Well, someone voted for it, so here it is. You should all thank whoever decided to hit up my 'new chapter' poll.

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Rude company

Three standard months after Geonosis, 0551 Hours

Kilter hummed to himself as he squeezed the firing stud, sending a wide spray of blue energy bolts into the deploying wing of droid starfighters. Showers of sparks and slagged metal splashed onto the deck as the clone pilot spunk the small craft about and hosed another cluster of SBDs.

A trio of destroyer droids rolled into the landing bay, and unfolded themselves as Kilter swung the nose around to bring his weaponry to bear on them. Reacting too late to prevent them from firing, he watched as the dozens of ruby lances raced towards his craft, even as he hosed the droids with blaster fire.

Yanking back on his altitude control slider, he dipped the craft up and over the energy beams, narrowly avoiding having his landing gear ruined. Shoving the slider forward once more, he spun the craft about, scattering droids about the cavernous landing bay as the stubby wings of the craft clipped the thing tinnies stupid enough to try closing in on the deadly little ship. "I could do this all day."

A high pitched tone started up, and he tipped the craft onto it's side, barely avoiding an explosive projectile fired by an SBD. Tilting the nose down, he poured fire into both the guilty SBD, and the dozens of droids pouring out of the bay door behind it. Another warning alarm sounded, and Kilter irritably glanced up at his overhead display, swinging around the tiny vessel once more. "Now wh- ..." Rolling the craft about, he looked through the top of the cockpit, staring out the landing bay entrance, and into the starry void of space.

Out in space, a tell-tale distortion made the inky black, broken up by hundreds of tiny points of light, waver and dance. "Oh you can't be serious." Glancing down at his control board, he thumbed a dial a few clicks, adjusting one of his sensors. Moving his hand a few centimeters to the right, he toggled the comm switch with a flick of his middle finger. "I hate to interrupt any merry-making you boys may be up to, but we have a problem."

-

"All I'm saying is, if it took an entire army, a whole security division, and a couple of Jedi last time, then five guys taking a Trade Fed ship on their own is a big deal."

"You're just saying that because you want a promotion, Fitz." Thumper sorted through his demo kit, checking to make sure he had the right explosives on hand to blow the droid control relay to make sure it stayed down for good.

"If not a promotion, then I just want one of those snazzy cloaks to go with my armor. I don't think it's too much to ask." Sitting in one of the control stations, Fitz flipped a few switches, cutting power to droid recharge racks. His APC array blaster was resting across his thighs as he worked with one hand, the other fiddling with the action from time to time.

"It is too much to ask." Ryyk stood over the captured Nemodian command crew, casually twirling his blade every few seconds. Mainly, he did it because he was bored. Also, it amused him to make the crew flinch by twisting the blade so it caught the bridge lighting just right, flashing and glimmering through the air, passing a little too close to their collective heads. "Do you have any idea how much it's going to cost them to resupply us for the next mission?"

"Hey, it's not my fault that Thumper went so wild with the Plex like that. Why should it cut into my net worth?" Flicking another row of switches, Fitz reversed polarity on a set of recharge racks, draining the droids power sources.

"Are you kidding? I probably have a higher kill ratio than both of you put together." Plugging dets into small bunches of ribbon charge, twined together and twisted into tight loops, Thumper resisted the urge to shoot Fitz an irritated glance.

"Yeah, but wih all that blasting, I'll bet you barely broke even. Plex rockets aren't exactly cheap you know." Another row of switches flicked, and this time, Fitz tripled the amount of power flow travelling through the recharge racks. He chuckled. "That should cause some interesting problems."

"Fitz, what're you up to?" Sarge looked up from his datapad, still in the process of composing his mission report. Slumped against a bulkhead, he had his pack off, and was still trying to shake off the dull ache in his upper torso. Being thrown about by explosions didn't agree with him that much, he had noted between half-doses of painkillers.

"Juuuust overloading some of the droid recharge racks." He chuckled again. "I like to make things explode as much as Thumper does. The difference is, I like to be cost effective about it."

"Well, just make sure you don't-" Pressing a gauntleted hand to the side of his helmet, Sarge abruptly stopped talking. Listening intently for a moment, he thumbed off his pad, and struggled to his feet. "We have a wrinkle."

Fitz glanced up from the control board. "How big of a wrinkle?" His fingers tightened around the stock of the array blaster, and he felt a uncomfortable tickle in the pit of his stomach, knowing he wasn't going to like the answer.

"Roughly the size of a small city, and bearing down on us fast." Shrugging his pack on after stuffing his pad into his belt, Sarge unclipped his DC and gripped it in both hands. He noted that his powerpack was down to half a charge, and resolved to dedicate more pack space to extra ammunition in the future. How did anyone survive combat before blasters were invented?

Fitz let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. "That's a pretty big wrinkle." Glancing down at the control board, he began rapidly flicking switches. "I'm shutting down external coms, internal sensors, and outside datafeeds. Even if they have override codes, it won't do them any good with the systems depowered. Not right away at least."

Thumper hastily began shifting charges around, grabbing dets and shoving them into place. "Why do I get the feeling I'm going to be running out of these before we get out of here?" Silently wishing for some more powerful brands, he started daisy-chaining explosives together. "I'm thinking of the spider droid and the thermal tape bomb, for some reason."

Ryyk glanced over, drawing his DC15s with his free hand, and pointing the muzzle directly into the command crew's midst, just to remind them of what would happen if they got any stupid ideas. "I don't remember that one."

"Because that's how we're going to do it. Thumper, get a big charge rigged. Fitz, give me the location of their ammunition storage, and the main reactor." Flicking off the safety on his Deecee, he ambled over to Ryyk, still limping somewhat. "It was back on Geonosis, when we were making our exfiltration after the crash. There was a spider droid in our way, and we had to improvise."

"So, this improvising you speak of." Ryyk thumbed off the safety on his sidearm, and nudged a Nemodian in the forehead without turning to look. "How does it work?"

-

Puffing hard, Sarge pushed himself to sprint down the corridor, back towards the landing bay where Kilter waited. "Fitz, Thumper, is everything ready on your end?" Rounding the corner, Sarge swept the bay with his blaster. A magled heap of scrap lay just inside of the entrance, a testament to just how much fun a pilot could have in an enclosed space without complaining.

Ahead of him, Ryyk was already prying open one of the deck lift covers to reveal the dark shaft below. "Thumper, just to confirm, all I need to do is drop this thing down there, and I'm done?" Ryyk glanced at the ugly looking explosive he held in one hand. The device was cobbled together from a mix of ribbon, breaching charges, and a single thermal detonator that was split into halves and wired into the rest of the mix.

-

"Almost Sarge." Setting the last of his explosives into place, he waved for Fitz to help him replace the panel, covering up any trace of the tampering they had set up. "Ryyk, all you need to do is drop it, ammo magazines on battleships aren't known for their ability to take direct hits."

"This seems like cheating to me." Fitz bolted the pannel into place with a large hydrospanner. "Setting the ship on a collision course, rigging it to blow, and just running away to a safe distance? What's to stop us from winning every fight this way?" Sitting back on his heels, he took a moment to admire his work.

-

"How about the fact that there's no way command would ever think of making anyone's lives that easy?" Ryyk muscled the cover back over the lift shaft, then stomped it back down into place. A quick application of a thin fragment of thermal tape on each side of the cover later, and there was no way anyone was going to get it back open. "The tape did the trick, nice idea Thumper."

"You call this easy?" Sarge hauled himself into the waiting vessel, grunting with the effort of hauling himself, his armor, and a twenty kilo pack up a half meter raised platform. Half-crawling across the deck, he detached his pack, shoved it into a corner, and used the back of the pilot's seat to pull himself upright.

"Well, it was easy enough for me." Kilter flicked a few switches, then glanced over his shoulder at Sarge. "You doing ok back there? I have a medical kit stashed aboard if you-"

"I'll be fine, thanks." Sighing, Sarge leaned against the cockpit aperture, turning his head to watch as Ryyk easily climbed aboard. "I just need a few days of R&R and I'll be fit to fight again." Closing his eyes, he pressed his helmet against the bulkhead and tried to relax.

"So, um. That ship is about to smash into us." Kilter turned a dial a few clicks with his thumb, adjusting the scanners again to pick up the area just outside of the Trade Federation battleship. "Just thought you guys would like to know that, you know, incase you'd like to get out of here alive."

-

"Really? Was that what the plan was?" Sprinting down the corridor alongside Thumper, Fitz pumped his arms for speed, his blaster and APC clipped to his chest webbing to free up his hands. "Because if it isn't, I'd love to squeeze that in, you know, just for a fun change of plans."

"How much longer do we have until that ship crashes into ours?" Thumper resisted the urge to reach over and give Fitz a good smack along the side of his head, only because that would throw off his stride, and they couldn't afford to slow down now. Later, he'd give him a good smack, later.

-

Outside the captured vessel, the second Trade Federation battleship was desperately straining to move itself out of the way of the oncoming ship. Unfortunately, ships that massive had no way of turning as fast as the frantic command crew wanted, no matter how much power they forced into the engines. Disaster loomed as the two multi-billion ton ships slowly raced towards each other.

-

The bay creaked as the ships hulls touched, and began to deform under the incredible stresses placed upon them by the slow-motion collision. Firing up the Interdictor's engines, Kilter lifted the tiny ship from the deck of the bay, half spinning the craft about to point the entry ramp towards the back of the landing bay. "We really can't afford to stick around here any longer. In about fifteen seconds, that charge is going to go off, and I need at least seven to get us to a safe distance."

"Then we wait that eight seconds. We're not leaving without the whole squad, got it?" Sarge had one hand on the pilot's seat in a white-knuckled grip. Helmet turned towards the corridor exit, he silently willed the other two Commandos to appear, feeling the seconds sluggishly tick away.

"Actually, it's more like four now." Turning the nose of the ship to face the bay exit, he lightly rested his hand on the throttle controls. "Time's up. We can't wait any longer or none of us are going to make it out of here."

Moving to the hatch, Ryyk gripped the edge of the frame, and began to lean out.

Shoving the throttle forward, Kilter twisted the flight controls. The tiny vessel turned on it's side and raced out of the bay as the massive frame began to deform and crumple.

Halfway hanging out of the hatch, Ryyk held on for dear life as the ship lurched about him.

Seconds later, the charges on the main reactor and weapons magazine detonated. Seconds after that, the two ships, locked together from the stresses that had welded the hulls together transformed into a massive fall of light and flame.

Punching the afterburners, Kilter was shoved deep into his seat as the racing explosion slowly began to catch up to the tiny fleeing craft. "Hold on!" Freeing his hand from the throttles, he flicked a few switches, and adjusted the ship's powerplant output to a hundred and forty percent. It was either risk exploding from overstressing the powerplant, or getting caught in the blast wave and exploding anyway.

A tiny bead of sweat tricked into Kilter's eye as the leadng edge of the blast wave crept towards the brightly burning engines at the rear. After what seemed like forever, the light began to fade, and it's expansion slowed. Letting out a deep sigh, Kilted quickly snapped switches, dialing back the powerplant's output to a more comfortable ninety percent. "So, thoughts?"

Half-turning from where he had leaned against the bulkhead, Sarge reached over, and hauled Ryyk back from the still open hatch. His lips were pressed together in a grim line as he remained silent

"My favorite part is where we didn't die in the explosion." Poking his head in through the hatch, Fitz glanced around the interior of the tiny vessel. "This thing seems a little smaller now that I think about it."

"Fitz!" Shoving Ryyk out of the way, Sarge reached over, caught Fitz by the chest webbing, and hauled him through the hatch. "You're alive!"

"Uh, yeah. It was just a couple of battleships exploding, come on." Pulling Thumper inside, Fitz thrashed his arm about. His gauntlet and elbow plate were tangled in Thumper's webbing and refused to let go. "But Thumper didn't make it."

"My shebs I didn't." Helping Fitz extract his arm from his webbing, he gave in to his craving, and smacked the Commando in the side of the head. "If I'm dead, you're dead too, di'kut."

Prodding Sarge in the back plate, Ryyk sidled around the group, reached over, and triggered the door controls, shutting the hatch. "I'm glad to be here too Sarge." Turning around, he draped an arm over Fitz and Thumper's shoulders.

"If either of you two idiots ever-" At a loss for words, Sarge grabbed the two by their webbing straps, and hauled them close. "I'm making you run laps around the barracks when we get back."

"Is it too late to go back and explode? I'd kind of prefer it to laps, and no promotion." Heaving a sigh, Fitz closed his eyes and continued in a mournful tone. "I'll bet they won't even give me a cloak... Hey." Fitz opened his eyes, looking at everyone in turn. "Does anyone remember what we did with that command crew?"