Rally drew out the CZ with her right hand and put a PPG in the right as she listened and watched signs and breathed in the air.
"I'm not surprised to find you sneaking around down here dealing in such sordid messes as this," the Minbari was saying.
He was moving, slowly, his voice was distracted with exaggerated caution. There were occasional clinks here and there from what she expected was a prematurely extended fighting pike.
She rolled her eyes at the obvious innuendo that came with that thought and then turned back to the situation at hand.
In any case the, the inexperience was rank.
The Minbari wasn't the only one around.
She could hear shuffling feet moving about the make shift barricades, people trying slide their feet so they didn't make noise. Then flickering lights that were partially visible through gaps in the ramshackle walls were blocked out. The lingering smell of energy blast discharge wafted through the recycled air along a path that told her her shooter was behind one of the make shift walls and moving to find a new entry at her. Small creaks and flaps came from the walls where they were unsteady, with weak welds.
In the movies, the heroes usually closed their eyes when they were concentrating and "using all their senses."
That was a mistake, using all your senses meant all your senses, not just one or two of them while leaving out the strongest. Though she had to admit,that when she'd started that with her father back as a kid, closing her eyes made it easier to focus on the others. But once you mastered it, really mastered it, it wasn't something you turned on or off.
It was just something you did.
Which was why she knew that the Minbari was not aware of the others.
"Sordid, complicated, messy and psychotic," Rally said idly. "Yeah, my life sucks."
She reached out with the PPG and fired it into one of those creaks indicated a weak weld at ten and one o'clock before twisting about and doing the same at the base of the converted shelving unit she was sustaining cover behind, melting the legs that held it up.
Rally twisted about to the other side of her now falling cover, fired out twice with the CZ 75 into the hard metal of the wall outside the small lurker-made room. The first bullet smacked into the wall and bounced left, the second bounced right with accompanying cries of pain.
The wall she had been sheltering behind was collapsing over as the legs that had held up the overburdened unit. Then she stepped up onto the falling wall, quickstepping over it backwards, her own weight adding to its momentum.
The minbari slipped out of his cover bearing his fighting pike and charging forward as Rally fired again with her PPG and another section of wall fell downward on top of him.
Rally's perch slammed into the nearest wall and the welds weakened by the bounty hunter's first shots gave way with a wrenching noise as someone behind the wall cried out in shock and fear, punctuated by randomly fired PPG shots that had no hope of hitting anything.
The bounty hunter showed that she hadn't slowed down, not even deep into her thirties, as she rolled with the impact out into the hallway concealing the forces surrounding the little room.
A man in dirty clothes stared at her vacantly and charged in with a piece of pipe until one of his knees exploded sending him stumbling down into the hallway as Rally passed by him, walking backwards and shot behind her.
One of the men had pointed a PPG at her and lost a thumb before he could depress a trigger. Another man's shoulder was burned through with a PPG blast as he tumbled backward.
Steps, quick now rushing, a couple limping. The Minbari was pushing the shelves off and trying to get into the fight again, or at all.
Rally twisted to face the way she was walking and fired, two bullets lashing out to strike one of the men as they came around the corner at her, shoulder and wrist. Another man with the same drugged out look dodged around his partner running at the walking bounty hunter with a war scream that turned into a high pitched shriek after she shifted aside simply and gave him a bit of a boost with a foot delivered somewhere south of his center of gravity.
A limping man clutched to the wall as she came around, leveled a gun at her and was smacked unconscious with the hilt of her CZ as the PPG fired again and into the knee of the second man who she'd struck with a ricochet earlier.
The Minbari leaped out of the room as she came to the entrance she'd originally taken into it. He wasn't totally untrained given how he'd just managed to surprise her.
However, the way he took advantage of it was less wise. He slammed the fighting pike horizontally into her, pushing her back away into corridors away from the battlefield and presenting his back to any of her attackers that still remained standing and simultaneously giving her distance away from him.
She landed on her back and couldn't completely roll off the impact, but came up to her knees quickly enough, the CZ 75 barking out three more times as the Minbari came at her.
The bullets passed by the young, oblivious warrior. Then he was swinging his pike down at her cursing bitterly as she rolled off to the side and back to her feet, nursing the left shoulder slightly as she danced away.
"The great Stalking Cat a little rattled?" he asked. "Can't you fire straight?"
Rally ducked under his next swing, reached out with the PPG and firing again. The sound of a cry behind the Minbari distracted him long enough that he failed to correct his overbalanced stance. The next thing he knew he was flying through the air, head downward before slamming painfully back into the ground.
"That's about all the small fry," Rally called out loudly. "Where's the big fish?"
Yelling out loudly, the Minbari stumbled to his feet and swung out at Rally who dodged back away.
"Face me, Vincent," he shouted angrily as he tried to catch up with her evading form and enraged at her grimacing face, irritated that she seemed to only be half looking at him.
"Get out of the way or you're going to ge..." Rally stopped mid sentence and dashed forward.
The bounty hunter twisted aside under the pike's strike and kicked a short hook into the back of his knee and pushing him aside behind her, his pike scattering along the hallway. The pistol came up firing twice just moments before a PPG burst slammed into her already injured shoulder.
The PPG fell out of her hand as she grunted and stumbled backwards.
The pistol was put back into her belt and she reached down with her right hand to grab the Minbari by the back of the collar and haul him up to his feet and around a corner, pushing the confused Minbari aside and redrawing her pistol.
"What is your game?" the Minbari asked.
"Survival," Rally said, checking her shoulder and flexing her left hand. "In case you haven't noticed, you've blundered into a trap."
"You admi..."
"A trap for me you idiot, or did you think I was just randomly shooting people," Rally said, looking around the corner. "You managed a hit, Jack. What's my score?"
"Damn you, Vincent!" came the response followed by a thump.
"Walking without knees," Vincent said. "That'll be a neat trick if you can learn it."
"I'm going to kill you, Vincent," he shouted. "I have to kill you."
"Uh huh," Rally said. "And who told you that?"
The Minbari started to stand and Rally casually pointed her pistol in his face, freezing his eyes on its large barrel.
"You're in the way," Jack said with effort, the sound of him trying to crawl toward where Rally stood clear among the various groans of drugged out thugs. "If you die everything is the way it should be. Everything goes right."
"What goes right, Jack?" the bounty hunter asked.
"The New World Order," Jack said. "Earth clean and pure and free of alien influence. Free to make things the way they should be. Don't you hate them? Vincent, didn't they kill Misty Brown? Shouldn't you want them all dead for your little lesbian who..."
Rally turned about the corner, ignoring the young Minbari she'd been covering. She fired at the prostate form of Jack, destroying his right hand and the PPG in it. He cried out in pain as she resolutely strode up to him and slammed a foot into his face.
"Part of me says this is kerasine talking," Rally said as she stepped on the man's hand. "But the rest of me knows that's because someone's dredged up your fantasy world to turn you against me. Either way, one more word about Misty and and I stop going easy on you."
"You can't hurt me, I can't be stopped," he shouted. "I have friends and backers and..."
Rally kicked down into his face again, knocking him unconscious.
"The black knight always wins," she muttered and snapped her gun up toward the Minbari again.
The Minbari opened his mouth and looked past Rally to the struggling bodies of the various thugs and devastation that she'd left behind her without much issue out at all.
"I don't know your name," Rally said sharply, "but last time I saw that particular pike in a fight, its wielder treated it with enough respect not to drag it along the ground or let it sit like a piece of debris."
Closing his mouth, the Minbari stepped over and picked up the pike quickly turning it towards Rally and getting into stance.
"Are you going to face me now?" he demanded.
"Go get security," Rally said simply.
The Minbari frowned and looked about at the incapacitated, but still living thugs.
"Are you presuming to ord..."
"Are you still here?"
"This is going to be a problem," Rally said.
"I hate to say it," Garibaldi noted, looking around the scene. "But given you didn't kill anyone, and they're lurkers, it might go overlooked."
"My girls are going to hear about this," the bounty hunter said with a frown. "This was supposed to be an easy recovery job. But looks like someone took advantage of the fact I'm the only investigator on station."
"You think this was about you," Garibaldi concluded. "Any particular reason?"
"I've seen this brand of evil before," the woman said quietly.
"Yeah, but Goldie Musou is dead," Garibaldi noted, idly revealing how much he knew of Rally's past.
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(Posted Fri, 07 Jan 2011 09:41)
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