Kara King & The Beyonders: The Nightwind Glyder Heist

Chapter Seven:

Stellar

Time to Supernova: 6h 54m

Sagita Astel-Moaan

Sagita watched Kara get ready and go without a word. She was off to get the droid from whatever room qualified as a robotics lab or holding facility. It was better this way. Commander King wasn’t oblivious to what Sagita did best. No, all of them had killed before on missions in the past. Sagita, and Maxwell for that matter, both felt that it was something they could easily do for Kara. Keep her hands clean as best as they could. If things ever went south, she knew she could count on her commander to plan a way to break them free or use her connections to absolve the crew of any crimes they may have committed. In some ways, it helped that they had a well-respected captain, a well-respected crew for that matter in their respective fields. Despite the messy business they seemed to always come out on top.

Sagita finished assembling her rifle. She didn’t trust the integrity of those printed guns. It might be a deep sense of professionalism and a skepticism that they would fail her at the most inopportune time. It might also have been her elvish nature. Her people, being as long lived as they were, valued true artisanal goods. They needed things that would last ages or they would end up buying the same product hundreds of times. In that sense, her people were long term research example for a human theory of economics, something about shoes. She couldn’t remember.

It was a ghost weapon in the sense that there was no way to trace the weapon back to her. Sagita had this rifle and a set of pistols commissioned on a dwarven-elvish mining project. The pistols were an anniversary present to her husband. The rifle, a gift to herself. Sagita wasn’t sure of how that Dwarven table of elements or metals, The Alonyosis, worked. Not entirely anyway. She did know there was a small section of it with metals containing unique properties. Her rifle, Singularity, was special to her. It would be to any assassin, really. It was designed with pressure sensing grips. The moment Singularity registered your hands coming off the grip and underbarrel, it would heat those parts of the gun enough to burn off oils and prints. The rifled barrel was designed with segments of those ultramagnetic metals on the Alonyosis so it could pull the bullets out quickly. You needed custom bullets with a low volume of explosive, just enough to send the round down the barrel a bit, and you would have yourself a nearly silent portable railgun. It was a ghost weapon, made for people who wanted to be ghosts. There was no way for the gun to be traced back to her if she had to leave it behind. Not with the custom rounds, self-cleaning features, lack of an identifying number, and certainly not with the once mining asteroid now floating through space, lifeless.

Sagita packed twenty rounds into the flat-space receiver of Singularity. She was sure she wouldn’t need any more than that. Despite her low-impact fracturing rounds, she wouldn’t want to miss with a slugthower on a ship. Gita took their bags and poked her head out of the room. The hallway was empty. She left the room, knocked on the next door over, and waited. No response. She kicked the door in and tossed the bags on the bed. They had packed an accelerant and firestarters for this reason. They weren’t coming back, and they didn’t need anything tracing back to them. Sagita wasn’t worried about the fire spreading, a ship like this would put it out quickly enough. That, and the fire would be beneficial to pull security away from Kara, Gamlok, and her for the next hour or so as they investigated its cause. She lit the compressed chemical firestarter, tossed it into the room, and left.

Gita found the door housekeeping would use on their floor to move about the ship relatively undetected. There was a scanning pad. Damnit Gita tapped the device on her forearm to engage her comms. “Some of the specs we had are a little off. Just a notice,” she said, muting herself afterwards.

“Okay,” Gita spoke to herself. “So, am I gonna have to kill someone else? No.” Gita put her ear to the door of a guest room nearby. Nothing. She kicked the door in and pulled it shut. There was a comms device in between two beds. “Perfect.”

One half hour, a housekeeper hidden unconscious in a closet, and a low security pass later, Gita was in the brightly lit backstage of the ship. She tapped her Sundrytech between communications, “I’m running behind.” She looked up a long set of stairs. “I could have a backup if Operation: Waterfall fails though.”

Sagita slinked behind pipes and carts as necessary to avoid being seen. She kept a laze pistol on her just in case but she did her best not to leave an unnecessary wake of bodies behind her. Eventually the bright white light became dim. Less taken care of, addressed, or otherwise. She hoped for the former. The last thing she needed was to deal with some engineering clan of creatures that only worked in the dark. She quietly pushed through the threshold.

Behind a set of swinging doors, low in the belly of the ship, was the backup engineering deck. It was bathed in a dim yellow light, but a far corner had a large circle of swirling silver light cast on the floor from above. The visibility could have been better but it wasn’t the worst she had worked with either. Not to mention the fact that the engineers on this deck were Palk. A Palki was a small, knee high for most imperium races, species native to a far rim planet. They had two horns on their hairy faces, thin articulating tails, and six fingers on each hand. Gita heard them described by a human at one point as something between a rhinoceros and a monkey. The Palk weren’t the most intelligent race in the verse but they were incredibly useful in hardworking environments. Their stature made them less likely to reach high places but equally as likely to be hit by large construction devices. In fact, their stocky nature made them incredibly durable. The extra hand they had in their nimble and articulating tails helped with carrying tools and the extra finger on each hand meant they had better grips when pulling on tools or opening large valves.

“Twelve… Thirteen… Fourteen.” Gita wasn’t the best at picking out the identifying features of these creatures but she was pretty sure she had that count right. Less than she expected, but she supposed some security might be arriving soon after she started her work. Now it was just time to get into place.

“Stellar this is Crown. We’re on our way to Objective C are you ready to receive?”

“One moment Crown,” she responded.

Gita was crouched on the far corner of the deck on the stairs. The Palk were going about their business so there was an inevitability that some would be in the corners of the room that she didn’t have eyes on. She waited until as many as she could hope for were in the central part of the room around pipes and computers. Then she started firing.

Though her shots were muffled behind the sound of mechanical devices whirring, it did not take long for the Palk to go into a frenzy. The first four shots were fine but then engineers noticed the bodies dropping. Quickly enough, the nine she had eyes on before she started were all down. Then another two. Gita got up and walked through the room. Two Palki charged at her immediately.

Gita sidestepped one but the other caught her on the outside of her thigh. She toppled over and felt the searing pain of a long cut down her side. The two Palki turned back. One went for Singularity, though its size made it cumbersome for the creature to carry. The other charged at Gita again, this time hoping to hold her down and gore her neck and face with its horns. Quickly, she pulled out the laze pistol and made her defense.

Gita took the brunt of the Palki’s push through her left arm as she reached up and grabbed one of the thick horns. The shock rippled through her body, feeling like the strain would fracture her arm, but the force quickly faded when she lifted its head and fired a round of heated plasma into the underside of its neck. Gita pivoted on her hip and fired two rounds at the Palki trying to make away with Singularity. One shot struck true in its legs sending it to the ground.

The creature still moved, trying to claw its way to the gun that had skid across the floor. Gita stood and in a sudden rush felt the throbbing pain from her leg again, reminded her that her entire right leg would be one big torn up bruise after the mission was complete. She fired two more rounds into the Palki crawling towards Singularity.

Gita saw the motion of two other Palki running behind her up the stairs. She dove for her rifle spinning in one quick movement and fired two shots into the creature farther up the stairs. It collapsed and stalled the second giving her time to fire a well-placed round into that Palki as well.

A beep rung through the nearly empty deck and panic set off in Gita’s mind. She spun around ignoring her pain to see a service elevator as the last Palki rushed in. She fired off a shot but it only hit the interior of the lift, not the creature itself. The doors slowly closed and the engineer was away.

Gita stood surrounded by the bodies of the Palk engineers that had at one time likely called this place home. She tapped the comms on her sundrytech, “King, this is Stellar. Engineering is secured but one got away in the service elevator.”