Re: Part 9 - Safely home
Rhijans piped up. "Do you want a full, step-by-step rundown, or do you just want the relevant points of contact, Colonel? For my own part, I'd have to say that the whole mission was hanging by a thread until U-Y came into the picture. We had pretty much no useful intel on the mine or the layout...Dak did a brilliant job of trying to access the computer systems, but the terminal available only had access to so much, and almost none of that information was on the Imperial installations, just on the mine itself. But the kid popped the restraining bolt on the droid, who offered up a lot of the relevant information we needed about where in the mine to search and what areas were high-threat zones to be handled."
He shrugged, and continued, "That was further aided when a group of Imperial troopers conveniently showed up looking for another non-Imperial agent of some sort...he was Ubese, never caught his name...but they also wanted to detain us about meddling with the droid. We took them down in short order, appropriated their armor for the sake of camouflage and intelligence-gathering, and split into two groups. One group--Jacobs, Lund, and myself--went for the warehouse area to see if we could locate where they were storing the Nergon that was ready to be shipped. The rest of the team went into the mines to see about freeing any slaves and disrupting the mining operations on that end. My group found a fortified inner bunker within the warehouse...Lund and Jacobs stayed to see about infiltrating it, while I went to see if I could create a distraction and draw troops away. Since they were already looking for an Ubese infiltrator, I improvised a few explosions, played along as though I was one of the regular troops, and put the blame on the Ubese. Communications and what emplacement weapons we could find were priority targets, there was apparently some animosity between the mining staff and the Imperial garrison and it took some gunboat diplomacy to convince the miners to get their gear out into the open and then make themselves scarce. By the time I got back to the warehouse, something had gone very wrong, the place was a shambles and barely standing and Jacobs was dead, Lund was wounded, and the Imperials were ready to shoot anyone who seemed even remotely antagonistic. About that time, the other team showed up from the mines with a string of freed slaves and the Nergon we were able to deliver, and while the Imperials were focused on them, I managed to eliminate the few that were around me and we made it back to the docking bay shortly before the Headhunters came in on their attack run...got off the ground just about the time they were opening fire. The slaves got aboard a different transport...the one the Ubese had come in on...don't know where they went, but I'm pretty sure it was not in the direction of any Imperial holdings, and we returned here."
With that, he shrugged, and looked at the rest of the team that was present to see if anyone had anything further to add, or some way of expanding on details he either didn't know or hadn't deemed relevant enough to include.