Thanks once more to NYCitygurl for the beta!
Chapter 9: Assault
They left their forces in the woods a mile from the prison camp and walked the rest of the way as the sun set.
"They'll know we're planning something," said Kev.
"Indeed," Tenel Ka concurred.
Jaina took a step back so that she could see them both and smiled. "They won't know what."
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Their first challenge was the wall surrounding the prison. It was comparatively low, but it would still have taken Jaina and Kev far too long to climb it alone; the patrol would have reached them before they'd both be able to get up. In order to expedite the process, Tenel Ka was the first to clamber up the grappling-rope she'd thrown up over the wall. She pulled Jaina up as the latter woman climbed, then the two of them dropped the rope and pulled Kev up. As it was, they barely managed to get down the other side and get the grapple unhooked. They ran quietly but quickly into the building, which had primitive doors with non-electronic locks that were easily broken off with Tenel Ka's spear. Such small installations tended to try to conserve power. They probably also assumed that the primitive natives could be foiled by slightly less primitive means. Idiots.
"The armories will be near the bunkrooms. Those won't be on the very close to the edges of the building, but they won't be in the very center, either," said Jaina.
Tenel Ka looked at Jaina in surprise. "You have… dealt with such installations before?"
"Yes," said Jaina in a clipped tone that forbid further questions.
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At the first armory they found, Kev donned stormtrooper armor.
"I had been led to believe Imperial armor was ineffective against off-world weapons," said Tenel Ka.
"That's true," replied Kev, "but 'troopers are less likely to shoot at someone dressed as one of their own without taking a moment to think and giving us a moment to shoot."
"Unfortunately," said Jaina, strapping a pair of blasters to her waist, "they don't make stormtrooper armor in my size. I assume you're not interested?"
"No. I must have access to my weapons." Tenel Ka gestured to the knife and blowgun strapped to her own waist. Jaina nodded.
They had to pry the bolts off a few lockers before they found the thermal detonators and the remote detonation controllers. They set three to the same remote detonation frequency and took a dozen more with them.
An hour later, Jaina was fairly sure that they'd hit all the armories, and that they'd found the entrance to the actual prison area. Either that, or those troopers were guarding the mess hall. They'd already made a detour to plant explosives on as many AT-STs as possible, which hadn't been many. The vehicles were fairly well-guarded. The gate had also been carefully watched, but by moving patrols. They'd managed to plant a couple of detonators there as well, which would hopefully weaken the weaken the what? You left this sentence unfinished.
"Ready?" she whispered to Kev.
"Ready," he replied.
Jaina pulled the remote detonator out of her pocket. "On three. One. Two."
"Three."
All hell broke loose.
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The first thing that happened was that the prison guards, aside from looking around frantically, did nothing. The second was that Jaina swung around the corner the three of them had been hiding behind with a blaster pistol in each hand and shot the two of them. "Fragged" is an Earthism – Vietnam, I believe.
Kev ran toward the door they'd been guarding and pried the front panel of the first electronic lock they'd encountered off the wall and began fiddling with the wires. Jaina and Tenel Ka stood with their backs to him, alert and on guard.
"What's it look like?" asked Jaina.
"Simple," replied Kev. "They must not have been counting on anyone trying to break into a prison." Jaina could practically feel him grinning. Perhaps a minute later, the door slid open and they ran in to the prison compound.
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At the sound of explosions from within the Imperial compound, Kirana Ti spoke the spell that would allow her clan-sisters and allies to hear her thoughts. "It is time. We move out."
It was surprising to those not familiar with rancors how fast the creatures could move. Those of the Imperials who had not directly encountered the Dathomiri creatures, if they had known that warrior-witches mounted on rancors were approaching, would have pictured them advancing at the deliberate, menacing pace of AT-ATs. They would have been sorely wrong.
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Inside the prison door there was a monitoring station. They couldn't tell if it was a monitoring station at first, but after they'd killed the three officers at work there, Jaina was able to determine what it was from the readouts they'd been looking at. She sat down in the highest-ranking officer's chair, pushing his body to the floor.
"Let's see if we can access the prisoner profiles from here. We don't want to go and release any psychopaths accidentally."
"What is a psychopath?" asked Tenel Ka as she and Kev moved to look over Jaina's shoulders.
Kev grinned at her. "So your Basic vocabulary does have limits."
"Found 'em," said Jaina. "No password required. Idiots probably assumed they'd never be dealing with anyone who knew how to use a computer."
"I do not believe they even thought any of us spoke Basic," said Tenel Ka.
"How many of you do?" asked Kev.
"Only my mother and I," she replied.
Jaina continued to scroll through the list of prisoners. "Sedition, treason, subversion… These are all political prisoners."
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The rancors loped through the trees, headed toward the Imperial prison.
The gates, warped but not down, came into view. Kirana Ti whispered a command to her rancor. Shesh hefted the bolder she had carried for over a mile above her head and threw it.
The enormous stone seemed to glide through the night air in slow motion. The illusion broke instantly when it hit the gates, warping them further. It took a moment for the 'troopers in the gate-side battle emplacements to comprehend what was going on, and another for them to decide how to react to what appeared to be rock-flinging wildlife. There was time for another rancor to come up beside Shesh and hurl her own rock before the laser cannons began to fire.
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Tenel Ka ran down the corridors with Jaina, slapping the door release panels and opening the cells while Kev stood guard at the entrance.
"What, what's going on?"
"Who are you!?"
"Please, leave me alone!"
Eventually the cacophony of the prisoner's yells made it impossible to discern individual words or phrases. The corridor looped around and Jaina and Tenel Ka found themselves in the same room they'd come from. A woman, middle-aged with blonde hair cropped prison-short, came striding purposefully toward the three of them.
"Who are you?" she asked.
Jaina did the introductions. "Jaina Draygo," she said, indicating herself, "Kev Melet, and Tenel Ka Djo. And you are?"
"Prisoner number – nine hells, have I really gotten that used to this place?" The woman shook her head sadly. "My name isn't important. What is important is that the other prisoners will listen to me."
"Don't they keep you all in separate cells?" asked Kev over the din of the other prisoner's voices.
"They let us out sometimes, to do menial work for them and for exercise. You'll notice that my legs aren't completely atrophied. Hell if I know why; none of us here are ever going to stand trial. No one from the outside was supposed to see how they were treating us." She said all this with the tone of one who had thought about it for a long time. She turned to the other prisoners and began shouting for order. Jaina got the feeling she'd done this before.
Eventually the majority of the prisoners had calmed down enough to stop shouting. Then Jaina clambered up onto a chair and addressed that part of the crowd that could hear her. They would be intrigued enough by her message to relay it to the others.
"Alright, everyone, here's the situation: we've blown up the armories, and, while none of us is a demolitions expert, I think we did a fairly good job. The stormtroopers should be low on, if not out of, armor and modern weapons. I'm Jaina Draygo, outlaw extraordinaire, and these fine folks are Kev Melet, my first mate, and Tenel Ka, a native of this fine planet who could kill a Wookie with her little finger. So, who wants to kick some butt?"
The blond woman immediately stepped up onto a chair beside Jaina's.
"I do. I'm not huge on revenge, but these bastards owe me for what they did to me and mine."
"Tenel Ka, would you kindly give the nice lady a blaster."
"Certainly." Tenel Ka pulled a blaster off one of the dead Imperials and handed it up to the blond.
"Thank you," said the woman. She then turned to the crowd once more. "You all know me, or at least most of you do. You know what I've been through. You know that I might risk my life on a hell-damned sliver of a chance, but I wouldn't risk yours. Well, this might not be much more than that, but it's the best chance we've got. Who's with us?"
Slowly at first, hesitantly even, the prisoners began to step forward. Some moved back, away from the possibility of a fight, but most moved forward. Jaina grinned and jumped down off her chair. She pulled the blasters off the remaining corpses. "Okay, who knows how to shoot?"
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The gate was down. Kirana Ti gave the order and the witches of the Singing Mountain and Dreaming River clans advanced through laser fire toward it. They were not without casualties. The rancor's skin might be resistant to such weapons, but that of the witches themselves was not, and the enemy had begun to target riders rather than the ridden. They weren't very successful, however: their turret guns weren't calibrated for such fine focus as it took to hit targets the size of humans. That would change as the attackers drew closer. A few witches had already fallen.
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There were about a dozen former soldiers among the prisoners. Apparently the prison had been mostly for peaceful dissidents. Jaina gave the remaining blasters to two of the soldiers and the mob moved out. The first group of troopers they encountered had managed to find two or three intact blasters and began shooting at the mob as it charged. A few of the prisoners went down and Jaina caught a graze on her shoulder. More prisoners went down along with several stormtroopers when, evidently more effected by the explosion than it had at first appeared, one of the stormtroopers' blasters exploded violently.
It was mob against mob. Jaina's mob was better armed, though it made little difference; it was impossible to aim in the brawling crowd. What it came down to, in the end, was that Jaina's mob was angry and the stormtroopers, due to the novelty of the thoroughly unexpected situation and their lack of the weapons and armor that usually made them nearly invincible, were scared. Jaina had never seen, had never taken part in, a fight so brutal, so vicious. It was hand-to-hand, foot-to-groin, nails-to-eyes fighting.
Ultimately, the stormtroopers in their black underarmor uniforms retreated, leaving their injured and dead on the floor. Some of Jaina's mob fell upon the injured. She grimaced, but didn't waste time trying to dissuade them. Kev made a feeble attempt at pulling a prisoner off a trooper who was down with a blow to the throat. Tenel Ka looked on in distaste. The blond woman organized a group to take their own injured back to the relative safety of their cells.
They left the bodies behind as they kept going. The sounds of a battle outside the building were becoming audible.
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Shesh was making pained sounds when laser blasts hit her in certain spots now. Rancor hide could not take such powerful fire indefinitely. And yet, they were winning. Two of the five gun emplacements were down, one more ready to fall. Kirana Ti called out an order and dismounted along with a fifth of the warriors. She brought weapons with her, along with some spare spears.
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