Nova Flare (slow updates)

Drowess

Ben silently studied the brooding drowess out of the corner of his eye as they marched across the slowly rising landing pad towards the small cutter parked at its heart.  The great circular plate of blast-proof ceramic alloy made the cutter, a five-man ship built more for speed than comfort, look like a toy when compared to its leviathan mass.  Yet, on silent grav lifts, it eased out of the castle's bowels as though it were a gliding falcon, effortlessly hanging in space and lifted by the slightest of winds.

The landing pad's marvels, however, were lost on the wiry smuggler as he continued his covert surveillance.  Hand on the hilt of her low-slung blaster, Kahri was the picture of cobalt nonchalance, showing none of her earlier fury at perceived insult, her shock of white hair, standing in tightly clustered spikes from the top of her head, unmoving as she moved with perfect balance.  So he was caught completely off-guard when she suddenly spoke, her throaty Common without accent.

"Before we embark to do my mistress' bidding, let's get one thing clear, human."  She turned to look up and over at him, the drowess only a handspan shorter than Ben, spiked hair notwithstanding.

"Insult me like that again, and I'll gut you like a fish and eat your still beating heart while you watch me with dying eyes."  Then she was looking straight forward again, striding without missing a step, her soft-soled knee boots silent on the ceramic underfoot.

Ben wasn't sure whether it was what she said that chilled him most, the promise of a horrible death delivered with absolute certainty.  Or that she made the promise in the same conversational tone most used to discuss the weather.  Either way, he didn't feel entirely comfortable despite the heavy blaster nestled in his armpit until he had eased away from the powerful drowess, putting nearly two metres between them by the time they had reached the cutter's burnished side.

Without looking at the nervous human, Kahri touched something on one of her heavy leather bracers that both sheathed her forearms and formed finger-less gloves over her hands and looked expectantly at the cutter's hull.  And was rewarded by a small panel sliding aside to reveal a touch pad and an ocular reader, strangely technological despite the two of them standing in the midst of a high sage's center of magical power.  Watching the dark skinned woman access the data panel to open a recessed door in the cutter's side, Ben grimaced.  There was no question who was in charge here and it certainly wasn't him.  Sighing yet again, he followed Kahri into the cutter's dark interior, the door hissing closed behind him.

As it turned out, the dark elf proved to be a more than competent pilot, easily guiding the cutter off the planet's surface and into the dark velvet of space without a bump.  A quick access of the ship's nav database and they were jumping to hyperspace, destination: Beta Zane and a rendezvous with Ben's Union contact.

With the doppler-shifting rainbow of hyperspace streaming by the cockpit's windows, Ben dropped into a sling seat set into the wall of the minuscule crew cabin, just behind the cockpit and stared at the curved ceiling.  Yet his eyes were unseeing as he mulled over the rapid-fire events that had enveloped him since arriving on the asteroid to meet with what he thought were perspective clients.  The ridiculously juicy offer, the flight to Fenril Station, the unsettling meeting with the Union and their mind-searing data, the subsequent flight and rescue, ... it was almost more than his mind could absorb.

Ben grimaced.  And it wasn't even close to being done.  His own ship in storage on  Astorin IV, awaiting his return from Fenril Station, he was now the unwilling ward of the high sages, escorted by a grim, death-dealing fantasy-made-flesh creature of sex and beauty, to meet with a contact he had never seen, on a planet he had never visited before.  

To make it worse, he was still involved in a situation any sane sentient would turn their back on and run as hard as they could away from it.  To be exact, he was running towards it, albeit reluctantly, his reaffirmed mission serving both the Determined Union of Mundane Alien Sub Species and the high sages.  'Well, one high sage, anyway,' he darkly mused.

Kudos to Bronwyn, or whatever her name was, for setting things up to perfectly trap him into doing her bidding.  Bloody hell, he hadn't been so well maneuvered since that one job in the Phades Asteroid Belt in the Damata System a couple years back.  'Covert operative?  Me??  How the frakin' hell am I going to pull this off?  I'm just a bloody smuggler, for frak's sake!'  He silently shouted into the darkness of his own mind.  

What annoyed him the most was that if he didn't, the whole game: mundanes, technomages, high sages, pretty much everybody, were going to burn in the fires of artificial novas, victims of the technomages' overwhelming desire to be the most powerful force in the known galaxy.

Oddly the thought brought a nervous giggle bubbling to his lips.  The fate of the known galaxy, resting on the shoulders of a bedraggled, out-of-luck human smuggler; if it wasn't actually happening to him, he would've thought it a conjuration of a mind tripped out on synapse burners.

Hearing the strange sound, Kahri glanced over her shoulder at the bemused human and his baggy clothes, looking entirely uncomfortable in the web sling against the wall.  

Strange that the mistress would pick such a frail and useless looking creature as the hope of the high sages against the technomages.  He looked as if he'd lose his mind at any moment.  Mentally she shrugged as she turned back to her instruments.  

As long as the human losing his mind didn't interfere with the mission, she was okay with it.  If it did, she'd just kill him and find the technomage weapon herself.  A simple solution to a simple problem, as many things were in the mind of a dark elf.