Disclaimer: They're not mine, and I'm not making any money off of this, as much as I wish that they were and I was. They're the creation of LucasArts, Aaron Allston and Michael A. Stackpole. I'm just borrowing 'em for a little while to vent a little creative energy.
Chapter 3:
Kirney heard the unmistakable sound of a blaster firing, and some part of her psyche that didn't want to witness her own death forced her eyes to close, and steeled her body for the inevitable impact. She heard the unmistakable sound of a body falling heavily to the floor. It took her a moment to realize that the body was not hers.
She ducked behind the table as another hail of blaster fire, this time from the only two remaining rifles, dug deep into the table's surface. As the roar of blaster fire died down, she heard another single blaster shot from somewhere nearby, followed again by the unmistakable thud of a body falling limply to the ground.
What in the name of the force is going on?
"It seems we have a friend with us." The Verpine sounded amused.
Whoever it was had impressive aim. He'd just downed two humans (who were undoubtedly wearing armor of some description) with a single shot each. It had taken her a burst of blaster fire, five or six individual blaster bolts, to down one.
The only person she knew personally who was capable of something like that was…
Myn?
She wiped that thought from her mind. It couldn't be him, it simply couldn't. She popped her head above the edge of the table again, and waited for the last gunner to take the bait. He did, opening fire at their position, but his aim was off, and the shots landed low, impacting the table. She'd gambled that he wouldn't be able to hit a small target such as her head, while he would have to present a much larger one to fire. Another quick burst of blaster fire tore through his chest, creating a hole the size of a small Ewok in the space his heart and lungs would once have occupied. As he fell to the ground, she stood carefully, keeping her rifle trained on the crowd just in case someone jumped up to attack. As she came around the table, she crouched down quickly to recover her pistol, and return it to its holster on her leg.
She approached the bodies. It was trivial to tell the ones she'd taken down, they had been shot in an almost haphazard manner. Blaster bolts had impacted their chests, and were spread over their respective torsos. The other two, on the other hand, were works of art. They'd been shot from the side in such a way that the blaster bolt slammed through the back of the neck where the spinal column connected with the base of the skull, liquefying the brain stem. This prevented the dying man from reflexively squeezing the trigger, potentially killing dozens, as he went down.
Standard sniper shot, she realized. Myn?
It's not Myn, a rebellious voice in the back of her mind spoke up, you just want it to be him.
She grabbed the lithe Verpine by the arm and, quite literally, dragged him outside. At a slow run, they made their way down the street, finally ducking into an alleyway where nobody would pay much attention to them.
"Okay, speak."
"I don't work for them, honest. I don't work with them either." The Verpine insisted, "but they do want me dead, which is why I have to leave the planet."
"Even career criminals don't try to kill you for no reason. That was a hit squad back there, not a random shoot-up-the-tapcaf operation. Why do they want you dead?" She demanded.
"They probably saw me and my wife enter the tapcaf."
"You're lying. You entered alone." She pressed the barrel of the blaster rifle under the Verpine's chin.
"Yes. She entered an hour before I came. They probably saw her come in and knew I'd be along soon."
"You're still lying." She told him, "You were the only Verpine in the room."
"I never said my wife was Verpine." The tiny creature cocked his head at her.
That was true, she realized, he hadn't. "What is she?"
"Human." The Verpine told her, shrugging.
"What was she doing there?"
"If you threatened me, she would have shot you."
"I did threaten you." She told him, "You'll recall one of the first things I did was point a gun at you."
He shrugged, "I knew you'd probably do that, and so did she."
She frowned, this Verpine had a way of making her feel really predictable. She didn't like feeling predictable. "You said you have children." She actually didn't know for sure whether a human and a Verpine could reproduce or not, but looking at the shape of the tiny creature's body, the mechanics of it alone were mind-boggling, and part of her mind was pretty certain that Verpine reproduction involved laying eggs in some way.
He nodded, "Six of them; two Verpines, two humans, a Givin and a Wookie." He looked sad for a moment, "the war with the empire left a lot of orphans on both sides."
"That still doesn't explain why they want you dead." She told him.
"My wife's name is Minos Corva." He told her.
"Corva, as in Logos Corva?"
He nodded, "his daughter."
The final piece slid into place. Logos Corva had been a small-time gangster at Nar Shadda for a few years before his operation spread galactically. He had his hand in a little bit of everything; smuggling, spice trading, piracy, black market weapons sales, wetwork. He wasn't a major player by any stretch of the imagination, but he definitely had his share of clout in the galactic underground. There were rumors of him having made an alliance with one of the Imperial warlords.
Corva was legendary for exactly two things: his ruthlessness with his enemies, and his irrational bigotry towards non-human races.
And it was likely that he wasn't too happy with his daughter marrying a Verpine.
"Sithspit." Kirney whispered under her breath. She hadn't heard that Corva's daughter was married. Probably because Corva wanted to keep it secret long enough to track them down and kill the husband.
"So now, you see why I need to get off this planet, and fast."
"Well, here's the thing: I told you that if you were even remotely involved with anything illegal, I'd cut you loose."
"I haven't broken any laws." The Verpine insisted.
"But you're involved with people who do." This is attention I really don't need, she stopped herself from adding. Having a gangster tailing them made it that much less likely that she could slip in and out of Coruscant without anybody noticing.
"Falling in love with the wrong woman is not a crime."
"It's just not particularly smart." Kirney muttered, bitterly.
"What does that have to do with it?" He demanded, harshly. His tone softened, "haven't you ever been in love with someone? Haven't you ever known that it was wrong and stupid for you to feel that way, but been completely powerless to stop it?"
Kirney glared at him for a long time, finally after what seemed like an eternity, she spoke: "What's your name?"
"My name?"
"We have a long way to go, and I can't be calling you 'hey you' all the time." She lowered the rifle from his chin.
The Verpine let out a long breath as a look of enormous relief washed over him, "call me Gus. Everybody else does."
"Alright, Gus. You've got yourself a ship."
Gus directed her to his residence. His wife was already there waiting, probably because Kirney and Gus had taken a number of detours to make sure they weren't being followed, and it looked as though they'd loaded his life's work (not to mention their six adopted children) into a small cargo speeder. The speeder would easily fit into the cargo hold of the Hope, which would save them, potentially, hours worth of unloading its contents.
"Thanks for the bail-out back there," Kirney said as she shook hands with Gus' unorthodox wife, "that was some pretty amazing shooting."
She stood a few centimeters shorter than Kirney, with long black hair which extended in a braid down to her waist.
"Thanks," Minos replied, "I've been firing blasters since I was six, and they weren't expecting me." She smiled, "it was pretty easy."
Kirney felt her heart sink into the soles of her feet. Somewhere, deep in the recesses of her mind where she wouldn't even admit it to herself, where no Jedi could dig it out, she'd been hoping that Minos would deny that she was the mystery gunman. She hoped she'd say that she didn't know who it was, but she saw a man with blond hair holster a blaster and leave the tapcaf.
It wasn't Myn, she realized, trying to keep the hurt from showing on her face.
"Are you okay?" Minos asked, concern in her voice.
"I am, I just was… hoping it was someone else."
Minos was a kind woman, in spite of her parentage. But Kirney couldn't repress the spark of jealousy burning in her. What right did they have to have something she had been denied? She still didn't know for sure whether or not she had loved Myn, but the universe had denied her the opportunity even to find out.
It just wasn't fair, dammit.
She'd keyed her comlink to the Hope's frequency, "Kolot, start spinning up the engines and begin preflight, we'll be there within fifteen minutes."
"Kolot?"
"Co-pilot," she explained, "You'll like him, he's a lot like you in an annoying sort of way."
"Do I need to remind you that I'm paying your bills?" Gus frowned at her, "You could try a little common courtesy."
"Okay, find another transport."
"Point." He conceded. After the display in the tapcaf, it seemed unlikely that anybody would offer them passage. Most transport pilots could be described as crazy, but none of them could be described as stupid.
"Everybody here? Let's go." She ordered. Minos was at the controls, and she seemed to be quite a competent pilot. Lara would have preferred to take the controls herself, but if she had to shoot something, it probably wasn't the best place to be. "Take a left here," she ordered her. Minos guided the vessel expertly through the narrow streets.
"Um? We have a problem." Minos piped up from the front of the speeder.
"What is it?" Kirney asked, pointlessly. As she looked through the front windshield, she saw six identical speeder bikes, blocking the road in front of them. Mounted on each one was a human armed with rifles identical to those that had been firing at them back in the tapcaf.
"Sithspit," She muttered under her breath, "ram them."
"What?"
"Give it as much speed as you can, ram them." She ordered.
"Yes, ma'am." Minos put as much power as she possibly could through the engines, and drove at the middle two of the six speeder bikes.
All six of the ambushers opened fire, and the windscreen disintegrated in front of Minos' face.
Minos ducked her head underneath the dash. She couldn't see where she was going, but she didn't really need to to keep this oversized brick on a straight course.
The collision of upwards of three metric tonnes traveling at over seventy kilometers per Coruscant hour with two stationary speeder bikes was analogous to dropping an anvil on a small rodent. The two riders had the intelligence to get out of the way before the speeder hit them, but the bikes could not be saved, and erupted into a pair of twin fireballs as the speeder ploughed through them. The wookie child roared in what Kirney interpreted as a victorious tone. The Givin child, with its mournful, sad looking eyes seemed to look upon the chase they were now in as an interesting intellectual exercise.
"Where's your ship?" Gus asked.
"We can't go to my ship, not yet. We have to lose them first." Through the back windows, she could see the bikes turning around to give chase.
"Can we outrun them?" That was Minos.
Kirney shook her head. "Not a snowball's chance on Nkllon."
"So, what do we do?"
"We lose 'em." Kirney looked down at the blaster rifle she still held in her hands. It had, she guessed, about 80 shots remaining, and she had the advantage that she wouldn't be trying to shoot and drive at the same time.
She crawled over the six kids into the cargo compartment in the back. It was cramped, and full of boxes and equipment, but there was still room to move around in it, and the boxes provided good cover.
Yes, this will do nicely, she thought to herself. She made her way to the back of the compartment, and pressed a small green button with her thumb. The large rear door slid upwards, revealing four speeder bikes moving in formation just behind their speeder. The bikes themselves were armed, she could now see, with some sort of light blaster cannon. They could mow down just about any soft target easily, but they were also notoriously inaccurate. The pilots, if they were smart, would be trying to disable their vehicle, not to necessarily hit anyone inside.
Besides which, they probably wanted Minos alive.
She ducked behind a metal crate, knowing that it would absorb just about anything those blaster cannons could throw at her. Provided none of them were lucky to take her head off, she should be safe there.
She, on the other hand, didn't have to worry about not running into anything, as long as Minos did her job well enough, so she could concentrate on shooting their pursuers.
She opened fire at the nearest, sending a wave of blaster fire at the unprotected driver. Of the six bolts she fired, exactly one hit in his left shoulder, forcing him to veer to the left, slamming with titanic force into an unyielding wall.
That was the easy one, she realized, the next three, I'm going to have to work for.
The three remaining bikers made that abundantly clear when they opened fire on the inside of the cargo compartment, forcing her to duck into as tight a space as she could to avoid getting hit. The bolts didn't have enough penetration to get into the passenger compartment.
Okay, I think they might be angry. She fired another burst at them, not expecting to hit anything, more to rub their faces in the fact that she was still there.
Someone tapped her on the shoulder.
She whipped around, bringing the rifle around to aim at the intruder.
"Sithspit, Gus. What are you doing?"
"I thought you could use a little help." He shrugged. She realized that he held a small blaster carbine in his hands.
"Always. Get yourself behind something on the other side of the cargo hold, and we'll see what we can do." She paused, "And just so you know, getting yourself killed isn't grounds for reneging on payment."
"Understood."
Gus quickly left her side and made his way to the opposite side of the small cargo compartment, and took position behind what looked like a computer console of some description.
The three remaining bikes had taken up a triangle formation: one leading, the other two behind him to either side. They'd open fire every time she or Gus popped up to shoot, then when they crouched down, they'd proceed to take the speeder apart piece by piece.
The whole compartment lurched, and with a screeching of metal, Kirney was flung free of her cover to slam, sprawled in the open. One of the bikes had just scored a lucky shot on one of the repulsorlift generators. The speeder had three more, and already she could feel the vessel righting itself as Minos played with the repulsor field to keep it steady, but the added power to the repulsors would slow them down by almost a quarter.
That was not her biggest worry.
The fact that she was lying prone without any shelter when all three bikes were about to open fire was.
She jumped up and ran towards her crate, it was only when she dove behind it that she realized that she'd left her rifle behind. She silently commended herself for remembering to pick up her blaster pistol back at the tapcaf.
This pistol held fifty shots, so she'd have to use them carefully. She had no spare power packs.
She took careful aim at the lead biker and fired, cursing as she saw her shot miss high.
Wait a second, high?
It wasn't that the shot had gone high, it was that the driver had sunk down.
That realization came a split second before the bike's skids caught on the rough ground, sending the bike rolling. The driver was flung free, and sailed through the air, slamming at over ninety kilometers per Coruscant hour into the ground. The newly-vacated bike twisted sideways, blocking the paths of the two remaining bikers who could not react in time to avoid a collision, they slammed headlong into the downed bike, catapulting themselves free of their seats to land in fairly close proximity to their fallen comrade.
"Vader's bones," Gus whispered from his hiding spot, "Damn fine shot."
"It wasn't me," Kirney told him, not entirely believing what she'd seen herself.
"I saw you," Gus insisted, "you hit his repulsor housing."
"It wasn't me. I was aiming at his head."
"Well, you missed." Gus told her, "Worked out for the best, I think."
"No, I missed high."
"What?"
"I shot over his head as his repulsorlift gave out. Someone else shot it out."
"Well, it wasn't me."
"Minos, stop." Kirney turned to the young woman at the controls.
"What?"
"Stop, now."
Kirney didn't even wait for the speeder to stop before jumping out. She only waited until it was moving slowly enough that she could do so without getting hurt.
Barely.
She stood in the middle of the street, scanning the building tops. This time it had to be him. Maybe a handful of people in the galaxy could have made that shot, and he was one of them.
C'mon, Myn, show yourself.
"Kirney," Gus walked up behind her, "What are we doing here?"
"I'm looking for someone." Her eyes scanned the balconies. He had to be out there somewhere. Where are you?
The Verpine looked up at the building tops, following her gaze. "Who?"
"Me."
Both human and Verpine spun around at the new voice, dropping into a crouch and taking aim at the new arrival.
"Sorry I'm late."
She brought the blaster down from its raised position and slipped it back into its holster.
She stood, looking at the new arrival quizically, trying to read his expressions, and found, for once, she couldn't.
"Hi, Myn." She said, quietly.