Chapter 15: Fear
A steady ringing filled her head. Ringing and tapping throbs. Omega squeezed her eyes shut and wished it would all go away.
She felt mildly sick to her stomach, and...also felt that something was missing. As if she were forgetting something very important.
She pulled herself to her hands and knees and crawled a few feet along the maintenance shaft, pausing when her left arm scraped strangely against the metal.
She stared at the vambrace sliding about on her arm and gasped.
"Tech! I have to warn Tech!"
Omega crawled faster, fright adding speed and awareness to her tired body. She shuffled around the corner back to the entrance point of the tunnel and leaned on the grate with her face, peering down the hall.
Tech was no longer there.
Omega pulled back from the entrance and gritted her teeth. She inhaled two or three rapid breaths, then started back up the tunnel again. How did Tech move so fast? Surely the newcomer in the medical room hadn't found Tech before Omega had arrived back in the first hall! Unless...
Omega pressed her back against the tunnel wall and flipped open Tech's vambrace computer. The chronometer blinked solid red numbers back at her, proving by the time indicated that she had been unconscious for over two hours.
Omega gulped and shuffled back to the medical room where Tech's gear was placed. No one was there.
She spent the next half-hour exploring the different shafts, some of which were large enough for her to stand up in. She stumbled from one to the next, the effects of a sedative overdose blaringly obvious to her. How could that bounty hunter have been so dumb as to not calculate the correct amount?
The fact that anyone could be so careless annoyed Omega more than her queasy stomach and throbbing head.
She heaved a sigh and slipped ahead into a particularly narrow tunnel. The walls closed in about her shoulders, obliging her to wriggle on her stomach.
A strange sense of urgency crept over her, and Omega pushed ahead with renewed energy, her frantic pace too fast to maneuver the narrow tunnels safely.
She skinned her knees through her pant legs on a rough hitch in the metal floor and banged against a sharp corner, bruising her shoulder.
Omega hauled herself one more length and flopped down over another grate-covered opening. She blinked wearily down into the room, then shoved herself upright on trembling wrists.
The room below was large, circular, and dark with no door blocking its entrance, and empty save for a black shape in one corner...
Tech was sitting with his back to the wall, wrists bound together with electobinders and a blindfold over his eyes. But he was definitely conscious.
"Tech," Omega whispered. It had been nearly three hours since she had left him in the hall, and she knew that if he had been here for even one hour, conscious but with nothing to occupy his mind, he would be quite miserable indeed.
Omega bit her lip, tugging weakly at the grate. She could feel another wave of debilitating exhaustion rushing through her body, and she struggled harder, determined to get to her teammate.
It was no use. Omega collapsed flat on top of the grate, tired tears pricking her eyes, and stared down at the room helplessly.
A small droid floated into the room and came to rest at the far end of the wall. Tech turned in the direction of the noise, cocking his head when the droid ceased to emit its mechanical whirring sound.
All was quiet. Omega held her breath.
"CT 33-7641...!" A voice boomed around the small holding cell.
Tech jumped violently and jerked ramrod stiff where he sat.
Omega stared at the hologram of a tall, female Kaminoan. She didn't remember seeing her before. But the voice was somewhat familiar.
Omega felt her eyes droop closed, and jolted her head up when "CT 33-7641...!" sounded again from the holorecording, much louder than before.
The droid remained in the room for a long, long time. Omega drifted in and out of consciousness, eventually becoming accustomed to the "CT 33-7641...!" that would sound out of the droids speakers at sporadic intervals.
Each replay varied with no specific pattern to its volume changes or timing. Sometimes there would be several minutes before the recording would play again, sometimes only a few seconds. But Omega could hear it all in the back of her mind as sleep came and went...
She started awake feeling marginally stronger than before. The droid was still there as was the hologram.
Omega sluggishly checked the chronometer. It had been three hours.
She hurriedly located Tech, worriedly watching him for a reaction at the next earsplitting "CT 33-7641...!" but he didn't jump again.
The hologram went silent for several long moments, and Omega leaned her ear to the grate.
Tech was muttering to himself, "Ah, very clever. An old recording. Well...that won't work," and other such things.
Omega gasped and looked down at the wrist comm. How long had it been since she last tried to call Hunter? Had she even tried at all? Her aching head refused to remember.
Casting a suspicious look at the droid, but not wanting to go too far from Tech, Omega slithered backwards a short ways up the shaft, just far enough to be out of hearing distance of anyone in the room.
"Hunter?" she hissed as she pushed down the button. "Echo? Wrecker? Come in!"
Hisssssssss...!
Omega frowned at the comm, static being the only response to her call. She reached for the button again, then hesitated. What if the bounty hunters below were still looking for her? What if they could tap into comms like Tech did? She couldn't risk them hearing her, but she also couldn't stop trying to reach Hunter and the others on the Marauder.
The rest of the Bad Batch was most likely in the Lido system by now, and were probably sweeping the comm channels, sorting through chatter to find her signal. Well, she'd give them one to find.
Flipping open Tech's vambrace computer, Omega located the comm controls and typed a message into the system to broadcast on repeat.
She smiled smugly.
If the bounty hunters or anyone else picked the message up on their comms, they would have no clue what it meant. But the Bad Batch would! Wrecker definitely would understand.
With another smirk that felt way too similar to the way Tech's looked, Omega started the comm transmitting the words "Mantell Mix" on repeat into the atmosphere.
She crawled back to the grate above Tech's prison room and flopped down, exhaustion pulling hard at her body once again.
Tech was still blindfolded, and the droid was playing more recordings of the strange Kaminoan. These were now softly spoken sentences interspersed with angry shouts.
Omega's tired mind could not process the actual words. They blurred together into irritating echoes in her head.
Tech was rigid and had pressed himself into the wall as far as he was able.
A tall figure slid through the doorway with a soft click of boots, but Tech didn't seem to notice.
The droid raised the volume and the next sentence from the speaker in the hologram seemed to rouse Tech enough that he lurched to his feet and stumbled toward the source of the recordings.
The droid simply hovered into the air, well out of reach.
Omega frowned at the tall hooded figure that had slipped into the holding cell. Tech had repositioned himself against the wall, his lips set in a stony line.
The recording of the Kaminoan increased in volume even further, the droid hovering closer to Tech, and Omega stared hard at Tech, wishing his throat would stop moving in such a strange way.
The tall figure approached him alongside the droid and bent down, reaching out a white three fingered hand, and touched Tech's cheek.
Tech recoiled violently and cried out, turning his head to stuff his face in the crook of his arm. "Oh, what is that?!" he cried.
Omega gritted her teeth.
The figure motioned to the droid and the holorecording was turned off.
The Kaminoan reached out, seized Tech by the throat, and jabbed a needle into his neck.
Tech flinched and Omega hated the heaving motion of his chest. She could almost hear the pounding of his heart as the Kaminoan yanked the cloth from his eyes.
"Hello, Tech."
Tech moaned, his face ashen. "Y-you were dead! The records -"
"Records can be wrong, CT 33-7641...now come with me.
Tech struggled against the Kaminoan's grip.
"You can't do this! I am a member of Clone Force 99, I'm under the Republic now, not you!"
His words were becoming more slurred, his motion sluggish and weak.
"What Republic?" the Kaminoan hissed. "Besides, we need to see if our time in training was a success. I have some questions for you."
Tech froze and then jerked against her again. "You...you can't! I won't let you!"
The Kaminoan sneered and lowered her head like a snake to rest inches from Tech's own.
"You don't have a choice," she hissed. "You can fight all you wish, but the drug has been administered. Quite an ingenious concoction. I never realized the amount of knowledge you kept stored on your datapad."
"Assuming you are following your usual methods of depravity, Sullo Pria," Tech snapped in a shaking tone, "Then I shall be able to move only slightly for the rest of this session."
"That is correct," the Kaminoan replied.
Tech stared at her, raw terror flashing visibly in his large eyes, the rest of his face a solid stone of barely controlled panic.
"We will begin shortly," Sullo Pria intoned. "First you shall have to be transported to a more...secluded location. We can't have anyone retrieving you now, can we?"
Tech's eyes widened. Sullo Pria lurched forward and seized him by the chin. "If you are not silent during your transfer," she snarled, "I will make certain to break you within the first moments of our reaching the lab. Understood?"
Tech stared back at her. She squeezed tighter and Omega finally heard a hoarsely whispered, "Yes, ma'am."
Then the Kaminoan seized Tech by the arms and dragged him from the cell.