All In A Night's Work is actually set prior to False Flag, but I completed the latter story first.
22nd Republic Clone Commando Regiment
All In A Night's Work
Vollanda, Mid Rim. The Second Year of the Clone Wars.
0100hrs (local time)
The plain was silent, just a little wind swaying the tall grass and the trees at the forest's edge. While Vollanda's two moons bathed the grasslands in pale light, when they weren't obscured by the clouds scudding across the sky; the forest was a well of darkness.
Alpha squad were set up in the high grass at the bottom of a hill almost half a klicks from the forest's edge. Their black mark III Katarn armour was covered with filth, ferns and tufts of grass. The camouflage combined with the dim light made them all but invisible.
The four commandoes; Pawn, Rook, Knight and their sergeant: King, were spaced out at maximum secure comms range. This was enemy territory and open communications were too risky.
Pawn shifted uncomfortably. No matter where he lay or knelt there always seemed to be a rock digging into him.
"Don't let sergeant Whitefeather see you fidget like that," Knight said, resisting the subconscious urge to rub his forehead.
"Don't let the enemy see you fidget like that," added Rook.
"Talking of the opposition, aren't they a little late?" Pawn commented, "You'd expect them to be punctual, being mechanical an' all."
"They're killing machines, Pawn. Not clocks."
The four of them had been camped out at the edge of the grassy plain since sundown and the wait was beginning to get to the squad's combined scout-and-demolitionist.
Vollanda had defected from the Republic to the Separatists (no one in the GAR except officers ever referred to them as the Confederacy of Independent Systems) early in the Wars. Ever since, the seppies had been using it as a staging point for operations further into Republic space, but now the Republic was pushing back the seppies in this sector and Vollanda had become a lynch-pin.
While the seppies fortified their positions and dug in at major settlements, the Republic conducted raids.
Vollanda was now under a GAR orbital blockade but three things prevented a normal siege. Firstly energy shields over the major cities ruled out orbital bombardment. Secondly logistics prevented invasion. With battles raging across the galaxy the GAR couldn't afford the heavy losses that conventional ground assaults would result in. And thirdly that elusive enemy of the soldier: politics. Full-out assault would result in heavy collateral-damage. Which, in civvie-speak, meant dead women and children on the morning holonews putting Coruscanti off their cereal.
Thus the 22nd Republic Clone Commando Regiment's Alpha squad had been covertly inserted onto Vollanda. Alpha prided themselves on being one of the regiment's few pure pods, rather than mongrel squads like Kappa or Sigma.
So far the four had been conducting guerrilla warfare on the seppie forces for a couple of months: fuel depots blown up...landing fields mined covertly...MTTs ambushed in mountain passes...Knight alone had racked up a dozen seppie officer kills with his DeeCee's sniper attachment.
And now they were acting on intel from above: the orbiting GAR blockade consisted of more than just warships. There was also a Clone Intel Division Eve. The 'Eve' was a recent development: a Corellian corvette variant designed for monitoring enemy communications. Studded with antenna and aerials all over its hull, the Eve was lightly armed and required other vessels for protection. Nevertheless, this time Eve had come up with the goods: apparently Alpha's hit-and-fade tactics had been beginning to really hurt the seppies and they were consolidating in a handful of key settlements. This meant transferring forces from smaller garrisons to the key locations. Eve had picked up all this in seppie communications between OOM droid commander units, and that the forces wouldn't be transferred by air for fear of GAR fighter raids from orbit.
Thus Alpha found themselves sat in a grassy field on a cool night waiting for a convoy of STAPs, ATTs, MTTs and Fett-knew-what-else to hover past.
A bush at the edge of the forest shifted and King heard Knight's breathing catch. Each commando heard his brother's breathing as a constant, comforting background noise. Without that constant sound, that rhythmic reminder that he and his brothers were alive, well and together, a clone commando felt extremely lonely. King had heard that even natural-borns experienced the same feeling. Generationals, who spent their entire lives aboard starships, were accustomed to the hum of a ship's systems and the minute vibration of its drives running through the ship. Remove them from their ship and they felt like a part of themselves was missing.
Knight released his breath as a stazelle bounded out of the forest and across the plain. The moonlight caught the mammal's shiny pelt and large antlers.
Over the comm someone swallowed.
"Anyone hungry?" Rook inquired, "I can slot her, gut her and roast her all in one shot."
"Quiet," King snapped.
Though the forest was pitch-black to the naked eye, it was painted in false tones of green on the commandoes' HUDs. Not quite daylight-level vision, but King could make out movement between the trees. And it was more than stazelle.
The treetops deeper in the forest were moving as something large pushed its way through and eventually the whine of repulsors escaped the forest. First came the distinct high pitched whine of STAPs as a pair shot out of the tree-line: scouts for the convoy. The four commandoes let them go; they were waiting for a bigger prize....
and then came a pair of Armoured Attack Tanks, beige hulls seeming grey in the dim light as clouds concealed the moons. With a crunch of breaking wood four Multi-Troop-Transports broke through the trees.
Pawn swallowed and shifted his grip on his DC-17m. Those four MTTs alone meant Alpha was outnumbered more than a hundred-to-one and he watched as more and more huge seppie machines of war exited the forest and began to float across the plain like gigantic insects marching back to the hive.
They waited patiently as the lead vehicles neared the middle of the field, the ATTs at the sides of the convoy just two hundred meters from the four concealed clones.
"Knight. Light 'er up," King said, giving Alpha's sniper his cue.
But when Knight raised his DC-17m and fired at the convoy no plasma bolt, ardanium slug or grenade flew from its barrel.
END OF PART ONE
Bookmarks