[Republic Commando] - 02(127)

“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.