"That is not supposed to be there!"
Seeing Nestor plodding comfortably towards a fight with a lightsaber in his hand was an unusual sight, Lia had to admit. His costume was sitting a bit awkwardly, and his head and neck were completely covered by the ridiculous blank mask he favored, and his weapon remained extinguished in his hand.
But what he looked like was entirely secondary to the flood of noise that was hammering into her head.
Ordinarily, that steady stream of gibberish was easy to adapt to. When Nestor was comfortable and at ease, it could almost be relaxing. Especially when combined with his utter inability to mask his emotions and the contentment literally radiated out of him.
Not this time, however.
This time, Nestor's thoughts echoed themselves, the sounds fraying as an undercurrent of anger began to bubble to the surface. She could understand where one word ended and another began, but that was just about it.
After perhaps five seconds of dashing through the base, they had made it halfway to the entrance. Ten imperial soldiers stood there with rifles raised and aimed squarely at Nestor and her. Clearly, they had heard their buffoonish boss get himself killed and had prepared themselves.
Twin hisses announced the activation of a pair of lightsabers, and Lia launched herself across the rest of the chamber. A pair of Sith troopers had their weapons erupt, a cloud of flame sprouting to life at either end of the formation before rushing over the rest of the squad. Somewhere behind her, Nestor gave an ugly chuckle, and a third trooper was pulled towards him.
Lia had no more time to spare on Nestor's attempt to be helpful before she was amongst the troopers. The blaster bolts she had absentmindedly been batting aside did not stop however; the soldiers tried to scatter, their blasters opening up in glowing streams of fully automatic fire.
For a quarter of a second. If that.
The first was cut in half from shoulder to hip as she landed. The second had his blaster rifle shifted minutely, the stream of fire pouring into the chest of an ally before he let off the trigger. His dead dropped to the floor before he had the chance to realize what he had done. Two more were pulled close and slashed across the chest. Another tried to pull out a grenade but found herself thrown across the room as soon as she armed it.
The pair of troopers engulfed in flames had managed to escape the distraction by then, of course. Surprisingly, they did not rush to engage. Effectively disarmed, they were only two against one jedi.
The background gibberish from Nestor's mind reached a new high right then, but Lia paid it no mind. She ignored it, as she had done in most of her encounters with Nestor, and used the Force to throw the disarmed troopers through the entrance and into the troopers manning the turrets, sending them sprawling to the ground. Outside, Nestor's three stooges were interrupted in their arguing as the eight troopers guarding them finally realized that something was wrong. Four of them turned around to bring their guns to bear on her, leaving four to keep their guns on the lesser Sith.
Four-on-three was far from sure odds.
If three of those were partially trained Sith?
The troopers died in a heartbeat. One carved in half vertically, one horizontally, another engulfed in lightning, and the last thrown into a wall with enough force to break his spine. The four on the ground were carved apart where they lay.
Somewhere inside the outpost, the grenade held by one unfortunate imperial finally went off.
And Nestor was still lingering inside.
The final trooper was hovering in front of Nestor, unable to reach the ground. But not being choked or strangled, reassuringly enough. Just… held in the air, immobile. While Nestor held a… was that a blue lightsaber? How did he get a blue lightsaber?
And why was the gibberish in stereo?
"Nestor," she called out. "Quit playing around and finish up."
For a heartbeat, the gibberish intensified and the anger flared, turning inwards, before returning to more sedate levels. Sedate for that encounter, at least; Compared to Nestor when she ran into him on the streets of Chembau, this was deafening.
A second later, the trooper was thrown into the wall. Unconscious but not dead. An unexpected amount of restraint from a Sith, but Nestor had always been an odd one.
"Well that went absolutely miserably," Nestor mused. Though superficially relaxed, there was an undercurrent of tension to his tone that marked it as patently false.
"Did… did your thoughts get louder?" the short Sith asked, a pained look on her face. Her compatriots didn't even manage that much. The heavily muscled was shifting uncomfortably, unable to keep still, while the third had her eyes screwed shut. Now that the fighting had stopped, the gibberish was quite difficult to ignore, it seemed. "I thought you didn't have control over that."
"I like to surprise people," Nestor shot back. Not a lie, Lia knew, but entirely unrelated to the previous statement. Classic misdirection. "Did anybody get the old man who was in charge?"
The gaggle of apprentices answered in the negative with various degrees of enthusiasm, earning a disappointed sigh from Nestor.
"Emergency exit, then. Try to find it, if you would be so kind. Then grab all the information they've got here."
"Assuming anything is left," the short Sith pointed out. "This was quite clearly a setup; Either they already moved anything that can hold data or they've got something in place to scrub it."
"They can't have gotten everything," he amended, frustration leaking through his voice. "I'll have Levin head over to assist. Oh, and ID the dead Sith if you can."
"Why?" the short Sith – Natia, that was her name – asked. "Where are you going?"
"Figuring out my next move and making some calls," he answered. "Maybe extort my master again once you've found something."
"And you need her help to do so?" The apprentice with a gym addiction waved his lightsaber in Lia's general direction. "And not Levin?"
"It'll give you the chance to discuss what to do with her in private," Nestor said, gesturing towards the potentially treacherous apprentice. "She might have been set up. Or she betrayed us. Either way: your ally, your call."
"Fine." Natia took the instructions with some semblance of grace. "Will that be all?"
"If something unexpected comes up, exercise your best judgement," he eventually said. "I trust you to handle things here without me there to hold your hand."
He did not wait for a response, instead striding out of the outpost making a beeline for where they had parked the speeder. Not the wisest idea, in Lia's opinion. There was at least one rogue intelligence agent on the loose in the vicinity; It would have been the easiest thing in the world to set a bomb or a tracker somewhere aboard the spacious vehicle.
Nestor paused in front of it, as though having read her mind.
An impossibility, of course.
"Trapped," he said, stating the obvious.
"Your hideout's a bit far away to walk, Little Sith," she pointed out. "Going to steal another one?"
"Little Jedi, you underestimate the depths of my resources," he chided her. Instead, he reached for his commlink. Within a few seconds, the device gave the chime of a successful connection. "Jain, I need transport. The other airspeeder got the wrong kind of attention. Grab the gear for an insurance payout and get over here."
Without waiting for a response, he cut the call.
"Insurance payout?" she asked.
"Can't say 'vehicle-borne IED' on an unsecured channel," he said. "I suspect they'll be using it to either start a war with the Duros gangsters or commit insurance fraud. I pray it's the latter."
A few minutes later, a cargo speeder landed beside them. A gaggle of Nikto gangsters piled out of it, clad in defaced imperial armor and armed with blaster rifles. Half of them took up watch around the speeder while the other half got to work on the speeder's underside, but neither she nor Nestor stuck around to watch. They took the gangsters' seats in the speeder and took off again.
Nestor did not relax for the brief trip.
He sat up straight, his shoulders twisted in a way that should have completely wrinkled and creased his outfit. Strangely enough, though, there was not a single fold to be seen. Whatever the Sith had unleashed on him must still be attached to him. Of course, he said nothing. Lia said nothing. It was a quiet ride while the gangster in the driver's seat tried and failed not to let his nerves get the better of him.
Eventually, they made it back to the base. The two of them got out, and the driver set off again immediately. To pick up his friends, no doubt. Setting up a bomb did not take too long, if you knew what you were doing.
"If you've got a message to send, use the transmitter in the suite," Nestor said, making a beeline for the ships. Not the big ship he had arrived in, though. No, this was a smaller vessel. Narrow, tube-shaped, and probably not well suited to carrying massive amounts of cargo. A light freighter, a courier, or a blockade runner of some sort. In short, the kind of ship she expected a Sith to operate when trying to keep a low profile.
For a moment, Lia considered taking him up on his offer. She had the means to set up a secure connection even through an unsecured terminal hidden in her belt pouches. And if her hunch about who that unknown Sith had been that attacked them, she would need to get in touch with the Republic's task force to take down Darth Angral.
Or she could wait for confirmation. That would force Nestor to make the call to reach out to the Republic, if indirectly, and strengthen their effort at his expense. Hardly a difficult choice.
...
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