Taran looked down at his watch as he sat against the shuttle door. Nearly five minutes had passed since the Field Commander left with his entourage, and he knew that the confrontation point was close by. It should not have taken them long to enter the cave for whatever the commander had in mind, but Wembley had not reported in during the entire time. He was starting to worry that his comrade had been captured or killed before he could report…
“They’re moving,” Wembley whispered into the earpiece. “Something must have happened at the confrontation point! Lining up my shot…”
A distant whine was all Taran heard of the sniper bolt as it cut through the air and struck one of the clone engineers in the throat, driving him to the ground with a squawk of surprise. The others, true to the descriptions in their files, began a panicked scramble for any cover they could find without paying attention to where the shot had come from. The pilots began spraying cover fire in the general direction of the shot when Wembley, noting that they were not angling their shots up, sent another lance of energy and shot another engineer in the head.
Taran pulled on the second layer of the adhesive strip, and the material immediately began to give off a white-hot glow. Jumping out of the shuttle, he slammed the door shut, trusting the material to warp the contact points of the door itself until it would not form a proper seal. The shuttle was no longer spaceworthy.
The sound of the door shutting was enough to draw the attention of the clones, and Taran found himself diving for cover in the tall grass as blaster fire tracked toward his position. Scrambling forward on elbows and knees, he set toward his next objective as Wembley tried to land another shot.
“They’re on to me!” Wembley said. “The pilots are angling their shots toward my position.”
“Can you keep them off me for a minute?” Taran asked. “If I can get to their fighters, I can disable them.”
“On it,” Wembley said, grunting as the sound of a blaster bolt carried over the comm system. The sounds of single shots from the sniper rifle soon became a storm of cover fire, driving the clones back to their cover and allowing Taran to move more quickly. Wembley must have packed a backup blaster carbine. The starfighters were only fifty meters away, but the clones continuously tried to shoot towards him, so progress was slow. One such shot burned so close to Taran that a line scorched itself across the fabric of his jumpsuit’s shoulder pad, causing him to lay prone and completely still before trying to move forward again.
“You’re right next to their secondary equipment dump,” Wembley was saying over the whine of blaster fire. “Five meters to your right. Twenty meters ahead is the landing area for the Headhunters. Can you get both?”
“I think so,” Taran said, wondering if his disturbance of the tall grass was serving as a means for the clones to track him. There were occasional shots fired in his direction, but Wembley was still providing covering fire. It did not take long for him to reach the equipment dump, set on a pallet to keep it off the grass. When he found the pallet, Taran put it between him and the clones. Taking out his blaster pistol, he eased an eye around a corner.
The clones were attempting to move forward, but Wembley would lay down a spattering of fire every time one tried to venture out from their cover. Apparently, these low-batch clones were not built for tactical thinking, as Taran could see several spots for them to move to that would keep them protected from Wembley’s shots.
Looking through his equipment bag, Taran took out one of the explosive charges in its boxy, protective casing. Looking through the dump, he found a space with the supplies that would give the explosive best odds of complete destruction and cracked the casing open. Within were two small bricks of explosive compound and a sensor/activation dial. Setting the charges to proximity and carefully backing away, Taran set his eyes on the nearby Headhunter and went back into the tall grass.
“The clones saw you and are trying to train their fire on you,” Wembley said into his headset. “Keep your head down.”
“Oh, excellent advice, Wembley,” Taran said as a blaster bolt burned the grass right next to him. “I keep reminding you people that this is not my area of expertise!”
“Less whining, Scarn,” Wembley countered, sending another spray of blaster fire down onto the clones. Taran had to duck his head down a few more times as he scrambled through the tall grass, but he eventually looked up to see one of the Z-95 Headhunters perched on its landing struts. He looked behind him to see fewer blaster rifles aimed in his direction, but the clones were attempting to get closer to his position. Thankfully, Wembley was keeping them busy with his cover fire.
Squirming awkwardly to not put his head above the tall grass as much as possible, Taran rummaged through his satchel for another explosive charge. With it in hand, he elbowed his way further along the headhunt, stopping to stand when he was behind the right-rear landing strut. It was poor cover against blaster fire, but the clones seemed reluctant to shoot at their own equipment, so he had better odds there.
Being as quick and careful as he could, Taran reached up and put the compound brick against the ion fission engines on the right side of the starship, set the charge to its timer, letting go when he heard the beep of its activation. He dropped back down into the grass and squirmed away quickly.
Three minutes isn’t much, he thought, but if it just wrecks the engine, I should be safe.
Or the charge could set off a chain reaction that would make the starfighter explode and kill him in the shockwave and fire. Taran tried to not think about that, but instead elbowed faster through the tall grass.
“One headhunter sabotaged!” he said into his mic. “How far to the other one?”
Wembley gave out a curse. “Too far!” he said. Taran heard grunts, as if Wembley was on the move. “The others are coming back, looks like. I can see the commander approaching their staging area, but so far he’s alone. You’d never make it to the other fighter. Better pull out and disappear.”
“Just him?” Taran looked back to see the field commander making his way back to the staging area. The commander looked like he was bleeding from a shoulder wound, his purple blood staining his officers’ uniform. “Those mercenaries get them, you think?”
“Not sure,” Wembley said. “We’ll find out at the debriefing. Look, Taran, you can’t make your way up the hill to me; you’ll be an easy target. Can you get to the mercenaries’ shuttle? It’s on the other side of that hill, in the next valley.”
At hearing that, Taran threw caution to the wind and stood, running through the tall grass for all that he was worth. There was the sharp crack of two explosions behind him, but Taran refused to stop or look back. “I’ll make it,” he said, before ducking from a blaster bolt that flew close by overhead. “At least, I think I’ll make it.”
***
Senata 7 had nearly reached the staging ground, holding his side against a stitch and grunting with pain from his shoulder, when one of his starfighters and a nearby equipment dump suddenly flared into light and thunder.
“What?” he wheezed, staring at the double conflagrations. What had happened here? Where were his men? He scanned the nearby area until he noticed the one human clone still standing: one of the Dorants. The human was approaching him with as much haste as his injured leg would allow.
“Commander!” the Dorant said, saluting. “Sir, we came under heavy fire by unknown enemies!”
“What do you mean ‘unknown’?” Senata 7 snarled, gesturing as if to take in the entire valley. “What have you been doing out here?! Picking flowers?!”
“Sir!” the Dorant said, pointing up at a hilltop to the west. “The attack began as soon as we received your orders to mobilize! Sniper fire at first, then heavy covering fire. We began returning fire, but then we spotted a saboteur making his way through our equipment. We tried to stop him, but-”
“But nothing, Dorant!” Senata 7 snarled. “How could you let these people get passed our perimeter? How could you let a saboteur destroy a Z-95?!”
“Sir, we’re working on that now,” the Dorant said. Senata 7 lumbered over to the rest of the equipment caches, snarling at the smoking wreckage that was one of the equipment dumps.
“Was the communication malfunction repaired?” Senata 7 asked, sitting down on a crate and waving one of his other soldiers over. That one had a medical kit with him.
“Yes sir,” the Dorant said. “We had just re-established comms with the Gentle Reproof when we received your message and the shooting started.”
The medical clone had arrived and began briskly about his work, cutting away at the military tunic Senata 7 wore and examining the body armor beneath. The bolt was pinned between two plates, right at their connection point.
That lucky little human hit the perfect spot, Senata 7 thought, uncharitably. If the bolt had any more force behind it, I’d be dead now. “Good,” he said. “Send them an update and request for assistance.”
“What do I tell them, sir?” the Dorant asked.
“Lean back, sir,” the medical clone was saying. “I’m injecting a pain suppressor and will remove the bolt.”
“You will tell them the truth, Dorant,” Senata 7 said as he complied with the medical clones’ suggestions. There was a tiny prick of sensation near the wound, and then the area started to go numb. “The mercenaries overpowered our undercooked soldiers and most likely have the artifact. Tell them we’ll be in pursuit of the artifact shortly.”
The medical clone began working a set of tools around the bolt, relaxing the tissue near it and holding a bacta patch at the ready.
“After that,” Senata 7 said, watching the medic work, “send our remaining fighter out. Locate and disable their shuttle, but do not destroy it if he can manage it.”
With a grunt of effort, the medical clone yanked the bolt out, following it up with a quick application of a bacta patch and wrapping the area in bandages. Senata 7 felt the bolt leaving as a brief sensation, but not much else.
The Dorant was typing furiously on his datapad to get all the notes down. “Shall I request for a pickup as well, sir, or do you want us to stay groundside for a while?”
Senata 7 raised a hairless eyebrow. “What’s wrong with our shuttle?”
“The saboteur managed to compromise its door, sir,” the Dorant said, grimacing. “We can’t take it into space.”
Senata 7 stared at the cloned human, then sighed and relaxed into the warm embrace of not-pain given by the suppressor. “Groundside,” he said eventually. “I’ll want that cave searched after this is over. Maybe we will find something in there we can use. After that, I want us off this planet.”
“Yes, sir,” the Dorant said, turning and striding over to the surviving pilot, off to give the orders.
Senata 7 closed his eyes and tried to not breathe too heavily. While the suppressor might have taken his pain away, there was no point in trying to exert himself.
How could this mission be sabotaged so easily? he wondered to himself. They had planned everything with meticulous detail. It was handled in complete secrecy; only the General and he had known the plans in their entirety. If it could not have been leaked from their side, then it had to have happened on the other side of the mission. But who could have known about the operation without them knowing?
Oblivion, the thought seethed in his mind. Of course. The Agent knew of the General’s ambitions and considered himself the opposite side of that coin. He must have known about the tablet and planned around the General, and Senata 7 as well, coming here to take it. For all Senata 7 knew, Oblivion could have been the source that confirmed the tablets’ location to the General’s spy network.
As the adrenaline of the last few minutes wore off, the worry started to settle into his mind. The mission was a failure, most likely. The General was not going to be happy.
Maybe if I had not been given subpar clones, he thought to himself, I would not be in this predicament. Senata 7 watched the remaining pilot put on his helmet as he raced towards his starfighter.
Maybe this time, we’ll catch a break.
***
Swift's Corner 