Author - I DID 3 FUCKING SEGMENTS. I MADE SURE TO CLICK SAVE BEFORE GOING TO BED AND IT WAS ALL FUCKING GONE. I AM GOING TO TEAR SOMEONE APART FOR FUCK SAKE.
Anyways, namaste.
patreon - Deluxee
****
"That explosion," I said. "What was that?"
Thorn's reply came through a haze of interference and shouted background orders. "Detonation in the engineering section. Communications array is hit. Partial breach on the palace shield relays. Secondary power is unstable, one of three backup generators is gone completely."
What in the actual fuck?!
For a second the command tier seemed to tilt under my feet.
"Implement protocol Nightfall right now."
As I said it I reached for the night vision eye piece and waited
The palace changed in under a minute, window shutters slammed down in hard successive impacts throughout the palace, killing the last of the daylight and the external fire-glow alike.
Internal lighting surged to overcharge, bulbs and panels flaring white-hot before bursting in chains. Whole corridors dropped into absolute black. Emergency strips remained only in sealed civilian routes and that barely.
Everywhere else became a hunting floor.
Under that cover of the dark me and my two guards moved to a side room that works as a bunker waiting for Thorne to escort us, in the meanwhile I gave Thorne another order.
"All units verify identity on contact, no one moves without announcing route and purpose. Servants, staff, unfamiliar droids if they can't justify themselves, restrain them. If they resist, kill them. We do not know who is already inside."
Thorn did not argue. "Understood."
Once Thorne arrived with a rather sizable group. we started moving, with us under Thorn's direct protection are: Harlan, Elara, Mira, Lira, and a compact knot of the palace guard elite, reinforced by a handful of Thorn-Root clan warriors.
Rusty had already slinked into the dark, probably to have some fun with 'meatbags' go on man. Rip and tear until it is done.
Distant echoes reached us as we descended through the inner routes short bursts of blaster fire, a scream cut in half, armoured boots running, then another exchange farther west. Not a full storm but close enough.
We had just reached one of the hardened interior junctions when a palace guardsman's channel forced itself through priority routing. "This is Sergeant Calven, detention approach. My squad moved to secure the prisoner blocks and walked into an ambush. Attackers are non-local. They are wearing non-standard mismatched Imperial Army armour, mixed weapons, they seem trained judging by their fluid movements. They're led by a trio of tall black armour, green visor stormtroopers."
Death Troopers here? That doesn't seem that good for me, they must be Jerjerrods personal retinue, for him to throw them here he must be desperate, or worse part of his plan.
His breathing was ragged, tight with pain or exhaustion. "We caught them mid-operation. They were freeing prisoners and arming them when contact started. The rest of my squad is down, I sealed the manual bulkhead and destroyed the panel, but they have explosives. They'll be through any minute."
The channel crackled hard.
"How many-" as I began the connection died in a burst of static and a final muffled detonation that could then be faintly felt throughout the palace.
FUCK
I slammed my palm into the nearest console hard enough to sting. "How in the fuck did they get inside?"
Harlan cleared his throat, the sound thin in the dark. "There are older service lines under the modern sewer lattice. If someone had the palace-era schematics, or even partial city maps, they could have come up under engineering."
I slowly turned on him. "And you didn't think that was worth mentioning before people started dying in my home!?"
Even through the night vision I could see the sweat at his temples. "Governor, Havenridge sits on older city ruins. There are buried streets, sealed blocks, half-collapsed undercity routes, the modern sewers only account for part of it. The most publicly known access is under the city museum. They run controlled tours through a preserved section."
Ah great, no one told me that the old city ruins were never cleared up properly and had non collapsed sewers. Great.
"How far is the museum?" I asked.
No one answered immediately. Every face in the circle had turned toward me, seemingly asking why I would ask seemingly random question.
"How far?" I half glared at them.
"About five kilometres," Elara said.
Great, five kilometres, even through half collapsed sewer lines is like what half an hour? An hour?
That was when Rusty came out of the corridor dark, plating marked with a fine spray of blood that was not his. One of his hands still flexed as if it had only just finished crushing something.
He seems to have had a grand ol' time.
"I monitored the exchange," he said. "Probability is high that the museum undercity was used as primary descent before transfer into the older sewer network. Current estimate places hostile infiltration strength near one hundred and twenty operators, with approximately eighty-two freed prisoners now armed and moving with them."
more than a hundred bodies, near enough two hundred at least that we know of.
It is not a sabotage team but a decapitation force.
Did Jerjerrod plan this from the start? Did he not trust his brother or is he unbelieving in his skills even with such a seemingly overwhelming power he gave him, could also be that he is using the supposed attack as a distraction for this team to take me out. I cannot know for certain.
I looked from Rusty's blood-marked frame to the sealed routes ahead, listening to another far burst of blasterfire roll through the blacked-out halls. "Then Nightfall earns its name," I said. "Thorn, seal off and close all nonessential corridors. Guide the hostiles into the prepared areas, and from now on I want. Everything told to me regarding important matters like security or potential breach points."
My hand stayed near the blaster at my side."And someone find out whether that museum entrance is still fucking open. If it is, seal it, I don't care if you have to blow up the precious fucking exhibit."
One of the clan warrior turns to me and starts speaking something about preserving history and culture.
So I pointedly tell him if we lose then there will be no history or culture to speak of if Jerjerrod wins, he will glass the entire fucking planet.
He didn't seem to like my answer but accepted it thankfully.
****
The secure bunker sat on the far side of the palace, buried under the civilian wing where no sensible assassin would look first. That had been the point of it.
Anyone hunting a governor would tear through offices, private quarters, military planning rooms, and the obvious command dens near the old generator spine. They would not waste opening minutes on guest halls, servant administration, and the reinforced sublevel under a wing built to look unimportant.
We sealed the last hatch behind us and the sound of the palace narrowed into filtered audio and camera light.
"Long-range is mostly dead," Lira said, already elbow-deep in a side console. "They dropped the roof dish. Local mesh still works across Havenridge and the near approaches, but anything beyond the city has to be bounced. If we can get a ship overhead, we can use it as a relay to the fleet."
"Add it to the list, right under not dying."
Harlan brought the internal grid up in pieces, half the palace cameras had been blinded by the overcharge and shutter drop, but enough remained in infrared, low-light, and hardliner security taps to give us broken windows into the dark spaces.
On the first clear feed, a mixed prisoner element tried to push a residential corridor by helmet lamps and muzzle flash. They stumbled constantly, even the professionals among them the ones in non-standard Imperial plate kept misjudging corners and depth.
Their night vision gear was partial and sparse, not purpose-built for a total blackout. A man would step through a doorway, pause, and never finish the next step as a palace guard rose from a side alcove and put a vibro dagger through his chin.
Another wheeled toward the sound and was dragged backward into an open service hatch by two pairs of hands, his scream cut off so abruptly the rest of his team only realized he was gone when their count failed.
"The dark armoured troopers that were described are probably Death troopers," Thorn muttered, scanning feeds. "But where are they?"
Nowhere, that was the problem. The ordinary hostiles we could track by mistakes and noise along with remaining cameras and status updates.
The death troopers left absence, they left no obvious trail except the rooms that went quiet after they supposedly passed.
"Keep cycling," I said.
We found the maintenance bay fight by accident, one camera turning just as a pirate's helmet light swept across a wall of motion.
A standby cluster of droids had come alive in the dark.
Protocol units of mixed make charged with whatever their chassis could hold: tool arms, maintenance hammers, cutting knives, one swinging a length of pipe with hideous serious intent to maim or harm.
A Ternica loader-frame lumbered through the bay and simply crushed a man against a support beam until something inside him cracked and cut his scream short.
Three B1s laid down crude suppressing fire from a raised catwalk, their shots wild by elite standards but still deadly in a closed space.
In the middle of it I was almost certain I saw a Czerka GA-97 industrial frame rip free of its charging dock, power saw already screaming.
The saw had never been meant for flesh, it had been meant for bulk metal, deck plating, sealed crates, the hard work of a yard that did not care about neat edges. When the GA-97 caught a Devaronian pirate under the ribs and drove upward, the blade did not cauterize or clean-cut.
It chewed.
Sparks and tissue flew together, the alien came apart in a vertical ruin, upper body peeling from lower in a wet, grinding split that left both halves thrashing for a second on the deck before the saw man caught and finished the job by accident more than intent.
All of it was lit up movie style with blasters passing beside it lighting up the horror scene.
Lira made a choked sound and turned away hard, one hand to her mouth.
Mira was close behind.
Blaster bolts created brief tunnels of sight: a face frozen mid-scream, a friend collapsing with his jaw gone, a man firing into nothing because the thing killing his squad was already behind him.
Someone on the enemy side started shouting for retreat and was still shouting when a small service spider droid climbed his back and drove a repair spike repeatedly into the side of his neck.
For a moment the bay belonged to the machine panic of Nightfall.
Freddy Fazbear got nothing on this.
Then a professional squad finally arrived to help the poor group of prisoners.
They came in coordinated and low, using overlapping arcs, marking targets, refusing the urge to chase every noise, two of them had night vision so they call out directions for the others.
The B1s died first under precise return fire while a protocol droid lost its head and kept swinging until a second burst dropped the frame. The GA-97 took three hits to one leg joint, staggered, and was finished by a detonator that blew its upper chassis across the tool racks in burning pieces.
In less than twenty seconds the machine advantage collapsed into scrap and sparks.
Thorn made a short disappointed sound in his throat.
Then the side doors eased open, three palace guards slipped in from the rear dark, almost polite in their quiet, as if not trying to disturb the people clearly enjoying how the tables had turned on the droids.
The furthest five hostiles dropped before they understood what happened throats opened, one by one. Only after those kills did the guards open open fire into the rest who were more grouped up, pinning the squad between dead droids and a now-closed exit line.
The fight lasted another minute and ended in a stack of bodies, a guardsman's voice came through local mesh, controlled and brief. "Maintenance Bay F clear. Advancing to Storage Bay F3."
We kept switching feeds, in a servant stairwell, Thorn-Root warriors fought with knives and short carbines, turning a descending enemy file into a slaughter pit, one clan fighter took a bolt through the shoulder and still drove his attacker into the railing hard enough to snap the man's spine over it, both then flipped over it and he used the disabled man as a landing pad to cushion the fall.
In a flooded sub-corridor near the old generator works, a palace squad was less lucky: the hostiles had better coverage and used freed prisoners as noisy first contact, two guards went down in the opening exchange.
A third was dragged into ankle-deep water and stabbed until the thrashing stopped. The remaining four fell back by flashbang and smoke, leaving the junction contested.
In one kitchen passage the camera caught only aftermath. Blood on tile. A servant with a captured pistol dead across a counter, two pirates dead near him, one with a carving fork buried in the soft armour under his chin. No clear winner, only the sense that the dark had harvested whoever was slowest.
And blind.
Another feed showed an enemy fireteam moving cleanly until the floor itself betrayed them trap plating in a service hall dropping one man into a maintenance shaft while guard droids opened from both side walls and turned the rest into a close-range execution, the last hostile managed to kill one droid before a palace guardsman stepped from a false panel and put a blade under his armpit, then left him there to bleed out.
Not every room favoured us, in the east gallery approach, a full hostile element overran a droid checkpoint and pushed into a civilian shelter corridor before reinforcements arrived. The camera there shook with panic: people screaming, a guard trying to hold a doorway alone, an attacker firing through the gap until bodies piled high.
When our counter push finally came, it retook the hall at a cost that would not look neat on any later report.
We were winning in pieces.
We were also bleeding in pieces.
"Still no confirmed death trooper track," Harlan said.
"They're here," Thorn replied. "They're just not performing for the cameras."
He was right, we found them only at the end of the cycle, and only by the quiet they left behind.A servant-quarters feed flicked live on a thirty-second delay. The room was already finished droids lay in broken heaps. Two palace guards were down in the doorway, one missing most of the front of his helmet.
A handful of armed servants had been killed where they stood, tools and old pistols still near their hands. There was almost no spent chaos in the placement of the bodies, no wild scorch pattern from blaster on the walls or panicked overkill
.Just surgical precision paired with utterly disturbing silence.
At the far edge of the frame, three shapes moved out of the room and into the deeper dark, black armour with precise spacing and no helmet lamps, probably built in high tech night vision, probably better than what even we have.
One paused long enough to glance toward the camera, not with surprise, only assessment, and then they were gone into a corridor the next feed could not hold.
Death troopers, fucking finally visible for more than two seconds, and already moving toward whatever objective they had come into my house to finish.
I stared at the empty doorway they had left behind. "Mark that wing," I said quietly. "Everything between those quarters and the civilian bunker routes is now priority danger. Thorn, if they came in through the museum deep lines, they're not here to free prisoners for charity. They're cutting toward command value, prepare our extraction to secondary stronghold."
In the dark above us, another far exchange of blasterfire flickered through the audio channel like distant heat lightning.
Nightfall was working but not good enough, I wonder how the space battle is going.
****
The death troopers were getting closer. Not by sight, but by pattern. Rooms going quiet in a line that bent gradually toward value targets, then corrected whenever we shifted.
Three of them had already made a mockery of every ordinary defensive assumption in the palace. I was not willing to gamble twelve lives five of them non-combatants on whether Thorn, a handful of elite guards, clan warriors, Rusty, and I could take that squad clean in a bunker corridor.
"We need to go to the secondary safe house, that is outside the grounds."
No one argued, the passage we took had been cut for exactly this kind of night: narrow, unlit, sealed from the main plans under a civilian maintenance label that meant nothing to anyone who had not been shown the truth.
Thorn took point with two palace elites behind him while Elara kept Mira and Lira between the armed bodies. Harlan stayed close enough that I could hear his breathing turn shallow.
Rusty covered the rear with the remaining Thorn-Root warriors, we were halfway through the under-route when the bait team died.
The notification hit my wrist display first, then the mirrored feed on Rusty's open channel, a squad of BX commandos left behind as both distraction and plausible magnetic target had made contact in one of the eastern service halls.
I watched while walking, the image bouncing hard with each step, it lasted less than forty seconds.
The first commando got the opening shot and still died immediately, black armour shapes closing the distance so fast the droid's second step never finished. One death trooper took a burst across the chest plate, staggered half a pace, and kept coming as if the impact had been weather.
Another used a doorway lip as cover for a fraction of a second, then came through smoke with a heavy rifle already firing in controlled pairs. The BXs tried to do what commandos were built to do split, flank, force close engagement while doing unpredictable inhuman manoeuvres and were dismantled for it.
One was dragged down and executed by a point-blank blast through the processor housing while the other lost an arm, reeled, and took a second shot that folded the chassis backward into a wall hard enough to leave a dent.
The last two died almost together, caught in overlapping fire that left only wreckage and the brief white glare of overloaded cells.
"Fucking hell," I said under my breath.
Thorn's posture changed at once, shoulders locking under the armour, one of the clan warriors glanced at the feed and could not keep the reaction out of his voice. "What is that abomination?"
"Death troopers," Thorn said, still moving. "Specialist black-ops, they are handpicked from the best of the best. Bigger and meaner than standard stormtroopers, heavier, put through training most units never see or live through. People say they get surgical work and implants on top of it. Covert kills, heavy weapons, close combat, bodyguard duty for the kind of Imperials who expect assassination attempts daily"
"Public version is bad enough," I added. "Black armour, scrambled voice systems that sound like broken static, rifles that punch through cover ordinary troops hide behind. They show up around high-value officers and secret projects. If you're hearing about them in a hallway, something has already gone wrong."
The warrior did not ask a second question, probably still processing the first one, that is when we finally see the exit of the tunnel, it was a concealed hatch that opened into a cluttered exterior trash court on the palace's outer edge: compressed refuse bins, broken transport panels, a service fence, and enough shade to make every angle look occupied.
We came out slowly and quietly into the afternoon sun but somethings felt wrong immediately.
It was the same unease I had felt before the first interior detonation, now.
I was about to opened my mouth when the clan warrior on my left took a blaster bolt through the upper face. The shot entered under the rim of his jawline and left nothing above it but an emptying spray and the sudden heavy fall of a body that no longer knew it had been alive.
In the same heartbeat a rocket streaked past us, so close the backwash slapped heat across my cheek and singed my hair, people ducked toward the bins and fence line, thinking the rocket was meant for flesh.
It was not, if it was anti-personnel it should have been slower and exploded with shrapnel, but it flew into the still-open tunnel mouth and detonated inside. The hidden exit collapsed in a cough of stone, dust, and sheared support metal, burying the route back under tons of failure.
The only way behind us became a tomb wall.
Then the courtyard lit with incoming fire, bolts hammered the refuse stacks and cracked off the outer palace stone. Our armed people returned fire at once Thorn, the palace elites, the remaining clan warriors, Rusty with precise heavy shots from his hidden armaments that forced at least one shooter to shift position.
I was still down behind a half-crushed cargo crate when I dragged my own blaster free, edged a look over cover, and snapped off an opportunistic shot toward where I seen a blaster shot come from. Return fire drove me flat again so hard I felt the crate shudder against my shoulder.
In that brief look I saw enough to scare the lights out of me
Tall.
Black armour.
Shrek piss Green visor glow.
Of course, a squad was typically four, not three. Of course the palace hunt had been the visible edge of a split element. Of course the exit was covered.
What lodged colder than the ambush itself was the precision, they had not searched random outer walls. They had been waiting on this exact hatch line, someone had given them the route. I had let myself believe my own house was different from the other governors' nests of soft loyalty and quiet sale.
At least my house was clean and strong enough to prevent any outright assassination or crippling sabotage like others experienced or half stopped before it became a disaster.
An old memory rose unwanted from me about the clerk from the first weeks, the one caught sending classified transmissions, turned into a controlled leak under my watch, he is still doing it intermediately.
There were always people like that, who would sell me out for money, favour or power. If one of them had survived in some other office, under some other name...
Thorn's voice ripped across the local channel, all restraint gone. "All units, converge on my mark! Governor is under attack outside the civilian wing refuse court! We are pinned downed!"
A bolt glanced off his custom helmet with a sharp cracking flash. Thorn dropped with a groan, heavy armour hitting broken ferrocrete hard. Lira made a terrified sound and pressed back against the bin wall. Mira's face had gone bloodless.
At least Elara did not freeze instead she tore the fallen clan warrior's blaster from his hands, braced against the crate line, and started firing in short controlled pulls, though the slight shake in her arms tells me enough.
I came up again over cover and fired until the heat and incoming bolts forced me down. Dust and pulverized trash danced in every flash. Somewhere to the right Rusty traded shots with a shadow that never stayed visible long enough to satisfy the blood thirsty droid.
One of the palace elites took a hit to the leg and kept shooting from the ground through clenched teeth only stopping when a grenade was thrown nearby and he jumped on it to cover the others from the blast.
All the while the thought kept circling under the noise: They knew the exit, someone inside had sold it, or had enough pull to access the schematics.
I put another pair of bolts over the crate, saw black armour shift between fence supports, and ducked as return fire chewed the edge into smoking fragments. "Of course," I muttered, furious and breathless, shoulder pressed to cover.
"Of course today is not enough without this."
Blasterfire kept hammering our little island of refuse and broken cover while the collapsed tunnel smoked behind us and the fourth death trooper's green visor burned like a patient ember in the dark.
And I kept shooting back, cursing my luck with every pull of the trigger.
*Atii POV*
The modified Scyk answered before I even finished thinking about the turn.
That was why I loved her. It is just a mean little interceptor with upgraded thrust, tightened targeting, and enough stolen improvements to make polite engineers cry. I kicked her sideways through a lattice of green turbolaser spill, felt the frame shudder, and came out under a burning escort's belly with my teeth bared hard enough to hurt.
"Too slow," I muttered, and stitched the nearest TIE hard enough to send it tumbling into its own wingman.
The battlespace above Elyria was ugly in the way only real fights were ugly, wreckage drifted in sheets. Fighters carved brief bright lives through it and vanished.
I slid between a pair of friendly gunships, rolled inverted to let a pursuit burst race past my ventral plating, and then dropped my nose toward one of the Star Destroyers hard enough that the harness bit my shoulders.
Flak and point-defence fire rose to meet me in a screaming curtain. I did not climb away from it, I threaded it.
The Scyk's alarms howled, a near burst slapped the port shield and made the whole cockpit flash amber.
I corrected with a snarl, cut thrust, skidded laterally along the destroyer's armour belt, and raked a full firing pass across a row of turrets. The first two exploded in their sockets, the third locked mid-rotation and cooked from inside. Then I was already gone, punching out before the local batteries could decide where I had been.
The thrill hit harder than my fighting instructors when I was younger. I hated and loved how alive it made me. No council rooms, no boring careful politics.
Just raw speed, death, and the possibility that every moment could be my last.
After this I wanted something stupidly normal, a real dinner. Somewhere with actual chairs. Maybe without blood on my boots.
I sighed at the thought, then shook my head and grinned under the helmet. "Don't get soft now."
I opened a channel to Kael while singing a little tune.
No signal.
What? I frowned and tried again.
Nothing, not busy-line delay or encryption lag.
Absence, that was wrong I switched channels at once. "Reza, this is Atii. Why is there no signal from the palace?"
His holo snapped toward me so hard I almost flinched in the seat.
"What!?"
The shout hit like a physical thing, I reeled back in instinct and nearly lost a wing to a spiralling friendly TIE that came dead across my nose in a trailing plume of smoke. I kicked the Scyk down hard, cursed in Mando'a, and corrected.
"I was trying to reach Kael," I said, sharper now. "To give uhhhh. An update, yes an update on the battle."
Reza was already turning away from me, attention fracturing into command mode. "Get a patrol craft into low orbit over Havenridge now! I want a relay over that city if the palace dish is down."
I disconnected while he was still issuing the next three orders, he had enough knives in his hands.
I forced myself back into the wider sensor picture, the battle had become a grinding annihilation match. Iron Reaver was still in it, but her shields were down in multiple sections and one whole flank was burning, venting light in ugly rhythmic pulses. One Acclamator drifted with power still alive inside, systems flickering, while the second was taking a brutal beating under concentrated fire.
We had lost more ships than I wanted to count at a glance. The Vultures and Hyena bombers had paid for half our remaining advantage with pure suicidal tactics. When they were hit badly enough to lose return capability, they stopped trying to survive they just overlocked their engines and drove themselves into enemy hulls like living munitions.
It was wasteful yes, but it was also working, they are unmanned droids, they can be replaced the only cost being materials and credits. You can't do that with a trained pilot.
The rest of our fleet had not been idle either, more of our ships were damaged or gone, yes, but the enemy had been carved down to seventeen hulls: one Victory-class, the flagship, and one other Star Destroyer. The third Destroyer had fallen to boarding about eight minutes earlier, a large portion of Imperial losses came from the transport push toward Durak's Hold.
From what I could piece together, the land battle there was still raging, their armoured division trying to smash through to the orbital cannons. They had attempted to screen those landings, but with their TIE strength broken and our fighter-bomber superiority choking every lane, the Imperial Army ships had committed fully to surface descent instead of cycling dropships under proper cover.
That bet was killing them, the Destroyers could not pin every major target at once and were not counting on actually losing one to boarding action, the ground assault was stalled short of the cannon lines, and the transport force was paying for the mistake in burning hulls.
They had gambled on seizing the batteries and lifting back under captured sky, instead they were losing that gamble in pieces.
I yawned hard enough that my ears popped.
Hours of this.
My hands were steady, but my mind was starting to fray at the edges.
I needed a stimulant.
Or a hot bath.
I chuckled or maybe Kae -
The channel-wide alert ripped across every frequency I had open, Reza's voice, stripped of everything but urgency: "This is priority one alert, governor Kael Voss is under attack! I repeat governor Kael Voss is under attack!. Assailants have infiltrated the palace while traitors and saboteurs are inside wrecking havoc throughout the palace and the city. They knew the location of his hidden exit. He is pinned down by elite stormtrooper variants and handpicked elite Imperial Army recon rangers. All free fighters and gunships capable of atmospheric support are to descend and provide cover fire. Boarding teams three through five, abort current missions and get planeside immediately!"
I didn't even wait for the sentence to finish, the moment I heard Kael was in danger, I wrenched the Scyk into a hard break from the void fight and drove her nose toward Elyria. The planet filled the canopy in a rushing dark curve of night-side surface and scattered city light.
*Kael POV*
Six minutes in the refuse court felt longer than the rest of the night combined.
By then we had lost three more people, one palace elite went down hard behind the left bin line and did not get up, another clan warrior took a burst across the chest while trying to drag Thorn into better cover and folded without a sound.
The third was a guard whose name I had learned only that morning; a sniper bolt found the gap under his raised arm and dropped him in the open. Elara caught a hit to the shoulder from thankfully low powered weapon a moment later, she spun halfway around, and cursed through clenched teeth as she forced herself back against the crate stack with the blaster still in her good hand.
I was not clean either, a concussion detonator had bounced short of our cover and gone off against the ferrocrete. The blast threw me into a collapsed pile of broken transparisteel and scrap framing. Something opened above my right brow in a hot white line, blood sheeted down into my eye almost immediately, thick enough to turn half the courtyard into a red smear.
Great another scar from another assassination mission.
You know if I got a nickle for every cool looking scar that I got from an assassination attempt made on me by political opponents I would have two nickles. Which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice.
We had killed at least seven of them though, that number would have felt better if the death trooper in the back line had not been turning the whole fight into a slow execution drill.
He stayed deep behind everyone else in the shadows, moved after every few shots, and waited for the exact stupid second someone leaned too far out.
Green visor, and no wasted motion with a sniper's patience attached to black-ops muscle. Like that fucking sniper from call of duty world at war..
That's when my communicator flared. "Governor," Reza said, tight and urgent, "are you all right?"
"What do you fucking think, Reza!?" I snarled, wiping blood from my eye with the back of my wrist.
"Communications are down and if you have eyes you can probably see Havenridge from orbit."
There was half a second of silence, then his voice came back harder. "Hold on. Close air support and ground forces are inbound. From what I can see there are multiple fires and explosions across the city."
Across the city, of course it was not only the palace, someone had seeded the wider board, my luck.
I shoved myself up, snapped two shots toward a where blaster flashed near the fence, and dropped again as return fire chewed the top of the crate into smoking fragments. Then I crawled, low and fast, into a different pocket of cover behind a half-shattered support pillar.
"Reza's sending reinforcements!" I yelled to the others. "We only need to hold five minutes!"
Rusty had taken several blaster marks across his chassis, black scoring over the heavier plates. He did not sound impressed. "We may not have five minutes. Internal cameras show the remaining death troopers have left the compound and are moving toward this position. Arrival estimate: two minutes. Most palace units are engaged or path-blocked. City garrison elements are either too far or already committed. Local police are chasing bombs, shooters, and civilian evacuation routes."
"Umazing."I whispered more to myself than others. Gold ship could've carried us out no sweat, she would drop kick that walking Shrek piss visor bastard into the building while at it as well.
Rusty shifted and took cover behind the ruined pillar, Lira and Mira were both armed now, hands shaking so hard their shots often went into empty dark or high wall stone. Even so, they fired, that counted.
Harlan my majordomo, of all people had a rifle pulled from a fallen guard and was doing the only useful thing an untrained man could do under this kind of fire: rough suppression. Every few seconds he forced an attacker to keep their head down, and every few seconds was better than freeze.
That was when I saw the old skyvan, it sat half-sheltered against the outer court wall, one panelling strip missing, dust-caked and ugly as hell no wonder it ended up here, the sort of municipal work vehicle nobody looked at twice and probably won't want to look at for the third.
In a day full of precise killers, ugly and overlooked suddenly looked like salvation, I started crawling for it.
"Rusty," I said through the local channel, breath rough, "what make is that van?"
"Governor," Rusty replied, his voice almost chiding. "this is not the time to admire the beauty of machines, in particular a twelve-year-old Rendili Skyhaul Type-9 municipal utility van manufactured under subcontract by the Corellian Consumer Transport division."
"So you know it," I said. "Good. How the fuck do I hot-wire this bitch?"
A tiny pause.
"Ahh," Rusty said. "I will guide you through it. To, as you put it, 'hot-wire this bitch.' You truly are my favourite meatbag, Kael."
He stood up into the open like a maniacal turret and began firing everywhere that moved, forcing the courtyard into a brief storm of redirected attention. Bolts sparked off his frame, he did not step back, but dodged from time to time when the sniper decided to finally pull the trigger.
I used the cover of that insanity and crawled hard for the van, glass and grit biting through my sleeves, blood still trying to blind the right side of my face.
I reached the driver's side, jammed a small chipped metal knife from the debris into the lower console seam, and pried the access panel open with a crack of cheap polymer.
"Talk,"
"Remove the safety cover over the auxiliary ignition cluster," Rusty instructed while shooting. "Not the main drive face. Lower left. You should see three linked power leads over a grounded strip. Strip the insulation on the primary red and the secondary striped line. Cross them first to wake the board. When the board lights, tap the ignition pulse lead against the same junction in short contact. Do not hold it continuously or you will cook the starter relay."
I worked exactly as told, fingers slippery with blood. The board flickered once, died, then came up weak and yellow-green.
"Got board light."
"Now the pulse lead," Rusty said. "Tap. Tap again. If the repulsors cough, wait one second, then hold for a full crank."
I tapped and the skyvan shuddered like something ancient being insulted back into life.
I waited.
Held.
The repulsor frame coughed, failed, then caught in a rough uneven hover a handspan off the ground, I still did not push power fully into drive.
"Move to the van," I called out to everyone. "One at a time, make it look like we're being forced back into the corner, injured and non combatants first."
They understood at once, Elara came first, shoulder soaked, face locked down against pain, crawling and sliding until Mira and Lira could drag her into the side bay. Harlan followed under his own messy covering fire, tripped once on a dead man's boot, and scrambled in with the rifle still clutched across his chest. Two surviving palace elites shifted next, one laying fire while the other pulled Thorn's now even more damaged armoured weight toward the vehicle.
Thorn was conscious enough to curse, but looking at how his ankle was twisted in wrong direction he wont be much help without setting it and administrating generous amount of pain meds which in this situation counted as promising.
Out of more than a dozen guards only Thorne, three palace guards and one clan warrior survived.
Rusty remained outside until the last possible second, a walking invitation for every hostile blaster in the court.
Only when the living and a droid, were inside did I slam the controls fully awake and throw the skyvan forward.
It handled like a drunk horse while on polished ice.
We tore across the refuse court, clipped a bin hard enough to send it cartwheeling, and hit the front gate with the side of the nose. The impact kicked the whole frame into an uncontrolled drift, for one sick instant I saw wall, then more wall, then the corner of a neighbouring storage building as we slammed into it and every system dropped dead at once.
"Come on" I forced the crossed leads again, the board sparked while the van coughed back into a broken hover just as I heard a door or fence section tear open behind us and the scrambled metallic death-trooper chatter spill into the open air.
I reversed hard, something hit the back bumper with a solid, body-heavy thud, violent enough to jolt the whole frame. In the rear camera smear I caught black armor and a green visor going under the line of the van for a split second before we lurched away.
"Please tell me that was a bin," Harlan gasped.
"That was not a bin," one of the palace elites said.
Rusty had forced half his frame up through the van's open sun-rail and was firing backward in short maniac bursts as the court shrank behind us.
From what I could see in the vibrating mirror strip, three death troopers were already in pursuit angles and a fourth was on the ground, one leg clearly wrong, still trying to bring a weapon up from the paving.
"Direct impact to hostile unit four," Rusty reported cheerfully over the wind and engine strain.
"Suggest reviewing local traffic code regarding pedestrians in black armour."
"Did you just run one over?" Elara asked from the bay, voice tight with pain and disbelief."
I borrowed the vehicle, we will blame the owner. I am too young and handsome to go to jail." I said, wrenching us around another corner hard enough to slam everyone sideways.
"The road just decided the rest."
Rusty laughed then, a distorted, delighted droid sound under incoming bolts and rushing air. "I love the wind in my hair!"
Despite the blood in my eyes, the pain across my skull, and the fact that death troopers were still trying to end my entire bloodline in a municipal utility van, I snorted.
"You don't have any hair."
"Touché," Rusty said, and kept shooting.
We tore into the darker side streets of Havenridge with the palace smoking behind us, the van rattling like it might come apart at the next turn, and the night around the city full of distant sirens, scattered gunfire, and the promise that whoever had sold my exit route was going to regret living long enough to see sunrise.
If sunrise came.