'Stop hitting yourself,' Luna said irritably.
'Am not,' Snett replied, hitting herself. 'I can't see a thing in this helmet.'
'Move your head from side to side,' Luna suggested, eyeing up a squad of stormtroopers, approaching from the other end of the corridor. The four trooper squad was giving them funny looks. 'Hud problems,' she called to them, hoping that that would ease their intrigue, but as they passed the mixed group of Nexus and Klatooinians, they still eyed them up. That was when Luna realised why: they were a twelve trooper squad, much larger than a regular patrol, just standing about in some random corridor, doing nothing. 'We need to split up,' she told the others. Face gave her a subtle nod. As she was the visible head of the Crimson Dawn, Face had ceded operation control to her, but Luna still sought and appreciated his feedback.
Snett had other ideas. 'Oh, no. We're not splitting up.'
'We're drawing too much attention as we are,' Luna argued. 'We need to break into smaller groups.'
'My orders are to keep an eye on you, so you're not leaving my sight.'
Luna huffed, thinking. 'Fine. We do have to split up - but we'll still stay within sight of each other,' she added quickly, sensing that Snett was ready to argue. 'As we're at one end of the hallway, you're at the other end, so it'll look like you're just walking, not following.'
Snett thought it over. 'Deal. But you better not be trying to screw us over.'
'I'm just here to get the package, I've always been upfront about that,' Luna said evenly, side stepping the fact that she was planning on doing exactly that. 'Come on, we should be able to find a security terminal soon,' Luna took Hoshi, Face, Vix, Amoya and Twitch off first, as Snett watched them, moving once they were twenty feet ahead.
They found a security terminal two corridors along, though annoyingly it was a droid terminal, and nowhere for them to use their cloned security cylinder. 'We should have brought Kinipopo,' said Hoshi, eyeing up a BB unit rolling past. 'Ka'iulani has it loaded up with the latest comm tech. It would have made this quick and easy.'
Luna nodded, standing guard over Amoya and Twitch as they worked at the terminal. She eyed the Marauders, loitering halfway down the hallway. Luna surrepticiously turned off her comm. 'Secret channel conversation time,' she told the others, her voice no longer coming out crisp through the vocabulator. She turned her comm back on and switched the frequency. 'The droids did come in useful while scouting on Bastion. And,' she hesitated, turning to Hoshi, 'what's your read on the Marauders?'
'Snett is getting suspicious,' Hoshi added.
'It could be that she's naturally suspicious,' Face mused, 'or it's coming from Xin. She did say she had orders to keep us within sight. Could be that Xin is either naturally distrustful or wasn't liking the way we strong-armed him. Though I think it was the best decision, given how things went,' he added, and though Luna couldn't see his face through his helmet, she imagined him smiling kindly at her, and she appreciated the back up, even as she had had doubts from the very beginning.
'Any ideas on how to neutralise them?' she asked.
Silence fell as they thought the issue over, until Twitch spoke up. 'We could always take them out in a firefight?'
Luna winced at the thought, but it was Vix who spoke up first. 'If they're expecting betrayal then we likely won't have the element of surprise. It would be messy.'
'And it would jeopardise the mission if we do it too soon,' Face added, 'or risk the lives of Zatt's parents, if it's too late.'
Luna didn't voice the thought that it felt scummy to shoot their supposed allies in the back.
