Chapter Text
The speed with which alarms started blaring in the cockpit once they were comfortably in hyperspace made the fact that they coaxed the jump at all seem retroactively like a feat of miraculous proportions.
The girl looked lost, but she wasn’t panicking. No stranger to onboard emergencies undoubtedly, considering the company she kept, but there was a unique peril to hyperspace travel in a compromised vessel. “Things,” he muttered as he leaned around her and started scanning the navicomputer, “are going to move very quickly and be very interesting.”
A yelping bark echoed up from the trooper bay; Crosshair paused his assessment of their situation to turn a slow, arched-brow look on Omega who looked as determinedly unbothered as that fateful day she sat herself down next to Hunter in the canteen on Kamino. “What? Batcher did her part for the plan too.”
“Fine. Move.” She scrambled free of the recessed pilot’s seat and he slid smoothly around into her place, absorbing the warning lights flashing across the console, and the particularly concerning blinking red that was the hyperdrive status. “Well – at least if we implode in hyperspace, the Empire will never know what happened to us.”
A beat passed, two, and then – “Are we going to implode in hyperspace?”
At least she sounded more curious than terrified.
None of his old squad would have ever bothered voicing the question aloud. No sense worrying about it; if it happened, they’d be blissfully free from worrying about anything ever again.
Crosshair bit back the retort and told her, “Not if we can limp to the next habitable system with somewhere we can crash.”
“Crash?”
He gestured irritably at the cacophony of lights and alarms. “Go grab anything useful from down below. And grab the damned hound.” She was already darting for the lift. “Time to draw up a new plan.”
She returned a scant minute later laden down with a medkit, two spare trooper packs, and the bounding beast. “No,” Crosshair drawled as it leapt towards him and, to the thing’s credit, it stopped and pivoted and stayed tucked up against Omega’s side. He eyed it somewhat more charitably and considered that it’d found its way here at all – maybe it would be of some use in the end.
The packs landed on the ground beside the one she’d grabbed in the wrecked shuttle. With a final glance at the flashing console – he’d silenced the alarms, if they were going to die in a sudden burst of oblivion there was no sense getting worked up about it – he stepped up out of the flight deck and joined her in taking inventory. “Primary objective?”
Without missing a beat: “Staying free.”
“Obstacles?”
She thought while she unfastened pockets and pouches, pulled out blaster charges and explosives, night-sight and grappling attachments, macrobinoculars and, eventually, finally, rations packs, hydro tabs, battle comm, a thermo-wrap, spare body-glove.
He eyed her scuffed and muddy uniform and diminutive figure and wondered if they’d make it far enough and long enough that lack of suitable alternative clothing would even begin to make the list of challenges worth considering.
“We can’t go far. They might have guessed that. They’ll be looking.” Apparently surviving the crash and severely outgunned were obvious enough not to be worth stating. “We’ve only got,” she finished emptying the kits and eyeing up the rations, “five days’ rations, if we can’t find food.”
Crosshair rebalanced that equation in his head but didn’t bother sharing his conclusion with Omega; not worth the argument until it actually mattered.
The hound sniffed idly at a nutrient bar; Crosshair also declined to voice aloud that he’d shoot the beast before he let Omega share her limited food supply with it.
“Anything else?”
“We’ll need another ride.”
“Which brings us to?”
She leaned eagerly forward, eyes shining with a glimmer of hope that was so much brighter than even her obnoxiously persistent optimistic determination during the long months of her semi-regular visits down in the detention levels. “Hunter. We have to send a message to Hunter.”
Which raised the question he’d not been able to pose all the while, the subject he’d avoided as determinedly as she, irrelevant faced with the impossible task at hand. And now, forced to peer through that doorway at last, to grapple with the question that had haunted him since the first he saw her dejected form trotting alongside the scientist – “And your confidence that the squad remains… free?”
Alive was his first choice word, but he suspected her determination and relentless optimism would have finally been dulled, if she suspected otherwise.
Braced for indignation, her subdued and honest assessment caught him by surprise. “Hemlock had Hunter and Wrecker when he took me. But AZI was getting help. And they never came to Tantiss.”
Flimsy, incomplete, hope-driven logic, but at least she seemed well-enough aware. “There is an additional complication.” She blinked up at him, far too earnest, far too trusting. “Signaling for help could very well hasten our pursuit. It is likely that transmitting a message from this ship will betray our position to the base.”
“But if we don’t…”
Crosshair gestured vaguely with his tremoring hand over the emptied packs. “These are our resources, until we locate alternative assistance or alternative means of survival.” And because it mattered, in the weight of deciding which path to follow, “Isolation is what makes a secret base; the surrounding systems are neither well-populated, nor well-known.”
Help would not be in high supply.
Were he alone, he’d take his chances, of course he would. These long months confined with only his own thoughts and pains to keep him company, until the girl and her ceaseless inane prattle began to interrupt the monotony. There would be something like peace, he imagined, in embracing that solitude on his own terms.
But he was not alone; inconveniently, the notion tugged at him that he owed her more than a weary half-starved existence living off the land.
More inconveniently still, something like conscience rose up in him at the memory of her steadfast determination to pull him along in her wake, to save him on Kamino, to consider him the brother he’d time and again rejected being.
He didn’t feel it; wasn’t sure he wanted to. But maybe that urgent need that led him to stumble his way through a fog of pain to try and warn them – the way he yielded to her plan to open his cell if for no other reason than to put an extra body between her and the blaster bolt with her name on it – the renewed surge of determination as he watched her gnaw on her lip and fret over their situation, to see her back where she belonged –
Maybe that was as close as he was going to get.
And maybe that was good enough.
“Omega.” She blinked up at him, strained under the weight of an impossible decision; he took it out of her hands. “Plan one hundred – the Fool’s Errand.”
“I don’t know that one.”
“No,” Crosshair agreed. “We’re drawing it up right now.”
But as he rose to check the countdown on the hyperdrive, she halted him with a quiet, quavering, “Crosshair?” He glanced back and down, but her eyes remained fixed on the deck, her hand curling against the flank of the tamed hound lying by her side. “They let us go.”
“Yes.”
“They want us… me,” she corrected reluctantly, “alive.”
“Yes.”
Omega tipped her face up to peer at him. Fear finally pushing through, pulling her mouth down, drawing her eyes tight. “Nala Se knew. She’d been destroying my blood for weeks. But she knew if they analyzed it with the others…” Her expression cleared and settled into a resolve that probably ought have been chilling coming from her, coming from a child, coming ahead of her next words: “Whatever happens – the plan, our plan – I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to be their experiment.”
Maybe there was purpose behind the barrier his mind put up between them, steadfastly maintained. The refusal to be the brother she claimed, the inability to see in her a sister.
Maybe that purpose was in his agreement here and now – “I don’t either” – and in his promise to her, as he cast a silent apology vaguely out into the galaxy and willed Hunter to hear it wherever he was, and accepted his own damnation: “And whatever happens – I promise you won’t be.”
Four minutes later she pulled them out of hyperspace and sent a new burst of alarms wailing around them. Crosshair finished securing the packs that risked become deadly projectiles on what promised to be an unpleasant descent and then moved wordlessly to the transceiver unit on the bulkhead below the pilot’s nest.
A single habitable planet he’d identified on the navcomp, and Omego set them on an atmospheric entry course while Crosshair worked the comm with his infuriatingly shaking fingers. Their old secret channels, the one he’d used in vain trying to warn them. If Hunter was out there living up to his moniker, he’d be monitoring them constantly, obsessively.
He sent out five numbers from his old code.
08. 11.
53. 98.
27.
And then he hit the battle comm’s distress beacon that would attach their position to the message and, likely, to their Imperial pursuit.
The moment the signal cleared, their last hope flung out into the nothingness of the empty void of space around them, he disabled the comm and barked, “Now!” prompting Omega to change course with a maneuver sure to put strain on their battered engines and stabilizers.
“Hold on to something,” she cried down to him. He got an arm wrapped around the restraints of one of the jump seats, spared a glance for the hound cowered against the far bulkhead as if it could escape the piercing blare of alarms portending their imminent demise, and braced himself against the quick lurch into hyperspace as they tried to coax one last iota of cooperation out of the protesting drive.
He stumbled with the jump, steadied himself, and promptly lost his grip and fell to the deck as the ship reverted just as quickly back to real-space with a violent shudder. He clambered several feet on hands and knees before the shaking stabilized enough to rise to his feet and claw his way up to the flight deck where Omega was desperately fighting the stick for control as a gas giant halfway across the system from their initial exit vector loomed in the viewport.
The micro-jump had blown out the hyperdrive; the reversion had blown out another of their engines. Crosshair leaned over the pilot’s seat and shut them down, toggled a few more switches to reroute power into their remaining engines, and got the vessel calmed enough to allow Omega to reassert a modicum of control. “Go,” he took the stick so she could start scrambling free of the crash webbing. “Strap in.”
They swapped places and she stumbled her way down to secure herself in one of the crew jumpseats while Crosshair reoriented their course and set them heading fast as he could persuade the protesting ship towards the gas giant’s sole terrestrial moon.
There was no grace in it. Simply making it through the atmospheric entry put the systems that weren’t already dire into the red, and for several stressful seconds his control amounted to little more than steering a glider. As they cut lower, terrain began to resolve, grassy plains and rocky outcroppings, promising rivers winding their way through denser flora.
There was no room to be strategic about it; surviving the descent took priority over an optimal position on the ground. So when he coaxed enough power into the repulsors, he didn’t waste the moment, simply looped them around and began a haphazard landing sequence. “Brace!”
For a fleeting moment – a few heartbeats at most – he thought they might make it down gently enough to potentially salvage the ship.
The wings were half-folded up and the ship thirty meters in the air still when the repulsors sputtered and sent them the rest of the way in little better than free-fall.
With the sickening crunch of metal folding in on itself as the trooper bay below absorbed the impact, with a few concerning pops of something blowing out aft, with the acrid smell of smoke quickly flooding the upper deck – with a final jolt that rattled his head so hard he nearly blacked out –
They were down.
Crosshair gave himself the span of five steadying breaths before forcing his weary body and shaking fingers back to work. The silence aft was worrying, and then the low whines from the hound more worrisome still. The console was dead, so he felt around near the seam of the hatch to find the manual release to break the seal. It popped open, just a few inches, but enough to start clearing out the haze quickly filling the deck.
And then he stumbled down the short ramp and felt his way to the sound of the beast’s mewling; found it licking Omega’s hand where she was slumped, unmoving, in the closest jumpseat.
He found her pulse, felt for breath. Knocked out on impact most likely. Choking on fumes wafting up from the crumbled bay below. He unhooked the restraints and managed to hoist her over his shoulder, maneuvered her precariously back up to the pilot’s chair where he deposited her before setting to work shoving the hatch further open, open enough to clear the air, enough to clamber free from the wreck.
By the time he went back and hauled the sorted and reassembled packs up to shove out ahead of their own precarious exit from the ship, she was coming around. “Cr-” she coughed, “Crosshair?”
“Not dead yet,” he informed her while leaning up and out, taking in the visible terrain they’d have to drop on to. “We need to move.”
The feint had – hopefully – bought them some time. Enough of it to find suitable shelter, to find a suitable place to strategize a last stand, while pinning their hopes on Hunter not only receiving their message but in piecing together its true meaning.
He climbed up out of the hatch enough to glean the shorter drop off the port side, hoisted the packs and shoved them off and over, and whistled for the hound. “Out,” he ordered; it didn’t move from where it was jammed into the space between the pilot’s seat and the bulkhead. Crosshair sighed. “Fine.” He slid himself along the edge of the hatch and eyed the footing below.
“Crosshair?” He glanced back around where Omega was shaking herself back into full coherence, fingers curling through the hound’s fur. “What if they don’t understand the message? What if they walk into a tra-?”
“Tech will figure it out,” he promised drily, and then dropped off onto the uneven and rocky ground below. He rolled as he landed, probably saving an ankle, but his back didn’t thank him for the rocks he tumbled over.
She was a minute in following, and moving a little too slowly and gingerly for comfort when she did. But the hound followed her up, let her keep a hold around its sturdy front legs as she edged closer over the sloped edge of the nose of the ship until she let go and slid the rest of the way down into his arms.
He made to put her down; she clung tightly and stared at him from disconcertingly close, clear-eyed and voice calm. “Tech’s dead.”
And then she let go and slid to the ground, found her footing, and started picking her way down the slope to where the packs had rolled.
The hound leapt down from the ship and followed, leaving Crosshair staring blankly in their wake.
x---x
Hunter stared at the message, mind racing, while Wrecker raised Echo and Rex on the transceiver. And then he stared at the readout on the beacon trace attached to the message, halfway across the sector from where they’d only just begun their hunt, before turning his attention back to the series of numbers that might have made sense individually but were nonsense put together.
Rex and Echo were starting their own investigation on the other side of the sector; Hunter wasn’t even sure if they’d made it to their jumping off point yet.
It was going to have to wait.
“Got a lead already?” Echo’s voice sounded over the comm without so much as a greeting.
“A message,” Hunter corrected grimly. “From the same channel Crosshair used to warn us about Hemlock.” He hesitated a moment. “And a location.”
A moment’s silence before Rex’s voice joined the comm. “What’s the message say?”
Hunter cleared his throat and rattled off the numbers. “Zero-eight, eleven.” Eyes and Ears; Bait-and-Switch. “Fifty-three, ninety-eight.” Precious Cargo; Scorched Earth. He cleared his throat. “And twenty-seven.”
Sniper Trap.
Echo skirted past the potential implications in the latter. “That doesn’t make any sense. Plans fifty-three and ninety-eight are completely opposite strategies.”
But it was the other three numbers that Hunter’s mind kept turning over. “He’s not calling plans, he’s sending information.”
“Plan twenty-seven,” Wrecker noted. “Sniper Trap.”
“Maybe he’s being coerced and warning us not to take the bait?” Rex said in a tone that suggested he knew damn well the likelihood of that outcome.
“No,” Hunter ran down the message, again and again. Applying ideas and theories, working through the implications, discarding them and starting over. “It’s not that simple.” Eyes and Ears. “He’s being followed, or expects to be. Or maybe expects the message will give away his position.”
“So he needs help more than he needs to hide,” Wrecker concluded, clearly ready to strap in and go.
Precious Cargo; Scorched Earth.
“He’s got something the Empire wants recovered,” Hunter read that one easily enough. And swallowed thickly. “And he’ll destroy it before letting them get it back.”
“What could that possibly be?” Echo asked. “A ship?”
Sniper Trap.
“It’s Omega.”
Wrecker whirled on him. “He’s telling us he’s going to kill Omega?”
They needed to go, and they needed to go now. “This feels a lot like a trap, boys,” Rex pointed out in the background.
“If it was a trap, he wouldn’t say trap,” Hunter countered. Turned it over again and again, Sniper Trap, any time they’d discussed the tactic – admittedly rarely, during a war fought primarily against machines – and the last time they’d seen it employed.
Against them, the day they’d fled Kamino with Omega. Wrecker wounded on the ground, yanking Omega back as a shot burned through the crate where her head had been.
Now in Crosshair’s hands. At his mercy, or…
“They’re desperate enough to give away their position to ask for help,” Hunter traced down the proffered plans slowly. Bait-and-switch – that was yet unclear. “Somehow they’re trying to trick their hunters, trying to hide…”
Sniper Trap, Crosshair’s finger tightening on the trigger while he and Echo tried desperately to recover the fallen Wrecker… the unexpected shot ringing out, cleanly knocking the rifle out of Crosshair’s hands.
“He’s compromised,” Hunter decided. “Wounded maybe.” All of them turning in stunned disbelief to trace the source of the shot that saved them all, gave them their chance to escape…
“He’s compromised; Omega’s been calling the shots.”
And she’d rather die than fall back in Hemlock’s hands.