areas of this map are clear of Trandoshan infestation?"

"Well, we can't be sure that a patrol hasn't come back in the time we've been gone," Vhetin said, "but I think most of the areas we explored are clear."

He pointed to the apartment building Jay had found. "We took cover there when we were first split up with our army. We found food and a good stock of weapons. It would probably be worth sending a speeder over there to pick it up."

The man nodded, but said nothing. Vhetin then pointed to a major highway they had come across shortly after leaving the apartment and said, "Basically every building along this road is clear. We checked them all, but didn't find anything useful."

"There's a big medcenter here," Jay said, pointing to a building highlighted in red. "We came across a Trando patrol there, but we dealt with it pretty easily."

"We also found a Trandoshan nest here," Vhetin added, pointing to a small bolo-ball arena a few blocks down. "We counted maybe fifty Trandoshans, but there were too many to even think about engaging."

"We probably couldn't handle a force that big either," the man admitted, "but if we can find your army friends we might be able to change that."

"We continued along this highway," Vhetin explained, tracing their progress with his forefinger, "until we reached your headquarters here."

He tapped the image of the Police HQ, causing the hologram to shake slightly. Then he leaned back and folded his arms, raising a masked eyebrow expectantly.

The man studied their map for a moment before nodding in satisfaction. "That's good. You managed to clear out a five-mile area of the city. But if the rest of Tandori is just as overrun, we could be looking at a counteroffensive months long."

Vhetin shuddered at the thought of being deployed in the ruined city for months. But he quickly pushed that thought aside and said, "What about your map? What can you tell us about the city at large?"

The man typed in a quick series of commands into the terminal keyboard. Moments later a holographic map of the city sprang to life, rotating and overlaying itself on top of Vhetin and Jay's map.

"This is the area you explored," the man explained, gesturing to a small sector in the southwest corner of the city. "And we're here, just a few miles north of your starting position."

"What local landmarks are in the area?"

He pointed to several areas: a statue here, a memorial park there. Nothing that gave Vhetin a clue to the location of the Mandalorian F.O.B.

"What about a bank?" Jay asked, leaning forward. "Are there any banks in the area?"

"Uh... there's Tandori City Bank here... Bonn Bank here... and ConfiBank-"

"ConfiBank," Jay interrupted. "We were there this morning. The Trandoshans blew it up with us still in it."

"Oh... yeah," the man said, "we may have had something to do with that."

"How so?" Vhetin asked, narrowing his eyes.

"We've been using different buildings in the city as storage areas for some repurposed military comm boosters. The plan was to relay and amplify a signal to try and penetrate whatever's jamming comms. We managed to punch a signal through to another precinct, but the Trandos somehow found out about it. They were surprisingly fast about finding the buildings we were using as relays and destroying them. ConfiBank was one of the relays."

"Our base," Vhetin sighed, narrowing his eyes and studying the map, "was to the east of the bank in some kind of memorial plaza."

The man grimaced. "You're out of luck there. The entire southern section of the city is a collection of memorial parks and plazas. It was a haven for upper-class civilians back in the day."

"There's no way to narrow the list down?" Jay asked. "It was a big plaza, surrounded on all sides by buildings-"

"No way," he said. "There have to be at least twenty plazas that fit your description. It's a waste of time."

"So…" Vhetin began, narrowing his eyes. "How many officers do you have total?"

"One hundred," he replied. "There are others scattered around the various city precincts, but they all connect to us. We've got the most space for refugees, so they send all their civvies to us."

"Armament?"

"We have enough weapons and ammo to arm our officers. Apart from that we have two speeders outfitted with heavy laser turrets."

"Not enough to mount an effective counteroffensive," Jay murmured.

"All we've been doing is trying to stay alive and protect the civilians we have in the building," the man said. "As long as the Trandos left us alone, we were content to wait until someone else came in to support us."

Vhetin nodded. "You'd do well to tell your patrols to keep an eye out for humanoids wearing green and red armor. If you guys can link up with a Mando patrol they can evacuate the civilians you have here."

The man nodded. "Normally I wouldn't be too happy about some trigger-happy merc ordering me around but in this case I agree. Our first priority is getting these people out of the heavy combat zones. Once that's done we can focus on driving these karking lizards out of the city."

"I want this map downloaded to my projector," Vhetin said, pointing to the map. "I want to know everything you know. There may be a way out of this yet."

"Already downloading," the man said. He paused, then said, "I'm Barrage, by the way."

"Cin Vhetin. My partner's name is Jay."

She held out her hand. Barrage stared at it, then reached out and shook it.

"Glad to have you two aboard," he said.

Mandalorian Spaceport Command Post

Brianna sighed in relief and stretched as she stepped out of the LAAT/i's passenger bay. She was aware of other Mandos hopping down out of their transports all around the circular landing bay that the Protectors had transformed into their main troop bay.

Accompanying the LAAT/i's down to the spaceport were five angular Imperial shuttles. Brianna looked up into the cloudy sky and watched as the winged transports coasted down into the spaceport, their inverted-Y wing configuration folded up into landing mode. After a few moments, the shuttles touched down lightly on the landing bay floor and deployed their exit ramps.

Striding down the ramps came several large groups of Tachadori Warriors. Tall purple-skinned aliens with black dreadlocks for hair and glowing yellow eyes, the Warriors were all clad in dull black battle armor that, when combined with their dark purple skin, caused them to almost blend into the shadows. They carried long, elegantly designed blaster rifles and vibroblade longswords sheathed across their backs. They regarded the Mandalorians with cool detachment; not hostility, but definitely lacking in friendliness.

Then again, Brianna thought, Mandalorians must seem pretty unfriendly to outsiders as well. It's only when you come into their inner circle that you see the intricacies of their culture.

Shysa stepped out of his own transport with a group of Tachadori Warriors. He let out a long, loud sigh and pulled his helmet off. Tobbi Dala followed a few steps behind.

"Who're the newcomers?" a Mando said, walking up to greet the returning Mandalore.

"Reinforcements," Shysa replied. He gestured to the Imperial shuttles still making their way down from orbit. "And a whole bloody lot of 'em."

"Just how many?"

"Two hundred," Dala said, brushing off his shoulder pads. "Should be enough to keep us from getting our heads ripped off for a day or so."

Brianna made straight for Rame and Sazh Kisaragi, who were waiting near the doorway and watching the Tachadori Warriors with curious stares.

"Has there been any contact with Cin or Jay?" she asked, not even bothering with a greeting.

"What?" Rame said, still staring at the huge purple aliens. Then he shook his head and said, "I mean no. We haven't heard anything from Vhetin or Jay. Comms are still jammed."

She sighed, her heart sinking. "What about security cams?"

"Nothing but Trandoshans."

"Look on the bright side," Sazh said, "now that the purple people have decided to join the party we can cover more ground. The next couple patrols will probably find them."

Brianna shook her head. "No they won't, because no one is looking for them. Fierfek, is there any way this deployment is going to have a happy ending?"

"Hey," Rame said with a frown. He put a hand on her shoulder. "Leave the pessimism to Cin, all right? We'll find them."

She nodded, not really believing him.

"You listening to me?" he said forcefully. "We'll find them. Even if we have to sneak out and look for them ourselves."

She was about to nod again when she stopped and frowned. "What? What did you just say?"

He stared at her, then cursed and said, "No. No, no, I didn't say anything. Don't listen to me."

She grinned and hugged Rame around the neck. "Thanks, vod'ika. You just gave me the best idea."

"I'm not going to be held responsible for whatever you're planning."

She grinned wider and said, "You won't have to. From now on I'm officially AWOL."

"Brianna," Rame said, starting after her as she made her way toward the doors into the spaceport, "don't do this. You won't help Cin if you go off and get yourself killed."

"I can handle myself," she said. "And I can help Cin if I can find him."

"Te Manda save you if Shysa finds out about this," Kisaragi said, shaking his head.

She grinned at him before turning and jogging into the spaceport.

She found herself cursing her own stupidity for not thinking of this before. Shysa and Dala had more important things to worry about than finding Cin, it was true. But now that the Tachadori had joined the fight, who would miss one more soldier?

On her way to the exits, she stopped by the ammunition depot staffed by Ume'o and picked up some extra ordnance for her trip. The bald, scowling technician watched her grab ammunition and grenades with a skeptical eyebrow raised. He folded his arms across his chest and growled, "You look like you're stockin' up for the apocalypse."

"Something like that," she murmured, grabbing a circular concussion grenade and slipping it into one of her belt pouches.

"So where are you going to start looking for him?"

She froze. "What are you talking about?"

"Come on, Brianna," he said. "I'm a friend. Don't insult my intelligence or I may not be for much longer."

She shook her head and said, "Sorry. But I'm not going to rest until I find him and Shysa just doesn't understand that."

"I'm not judging you," he said. "If my ex-wife was out there – and if we were still married – I wouldn't hesitate to do the same thing."

"I can trust you to keep your mouth shut?"

He nodded. "As far as I'm concerned, Mand'alor or not, this isn't Fenn'ika's business. This is your decision and your responsibility."

She stared at him, then nodded. "Thanks."

"No problem, vod."

She sighed and held up an extra short-range pistol. "How much do you want for all of this?"

He narrowed his eyes at her. "Tell you what," he said, "if you come back without finding Vhetin, we'll talk about price. If you can find him, consider it on the house."

She stared at him, then her face broke out in a smile. She nodded and jogged away without another word.

It didn't take her long to reach the main reception hall of the spaceport. Many of the Mandalorians who had been waiting there were gone, spreading out to different sections of the spaceport.

But the place was far from empty. As Brianna strode toward the line of troopers guarding the doors a gravelly voice said, "And where d'you think you're goin'?"

She started as Norac stepped in her path, his heavy battle-axe resting on his shoulder. He raised an eyebrow and said, "If I didn't know better, I'd say you were tryin' to get out of here without bein' seen."

"Norac," she said warningly, "I don't have any problem with you. Just let me pass and we won't have a problem."

"See, I don't know about that. I had a different idea in mind."

"Which was what?"

He gestured and six other Berserkers – including Droun and Beten – stepped up to stand beside their leader. Brianna clenched her fists, preparing for a fight. She was an aruetii after all and the Berserkers were known to be a little rough with outsiders.

"I don't want any trouble, guys," she said slowly.

"We do," Droun growled, flexing his grip on his huge hammer. "And that's why we're going with you."

She opened her mouth to shoot back a retort, then promptly closed it again. "What?"

Norac nodded, stroking his wild black beard. "That di'kut Shysa has kept us penned up in here for too long. We're gettin' restless. We figure you're headin' out to find your cyar'ika. The gloomy one with the glow sabers, right?"

She cracked a slight smile. "That's him."

"Then we're goin' with you to find him," he said. "Te Manda knows you're goin' to need our help."

She stared at him, then nodded and said, "Okay. Thank you."

He nodded back and said, "Just point us at the Trandos and we'll take care of the rest."

When they reached the main perimeter guard at the front doors, they explained that they were a patrol group heading out to clear the city around the spaceport. The guards nodded and stepped aside to let them pass.

Brianna took a deep breath of smoky air as they stepped outside. She shouldered her rifle and narrowed her eyes.

Hold on, Stripes, she thought. I'm coming to find you.