She halved her throttle and angled the ship upward, a tight arc taking her up and over her pursuer, placing her behind him with a clear shot before he could realise what had happened. Accelerating to full, she opened up with her twin cannons, blowing the V-Wing's engines to pieces and scattering the fighter into fragments, a second before her Toscan 8-Q fighter blasted through the debris.
"Bronze Leader this is Bronze Four, that blastboat has a bead on you..."
"Copy that, Bronze Four" she snapped back; she had her teeth clenched, lost entirely in the world of starfighter combat. Stars spun about her as she pushed the Toscan into a 180 flip, straining the reverse thrusters. She ignored the warning blip on her dashboard, and compensated for the strain once she'd levelled out.
"Bronze Leader, Bronze Four... are you actually heading for that blastboat?"
"Damn kriffin' right I am..." she replied, opening the thrusters to full and employing evasive maneuvers as the Skipray Blastboat opened fire on her. The enemy gunners adapted to her tactics, and a reflexive starboard roll was all that saved her from being vapourised there and then.
"Oh he's good..." she said to herself; she was almost laughing.
"Bronze Leader, this is HQ. Pull up, repeat, pull up".
"It's ok, I've got him..." Kalyn shot back, levelling out and opening with her own cannons. She struck, but not her target; a stray V-Wing had put itself right into her path, its port wing catching her assault, sending it spiralling toward Talus. It burned up in atmosphere, fragmenting and dispersing.
"Bronze Leader, return to base. This op is over". It had meant to be a simple in-and-out operation; an Imperial dignitary, who's name escaped Kalyn since she hadn't read the pre-flight prep, was visiting her home system. Intel had suggested he'd be relatively unguarded, but in the opening salvo's of the battle it had been clear the whole thing had been a ruse to draw out the suspected insurgents operation in the system. It rankled Kalyn, and so she'd pushed her squadron to take out every Imperial they could before things got too hairy.
"Bit busy right now" she snapped through ground teeth, evading blasts from the blastboat and returning fire when she had a clear shot; space had suddenly become so full of debris, it was affecting her sensors. A quick glance at the scope told her Bronze Squadron was making its escape; Blue were still in the fight, but were starting to peel off. Green had disappeared altogether, though in the heat of battle she hadn't noticed if they'd jumped away or been vaped.
Another shot glanced her fighter, and she swore loudly, putting herself into a spin to try and out-maneuver the blastboats gunners; confidant she'd temporarily lost them, she unleashed her fury, hammering at its shields, trying to disable its reactor and leave it sitting dead in the water, when suddenly she was almost jolted from her seat; her console alarmed, read-outs turning red. Her engines had been all but vapourised, by the V-Wing approaching from beneath, and what remained of her propulsion system had ignited her remaining fuel. She was burning up; controls were gone, and she was in a free-spin, angled toward the planet.
"HQ this is Bronze Leader, I'm hit and going down, repeat, I'm hit and going down..."
Static. Her systems were either fried, or the base ship had deemed her tactics as suicidal and jumped to safety to preserve their operation. Either way, she was royally screwed.
"Kriff it..." she growled to herself, and re-secured her crash webbing, checking her helmet's seal was airtight and her emergency oxygen reserves attached.
Talus approached fast; the view in her cockpit turned from stars to planet, stars to planet, each spin turning the looming planet larger and larger. The tell-tale red glow enveloped the nose of her fighter, telling her she was in atmosphere, and she was still spinning fast.
"Ok Kalyn, breathe..." she said to herself. She'd lost her assailant soon after being shot down; either he'd been satisfied enough to let her crash and burn, or he hadn't noticed the critical damage he'd caused to her ship.
Closing her eyes, Kalyn said a silent prayer to whoever was listening, then thumbed her console until it showed her personal log. At least she could record a final message, which might one day find its way to her folks.
The console made a half-hearted bleep, which sounded like a droid trying to be sick, and the only text that appeared was 'Error - Unrecoverable data'.
"Stang!" she swore, as she broke cloud cover and realised just how quickly the ground was coming up. She checked her altitude, the pressure outside, then realised she only had a narrow margin with which to initiate the eject sequence. The ground below seemed mostly flat; luckily, she wasn't about to make planetfall in one of the vast mountain ranges dotted around Talus. With any luck, she'd land somewhere near a town or village.
Fighting the pressure of her freefall, she pushed her hand down to the edge of her seat, found the release lever, and pulled. By instinct, she crossed her arms over her chest, and with a hiss of air, the cockpit seals blew, the canopy rushed away, and the pilots seat rocketed out of the quickly-disentegrating fighter with her strapped inside it.
No sooner had she begun to rise away from the cockpit than she began to fall, back toward the ground. She breathed as slowly and deeply as she could, though her lungs still felt empty and ached for more air. Trees hove into view, and a lake, then some sort of settlement; from up here, she couldn't tell, only that it seemed to be a well fortified area. Then... stang, those are Imperial walkers, she realised, but there was nothing else for it. She grabbed the cord on her crash webbing, and the pilots chair released its chute. Her stomach heavy with dread and her helmet visor slick with condensation, Kalyn felt a little queasy; the more she breathed, the worse it felt. She wasn't even sure if it was oxygen she was sucking down from her reserves, because it sure tasted funny. Everything seemed blurry...
Then it went black.
********
White lights burned at her retinas, as if she were staring into the sun after spending a year underground. She'd blink, were it not for the speculi holding her eyelids open. She didn't know what lasting damage this might cause, and she doubted her captors cared. Afterall, she didn't need her eyes to talk.
But they hadn't even asked her anything as of late. Their infuriating interrogation had ceased, after the billionth time of telling them she couldn't remember anything but crashing. She didn't know what sect of which militia Bronze Squadron belonged to, where the supposed 'insurgent cell she came from' was located, or even what the frack she was doing over Talus in the first place.
Since then, they'd seemed happy to routinely torture her, whether with their optic-shock treatment, the occasional beating from the more unruly of their officers, and once or twice she'd been locked in an echoey room while loud, high pitched noises had been blasted at her, leaving her head ringing for days.
More than a little malnourished, she'd accepted any crummy meal with urgency, knowing it was probably a ploy to ply her before grilling her for information. But again, all there'd been was senseless torture.
She knew, more than anything, she needed to get out of this place and get home, wherever that was. It wasn't Corellia, even though she'd lived there as a child. It was with the people she'd been fighting for before the black-out. The only question that remained was how to make her escape.
As the white lights died, the world still shone bright. For a moment, she thought they'd finally done it, finally blinded her. But slowly, darkness crept around the edges of her vision, and dark shapes resolved themselves into armoured Stormtroopers and a uniformed Officer. Unstrapped and mercilessly dragged from her chair, Kalyn was led by a snare to her cell, and pushed inside. Here, she found a fresh set of prison greys, and a plate of nondescript mush that was supposed to pass for nourishment.
Ignoring both, she huddled in the corner, and massaged her bruised wrists against each other.
"Soon..." she promised herself. Soon she'd get out of here, or die trying.
Added (30 Sep 2010, 11:50 Am)
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"Lieutenant Kalyn Fane, you have been charged as guily for the deaths of five Imperial pilots, good men who gave their life for the service".
The words barely registered. Kalyn's resolve to escape had just gone up a notch. She didn't know whether this was an official proclamation, since she'd never been given the benefit of a trial. But then, from what she could make out, she'd been treated as a terrorist who didn't deserve a trial, so she doubted she'd get one. The Empire, as sensationalist as it was, dealt with terror in the manner it should; swiftly, decisively, and without remorse.
"As this accompanies an act of treason," the Commander continued, "the sentence is death by firing squad, at first light. Have you anything to say?"
Kalyn felt numbness settle in. No... not entirely. A silent rage boiled beneath the surface, rage which fuelled her decision: I'm getting out of here tonight.
After a moments silence, the Commander signalled two troops, who hoisted her to her feet.
"Final meal will be served tonight at 2100 hours. Justice be done" the Commander muttered, and the troopers dragged Kalyn away.
*****
Commander Turin studied the setting sun, from the slit of transparisteel which classed as a window in his cramped office. The outpost was a temporary establishment on Talus, to help CorSec oversee security detail and the like. Turin knew also, that as the duration of his stay increased, so did the likelihood that this was exactly what he'd dreaded it was when he'd arrived. A dead-end, somewhere for an undistinguished officer to cool his heels while playing to the tune that he was actually doing something important.
"TH-3270, tell me..." he muttered, through steepled fingers, elbows propped on his unremarkable black desk, "what do you think she'll do?"
"Sir?" the Stormtrooper asked, as monotone as ever. He seemed unsure, his posture sagging a little. Turin motioned for him to stand at ease.
"Speak freely, soldier. I want to know if my judgement is sound, in the case of Lieutenant Fane".
"Well... sir, she's been here weeks. If she was going to escape, she'd have done so by now".
"True, but now she has an ultimatum; escape, or die" Turin pointed out.
"If she escapes, it could mean a potential for a lot of death" the trooper said, seeming to mull it over. Turin discarded the notion with a wave of his hand.
"Stormtroopers can be replaced" he said flippantly. "Besides, what we could recover of her details says she's a commando and a sniper, so she'll probably do it with minimal casualty, drawing as little attention to herself as possible". He seemed to have also discarded of the notion that Kalyn wouldn't escape.
"So, once she's out, you just follow at a distance til she leads you to her superiors" the trooper said, as if reciting. "And if she still can't remember, even on the outside?"
"Then someone may find her, instead. And if not, she can be silently swept under the carpet and nobody will miss her". And either way, Turin thought to himself, it should be enough to wrangle a promotion away from this outpost.
*****
Kalyn sat once more in silence. The day had gone by with no torture, and she'd had a lot of time to think. A lot of time to plan, to strategise. She knew the layout of the place, having been dragged from one end of it to the other. For the past week, she'd memorised camera locations, patrol routes, likely supply lockers, ventilation access and now felt more than prepared. She had no real plan, other than to get out with minimal fuss.
She slowly chewed on a piece of bantha steak; it was good, better than anything she'd had since waking up here. For a final meal, even for a supposed terrorist, the Imperials didn't cut costs. She supposed it was a simple courtesy, a gesture of goodwill. Yeah, and in the morning you'll hope I stand there nice and serene while you put a bolt through my brain.
She examined her steak knife, catching glimpses of her haggard reflection. It was curious that they'd even allow her a knife, she thought. Perhaps they didn't realise that they hadn't completely stamped the fight out of her. When the time came, that steak knife was her escape route; she just had to be sure she was ready to act as decisively and mercilessly as her captors were.
Added (08 Oct 2010, 10:43 Am)
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2130 Hours
Talus Imperial Outpost
She poked gingerly at her food, which had begun to dry out and had long gone cold. Devoid of expression and staring off into the darkness of her cell, Kalyn raised a bloodied hand, forking some of the bantha steak into her mouth.
She'd killed before, but this felt different. There was no safety net of distance, no clean and easy shot to the head to put her mind at rest. The guard who had come to retrieve her plate, not expecting her to be hidden beside the door, had struggled right up until his dying breath. She'd seen the colour leave his face, heard him choking on his own blood even as he tried to pin her to the wall and keep her from escaping. Every time he'd moved, she'd forced the blade deeper into his throat, in blind panic over the childish notion that allowing the blade to come free might allow the guard to regain his strength.
When he'd sagged to the floor, so too had Kalyn. An hour had passed, then two. Still nobody came. Still she barely registered that fact.
And then it had dawned on her that she was hungry, and bloodied knife or no, she really should eat her steak before making her escape. And so she sat, in silence, the shadows closing in on her, and ate. The more she chewed, the hungrier she became; she hadn't eaten in days. She wolfed her food down, chewing noisily and not having to care for she had no company but her conscience. And right now, she didn't want to listen to the voice in her head, the one telling her she was a monster for killing a man that way, that she had no hope of escaping, that there was nobody out there waiting for her to come home.
She shut her conscience out, and finally rose, surprised at how shaky her legs still were. She closed her eyes and counted to three; then, tucking the steak knife in the waistband of her prison greys, she walked out of her open door and into a rather bland corridor. There were no decorations, just a gunmetal grille floor and white-grey walls. She recognised it as the kind of flat-pack structure that was manufactured for hasty construction and, if necessary, relocation. She imagined that the many corridors she'd been dragged down were, infact, connectors from one pre-fab to another.
Putting this aside in her mind, she took a left, recalling seeing a weapons locker in the same block when she'd been dragged from her cell to her first ever torture session. Curiously, the room beyond was unguarded. She guessed that the facility was low-priority, and that they only could afford one guard per rota. Deciding not to question her luck, she approached the weapons locker, rammed her knife into the old-fashioned manual lock, and jiggled it around until she heard the tell-tale 'click'. With one foot, she tapped the door, and it swung open revealing racks of E-11's, as well as sets of Stormtrooper armour, all neatly lined in the cramped space.
Without hesitation, she hastily removed her prison overalls, and picked out a black bodyglove, before pulling on pieces of armour. Some of it was too big, the breastplate a little tight, but she'd expected it; the Empire hadn't designed them with women in mind, it seemed. She tried on a helmet, and instantly discarded it; there was way too much on its HUD for her liking, not to mention the feeling of claustrophobia. Pulling her hair back into a knot, she picked an E-11 and left the locker, heading to the next room. It turned out not to be a room, but a corridor, occupied only by a single terminal. She activated it, and though she had no clearance code to delve into its files, the home screen was a map of the facility. There were five pre-fabricated buildings, all but two of them joined, forming an open ring around a central watch tower. The entire lot was surrounded by a hexagon of barriers, each with turrets at either end. She assumed there'd also be a couple of walkers guarding the area, and didn't dare to imagine how many troopers.
A noise from behind her made her bolt toward the end of the corridor, and as she entered the next pre-fab, she paused to consider just how easy this was. There was nobody around, though she recognised where she was; the interrogation quarter, a building dedicated to the torture and questioning of prisoners. Whenever she'd been here before, it was always bustling with life.
"Maybe they ran out of questions to ask..." she said to herself, relaxing her grip on her E-11.
"Who's there?" a voice rang out, and a Stormtrooper burst out from around a corner. Stang, she thought, just when this was getting good.
"Hi" she said, smiling through her teeth, even offering a wave. Mentally, she kicked herself.
"Command this is TK-143, Lieutenant Fane has escaped, repeat..."
Kalyn shot him, twice, in the chest, cursing herself for not doing so straight away. She should have realised those helmets had internal comm-links. As she stepped over the corpse, a low, wailing alarm began to ring out, and red overhead lights flashed. Kalyn picked up the pace, rushing through the building and the next corridor, then again through what seemed to be a simple reception area, and before she knew it, she'd burst out onto soft ground.
She felt blasters train on her, as she stood in the proverbial search light. A quick scan of the perimeter walls and the central watch tower proved fruitless, as she could see little in this darkness.
"Shoulda worn the damn helmet..." she scolded herself, but there was nothing for it. She could either run and risk getting shot, or stay here and either definately get shot, or get caught. And then in the morning, be shackled to a wall and then get shot anyway. Only one option presented opportunity for survival. She ran.
