The Job part 2

 

Nicci spotted the Adascorp Science vessel in orbit around Nam Chorios just before she entered the planet's atmosphere.  The planet was a vast, arid wasteland with tall mountains and giant crystals everywhere.  Lightning seemed consistently drawn to these crystals, creating a spectacular light show.  Beautiful to look at, but very difficult to navigate through.

Nicci scanned for an area where the crystals were least dense, and also furthest from any civilization, to land her ship.  She had picked up the special cages to hold the creatures in, and was also given some very 'questionable' bait to line them with to see if she could set them up as traps first.  The Droch liked to feed on live humanoids, but the scientists aboard the vessel said freshly dead ones would do.  Nicci didn't care much for this and didn't question where the corpses came from.  She just loaded the containers on board and got on with the job so she could go back home to Endor as quickly as possible. 

Upon leaving the ship she was almost immediately forced to dive out of the way or be hit with lightning.  This was going to make things difficult.  Difficult, but not impossible.  Nicci stayed low, weaving her way between the taller crystals, ordering her seeker droid to scan for the species she was hunting.  The seeker droid seemed to only be searching for half a second before it tagged thousands of entities and began its droning alerts at a constant rate. 

"Well at least they won't be hard to find," Nicci muttered, muting the droid quickly.  Nicci offloaded about eight or so containers and put them in the dark shadows where the light from the crystals was not shining and the lightning light was not very intrusive.  She crouched at a comfortable distance away from the cages and waited, observing the planet as she did so.  

It was always dusk on this planet, which she presumed was why the Droch were able to thrive here.  Very little vegetation grew here, but there was some.  Her eyes fell on something that seemed to connect between two crystals.  It looked like a massive planet, but when she set her visor to zoom in close, she realized it was not a planet at all, but rather a giant insect, that seemed to cocoon itself between two massive crystal formations.  The creature looked...part humanoid, which was the most disturbing thing, and it was huge.  Nicci remembered Xera saying that the very large creatures had merged with their humanoid host, becoming intelligent and sentient.  Nicci shuddered.  Why did it have to be bugs?  

She mulled over moving from cover to go kill the abomination, but realized if she did so, it would negate catching any of the smaller creatures in the containers, as they would surely scatter off.  Reluctantly, she decided to finish the job and get off this rock as quickly as possible.  But that didn't mean she wanted to be anywhere near that thing.  She decided to wait for the traps to spring from inside the ship.  She was old afterall, and tired.  She climbed into her bunk and slept until morning.

Morning came and went, and she ended up waking early afternoon.  You'd never be able to tell, because it looked the same at all hours of the day.  Always dusk.  She pulled her armor back on and went to go check her traps.  Every single one of them was full of at least two droch.  She pushed each container into the cargo hold of her vessel.  The giant freaky droch was no longer there, which suited Nicci JUST fine.

When she happened upon the last container, not only did it have three droch inside it, but the outside was covered in them as well.  Grimacing, Nicci pulled out her bes'kad and tried to knock each one off.  They made a loud hissing noise, and charged her.  She cut them in half one by one, but they just seemed to keep coming from a nearby hole in the ground.  She quickly activated the container to float back to the ship, fighting the droch off the cage just before it took off.  They stopped splitting their attention now, and all jumped her instead, in overwhelming numbers.   They were biting and clawing and scratching but it did almost nothing to her armor, but they were too thick for her to move through to get back to her ship, and she certainly didn't want to bring any with her.

Finally she decided she had had enough, and pulled the hydraulic fluid tube deep inside her prowler until it burst and leaked fluid everywhere.  She then used her wrist flamethrower to set it ablaze.  The droch screamed and shrieked shrilly, scattering everywhere in a panic which only made the fire spread among them faster.  They retreated off Nicci, frantically rolling about in the sand, leaving her to make her escape back to the ship unpursued.