Before - Legends Skip of Breath (OCs, Spring 2021 Challenge)

Title: Skip of Breath
Author: Mechalich
Timeframe: Ductavis Era (9,905 BBY)
Characters: Decima (OC)
Genre: Science Fiction, Adventure, Genetic Engineering
Keywords: Assassin, Near-human
Summary: Decima struggles to survive a criminal-mediated interruption to her work
Notes: Decima is a viewpoint character in Heritage, Encoded. This is a minor companion piece to that work, but the story should not require any additional outside context. All comments, including criticism, are encouraged.


Skip of Breath

The Yardmaster sent an assassin to kill her on the sixth day after her arrival. Decima would later be impressed by the restraint and patience such a move implied; she’d expected the attack far sooner.

She was working deep down in the bowels of the data archive hub at Fifteen-Plus-Twenty, an isolated position in the industrial zones. Shadowy and cramped, filled with towering servers several meters high, it welcomed no living presence. Loud electronic humming and the whirr of powerful cooling fans filled the air with an omnipresent thrum. All other sounds lay buried beneath this ambient noise, perfect concealment for a stealth approach.

The violent rapport unleashed by a storm of high-powered slugs launched from the mouth of a high-grade submachinegun cut through the white noise, the crack of a thunderhead across the plains.

Pure luck saved her from that first fusillade. She’d called for a set of data spikes to pierce the defenses of her targeted console, and her courier droid crossed behind her to bring them within reach at the critical moment.

Little more than a toolbox welded atop four spider-legs and a sensor housing, it’s boxy frame nevertheless intercepted the high-speed vectors.

Supersonic cylinders of hardened metal spattered against the alloyed panels of the toolbox. Ricochets sprayed in every direction, marched a scatterplot across the protective clear ceramic girding the surrounding databank hulks. Sparks ignited across the room, a surreal burst of illumination.

The droid howled, a liquid hiss of high-pitched electronic pain as slugs perforated its superstructure. It bucked and twitched in the next moment, automated systems fired erratically by the penetration of shrapnel across its circuits. A brief spasm only before its body, smoldering and gutted, collapsed to the floor.

Decima did not observe this destruction. She had was already gone, launched into a dash around the corner at the first detonation. She accelerated to full speed in three steps, bolted along a heedless rush into the maze-like depths of the archive’s contorted passageways. Twisting and branching trackways arrayed according to bizarre mathematics, they offered narrow and confined routes only. Countless turns, no long straightaways, carried her through a myriad set of directions, impossible to trace the path.

Gaps, places where maintenance droids removed burned out storage banks, hung loose arrays of power cables, or placed floor-level fans, allowed intermittent glimpses across the cold, sterile expanse. Such portal allowed the assassin to track his quarry, and to send pursuing enfilades hunting for Decima’s flesh. Scrambling just barely ahead of his aim, she left a trail of shattered glass and smoking cables behind.

Never stopping, never slowing, she ran down those corridors. She vaulted maintenance droids in her path with smooth hurdles; squeezed through narrow straights between piled spare parts with slick slides. Nothing allowed to impede ceaseless motion, she gave everything over to speed. Even the small pistol carried in her right hand received no chance to aim. All counterfire blind, quick taps launched at flickering glimpses, no chance to register a hit.

Run. Run. Run. Instincts shouted through her brain, sent power to her muscles, trampled across her nerves. The song of her species, a continual demand for motion. Long smooth strides propelled her rapidly. Arms joined together with the stenciled soles of her shoes to whip her around corners without losing momentum.

The killer pursued. Sharp clangs of armored boots upon plated floor tiles revealed his presence. Weapons clanged against the humming servers.

Decima, mouth held wide open, could not smile, but inside she reveled in the knowledge of this action, this mistake.

The assassin could only be human. The Bloody Yard gang held hatred of aliens at the very core of its criminal purpose. They would never rely on a killer of any other species.

No Human ought to pursue a Rucel.

Heartbeat by heartbeat, Decima counted out the passage of time through her mad sprint. Despite pressing for every bit of desperate speed her body could supply the muscle at her core kept to a steady rate. Oxygen flooded steady through her blood, air drawn in through the nose and pushed out through the mouth by air sacks hidden beneath her spine and within her ribs. No mammalian huff and puff for her, instead an unceasing avian flow pushed her onward.

Her plan to stay forever beyond the reach of her enemy worked perfectly for four minutes.

Then she ran out of maze.

She crashed out between two servers and found herself face to face with a smooth, metal-coated concrete wall. She did not stop, of course, but turned and ran down the exterior passage all the same. Desperately she searched for another entry point back into the clustered electronic embankment.

Shifting shadows ahead attended an aperture, almost close enough. Long strides and raised heels propelled her with supple swiftness, but no speed cleared the gap. Distance closed too slow.

From behind the assassin lurched free of the maze in turn. Careening uncontrolled, his heavy body slammed hard into the wall. Plated shock armor took the impact. A mighty whump echoed down the hallway in indication of this collision. A low, soft signal of doom, it preceded percussive discharge.

Without hesitation, Decima threw herself to the floor. She rolled and slid, felt the impact ripple through her bones, explode across her muscles in a rain of low-key bruises at a stroke. Even as the tiles grabbed her jumpsuit and pulled it burning hot against her skin she turned, spun about onto her back. Neck bent, she stared into the face of the oncoming assassin.

The first burst sprayed a rain of supersonic metal above her head. Quick hands corrected the second, tracked tracers along the floor, walked their way toward her.

Too short.

Lighter than a human, and with a greater sprinting speed than even the best of their athletes, Decima slid faster and further across the floor. Distance greater than her foe anticipated.

The last shot embedded two centimeters short of her left heel.

A consummate professional, the assassin dropped his magazine and moved to reload instantly.

Decima held her pistol in both hands and took aim. No great marksman, the motion of her arms felt frozen in place, far too slow to find the line in time.

Gloved hands ripped a replacement magazine from the belt. It rose with swift surety toward the dark aperture at the base of the dark black submachinegun. The opposite hand steadied the weapon, ready to launch death the moment supply restored.

Endurance intervened. Lungs heaving, blood depleted of oxygen, muscles starved of glucose lacked the power to sustain fine-tuned muscle memory.

His hand twitched once, uncontrolled.

The magazine clipped the edge. It slid past, not slotted in.

Decima lined her sight against the enemy’s visor, the one sure vulnerable point in his body armor, and pulled the trigger.

Polyplast shattered. A dark star sprouted beneath broken cover. The body bent and tumbled forward.

Decima shot three times more. Holes pierced through the exposed skull of the helmet until her own magazine emptied, just to be sure.

“One twitch,” her head shook as she stood. Adrenalin set her bouncing back and forth from one leg to the other. “Too close.”

Pain rippled across her hips and roved up her spine as she moved. The legacy of her brutal slide only beginning to make itself felt against her spindly bone structure. Her shoulders crackled too, shocked by the roll and too many tight corners. Soon the brown skin would darken with a map of bruising.

She stepped up to the fallen gunman and stripped away goggles and helmet. From the harness strapped to her lower back she extracted the spearpoint blade resting there. Razor sharp, it sliced through armor joins and ties easily as she stripped away protection to clear the neck and roll over the body. A ruined face stared up at her, frozen in a rictus mix of rage and terror.

No remorse struck her as she examined the remains. Only the idle thought that this man had been a fool to follow her. Humans might be a superior species to her own, but in the art of persistence killing Rucels were the masters. Truly, a human ought to know better.

A single twist on her wrist, gripped at the right point, trigger the hidden telescoping mechanism within her spear. It burst out in sections to fasten together at its full two-meter length, reinforced alloy supporting the leaf-shaped blade. She stepped back and braced her frame for maximum leverage.

She resolved to handle the matter in one strike. Sore as she was, the mere prospect of sawing away the head made her ache.

Spearhead rose smoothly. It crashed down in a broad circular arc.

Later that day the Yardmaster received a courier droid carrying a small box, stained a deep crimson.

Decima felt it unnecessary to append a note.


Notes
About the weaponry: it’s 9,905 BBY, and blasters won’t exist for thousands of years and beam-tubes aren’t any fun. As a result, everyone’s still fighting with slugthrowers.

About biology: Decima is a Rucel, a grassland optimized near-human species. She has a unidirectional breathing system like that of a bird (or even more accurately, like a high-speed predatory dinosaur). The space needed for the air sacs to allow this mean that the bones of her ribcage and shoulder girdle are thinner and weaker than in a human.

 

That was really coolZ I loved the description as the extra description at the end. The fact you could see the evolution of her species winding its way through the story was very nicely done.


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Thank you. To clarify though, it's actually the design of her species, not the evolution. The Rucel were created in a laboratory as part of a massive bioengineering project. Decima is very conscious of this, and it's central to the plot of Heritage, Encoded.

 

a great action piece with those weapons used

 

It is nice to occasionally get a chance to highlight the difference between blasters and slugthrowers. I feel like they're treated interchangeably a bit too often.

 

That is truly a unqiue setting. Like the ideas of seeing this pre blaster era of SW.

 

Great job! The Rucel sound like an interesting species. It was neat to see the physiological differences highlighted and make a difference in the story, especially when it's very easy (I'm guilty of this) to treat aliens as just another human in a mask, so to speak.

The opening paragraph is a great hook. At first I thought the assassination attempt might have been personal, but later in the story I started wondering if it was due to the gang's xenophobia.

Decima definitely had to go all-out during the fight in her attempt to escape.

Great work!

 

It's somewhat ironic but, at least in Legends, the majority of Star Wars history actually occurs in the pre-blaster period. Modern blasters (and lightsabers and a lot of other stuff) basically don't show up until right before KOTOR. Some combination of the Great Sith War/Mandalorian Wars appears to have sparked a technological revolution, possibly due to the rediscovery of Rakata & Gree technologies (for maximum amusement value I'd call it the Revanite Revolution). Guidebooks suggest that Star Wars was still fundamentally Star Wars without these technologies, so I wanted to look at how that might work a bit.

The opening paragraph is a great hook. At first I thought the assassination attempt might have been personal, but later in the story I started wondering if it was due to the gang's xenophobia.

Decima definitely had to go all-out during the fight in her attempt to escape.

Great work! [/QUOTE]

Thanks. Playing with biological traits has a lot of room. I find that there's often tendency in science fiction (including lots of published material) to go from 'exactly like a human' to 'xenomorph' with very little if anything in between. The Rucel are a much more limited tweak.

Bloody Yard is actually after Decima because she's an outside agent meddling in their business. The nasty man she works for is also the guy who bankrolls the gang and he's authorized her to use their resources. This fosters considerable resentment.

With regard to Decima's efforts, yeah, she has to go all out. I tried to convey that she's not naturally a fighter. She has combat training, but she's an intelligence agent rather than a soldier.