Disclaimer: See Chapter 1. The short version is that I don't own any of this, and I'm not making money off of it, as much as I wish I could. This is intended as a purely creative exercise.
Chapter 2:
The woman who had once called herself Lara Nostil stepped out of the tiny refresher, running a towel over her wet, tangled hair. Tonin tweedled at her quietly, leaving her to guess at his message's content.
"Whatever it was you just said, I'll take care of it in a minute," she muttered groggily. She hadn't been sleeping terribly well lately, and the shower she'd just taken did little to waken her. Money was tight at the moment. She'd managed to land a couple of transport jobs, but the cavernous space of the Sentinel-class landing ship would be painfully devoid of cargo for the next little while.
That, in part, explained the Spartan existence she now enjoyed. She lived in the tiny crew quarters of the drop ship. Barely tall enough to stand in, and just barely wide enough to spread one's arms. The bunk was little more than an alcove set into the wall, and was just barely long enough to fit her slender frame; and she wasn't tall, by any stretch of the imagination. She couldn't help but wonder why a vehicle with such a vast cargo space had such cramped quarters. Surely they could sacrifice a couple of cubic meters of cargo room to make the crew more comfortable.
It was definitely on her list of modifications to this ship, once she could afford it. For now, keeping the ship moored here was draining her finances. In three weeks, she would either have a steady stream of clients, or she would have to move on. The ship had been loaded with various miscellaneous Imperial knickknacks, a dozen or so speeder bikes, enough blaster rifles to occupy a small planet (she'd kept a few of those for her own use). She'd sold most of them off to get the necessary overhead to start up her business. Not to mention to cement Kirney Slane's identity. Plant enough information in just the right places that anybody doing a background check would believe her. Lara Nostil had been a lie that became truth. Perhaps Kirney Slane would be equally lucky.
Tonin stood silently in the corner, taking up some of the desperately-needed floor space of the tiny room, watching her silently as she dressed.
Horny little bastard, she thought to herself, jokingly. Truth be known, she wanted him there. She felt more… comfortable when he was with her. He made her feel safe, somehow.
Of course, it would have been nice if he'd been a little more judgmental a few days back when, in a moment of weakness, she'd recorded and sent a message to Myn Donos. It would have been nice to have him try to talk her out of it. Instead, the little droid had stood idly by to let her record a message that she had absolutely no reason to believe would be answered; without so much as twittering in protest.
After all, the last time she'd seen him, he'd tried to blow her out of the sky, and had been willing to shoot through his commanding officer to do it. She wasn't exactly optimistic that his opinion of her had improved since then.
Not that she hadn't meant every word of it, but Myn really didn't need her screwing his life up.
Again.
No, the odds were that Myn had watched it once, deleted it, and had never looked at it again.
In the meantime, keeping herself busy did wonders for keeping her from thinking about it.
Keeping her mind occupied stopped it from thinking about the last time she'd seen him.
She had a meeting with a client this morning. He'd insisted on meeting her at one of the local tapcafs a short distance from the spaceport. She'd done a background check on him, and he seemed to be on the level.
Still, never hurts to be cautious. She strapped a heavy blaster pistol to her left thigh. The weapon didn't have much in the way of range. She could probably launch a spitball farther than this thing could shoot. But it packed a punch which rivaled most blaster rifles.
She'd never been a particularly good shot. Not as good as…
She stopped herself. It did her no good to dwell on what couldn't be.
Myn was an exceptional sniper. But even at close range, he was deadly. With a good, accurate pistol…
She stopped herself again. She was dwelling, she realized.
At any rate, at the range this pistol had, aim didn't really matter. Your average trained bantha could bull's-eye a target at this thing's maximum range.
She sat quietly and completed her preparations.
If Tonin had a brow, it would have been furrowed at that moment. He'd spent most of his functional existence working alongside humans, but if there was one thing of which he was certain, it was that he would never understand them.
He lacked arms, but even if he didn't, he doubted that having one of them tied behind his back would have affected his ability to calculate a hyperspace jump in the least. He could perform complex mathematics in microseconds. He could perform emergency repairs on, arguably, the most advanced fighter craft in existence, and had a deep understanding of every component on the spacecraft.
With one exception: the human pilot.
Tonin lacked emotions as human beings or other sentient creatures understand them, but the unpleasant electrical impulses the coursed through his circuitry would best be described as concern. In the last seventy-two standard hours, he'd witnessed Kirney crying eleven times, for a total time of 28.176 standard minutes. Yet, in spite of witnessing the process those eleven times, he had proven completely unable to predict it. He suspected that her recent angst was in some way related to a message he'd recorded and sent for her 79.466 hours ago. However, he'd seen her send dozens of holocom messages without crying over them. He could not grasp why this one would be any different.
He pondered his own experiences over the past weeks, in an attempt to understand her position better. He'd worked for a long time with Lara's X-wing. The two had had a close working relationship. Perhaps even a reasonable analog of human friendship. Tonin had certainly felt his loss, but it was difficult for him to describe what he felt as sadness. And, in a way, the X-wing had been replaced in his life. The Sentinel (which Kirney had dubbed Lara's Hope, although its transponder identified it as the Wraith) was a pleasant enough machine to work with. It allowed him to do most of the hyperspace calculations, something he excelled at, and to a great degree, he found working with the much larger machine very rewarding.
So, why could Kirney not find a replacement?
This was something he would have to contemplate.
The tapcaf was small and crowded, but it was also the kind of place that nobody would be likely to notice or care if one of the patrons drew a blaster and shot another; provided the deceased patron had paid for his drink first. Corellian law enforcement tended to turn a blind eye to places like this.
Kirney had arrived early, and had taken a table, alone.
Her client was a Verpine who wanted himself, his family, and his work transported to Coruscant, and he wanted it done quietly. That suited Kirney just fine. She wasn't exactly interested in making a lot of noise on the capital planet of the regime that had her labeled as a traitor. But she was fairly certain she could slip in and out quietly enough not to arouse any attention. The planet had, literally, millions of craft flying into and out of its atmosphere. One more freighter, even one as big as Lara's Hope, would hardly be a blip on their sensors.
She could practically be there and back within two standard days; and he was willing to pay handsomely for it.
She spotted him the instant he walked into the caf. There weren't many Verpine on Corellia, which, in and of itself, made him stand out in a crowd. Plus, he looked nervous. She hadn't seen a whole lot of nervous people walking in. His insectile features, radiated worry, such that they could through his tough exoskeleton.
He slid into the chair in front of her and looked at her across the table.
She drew her pistol and pointed it directly at the Verpine's chest. "Blaster on the table now." The Verpine's exoskeleton provided quite a bit of protection against blaster bolts, but not enough to block this pistol at point-blank range.
"How do I know you won't shoot me as soon as I hand it over?"
"'Cause you're not going to hand it over. We're both going to put our weapons down on the table, then our hands go under the table, and don't come back up, do you understand?"
The Verpine nodded. He reached down, bringing a blaster pistol not unlike her own up above the table, holding it by its trigger guard. He deposited it on the table top as she did the same. Then he brought his hands to his lap, watching hers intently as they did the same.
"Ten thousand," she said, blankly, "Half now, half on arrival."
He stared at her, "there are a dozen courriers who would take me that far for half that much."
"But none who'll do it no questions asked." She told him, "You said you wanted this done quietly."
"Seven-five?"
"Nine."
"Eight?"
"Eighty-seven, fifty."
"Done."
"Half now, half upon arrival." She told him. He nodded, "You pay gas." He nodded again. She tried not to let the relief show on her face. That sum alone would allow her to cover mooring for an additional month, maybe even find herself a decent place to live.
"Do we have a deal?"
"Yes," she nodded, "but just so that we understand each other, if you are so much as remotely involved with any illegal activity, I jettison you, your equipment and your family, regardless of where we happen to be when I find out, clear?"
"As transparisteel."
"Alright, hand over the forty-three, seventy-five, and we'll get on our way."
He nodded, and reached into his pocket. He peeled off a few bills and handed them across the table to her. She casually placed one hand on her blaster pistol atop the table as a not-too-subtle warning not to try anything. "That should cover gas as well," he informed her.
She counted it. He was right: it would cover gas and then some. He must really be desperate. She looked at the size of the roll of cash he stuffed back in his pocket, "You came prepared to pay ten thousand," she accused him.
He shrugged, a rather interesting gesture with his insectile features, "Why pay ten thousand when you were willing to settle for eighty-seven fifty?"
She glared at him, "I see your point, I suppose."
"Shall we be off, then?" He asked her.
"Before we go, is there anything you want to tell me?" She glanced over his shoulder, and planted her feet on either side of the chair she was seated on.
"No, why?"
"'Cause you're about to get jettisoned." She propelled herself upwards and across the table, catching him across the chest in a high tackle, praying silently that anyone behind her would have the brains to hit the deck. The duo hit the floor hard, and blaster rifle bolts tore through the space they had both occupied only moments ago.
She counted four, human, armed with what appeared to be stormtrooper rifles, but they had the advantage of not caring who got killed in the crossfire. Everything about them, their clothes, the way they moved, screamed gangster. Somehow, she'd stumbled into the middle of a hit.
Or maybe she was the target, she wasn't sure. She reached for her pistol before she realized that it was still on top of the table they were now under, and there was no way she could grab it before she had at least four blaster bolts in her. She was fast, but not that fast. Instead, she kicked up at the bottom of the table, flipping it onto its side, and creating a barrier between them and the assassins. It would absorb at least a few shots.
"Now if you'd let me keep my gun then maybe…" He stopped when he saw a blaster rifle taped to the bottom of the table, "Oh." Then, in his mind, he reconstructed the way the table had been standing, and came to the realization that the rifle had been pointing right at his navel when he'd been seated, "Hey!"
"Later," she muttered, ripping the rifle free of the bottom of the table. She took a quick glance around. Everybody was on the ground or under a table. As far as she could tell, nobody was hurt.
Now she would see if she could keep it that way.
For a brief instant, she looked at the diminutive Verpine and contemplated shooting him before she went to work on her attackers. No, she shook her head, angry at herself, that's Gara talking. For the moment, the little insect hadn't done anything to harm her directly.
But if she found out that he had anything to do with this…
She popped up, taking aim at the positions the gunmen had occupied moments ago, but they were no longer there. She ducked back behind the table as a swath of blaster bolts flew at her.
The bastards had taken cover behind the cowering patrons.
Dammit.
A year ago, she would not have given a second thought to shooting through those patrons to get these gunmen. Now…
Dammit.
"I'm asking you this once," she told the Verpine, "did you have anything to do with this?"
"No!" He insisted, then clarified: "A little."
"If we get out of this, you're going to explain that, then I'll decide whether to blow your head off."
"Sounds fair."
She popped up again, firing a quick burst over the patron's heads. C'mon, she chided them silently, give me something to shoot off.
One of the attackers did, he rose to a low crouch, his rifle held up to his eye as he carefully took aim at the redhead.
She loosed another burst before he could squeeze the trigger, catching him in the center of his chest, driving him backwards. Too slow, she thought at him as angrily as she could. Peripherally, she saw one of the others standing, bringing his rifle to bear. She couldn't swing hers at him fast enough. Not before she fired, and by the time she managed to duck behind the table again, he would have shot her three times.
She wasn't going to make it out of this.
It seemed to take an eternity for the man to squeeze the trigger, but she knew it couldn't be more than the fraction of a second it took her to swing her own rifle at him. Her hands seemed to be moving impossibly slowly. Even as the sights of her rifle panned across the room, she knew it wasn't fast enough.
Myn, for whatever it's worth, I'm sorry.
The sound of a blaster erupting in the enclosed space was deafening.