9.120 - The Vanguards: Rapture

[MARCUS]

The bipedal droid module paused, slowly panning around.

"There are high levels of ionizing radiation and electromagnetic interference. The sensor suite on this module is limited to one hundred meters."

Hunching down, MARCUS projected a holographic map of the city from his single eye.

"Please note: map of Karallon City. We are here. The prefect's office will be located here. I suggest starting our search at these vectors for high value intelligence. Suggest Dirge, Maren to lead."

[John Glayde]

Glayde threw a glance in the spook's direction, offering as much of a shrug as he could without dislodging his rifle.

"You heard the -"

Damn. The need for terminology came crashing back. Was it a droid? An avatar of a larger program? A subroutine with legs? A ghost in a machine?

"- man," he settled upon. Did MARCUS even consider itself masculine, or was John simply imposing that persona onto the software because of it's name?

It was making his head hurt, and so he decided not to bother thinking about it, ever again.

"You're on point, Dirge. And since you're such a fan of chasing ass, Onashi - cover our six."

[Serasai Onashi]

Onashi grimaced but settled the butt of his blaster rifle into his shoulder and watched as the team stalked past him into the city proper.

He did have to give Glayde credit The views of Dirge, Porter and Tallen's asses was amazing.

"This place is entirely too quiet," He grunted after following a floating piece of debris with his sights. "It's almost like slavers came in and took the whole city."

[Sam Porter]

She felt like she was simply... here. As a spectator and nothing more. There was a sort of disinterested glaze to her eyes as Sam gave her surroundings a look-over, and she made a disgusted face at nothing in particular.

She hefted the rifle she lazily carried just a little higher as her boots scuffed along the debris-strewn road. It felt like going home almost.

It made her want to drink. Heavily.

With the duffel slung loosely over her shoulder Sam resisted the urge to simply turn around and walk back the way they'd come, march her way onto the Comet, and wait there until they were ready to light out.

Wasn't a bad idea, all things considered. Of course things never happened how she wished them to, and the blonde grumbled an incoherent jumble of expletives as she continued on.

[Maren Dirge]

Maren lead the party as they moved into Karalon City proper, her eyes sweeping the width and height of the street before them.

There was a touch of Alderaan in the architecture, with its white towers shaped like pieces from a holochess board. From a distance, it had all looked pristine and untouched but as they moved through the streets on foot, the marks of humanity became visible. An speeder cab parked haphazardly in the middle of a road. A foot cart abandoned on a ped-way.

Holographic billboards displayed an endless parade of images: military propaganda, adverts for the latest gadgets and twenty-foot high smiles beaming down on empty streets. In spite them, there was silence. Not merely a lack of sound but an oppressive silence, as if something had fallen over Karalon City and was smothering it, forcing all of the life out of it.

No sympathy. This is an Imperial world, Maren reminded herself, as she followed her mental copy of MARCUS' map and edged around a street corner, bringing the tower of the prefects office into sight.

[MARCUS]

MARCUS approached the main gate of the Prefecture behind Dirge, as the rest of the team followed closely. There was no enemy resistance, and while that would normally cause guards to lower, everyone was on edge. This wasn't right. The other shoe was just waiting to drop.

The main gate was sealed. MARCUS attempted to bypass it at the control terminal.

"This interface is not responding to commands."

Carefully, the droid pointed a finger at the access console, which sprouted a screwdriver. Working the plate off the terminal, he fished through wires.

"Establishing manual bypass."

Eventually, the splice worked, and the blast doors peeled apart in three layers, granting access within. MARCUS followed Dirge in, and once they arrived at an interior plaza adjacent to a fountain, he paused.

"I am detecting a holonet terminal still active on the network. Six levels up. Its signature shows origination of the distress message."

[John Glayde]

Glayde's eyes swept the plaza, eyes falling on a plethora of tactical vantages and potential ambush sites. It was something that had bugged him about the Empire even before his loyalty had begun to falter: for such a heavily militarised culture, almost everything they built was a strategic nightmare. It was bad enough that their terrifying planet-destroying space weapon had been successfully infiltrated by a kid in pyjamas and an old man in a bath robe; but this place was ridiculous. It was like the interior designers had staged the ultimate nightmare battlefield, with huge planters and stone features scattered at the optimum points to give the officer responsible for defending it nightmares for his entire tour of duty.

Glayde's attention finished it's sweep, and turned briefly to his new infiltration specialist extraordinaire. "Good job, MARCUS," he offered; he'd almost not bothered, but until he knew what exactly it was that he was dealing with, he saw no reason to treat the droid-esque member of his team any differently from the rest.

He turned to Maren. "Take Onashi, and see if you can work a defensive miracle with this jumbled mess down here. I want to know the second anything hostile shows up... the signal will be a loud explosion, followed by gunfire."

"Porter," he added; "You're with me. We're going with MARCUS -" His eyes flicked back to the automaton. "- who is going to find us a route up to that terminal."

[Sam Porter]

She rolled her eyes, masking the reaction as one of looking upwards toward their target.

"Whatever you say."

Re-situating the duffel, she let out an annoyed breath while licking her lips and wondering just what her role in this was supposed to be.

Information retrieval, the droid had said. Then why was she here?! She wasn't a specialist in that particular area. It made her want to slap that thing upside its' metal head.

"Lead on, then."

[MARCUS]

The droid beeped an affirmative, his processors already teasing out possible solutions to their task.

"Proceeding. The turboshaft access to our destination is in this direction."

The three team members moved as one, heading to the lift which similarly had to be bypassed to function. Eventually it was done, and the group was on their way to the Prefect's office itself. Barring their path this time was another blast door. MARCUS moved to bypass, and paused in the middle of his attempt.

"Error. Physical interruption of interface. This access terminal has been severed from its mechanism. Cause unknown."

He looked to Glayde, then to Porter.

"An electronic bypass of this door is not possible. We must seek alternatatives."

[Serasai Onashi]

Onashi watched the droid, Glayde, and Porter make their way off, before turning back to Dirge, taking in the scenery and their surroundings. It was too bad that they were on a mission. Alone time with Dirge wasn't something he got often.

"Well," he said after a moment, shouldering his blaster rifle and clapping and rubbing his hands together in anticipation. "Let's get to work, shall we?"

[John Glayde]

Alternatives, MARCUS had said.

John eyed the blast door suspiciously, contemplating his options. From what he could decipher from MARCUS' description, someone - or something - had essentially sealed the door shut. Questions of who, and whether it had been done from inside and out, were particularly pressing: John was inclined to guess the former, but the only way to know for sure was to find the answers lurking inside the inaccessible room.

Behind the blast door.

Blast door.

A sidelong glance was cast from Glayde, towards Sam Porter. "I need a large hole made, Miss Porter," he said casually, with the kind of incidental tone of a man who wanted to temporarily borrow someone's blaster cleaning gear. "Think you can do anything about that?"

[Sam Porter]

A devilish grin.

"Thought you'd never ask," came her swiftly mumbled answer, though her tone was certainly one of relief.

Her rifle was set carefully to the side, and Sam eased the duffel from her shoulder, making a point of looking at MARCUS while she set it down and opened it up. She had desperately wanted to slap him upside his head, but decided against that action as she supposed it would be 'unprofessional'. Didn't mean that she could leave him with a parting verbal shot at least.

"A purely information retrieval mission, eh?"

The contents of her duffel - to anyone else - would seem to be nothing but a mass of jumbled detonators and haphazardly stored mines. To her, there was a system to it, and she reached into the pack's innards. Deft hands shoved each piece aside, occasionally pulling out one or two in the process, and it wasn't long before she'd retrieved what she wanted.

Rising to stand, the blonde stepped over the duffel and up to the blast doors.

"Did you know," she talked as she worked. It helped her to think.

"... that at least twenty-three percent of holocopier faults in the galaxy are caused by people sitting on them and copying their backsides?"

She gave a cursory look over the barrier between them and wherever it was Glayde wanted to be before once again setting to work.

"Can you just imagine that?"

One button set each detonator's magnetic grip, and as if she cared little for their placement, Sam stuck each one to the metal surface of the doors. She went to each one, synchronizing their blast times.

"That means that somewhere, someone right now is making a holocopy of their rear."

Stepping away, Sam smoothly scooped up her duffel, and reaching out, she took up her rifle while shooing her two teammates away.

"Come on then boys. Since we can't be the ones to add to that statistic, let's go ahead and make sure we're not dumped into that lovely statistical pile of poor sods who didn't take cover from their own explosives."

[MARCUS]

MARCUS complied, although he tried to run with all the loose ends Porter was spouting, so as he ducked behind a support structure outside of the blast zone, he pontificated.

"Non sequitur. A comedic element designed to introduce absurd and incongruous dialogue into a situation. I question the timing of this attempt."

KA-BOOM!!!

Rising from his protected area and shrouded by a sudden enveloping cloud of dust, the droid appeared not one bit startled by the sudden explosion.

"Detonation intensity 10.5 megajoules. Sufficient for breach."

While the organic members of his team had to cope with the blinding dust in the aftermath for at least a few seconds, MARCUS casually cut through the abyss by switching to infrared as he entered the neat aperture punctured into the door by Sam's bomb.

"There are sixteen humans within the command bunker. All appear to be upper echelon Imperial staff.

All deceased. Probable cause close range gunshots to the temple."

Glayde's voice carried from outside.

"They killed themselves?"

MARCUS's processors accelerated, testing out possible outcomes.

"This outcome seems likely judging from the pattern of dermal cremation. Major, the room is clear of threats. I suggest entry."

[John Glayde]

John cursed under his breath as he clambered through the breach, eyes sweeping the mausoleum they had just unsealed. One thing that MARCUS had neglected to mention was the smell; the tell-tale sickly sweet medley of early-onset decomposition with a dash of singed flesh and ozone.

The Major had seen enough battlefields, enough bodies, and enough self-inflicted blaster wounds for the sight to not phase him in the slightest. That fact in itself was unsettling; but he set it aside, making a note to lament it in the company of alcohol later on.

He drew up alongside MARCUS, his blaster rifle almost completely lowered: there was no one left alive in here to be a threat to anyone any more.

"Are you equipped for forensics, MARCUS?" he asked, realising that he was almost completely unaware of the full extent of the walking hardware's mission potential. "Can you calculate a likely time of death?"

[MARCUS]

A dull sounding buzz-beep emanated from the droid.

"I possess a full anatomical database but have no onboard tools on this module to perform anything beyond a cursory visual examination."

MARCUS gestured to the computer at the center of the room, it's screen still flickering a warm glow.

"The data on this terminal may still be intact. It may offer the information you seek."

[Sam Porter]

Thank you, Porter.

Good job, Porter.

Perfect spacing, Porter.

With a stormcloud of annoyance souring her features, Sam stalked after the other two, making sure her duffel was once more thrown over one shoulder and across her back.

Her rifle, still angled downward, seemed to tip lower as she stepped over the rubble and remnants of the blast door.

The scent that assaulted her nose was one that she instantly decided she could do without smelling ever again - and the sight to match was filed away as well as something that she never wished to see again. She followed Glayde's lead on this one, sweeping her gaze over each body that littered the area like some sort of macabre display of art.

"No one deserves to go out like this," she murmured to herself.

[John Glayde]

John rose an eyebrow at that.

"No one deserves to die on their own terms?" he countered, turning his gaze on her for a moment. "No one deserves to be allowed to choose the quick and painless option?"

The Major's mouth drew into a thin line. "I've seen enough mass suicides to know, Miss Porter: whatever they were locked in here and hiding themselves from, these men all decided that a death by their own hands was an infinately more preferable option."

That didn't shift the unsettling feeling in his stomach, however. What exactly had terrified the Empire so badly that an entire population had fled and it's leaders turned this room into their own mass grave?

He shook that thought aside, turning back to MARCUS. If the console they'd stumbled upon really was the source of the distress call, maybe it could offer the answers to some of those grim and uncomfortable questions. He jerked a head in it's direction.

"Any chance you can pull the full distress call out of the recording logs on that terminal, MARCUS?"

[MARCUS]

"This terminal's circuitry is undamaged by the external ionizing radiation detected in the city. Given this facility's priority, it may be shielded."

The module began a cursory examination.

"This unit is still logged in. Opening and copying media."

A series of holo-images began to appear on an emitter as an audio file played.

"Attention all Imperial stations. If you are reading this, we are issuing an all points evacuation on Karallon. Enemy attack is commencing. Heavy ion cannon strikes have disabled all shielding and defense systems. Unkown vessels. They conform to no Rebel ship on record. Dropships have begun ground assault. Mixed elements of droids and unknown aliens. They're taking everyone alive. This is General K~~~~~"

MARCUS rose from the terminal, now facing Glayde.

"Transmission from this terminal ends. Unknown interruption."

[John Glayde]

Each word added an extra grim weight to the force dragging down on Glayde's innards. Evacuation. Ground assault. Unknown aliens. It sounded like the plot for some cheap science fiction holonovel - the kind too trashy for even Onashi to read - and if Glayde hadn't seen the abandoned streets, and wasn't in a room with a dozen corpses, he'd have almost thought it was some sick joke.

"Check the communications logs."

Words were tumbling slowly from Glayde on autopilot, his years of experience compelling his mouth to speak while his consciousness mind tried to rationalise what he had learned.

"Pull out tactical information. Video feeds. If it's even vaguely connected with this attack, I want it downloaded and brought back to the ship with us. The Captain is going to need all the information we can find."

His hand strayed towards his comm, but it would be of little use. The same ionising radation that had interfered with the Imperial distress call would no doubt prevent them from holding a coherant conversation with the ship.

Besides, Glayde mused grimly. The Captain needs to hear this in person.

"Grab what you can," he finished, with a curt nod in MARCUS' direction. "And lets get the hell out of there."

[Serasai Onashi]

"Help me with this," he grunted to Dirge, shouldering his rifle and picking up a large container that had been left open and empty. They pulled it between two duracrete planters containing quaint, thin trees.

"You can't tell me this doesn't bother you," He said, looking around, a frown creasing his features. "I'd think it was a slaver attack, but this place is far too big and well defended."