"Walon."

He halted.

"Wait."

Her voice sounded miserable.

"It's fine, cyar'ika. I'll be at the other end and you'll be there to pull me out. You and Mird will-"

"Just wait," she told him. He felt her hands scrabbling at his helmet and leaned his rump against the other side of the tunnel to brace so he could help her.

"What is it?" he asked her, lifting it free.

She bent into the space, laid her lips against his.

His brain stopped working. His brain absolutely, totally and completely, utterly just... ground to a halt. He was lucky he didn't fall to his death, the eagerness with which his hands reached for her. He'd never been kissed upside down before. It was everything the vids made it out to be, a slide of tongue on tongue that made a traditional kiss seem tame, even though this was hardly the time or place for it.

She tasted of the herbs she'd picked as they hiked. Scented of that particular sweetness that seemed to cling to her. The fruit and nuts she preferred to his bread and jerky. And, heavenly bodies, that soft hair of hers.

"Oh, cruel…" he murmured when she lifted her lips from his. He followed her back up, arresting her retreat by pulling the braided tail that had fallen in front of her shoulder.

"Cruel?" she breathed across his lips as he closed the distance between them again.

He nodded, his mouth already open to taste her more thoroughly.

"Cruel. Heartless jetiise bitch. To fill my senses with you when we're days from exfil and I want my hands on you."

She craned to meet his plunder. Nearly dropped his helmet when he climbed high enough for her to lace both hands through that thick pelt of his hair.

"We're dealing with a timed element here," she reminded him.

"You started it."

"I did. I got tired of waiting for you to."

He gave her a little huff of a laugh, a little half-smile. "It's called being respectful. I didn't want to rush you."

"Gee, thanks."

He caressed her cheek. "I think you're beautiful."

She made a coy face. "You just like the way I wear my jeans."

"I'm after getting you out of them. Which, you'll recall, I told you plainly often enough."

"Big talk for a guy about to climb into an abandoned sewer," she told him.

"I may need to bathe first," he agreed.

The lips came together in a tight curve and the brows shot up. "I want a hot bath so badly I'm dreaming about it at night."

"Give me forty-eight hours," he vowed. "Then, I promise, when your dreams are hot it won't be because of a tub of bubbles."

He reached out, smacked a quick kiss on her lips, and snagged his bucket back.

"Be careful."

"Probably not, but it's worth saying."

She rolled her eyes.

"You two take care of each other," he told her before he climbed back down. He was barely a fraction of the way down when she shut the hatch, sealing it once more and plunging the tunnel access into darkness. He knew she'd make some effort to conceal that the tube had been disturbed. It was going to be a long couple of days. He told himself he was no more claustrophobic in this endless permasteel chute than he felt in his beskar'gam. Told himself that every time his foot searched for the next of the unevenly spaced rungs. Or when one gave, his weight collapsing whatever rusted bond the lowest bidder had welded over. If he could find a hidden cache, though, it would be worth it.

Armor was surfacing from Wasskah. Right now it was plain CT armor, but he wanted it. Wanted the tallies. Wanted to know if there was precious RC armor there, too. Precious Katarn rig with blood-red slashes where Sev had detailed it out after the new stuff was issued.

He wondered if the outlet on the other end was seven times larger than this one. Wondered if he was going to encounter anybody else down here—how the fek were they getting stuff in and out of here if this was the cache they were looking for? He hadn't even been able to fit through with his pack on.

That's what led to the last-minute change-of-plans.

Last minute op changes were asking for trouble. But what else was he supposed to do? Stop? Give up?

He hoped comms lasted, although from the schematics he doubted it. He wondered if it would get hotter or colder as he descended. He'd upgraded his winter layers after landing in the sinkhole on Mygeeto. He wouldn't have room to do any reconfiguring in here, if the old intel from the contractors was correct. And he figured he'd be glad he'd thought to change the filters in the resp-unit. If he got down here and ran out of air…

Well, he'd told her to wait for two days for him, not knowing what he'd run into. He had a limited amount of resources and if he got stuck or hit a patch of trouble he was screwed. For the first time since they'd met he was glad she'd resisted his insistence that she needed beskar'gam of her own.

N'Dara had instantly suggested that she be the one to crawl through, to see what she could find. She was smaller, she insisted, and would fit through more easily.

He'd been able to negate that argument by the lack of gear.

So she was lugging his pack as well as hers, and making tracks to the outlet under the waterfall. Delightful little trick, that. Let's be so civilized we put in modern 'flushers and 'freshers but not quite so civilized that we actually treat the waste produced. Let's just shoot it back out into the water supply. He was never drinking anything in this system again. He'd bring his own in.

Vau grunted. Searched for the next rung. Lowered a little. Stretched his leg out and groped with the toe of his boot.

Fek me sideways.

He resituated himself and tried with his left. Slid his foot along the side of the ladder. Didn't even feel resistance where a rung had been and fallen or broken away.

This didn't make sense. He was a tall guy. Taller than any Trando he'd met. He should be able to take any track they'd built.

He looked up. Considered his options. He wasn't going back and he'd lost sense of where he might be in the vault. How many rungs he'd descended and how many feet that might translate to. If he tried to just lower himself with his arms until he hit the next set would he have the strength to haul himself back up if he still couldn't touch anything? And, if he managed to get down that way and then had to come up the same way instead of getting out under the waterfall, how would he span the gap then? He had a couple liquid cable lines. Handy, all the jedi stores hitting the black market. Nobody could fault their tech. So. Worse case scenario, he could hook a line and winch himself back up.

He wrapped an arm and leg around and through and dug into his belt pouch. The rifle he'd slung across his chest kept getting in his way. He didn't want to fuck it up if he'd needed to lean against the tunnel wall—and, hey, handy foresight because he'd probably have managed to hook the safety and shoot his balls off when N'Dara had kissed him. He finally found the cable he wanted and looped it. Tied a Irmenui Steady-On one-handed with skill that even his father would have had to admire. Kiss my shebs, Pa Vau. No sense advertising that a Mandalorian had been here to the next guy who came through, right? Unless they found his dead, lifeless body hanging at the end of the tether like a beskar-clad pinata. That would be a give-away.

So, let's try not to break our neck doing this, then. Yeah?

Great. He was talking to himself. And adding in N'Dara's little idiosyncrasies at that.

N'Dara Jouselle. Forget this Peck guy and his fancy hyphenated Marrow-bone-ée.

Osik. Pure osik. What kind of operative was named Daveed anyway? Sounded fake. He'd already sent the guy's info to Jaing to see if he could pull up anything fishy on him. Who chose to continue working for the Empire when your ex-wife, who was an ex-jedi, was on their wanted-and-detain list? And who still went to their ex-husband for kriffing leads when you had a perfectly good network with your new partner. He snorted. Vau was a hell of a lot better surname than Pek-Marring'tionne. The woman's name was N'Dara Jouselle now, no matter what her discharge papers and ID docs said. He'd get her new ones. Dara Vau. Darrie Vau. Yeah. Darrie Vau.

He took a deep breath and swung his leg back around. Felt the strain of his weight when he could no longer brace his legs. Climbed down hand-over-hand, still hoping to feel that next ladder rung.

Shab.

His arm groped for the side. If he… could he just hold the two support poles and kind of… walk down the rest of the way? He had the cable line, so it wasn't like he was going far.

He took another bracing gulp of air and caught a good grip. Arched his back forward to brace his ass against the back of the access and tried to get purchase with both his feet on the wall.

Yeah. He was going to kill himself.

It seemed to be working, though.

Not the prettiest sight, probably. That made him laugh and he automatically looked down. Like there might have been somebody down there taking vid to post on the holo-web of this reckless merc trying to shimmy down into the absolute gutters of Wasskah. Good stuff that.

He was making enough noise now that his approach was far from stealthy. If anybody else had dropped in to do a little asset relocation he was screwed. Just how he'd like to go out—a blaster up the tailpipe. His stomach dropped again when the handrail curved and reattached to the wall.

Good sign, right? That meant he was at the base.

He took a better grip, braced his elbow through one side, and cautiously tried to find the floor with his right foot.

Fekking killing me here, he thought. Scraped and scraped and scraped and couldn't feel anything but more tunnel. Got that leg up under him and tried again. Kriff. It has to be here. What the hell did they have working these tunnels? Wookies!?

Yeah. He was stupid. Of course they had Wookies build their shitter pipeline. He actually laughed out loud at the mental image of Tarrful down here with a giant plunger.

Losing it, Walon.

He wondered if his laugh would echo up to N'Dara. If she was still hovering up there or if she'd done as he'd told her and beat feet back under cover.

If he died here he liked to think the last she heard from him was his laugh.

He clicked through the comm circuits. Not a damn thing. Not that he'd expected anything different.

It was a disconcerting little detail to be right about, though. That he'd be completely cut off down here. No one would ever know…

I forgot to tell her that Jaing said he'd take Mirdalon. Haar'chak. Well. Rangir. No help for it now. Best just to live long enough to tell her in person.

All right, Walon. Options.

He could give up and winch himself back up. He could just drop. He had little enough line that he shouldn't break a leg hitting bottom. And he could kind of throw himself over to the smooth side of the tube, try to slow his descent by like… gliding kind of?... down the tunnel vent.

Okay. That's what he'd do.

Good plan.

No it wasn't. It was a plan, though, so moving on…

He reslung his rifle one-handed so it was tucked under his left armpit, the strap pulled tight.

In the very second that he let go and hit the opposite wall he considered that he could have just dropped something so he could hear where the bottom was. And that he was getting a better external lamp for his HUD.

It took all of ten seconds for him to crash into the back wall, slide down, then hit and instantly lose purchase with his feet, landing on his back still half-in the tunnel.

Good old Mandalorian beskar ore was the only thing that saved his gett'se since he slid with one foot out in the actual sewer and the other leg bent at an awkward angle still in the access port.

So that would have been embarrassing if anybody saw it.

He wondered idly if he'd pulled anything in his groin. The sheer adrenaline of deciding to free-fall still rocketed through his bloodstream and it was mixing with a slight hysteria he'd never felt before.

Vau managed to get himself upright. Re-angled and slid though the port with both feet so he could actually stand in the sewer junction. When he looked up and realized he could see the end of the liquid cable he'd unclipped from the belt winch curling on the dingy permacrete he lifted both middle fingers in a salute nobody's mother approved of in public.

Bringing up the schematics one more time to confirm, he hit his knees and started crawling.

N'Dara tried to comm Vau every twelve steps. She looked at Mird. Sighed.

"This is crap. What was I thinking?"

She'd shifted as much of her gear as she could into his pack, then slung the now-heavier pack onto her back. She'd tried to situate hers on her chest, but couldn't get it to stay where she wanted it. In the end she slung it diagonally across her torso like a really unwieldy baby in a sling.

The strill yowled mournfully and looked back over its shoulder.

"We're going to pick him up, he's going to have found a treasure map that says Here Be Sev, and then we're going to live happily ever after. Yeah?"

The strill decided the woman was its best option and, since Vau's last words to it had been Protect Dara, it stuck close. Even when a jackatrab-hybrid went jogging through the underbrush.

"When we get close to the rendezvous we'll cook him a nice supper," she promised. "Something tasty. With wings. I'd rather have wings than rodentia, Mirdy," she told it apologetically.

Mird was in the mood to take down something big. A nice shatual or even one of the Nitko they'd spotted upriver.

That made a bad trio of captors: Trannies, Nitko, and Bugs.

N'Dara shivered.

'Walon. Vau. You'd better be all right. If not I will never forgive you.'

Walon Vau was up to his belly in what he figured was decades-old Tran dung. Nobody had come down here this way in a long time based on how he broke through a thick crust on top of the sludge every time he put his elbow down. Thank all the gods in every heaven known to mankind that there was a waterfall at the end of this venture. He might have to trash his suit. There was an overwhelming temptation to disengage the helmet's olfactory filtration and see just how bad it was, but he managed to tamp that urge down every time it reared its ugly head.

He chuckled, glancing down at himself, and wondered what a scavenger would make of that—if he dumped his beskar'gam. Apparently to the non-discerning it was close enough to what the RCs had been issued at the end of the war for N'Dara's initial impression that he was a clone trooper.

His belt was a goner. He didn't need anything in it bad enough to go through the hassle of scrubbing each and every pocket and flap. And he'd just fast overnight, he decided. Even as he thought it his throat ached for a drink of something cold and sweet. A lot of something cold and sweet. He was sweating like a pig, although you had to figure that was just adrenaline and exertion. It was cold enough that his HUD kept automatically cycling the temp control up every forty minutes or so.

So. He had four days' worth of power. The yai-yai pouch he'd snagged was in his thigh pouch. Probably fairly shitte-free. The rats pouches he'd tucked in at his waist at the beginning of every day? Goners. No way could he stomach eating them. Even if he managed to keep his gloves out of the muck and even if his gloves kept any water-resistant integrity. Nope. Not even going to try to figure out how to get those packets torn open and down the hatch without ingesting Trando-Nikto-Bug by-product.

He'd never even been tempted to roast one after he hunted it down, despite the fact that Enacca and Havyyyk and Chakkyrr had spent considerable time discussing the possibility. Apparently Kal had clued Enacca in on his secret little recipe book for ways to prepare tatsushi and she was passing the gag-worthy skill to the rest of her herd. Women were terrifying.

That little runt of Havyyyk's sure had grown fast, though. Shab. Just a year, he thought, and the thing was walking around and swinging around like a little sapien. Cute, the way it swung up to N'Dara, too. She pulled it's hair back into a little bun and taught it how to drum on his bucket.

She'd wanted a baby with this Daveed.

He tried to put it out of his mind. Tried to imagine her with her pale belly stretched out the way Etain's had been. Couldn't merge the two images. Nothing about his daryc meshurok struck him as weak. Because, as much as he'd loved her, Etain had been weak. Timid. No, the woman who wore those talyc mureyca's wasn't weak. Not timid, not easy, not cowable.

It was a shame, if she was right and she was baren, that she wouldn't be able to pass down those indominable genes.

See? Just another reason for her to join us.

Mando'ad were habitual adopters. She was a mother without a child, there were more than enough children in the galaxy who would benefit from her warmth. It was fated.

Another yawning maw opened up ahead of him and on the left. It seemed wider and deeper. The drop-off it offered meant that a good bit of the muck tapered off. There might be gods out there listening after all.

N'Dara studied the sheer drop-off of the cliff where they'd held up.

"I just hate it here," she told the strill. "Fly me down there?"

She laughed at her own joke. Vau said Mird could fly, but she'd never seen it. She liked the way it glided, though, when it soared from tree to tree. It just made her nervous here. There were bigger, more vicious things on this particular island than she'd seen previously. Like, whatever genetic similarities there'd been to the creatures on Kashyyk and Alaris… Wasskah's all adapted to be super mean and super big and super quiet with it.

Some kind of skimmer had nearly gotten Mird one afternoon and only Vau's shout had given the strill enough time to ricochet off the tree it'd been aiming for and counter-attack. She didn't count the hawk-owl thing that had gone for the same lizard as Mirdy a couple weeks ago. She'd taken it with the crossbow Chakkyrr made to fit her slighter frame. When he'd tried to teach her to fire his he'd laughed and called her pitifully human.

Pitifully human.

"All right Mirdy. Let's do this."

She looped a vine, took a good hold, and used the force to keep herself from banging—with the extra eighty kilos or so the packs added—into the rock facing.

"Excellent," she swore when she landed. She made a face at her gloves.

The vine had kind of shredded the outer layer of the leather. She looked up at it. There were big dribbles of viscous green sap-pus bubbling out where she'd slid down the length of greenery, breaking off stems and leaflets. It didn't take any time at all to decide to shuck the ruined gloves and just make do with her glove liners if she needed them later.

"Okay. Even the flora hates us here. Let's go find your daddy's new doorway."

The strill's 'daddy' was rounding a curve that felt like it matched the one that should lead to a larger air vent chamber. He picked up the pace. It made sense that if this was where armor taken from MIAs and KIAs was being stockpiled, they needed a fairly large space for it. A lot of troops had lost their lives in this sector. And if Geonosians were still involved, that opened up a whole other world of possibilities.

He shone his torch around, before actually engaging his head. He'd learned the hard way when a whole colony of fluttering parasites took offense to his investigative techniques. He hated shit flying at his face. Hated it.

So far so good.

His stomach plunged as he ducked around and looked.

Yeah. A good many troops had lost their lives in this sector. And he was going to be here for a little bit.

His gut knotted as he stripped off his ruined gloves and reached out to touch the plastoid armor stacked floor to ceiling in the space.

'Dara, if you can hear me, I found it. A lot of it.'

New problem. He was going to incinerate it. Decaying shit released methane gas, which was explosive and highly flammable. If he couldn't sync up a comm signal, he might not be able to trust to a radio wave, so remote detonation was off the drawing board. Which meant a timed charge. So he couldn't screw that up.

It wasn't like he needed to bring down the whole place, he thought as he worked.

Don't bring down the whole place, Walon. It's a big mountain and your way out is downhill.

He needed enough destructive property out of the charge to render the armor into shrapnel. He had no intention of leaving it for somebody to sell to the next highest bidder. But the problem was, it was good damned armor. Not beskar, but… yeah. There was some shock trooper and RC kit in here. Good armor, but not good enough to save every lad who had strapped it on. They'd been bred to be disposable.

He ran his thumb over the tally that came off in his hand.

Blinked back tears and swallowed hard to shove them down his throat. He'd need a way of figuring out who'd been dead when they took it off of them and who'd been alive. Jusik had been able to sense that at the auction. Could N'Dara? Could he ask her to touch every single tally in this room and attempt to discern if the wearer's pain had ended in passing into the manda or a prison cell?

Yeah, he grimaced. Yeah, he was a big enough bastard that he could do that.

This is why no woman set her sights on you for home and hearth, he told himself. You'd use or sell out whoever you had to if it put your goal in sight.

Since when had every POW become his problem, his goal?

He rested his knife on his knee. Looked up and over his shoulder.

Since when did every POW become your problem? When did this stop being just about Sev?

Was that weak of him, that he was willing to take this time, solve this puzzle, too? He didn't have a lead on Sev specifically. That was the honest, heartbreaking truth. He didn't even know if he'd lived past those gun turrets being overrun. Harsh line, but spot-on. Delta Squad had found its new home in the Empire and from what Niner said, didn't even really try to make contact with their old comrades still serving the emperor. Were they happier there? Or was it their own penance?

Why hadn't he insisted that they extract Boss and Scorch and Fixer when they went after Niner and Dar?

Because in their place you'd need displacement activities, too. And what can you offer them at Casa Skirata? At the farm Levet and Cov and those boys were bringing up to par? Another helping of skraan and empty reassurance that they had no other choice.

They'd had a choice. He didn't hold the one they'd made against them, but it wasn't the choice he'd have made.

Boss would be right here beside me, he admitted. No way would Boss have let him walk away from Kyrimoriut time and time again without wanting to be in on any op that might lead to his brother, whether it was Sev or any other vode.

So why wasn't he giving him that choice?

Because how do I look at them when I come up empty-handed.

He nicked his finger. Okay. Great. Now he'd die of whatever the hell he picked up in this foul entrée to the pits of hell. Wonder if jedi can suck poison out of a wound like you do a snake bite?

His mind wandered for a second.

His thumb was not what came to mind as first choices if N'Dara was going to be-

Bad. Jesu, Walon. She kissed you once. You watched that video. Take it easy on her.

It wasn't like she was inexperienced, though. She'd slept around some. Before and after the attack.

It made his gut knot up.

This was why he avoided entanglements. He hated women.

He sucked in a deep breath when he finished prying tallies from where they were embedded. None of them were his boys. He didn't know what to feel about that. Pride, sure. But the simple reason could be just that his guys hadn't been tasked here. You didn't need commando squads piled up on top of each other. There were too few of them and too many theaters in the war.

Gods, he was tired.

He'd stopped for a little bit, tried to meditate like N'Dara. He'd known sleep was beyond him in here. Figured it was better to get done and get out anyway. But he was tired now. Felt like the weight of making the decision about the ordnance he swapped out for dead men's numbers was going to drag him down.

Fek it. He yanked a drink pouch from his thigh. He'd brought them for troopers they were able to liberate. The grey freaks prided themselves on those stim shots and nutricubes. But you couldn't beat manda'yaim for sending her boys to the front armed with a restorative that would put the kick back in you.

He nearly lost his stomach when he unsealed his helmet.

No. It couldn't be that bad. It was his imagination.

He didn't even take it all the way off. Inhaled hard when the straw got close to his nose, then held his breath while he sucked down the entire thing. Slammed his bucket back down, exhaled again with his jaw jutted forward to try to blow the sticky-sweet flavor over his deeply-offended senses.

He wasn't going to have to worry about taking it slow with N'Dara.

She was never going to be able to stomach the scent or sight of him again.

He left the pouch. Rolled his head on his neck and got to work.

He might have been a sniper, an assassin, but he was no stranger to making a charge. Laying some line. The problem with trusting a fuse in here was two-fold: possible slowdown from sheer saturation versus early detonation due to the gases present. He could affix it to the walls of the tunnel as he went but that still meant that there was a possibility of the entire tunnel complex going up when he lit it. He smeared dermaplast along the inside of every piece of armor he'd already set aside, concentrating on the chest and back pieces since those were larger and thicker.

Omega had reported that Seps were wearing trooper shoulder bells, the leg and arm plates, near Haddick.

Can't solve everything, Walon. Do what you can, when you can.

Asset denial was a common functionality in every well-planned military campaign. Profiteering went hand-in-hand with war. And, since he'd rappelled down here on black market jedi liquid cable, he should be the last one to take offense at somebody reutilizing gear nobody needed anymore.

Let's just let Darrie determine if they still needed it before we go down that path, he told himself.

"Okay."

He pulled up the schematic again. How long would it take him to get out?

He tried to do the arithmetic, working out how long he'd taken to traverse, along with a declining rate of speed. Might be able to count on a bump from the yai-yai when adrenaline started coursing again. Nothing like knowing you were in a flammable tube when you started the ticker on a countdown clock to get your shebs in gear under the best of circumstances.

"Just do it, Walon," he said aloud.

He set his charge. Synced his chrono with the detonator. Slung himself toward the exit.

Swung right back around to pull on his disgusting gloves.

He hated this daryaim. Fekking haran.

That brought out another dark little chuckle. It was about to be as close to the fiery pits of hell as any man had ever managed to produce.

N'Dara heard the explosion before she heard the man calling her.

It started beneath her, a rumble and shriek that seemed to come from the ground behind her.

"Run!"

She turned, saw him thirty meters from where she'd expected him to be.

"Are you wet?"

"I climbed out a culvert," he reminded her.

He'd checked his chrono and decided he had time to splash the worst of it off, too, truth be told.

She didn't need to know that. The female of any breed rarely appreciated those kinds of details.

He was chugging toward her as fast as he could now, though. There was a distinct possibility that he'd over-thought that whole asset denial thing. Plus, ancient and degrading sewer system. Explosive gases. There might be a little bit of landscape reformation to be anticipated.

"Inland!" he yelled to her.

"I thought you said down! Enacca's set to meet us-"

He didn't pause to listen to her rationale. As he swept up to her he jerked her arm around and sent her in the direction he'd decided made more sense.

"I changed my mind."

Peninsula. Peninsula. Peninsula. This particular island was basically five-pronged, which had made it likely for some of the factorizations. Lots of points of egress. The problem was, there was massive waterflow, too. The reason these two facets of the land had formed peninsulas in the first place was the massive and violent river that crested down in three huge, gaping waterfalls to eventually drop into the sea. No Bueno. Starting a landslide on this side of the island wasn't going to end well and he didn't want to be below when it dropped.

"Did she comm you?" he asked as he ran.

"No. She usually comms you. She's your friend."

Hardly that, and not anymore. His cinyc daryc had been well and truly embraced by the new Wookie resistance. They loved guts and the little dikut had it in spades.

"I figured if she didn't get me she'd try you. So she's not on the way yet."

"Or else she's already in place and-"

"Give me my pack."

He gestured impatiently. She hesitated long enough to swap it over. She'd pulled her gear back out of it while she and Mird huddled under the biggest fern she'd ever seen, waiting to find out if they were orphans.

Mird, at least, had appreciated her choice of cover. There was a warren den right next to them and he'd been crunching happily every time he pulled his head out of the hole.

"Comm chatter increased the whole time you were in there," she told him. "I think we're busted."

"Well, our other little surprise wasn't going to stay secret for long."

"I was hoping for a little longer, at least."

"No such luck."

They hit the underbrush and he jerked her to a stop.

"Message Enacca," he told her. "Just tell her we may have to rethink exfil. See if the north end beach meets her approval. Tell her I'll look for an LZ and drop her grid points."

"What are you doing?"

Jiang had rigged him a fairly portable master receiver. He couldn't jam comms, but right now he was more interested in hearing what was being said.

He hooked the earpiece in and tried to tune it. Channel after channel it was patrols being sent out, patrols coming in. Demands and check points. Rerouting some delivery that their little pyrotechnics display must have necessitated. He'd rigged the door of the warehouse to blow at a heat signature. Genius stuff, what those Skirata lads came up with sometimes. No sense just using motion-activated dets if they were using droids or repulsor carts. Let's take out as many of the bastards as possible and their hoard.

"This is why missions go south the minute you go off-template," she told him.

"You would not have enjoyed that little tour, cyar'ika," he assured her. "In no way, shape, or form."

She frowned at him. "You could have at least kissed me before you started shoving me around."

His eyes flashed and his nostrils flared. He had her pulled to him, her mouth like a breath of sanity for his parched soul, before she could even react to his instant arousal.

Vau stripped off his thin glove liners when she crawled into his lap. His fingers wove into her braid, angling her head as he liked it. When she hummed out a little whimper he felt his dick twitch against the hard plate that covered him.

"Oh, shab," he moaned. "No, Walon."

That made her laugh. "Why, 'no Walon'?"

"It's my name."

"I'm aware," she giggled against his lips.

"Just a kiss this time," he warned her. "I'm trying to get us out of this alive. No more sexy noises."

That made her expression go incredulous. "I-"

"Shut up, cinyc daryc'ika," he ordered as he opened his mouth to hers again.

She jumped when the radio in his ear squawked so loudly even she heard it. Or maybe felt it, since their mouths were well and truly fused and she might have had more tongue in his mouth than hers.

He paused, rubbing his lips together, while he listened.

Wasn't good. Whatever the translation was, it wasn't good.

He nodded. Removed the earpiece, and just pursed his lips while he regarded her.

"Good chance we're going to die."

"Why?"

"We need to get to the other side of that river."

She made a face.

"They're talking about clearing this side. They just blew bridges to trap us here. They think they're dealing with a ramikadyc unit sent by the Empire."

"So… we can just pretend to be a couple lost waifs if they find us… no, sir, I ain't never seen no Rangers, sir."

"Yeah. You and I both wish. Can you swim?"

"Nay-vee."

"Considering that most of the service in the Republic Navy is space-bound, you could lose the attitude."

"They teach us all to swim. It's actually good practice for if you lose Gs."

She swam her arms through the air.

"This is how Palpatine was able to take over the entire galaxy," he muttered. He snapped his bucket back into place and reached down to haul her up. When he tried to put his pack on the right way instead of just slinging one strap over his shoulder as they hauled shebs he found his movement seriously limited.

"Oh! I adjusted it. Like you showed me."

She beamed at him. He kept his comms on internal as he muttered and grunted his way through readjusting the straps back to where he'd had them. Probably for longer than she'd been alive.

So fekking proud of herself for it, too.

He didn't even wait for her to give him any kind of ready signal before heading out, slinking deeper and deeper into the cover of the soft, piney forest.

"And they say romance is dead," she bitched as she finished getting herself strapped back into her own ruck and made to follow.

"Oh, baby," he told her. "You have the romance osik well in hand. That was probably the sexiest thing a woman's ever done."

"Adjusting your straps so I could lug your shit through high heaven?"

"Kissing me like that," he threw over his shoulder. "If there'd been room in that tunnel I'd have probably thrown you down right then and there."

He feigned an exaggerated shiver.

"Gives me goose bumps just thinking about it. Well worth whatever chick-vids you made your ex-hubbie watch, wherever you learned that yank-and-grab move."

"Happy feeling gone now," she complained. "Every time I think your asshat-ability is an act you go and prove me wrong."

"The things you do the Basic-language are horrifying. It's a shame you never went to uni. You could have wiped out a language arts department. Sent them all to an early grave."

To piss him off she over-exaggerated everything she said for the next two hours. Kept up a steady commentary liberally laced with drawling ch and sh sounds in every word she could find to support them.

She forgot she was mad at him when he held up his fist for her to pause, then stretched up and around a fallen tree trunk to retrieve a pale blue flower with deep red fronds. Tucked it behind her ear.

"Shut up, cinyc daryc cyar'ika," he whispered through the soulless black helm as he traced the curve of that little pink earlobe of hers.

She'd just nodded mutely. Taken his hand when he offered it and followed behind him.

Eventually they ran out of luck.