"You can run, but you'll only die tired."
-Boba Fett (25 ABY)
Star Wars: The Most Dangerous Game
Chapter Two – Just Another Day
One week before being marooned on Taris, Shae knelt on the roof of the Civic Services Building in Level 223 on Coruscant and peered through her macrobinoculars one more time. She had never seen someone run so fast in all her life.
On the nearest walkway just below her perch, a bald young man with a very noticeable tattoo running the length of his scalp was sprinting away from her, very likely heading towards the nearest transit hub. It was all she needed to see; her presence on the Republic capital world had been compromised. She sighed and apathetically returned the binoculars to their compartment on her pack.
This was going to be a long day.
Later, she would learn that an acquaintance of her employer had found out about the bounty contract and been secretly kept Shae's mark updated with her current whereabouts. She would react negatively upon hearing the news. But for now: she stood, pushed her bright red hair off of her face, and slipped her Mando UIY-2249 tactical helmet over her head. The helmet's HUD immediately came to life, giving her what little tactical information there was to be had from her perch. Altitude, temperature, wind speed, armor durability, and the ammo count of the twin blasters at her hips lit up faintly at the edges of her visor.
"Time to go to work," she said. At times like this, when everything was going wrong, she was grateful for her Mandalorian sensibilities and absolute inability to lose her cool under stress... but she was also grateful for her jetpack.
Taking a widened stance and shifting around in her armor, she pressed the button on her left glove to prime and ignite her jetpack. In a matter of seconds, she was rocketing over the congested walkways and platforms of Level 223. The deeper you went in Coruscant, the tougher it was to surprise the average pedestrian, so a woman in Mandalorian armor riding a jetpack did little to turn up any curious eyes in this part of the city.
At the Shilo Street Junction, where pedestrian traffic intersected with a speeders-only road, Shae's HUD gave her a temperature warning for her pack. Toggling the controls on her glove, she eased herself down near the junction to cool her jets, all the while scanning the crowds for any sign of her mark.
"HUD, ping Cander," Shae said and her helmet responded with the chime of an opened channel. "You better not be sleeping. Stars, you better not be—"
"Hello, Shae," Cander replied through the helmet's comm, clearing his throat. "To what do I owe this honor?"
"Don't even start that," she sighed and kicked into a sprint down the walkway. "I need you to do me a favor."
"Anything, dearest sibling. I'll just log this one away with the others." Shae could hear Cander moving through the house, probably heading to his personal terminal, per standard procedure. "What do you need?"
"One second..." Shae caught sight of her mark's bald head as he pushed his way into the Lost Bek Cantina, one of the more bustling dives on this level. Crowded enough to effectively hide someone who didn't want to be found, or to act as a nice cover for an escape. This far down, there was never just one exit to a business, which was why she had been hoping to take her mark by surprise. "In pursuit here."
"Hey, you called me." She could tell Cander was speaking through a very demeaning grin.
"I know that!"
"I walked clear across the room to get to my terminal, and this is how you repay my token—"
"Cander, stop yourself for one moment." Shae jogged into the Lost Bek Cantina, quickly rounding the crowds and brandishing her blaster at anyone a little too slow to clear out of her path. "You still have my contact list?"
"I do."
"I need you to get a hold of my current employer and tell him—Get out of the way!" Shae nearly had to knock an inebriated Aqualish on his snout when he stumbled directly in front of her. She shoved him, but his wide boots kept him upright and reaching for his next drink.
"Tell employer to get out of the way. All right, I'll get back to you."
"Cander, this is not the time!" Past the bar, Shae was nearly overwhelmed by pulsing lights, droning music, and the thick aroma of death sticks suspended in unusually humid air. She adjusted the filter on her visor a few different ways so she could actually make out the faces in the room, and went about tracking down her tattooed mark. "I need you to contact my employer and let him know that he has a leak."
A few seconds of silence. "Like... in his refresher?"
"What?" Shae was dumbstruck by the response, but then remembered what time it was on Vulta. "Have you started drinking already?"
Cander chuckled through the comm. "I wouldn't... I... I don't know." He sniffed. "Yeah, I have. Basically."
"You better sober up real kriffing quick, Cander. I need you to call my high-paying employer and let him know he has an information leak in his organization. My mark started running before he even saw me."
"Okay, okay, okay." Cander took a deep breath, exhaled, then came a sound like he had just slapped himself awake. "Okay, I'm calling Jarvin Trell, correct?"
"Correct. There were only two people in the meeting with us, so he won't have to look far."
"Right, I'll get on it straight away," he said. "I'll also keep an eye on the authority feeds. What level are you on?"
"Two twenty-three. Just chased him into the Lost Bek Cantina."
Shae could hear him typing. "Okay, Shae, I'll get back to you."
"Thanks." The channel closed. That was what she loved most about her brother and frequent partner in the bounty hunting game: no matter the time of day or state of mind, he always got reliable as quickly as possible.
Usually, she amended. There was that time on Balmorra...
The cantina patrons suddenly jumped to their feet and cheered wildly at the enlarged image of a swoop race, which took up most of the back wall. Shae seemed to remember Cander telling her about a big race happening sometime this week on Telos. The racer from Coruscant must have taken the lead. Unfortunate, because now the place was a Geonosian hive of motion, which made it all the more difficult to pick her man out of the crowd.
They chanted the racer's name with a kind of fervor that made the audio receptors inside Shae's helmet crackle. "JANAR! JANAR! JANAR!"
"Great." She elbowed through the crowd of patrons, but there was too much motion. She couldn't even make out the faces immediately in front of her before they were absorbed back into the mob. Show of force wouldn't amount to much here, and there was no time for anything short of that.
Unless...
"HUD, ping Cander."
The channel opened immediately. "What do you need, Shae?"
"I'm stuck in the middle of that cantina I mentioned earlier, can you—"
"You're gonna have to speak up, sis, I can barely hear you."
Shae was nearly shouting now. "I'm in the cantina! There's a massive crowd here watching a swoop race on the HoloNet."
A flurry of curses came back to her. "The kriffing Telos Cup Series is on right now? It wasn't supposed to be on for another three hours! What the—"
"Cander, I need to know the name of the racer from Coruscant. People are chanting the name Janar."
"That would be Oka Janar. He's the favorite this year. Born on Level Thirteen-Thirteen, so almost everyone below the upper crust considers him a hometown hero. Personally, I have money riding on Lykus Brejik, but if they're cheering for Janar, that means I'm probably screwed out of—"
Shae closed the channel and pulled off her helmet. Stepping up onto a bar stool, she took in a deep breath and bellowed, "LISTEN UP, EVERYONE!"
Minus the noise coming from the holo, everyone stopped their cheering and peeled their eyes and infrared receptors away from the race.
Hopefully this would work. "I'm looking for a bald-headed scoundrel that calls himself Ular Thrask." She was immediately met with some heckling and flying liquor bottles, but she soldiered on. "I just got back from the bookies, and this Thrask fella just went and placed the biggest bet I've ever seen against our man Oka!"
In almost comedic fashion, the entire room gasped at once. A Dug at the back of the room cursed, "Achootah!"
"I'm looking for Thrask to teach him that he should take those bets offworld where they belong... and maybe to send him that way in a leaky spacesuit. Now, where is that nerf-herder!"
A muscle-bound Trandoshan roared into the room,"WHERE IS HE!" The entire cantina was once again whipped into a frenzy, but this one was working in Shae's favor, as every native Coruscanti in the place began scanning the crowd for her mark, Ular Thrask.
"Get 'im!"
"I just saw Thrask, that Huttslime! I just saw him!"
"Find him so we can throw his corpse off the platform! Let the guys on Thirteen-Thirteen get a look at him!"
It was only a matter of seconds before a Human was tossed out of the crowd, slamming into the bar area and knocking a few bottles onto the ground. The mob cheered and clumsily hugged each other.
Shae took a quick look at the man lying among the booze and broken glass. "That's not the guy," she told the patrons. "He has hair."
"That's Thrask!" a Twi'lek insisted. "I know the guy personally. Mardon Thrask."
Shae blinked. "I said Ular Thrask, sir. Ular."
"Ohhh..." The mob dwelled on this revelation for a moment, then went back to searching.
The Twi'lek helped the unconscious man back onto his feet. "Sorry 'bout that, Mardon. Let's find you a chair with padding."
The whole situation was beginning to look hopeless. It would likely be another week before Shae could track Thrask down, and that was if the man didn't catch the first transport offworld. If she ever caught whoever leaked her presence to Thrask, she was going to get creatively violent on them. Creatively.
"Hey, wait!" said a Human near the holo, slurring his words a bit. "Thrashhk? That guy with a really bad tattoo on his shhcalp?"
"Where is he?" Shae asked, looking around.
It took a moment for the man to reply. "Yeah, he, ah... He jusht booked it out the, uh, back door when you got up on that there shhtool."
Shae immediately replaced her helmet and took off through the back door of the cantina.
"Let's go get 'im!" cried someone in the crowd. The entire cantina rose to their feet to follow Shae, but then someone pointed to the holo. "Wait! Janar's making a move!"
The back door slammed shut behind Shae, effectively muting the chanting that followed. "JANAR! JANAR! JAN—!"
She found herself in a long alleyway between buildings. Fortunately, there was only one way in or out. Toggling her jetpack, she flew to the mouth of the alley, covering the ground in a matter of seconds. At the end, she was met by another pedestrian-choked walkway, but this time she was fairly certain where her mark was heading.
The Landrak Transit Station was less than a block away. From there, Thrask could catch an aircab to just about anywhere in the sector. "That's where I'd go." Shae was still taking chances, but unless Cander could find something through his personal channels, she was going to catch Thrask at the transit station or not at all. Her jetpack temp read green on her visor, so she toggled another quick burst to get her over the walkway and onto the adjacent roof.
Sitting beneath one of the few beams of sunlight that managed to make its way this far down was the transit station. Speeders, aircabs, and shuttles dove in and out of a circular, open-air structure in an almost constant shuffle of motion. Taking a relaxing breath, she activated her jetpack again and aimed for the roof of the station. Just as she reached the top of her arcing path and began to descend, Cander's voice cut through the roar of her pack.
"Shae!"
"What!"
"Just spotted a red flag at the Landrak Transit Station. A bald man with a tattoo just stole a man's credit chit."
Shae exhaled. "Thank you, Cander. I'm descending on the place now."
Cander clicked his tongue. "Literally?"
"Literally."
"All right, well hurry. He ran off in the direction of the cabs. You might still have a chance to grab him before he finds one."
"Will do. Thanks, Cander."
"No prob."
She landed on the durasteel roof with a loud thud. A temp warning was flashing in the corner of her eye, so she began to run towards the cabs as fast as she could manage in her armor. Please, be there! Be there, be there, be there! At the northern part of the station, she arrived at the aircab landing pads.
Barely even a moment afterwards, a cab lifted off and passed by overhead. Through the back window she could see a bald head, tattooed and shining with sweat in the scant sunlight. She could've marked the cab with a tracer dart, or called up Cander again to have him keep track of the cab as it made its rounds. But taking either of those methods left Thrask's capture to chance—and she didn't much care for such options.
Without even the slightest thought for the consequences, Shae aimed, locked, and fired her wrist-mounted grappling launcher.
Oh, boy...
The spike embedded itself onto the rear of the cab and, sensing the connection, the device went taut and began to reel her in. She was swept off her feet and pulled nearly a kilometer into the air before she could even react, the tether's failsafe along with the brace built into her armor the only things keeping her arm from being plucked out of its socket.
The aircab at once accelerated and ascended to Level 222, moving with calculated grace through the gap between the Czerka Corporation Interstellar Employment Building and the Jank'wray Apartment Complex and Casino—the latter of which granting Shae a moment of pause before the cab's unpredictable motions sent her spinning on her tether. The cityscape rotated into a nauseating blur of lights, darks and transient stars. Fighting through the nausea, she fired controlled bursts out of her jetpack to stop her spin and concentrated a little harder on reaching the cab.
They moved up to Level 220, then back down to 221 by the time Shae was finally able to get a grip on the cab's rear deflector pad, all the while trying to ignore that she was, on average, dangling a few kilometers over any kind of solid surface. She had never been afraid of heights, but the kind of heights one experienced on Coruscant was something else entirely.
When the aircab looked to be leveling out for a moment, Shae unhooked the grappling launcher from her wrist and attached it to a spot on her utility belt, all the while keeping a vice-like grip on the rear deflector pad that could have broken bone under different circumstances. She had barely felt the click of the launcher locking into its slot when the back window of the cab erupted into a fountain of broken glass and blasterfire.
Shae braced her feet on the rear deflector and let out some slack on the tether, allowing her to "stand" on the back of the cab, level with the ground. The curve of the vehicle's body shielded her from taking any direct fire, but that didn't stop Thrask from unloading an entire power pack at her cover.
In all the chaos, between roar of rushing air and the screech of blasterfire, Shae's audio receptors were able to pick up the voice of the droid driving the cab. "Weapons fire detected. Rerouting to nearest emergency landing pad."
"No!" Thrask shouted. "Keep this thing in the air, you damn droid!"
Shae drew a blaster pistol with her free hand and pulled herself up on the tether enough to fire a few suppressing shots into the cab. She caught a glimpse of Thrask's head as it ducked down behind the seat. Then his blaster came back up and he blindfired, missing wildly.
"You could come out of this with a stun burn, Thrask!" Shae called out. "Or I can put one through your tattoo! Your bounty is only slightly less if I bring you in dead!"
Thrask cursed and blindfired again, forcing Shae back onto her tether. When the bolts stopped coming, she pulled up and saw Thrask messing with the droid. She had a good idea of what he was trying to do.
"Wait!" she shouted. "Stop! You're gonna—"
The aircab dipped and, with an ever-so-slight shudder, powered down completely. They were falling almost instantly, the nose of the cab aimed straight down towards a cluster of rooftops. Level 221 became 222—and at 223 they crossed paths with an active skylane. Shae held her breath as they passed through the stream of air traffic, ready to hear the crash of what would likely be a fatal collision. Luckily, the approaching drivers were able to take evasive action and her plummeting cab passed cleanly through.
"Enough of this!" Shae could see the ground approaching, and fast. Thrask had stopped moving in the cab, probably figuring he had ended their little engagement with a forced draw. She could see him smiling madly, his eyes unblinking as the rooftops closed in. With stun bolts locked into her blaster, Shae fired a shot into Thrask's back and watched the man convulse once before going limp.
She pulled herself into the cab and grabbed a hold of Thrask by his belt. Looking out the window, she waited until the last possible second, until the rooftop of a Level 225 skyscraper was only meters below. Seconds to impact, Shae cut the tether and toggled her jetpack to full power. Flames built up inside the cab as she and Thrask rocketed out of the shattered back window. They rapidly ascended until her visor flashed with a temp warning, but even then, they were still caught in the explosion of the cab connecting with the rooftop.
Shae was flung off course as the concussion washed over her, pushing her well out of range of the landing spot she had been trying for. As the temp warning flared and cab debris collided with her armor like slugthrower rounds and her grip on Thrask started to loosen, she began to wonder what death would be like and how long she'd fall before hitting something. She made it to that state of mind between fear and loss where her mind accepted everything that was about to come.
Oh, I suppose it's time to die now.
How unfortunate.
A channel opened in her helmet's comm just as her jetpack sputtered and died—directly over a couple kilometers' worth of nothing. "Hey, Shae! You won't freaking believe what just happened during the Telos Cup Series. My man Brejik just pulled a last minute miracle out of his hat! We won! We won so hard, Shae. You'll have no choice but to support my gambling addiction in the future, it was that damn lucrative."
"That's nice, Cander," Shae said as she fell. Not a hint of fear in her voice. "I gotta tell you something, okay? Something bad just happened."
"I swear it was like nothing could stop that racer from Coruscant, but at the last turn he took it too wide. He just opened the door and Brejik walked right through. Right through!"
"Cander!."
"Gah! Stars, it was amazing! You should've seen it!"
"Cander—!" Shae blinked and realized she had hit something. She wasn't dead... as far as she knew. She felt around, tapping her breastplate all the way up to her helmet, which she pulled off. Looking around, she and the unconscious Thrask had fallen right into the middle of a recycling transport, which was inexplicably opened to the sky and hovering in place. Like it had been waiting.
She quickly replaced her helmet. "Cander, can you hear me?"
"Want to know what else just happened during the Telos Cup Series? Your brother sliced an automated recycling transport to catch you mid-fall."
Shae eased back onto her cushion of plastics and papers, and, despite herself, began to laugh uncontrollably. The transport started moving again, and the hatch closed safely overhead.
There came a sound like a straw sucking at an empty glass. Cander exhaled with delight. "You're welcome."