“I didn’t make this stuff up, man,” the Weequay insists. Still standing in audience before Mukry Boze, he turns, appealing to his comrades. “The guy’s some kind of crazy assassin. You heard Adalat calling in and saying the captain had his own bodyguards. Some sort of secret security squad—that’s who this guy was!” He turns back to the Zann executive. “We didn’t sign on for that. You should have seen him. Chop! Chop! Chop! He kicked knives out of hands.”
Mukry Boze seems unimpressed by these claims. “And who was this guy?”
“I don’t know,” he shrugs. Then he reiterates the only identifying fact he has. “He was blue.”
Oh! That’s my cue! JT squeezes through the cut in the partition wall, flipping up her volume as she launches forward in flight. Into the chaos of the shaking and groaning room, comes the Blue Streak with her glitter grenades and blue smoke. “Watch out, evil-doers!”
Boze pushes herself to her feet with a snort of derision. “What is this?” Then the wave of blue glitter hits her. “Blue Streak!” Although Mukry operates out of Corellia herself, she of course knows of this helmeted vigilante, implicated in the murder of her fellow executive, Dinek Blen, on Ryloth. The Blue Streak was spotted at the sail barge where he was assassinated. Romar Kek was supposed to deal with this, but that turned out poorly as well, and the Blue Streak remains a thorn in the Zann Consortium’s side. “Of all places, here?! To foil my operation?” Even if this job falls apart, if Mukry can bag the Blue Streak, that will still be worth something.
Across the room, ducked down and catching his breath, Tcho marvels, Hunh, the Blue Streak really is a thing, not just a delusion of JT’s.
Though Boze and her bodyguard are on high alert at the central table, the smaller players have scattered away from the glitter-covered surface. The Blue Streak circles above, broadcasting, “Zann Consortium, your evil schemes will be thwarted once again. Will you never learn? Preying upon the disadvantaged again... How many others will you try to corrupt?” She flies toward the spacers. “Don’t follow them! For some of you, there’s still hope. We know you were just hired to do a job, and you were doing that job. That job is over. If you set Zann and this life of crime aside now, we can set you up with a new job, working right here on Dame Metropolis. Haven’t you enjoyed your time here? Openings are now available in ship security!”
The clattering and groaning of the ship is now joined by a whuh-whuh-whuh that JT has become quite familiar with over the years. She groans. Kriff, we’ve lost the engine. We’re dead in the water. This is second only to shields failing, as far as bad things that frequently happen on her ships. On the bright side, this definitely foils Boze’s plan to crash the Dame. However, it means there will be no quick way out of the Maelstrom for the cruiseliner, either.
“Take her down!” Mukry shouts, pointing at the Blue Streak with her heavy blaster. She fires a salvo, and multiple blasts hit the vigilante along the flank, heating up the side controls of the jetpack as well. Mukry trills with pleasure. That should make flying around a little more tricky. “All of you, deal with that problem!” she orders. Most of her underlings do not have blasters, but Alask does. Mukry looks around the room, trying to see where the shipjacker sulked off to.
The only ranged weapon Boze’s bodyguard Thuug has is a frag grenade. Using it against a flying target does not strike him as tactically wise. Instead, the burly Trandoshan decides to use his own body that way. He scales the scaffold near where the Blue Streak is circling and launches himself at her. He connects but not securely enough to catch hold and weigh her to the ground. She spins away, control compromised, and his arc carries him across to a scaffold on the opposite side.
While JT has been drawing all the attention, Tcho has been quietly slipping farther up the room. Now, an opportunity to assist her has practically fallen into his lap. Recalling how Kerr-Lonn-Ny upset the bookcase in the captain’s office, Tcho decides to take a page from her playbook. He puts his back against the scaffold frame and grabs the bars just above his head that make up its second tier. Tcho then jumps up and kicks both legs out against the nearby wall, pushing as hard as he can. The scaffold wobbles, but the effort is not quite enough to push the heavy structure over. Tcho glances up and sees the Trandoshan atop it is staring right down at him. He grits his teeth, pushing harder. The Trandoshan flares his nostrils and bares his teeth.
There’s that blue guy they were talking about, Thuug thinks. Looks like a soft place to land. He jumps down, intending to tackle the Pantoran, but the other man is too quick, flipping himself out of the way. Then Thuug hits the duracrete floor hard, and there is nothing left to think about.
Across the room, other people are also trying to knock over scaffolds, though in their case, the Blue Streak is the target. The spacers from Shipjackers, LLC, and the mutineers do not trust each other enough to work together, though. As a result of this lack of coordination, both groups fail to knock over the individual scaffold they have focused on. For all that the Dame is shuddering and groaning right now, the construction structures in this particular room are remarkably stable.
Given the hail of blaster bolts coming from where Mukry Boze stands at the head of the conference table, JT decides to land before she gets shot out of the sky. She alights on a scaffold and catches her breath. Her side is burning from all the blasts she has taken, but she gave her last painkiller to Tcho after rescuing him from space. The only treatment options JT has on her at this point are repair patches. Unfortunately, she is not as inorganic as the B1s who raised her. She needs some doctory help from Tcho right now, but he is probably busy down on the ground. No… no, what I need is that gun. JT flicks on one of her experimental modules that she has been playing around with lately for obscuring the direction from which her Blue Streak announcements come. It might provide enough distraction for no one to quite realize what she herself is about to actually do. “Justice will prevail!” the Blue Streak declares from seemingly all directions.
JT stretches out her hand, willing through the Force for the blaster to move towards her. The environment is noisy and the scaffold she stands on shakes even more, as now minions are beginning to climb it, trying to reach her. Her attention slips, and so does Boze’s chair. It shoots forward, catching the Selonian at the knees and plopping her back to sitting. The sudden movement jars the gun from the woman’s hand, sending it skittering into some nearby rubble.
“Pipe down and take a seat, criminal!” the Blue Streak orders, willing to settle for a partial win.