"So what are we looking for, exactly?" Kristy holstered her blaster at Sci's motion and fell into step beside him.
"To be honest, I'm not sure. The shield, if we can find it, of course. If not...then I'd be looking for a computer center. An ops. Targets of opportunity, at any rate."
They walked along in silence for a while. No guards came to accost them, no Dark Jedi appeared out of the shadows. In fact, the last people they had seen were the rest of the team. Kristy's mind started to wander, to Thayer, Becki, Josh, Nick...
"What's your opinion of the team?" asked Sci, startling Kristy out of her reverie.
"What?"
"Your opinion of the team." Sci glanced sideways at her. Kristy was, by her own admission, far from the ideal XO for a unit like the Terrans. She and Sci had been trying to get her better trained for the role she found herself in, and Sci had apparently decided this was a perfect time for another test.
"Shoot the hostage," she said after a second. Sci chuckled softly.
"Very funny. But I'm serious. You've been working with the team longer than I have this time; what's your opinion of their status?"
"The last time I gave you my opinion, I'd like to point out, you just said how much it didn't matter."
"I know what I said. Just answer the question."
"Um...The only phrase I can think of is 'total disarray" and that doesn't seem strong enough." Kristy thought back, trying what she and Sci had been training her in.
Sci had been telling Kristy from the beginning that she had all the tools to be a competent XO. Her scientific training gave her the most solid foundation he could hope for: a belief in the importance of observation, data collection, and eventual decision making. All she needed to do was turn it to a new data set.
"Let's start with Becki," she said, her voice slipping into paper presentation/lecture mode. "She's pretty close to catatonic right now, or she was when I left. Thayer..."
"I know, I was there."
"Suffice it to say, I'm glad she's with Cheriss," Kristy continued as the two came up on a corner. Sci flattened himself against the wall, as Kristy followed suit. Sci glanced around briefly, then shined a light down the hall. Nothing.
"Agreed," said Sci as they turned, "but how is everybody else?"
"Brad is a loose cannon. I wouldn't trust him."
"I don't."
"I suspect you're the only reason he's still alive and not in prison."
"You're right. I believe in him--I think he's a good man in a bad place. But that doesn't mean I trust him."
"Well, you're the boss, and it's your prerogative. But if he ever turns on you..."
"I'll hope he kills me before you have time to say 'I told you so.'"
"How considerate of you. Good idea pairing him with Fes, though, if only because Fes is equally offkilter. With luck they can cancel each other out. Josh Cochran is a disaster waiting to happen, and we both know that, but pairing him with Mike might help. Or it might leave us with another lightsaber slice-and-diced body.
"And Mike isn't exactly stable either," she continued. "I don't know what's going on with him..."
"He's averse to killing and can't stand being a member of the team. He says he's going to quit after the mission, but I figure he'll just take an extended leave."
"Oh, fantastic," Kristy muttered. "He's as screwed up as the rest of them. Thankfully, the rest of our less-than-stable team is safely off for med help."
"Which can't possibly end well, and we both know it."
"This is being an executive officer?"
"Pretty much. Could be worse; in your case, at the end of the day, you can blame me."
"When do you ever take a break?"
"What is this 'break' of which you speak?"
Kristy giggled a little as Sci held up a hand, pointing to a door on the right. "Looks like that's the ops center," he said. "Let's go."
They took up positions on the left and right of the door. Sci counted off three on his fingers, and kicked in the door. He was in first, blaster pointed right, as Kristy followed immediately behind looking left. Empty. Kristy closed the door again.
Sci ran to the computer terminal on the desk in the center of the room, then chuckled wryly. "They're running their entire Terra-based system on a Pentium 3." He pulled the chair out and sat down, tapping at the keyboard. "It's reasonably password-protected, though. Here..."
He pulled the computer out of the desk and threw the case on the floor, pulling a datapad from a pocket. He yanked out the hard drive cable, and plugged it into the datapad. "I'll download the data for now," he said. As the datapad pinged, he removed the cable and blasted the entire computer, drive and all, to melted pieces.
Kristy hissed as she heard a noise outside. She and Sci dove into a shadowy corner as the door swung open.
A large, mustached man walked in, glanced around, and slammed his hand on an alarm panel on the wall. Outside, they could hear klaxons howling. Kristy gasped silently as she recognized his uniform: A New Republic colonel's. She glanced at Sci, but his face was unreadable.
Unfortunately, the silent gasp was too loud, and the colonel spun. "Who's there?" He leveled a blaster at a different part of the room, fired twice, and shouted again. "Who's there?"
Sci and Kristy stood and raised their blasters, his level, hers shaky and confused. "Retlaw Zturk, you are under arrest on the charge of treason against the New Republic."
The man--Zturk--laughed. "Arrest me? Treason? You must be kidding."
Sci said nothing, merely shifted his aim and fired. Zturk yelped in pain as the bolt shredded the blaster he was holding, but before Sci could fire again--and before Kristy could get a clear enough mind to fire, Zturk ran out of the door. Sci swore in a language Kristy didn't know and followed. Once they were both outside Sci threw a device from his belt into the room and closed the door. Three seconds later Kristy heard a cacophony of electrical discharge and explosion.
"What was that?"
"Empion grenade. EM pulse, ion blast, and chemical fragmentation in one convenient package. Come on, we can't let him get away." He started down the corridor, no longer concerned with subtlety, as the alarms clanged down the halls.
"Who are we chasing, anyway?"
"Retlaw Zturk has been in the top ten of NRI's locate-and-detain list for months. He was the galactic-force commander for another of the New Republic's 'cultural meddling' jobs until he went a little power-mad. He used his power and connections to declare himself Warlord of the planet, enslaved the populace...you get the idea. One of his team managed to warn NRI and a task force was sent in and overthrew him, but he got away. He took a fair bit of tech with him, too. Looks like he allied himself with whoever's commanding the galactics here."
"How do you know all of this?"
"I read the NRI dispatches. Right now, though, we need to find Zturk and his boss." Sci abruptly stopped and retrieved his datapad. "And that person is...oh boy."
"What?" Kristy frowned as Sci passed her the datapad and she read through the decoded hard drive's components. It took her a few moments, but she looked up in shock. "This is a lot bigger than we thought this was. This isn't revenge or anger...it's invasion."
"Well, we've dealt with invasion before. Add to your list of targets of opportunity any other tech that doesn't belong."
"You got it. But now we find Zturk?"
"Yeah. Shoot for stun, we need this to be by the book."
They charged down the hall, blasters drawn.