Did you have fun?


Sahrai entered the room and nearly lost his stomach. His mouth curved in a decided grimace as he waved his hand. He used the Force to send the foul-smelling air to the other side of the room held his breath as much as he could.

He didn't look at the sub-commander. He was afraid that if he did, he would lose his control over his churning stomach and have to join her at the sink.

"I think we were investigating the pathogen," he replied to her question.

----

Daaron was very careful to avoid na'Tatha's gaze--most people didn't like throwing up in front of others, especially strangers who hadn't thrown up, and would be very irritated afterwards, liable to take even eye contact in a derogative way.

Hearing Sahrai, he nodded. "You were going to see what you could find in here." He turned towards Viree. "I think it's well established that this corpse is decaying," he said in a dry tone.

Hopefully they wouldn't need to be in this room very long.

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(Loads. It was amazing.)

"Ah, yes." na'Tatha pulled down the visor on her helmet, sealed it, and started filtering the outside air in. She breathed deeply. It was slightly musty, but at least she didn't feel the bile rising through her throat again.

The subcommander approached the post-mortem ... hopefully ... subject and ran a quick eye over it. The decay was too heavy to tell much.

"Wait." Digging a pair of surgical gloves out of her med kit, she reached into a cut and dug out a plastic nodule, no bigger than a bean. Continuing her investigation, she discovered several more, spread throughout the body but exposed by the cuts. Once she could find no more, she headed out into the corridor and unsealed her helmet so that she could look more closely at the pieces.

That was a mistake. Just looking at the nodules, replete with lumps of putrid flesh, was enough to make her gag. She pressed her face against the cold wall until she had her reaction under control, then reached for her scanner. "These aren't hormone dispensers - they're sample collectors, retrievable only by post-mortem. They were installed five years ago - since then, he was a walking dead man."

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<center>Nothing but the Rain</center>

Sahrai and Daaron followed the sub-commander out of the room. Giving the small nodules a look of disgust, Sahrai spoke.

"So, what your saying is that this man was just a laboratory experiment all along?"

It wasn't a pleasant thought. People shouldn't be tested on that way. I wonder if he knew, Sahrai thought. It would be all the worse if he hadn't. He grimaced in disgust.

----

Daaron quirked an eyebrow at Sahrai. The Jedi was obviously concerned about the ethics of experimentation on human test subjects, but something else interested the commando.

"They've been in that man for five years?" he asked. "That would imply that the Maedan have been planning this onslaught for a long time--it's obviously much more coordinated than it seems at the surface."

If that was so, the enemy would have had plenty of time to prepare for opposition. Only the knowledge that his own trusted commandos were keeping watch behind and in front of him kept Daaron from taking a glance over his shoulder, unsure of what the enemy might have prepared for unsuspecting intruders.

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"Yes, that's essentially it. So were most, if not all, of these other soldiers." na'Tatha sealed the nodules away in a container. Later, the Taarin would be able to analyze them and determine more of the actual results.

She peeled the gloves off her hands, wrinkling her nose in disgust. "It's more than likely that they've been working on this for more than a decade, Major. Any sort of technology takes time to develop and test - unlike the holovids in which a cure is developed, then distributed the next day." She straightened. "They may or may not have been preparing for this specific incident. I suggest we continue to other levels."

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<center>Nothing but the Rain</center>

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Packing her equipment away, na'Tatha looked down the corridor. "To tell, the truth, I'm not quite sure. It looks like a Kareth-type layout, but there are some differences. We should continue on, however."

She took point, with two commandos backing her up, and they proceded down the corridor. The subcommander stopped in front of a durasteel door. "This is the main lift."

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<center>Nothing but the Rain</center>

The lift was clear of traps, so the team piled in, and Sahrai tapped the button that would let them off at the next level down.

"Now would be a really bad time to get trapped," Sahrai muttered. Thankfully, the turbolift doors opened at the correct level, and the commandos rapidly exited the risky lift.

"There are living beings on this level," Sahrai cautioned as they moved down the corridor again.

----

Daaron tried scanning their surroundings with the infrared setting on his eyeshield, but there was something in the walls that pretty much rendered it useless. It seemed they would relying completely on their two Force-users to know if anyone was approaching.

He smiled grimly as one of his commandos located a dataport and Aivon accessed it. "We're downloading the building layout now, Sahrai," he informed the Jedi.

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na'Tatha, overhearing, nodded in approval. The commandos had to be good, she surmised, to get past the Maedan security protocols and hack into the system so easily. She was about to request a transfer of data to her pad when - something - echoed through the corridor. It was faint, and brief, but it definately sounded like something ... dangerous. "What's that?"

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<center>Nothing but the Rain</center>

Sahrai snapped his head to the side, looking down the corridor in the direction of the sound.

"It feels like a droid," he said as he looked for the source of the noise via the Force. "And I can't imagine that they would send just one droid after us--yeah. I'm picking up several more. Unfortunately, I can't tell what class they are, so they might be pretty big. Better take cover."

He followed his own advice as he looked for something to crouch behind, grabbing his lightsabers off of his belt.

Daaron, however, didn't seem to pay attention to him, turning his back on direction the droids would be coming from. He rummaged through his pack until he found want he was looking for--a flat, round explosive.

"Sahrai?" Daaron asked, holding the mine out. Sahrai nodded, reaching out with the Force to move the mine from Daaron's grasp to the center of the intersection down the hall, right where the droids would have to turn the corner.

"Remote or Proximity?" he asked the Major.

----

Daaron glanced up at the Jedi as he pulled out his detonator. "Remote," he said. Hopefully whatever it was wasn't big enough that they would need it, but it might very well be. He carefully clipped the detonator to his jumpsuit where he could easily press the button, and then unlimbered his blaster rifle.

"Where are they?" he asked Sahrai.

"Right around the corner," the Jedi responded.

"Okay, let's try and keep them pinned in the intersection," Daaron cautioned the commandos, giving na'Tatha a pointed look just in case she didn't realize that the statement was for her, too.

I'm gonna let you make the droids into whatever you want, Valera--the threat was your idea, after all. Plus, I like destroying other people's creations.

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(dang.... *rummages around in idea box* k, let's try this)

Shooting Fahl's "pointed look" straight back at him, the subcommander ducked behind a thick support column and unslung her rifle. She referenced her scanner again - nothing. "I'm not picking up anything ... no metal, no droids, no movement ... are you sure you're not mistaken, Master Faradej?"

Perhaps she should have rephrased that. One glance at the Jedi Master's face told that he was, indeed, certain of the droids.

"In that case," she muttered, "we have two possibilities. Most likely is that my scanner is malfunctioning. Less likely, but still possible, is that these droids have been engineered with a stealth mode."

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<center>Nothing but the Rain</center>

Sahrai pointed. "There," he said, opening his eyes to see where his hand was directed. So far as they could see, the intersection was empty, but the commandos wasted no time in opening fire at the space he indicated.

The scarlet bolts burned through the air to splash against something. Encouraged, the commandos fired at a steady rate instead of a single volley, and the space around where their bolts were hitting began to flicker--a moment later, the cloaking shield vanished entirely, and a droid was revealed.

"New model," Sahrai said, his voice nearly drowned out by the blaster fire.

----

"It's an assassin droid, model HA-148," Daaron said, raising his voice so Sahrai could hear him.

Obviously the droid relied a lot on its cloaking field for camouflage, because its surface was a bright, reflective chrome color, and fairly resilient, too, considering how many bolts were hitting it. It began to fire back, and soon Omega squad was scrambling around in the hallway as their cover was blown out from in front of them. Daaron shifted his aim to shoot next to the droid, and another one blinked into view a few seconds later, opening fire too. Eight heavy blasters fired down the hall at the commando squad as the two droids straightened their hands to allow the weapons on either side of their wrists to have clear shots.

Two orange lightsabers hummed to life as Sahrai stepped in the path of the oncoming bolts, somehow managing to deflect the oncoming bolts back towards the droids while not getting in the way of any of the commandos' shots.

"Do the Maedan normally use droids like these, sub-commander?" Daaron asked the Taarin officer.

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"Not that we -" na'Tatha began, then instinctively dove away from the column as most of one side disappeared. Liquid metal splashed her previous position. She landed on her belly and forearms in a reasonably covered area, and decided to keep her answer short. "No!" the soldier yelled back over her shoulder, and proceeded to align her sights on one of the sensor arrays on the side of a droid. It took three successive shots to penetrate, and the machine barely faltered. She rolled into a better position to try again. "I need vulnerable spots!"

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<center>Nothing but the Rain</center>

Sahrai moved a little more into the center of the corridor and a little closer to the droids. If he wasn't trying to deflect shots away from the commandos, he wouldn't have any trouble taking down the droids, but trying to block them all meant he could move very far very fast.

He locked one of his lightsabers on and hurled it down the corridor at the droids, assuming control of it with the Force. One of the droid's bolts got past him as his concentration shifted, and he heard a curse from behind him as Daaron had molten metal splash onto him. Ignoring the commando, he continued to block the oncoming bolts as best he could, manipulating his other lightsaber via the Force to slash at them from the other side.

----

Daaron rolled away as his cover got blown out from in front of him again. The laser beam boiled away the metal, splattering drops of it around a small radius. Daaron cursed as several of them found a landing site on the back of his leg.

Up ahead, he could see Sahrai blocking most of the oncoming bolts with one lightsaber, while his other one was floating next to the two Assassin droids, slashing away at their armored exterior. As he aimed at them once more, Daaron saw the lightsaber finally slice through one of the droids' arms. As the blaster fire coming towards them decreased slightly, Sahrai moved more up the corridor.

"It looks like we don't need the weak spots after all," Daaron said to na'Tatha. "I think he's going to take out those droids."

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na'Tatha pulled herself to a kneeling position and began digging in her utility vest. "He should get on with it, then. The current state of affairs is highly ... undesirable." She found what she was looking for - the smooth, cold curve of an EMP grenade. When detonated, it would project a force field to contain the electromagnetic pulse that followed. The pulse could completely interrupt the operation of the droids, provided that their backup systems and redundancy routines were not very efficient. At the very least, the grenade would halt the droids for a few seconds, giving the Jedi time to finish them off.

The subcommander set the timer for five seconds and lobbed the grenade down the corridor, over Faradej's head. It struck the ground and rolled to a stop in between the droids, who didn't appear to have noticed it. Three .... two ... one ...

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<center>Nothing but the Rain</center>

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(Rawr.... I missed the whole dang fight!!!..... What shall I have been doing while this is going on, just watching?.....)

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For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him shall not die, but have everlasting Life. ~John 3:16~





~The Mercenary A-U Gentlewoman~