“I was in that speeder.”
“I know. Clever, wasn’t it?”
Skirata took the det and checked that it was disabled before slipping it in his pocket.
“Ord’ika, let me talk to Jaller.” He held his hand out for the comlink to Obrim. “Can your people cover the locations we gave you?”
Obrim’s voice was tight with tension. “We’re pulling people back off shifts now. We’re synchronizing this for twenty-two-hundred, are we?”
“Correct. I’ll patch you into my comlink for the duration, but don’t talk to me unless it’s critical. Other than that, stay away from the area coordinates we’re going to transmit to you, and pretend we never existed.”
“Sorry about the arrest—not my team. A routine firearms control stop, I’m afraid.”
“At least it made them bolt. They’re vulnerable when they bolt.”
“I’ll talk to you in twelve hours if all goes smoothly, then. Next breakfast’s on you, remember?”
“You take care, too, friend.”
The tangle of possibilities and risks in Skirata’s mind had become crystal clear. Two key parts of the operation were now as pinned down as they could be: the synchronized raid on the lower-priority terrorist targets by CSF, and the interception of an unspecified number of key players at the landing strip, along with their vessels.
“Remember, vode. No prisoners.” Skirata took out his medpac and prepared a one-use painkiller syringe. Then he rolled down the soft leather of his left boot and stabbed the needle deep into his ankle. The pain made his muscles shake but he clenched his teeth and let it pass. This was not the night to be slowed down by a limp. “Shoot to kill.”
Fourteen men and one woman to kill maybe twenty terrorists. Very expensive use of manpower compared to droid kill rates. But worth it.
There were a few more targets still wandering around out there, ones they hadn’t even tagged. But when it came to destroying a small organization like a group of terror cells, taking out a cell like this one would have enormous impact. It slowed them down. It set them back while they recruited and reorganized and retrained.
Even a few months made all the difference in this war.
“Walon,” he said. “Take one of my Verpine rifles tonight. Might come in handy.”
“I’m grateful, Kal.”
“Okay, vode. This is now Captain Ordo’s command as ranking officer—even if we have no ranks right now.”
Skirata swung his arms through the full range of movement to check the fit of his armor, the sand-gold suit that his adoptive father Munin had given him. He put his knife—the knife he had retrieved from his real father’s dead body—up his right sleeve, handle uppermost. He could barely remember his parents or even his original name, but Munin Skirata was as vivid as life and still with him every day, one of the precious departed whose names he recited each night.
He hit his gauntlets against his chest plate to snap himself out of memories. Both squads jumped.
Lord Mirdalan, jowls flapping, threw its head back and let out a long, low, moaning howl. The preparations had worked the strill into a hunting frenzy. It could see its master in full Mandalorian armor, and it smelled and heard men who were tense and ready to fight. All its instincts and training said hunt, hunt, hunt.
And Vau held his gloved hand out to Atin. Astonishingly, Atin took it. There was nothing but the battle in mind now. They were all saving it for the enemy.
Skirata felt the visceral thrill tighten his throat and stomach. It had been many years since he’d put on this armor to fight.
“Buy’cese!” he said. Helmets on!
It was, he knew, a sight few would believe—Walon Vau and a Jedi Knight both in full Mandalorian armor, and Republic Commandos, ARC troopers, and a clone trooper in fighting order so closely modeled on that armor he wore himself that they looked like one united army. He pulled on his own helmet before anyone noticed the tears in his eyes.
“I ought to get a holo of this,” Corr said.
Etain stood among them, incongruously fragile.
“I could have lent you my Hokan armor, General,” Fi said. “Only one careless owner.”
Etain lifted her tunic to reveal plates of body armor. “I’m not stupid.” Then she pulled out two lightsabers. Skirata winced. “Mine, and Master Fulier’s. He’d have relished a fight like this.”
She was not herself tonight, if her usual self was that worried, awkward, but tenacious soul who found it so hard to be a Jedi. She was utterly alive. Darman seemed to be able to strike sparks off her. Skirata hoped she did the same for him.
Vau flung out his arm to signal the strill to race ahead. “Oya! Oya!” Let’s go hunting! “Oya, Mird!”
The strill bayed at the top of its voice and shot out the doors to the landing platform.
Ordo turned to the strike team. “Oya! Oya, vode!”
It was electric. It had never happened before, and it would probably never happen again.
And they went hunting.
Chapter Twenty-One
Buy’ce gal, buy’ce tal
Vebor’ad ures alit
Mhi draar baat’i meg’parjii’se
Kote lo’shebs’ul narit
A pint of ale, a pint of blood
Buys men without a name
We never care who wins the war
So you can keep your fame
—Popular drinking chant of Mandalorian mercenaries—approximate translation, edited for strong language
Landing area, CoruFresh Farm Produce distribution division,
Quadrant F-76,
2035 hours, 385 days after Geonosis
The produce distribution depot was as familiar as Arca Barracks now. Everything was as the holochart and holocam images had modeled it, although some of the vessels had been moved in the last hour. Ordo took a small risk and flew the airspeeder over the CoruFresh landing strip at a cautious height just for reassurance. The depot was a lake of harsh white light dotted with loader droids, trucks, and an assortment of speeders. There were more vessels parked there than Perrive had said. They were probably legitimate transports shipping nothing more deadly than fruit.
“I think CoruFresh might be annoyed about the damage to their fleet in the morning,” Ordo said.
“That’s their problem for not being too choosy about the company they keep.” Sev secured one of the Verpine rifles to his webbing. He seemed to take Skirata’s warning about bending anyone who bent his kit quite literally. “They must be bankrolled by crime gangs themselves.”
“We’ll be doing CSF a favor, then.”
It was always a challenge to insert teams into a busy location. Air traffic data said the strip clocked an average of 120 trucks and cargo lifters passing through the strip every twenty-four hours; 2000 to 2300 hours seemed to be the period when it almost shut down completely. That was probably why the Separatists had picked the 2200 time slot for Skirata to deliver the explosives. They’d be loaded and gone by the time the overnight deliveries started again at 2300.
If the teams had gone in early, they would have needed to avoid an awful lot of people and droids.
“You ever carried out an assault on an urban objective before?” Sev said.
“Yes. N’dian. Heard of it?”
Sev paused to check his HUD database. Ordo could see the icon flash up on his own HUD over the shared link. He heard Sev swallow.
“I meant one where you had to leave the place pretty well intact, sir.”
“In that case, Sev, no. It’ll be a first.”
“Me, too.”
“Glad we could share this moment, then.”
Ordo parked the airspeeder next to the small substation that routed utilities to the industrial area where the CoruFresh depot was located. A meter-wide conduit carrying pipes and cables stretched out twenty meters from the substation to span a gap that was five hundred meters deep. That was their route in.
“All tooled up?” Ordo shouldered two Plex missile launchers
against his pauldron, one on each side.
“Yes sir.”
“Shoulder okay?”
“Fi has a big mouth.”
“Fi knows that I need to know if any of my team is compromised by injury.”
“I’m fine, sir.”
Ordo nudged him. “Oya, ner vod.”
Ordo led the way across the conduit, checking Sev’s progress in his HUD. A man who’d nearly fallen to his death could get a little nervous at heights like this. But Sev advanced as if he were on solid ground, and they slipped into the cover of crates and containers at the rear wall of the warehouse.
“Omega, are you in position?”
Niner’s voice crackled slightly in Ordo’s comlink. “We’re one hundred fifty meters from the perimeter, sir. Southeast of the strip at the waste processing depot.”
“Any activity in the vessels parked on the eastern edge of the strip?”
“All quiet except for maintenance droids. Dar sent up a surveillance remote and all the wets are clustered at the warehouse entrance moving boxes. They’ve backed up two of the trucks against the loading bay.”
“We’re going to position ourselves on the roof, then.”
The warehouse was a single-story building with an unforgiving flat roof that meant anyone in the two repulsor trucks on the far side of the landing area would notice troops moving around. It was the only high vantage point overlooking the floodlit landing area to direct fire as well as pick off a few targets for themselves. Ordo had decided it was asking for trouble to take up a position in the residential towers nearly a thousand meters away. If they wound up on the receiving end of returned fire, there would be a lot of dead civilians to explain.
“Up you go,” said Ordo.
Sev fired his rappelling line over the roof and tugged on it to ensure it was secure. The small winch in his belt took most of his weight but he pushed off with his boots, looking almost as if he were walking up the vertical surface. Ordo waited as Sev rolled flat over the edge of the roof, Verpine rifle in his right hand.
“Roof clear, sir.”
Ordo fired his own line and let the winch lift him until he could reach the roof with his hand. He handed Sev the Plex launchers and hauled himself over the top to crawl flat on elbows and knees until he was near the front edge of the roof.
They both flipped down the scopes in their visors at the same time. Ordo saw the same image repeated in Sev’s viewpoint icon on the margin of his HUD.
“In an ideal world, we could have left a timed charge on that utility conduit and paralyzed this whole sector before we went in,” Sev said.
“And that just advertises the fact that the Grand Army was here. We don’t exist, remember? We’ve gone bandit.”
“Just fantasizing.”
The textbook approach was to knock out the two illumigrids and then move in. But timing was critical. Skirata and Jusik needed to make the delivery of explosives and then get clear before the party started.
“Omega, we’re in position.”
“Copy that.” This time it was Mereel’s voice.
“On my mark, we’ll knock out both lights and then provide covering fire while you advance from the south side. Delta, what’s your location?”
“Boss here, sir. We’ll be in position behind the warehouse in two minutes. Atin and Fixer will enter from the front. Scorch and I will cover the north side of the strip.”
Atin seemed to have slipped easily into the temporary gap left by Sev. There wasn’t the slightest hint in their voices that their former brother wasn’t welcome. Ordo supposed that once you were one of Vau’s trainees, you could merge back into the batch without comment when there was a job to be done.
“Okay, vode. Now we watch and wait.”
Mereel, Fi, Niner, Darman, and Corr crouched in the cover of a conveyor belt of bins outside the waste depot, where droids collected the contents for compaction and disposal.
Fi sniffed dubiously. There was the distinct sulfurous tang of rotting vegetables: harmless, or his helmet’s filter would never have let the aroma through, but nauseating nonetheless. On Niner’s signal, they sprinted from the bins and dropped down by a pillar at the end of the walkway that led across to the CoruFresh depot.
“You’re very shiny, you two,” Niner said, jerking his thumb at Corr and Mereel, who were almost glowing in the light from the red flashing sign of a seedy caf bar. “Why don’t you just write SHOOT ME HERE on that di’kutla white armor?”
“You rely on that black stuff way too much,” Mereel said. “It’s all about a stealthy approach, you see.” He heaved a massive Merr-Sonn Reciprocating Quad Blaster onto his hip and powered up the microrepulsorlift to take some of its weight. Four huge double-barreled blaster muzzles loomed from the weapon’s body. It was close on eighty centimeters long and looked more like a cruiser’s close-in defense cannon. “Stealth, and a nice big Cip-Quad, of course.”
Fi patted Corr’s conspicuously white shoulder. “His men will follow him anywhere, ner vod. But only out of curiosity.”
“Okay, get curious, then.” Mereel indicated the direction of the landing strip. “They’ve moved some of the vessels, so we’re going to have to cover a little extra open ground. At least most of the cockpits are facing the same way so we might have a blind spot to take advantage of.”
Darman, Verpine rifle slung across his back, was still examining the other impressive item of Merr-Sonn firepower excess that was balanced across his thighs, the Z-6 Rotary Blaster. It was almost as big as the Cip-Quad. He looked wary of it and passed it to Corr. “We really did say no prisoners, didn’t we, sir?”
“Not exactly a sniper weapon, I know.”
“Etain would like that,” Fi said. “Bit classier than her Trannie LJ-50.”
Mereel snorted. “The general can get her own rotary. That’s my baby.”
“Beats a bunch of flowers, Dar…”
“Has she called in yet, by the way?”
Ordo’s voice cut in. There was no privacy on this frequency. “She and Vau followed Perrive’s trace to an apartment in zone three, Quadrant A-Four. They’re watching him now.”
“Isn’t that a diplomatic quarter?” asked Mereel, whose capacity for memorizing data seemed as unlimited as his brother’s.
“’Fraid so,” said Ordo. “That could get interesting. If we go in there, we’re into a whole new level of deniability.”
Fi watched Darman’s head drop for a moment, but there wasn’t so much as a breath or a click of teeth. He snapped back to his alert position. Fi wasn’t sure if he was afraid for Etain’s safety or of what she might do, and he didn’t plan to ask. “Vau doesn’t need that strill when he’s got a Jedi with him.”
“He takes Mird everywhere,” Mereel said. “Like Mando fathers take their sons into battle.”
“If I didn’t know Old Psycho was a head case, I’d say that was cute. What is it going to do?”
“You’ve never seen a strill hunt, have you?”
Mereel didn’t say another word. He signaled advance to Niner with a sweep of his hand and the squad sprinted for the perimeter of the landing strip.
Diplomatic sector, Quadrant A-4,
2145 hours, 385 days after Geonosis
Etain stood on the ledge of a soaring office tower facing the elegant apartment block and realized exactly what black ops truly meant.
Vau stood beside her. The ledge was about 150 centimeters wide, and the breeze at this height was noticeable even on climate-controlled Coruscant.
“What’s the matter?” Vau said, his parade-ground voice slightly softened by his Mando helmet. “Didn’t know how dirty politics could be? That diplomats aren’t all nice honest people? That they keep unpleasant company?”
“I think I worked that out already.” She felt the strill brush past her legs, padding impatiently up and down the narrow ledge. It had no fear of heights, it seemed. “But the consequences of pursuing Perrive into that building reach far beyond assassinating a terrorist.”
“We’ll have to get him to come out, then.”
“He could lie low there for weeks.”
“If he’s hiding, yes.”
“I find you hard to follow sometimes, Vau.”
“He might be collecting something or somebody. He was in a mad rush to leave.”
“I sense he’s alone. He isn’t picking up a colleague.”
Vau leveled the scope of the Verpine, angled down about thirty degrees. The strill teetered on the edge of the ledge.
“I can see Perrive. Yes, he’s alone. He’s in front of the doors to the balcony—now that’s arrogant, my friend. Think nobody can see you, eh? Etain, want to take a look?”
Vau handed her the Verpine. She took it nervously, hearing Skirata’s constant admonition to take care of the weapon, and was surprised how light and harmless it felt. She peered down the scope and felt Vau reach out and flick something on the optic. A different image appeared in the eyepiece, slightly pink-tinted, of a man rummaging through a desk and sticking datachips into his ’pad, activating them, and then extracting and discarding them. A pale blob of light shimmered from his chest and then from his back as he turned.
“What can you see?”
“He’s loading data,” Etain said.
“He’s shredding someone’s files. Told you so.”
“What’s the white light? The EM emissions from the Dust?”
“Correct.”
Etain handed back the rifle. “That datapad is going to contain some interesting material. How do we get hold of it?”
“The old-fashioned way.” Vau sounded as if he’d smiled. It was hard to tell under the helmet. “Let’s get him to come to the balcony.”
“I’m not sure I can influence his mind at this range… or at all.”
“No need, my dear.” Vau folded a cloth one-handed and placed it under the stock of the Verpine at the point where it touched his armored shoulder. “I hate a standing shot without something to lean against, but I’m not as sure-footed as Mird so I’m not going to attempt to kneel.” He leaned back slightly against the wall at his back. “But this Verpine is beautiful.” He rested his firing hand on his raised forearm. “It’s almost a handgun.”
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