[b][i]Bonadan, Dock 116[/i][/b] It was a quiet, typical morning; the day starting off so innocently with the last spice ship from the night before leaving for its destination elsewhere. As the dockhands, guards and enforcers for the day shift lazily move in to take over their already departing coworkers, little did they know that today was going to be their last day on the job. The first spice freighter they were supposed to receive, one of the ubiquitous CEC models made its way towards the dock; in quite the hurry judging from its pace. "Why isn't she slowing?" Jyn Liak asked, the young half-Zeltron shifted in place, eyeing the vessel nervously as it kept its heading, heedless of the automated warnings sent to it. "No idea...Raise 'em on the comm Jyn!" Barked His'zro 'grass, an elderly Zabrak male who'd already lost one arm to a spice fried freighter Captain that came into the station, hugging the catwalks tightly enough that the old Corellian junker simply twisted his limb off. For him, it brought memories of the unpleasant experience to the surface. For the foreman, S'skistos a Dreathos it reminded the old lizard far too much of a the tactics used by the fanatics of Pallowa that Grand Master Yoda had exterminated six centuries ago... "This isn't a spiced out spacer! His'zro activate the tractor beams! Push her away!" "They aren't functioning!" "Weapons!?" "The gun crews are in the middle of rotation! Nobody's manning them!" "I'm picking up something hot!?" Jyn let out a terrified cry, both men whipped around "...f..fire...fire" The terror in the elder Dreathos' voice was matched only by the one armed Zabrak who lunged for one of the emergency cells designed to shield the comm and docking crews from hazardous chemicals and waste spillage should freighters suffer a mishap. Below them, alarm klaxons woke sleepy gunners who were busy napping off an all too heavy lunch with too much alcohol. Their slowed reactions to rising, causing one to stumble and hit his chin on the long, plasteel ladder rising up to the firing tower. The Zeltran spat a piece of his tongue and cursed as dark black blood spilled from his mouth. The youth cursed, furious at his injury which he was convinced was the result of another of those damned drills. "mugh withs, gonna kurrll me..forl..dis" he muttered, growling at the lack of annunciation. Storming off, he abandoned his post stomping by a pair of Sephi who were holding their little girl who was scared for reasons she couldn't quite put to words. Neither parent would have the chance to ask their little girl what was wrong, nor would the irate Zeltran get a chance to complain to his Union rep as the vessel speeding towards the docks, smashed into the floor at such speeds that its nose came sheering off and the vessel lurched upwards, its engines roaring as they began to shape loose, tearing its aft section in twain. What followed was a demented cry of "Run!" From the Dreathos before vessel exploded turning the world charcoal gray and bright orange..and then..to the horror of several dodging debris, a brilliant hue of pink then green, yellow and finally white as the world exploded and debris smashed into the lower levels with such force that the Zeltran was smashed in the torso by a turbolift tearing out of its walled entrance and impacting against his form. The Sephi parents did this best to shield their daughter, but the floor buckled, then it twitched, then it lurched inward before being vomited up against the ceiling with such force nearly twelve thousand tons of plasteel and wiring passed through the forms of the Sephi's whose bodies all but splattered apart. The radiation wave hit, causing tibana gas improperly stored within the munitions chamber of the gun towers to go off. The drunks who'd made it half way up, tasted metal, licked their lips and would have realized they'd just tasted radioactive dust were it not for the gas igniting and causing a wave of superheated plasma to impact against them with such violent they had the dubious of honor of being the first sentients in that corner of the system to be decapitated by their own pelvic bones. The Dreathos grabbed the halfbreed, yanking her into another one of the lockers as the plastiglass was converted into superheated molten particles which splashed all over the Sullustan Kinja Diapa, who'd been there sensor suit operator and who'd been force to pull a triple shift that week and might have detected the radioactive material before Jyn was forced to use his console had he not been so exhausted due to severe mismanagement. Diapa attempted to let out a scream but his vocal cords were being incinerated and as his traumatized body inhaled sharply Diapa's lungs superheated. His last thoughts were of his wives, their fifty children. Below, a passenger liner filled with families on a commute from their homes in the sprawling corporate sectors of the expansion region to their vacation homes on Aquila was caught in the debris. A mother was cut clear in half by a blade from the intake valve, her son ran for cover dragging mommy only to turn his head and realize he was only pulling half of mommy. others were caught by the radiation itself, many died instantly from the massive overdose, the shadows of their bodies would later be found to have been burned into the plasteel dock Debris both metal and sentient, all saturated with hundreds of times the lethal dose of radiation spread about the facility. The world went dark And then the screams began. "mommy, mommy..where's the rest of you mommy?! Mommy..why does the air taste funny?" "WHERE IS MY SON?! HAS ANYONE SEEN MY SON?!" "my hand, my hand, it burn, it burns!" "MY SKIN IS ON FIRE!!!" Others, were already dying, or in the agonized throes of one who was experiencing total ionization of the ferrous material in their blood. Those would die the most horribly, gamma radiation would turn them into living soup, as the ionized iron literally boiled their blood, causing them to seizure and sneeze bits of brain out as their spines shattered from the convulsions. A pregnant woman who had been caught in the blast was vaporized utterly, the shadow of both her and her baby's eerily skeletal form would remain forever plastered to one wall...an odd tribute to life denied. But above the fray, the cacophony of the damned a soft whisper of "I'm so sorry kid" could be heard, as the Dreathos clutched the halfbreed, who'd jumped with him into a safety locker only for the debris to dent the door enough that radiation seeped in. She'd absorbed ten times the lethal dose, but well within parameters for the antirad stim to fix. Only for him to find out the debris had severed her spine and she was now suffocating in his arms, holding him tight with tears, murmuring how much she wanted her daddy. Jyn was seventeen. S'Skistos was eight hundred and sixty five, beloved and called "grandpa" by much of the crew. but today he failed his little ones..and he resolved to get revenge on whatever animal had done this. After he had laid down the now silent and cold body of the young Half-Zeltron with as much gentleness as his shaking hands could, there is a terrible metallic groaning coming from the partially collapsed and half-molten entryway to the control room as something was forcing its way inside, maybe a droid that made it through the explosion intact and was sent by whoever's still alive after all that? What else would be strong enough or respond as quickly as this? "I'm still alive down here!" Still believing that the droid outside steadily ripping away at the ruined durasteel doors had come to his aid, the reptilian would soon find that it wasn't salvation that had come for him, it was his doom. He knew the moment he had laid eyes upon the thing that had come for him. "No... No..." The monster before him wan't supposed to be here... It should be dead! But once he realized just who had come for him, past the delirium and nausea of his brain shutting down from the radiation destroying his neurons, the Dreathos knew it in his old bones, that his vengeance was an impossible dream and that he would die here, 800 years of life culminating in this singular moment... A pitiful death surrounded by the bodies of all he had failed... He just hopes that whatever black heart in that thing before him had, it would make it quick... "Kriff..." And so were the last words of S'skistos before his head was blown apart into a cloud of ash and burning bone fragments from a blaster bolt. A red glow settling on the two corpses underneath the gaze of the Dreathos and the Half-Zeltron's murderer, the thing strides past their broken forms with neither glee nor guilt, to the slayer; it had all become so routine. Making its way into the staff turbolift, the killer readies its armaments for the extermination to come. The staff turbolift rings out with a tinny ring, catching the attention of the confused and shaken dockworkers who were lucky enough to be deep inside the structure, the men below having little idea of just how bad the situation topside was. "Quick guys, get the antirads and first aid kits they're gonna-" The dockhand's sentence was cut off as his entire sternum deflagrated into a fireball before the rest of his compatriots were cut to pieces by a sudden and lethal barrage of blaster fire from the turbolift. Moments later, the only noise made in the now-emptied hallway aside from the smoldering corpses was the soft whirring of high-performance servomotors and clanking of metallic feet. "Hang in there!" "Captain" Udo Tyree muttered, a human born to slaves in the space mines of Kessel, he'd dreamed of being a cop in his youth, but his mean birth and the merciless climate of the outer rim forced to settle with being an enforcer for various organized crime masters until the Zann consortium came and with Tyber's outfit came order and with order came a thug's badge. Around him, warning klaxons alerting the survivors both to rad leaks and chemical fires but also to failing AG fields and worse an intruder. "Hang in there" he ordered again. Fortunately, they were too far into the station to be effected by the radiation from the dirty bombs. However, the exploding vessel and structural damage caused dozens of secondary explosions. The Rodian slumped over his shoulder, holding in his guts with a hand was Dorfyus Zeebo, a former hitman turned merchant marine and security rep for the shell company that Zann used to smuggle his narcotics. The lights began to flicker and steam and other, less than savory vapors choked the air. A khaleesh and Gamorrian ran towards the pair, the piggie was his security deputy and the Khaleesh was a drunk they'd detained. "D'Kriff happened here bossman?" Growled the Khaleesh "No idea! One moment all was still the next..." Their conversation was interrupted by the frenzied howling of an enormous Wookie hurtling towards them in a mad charge, His fur ablaze, filling the air with the acrid stench of burning flesh. Udo put him out of his misery with a well aimed blaster bolt to the face. "We need to move" "What about the stuff?!" "Kriff the stuff..anti rad droids won't be able to stop chemical fires and the suppression system failed because some of nerf brained idiot embezzled the funds for general maintenance!" "We need to...to-" It came at first, a soft buzzing noise that seemed more and more like the whirring of servos, but it was so soft it could have been mistaken for the echoes of the myriad mechanical failures occurring about the station. "what..the.." Something was advancing towards them, a tall, gaunt figure in the darkness, skeletal and yet strong enough to hold an E-web single handed! Beams of light flickered in the dark, the ghoulish gaze of a macabre murderer. The architect of this atrocity! No words needing to be said, Tyree and his men lit up the intruder with everything they had, including one particularly crazy/well prepared thug that threw a thermal detonator at it; seemingly destroying the trespasser in a cloud of superheated air and debris. "Don't you dare relax, keep-" And then Tyree was blown in half by a thunderous volley of crimson bolts, with the rest of his men following him close behind into Chaos as the thing mercilessly gunned them all down as it strode past the smoke, whatever blaster bolts sent towards it from those lucky or swift enough to seek cover or go prone deflecting across the armor plate comprising the slayer's form. The survivors quickly realized the futility of their resistance and begged for mercy, throwing their blasters to the floor or feigned death, hoping that it wouldn't stop to check. Their optimism was sadly unfounded as they too were executed. No mercy was spared, no quarter given, no witnesses left to tell of the tragedy that befell this soon-to-be cursed place. At last reaching its destination, a pair of rather tastelessly imposing durasteel sliding doors more at home at a star cruiser' as part of an emergency bulkhead than a "civilian" dock such as this, it only took the intruder a few seconds to bypass the meter-thick doors with a thermal detonator before it lets itself in, only to find the gaudily-decorated office empty and unspoiled; suspiciously so. However, the killer was not so easily fooled by how orderly the office was and within a few moments, discovers a hidden turbolift behind a holobook shelf that was presumably just for the sake of decoration. Taking its second trip in a turbolift for the day, the minor inconvenience was soon rewarded when the killer steps out into an underground hangar built beneath the dock's foundations and finally laying eyes upon its quarry, who was hurriedly initiating the startup sequence of his personal Z-95 Headhunter. "[b][i]Ulthak Canaris...[/i][/b]" The killer spoke in a warbled, low-pitched digitized growl as it brought the E-WEB to bear and reduced one of the snubfighter's engines into a flaming wreck with a volley of blaster bolts, trapping its victim with it as it discarded the now-useless heavy blaster now that its plasma pack had run dry and its barrel warped to the point of uselessness from the abuse its wielder had subjected it to. Watching with crimson-hued photoreceptors as its target struggled to dismount the crippled Headhunter, the killer draws forth a master-crafted vibrosword from its back and marches towards the Zann Consortium scumdog the Hutts had paid it to kill with singleminded purpose, its mechanical stride steady and measured in sheer contrast to the chaos raging around it. "They sent you?!" The defiler all but screamed, the pause in his voice seemed to suggest he'd know who "they" were. He'd long ago stopped worrying about death, infiltrating systems controlled by the Empire or the Alliance was always risky, the more success a defiler had the more it out him on Tyber's radar and that had its own risks. But to send The Highsinger, there were assassins and then there were assassins, even IG 88 lacked the level of seeming soulful glee with which the legendary droid went about his missions. He backed slowly away, taking a breath "Of all beings...why..." well, he thought, no matter, a shaky hand went for his blaster and it seemed though he was going to take a shot at Highsinger only for the barrel to point under his chin a click and...Nothing. A hysterical laugh left the Defiler's throat "I forgot to change the powerpack out". No matter, the man ran towards a vibro blade, if he couldn't kill himself he could at least make the droid work for it. Calmly stopping his stride as the maddened Defiler rushed to arm himself before charging forth to meet his end with some form of dignity, the half-moon crested droid waited up until the criminal had hefted his blade over his head, unleashing a warcry that was equal parts rage-filled and terror-stricken, a noise that the long-lived droid had heard hundreds of thousands of times to the point that such a reaction was practically mundane to the likes of the assassin, and honestly speaking, his had half expected the Zann boss to instead beg or bargain for his life. Lost in his reminiscing, the Highsinger noticed that his quarry was now exactly where he wanted him and faster than an eyeblink, the droid lashed out with a slash that was perfectly executed yet with no flourish or any exertion aside from swinging the blade itself, an attack that perfectly encapsulated what Highsinger was: Pure, relentles efficiency. Immediately after the Defiler's foot had once again made contact with the ground, his head and his arms from the shoulder down abruptly detached from his body in arcing sprays of crimson lifeblood that splashed against the droid's blaster-proofed frame and aesthetically-designed visage in a perversely beautiful manner to any unlucky enough to bare witness; the syndicate boss already dead the moment his helmeted head bounced off the duracrete floor. Casually retrieving the head as he shook the blood off his vibroblade, the Droid then makes its way back up to the surface by retracing its steps and encountering no further hostiles, Highsinger gets in contact with his employer via an encrypted holocomm. [b][i]"Zann's holdings on Bonadan have been irreparably damaged and the "Defiler" in charge of the operation is no more."[/i][/b] As a lone transport vessel exited a hangar frantically being worked on by underpowered, poorly equipped anti rad droids, the one armed Zabrak pried himself free, his eyes awash with horror, radiation protocols would save his life on this dark day but there existed no balm to his soul. The Highsinger was an assassin droid sung about in legend, a clone war era relic that some said was from a much older time. The Zabrak had long dismissed him as an urban legend but here, to see that infamous crested head emerge from the radioactive inferno it was doubtlessly responsible for, smeared in the lifeblood of its victims. Grief at the memory of the dead, all of his friends, of the dying many of whom were children, continued to cry out. His'zro 'Grass fell to his knees and let out an agonized scream. In the void, before that scream was lost to the void. One might have heard the deep, baritone laughter of a Hutt. And the pinging, of a song the galaxy hadn't heard in almost two thousand years.