A Recon in Red {Closed}

[tenkalus]

“You’re late, little Sparrow.”

Astrid ran as hard as she could up the hill, her little legs burning with the sustained effort. When finally she reached her father’s side, she doubled over with her hands on her knees and sucked in air to fill her cramping lungs. “Sorry…. Papa,” she gasped between a lungfull. “I …. Ran into…. Leeah… on the… path. She-wouldn’t…. Shut up….”

Leeah, her father knew, was Astrid’s good friend that lived in town. They would cross paths occasionally when their educational semesters started up for the season, but rarely saw each other out of schooling. Her father remained unconvinced and his expression showed it. “Astrid, what did we say about fibbing?”

But even though he was chastising her, he’d always found the stories his daughter came up with creative and amusing.

Astrid sighed, heart hammering in her chest, “Excuses don’t…. Exist on the ba- battlefield…”

He nodded in approval and slipped off of the boulder he’d been sitting on waiting for her. “Good. Now you’re having trouble catching your breath. Why?”

Every moment was a teachable moment. Every action, one that could be learned from and knowledge gleaned for the rest of one’s life. Astrid knew this at her core, and knew what the answer to the question was because he’d phrased it exactly this way before. Sometimes, learning was nothing more than repetition, until the body just knew instinctively to react a certain way. “Cuz... “ she blew out. With a grimace, she straightened her torso and put both hands on the back of her head and interlaced her fingers. “My head… needs to be …. Above my heart. Lungs… compress when I’m…. I’m bent over.”

“Exactly right, Sparrow, good. Now what was the real reason you were late for training?”

She looked up at her father guiltily. Even when he was disciplining his daughter, the stoic warrior was gentle and kind. His voice was always even and measured. He only raised his voice when he needed to be heard above the volume of nature or background noise. “Becauuuuuseeeee, the sweets cart was down the drive when I left and I stopped to buy us pastries with my allowance…”

Eagle eyes peered down at her with their unspoken might. Her father held out his hand expectantly. “And where is mine?”

Astrid was finally catching her breath now and she swiped the back of her hand over her forehead to remove the sweat streaking into her eyes. “Um…. I ate them both… There is only a half left.”

“Mmmm. I see,” he said, completely unsurprised. He knew his daughter was a bit of a sugar fiend.

She reached into the small pack she wore to training and removed a small bit of pastry wrapped in flimsi, then handed it to her father. And as he unwrapped the package, Xephael Blackspyre realized that the situation was worse than he’d thought. The “half” that was left was more of a quarter in reality.

“Hand.” He stated. His voice filled with admonishment and disappointment. Astrid’s head fell, crestfallen. Her eyes drilling into the grass at her feet in shame as she extended her left arm, palm down. She yelped slightly in surprise when her father’s calloused hands closed around her wrist and turned it back over. She’d expected a slap on the wrist. Instead, a half of the quarter of the treat landed back in her palm. She looked up in shock as her warrior father popped his share into his mouth and munched noisily. “I’m not going to discipline you for buying your papa a treat, little Sparrow. Especially when you purchased it with your own money. I’ve taken my tribute, you can have the rest.”

But Xephael Blackspyre was too slow for this opponent. Before he could even finish speaking, he looked down and saw that Astrid’s palm was empty, and she had crumbs lining her mouth as she chewed rapidly to destroy the evidence. Her eyes were wide and star struck as she took in her beloved father.

Xephael had faced deadly enemies in single combat. He’d been integral in toppling governments. But even he was no match for his daughter’s crumb crusted face. He broke into a grin and swept her up in a hug, then slipped her up on his shoulders as she giggled.

“Don’t think you’re getting off easy though Sparrow!” he warned as he took off toward the woods and their usual training grounds. “You’re going to work twice as hard to burn off those calories!”

“Deal!” She yelled happily.

“Speaking of calories, name a wild plant that you can eat, that will sustain you in the absence of raw protein.”

The list that Astrid had all but memorized was not a long one, but she occasionally had trouble reciting the official names. She knew the plants by sight, but the scientific names often escaped her. So she’d started coming up with names of her own. Her father was training her in everything he knew. It wasn’t just about fighting. It was about being able to survive on nothing but your wits.

Today, she didn’t even have to pause as she recited the one native plant she actually knew by heart. “Fortunica LaBelle!”

A flower that had been imported to Panatha, few people knew of its nutritional properties. Most individuals knew of the Fortunica because they enjoyed the cosmetic look for their gardens. The long orange and blue petals bloomed in a spiral pattern and accented any garden quite well. It was only the soldiers of Panatha that had eventually run out of food during battle, who had discovered the high amount of clean water stored within the bulbs and stem, and the pleasant sugary taste of the petals themselves.

All factoids aside, Astrid remembered the life saving plant, not because of its restorative properties, but simply because the name was pretty. The Beautiful Fortune. Soldiers used to spread tales about how seeing a Fortunica LaBelle meant they would survive even the most harrowing of trials.

It just so happened that the reason Astrid called out this particular flower, was because it always grew at the very edge of the woods they went to train in. And every day they trained, her father would cut the stem from one of the flowers and stick it in her hair.

And now, fourteen years later, her fingers brushed the petals of a fresh Forunica LaBelle in a small, simple vase as she sat at an outdoor cafe in the heart of Ord Mantell City.

Her expression hardened as she looked at the flower. Training was over. Her father was more than a decade past dead, and she was currently on-mission. Lord Keelen had put her on task to do some information gathering on the planet of Ord Mantell while their ship, The Revenant, was stationed in orbit. There had been scattered reports of an up-and-coming group of pirates in the sector that were gaining in both strength and audacity that called themselves the Verigaasi.

Current estimates placed their fleet at just under ten ships, most of them freighters but somehow the group had allegedly acquired a light cruiser as well. They had been raiding all up and down the Celanon Spur, disabling passenger ships on their way out of the system, boarding them and relieving passengers of their personal wealth and cargo. And on occasion when passengers got courageous enough to stand up for themselves, the Verigaasi relieved them of their lives.

As a Sith Acolyte, Astrid shouldn’t have cared about that fact. If the victims were too weak to defend themselves, then they deserved to die, by her Order’s way of thinking. Lord Keelen himself was more interested in marshalling in law and order. Ord Mantell was supposed to fall under the Empire’s territory and having a band of lowlife pirates pilfering the collective wealth from Imperial citizens simply would not fly.

But for some reason, Astrid did care. Something about non-combatants dying for sticking up for what was theirs just didn’t set right with her. They’d earned their money, and if they were leaving Ord Mantell on a standard passenger line, chances were their wealth wasn’t anything to write home about. They were people just trying to get out of a slum and make something of their lives. They wanted to escape the industrial stink and corruption of a planet they’d once called home.

Astrid understood all too well what it meant to be desperate. Sometimes, you could only hold your breath for so long, wishing that that a hand would plunge through the water and haul you back to safety. A hand, that would never come.

….Usually….

Keelen had informed her that she was to track down and tag the pirate group known as the Verigaasi, but not to engage their members unless it was a life or death situation. It was outside of Astrid’s norm, as she wasn’t used to having to show restraint. Normally she’d find a target, assess their combat capabilities, and then smash them to bits with brute strength. Lord Keelen was getting her to think outside the box, to the effect that he’d given her total freedom as to what assets and methodology she chose to employ in her mission, within reason of course.

To that end, Astrid had taken an hour to plan and pack, and had briefly commandeered a pilot and shuttle from The Revenant’s hangar bay to transport her from the Imperial ship and out of the system to a neighboring planet. From there she sent the pilot back home and bartered private passage back to Ord Mantell under the guise of a ship mechanic looking for work. Her belongings were meager enough to travel light and the plain coveralls she was wearing had been convincingly smeared with enough engine grease to sell the disguise. Add to that a smudge or two on her cheeks, some standard mechanic gloves and a beat up, well worn cap to hold up her hair and she’d been effectively divorced of any item that tied her to the Sith or the Empire. Just another civilian trying to get by.

Since landing on Ord Mantell, she’d discretely asked around for details about the recent uptick in pirate activity. Four out of the five ship owners she’d questioned at the starport had been unhelpful, but the fifth had been hit twice in recent months, and was actually in the process of installing an auto-cannon to the side of his freighter for protection when she’d approached. The disgruntled freight pilot let slip that a few of the pirate crew that had robbed him and effectively ruined his reputation in this sector of space as a courier, had come back down to the city to re-sell his contract goods at inflated prices on the black market.

When asked how he knew what the prices were on said market, he mumbled something about hearing it somewhere and quickly returned to his work. Acolyte Blackspyre was wholly unconvinced that the man himself was not a criminal, but she remained focused on her recon mission and decided to pursue the bigger fish. It only took another day of digging around the port to get some finer details of sightings and general descriptions of the pirates and where they frequented.

The cafe she’d been taking lunch at today was across the street from a hole in the wall cantina called the “Last Reserve”, which was a known establishment prone to serve patrons not on the right side of the law. After some data diving through records previously compiled by the Ministry of Intelligence, Astrid had found that the Last Reserve was actually known to be the watering hole of a local fence or two as well. So if someone were to need to offload cargo quickly onto the black market, they would need to go somewhere discrete and relatively nearby to the starport, where fewer palms had to be greased and cargo shifters were easier to move around. The further away from the port you got, the more likely the authorities would intercept you and take you down.

As fortune would have it, the Last Reserve was within walking distance of one of the seedier sections of the port, and right across the street from a little cafe struggling to make good business in a bad neighborhood. And who would Astrid Blackspyre be if she were to deny good, upstanding Imperial citizens her patronage?

She hadn’t been waiting long when she noticed and recorded some persons of interest walking cautiously into the Reserve, hands square in their pockets and very obviously fingering some small weapon, possibly a holdout blaster for self defense. Two humans and a zabrak in total. They had arrived in a cargo truck straight from the port and carried a few backpacks into the cantina.

“Get anything else for you sweetheart?”

Astrid flinched. She hadn’t heard the waitress walk up on her since she’d been so focused. It was good Lord Keelen wasn’t around to see the ineptitude. Something she’d work on for the future.

“Oh!” she squealed in her girliest voice, “No! Thank you very much!”

As soon as the waitress left, Astrid was kicking herself. A real Sith wouldn’t even have looked at the older woman. A real Sith would have simply raised a couple of fingers and indicated that they may go away. But a smile crept its way onto Astrid’s face when the realization hit her immediately after.

A real Sith might have done those things to a tee. But a real Sith wouldn’t be effective going undercover if they announced themselves as real Sith, complete with brooding attitude and lack of respect for common folk. And so quietly, Astrid congratulated herself on falling back on her instincts.

Astrid paid for her meal and left a generous tip for the waitress, only after cleaning up the mess she’d made personally and not leaving it for a struggling woman in a service industry to do for her. Then headed across the street to the two story building next to the cantina, leaving the table exactly as she’d found it.

Minus one Fortunica LaBelle….

[tenkalus]

“The best laid battle plans rarely survive first contact with the enemy, Sparrow.” Her father said. “In battle, you stick to your plan as closely as you can. But if you are too rigid and cannot flex to the inevitable chaos that follows action, you will be doomed to an unceremonious end. And in the end, it isn’t the strongest warrior who survives. The warrior who proves most adaptable to new information will always be the victor. Always.”

The plan had been for Astrid to cross the street, head on up to the roof access of the building next to the cantina, and toss a little tracker onto the cargo truck without anyone spotting her from below. The tracker would follow the pirates back to their nest, Ingrid would find it a short time later and assess enemy strengths, then report to Keelen for a job well done and a shuttle ride back to The Revenant. Keelen would send in a task force to disable ships and subdue pirates, or probably just turn their holdings to glass with turbolaser fire from orbit and that would end the pirate threat on Ord Mantell, plus or minus the job well done part.

The building looked abandoned so she didn’t anticipate running into anyone who would place her out of bounds. But as she was starting to realize more often lately, looks were almost always deceiving. Instead of the boarded up windows and blaster pocked duracrete building being home to a few rodents, Astrid instead found that it was home to a host of dangerous looking men, and an equally dangerous looking baby acklay, blissfully locked up in a cage at the moment.

The Force should have been able to forewarn her of the dangers within the building. But while instructors had often told her she was strong in the Force, they’d been equally baffled to find that she had no understanding of how to harness her own power. Keelen had spirited her away from the Sith Academy well before she’d entered into the more stringent lessons regarding the Force and its manipulation. So while she knew it was there for her to command, Astrid had no idea what it felt like to even touch the Force. She had the notion that it was a subtle thing, something to noticed in time of quiet, but otherwise useless to a novice who didn’t know what feeling to watch out for.

Boy was she wrong about subtle.

She hadn’t sensed any life in the building because she didn’t know how, obviously. But when her spine went cold and the hair on her neck stood up practically screaming at her to duck as soon as she entered the seemingly abandoned building, Astrid listened. Her every nerve rang with the sensation that she needed to move, and so move she did. It was only that fraction of a second in moving that kept her from being skewered because a pair of the gentlemen by the acklay cage were wrestling over a dagger. One knocked into the other hard and sent the dagger spinning end over end directly at Astrid’s chest.

Her intuitive warning was enough to get her to dive out of the way, but the blade took a gouge from the shoulder of her coveralls and left a thin gash along the flesh of her left bicep as it sank into the wall.

“Whoaaa! Watch yourself there missy!” One of the group said, igniting laughter throughout the rest.

As Astrid slowly got to her feet, her eyes flicked around the room. Seven dirty thugs, one immature acklay. Likely more down the hallway. If the layout of the entry floor to the building was an indication, there was another hallway just off the northern edge of the main room that twisted back round to the west and toward where the cantina was situated. The ground sloped down sharply there and given the noise coming from below, Astrid had little left to the imagination that yes, there was a tunnel that led from a sub-basement of the cantina to where she was now, which must have been some kind of holding area for pit contenders and exotic animals.

She’d inadvertently stumbled upon an illegal fighting ring while looking for a pirate racket. What bad luck she had.

“Alright there little pretty?” Another thug asked from across the room. The way he said the word pretty, made Astrid’s skin crawl, and the look in his eye spoke to a man who was harboring anything but honorable intentions. Even his teeth were black, so noticed when he licked his lips and stood up to examine her better.

“Uh, sorry. Wrong house…” she said drily and turned to leave.

But naturally, someone had already slipped behind her and barred the door. She actually didn’t think it would have been that easy. First, they had no way of knowing she wasn’t some law enforcement informant looking to spot their action. And second, she was a defenseless, good looking young woman dropped in the center of a bunch of lecherous men who likely had to take what they wanted from the unwilling. “Well hold on there,” came the voice behind her. “You only just got here, how about we go somewhere and get to kno-”

She felt fingers brush her hair from behind and her pupils dilated as the danger sense spiked.

Wrong move, creep.

He wanted to hold on to something. Astrid got it. Men liked holding things. But so did women…

Her left palm opened and smacked right between his legs, and when she made contact, she squeezed. Hard.

While the man didn’t know her for any stranger on the street, she knew that right about then, he would probably have no question as to why she was called Steel Hand. He immediately blew out all his breath and his eyes bulged wide as he hunched over, clawing at her wrist to get her to release his manhood.

But she did no such thing. Astrid just tightened her grip further.

“Anyone else want to get grabby?” she growled, eyes narrowed at the rest of the group who were now fully attentive to her and laughing as they watched their compatriot get manhandled.

Blacktooth stood from his perch by the ascension stairs, his smile growing as he stepped forward. “Alright then lass, cut him free. That’s enough.”

But something was happening. There was a tickle in her mind, something poking at her consciousness that hadn’t been there before. Mentally, she followed the thread and blinked rapidly to immediately clear the images that flooded her vision. But it wasn’t just a vision, there were sensations involved too. She saw young women before her, crying, screaming in pain and accompanied only by the laughter of the group before her. Faces flashed before her, some were in the room with her now. The fear and anger and hatred and helplessness bled together at lightspeed, leaving Astrid a bit winded herself.

Incredulously, she turned around and eyed the demon in her grip, struggling against her superior muscle. Tears were streaming down his face and he was gasping for air, now held up only by willpower and the tips of his toes as he was hunched over her elbow.

“I said cut him loose.” Blacktooth repeated. “I’ll not tell you again, girl.”

That was fine with Astrid, she was done listening. The pirates would wait, these so called “men” would need to be dealt with first. So she released the retch and watched him suck in oxygen as he dropped to his knees. As he was gulping in air and holding his crushed berries, Astrid unzipped the front of her coveralls. A few of the thugs before her whistled as the white tank top beneath became visible. They thought she was undressing.

She just wanted her arms free.

The whistling abruptly stopped when the men before her took notice of the diamond etched muscles struggling to escape their prison of flesh, rippling down her long arms. All eyes were on her as she methodically pulled down the coveralls to her waist and tied the sleeves off. Then she pulled the mechanics gloves from her pockets and slipped them tightly over her fists until the material creaked when she flexed. They wouldn’t provide much padding, but something was better than nothing.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Blacktooth asked with a less confident sneer.

“....what your other victims were too weak to do….”

She spun fully and snatched up the man collapsed behind her, wrenching him to his feet. He tried to protect himself. Tried to punch her, to kick her as best he could. He fought. But every punch and kick was met with an expertly placed slip grip, making him slide into locks that allowed Astrid to shatter his bones. His companions watched in stunned silence as this muscled giant of a girl literally broke their friend to pieces, joint by joint.

He was a misshapen mess when he hit the floor again, now in so much pain he was unable to even scream. He could only rock around on his back taking sharp breaths and whimpering.

“You,” she muttered to Blacktooth, suddenly very detached from herself. She could feel her timid nature slipping away and being replaced by the crimson edges forming the tunnel vision of her rage. “Do you like candy?”

“What?”

Astrid’s hands, for they were no longer under her own control, reached up and plucked the worn cap from her head and tossed it to the side. “I just think it’s going to be pretty funny watching you eat candy with no kriffin teeth...” she hissed through her own pearly whites.

“Enough of this, KILL HER!” Blacktooth roared after she turned to face them again.

Vibro weapons flashed into existence as the remaining group drew and charged. She rushed them right back with a hard battle cry.

For Astrid Blackspyre, there was a kind of peace in rage. It was a hard thing for her to describe even to Lord Keelen. But it was always there. She’d first experienced it back at the academy during her final test with Keelen. She was a good fighter without the Force, having been trained early in life. But when she gave her mind permission to surrender to her body, her rage took over and obliterated the enemies before her. At the academy, that had taken the form of sending four promising acolytes to the infirmary to heal their broken bones. At that time, she hadn’t fully surrendered herself to the din of battle. Some of her rational mind remained enough for her to realize that killing them, meant she in turn would be killed. For these men, there was nothing holding her back. No Masters to please, no witnesses. For these men, her unfocused rage would be sending them to the morgue.

She’d been given merely a glimpse of the horrors that had befallen the girls that had likely been kidnapped and brought to this place. Even if the Force didn’t deem her worthy of its physical power, it had apparently seen fit to show her absolute evil when it was in front of her. That evil spurred her anger, deepened her hate, and through that red-rimmed chaos, Astrid Blackspyre found true freedom. Gone were the deep seeded workings of political intrigue. Gone were the misgivings of having to please Masters and Lords and remember etiquette around this person or that person. She didn’t have to play a part in battle, she became the battle.

And it felt good.

When it was over, she stood panting over a floor of bodies. She was sporting a few more cuts from near-misses, and would have a bruise or two to hide from Keelen when she got back, but was overall not seriously harmed. The others could not say the same.

As the adrenaline began to wane, she felt a throbbing pain in her left hand. When she looked down to examine the damage, she saw her glove was covered in blood, and that she had two dark teeth sticking out of her knuckles. Astrid quickly plucked the teeth from her hand and tossed them aside. And when they clattered to the floor, she saw a body flinch nearby.

It was Blacktooth. Or maybe he would be Blackgums now. She bent down and snatched up handfuls of his tunic and jerked him to a sitting position against the wall. He was still alive. His nose was crushed almost flat and his mouth was smashed to broken pancakes, his leg was broken in probably three places and if he didn’t have internal bleeding just then, Astrid would have been surprised. But if nothing else, he was still alive. Witness to the carnage Astrid Blackspyre had wrought.

Astrid hated witnesses.

He whimpered and cowered as she raised her hands to his neck, intent on breaking it. But Keelen’s voice echoed in her mind and stalled her. She glanced at the room. There were probably a dozen or more men down the ramp and under the Last Reserve, and she had just taken out six of their number. One or two that went missing could be construed as accidents or casualties of the neighborhood. Six meant someone was going to war. Lord Keelen’s methodical military mind smacked her in the head and Astrid realized she’d made a big splash while off task.

But Keelen was also teaching her how to salvage situations with ingenuity. This particular scene had been a powder keg before she’d strolled in. Astrid just needed to light the match to finalize the look.

“Wah- w-w-wah ah yoo?” Blackgums whimpered, unable to speak well through broken teeth and blood.

Astrid looked back at him, calmly now.

“Who me?” she asked playfully, now every bit the teenage girl again. “I’m just a Sith. But you? You, mister man, unfortunately are lunch. You really should have treated women with more respect when you had the chance.”

“Wah?”

Astrid stood, bringing with her a fallen dagger from the ground. She turned and lobbed the dagger through the air and watched as it struck the release panel on the baby acklay’s cage. The beast immediately burst through the door and began ravaging the bodies around it. Astrid grabbed hold of Blackgum’s collar and hurled him at the creatures feet.

He got one last scream out before being abruptly silenced by a long claw to the back.

“Bon appetit, little friend.” She said with a salute to the wild animal. And then she ran upstairs and found the roof access. Naturally as her luck would have it, the cargo truck was gone.

But it was alright. She would find another way to track them. Keelen’s mandate remained satisfied, as she had not engaged any pirates (assuming that the thugs below weren’t part of the same crew, which seemed highly unlikely), and Astrid herself had been smart enough to cover her tracks with what could be easily seen as a negligent guard accidentally hitting the release panel on an underfed and agitated carnivorous creature. Served them right for playing such a dangerous game. Eventually when you rolled the dice with fate, you’d lose.

Astrid was going to be sure to remember that in her future.

[tenkalus]

Her recon mission was quickly tearing at the seams. She was due to report to Keelen within the next few hours and had almost literally nothing to show for her efforts. She didn’t have time to wait for another shipment to get jacked. If Astrid reported nothing to her Master, she was sure that the mission would be over. Keelen would pull her back to the ship, and she would be punished for failure and wasting resources.

Astrid Blackspyre was not a failure. Not anymore. Academy instructors be damned. Lord Keelen had plucked her from the halls that would surely have become her tomb, because he’d seen potential. Maybe it was because both of them had been slaves at one point. Maybe it was because he was being pressured to take an apprentice, or maybe he was just using her to advance some unknown agenda that she was too inept to wrap her head around. Whatever the reason, Astrid wasn’t going to fail her Master anymore. She’d been given trust with this mission. And that trust wasn’t something she was going to waste.

So now she had the daunting task of starting over from zero. Somehow she needed to find a lead where none existed. She couldn’t sense the truck or what direction it had gone. Fact was, she was just undertrained when it came to that skill set. Thinking back several minutes, Astrid was actually surprised that she’d seen what she had. And what exactly had that been anyway? A vision? She’d never had one before. It had been such a strange sensation, being able to see the faces and feel the emotions of the victims of the now, very dead thugs downstairs.

But she was focusing on the wrong things right now. Visions or no, she had a job to do. But where to start? She hadn’t been able to attach her tracker to the truck. How did one track a vehicle with no information except a general description, and a description that matched likely well over a hundred commonly used vehicles in the area?

Suddenly, the thought occurred to her. They were criminals. Who better to track criminals than law enforcement?

Following her instincts, she carefully edged to the side of the roof and peered over the side and across the street to that quaint little cafe she’d been taking lunch at. A clean business that was forced to operate in a bad neighborhood would logically take a few extra steps to insure their property against bad elements. Sure enough, as she looked over the edges of the cafe’s exterior, she saw multiple security cam domes sprouting like blisters from its surface.

Perfect.

She keyed her comlink to the Revenant and only had to wait a few seconds before an answer came back. “Imperial Cruiser Revenant.”

“This is Apprentice Astrid Blackspyre, on mission. Put me through to Intel, priority one.”

“One moment Apprentice Blackspyre, I will connect you now.”

Astrid caught herself before saying thank you. It wasn’t something a Sith Lord would do. But then, she was trying to show people a different way wasn’t she?

“Thank y-” she tried hurriedly, but the comm officer on the bridge was too fast, and the line cut as it was transferred. A moment later another voice came over the line.

“Mistress Blackspyre, this is Lieutenant Polke. How may I assist you?”

Astrid turned and slid her back down the wall, coming to a more comfortable seated position in the shade of the wall. “Lieutenant, are you able to slice into security grids by remote?”

“Depending on the distance from the point of origin and the complexity of the encryption, yes, we should be able to.”

“Outstanding,” Astrid replied, a small grin playing across her lips. “I’m sending you my coordinates now. I need you to commandeer the security cams of a cafe across the street from my location and see if you can identify the registration number of a cargo truck parked in front of the cantina parallel to it. Following that, I need a trace through city traffic cams of where the truck has gone. If possible, I want eyes on it until it leaves the city, assuming it does.”

With the professionalism of a true Imperial soldier under Lord Keelen’s command, her only response was, “Yes ma’am, one moment.” There were no questions, no hesitation. Nothing else Intel was doing in that moment aboard the ship in orbit came first in line across the request of their commanding officers student, save for an order from the man himself.

While she waited, Astrid slipped her mechanics gloves off and stowed them in a pocket again. She examined the back of her hand and noticed that a nail had cracked. So she idly picked at it with her thumb as she hummed to herself quietly.

“Acolyte Blackspyre, we have the vehicle in question in sight and are tracking through local traffic cameras. The vehicle is moving southbound on the public thoroughfare at a high rate of speed. Local enforcement has not been notified, shall I make a call ma’am?”

“Oh no,” she said casually into her comlink, “We don’t want to tip them off that we have eyes on. Can you arrange some ground transportation for me?”

“How great is your need ma’am?”

“Need to put a tracker on that truck before it gets too far out of the city and you can’t follow it anymore, Lieutenant.” She responded sweetly.

“Very well ma’am. We have an asset storehouse not far from your location. It’s a refit garage for equipment used by embedded agents coming off mission. There should be a few modified speeders available there. Sending coordinates to your personal device now. We’ll keep eyes on the target for as long as we can, but I suggest you get to the garage with all haste.”

Astrid was surprised. She knew that Ord Mantell was under Imperial control, but didn’t know that they had spies embedded with the population already. She didn’t even think there was anything worth monitoring on Ord Mantell, but then that probably showed how much she needed to know.

“Affirmative Lieutenant,” she began as she stood and checked her datapad, “Thank-” but the line was already cut. Imperials really weren’t used to having Sith offer gratitude…

According to her pad, the garage was roughly 3.2 kilometers away. She’d taken a taxi to the cafe and it had left some time ago. She doubted she would be able to flag one in suitable time to get to the garage before the truck vanished into the wind. But just as she was thinking about how to get there, an update to her pad chimed and she looked down as her map updated with a red line that went zigzagging between buildings and offered the shortest distance to the garage itself.

“Awww. I should buy Polke a fruit basket…”

Even with the directions available, it was still a hike. So she ran to the edge of the roof and hopped the ledge, collapsing her knees as her feet hit the ground in the alley behind the allegedly “abandoned” building where her new acklay friend was probably still snacking.

Tumbling was something her father had insisted on teaching her early. No matter what you were riding on, inevitably you were going to fall, he’d said. Whether it be on the back of a steed or a speeder bike, or even a high rooftop, she’d been shown the proper way to roll, and the building she’d leapt from was only 2 stories to begin with, so it wasn’t a huge impact on her joints.

If one thing were true to that very moment, it was the fact that Astrid Blackspyre was glad she’d kept in shape, she had a long run ahead of her…