The Knight, Death, and the Devil

Chapter 20: Lost And Found

Marcus Tym liked his job. He didn't particularly like his employers, but it'd been years since he'd actually had to speak to a Hutt face-to-face. Ten years as head of security at their thermoplast plant on Nar Shaddaa, and the worst situation he'd ever dealt with was a gang war that spilled over into one of the cooling stations on his level. A few quick words on the radio to a nearby garrison and three dead Nikto later, the gangs scattered. It wasn't something he'd like to see become a regular occurrence, but he had felt a bit of pride that day at having restored order to the sector he was charged with securing.

Not that he was concerned much with the sector as a whole—gangs had carved it up like a slab of Bantha—since the Hutts only cared about the continued operation of the refinery sitting smack dab in the middle of the multiple tiers of superstructures comprising the Corellian sector. Nor did any gangs try and mess with the Hutts' operations, outside of the incidental intrusion he'd thwarted a few months ago. Those slugs owned the Smugglers' Moon, and to draw their attention was to bring down the wrath of the entire cartel.

So on things went as usual, the Hutts sitting back and getting filthy rich from the liquid thermoplast flux pumped out of the facility, the gangs picking up credits here and there selling drugs and pimping women, and Marcus in between the two worlds making sure they never collided. They might have some spacer kid crawl into a pipe and get killed by one of the periodic heat emissions, forcing Marcus to send out some unlucky bastard to clean up the remains, but he didn't see the night getting any worse than that.

The lights in the small surveillance room shut out, and Marcus stopped pacing about the cramped space where he and his men watched over the facility. Within seconds emergency lighting kicked in, bathing the room in an eerie red glow.

"Sir!" Came a shout to his right. He spun on his heels and walked over to where one of his men sat in front of a wall of monitors, each showing a different security feed from somewhere in the massive complex of pipes, storage tanks, and vats of superheated chemicals. The seated man pointed at one of the screens, and Marcus smoothed out his ruffled uniform as he leaned over and squinted at the small screen.

"What in the name of..." He trailed off, both men watching the feed in bewilderment. On the screen, a brown-haired man and a tall woman strode through the series of corridors leading to the security headquarters in which Marcus and his men stood guard. The pair stopped in front of a security door, and the man reached out with both hands and wrenched it open, throwing the heavy steel slabs to both sides of the hall. The video had no sound to it, but Marcus could hear and feel the impact carry into the room he stood in.

"Countermeasures, now!" He pointed at his subordinate's terminal, and the man hurriedly went to work shutting blast doors and deploying security droids. The two intruders moved from one screen to the next, the man prying open vault-like blast doors with hardly any more difficulty than the first, while the woman beside him used her pistol to take down the bipedal droids deploying from narrow alcoves along the edges of the hallway. The pair were drawing closer to the security room, though he hardly needed to watch the screens for that—each subsequent shake of the building grew louder, making it abundantly clear that they were about to reach them.

Marcus pulled his blaster from its holster and walked to the center of the room, then pointed it at the doorway. Of the four men in the room, he was the only one armed. Once those two— whoever they were—made it through, he was the only thing standing in their way.

The doors wrenched open, flying back into the hallway and Marcus fired blindly into the dimly-lit corridor, wild shots striking the walls further down the passage. As his hand and gun moved about, the woman stepped out from the edge of the hall and calmly took aim at his chest, discharging a single shot into his chest. He fell backwards, his blaster clattering to the floor and the life leaving his eyes.