Chapter 90

Renn crashed down on to the mercenary filled rooftop and rolled to bleed off his remaining momentum.

The speed he had travelled at thanks to opals assistance had meant that he had reached the rooftop before any of the mercenaries even had the time to react.

He stopped his roll as he came up into a crouch in the centre of the rooftop, surrounded by confused and surprised mercenaries.

"Alright guys, nice night isn't" Renn said simply before raising his blaster pistol and sending a flurry of bolts into the E-Web's attacked power generator.

The world then seemed to stand still as Renn launched himself sideways, through a maintenance access door that was conveniently nearby, and into the relative safety of one of the stairways leading up onto the roof.

Barely a second later the E-Web's power generator erupted in an immense explosion that sent great plumes of flame into the night air and ripped through the rooftop beneath it, sending much of the part of the roof it had been on and parts of several floors beneath exploding outwards.

The three mercenaries operating the heavy repeating blaster were instantly incinerated, flash cooked by the exploding power generator, and a fourth was struck in the chest by a large fragment of the E-Web's barrel. That punched clean through his armour and torso alike and left the man bleeding out on the floor.

Two other mercenaries were lifted into the air by the force of the explosion before being carried over the edge of the rooftop by it. They flailed helplessly as they fell screaming the thousands of feet from the top of the mega-structure of an apartment building, they had been on to the planet's surface bellow.

The rest of the mercenaries were in in a state of shock, staring disbelievingly at were the E-Web had once been.

In barely more than a handful of seconds the situation had changed from them slaughtering their trapped and helpless prey, to suddenly having an explosion wipe out half of their team.

They were still trying to wrap their heads around what had happened when Renn, deciding he didn't feel like waiting for an invitation to restart the fight, strode out of the stairway he had been taking cover inside and calmly shot one of the remaining mercenaries in the head before switching to take aim at another.

But before he could pull the trigger a second time a blue blur streaked across from Padme's penthouse towards Renn.

The air was still filled with the dust and smoke from the explosion so all that was visible was a shadowy figure slamming into the rooftop, but Renn knew exactly who it was.

A moment later the dust, smoke, and a terrified mercenary were sent hurtling off the rooftop and into the sky lanes as Seela pulled a massive wave of the force behind her.

She then rose from the crouched position she had landed in, pivoting as she ignited her double-bladed lightsabre, and lunged for two mercenaries who were stood conveniently close together.

Seela then twisted and spun, looking like the combination of one of the galaxies most elegant dancers and a spinning top.

Her movements were so fluid and graceful that Renn was almost surprised that when she finished her spin, instead of being greeted by the thundering applause of a crowded theatre witnessing the performance of a famous dancer, she was greeted by the bodies of the two mercenaries sliding apart into multiple seared chunks of meat after being sliced apart by multiple slashes from Seela's deadly lightsabre.

They then heard the blaring of a horn as instead of simply falling screaming down to the planets surface like his two companions before him, the mercenary Seela had thrown of the roof flew directly into the path of a passing freight transport speeder.

The Speeder had honked its horn in a futile attempt to 'get the stupid man who had decided to jump in front of it out of the way' before it slammed straight into him.

Renn and Seela heard the wet thwack sound despite the perpetual whine of speeders, piloted by citizens of Coruscant who seemed completely unconcerned with the gunbattle happening around them.

The unfortunate mercenary's death at the hands of the speeder truck, left only one living merc for Renn and Seela to deal with and as they turned to face him they saw the pure terror in the man's eyes.

He began backing away in fear as he looked at the duo who had just killed the rest of his team.

"Your, M-mons—" He began saying as he raised his blaster, when a third figure made the jump across the gap between the buildings.

The figure dived into a forward roll when they hit the roof and a glittering object hurtled away from the rolling person and towards the remaining mercenary.

A second later the mercenary stumbled backwards the force of a vibro-knife embedding itself between his eyes enough to knock him back a few steps.

Shae then exited her roll, rising to her feet next to the mercenary who had just begun to fall to the ground.

She reached out without looking as the man fell past her and yanked her knife out of his head. She then casually flicked the blood of her blade before sheathing it in a hidden holster on her arm covered by her leather jacket, before turning to Renn and Seela.

"Soo, do I win the coolest entrance or what?" Shae said grinning and looking for praise from the others.

"I got three with my entrance, so I'd say no." Seela said grinning back at the Mandalorian who lost her grin instantly and narrowed her eyes at the Twi'lek girl.

"No one likes a show off," Shae said irritably, blissfully ignoring the fact that she herself had been trying to show off moments earlier.

"Unless their showing off something really cool, like dicing two trained killers as easily as a chef dices vegetables," Seela said with a tone of mock superiority and Shae looked away before mumbling in annoyance something about that being true.

The two girls then stared at each other for a few more seconds before both they and Renn began laughing at the pretend conflict they had been having.

They then moved over to the edge of the building and the three of them sat down, still grinning, with their feet dangling over the impossibly high precipice.

The three of them then began chatting and speculating about who attacked them and wondering how they had gotten their hands on an E-Web, a serious piece of hardware and supposedly for military use only.

They talked for a while until Seela raised a question that hadn't occurred to the other two until that moment.

"How are we going to get back to Padme's apartment?" She said, looking at the massive gap between the two buildings.

"Eh," Renn shrugged uncaringly, "I'm sure Opal will figure something out."

-

"So, you're the infamous Wraith then… I thought you'd be taller,"

Renn rolled his eyes at the comment made by the senate guard commander in front of him, who was significantly shorter than Renn's own height of six foot four inches.

"Well, my armour usually adds a few inches to my height, so it's probably easy for people to get confused," Renn said with a small shrug.

"Ha, I'll bet," The senate guard commander said before a clatter from across the room made them both turn to observe a slightly portly lieutenant of the Coruscant security force admonishing a police droid that had just tripped over a fallen vase.

It hadn't taken long for both the senate guard and the Coruscant security force to descend on Padme's apartment after the sounds of heavy baster fire had ripped through the night air.

Apparently trying to kill a republic senator with a E-Web was enough to send multiple security forces swarming towards the battle, but not quickly enough to get there before it was already over.

"I thought you'd have been here already, seeing as though part of your job is protecting senators from assassination attempts," Renn curiously asked the senate guard commander, a man named Jaller Obrim, while trying not to sound like he was blaming the man for the incident.

"The senator didn't want our help and the chancellor didn't force the issue for some reason. Apparently, they thought the senator's planetary security would be good enough." Commander Obrim said as he turned to look at the line of dead Naboo security forces officers covered by white sheets.

Five of the Naboo security forces officers had died in the assault on the penthouse and their leader captain Typho had been wounded in the fighting.

"Well, the senator did have some jedi guards I guess," Renn said nodding towards Obi-wan, who had returned to the penthouse with Anakin moments before the CSF personnel had arrived.

"Yeah…" Obrim said slowly, not so subtly making his opinion of the jedi's guarding skills known.

Anakin had rushed off to Padme's side as soon as the two jedi had returned to the apartment but Obi-wan had stopped to tell the others about what had happened during their speeder chase.

They had managed to catch the lead gangster who had fled from the scene after chasing him across Coruscant's streets but before they were able to interrogate him the gangster had been shot with some kind of dart containing a potent neurotoxin that had killed the man instantly.

Obi-wan had brought the dart back with him and was still holding it up appraisingly, trying to figure out where it had been made in the hopes of getting some clues to who fired it, and Renn was trying to avoid looking at it.

He knew exactly where it came from, but he didn't want anyone to know until he'd had the chance to give Jango and the others a heads up, especially seeing as it was highly likely one of the mercenaries Jango had hired to help him on kamino seemed to have gone rogue.

Renn had a strong suspicion that something big was about to happen and it was probably going to involve the clones on kamino so he wanted to make sure his friends where ready for whatever would happen.

The investigation into the incident lasted a bit longer than was probably necessary and nearly ended with Shae putting a blaster bolt through the CSF lieutenant's smug face after the man, named Tan Divo, had tried to claim that Renn blowing up the neighbouring building's roof when he destroyed the E-Web was a terrorism offence.

But commander Obrim had been quick to dismiss the charge and the arrogant lieutenant, although it was unclear if he had done this to save Renn or to save the CSF from crossing the Wraith's wrath.

The jedi had then decided to move the Senator to a safe house, under the strong insistence of the senate guard present in the apartment, while they figured out what they would do next.

Renn had overheard vague plans to move Padme off world in disguise, while Obi-wan went to track down the assassin who was after her, but decided it wasn't his problem.

The jedi had taken full responsibility for the senator and so Renn and the girls had decided to go back to their ship to try and get some sleep before they tried to figure out what to do next themselves.