Shootout time!

“That’s a big club” you said as you inspected the skyscraper sized building in front of you. You and Tanna were across the street from the club in an overlooking hotel room.

“It doubles as a warehouse” Tanna said distractedly as she worked on putting her blaster back together. She had scavenged a ‘tube pistol’ from one of the dead goons in the alleyway and was now doing a little maintenance on it. You called the weapon a tube pistol because it was made of tubes, even the grip was a tube. It was like the film crew ran out of budget for props and glued some metal piping together.

“You sure that blaster will actually do anything?” you asked as you eyed the weapon dubiously.

“The Dexter Industries S-series is one of the most reliable brands on the market” Tanna replied leaving you to absorb that useless bit of information.

“Uh-huh, whatever you say” You replied disinterestedly as you turn back to the club. “So are we Ramboing it in? Or is there a game plan for this?” You asked.

“Rambo?” Tanna replied, giving you a look over her shoulder. “You know what, I don’t care” she added, putting the last bit of her pistol together “I fully intend on bypassing most of the club by taking a speeder to the back of the 7th floor and working from there” she told you.

“Makes sense . . . why go through the front door when they obviously don’t keep their slaves on the dance floor” You muttered.

“Exactly, now we going or what?” she asked, standing up from her position on the floor.

“No time like the present” You say and the two of you head out.

A speeder was waiting on a nearby landing platform which Tanna drove to another landing platform at the club. This was noticed pretty much instantly by the clubs security as a trio of goons arrived to meet you before you’d even finished landing.

“Oi! Watchya doin!?” demanded one of the goons, some type of alien with green skin, tusks and head ridges.

“Oh great, an Orcish Klingon, because why the fuck not” you mutter as you step out of the speeder.

“We’re here to crash your little **** operation!” Tanna announced with conviction, causing you to facepalm and the goons to laugh.

“You needa get yo wooman unda control!” the klingork told you between laughs.

“Yeah yeah, and I also need to blast the three of you” You say before smoothly drawing your blaster and blasting the three goons in the chest. Hard to miss at point blank. “The hell you just shouting that to the high heavens for?” You asked Tanna, turning to face her.

“What? We ARE here to stop their **** trade!” She replied in a huff.

“Yeah . . . but have you forgotten the crucial little detail of THERE’S ONLY TWO OF US!?!?!” you exclaimed before turning and marching towards the door. “Well, I wanted a firefight I suppose, guess I’m going to get it” you muttered to yourself. Though secretly you were pleased, this was going to be fun.

“Now what?” Tanna asked as you walked over to the door leading into the building.

“Easy, now we fight our way to where we need to go” you say, getting down on one knee and taking your blaster in a two handed grip. “Get the door open” you order, aiming at the door. Tanna grumbled but complied, and after only a few button presses, the door slid open.

“The door wasn’t even locked, you could hav-” whatever she was saying was cut off as you fired your pistol into the small squad of goons on the other side of the door. None of them apparently expected the shooting to start the moment it slid open, so five of them went down before they even started moving. You blasted another one as they tried ducking into doorways, leaving one last goon, the idiot then promptly stuck his head out. You quite literally fried his brains in one more well placed shot.

“W-what s-sector defense **** are you from?” Tanna asked, her eyes wide as she stared at the small pile of bodies in the hallway. You merely grinned before getting up and moving inside.

It didn’t take long for you to run into more goons. This time they were better prepared for you. As you turned a corner, there was about ten of them marching towards the landing pad and the moment they saw you, they had their hodgepodge of blasters firing in your direction. Ducking back behind the wall you twisted around the corner, holding your gun sideways, and squeezed off shots. You weren’t really trying to aim but since there were ten guys crowded together in a tight hallway, your inaccurate fire took several down. The goons began falling back and ducking for cover in doorways, halting their fire as they repositioned. Taking advantage of this you dropped to one knee, lined up a shot and blasted one of the goons before blaster bolts began pelting your protective wall again.

“Thank god for sharp corners” You say to Tanna who is beside you. She gave you a quizzical frown. “If this were a curved hallway, there’d be no cover and they’d be able to rush us” you said in answer to the unasked questions. You then lean around the corner, used a bit of your god power to make sure they don’t hit you and squeeze off a round, blasting another goon leaving only half the squad alive. It turns out that losing half your squad in about a minute was hell on the morale, as the remaining members of the goon squad started retreating further. This meant their already pitiful accuracy got worse, and their already shit cover was abandoned. You stepped around the corner and once again went down to one knee, returning fire and picking off the goons one by one. The last guy in the squad just turned and ran, heading for another corner at the end of the relatively short hallway. You took the time to line up your shot, closing an eye to help line the barrel with the man’s back, and squeezed the trigger. The goon had been close to getting away so he slammed face first into the wall when the bolt hit him, a satisfying ‘thunk’ echoing through the blast scared and smoky hallway.

You advanced down the hallway, marvelling at how movies and a bit of basic firearms knowledge allowed you to decimate your enemies. Looking back, you saw Tanna stop and pick up one of the goon’s rifles. When you saw her weapon of choice you groaned.

“What?” the Twi’lek asked, brushing her lekku over her shoulder.

“It’s a tube rifle” you said, adding that category to your ever expanding list of ‘tube weapons’

“It’s a reliable and affordable model!” Tanna replied indignantly.

“It looks like someone glued two pipes together and called it a rifle!” you replied before shaking your head at it. Who knew that the prop makers of Star Wars were making actual legit weapons? “It doesn’t even have iron sights!” you said angrily before shaking your head again and moving on.

“So what? I don’t even know what an iron sight is anyway” Tanna replied “Besides, your blaster doesn’t have a scope!” she replied as you checked around the corner to see if there were any more goons set up.

“I know, and it annoys me” you say to the blue girl. “But at the very least, this is a pistol, a sidearm, one doesn’t go sniping with a sidearm unlike a rifle” you say before snapping your gun up and firing a shot off, nailing a goon that had been cowering behind a door frame. “Where exactly are we headed anyway?” you ask. Tanna huffed and strode forward, taking the lead. Seeing that Tanna was just about to walk straight past a hallway that was branching off, you grabbed her. Not a moment too soon, you pull her back and she narrowly avoids a stream of blaster fire from the corner she didn’t check.

“Always check your corners!” you hiss, funny that a lesson you learnt from playing Call of Duty would be what saved a life, but there it was. “Does that thing do rapid fire?” you ask, pointing to her rifle.

“Uhh? I don’t normally use rifles” Tanna admitted sheepishly.

“Then why’d you pick it up in the first place?” you asked, frowning at the girl.

“It’s a rifle! Aren’t they like . . . better?” she asked and you groaned before taking the rifle from her. Sticking it around and the corner you squeeze down the trigger. It turns out the rifle was indeed fully automatic and you thoroughly rinsed the hallway with it. Peeking around the corner you noticed that the poor amounts of cover meant that if anything was still alive, they’d already ran away.

“Excellent!” you said “Here, you can have this back, point the barrel in the direction of the enemy and hold down the trigger” you told Tanna as you handed the rifle back to her. She gave you a deadpan as she took the weapon back.

You and Tanna entered what looked like a warehouse. Stacks upon stacks of some kind of futuristic space shipping containers and some hover droids buzzing around attending to them.

“If the girls are still here, they’ll be in this section somewhere” Tanna said quietly as she lead the way down one of the aisles. She had another rifle on her back, having decided she had no idea how to reload her tube gun and promptly picked up a couple so she could just drop one if it ran out. You were beginning to wonder if the bad guys had run out of mooks for you to cut through. You may have been getting a little bored, when a shout came from behind you.

“There they are! Blast em!” if there was ever a more cliched Star Wars line it could only be;

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this” Tanna said as the two of you twisted around to meet the goons head on. You, however didn’t have a bad feeling. There was only enough room for two people to walk through the aisle side by side so you took a knee, aimed and began the turkey shoot.

“Be a dear and watch the other side of the aisle” You said to the Twi’lek who huffed but complied.

It didn’t take long for the mooks to get the idea and stopped rushing into the aisle, and with this reprieve you and Tanna advanced forward. Occasionally, a mook would take potshots at you between the aisles, and you would return fire. Even more occasionally, Tanna would return fire, but if she actually hit anything you’d probably never know.

It didn’t take long for your little running battle to corale you to the other end of the warehouse where you and Tanna found an office. The inside was pretty spartan but at least it held a terminal.

“Gimme your rifle and see if you can get any data off that computer” you said as you turned and peeked out through the open doorway.

“It’s a data terminal” Tanna replied, handing you her spare rifle before walking over to the desk and working at it. “You really expect them to keep a reco-oh” began, the blue light of the terminal illuminating the Twi’lek in a rather fetching manner “They have records on everything” she continued, typing away. As Tanna worked away at the terminal, you took a look around the corner and shot an idiot trying to rush you alone. “It wasn’t even password protected or anything” Tanna added as she pulled out some sort of USB device and began copying data. “We need to get this to HQ, they’ll be able to do a lot with this” she said “Unfortunately, we missed the shipment already, they’ve sent the girls off, but the fleet can catch ‘em no trouble” she said happily, grabbing her rifle from the desk and attempting to stride out. You grabbed her by the arm and **** her back beside you as a stream of blaster fire drenched the back wall.

“You are actually trying to die aren’t you” you said to the girl, a deadpan expression to her sheepish one.

“If I was any good at this, I wouldn’t need you!” she exclaimed before turning her head and pouting, you also thought she might have been blushing in embarrassment.

The fight back to the speeder was pretty simple, there weren’t many goons left to blast through, which made things easy. The problem was with the judicial forces. The blue uniforms of the Judicial officers were pretty smart but unfortunately, they’d dumped all their intelligence points into their outfits.

“What do you mean you can’t do anything!?” Tanna asked incredulously.

“All we have to go on is a rumor” The man she was speaking to said.

“But we have the location right here!” Tana replied “We got it from THEIR terminals!” she exclaimed.

“Look Tanna . . . even if you had hard evidence on where this was happening, what ships would be present, the **** disposition, names of every race represented, a short biography of every individual and the colour of their knickers, I’d still not be able to allocate resources” The man sighed “The fact of the matter is” he paused and sighed again “sometimes with small operations like this, the higher ups like to wave them through for some” here the man paused again “Tariffs” he said with venom. “This is clearly one of those cases”

“So you’ll do nothing?” Tanna asked, looking like she was about to cry.

“If you manage to pull off another heroic ****, I’ll accidentally lose some credits or something” the man said, nodding at you. Tanna looked at you with puppy dog eyes.

“I don’t have a ship” You said to her and then watched as all hope drained from her. She might have even gone a little grey.

“There was a ship dealer over in sector two-two-seven” the uniform casually stated “I was already thinking about dropping some credits out that way for added security” he added thoughtfully. You gave the guy a look, it was rather blatantly obvious where he was going with that. “Who knows what mercs spend their credits on” he added before holding out a credit chip.