Unexpected

chapter thirty-nine: infiltrate

"I suppose I should refer to you as Commander." WAC suggests as he spins in the copilot seat of the shuttle.

"Sure." Elara sighs, switching to autopilot once the coordinates are set. "Let me know when we're approaching the dreadnought, I have a plan on how to get their attention." She states before standing from her seat and heading to the cargo hold of the shuttle.

"A plan!" WAC cheers. "Perhaps I should also know this plan of yours, Commander."

"Once we're on that ship, just stay quiet and follow my lead." Elara points at the droid. "Got it?"

"Yes sir!" WAC salutes the girl and she rolls her eyes.

Elara sorts through her weapons, making sure they're all functioning properly before securing them to her tool belt. A sudden jolt causes her to lose her footing and hit her head, followed by a string of mando'a profanities.

"WAC, what's going on up there?" She yells.

"We've got their attention!" He sings.

Elara's eyes widen as she runs to the cockpit. "What did you do?" She asks, trying to manually maneuver away from the Separatist cruisers. "You got us stuck in a tractor beam, you di'kut!" She clenches her jaw.

The small shuttle is pulled into one of the hangars and Elara begins to panic.

"Get us out of this." She orders the droid before slipping under a panel of the ship's flooring.

As the shuttle lands, battle droids board the ship in search of any soldiers. The cockpit doors open to reveal a lone pit droid and the enemy droids quickly buy it.

"You're coming with us for interrogation." One of the battle droids nudges WAC.

The two clankers lead WAC through the large ship, leaving Elara a small window to escape the shuttle. She slips into the shadows and considers going through with the mission on her own but sighs. If the Jedi assigned WAC to this mission, there has to be a reason.

She peeks down the hallway to find the three droids and jumps along the narrow walls before disabling the two battle droids and landing in front of WAC.

"Good work Commander. I knew you'd keep up." WAC states.

Elara furrows her eyebrows and pulls the two trashed droids into a supply closet before continuing with the mission.

"We have to reach C deck. That's where their communication center is housed." Elara explains.

"Right. Uh.. This way!" WAC walks aimlessly down a hall.

"WAC." Elara whispers. "This way." She corrects him.

Thanks to Elara's handy tools and weapons, she's able to blast the locks on the necessary doors. WAC, as it turns out, is very useful is bypassing security alarms. They finally reach the communications vault and Elara rolls a magnetized bomb-diffuser across the floor to attract the swarm mines and deactivate them. As they walk through the vault, she picks up the cluster of inactive bombs and tucks them into a pouch on her belt.

"There it is, the object from the hologram." WAC points to the object in the containment field.

"The encryption module." Elara breathes. As she reaches for the object, the doors slide open behind them.

"Not so fast." A super tactical droid says, surrounded by super battle droids. The droids file in, surrounding Elara and WAC.

"I've got a bad feeling about this." WAC trembles as he puts his arms up.

Elara slowly puts her hands up as she counts the droids in her head. She grabs the bombs from her pouch and clicks a button to reactivate them before throwing them at the droids. The explosion takes care of most of them, but the remaining few droids open fire. She ducks behind the console in the middle of the room and uses her blaster to handle the others as she reaches for the encryption module.