The tournament shuttle dropped Chikma on Bracca with engines still hot and its pilot eager to leave. The ship clawed back into the copper sky with barely enough time for the Ewok to hop off the ramp onto a gantry.
Endor still clung to him. Ash streaked his armor’s durasteel plating and the ghillie suit that wrapped it had lost half its leaves. He hadn’t rested. His ribs ached. But with a deep breath, he turned in a slow circle to survey the Shipbreaking Yard.
Dead warships stretched to the horizon, hulls split like fileted fish and ribs jutting into the sky. Cranes crawled over them. Somewhere, a cutter shrieked through hull plating and spat sparks that drifted down like fireflies into the pit below. The whole graveyard groaned and shifted underfoot. A deep, wet rumble rolled up through the soles of his boots from far below. Something down there was moving. Or eating. Or Force knows what.
Chikma fingered the beskar pendant hanging from his neck. The scene reminded him of the shrine his clan had built out of a crashed Firespray gunship. The scale of this operation dwarfed the sacred site, but he couldn’t help but feel as though the venue were hallowed ground.
All the more reason to win this battle.
He thumbed his helmet’s display awake. The multi-frequency target acquisition system threw up the tournament’s market, an arrow pulsing toward a gutted hangar about a hundred yards away with a name beside it. ZAKIROV, VIGO. The heat and motion readouts beside the name remained blank. Chikma slapped the side of his helmet, but nothing changed.
He didn’t like it. He’d spent seventeen years learning what a trap felt like. The entire yard felt like one. He just never noticed the mechanical jaws until they started to close.
Chikma crossed the gantry anyway. He crouched low, but his leaf-green “camouflage” contrasted against rusted durasteel. He may as well have been waving. Inside his visor, his wrist rocket’s motion tracker pinged the heads-up display at every shifting plate and drifting spark.
Then, a ping with no source.
Blue light rippled across Chikma’s chest as his shield flared. The flattened blaster bolt nonetheless felt like a slap across his chest. Whoever had fired it made no sound at all.
Chima threw himself behind a hull rib.
Another shot. The rib rang once, followed by a dry crack. A seam of melted steel opened above his head. Breathing fast, he pressed his back into the metal and counted. The shield had stopped one hit. It had five left. Not many with a shooter this impatient.
He peered out from the side of the rib. In the dark of the hangar, a black shape moved in a pale blur. His tracker found nothing. Whatever was in there had soaked up the darkness and become one with it.
Chikma just grinned. He’d hunted things that hid all his life.
He sent a wrist rocket shrieking out toward the blur in a streak of white smoke. It slammed into the hangar’s lip. Orange fire blossomed out as incendiary gel splashed across the bulkhead and clung to any surface it landed on. The whole mouth of the hangar illuminated in flickering, honest light. The dark shape moved at the edge of the glare as shadows ran for the corners.
“Oya!” Chikma barked. The hunt was on.
He lunged out of cover. Something black spun out of the fire toward his throat.
Chikma jerked his head back and heard it hiss past, a flat blade with no handle. Another leaf fell from the ghillie fringe on his collar. It rang off the rib behind him and clattered away.
Too close. A hand’s width lower and it would have found the gap at his throat.
He dropped, rolled, and popped up with a Syndicate blaster pistol already in his fist. The fire was spreading along the hangar’s mouth, whipping smoke into a curtain. Through the smoke came a quiet voice.
“Wrong yard, small thing.” A male’s voice, it sounded flat and almost bored.
Heat flushed Chikma’s face, almost hotter than the fire. Small. He’d been called that word in almost every language. He thumped his chest plate with a fist. He pointed at the hangar, then at the ground. Then he stomped forward, pistol held low.
The deck lurched. Metal screamed overhead as a girder tore loose. He activated his jetpack and kicked off the ground. A dozen yards below, the thing in the dark gave another slow, hungry roll. The ship was coming apart under them both.
