Messenger of Death

[Vega Van-Derveld]

Continued from 'Original Sin'...

As the landing struts of his shuttle touched down within the belly of the Whaladon, Vega Van-Derveld sat in the dark of the ships cockpit and indulged in a private moment of relish. The security co-ordinates which had allowed him to infiltrate one of the most heavily guarded vessels within the Wheel had been accepted without question, his cover-story – that he was an Alliance specialist arriving to assist in essential maintenance – had not been challenged.

It was exactly as Darth Acera had planned.

There were men waiting to welcome him as he descended the shuttles boarding ramp, their attention divided between the new arrival and data cards of information that they were examining. Van-Derveld's footsteps echoed heavily as he lurched down the ramp, something almost arachnid to his gait. Awareness creeping over them, the Alliance crew felt their gazes pulled away from their data cards to the figure approaching them. His skin was white, his eyes as cold and empty as space and in his hand he carried a lightsaber.

With a snap-hiss the blood-red blade came to life.

Ripples of fear spread through the hangar as shocking realisation dawned upon those closest to Vega's shuttle – but he was on them before they could react. The rancid scent of burnt flesh filled his nostrils, thrilled his senses, as he struck down one then two, the third struggling to get away as a concussive burst of telekinetic energy slammed into his back and sent him sprawling on his stomach.

The messenger of death spoke with a hollow voice, his words laced with the venomous power of the Dark Side:

“Take me to the Jedi.”

[Akasha Khan]

Akasha Khan felt dizzy for a moment, and she reached one paw out to steady herself against the corridor wall. The Orryxians had a proverb to describe that inexplicable feeling of dread that came over a being without warning - The predator's footsteps in your footprints. The analog in Basic was something like someone just stepped over my grave. Akasha was not the most sensitive of adepts on the Wheel, but she knew without a doubt that something was terribly wrong.

Her heartrate quickened, and the young Orryxian padded onward, giving wary glances to a pair of engineers walking back the other way. And then her sensitive ears picked up the telltale thrum of an ignited lightsaber from the hangar deck just down the corridor. Was someone sparring in there?

The black-furred felinoid ventured forward, scratching absent-mindedly at her burgundy vest where it laid over the hairless scar that an orbalisk had left in the center of her chest. When she reached the door to the hangar deck, she gripped the bulkhead frame with one paw and cautiously peeked her head around to look inside.

[Vega Van-Derveld]

The deck hand scrabbled backwards on his elbows, desperate to put whatever futile distance he could between himself and the monster bearing down on him. Vega slammed his mind against that of his prey, invading his thoughts and overpowering his emotions with primal fear.

“The Jedi.”

The words were said without feeling, voiced in an artificial synthetic drone, but they sounded to the deck hand like a demand. To punctuate his point, the Sith drove the tip of his lightsaber down into the poor wretches thigh, boring a scorching hole through flesh and bone alike. White-hot pain seared through his victims thoughts, like purifying flames burning away everything but the primal urge to escape and – prompted by the Sith's words – the image of the people who might save him from his torment: the Jedi. Vega fed on his frantic emotions and the Dark Side rushed through him. It gave him strength and sharpened his senses, expanding his awareness until it met with the next living thing that lay in his path.

With a rasping hiss, he raked one hand through the air and snatched at the tendrils of the Dark Side, willing them to ensnare Akasha Khan and tear her out of her hiding place.

[Akasha Khan]

Akasha shrieked as she was seized by an invisible force and pulled into the hangar. She grabbed madly at the bulkhead, but her paws slipped off the durasteel, and she fell flat onto the hard deckplates. Desperately she tried to dig her claws into the floor, but her clawtips only scored at the paint on the durasteel as she slid inexorably toward the spectral monster of flesh and metal.

The Orryxian twisted to look back over her shoulder at the intruder, her ears pinned back and all her fur standing on end, and she saw the cold, sneering hatred on the Darksider's face. She knew he was not like Idesca, who was looking for a convert - this man would kill her as soon as she was in range of his baleful red blade.

With a snarl of mad desperation, she conjured a flaming orb of Destruction and sent it hissing at his chest.

[Vega Van-Derveld]

With the ball of flame roaring towards him, Van-Derveld lashed one hand to his left – releasing his hold on the feline and hurling a concussive burst of telekinetic energy into her body in the same instant. If the blow connected, she'd been rolled over and over like a ragdoll.

Bending at the knees, the Sith launched himself into the air and landed with an almighty clang of metal against metal on top of the shuttle he'd arrived in. The impact of his landing sent shattering fault-lines through the transparisteel view-port. The craft shook beneath Vega as the orb of Destruction bit into its hull-plating and the parts beneath it, which spat sparks as the unnatural fire raged through them. The shuttle wouldn't be space-worthy with a gaping hole like that in it – but that fact was far from Vega's mind as he sprung off the canopy to the deck floor and began to sprint towards the doorway that Akasha had first emerged through.

As he neared the exit, a shrieking Astromech droid ahead tried to wheel its way into the cover of a bulkhead but Vega swiped a hand at it, sending the droid spinning wildly into the air behind him as an improvised projectile weapon.

[Akasha Khan]

Akasha went tumbling over the deckplates, and she only just found her feet when the unlucky R4 unit came screaming her way. She sprung straight up in the air as the droid struck the deck beneath her and skidded past on a trail of sparks, and she landed nimbly on all four paws. The pale apparition was already dashing out of the hangar and into the corridors of the Whaladon.

Adrenalin roared in the Orryxian's ears with a force she hadn't felt since her trials on Onderon. He'd had a lightsaber, and he was better trained in the arts of the Force than she was. Which meant she'd only just escaped a very messy and violent death.

Part of her thought, Thank Maiur. Another part said, What am I, then, chopped nerfsteak?

It was only when she rose to her feet that it settled on her like a storm on the Orryxian steppes. There was a Sith. A murderer. On the Wheel. On a ship with younglings, fellow padawans. Kala.

Akasha rushed to the comm. panel sitting next to the hangar door and punched the emergency key. It glowed, but there was no answer. She hit it again. Then she pounded on it furiously until a bored-sounding voice responded from the bridge: "Yes?"

"Sith," Akasha gasped - she hadn't even realized she was out of breath. "There's a Sith on the ship. He's heading for the living quarters."

The crewman on the other end shifted audibly. "What?"

"There's a Sith onboard, you soft-skulled evolutionary throwback!" Akasha snarled. "Sound the alarm, or whatever it is you do!"

She jumped back from the panel and glanced around the hangar, just in case he might have any accomplices - she only saw two dock hands brutally shorn in half, the third groaning and trying to lift himself from the deck on what looked like a broken arm. Akasha's ears flattened against her head. There was no way she could stop this monster by herself. The Orryxian snatched the Echani fighting staff from her belt and rushed out into the corridor, desperate to find help.

[Navaria Tarkin]

It only took hours for the precarious safety of The Wheel to be tossed into the uncertainty that the Dark Side had cloaked with the new that Master Vymes had brought the Council. There was still much to deliberate and Daria and Navaria were already discussing strategies in protecting their own as they walked down the corridor, already steeling themselves in what was to come with the Republic. They had to be informed of what was at stake now that it was revealed the General Dan was confirmed to be a Sith, let alone one of their own ranks deceiving them so easily under the influence of Darth Acera ... she walked amongst them, even aided both her and Daria on personal matters. How could she not have sense that s'Ilancy was being corrupted from an outside influence?

Suddenly she stopped and grabbed Daria by the arm, squeezing it. "Do you sense that?"

Dread washed over her and attempted to drown the Jedi Master in despair but despite the urgency of this danger, Navaria kept her composure - her mind clear.

That was when the klaxons rang and priority one alerts were blasted over the ship's intercom.

"PRIORITY ALERT ZETA. ALL SECURITY PERSONAL TO LEVEL 3, SECTION 15B. WE ARE UNDER ATTACK BY UNKNOWN SITH. ALL NON-NONESSENTIAL PERSONAL ARE TO RETREAT AND STAY OUT OF THE AREA UNTIL CLEAR. I REPEAT THIS IS A PRIORITY ALERT ZETA...."

"It's him," Navaria said and Daria would know exactly to whom in which she was referring. "This has to be Acera's doing." Unless who they were facing was Darth Acera. Questions that needed answering but action had to be implemented now.

Letting go of Daria, Navaria was already moving in the direction of the nearest lift that would bring her closer to an old nemesis ...

[Bryna Belargic]

The blare of the klaxons had woken Bryna Belargic from a restless nightmare of Coruscant wreathed in fire. Startled, she'd slammed her hand down onto the bed-side locker where he lightsaber lay and ignited the blue-green blade before her eyes were even half open. The sudden awakening and the sound of sirens had set her pulse racing, but it was the disturbance that she felt in the Force which sent her stumbling out of bed, desperately pulling on whatever clothes she could lay her hands on.

“This is not happening, this is not happening-” Moving towards the source of the chaos, Bryna shoved her way past a pair of crewmen just in time to see a turbolift in the wall to her right slide open. Two familiar figures moved quickly into view.

“Find us once the younglings are safe,” Master Tarkin said to Master Nytherciria as they strode out of the lift, lightsabers already in their hands. “I can hold him off until we know they're secure.”

Daria gave a crisp nod and broke off in one direction whilst Navaria turned towards the corridors that would lead to the Whaladon's hangar bay.

“Master!” Bryna jogged to Navaria's side and immediately fell in step alongside her master and mentor, her own lightsaber disengaged for now but gripped tightly in one fist. “Master, I recognise how this Sith feels. I think I've fought him before, in my time.”

[Ilias Nytrau]

It was just when he finshed his rounds in the medbay that the stink reached him and yanked his attentions from signing off on his rounds and mentally going over Kala's training plan for the day. For moments, it was disorienting, a thickness of dark presence he had not personally encountered for some 20 years, perhaps more. It was not a familiar one - the familiar ones seemed to have faded away with the passing of time - but it nearly made the halfbreed drop the datapad the five feet or so it would travel from his hands to the deck, nonetheless. Another moment to compose himself and urge the regular medbay staff to lock themselves in for safety just as the alarms began to sound off.

Sith. On board. His brow furrowed in the slightest of confusions. How?

Not that the 'how' mattered as he exited the medbay and began rushing down the corridor, which served at that moment in time to be a wall against a rather fast-moving blur of fur. It elicited a measure of oof from the warrior-healer as he absorbed the impact and steadied the familiar Orryxian, lowering himself to her level. He grimaced a fair degree as the impact had taken him square in the stomach.

"Akasha! Akasha, calm yourself, child! This panic will not serve well." All he could get out of her was some panicked verbalizations about... "Sith. I know, I know! A vile stench in the Force I have ever had the displeasure to smell."

A whisp of the stench lingered on her and caused something hungry to stir inside him. He held Kala's black-furred roommate by both arms and made eye contact. "You have seen...?"

[Akasha Khan]

"Who's panicking?" Akasha said between heaving breaths. She tried to jerk her arms away as a matter of reflex, but the knight held on, and her heart started pounding just a little less frantically.

The Orryxian swallowed back her fight-or-flight instinct and looked Ilias in the eye. "In the hangar," she said. "He was humanoid, but he looked half machine and half... dead. He has a lightsaber, and he's stronger in telekinesis than I am. So, what do we do?"

[Ilias Nytrau]

"And where is he headed..." The knight wondered, half curious yet half seeking with the Force and the detailed memory of the layout of the Whaladon. Pinpointing the source of the stench and his direction brought on a great burden of worry for the knight and pushed him to act. He flicked his eyes back to the furred face of the girl.

"We find the quickest way to cut him off before he reaches his destination and hope we are not the only ones trying to head him off. What I want you to do when we get there is be with the other young and urge their calm and let them not fear." He smiled a grim smile. "Perhaps Kala might be of some help in this respect."

Ilias released the Orryxian's arms and stood up, scanning and listening for a brief moment. He then started off in the opposite direction of the one in which he had been headed when he had ran stomach to furball into Akasha, and he did not look back save for to urge Akasha into action.

"Now come, my young Orryxian friend! There is a faster way to where our adversary is headed. This vessel, thankfully, has many useful secrets."

[Zem Vymes]

Zem had brought ill omens with him, back to a temporary home and hearth, and back to friends and family who deserved better. There was no sin in being the messenger, but the burden still weighed heavily on him, as he felt it imperative that he become the instrument of its resolution.

Alone in meditation, the songs of the Force a Jedi could feel allowed one to explore self, and beyond self. You listened, and did not speak. It took a patience that demanded discipline. What you heard was often subtle, and required time to discern. There were other times that it did not.

Zem's meditation broke a full minute before the klaxon sounded. He was on his feet, lightsaber in hand, and out of the door of his quarters when the alarm sounded moments too late for too many

There may not be time to undo Darth Decepis's evil, or Darth Acera's betrayal, but now was the time to balance the threat before them. And this threat felt intimate. The corruptions of the Force he could feel from the hangar bay bore the feral urgency he recognized in style and philosophy as a tenet of his former lupine student.

His pace quickened. The enemy was approaching the his direction; heading for the living quarters. Though his eyes bore him no witness around a blind turn in the hallway, his instincts demanded action NOW and with all of the inequities and tyrannies they faced, the scales would right themselves HERE.

With righteous vindication as his fuel, he drew upon the Force. If his heart were a cannon, he would fire upon what rounded that corner with the grim determination to settle all accounts, a primal blast of energy that would leave nothing on its feet.

[Vega Van-Derveld]

The clamor of the klaxons filled the ships corridors, deafeningly loud, making its claustrophobic walkways all the more oppressive. Vega rounded one hallway corner with serpentine speed and a hiss sucked through vile, off-white teeth. Within seconds of laying eyes on Zem Vymes, a burst of energy propelled him through the distance between them, his feet barely touching the deck-plating as he charged into a full-body collision with the old Jedi.

[Charlotte Tur'enne]

It was the same dream she had been having... she was walking, prowling through the darkened bowels of a ship she had never seen before but somehow knew every inch of. Fear could practically be tasted in the air, it signaled her prey's location before she came upon the unsuspecting individual. Their features were blurred in the vision, unimportant as she raised them into the air and slammed them against the opposing wall, lingering only to dip fingertips into the broken figure's blood and smear them across her face in a tribute of the carnage to come. But they were on to her now. Aware of her coming... and they had set off the alarms.

Alarms that grew louder and louder until Charlotte found herself sitting upright and glaring hazily at a panel above the door she was sure the sound was coming from. Frakking starships... The adrenaline surge that had threatened to take hold of her body had to be silenced. Even if there was an attack in progress, it was something for the flight crews to deal with. There wasn't a damn thing a soldier could do about it. Charlotte grumbled, cursing Dashiel for bringing her to this place once again as she pulled on the fatigues she had arrived in. Some part of her was refusing to get too cozy in this place, even if it was day three without any word from command on when her and Starborn would be returning home.

As the door to her temporary quarters slid open, the klaxons seemed to dull, as if she was suddenly detached from all of it. It was as if everything had suddenly changed to painful slow motion as she turned down the hall to see the Jedi that she and Dash had escorted to The Wheel and baring down on Vymes was a creature she instantly recognized though had never actually seen before. How strange it was, though, to not be seeing everything from his perspective.

[Navaria Tarkin]

Bryna's appearance wasn't surprising to the Jedi Master, considering whom had violated the sanctity of the Wheel.

"As have I," she quickly informed and moved past the rush of military personal that was evacuating the area. "Thus far he has attempted to assassinate my sister and almost cost me Master Nytherciria. His cruelty knows no limitations."

Time had passed but the Dark Side was even stronger with Vega this day. Coldness emanating from his use of power grew only more potent as the two of them forged on. Eventually the crash of lightsabers hit their ears and only grew more intense as they moved closer. Picking up the pace, Navaria steadied herself for the inevitable confrontation only to sense confusion nearby.

"Charlotte?" came the perplexed response from the Jedi Master. "Why haven't you evacuated?"

With her lightsaber hilt at the ready, Navaria motion for the Republic operative to retreat. "Go. Now!"

[Zem Vymes]

The unstoppable force and the immovable object. The effect of each other's attack cancelled out the other, a zero sum stalemate that brought the two mortal enemies directly to the other. The energy shed from their efforts took the ship itself as a casualty, as the durasteel of the floor, corridors, and ceiling bent and groaned with the explosive force.

In the midst of the destruction, Zem Vymes and Vega Van Derveld grappled, a contest without grace but with urgency, fury, and immediacy. Unable to separate from each other to attempt a decisive blow, they resorted to a tangle of body shots, contorting rolls, and any means at their disposal.

[Vega Van-Derveld]

In the cramped confines of the corridors, there was no room for finesse but that suited Vega just fine. In close quarters, he could do more than just sense the fear in his enemy. He could see it in their eyes, smell in the foetid stench of their sweat. He could wring the life out of the old Jedi with his bare hands and watch him slip into the netherworld of the Force knowing that all his effort had been for nothing.

As if spurred on by the foolish notion that there still was hope, Vymes let loose with a burst of energy that threatened to hurl Vega crashing backwards into a bulkhead. Instead of being carried by the wave he rode it. Landing at the opposite end of the hallway with a clatter of metal grating under foot, the Sith's attention was snatched away from Zem to an unexpected sight.

He thrust one hand at Charlotte Tur'enne – darkness slamming into her mind, forcing open the connection that had unexpectedly formed between them on Nelvaan. His malice became hers, overwhelming all rational thought with pure fury that would drive her into an uncontrollable rage.

Vega saw who was running up behind Tur'enne and, head rolling back, bared his teeth in a macabre half-snarl, half-grin: “Tarkin!”

[Charlotte Tur'enne]

The scream that left her was purely feral, the pain horrendous...

Both ended before she had any time to really understand them and all that was left was nothing that had once been the smug, somewhat nervous, Rebel officer. All that remained was the anger. It didn't matter who it was directed at, it was blinding, driven, hungry.

The woman stood there, breathing heavily before a voice brought instant clarity to everything. Whether Van-Derveld meant it or not, his shout had served as a demand, one that couldn't be ignored.

The combat blade that was ever present, strapped to the side of her calf just above the top of her boots was drawn and the girl launched herself at the Jedi Master. Charlotte could care less what it was that Navaria Tarkin had done, all that mattered now was her death.

[Zem Vymes]

Zem marched forward purposefully.

"The fight's with me, you cur!"

His fist tightned, and the utilitarian metal grating that made up the corridor's floor drew up suddenly around the Lupine's artificial legs, as if the durasteel was made of origami. Accelerating his pace, his lightsaber was in his hand in the blink of an eye, as he sought to liberate Vega from the metal rosebud...from the waist up.

[Akasha Khan]

Somewhere behind the Force-powered melee, a trapezoidal panel burst from the wall, and Akasha stumbled out of the maintenance crawlspace that she and Ilias had just rushed through and into the corridor. At first she turned in the direction of the crackling of lightsaber blades, but then her danger sense warned her of a more impending threat from behind.

Akasha whirled around to see a blonde woman with a large knife and a mask of frothing rage bearing down on her like a charging reek. With a cry, the petite Orryxian female turned her fighting staff sideways and squeezed.

What had been a featureless white cylinder the breadth of her paw expanded violently in both directions into a tapering five-foot staff. She managed to ward off Charlotte's knife, but the impact of the charging woman sent Akasha careening backwards toward Navaria.