Satsi Tameike sighted her target in the crosshairs of her scope, steady on the back of the man's hooded skull...and once again, didn't fire.
She really wanted to fire.
The Human sighed.
Still no particularly good, clear shot, and she couldn't afford to waste hers. The thought didn't make her feel any better, laying on her stomach seven floors up on the roof of one of the shorter "skyscrapers" a few streets over from Murder Alley. It was, however, still true.
The former Fade rubbed at her tired, aching eyes and kept tracking her mark as she had been for the last few hours while he went about his business.
The area the large man occupied now, still the least densely populated yet, was full of pirates and poor exhaust-chasers, the kind of frakkers that followed after mercantile and smuggling types and tried to beg scraps or make some profit in black market trades. It was an eclectic crowd. A couple urchins, not a one over twenty, none younger than ten, by the look of it — real young didn't last long. A hollow-eyed whore held her baby to her empty, sagging breast and shared smokes with her fellow entertainers. Some men of scales and skin traded death sticks for cred. Vendors peddled wares.
Collateral.
Her finger twitched on the trigger of her launcher.
Her target went inside a shop again.
Satsi snarled and dropped her head to the floor, banging her forehead lightly against cold metal with hollow thumps.
What exactly he was doing in there, or in any of the other places he'd been in the last month or so that she'd been keeping tabs on him as best she could, she didn't give one flying frak. She wasn't there to gather information on the man. She wasn't there to con him with a false face or pretty smile. This wasn't about playing him, or intel for Arcona, or anything of the like.
This was about straight up murder.
Her list of targets was based on exactly two things: threat level, and ease of access. Rrogon Skar Argona was her first and most ideal target; a definite danger to her family for his grudge against her twin, but someone no one would even notice was gone until the annual check of the Clan's pay stubs came around, if then. He'd burned all his bridges in Arcona and turned traitor, from what she knew. Uji said he was of no more use to them personally, if he ever had been. The Kaleesh was supposedly completely frakking crazy. Killed his own pregnant wife and ran off to the Inqys. It was possible they'd even met while she was undercover, though she was pretty sure she would have remembered the hulking, brooding idiot.
Yeah, somebody nobody would miss.
It wasn't the Arconae types or the Councillors or the Grand Frakker or even the next two-bit assassin, but it was a start. He would do real good for wiping off her boots. She had a lot of catching up to do to make up for all the stupid that had gone down while she was gone, and she wasn't wasting any more time in getting a start. Anyone who was a threat to her brother was going to burn.
Satsi lifted her head again and refocused, peering through her rocket launcher's scope to examine the shop and the surrounding area. She had to have missed Argona's exit, because she spotted him a moment later, skulking like a predator through a throng of gang-certified murderers and thieves. He didn't leave the little "plaza" though, stopping instead to sit at what might have been a bar, or food stall, or something.
Her shot still wasn't clear. She was going to have to go down there.
"Damn," sighed the woman, feeling her chances of survival drop like the pants of a man with his favorite streetwalker. Scooting back from the lip of the building slightly, she looked fondly at the rocket mounted against her shoulder. It would be too cramped once she got back on the streets to handle the weapon effectively.
"PB," Satsi murmured to the tall droid stretched out flat beside her. She handed him the launcher. "Cover me, okay? Things start to go bad, you light the frakker up. I don't care who's around or what's in the way. Kaleesh go boom. Got it?"
"I shall incinerate the target with vigor, mistress."
"Good boy. If I go down, run your backup protocol."
"File name: Frakshit Daycare, mistress?"
He couldn't say it right, whether because he wasn't programmed to use such vocabulary or because it wasn't a real word, and it made her chuckle morbidly every time to hear his voice modulating circuits try.
"That's the one. Confirm protocol parameters."
"I shall return to Dajorra and perform security duties for the infant Samantha Tameike to whom my ownership shall be transferred if you are murdered, mistress."
"Good boy," repeated the Human, shuffling backwards in a belly crawl. "Keep target in your sights. I'm going in."
She made it off the roof and onto the scrapmetal balcony of the whorehouse she was situated above with ease, moving inside and passing the Ongree "proprietor" of the workers an extra handful of creds for his allowing her the space. He wiped his tentacles on the fluffy sleeve of his coat and asked her again if she wasn't looking for more work. She declined, stretching up on her toes between his sagging eyestalks to place a tonguing kiss on his lipless mouth, and headed downstairs. The next six shops and homes went by in a shouting, stinking blur of whispers and soft fingers and paid handouts or promised favors or deliberate and happy ignorance, and then she was out, stepping onto the street.
Cautiously, she paused and secured her breath mask over her face and flipped the voluminous hood of her cloak up, making her look just like any of the hundred other folks in the hangar that skulked about brooding deep inside their coats or robes. It was unlikely Argona would even know who she was, nevermind recognizing her from before she'd left the Clan, but she didn't need to just hand him the chance at it.
Satisfied, she turned left, quickly heading for the plaza where she'd last seen the Kaleesh. Hopefully, he would still be there.
The view from the ground was drastically different from the one above, but she managed well enough, familiar with the hangar-made-market. It took her several precious minutes in the packed foot traffic, constantly hounded by peddlers and more than one bouncer, but soon she was stepping around a corner and into a shoddy cluster of tents and stalls and one particular bar. There, a particular Kaleesh still sat, though he wasn't drinking.
Shame.
Satsi took a deep breath behind her mask to keep her heartbeat steady and tried not to think too hard about killing the motherfrakker as she unholstered her gun and made her way casually around the perimeter of the space, circling closer. She was never quite sure what it was that gave people away to a sparkfinger's senses, but Uji and Atty and Turel and every-frakking-one else with powers always seemed to know when danger was coming. Maybe if she just thought, I'm totally not here to hurt you really loudly over and over?
She was a shop or two away when the Kaleesh spun around in his seat and looked right at her, peeking out from under his Inquisitorious hood. His arm twitched.
Instinct took over. Satsi lifted her pistol, raised it steady with two hands, and fired five shots right for him in quick succession, feeling each kick of the gun rock through her bones.
The Sith threw up his hands. Her bullets sputtered harmlessly against an invisible bubble.
"Oh, fr—" she began, only to choke on the expletive when a crushing pressure cut off her windpipe. Her eyes bugged out as much from the sudden lack of air as from the sensation of her feet leaving the ground ever so slightly. She dropped her slugthrower.
Across the space of a few meters, Rrogon Skar snarled at her, bloody eyes bright and hand thrust out in the air as if he was actually lifting her by the throat. Satsi kicked slightly, desperately. Her gaze wheeled. People weren't really clearing out of the space, exactly. Gunshots and magic choking powers. Just another day on the Matron.
"Foolish scum," roared the Kaleesh in a modulated voice, taking steps towards her, hand still lifted. "Do you know how many have tried and failed to kill me? You are just one more pathetic attempt."
The woman stopped trying to grasp instinctively at her own neck and dropped her hands instead to her belt, glaring at the man with narrowed eyes going dark at the edges.
"I will make you wish for death. But first you will tell me who was stupid enough to come after me this time. One way or another, I will make you—"
The best time to catch a man off-guard is when he's talking. He's too focused on what he's going to say next.
Let's see you stop this, sparky, she thought, activating and throwing the grenade she held.
Predictably, the hulking Kaleesh did what most Force-trained she'd seen did: he drew, activated, and twirled that lightsaber of his with preternatural grace, too quick to follow with mortal eyes, and slashed at the incoming projectile that his preternatural senses warned him of.
He sliced right through it.
Dioxis gas exploded in a roiling cloud of pale, deathly green.
Satsi, having hit the ground gagging as soon as he'd shifted his focus and dropped her, gasped for canned air and pushed herself to her feet as people began shouting and shoving, nearly trampling her. The Human dodged raggedly to the side and pressed herself up tight against the side of a shack, aching all over from fresh new bruises and battered constantly by the stampede of the crowd.
Chute Town was large, but it was also enclosed, and the press of bodies and recycled oxygen was tight enough that even just the smog of perspirant held in the air and lingered in a fog close to the ground. The gas was spreading fast and didn't seem to be going anywhere, and there was nowhere good to hide from it for several blocks save the tops of some of the buildings. Some people crushed others in their dash to get up high enough to avoid the low-clinging toxin. Others shut themselves up in their ramshackle stalls and probably prayed. Most of them just went down.
The whore's baby had stopped crying.
Collateral, Satsi thought firmly, squinting into the mist around the newfound massacre and trying to spot if her target was one of the corpses on the ground or not. It was hard to see, and she couldn't make out a shape large enough to be his from where she stood. She peeled gingerly off the wall, trying not to stumble over stay limbs or knocked-over wares, and advanced back into the middle of the causeway, searching more closely.
With her luck, the monster had probably gotten away after the first face-full of gas and was busy almost but very much not dying in an alley somewhere already, healing himself or some other sparky sithspit. She'd probably never find him.
Dammit, dammit, dammit, the ex-Arconan thought in frustration, grinding her teeth, just as a clawed, four-fingered hand closed around her shoulder.
