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 Fuller'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.
21
Buy'ce gal, buy'ce tal
Vebor'ad ures aliit
Mhi draar baat'i meg'paijii'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.”