Disclaimer: I think we've all gotten the gist of my disclaimers by now. Just apply that here and everyone'll be happy.
Cryos left Draco high in the planet's atmosphere with the instructions to not go anywhere and to only stop Imperial ships from getting through the hole in the shield. He doubted that Draco would listen, but he may as well try.
As he dropped after the Rebel shuttles, he saw some turbo-laser cannons on the surface powering up, which he destroyed with small but powerful energy bombs before they managed to fire even a single shot. Then he followed the shuttles to the rooftop. By the time he arrived the Rebels had taken out the guards, and were beginning to pull apart the control panel of the heavy metal door that lead down into the top floor.
"Allow me" He told them, chasing the hacker away, "You gotta know how to handle these doors." With an almost lazy motion, he dug his fingers into the frame and ripped the door clear off it's hinges. "Come on." Everyone was staring at him in disbelief. "This Empire isn't going to topple itself."
The top few floors were relatively empty. They were mostly apartments for the top officers, and of course, they weren't going to hang around there during an attack. Most of them were probably in the underground bunker by now. The Rebels would have to fight their way down there.
The Rebel group didn't see any Imperials until they got about fifty floors down. Cryos was about to rip off yet another door when Luke Skywalker suddenly stuck his arm out in front of Cryos to stop him, and said "Wait, there's a bunch of Imp Stormtroopers in the next room. I can sense them."
"I'll handle it." Cryos told him. "Everyone wait here!" Then he used his wrist blades to slice a huge triangular hole in the door's blast-shielding. With utter confidence, he strode into the room, ignoring the roughly fifty troopers in their white armor. Every one of whom had a blaster pointed at him.
When he reached the center of the room, he stopped, then waited for the Stormtroopers to make the first move, one of then did. The unlucky Imperial stepped forward with a pair of wrist binders and announced, "By order of the Imperial army, you are under arrest. Surrender and you will receive a quick death." With a move too fast to follow, Cryos dashed forward and smashed the faceplate of the trooper's armor. Another blow to the chest and he was down. Cryos quickly moved to the next, and another, and four more, before the Stormtroopers mounted an organized attack on him. They realized that they couldn't shoot at him without hitting each other, so they just began attacking in mass. Trying to pile in top of him and pin him with their combined weight. It was a serious mistake. With an explosion of energy, Cryos blasted Stormtroopers in every direction. Most of them were unconscious, the rest were worse.
The Rebels gathered up all the Troopers still alive and bound them with their own cuffs. After they had taken everything of use from their captives, they moved on.
As they were walking, Cryos noticed a Rebel woman watching him closely. She was young and wore a standard Rebel flight suit, and had a blaster rifle hung over her shoulder, but it didn't look like it had ever been used in combat. She wasn't human, but she was human-like. If it weren't for her pale purplish, pupil-less eyes, silver-white hair and the odd, silvery scales stuck here and there on her face and exposed arms, Cryos would not even have realized she was an alien.
Cryos didn't mind, more often than not when he played the hero some kind of female was attracted to him. He was just relieved that this time she didn't have seven legs and arms as big around as his chest. Draco had teased him for a month about that one. This alien, however, actually had a sort of unearthly beauty, now that he took a second look at her. So Cryos drifted back in the group while they walked, he wanted to talk with her. As he got close, she shied away, apparently embarrassed that he had noticed.
"Hi there." Cryos said softly to the alien woman. "What's your name?"
She looked up, shocked that he was talking to her. "H-hello," She stuttered, "I-I'm Kentra. Arn-n't y-you C-Cryos? The one le-leading this whole attack?" Her stuttering was very bad, but it seemed to be caused more by nervousness than anything else.
"I'm not leading anything," Cryos answered coolly. "I was involved in the planing, and I'm a pretty important part of this whole thing, but I'm no leader. I don't really like to boss people around, I'd rather let other people do that."
She smiled just a little bit at that. "I'm here b-because the Empire decimated my homeworld, Ba`Ran. We Ba`Ranians are a cowardly people, k-keep mostly to ourselves. Even a-after we were attacked, we could only get twelve volunteers f-from the whole planet to join the Rebelion."
She fell silent and looked quite upset, as if she had made a fool of herself. Cryos realized that unless he calmed her down she was going to burst into tears. "I guess that makes you a hero, doesn't it? If you were just one of twelve people from the entire planet brave enough to fight."
"N-no, I only joined because I had nothing left there for me. Me entire family was killed when the E-Empire, when…" She tried not to cry, but green tears started running down her cheeks.
Oh, great, now I've made it worse. Cryos was annoyed that whenever he found someone he liked, something always got in the way. Often, that something was Draco, but not this time. Thinking fast, he put his arm over her shoulders and said softly, "We can make you a hero, everyone involved in this attack is going to go down in the history books. Please, walk with me, a lot of the people back here don't really seem to like me." Sure enough, three members of the Rebel group that had 'attacked' him that morning were there, glaring darkly at him.
"NO! It's too d-dangerous in the front. I'm scared." She started to pull back. But Cryos stopped her.
"It's alright, I'll protect you."
"You promise?"
"Of course I do. If I say I'll protect you, then nothing bad is going to happen." She smiled at him, and ignoring the glares of the three suspicious Rebels behind him, he led her up to the front to the group.
While the trek continued, Cryos got to know Kentra better. It turned out that she had been asked to come on this mission, even though she was very timid and meek, was because Ba`Ranians had the fastest hand-eye coordination of any species in the Rebellion. Timid little Kentra had scored better on the training simulations than even the Jedi Luke Skywalker. Ba`Ranians were also excellent lookouts and snipers. They had superb hearing, eyes that saw deep into ranges of light that others could not see, and they were one of the few species in the galaxy that didn't sleep. Cryos had seen other sleepless creatures over the years, but they were surprisingly few and far between considering what an advantage they had over everyone else.
In return, Kentra heard Cryos's life story, why he was wandering the Multiverse, some of the highlights from his adventures and all about some of the people he had met.
Less than ten minutes later, they got a big break. They found an elevator. And is was a service one too. One of the giant ones that you could fit a truck in. Service elevators usually run the whole length of the building, and this one was no exception. The Rebels and Cryos piled in and began the long trip to the ground floor.
This feels weird. Cryos thought to himself as he listened to the elevator music. Here we are heading into certain danger and a probable battle and there's elevator music. AND WHY DOES ELEVATOR MUSIC SOUND THE SAME NO MATTER WHERE I GO!?
The trip lasted almost twenty minutes, and when it ended, he, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Chewbacca, and the Princess Leia moved to the front, expecting an attack. Kentra didn't run to the back to of the elevator car, and Cryos could tell how much she wanted to. But she did hide behind him and peer over his shoulder. That was pointless, however, there was no one there.
Cryos was more than a little surprised about that. He had expected at least as many troopers here as there had been upstairs. But there wasn't anything except for some roach-like things the size of rats and a rat-like thing the size of a dog. So they set off down the corridor, keeping on the watch out for Imperials. They didn't go far before they found a large metal door. It was too large to rip off the wall, so Cryos extended his arm blades (Scaring Kentra, she'd never seen him do that up close) And began working can-opener-like around the edge of the door.
Cryos could hear the alarms going off even before he finished cutting the door away and he dropped back down to the ground to protect Kentra and the others before giving it the final push that knocked it over and into the protected Imperial bunker. There were over a hundred more stormtroopers in that one room. At least there were until the door fell on them, now there were only about twenty. There was a lot of shooting for a few seconds, but not very many people on either side were hit as no one could see with all the dust in the air. Well, not quite no one, as soon as she managed to get her blaster unslung from her arm, she popped up over Cryos's shoulder again and the fastest succession of laser bolts he had ever heard went zipping bast his ear.
All the shooting abruptly stopped. Every Stormtrooper in the room had been cut down by her fire. Each one had one clean shot through the head, and as far as Cryos could tell, she hadn't missed a single shot.
No one was more shocked than Cryos. He turned to look at Kentra. "Tell me again," He said, "why you were afraid to come up to the front of the group."
"It's dangerous up here." She clarified.
"Yeah, if you're on the wrong end of that." He said, pointing at the smoking blaster in her hands.
"I was only brave because I could hide behind you." She sounded depressed. It didn't escape his attention that her stuttering had stopped. He hoped that meant that she wasn't so afraid of him anymore.
"Are you kidding?! That was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen! How can you say you're not brave?" Cryos was surprised again at this alien girl who seemed to not even realize how gifted she was.
She couldn't answer him though, and was on the verge of tears again. Han Solo stepped up to Cryos and said in a low voice "Listen, she's useful, but we can't afford to have her break down in tears every five standard minutes. Calm her down or she's getting left behind."
Cryos knew Han was bluffing and wouldn't leave anyone behind, he wasn't that kind of person, but he also knew that Han had a point. He had to calm down Kentra before they could move on.
"Come here Kentra," He said softly, and scooped her up off the ground. He could carry her for a bit. She stopped crying after a few minutes, but really enjoyed being carried so Cryos let her ride on his back. He wrapped his tail around her waist to keep her from falling off.
After a few more minutes of walking, the hallway opened up into a large rounded room with a door at each end. Something about it made Cryos nervous, and he pulled Elfour from his pocket. Kentra watched intently. "Elfour," He said to the little robot, "Run a scan of this room."
"Certainly, but a I don't suppose I'm going to get introduced to the girl riding on your back, am I?"
"Oh, sorry, Elfour." Cryos held her up so that she and Kentra could see each other. "Elfour, meet Kentra. Kentra, Elfour. Now, what about that scan of the room?"
Elfour made beeping sounds for a few seconds, then answered, "I'm not really sure, there's some kind of machinery in the walls and ceiling. I don't know what it could be except for…" She paused, and then suddenly screamed a warning. "GET OUT!! IT'S A TRAP!!!"
At the very moment she said it, both of the doors slammed shut, sealing all the rebels in the room, and with a frightening swiftness, the ceiling began to drop. Cryos was standing near the center of the room, and held up his hands to stop it's fall. It wasn't easy, but he could hold it up for a few minutes. The Rebel hacker team rushed up to the front of the group and started working on the control panel for the door.
As the hackers worked, he unwrapped his tail from Kentra's waist. "Kentra," He said through tightly gritted teeth, "I want you to go with everyone else-"
"NO!" She looked up at the ceiling and how his hands were making ever-deeper impressions in the metal. "I couldn't leave you to die, if you're sacrificing yourself for this mission, I am too." She wrapped her arms around him.
"Kentra! Go! I'll be alright."
But try as he might, she flatly refused to leave him. He was about to ask Luke or Leia to take her to safety, but the hackers had opened the door, and they were the first to get into the next room with their weapons drawn. The rest of the Rebels left quickly as well, leaving only Cryos and Kentra behind.
Cryos knew he could get out on his own, but he had to find a way to get Kentra out with him, he couldn't leave her. So with sudden speed, he let go of the ceiling, grabbed Kentra, and dashed to the open door.
He knew he couldn't make it himself, not carrying someone like this. But he could survive the ceiling smashing down on him. Kentra couldn't. He could at least have thrown Kentra to the relative safety of the Rebel group, if it wasn't for what he saw when he got there to the door.
The Rebels were engaged in a battle against the largest group of Imperials Cryos had seen so far. He couldn't just toss Kentra into the middle of a battle like that. He wasn't sure what to do, and in the end, that split second of indecision took away his choice all together. As the ceiling slammed down he spun Kentra underneath his body to protect her as much as he could. And then there was a slam of the ceiling hitting the floor.
Then darkness…
