Chapter Text
“Hold it…don’t make a move. Put your hands where I can see them and turn around. Slowly.” She stood as straight as she could in the air duct, both hands gripping the blaster she had pointed at the man. Her aim was steady, ready to fire if he made any sudden moves. The man took his time, but, eventually, he slowly moved both hands out to the side and twisted his body to face her. She stared at him for a moment, then her heart started to pound. “Oh shit! Fuck, fuck, fuck!” She lowered her blaster, waving it around in one hand as she cursed to herself.
When she looked back at the man, he was watching her warily, one eye still on the weapon in her hands. He was lying down in the duct, propped up on one elbow, and why he was there was becoming abundantly clear to her. The anger and disbelief on his face just confirmed it. She holstered her weapon and dropped to her knees beside him. “You’re not going to rat me out, are you?”
The man thought for a moment before he responded. “That depends on who you are and what the shab you’re doing here.”
“Probably the same thing as you.” She pulled a small leather wallet from her tac belt and flipped it open to reveal a badge. “Lieutenant Aysa Denn. CSF.”
The man pushed himself up to a sitting position, leaning out to check something before looking back at her. “How do you know what I’m doing here?”
“My boss told me. He also told me to stay away. And if he finds out I was here, he’ll bust me back to traffic so fast it’ll make your head spin.”
“Obrim?”
“Yeah.”
The man resumed his position, lying on his stomach, just back from the edge of the duct. “So, why are you here then? You usually disobey direct orders?”
“Well…yeah. I mean, he won’t necessarily be surprised, but he will be very disappointed. This was my case before you all got involved. I’ve been running surveillance for months.” She lay down on her stomach beside him, her body pressed against his in the cramped space. “How many of them are in there?”
“Four.”
“How long?”
“Three hours.”
“Hmm.” She leaned out to peer through the grimy window. “You didn’t tell me your name.”
The man gave her a disbelieving look, then shook his head. “This is black ops. You think I’m going to tell you who I am?”
“Well…I know you’re with Spec Ops. I know Sergeant Skirata is running this op. And I know Fi…he’s working with you, right?”
“You seem to have everything all figured out then.”
“Not quite everything. I don’t know your name.”
The man gave her another look, as though double-checking her credentials. Her ID could be fake, but she knew enough details to be legit. And she was fully kitted out in a dark blue CSF uniform with their standard issue blaster holstered on her hip. He turned back to the open vent, eyes on the target. “Boss.”
“What?”
“Boss. That’s what I go by.”
“Oh.” She managed to free a hand from under her body and held it out to him. “Aysa. You can call me Ace.”
Boss ignored the hand. “Now that we’ve established who you are and that you’re not supposed to be here, you can get out. I’ve got a job to do.”
Ace withdrew her hand and looked shrewdly at the commando. “Do you know who they all are?”
“I don’t need to. I’m just tracking their movements.”
She peered at the shadowy figures that were visible through the window. “The tall one’s the leader in this group. He bumped off his predecessor. It was pretty messy. Our crime scene guys had quite a job trying to put him back together enough to ID him. He was splattered all over the place by the time I got there.”
Boss gave her a brief glance but didn’t comment. He wasn’t interested in her police work. But he did file away her intel for later, hoping she would leave now. But she didn’t leave. Instead, she pressed closer to him, pointing to a smaller window on the second floor of the old warehouse. “See that tubby one up there? He’s their stooge. If this all goes to shit…when this all goes to shit, he’s taking the fall.”
Boss peered into the darkness. He hadn’t seen the man she was pointing at. He swore under his breath, watching the second-floor window as the shadowy figure moved around. “I’d see more if I had my bucket.”
She made a sympathetic noise. “Yeah, I know what you mean.” She shuffled around, reaching a hand under her stomach to retrieve something from her tac belt. Boss watched expectantly, assuming she would pull out a set of binocs. But, instead, she held a small, pink plastoid tube. Baffled, he watched as she unscrewed the lid, pulled out a wand and dabbed something pink and glossy onto her lips. “I don’t think our HUDs are nearly as good as yours, but they make the job a whole lot easier.”
She stayed quietly where she was for several minutes, then shuffled to her hands and knees. “I guess I’ll leave you to it, then. Umm…if you could keep this to yourself, that would…” She trailed off as several speeders arrived, parking at the only exit point they had, unloading half a dozen more people. “Damn. That’s going to complicate things.”
Boss leaned out to get a better look. “Shab. Any other way out of here?”
“Not that I know of. I’ll have to think of something…”
Boss wanted to laugh at her. The idea of her saving the day was bordering on ridiculous. She was slim and petite and didn’t look anything like a cop other than her uniform. Her auburn hair was pulled up into a ponytail that bounced when she moved. Her pale skin was comprehensively freckled, and her bright blue eyes were framed by long, dark lashes. Not to mention the now bright pink lips. He wasn’t quite ready to let her rescue him. She wasn’t even meant to be there. But she was already pulling something out of a pouch on the back of her tac belt, opening her hand to reveal a small thermal detonator.
Boss looked sceptically at the small grenade. Not much explosive capacity. “What are you hoping to achieve with that?”
“Just a little distraction.” She was already crawling back towards a junction in the ducts. “If I can get it in the right place, we can draw them away from our exit.”
Shaking his head, he crawled along behind her. “You think that firecracker’s going to distract them?”
“It’s more impressive than it looks,” she said back over her shoulder. “The downside is they have an automatic detonator switch. Thirty seconds till boom.” She grinned at him then, and he saw she had a noticeable gap between her two front teeth. “Trust me.”
Boss was feeling a lot of things right now, but trust wasn’t one of them. He didn’t know this woman. He didn’t know what she was capable of, if anything. “We can just wait them out.”
“They could be here for days.”
“Then I’ll call for an extraction.”
“What, and let them know you’ve got them under surveillance?”
Boss grunted irritably. She was right. “Okay. We’ll try it your way. But if it doesn’t work—”
“It’ll work. Don’t worry about it. I’ve done this loads of times!”
They reached the junction, and she lowered her legs down into a duct that was running at a forty-five-degree angle down the outside of the building. As she slipped down into the duct, she grinned back up at him. “Be ready to move.”
He cursed under his breath as he watched her slide down into the duct until she was out of sight around a slight bend. He didn’t like this mission. He didn’t like working without armor, without his HUD. He felt exposed. Vulnerable. He peered down into the duct, wondering how far she was planning to go. Too far and she wouldn’t make it out in time. Not far enough, and they could all blow. He ran a hand over his chest. At least he had the light body armor under his fatigues. It was better than nothing, as long as he kept his head down.
He listened carefully for a moment. Nothing. She’d gone further than he expected. She was going to have her work cut out climbing back up the incline in time. Thirty seconds wasn’t long when you were climbing uphill. He crouched in the duct as he waited, stretching his neck out. He hadn’t stood upright for over six hours. He’d need to push his legs when it came time to move.
He looked towards the junction then when he heard a noise, a metallic clank. This was followed by more banging, a steady rhythmic sound. She was coming back up. He started counting the seconds in his head. She had about twenty left. He kept counting down, worried when he got to ten, and there was still no sign of her. Swearing again, he leaned down into the duct to look for her, seeing nothing but the silver metallic tube. But then he heard her voice. “Move, move, move!”
Boss didn’t move. If he left, she wouldn’t make it. Five seconds. He saw her then, her auburn ponytail bouncing as she frantically scrambled up the last stretch. She managed to get her fingers over the lip of the junction, and Boss reached in, grabbing her around the waist to haul her out. Acting on instinct, he shoved her back into the duct they’d come from, throwing himself in after her as the blast ripped through the cooling system. He grimaced when he felt pieces of shrapnel bounce heavily off his lightly armored back, gritting his teeth until the rain of sharp metal stopped.
He looked down at Ace. Her blue eyes were wide as she looked back at him. Then she winced. “Ouch.”
“You hurt?”
“No, you’re just…really heavy.”
She gave him a shove and crawled out from under him. “We need to move before we lose our distraction.”
Moving fast, they crawled back through the duct to the end, and he waited for her to swing out and find a foothold to start clambering down the wall. He followed her quickly down into the alley between the two warehouses, past the parked speeders and out into the street. Looking around at the curious faces, she thought quickly, whipping a set of binders from her belt. She shoved Boss up against a wall and pulled his hands behind his back. “Play along.”
“What the—” He had to suppress the urge to fight back as the binders tightened around his wrists, and she grabbed his arm to lead him to where her speeder was parked.
“Nothing to see here, folks,” she called out to the gawking onlookers. “Just one of our brave troopers having a little bit too much fun on leave. We can do without the rubbernecking. Move along!”
Boss forced himself to relax his taught muscles as she gave the impression of strongarming him to her speeder. The idea of that was ridiculous. He could snap her neck in an instant if he wanted to. They made it to a quiet side street where an unmarked speeder was parked, and she looked around cautiously before deactivating the binders. She linked them back onto her belt, then gasped. “Shit, you’re bleeding!”
“Bleeding where?” He couldn’t feel anything, not yet, with the adrenaline still wearing off.
“Back.” She popped the speeder hatch and gave him a shove. “Hop in, and I’ll have a look.”
“I don’t need you to—”
But she shoved him harder, climbing in beside him and closing the hatch. “You’d better take this off,” she said, tugging on the shirt he was wearing – part of the collection of civilian clothing they’d been given to wear. He contemplated arguing with her, but he didn’t particularly want to bleed out in her speeder. So, he pulled the shirt off, the light pieces of body armor dropping to the footwell. He still had his back to her, so he didn’t see her wide-eyed, open-mouthed expression as she was presented with his heavily muscled back and broad shoulders.
Ace swallowed dryly, forcing herself to focus as she assessed the bleeding wound. She stretched over to pull a medkit from the back seat, digging around for a clean folded cloth to put pressure on the wound. She used both hands to press down, trying to ignore the warm, smooth brown skin. There were some scars, she noticed, but somehow they just added to her desire to run her fingers over his back. She jumped when his voice interrupted her reverie. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“How bad is it?”
“Oh.” She lifted the cloth to see the bleeding was subsiding, but he had a decent-sized gash down over his lats down the left side. Large, but not deep. “I don’t think it’s too bad. Not deep enough for sutures.”
Boss just grunted. Despite not being able to see the wound, he had to trust her opinion. She was a cop. She’d know what she was doing when it came to basic first aid in the field. He sat silently while she used sterile wipes to clean the cut and sealed a bacta-infused dressing over it. “There you go. That should keep your insides in.”
She tried not to stare when he turned to face her, but it was hard to ignore the muscles flexing and contracting as he tried to pull his shirt back on in the cramped speeder. She ducked as one of his arms almost connected with her head, and found herself inches away from his chest, close enough to count the black hairs scattered across the broad, muscular expanse, tapering down to a trail that led beneath his waistband. She felt the heat rising from her chest up to her face, and she knew she would be turning red.
Mortified, she reached into a compartment under her seat and retrieved two water pouches, handing one to him. “Here, rehydrate, and I’ll drop you back to wherever your base is.”
“We’re getting picked up in two hours.”
“We who? And you can’t hang around here for two hours, can you?”
“There’s another commando posted on the other side of the warehouse. Probably wondering what the hell’s going on about now.”
“Yeah, probably,” she agreed. “Well, let’s go pick him up, and then I can confess my indiscretions and take my punishment on the chin.”
“From Obrim?”
“And Skirata. He’s going to be mad. Ever seen him blow up?”
Boss shrugged. He didn’t owe Skirata any allegiance outside this mission. “Not if you share your intel with him.”
“Maybe. I guess we’ll see. You’d better direct me.”
Boss gave her directions to the RV point and sent a message to his fellow operative. Within two minutes, another commando in plain clothes ducked out of an old, disused watchhouse and jogged to the speeder, smoothly sliding into the backseat. “What the hell is going on, ner vod?”
“Change of plans,” Boss said shortly as Ace got the speeder back into traffic.
The other commando leaned over from the backseat, looking surprised. “Lieutenant Denn?” Aysa turned around and shrugged with an apologetic smile. “Darman,” the man offered. “From the spaceport.”
“Oh, right.” She grinned brightly then. “Fi’s buddy. Nice to see you again.”
“Sarge didn’t mention anything about you being in on this.”
“Yeah…about that…”
Darman caught her eyes in the rear-view mirror. “Oh, you’re going to be in deep dwang.”
“Probably.”
Darman noticed the blood on the back of Boss’s shirt. “You injured?”
“Not badly.”
“I heard an explosion. Was that you two?”
“It was her,” Boss said, indicating the woman driving. “Distraction to get us out.”
“Ah.” Darman leaned over again. “How’s life in Anti-Terrorism? Did Obrim take you across from the Senate?”
“Yes. He told them I was crucial to his leadership. He’s probably going to change his mind after this.”
“He doesn’t seem that hard-nosed. Maybe just a warning and relegation to desk duty for a decade or two.”
Ace gave him a look in the mirror. “Don’t give him any ideas!” She brought the speeder down on the obscured platform at Qibbu’s Hutt. “Nice location. Classy.”
Darman chuckled as he climbed out. “Wait till you try the food. You’d better come in and talk to the Sarge. Maybe he can soften Obrim up for you.”
Ace sighed heavily as she climbed out. “Maybe. Or maybe Obrim will have to soften him up.”
She followed Darman inside, head down as she anticipated how this was going to play out. Boss watched them go, then bent stiffly to retrieve his body armor from the footwell. He straightened with a wince and closed up the speeder before heading inside. This was going to be interesting.