Part 2
Tallie palms a small sensor and tells Bane to keep a weapon at the ready. She wishes she could juggle both but the gloves she has to wear make the functioning of the sensor clumsy. Poe's choice is to hold the gun and let Corsu sweep for biologic information. He gestures their direction and she stretches her stride to keep pace with the men. She periodically provides that the readings remain negative. She could leave it and only chime in if alerts start popping, but it is better to be affirmative than let silence imply situation.
At each intersection they throw glances and consider. BB8 has rolled ahead and from its dome baths of blue light have swept the area from wall to wall, ceiling to floor. When they stop before the door to the bridge R9 tells them he is on his 28th sweep of the room treating all the surfaces he with ultraviolet radiation.
"Stop now, please," Tallie sighs. She should appreciate his stick-to-it-ivness, but it highlights his literal interpretations of her instructions.
Poe uses hand gestures to say which of them is sweeping which direction as they move into the room. He doesn't entirely trust the robot to be accurate. When the door cycles open, she moves smoothly beside him into the space completing her directional sweep before letting her concentration recalibrate to see the full room.
Then she sees the captain and almost pukes.
"Not sleeping," she manages to mutter and maybe it is Bane behind her who is choking back his own gag.
"Don't chuck in your suits. You'll hate life if your rebreather gets all jammed up with spew."
"Not helpful," she smacks the back of her hand against his shoulder.
"But true," he swallows hard and then gets his bearings.
The captain is tied to the control console with his arms spread eagle. His body is shirtless but covered in deep gouging stripes that are many inches long, somewhat evenly spaced. His throat is flayed open exposing bits of his larynx that is also ripped apart. His tongue has been dragged out of the new opening in the neck…and lolls limply against the gash. The blue-white clouded eyes are open, but not so solidly fixed into the sockets.
"Doesn't look like a contagion. Something less demur. Confirm." Poe gives up throttling back his nattering.
"Doesn't look like blaster fire. Kind of ragged," she assesses. "Like an animal." She runs a scan for anything that will trip the bio-contaminant spectrum. She reports the negative results.
"An animal would not take time to tie him to the command counsel to dead hand the ship."
Gingerly working around the corpse, Poe manages to make some changes in the ship heading controls. He arrests the forward momentum. Then he considers his options and sends the craft to a fresh set of coordinates. The new position is not far away, but a safe distance from their base.
"Call up logs. I want to know what was happening when the crew was last filing entries."
She moves to the terminal and knocks at it to bring up a daily record. It is bland ship facts and it stopped 32 hours ago. The ship was sub light but getting ready to move to hyper speed. The manifest indicated a compliment of 9, the location and the destination. She reported this to Poe.
Tallie is in no hurry to solve what should happen with the dead ship captain. Selfishly, she thinks asking will land her with the responsibility. Instead she restores secondary atmosphere and life support systems. They've been off for more time than would allow for pockets of the ship to handle isolation measures. Unless crew were in stasis, nothing humanoid was aboard the ice cold, airless vessel.
"Let's bring the rest of the squad aboard and do a full search of the space," she suggests.
"Not so fast," Poe shakes his head. Violence a regular part of their existence, but it doesn't look like what was done to this man. He isn't thrilled but he's studying the remains. "What's in the hold?"
"Machine parts," she answers looking at the last entries. "Coming from Esquinn."
"Let's get a visual on the parts to make sure this isn't a trap. This might have been pushed our way with purpose. BB8 go take a survey of the crew and engineering spaces and report back anything unusual. Check all the rooms, holds, closets. Let's see if there are any other crew or droids remaining. R9 go to the console over there and make a copy of all the recent ship records back to the last time it docked in a central port. Bane & Corsu go to the cargo hold and confirm the contents."
"Aye, sir." They respond crisply.
When they've left, he spins to Tallie.
"What do you notice?" Poe asks.
"Dead guy," she doesn't understand what he's getting at.
"Right. But look at how he's dead." He invites her to consider and she wishes he wouldn't. She locks down her nerves and mentally distances herself.
"He wasn't killed here," she is surprised to realize. "He was brought here and tied up after."
"Right," Poe nods. "What else?"
"Some of this happened after he was dead. The cuts on the back don't show swelling." She's no medical tech, but she has seen her share of dead. She knows a few things that can happen to a brutalized body before and after death.
"This is done to get our attention, to make a point. We need to figure out the message."
"It's a threat, Poe. An unsophisticated, head on a pike, message that someone wants us to be afraid."
To her astonishment, he scoffs. "I'm not intimidated. It might have been punishment to this crew and these men rather than…"
"Perhaps," she considers, "but it came out of light speed and is wending its way to our location. I take that as purposeful."
"Always on guard," he mentions as he throws her a look. "Probably wise. Pull the communications. I want to know what messages were sent and received since the last time they were in a port station."
/&&&&&&/
The cramped offices of the government official are without pomp or circumstance. Two figures have entered at the invitation of the official. His clothing belies his modest means. This man receives a nominal government allowance for his labors but reaps a much better income from graft he facilitates within the facilities. He hides many aspects of his comfortable life from his cohorts and superiors but is not immune to comfortable pleasures like a tailored suit of clothes. The two people who have entered have an appointment and he is looking forward to squeezing them in their current situation. The ship scheduled to bring their goods is incommunicado and likely requiring some form of rescue. He can arrange for this, at a price.
Lady Hr'ker extends rapturous forearms and in lightening reflexes snaps the balding head of the import-export official forward into her chest. The preapical ridges along her appendage make any backward jerk impossible.
The robed official drops his data pad and moans in fear. He looks frantically up at the statuesque female figure. The frozen expression that might be a smile is not warm or hospitable. Her body tenses ever so slightly there is an audible pop and the small man's neck slides backwards and his legs go limp. He sloughs to the floor.
"Problem managed," her mouth manufactures a facsimile of the speech pattern humanoids rely for communications.
"I see," Laddie's mouth purses in displeasure. "You are efficient as ever, Lady Hr'kr."
"I was finished with him anyway," she steps clear of him in what might appear as delicate, dancer-like moves if they had not been proceeded by the violence moments before.
"Most people do not kill when a bride would suffice."
"You're boring me, Laddie," she chills the words he would have used.
He takes her example and steps away from the corpse. Walking over to the bar he pours a drink. She is doing something fastidious with her bare arms that looks suspiciously like a cat cleaning itself.
"It's early morning, Laddie," she scolds.
"It's happy hour somewhere in the universe," he swipes his bottle blond bangs away from his eyes as he knocks back half the glass.
"Recover the freighter cargo. The shipping containers are well able to sustain uncontrolled reentry."
Laddie nods and slams back the rest of his glass and waves impatiently. "I'll take care of it."
"Then we'll talk about the other aspects of our partnership," she intones.