The Battle of Ryloth

[5ame_heart]

The role of the 501st in the liberation of Ryloth has been mostly one of orbital support, but Captain Rex has his eye on the boys from Domino Squad.  He's assigned Echo and Fives to the 91st Mobile Reconnaissance Corps for the operation.

According to Rex, his reasoning is that as neither Fives or Echo can pilot worth a damn, they'd better make themselves useful in the ground assault. Echo is optimistically convinced this attachment to an elite Recon Unit is serving as field training for eventual promotion to ARC-Troopers. As Rex has been friendly with them since Rishi and has continually expressed his respect for them as soldiers, Fives doesn't have a reason to disagree.

A major difference between the 91st and the 501st is that the men of the 91st like and respect their Jedi General with the sort of fondness and respect that comes with reliable, understandable and well thought out plans - General Windu seems to like and respect them back, to the extent of their lives as equal to his own, and as highly as they value each other. Skywalker is the same, of course, but the 501st are generally of the opinion that a healthy culture of talking back is a key part of letting your General exactly what you think of showy recklessness.

But one way they match, of course, is that all plans are lucky if they last five minutes' contact with the enemy.

The 91st are engaged with the droid army in the approach to the capital city of Lessu. Ryloth is all mesas and gorges around here; it's hot, much drier than the jungles where they staged earlier engagements, and the ground has a bad habit of crumbling under one's feet - especially when hit by stray blaster bolts.

Fives is right by Echo's side one second, and the next he finds himself slipping perilously down a near vertical face into a gorge, sandy rocks racing past him to the sound of his name being yelled by his brother above. He shouts in annoyance and in shock, and then when his foot makes contact with a rock a few feet down, with pain. 

The rocky nature of this planet acts to his advantage, Fives realises. He's sliding rather than falling, and is able to holster his blaster in time to grab another rock, which jerks his shoulder violently but stops his descent before his fingers slip and he falls again. The Force obviously has plans for him because he's able to combine what purchase he can get with what obstructions there are to turn a death fall into a painful tumble into shadow.

Eventually Fives lands hard on his feet at the bottom of a crevasse deep enough that the fighting above is only distant flashes of light, and next to the less fortunate body of a trooper who turns out to be CT-89-2874 - Fives doesn't know him and so doesn't know what his name was.

He stands up slowly, his legs screaming from the landing, his headache informing him that he may have hit that part of him on the way down. His armor is more than scratched - some of his plates have broken in clear shards, and he's entirely lost one of his  He keys his wrist comm.

"Echo? Sarge? Anyone?"

But there's no signal. And there's no reason to come look for him either, so as far as Echo and the others is concerned, CT-27-5555 is one more casualty of the Battle for Ryloth.

He leans against the rocky wall, and considers his options. 

And that's when he hears something.

Comments

[5ame_heart]

"Kriff."

He hesitates, looking back where the droids came from, and then back at Hera.

On the one hand - he's got to get her home safe.

On the other hand - there was no damn reason for that patrol, and while droids are stupid as hell, they're not random.

"Right," he says finally making a decision. "Come on. You might be able to get much better parts from this lot."

He jerks his head to indicate she should follow him, and heads back the way he came.

When they get there, he lets her survey the bodies, and himself crouches down by each one, searching for a commlink of some sort.

[for_everyone]

If Hera was expecting so much success in scavenging, she might have brought a backpack. As it is, she sets down the droid head she's already carrying, and reconsiders one of the droids' rifles.

(It's still pretty big and heavy for her.)

[5ame_heart]

There is a commlink, and Fives palms it for now - he'll try and work out what to do with it when they're walking again, he doesbn't want to hang around the droids for too long.

He looks to see what Hera's doing, and grunts a negative.

"We don't need two," he says. "And don't take anything you can't drop in a hurry. We could use an extra powerpack, though."

[for_everyone]

The powerpack Hera finds and extracts from the rifle fairly quickly.

Though as she sets down the rifle, she says, a little haltingly, "You might need help."

[5ame_heart]

Fives grunts again, this time in the affirmative.

"Yeah," he says, as reluctant as he is to admit it. Whether he needs help or not it irrelevent against the fact he can't leave her.

"But I need you to carry this," he says, picking up the rifle he already has and handing it over to her. "How confident are you with it?"

[for_everyone]

She takes the rifle, which is big, and heavy, though the weight at least is something she can adjust to. The Separatists' weapons aren't unknown to her, as the fighters often scavenged blasters off droids, but it's the kind of weapon that has only been explained to her by sight, rather than practice.

Hera rolls the weapon over between her hands, dutifully counting off the relevant components she recognizes. "Trigger, cooling vent, stun switch, no safety."

She looks back up to Fives and nods. "I think I understand."

[5ame_heart]

He nods, exhaling in relief that she seems to have an idea, then turns his head to scan the ground, looking for the droids' tracks.

"Plan Aurek is still you give it to me," he says bluntly.

"But I need your help now as well. I need to find out where this patrol came from, and I need to get there. You know the area and I'm figuring you've hunted around here? Think you can help me trace them back to the source?"

He holds up the commlink stole from the droids. "I'm going to try and get into this, see if we can tap into what they're saying to each other."

[for_everyone]

"I can follow them..."

It's just that Hera usually tries to do the opposite.

"They leave a lot behind."

[5ame_heart]

He nods again. "Lead the way, then, I'm right behind you. But if you see or hear anything that you shouldn't, you stop immediately."

He finds it remarkably easy to fall into a tone appropriate for a briefing, following her with his head turned down and his vambrace open, as he attempts to get the Sep commlink to interface with his own comms. It's an embarrasing shame that he'd be more comfortable with technology from a whole different galaxy at this point.

"Do you understand what we're doing?" he asks, semi-conversationally. "These droids are up to something, and if it's more important than defending the city, it's got to be big."

[for_everyone]

Hera takes a moment to decide what to do with the droid head she'd already acquired, looking over it and the then tugging at the wires at its neck and using them to tie it to her waist, along with the dead lizards. It seems to work well enough, only knocking softly against her, and leaving her hands free for the rifle.

Tracking where this patrol had come from first means looking for the tracks they leave in the sand and soil, as the droids weren't the kind of predator that bother to hide. They also often found cracked bits of plastoid or even whole antennas ripped off by a tumbling rock or animal or even a particularly strong wind.

She keeps her eyes down when Fives speaks this time, scouring the canyon floor for what they'd left behind, but she answers, a little nervous, "There's only two of us."

[5ame_heart]

"Yeah, and only one of me," Fives says, half-distracted by the commlink.

"We're going to find out what's going on, and then you're going to run back to your people as fast as you can, tell them what we find, and get help. The rifle's only for emergencies."

Using a miniature hydrospanner from his vambrace, he digs out a wire and, as well as he can one-handed, twists it into a connector, forces the whole device into his commlink and pushes the plastoid shut, so he can operate it from outside.

It seems quiet, but he wishes Echo were here to tell him what he was doing wrong.

[for_everyone]

"I know the frequency my people use," Hera says, as she slips ahead. "If we find something."

She steps around around scuff in the dirt, trying to stay within reach of him as she does, and then halts.

"Do you smell that?"

[5ame_heart]

"Let's get that programmed in then..."

But before Fives can start, she stops. He can't smell much through the air filter on his helmet, but lifts his head to sniff anyway.

"Smells like... bodies?"

He's encountered a few old battlefields before, that no one survided to clear up. He remembers the smell.

[for_everyone]

Hera starts to walk forward again, trying to tell if the smell is getting stronger, and looks back to the ground, not so closely for signs of droids, but -

"There -"

She points to a turn up ahead, where just visible from this distance, a thin black line strings out of the ground and around the corner. Once they draw closer, they should see that the line is made up of small black beetles.

[5ame_heart]

"Insects?"

Fives pulls a face under his helmet. He's definitely seen enough battlefields to know what insects mean, even if it's different actual bugs on each planet.

He puts a hand on Hera's shoulder.

"Wait here a second," he says gently. There's no urgency - they're not in danger right now, but if there are Twi'lek bodies at the other end of this thin black line, he wants to see it first.

[for_everyone]

For the first time, Hera doesn't obey his instruction. She shakes her head, answers, "No, those are kreki beetles, they probably won't hurt us."

She rounds the corner, where the line of beetles continues, onward toward a slope ahead of them. There aren't any organic bodies yet, but there are dark brown streaks in the dust, many of these crawling with tiny, light brown ants. And ignored by all of these insects is the upper half of a battle droid, that looks as though it were ripped off just below the torso, one of its arms lying a meter from it.

Hera closes her eyes and shakes her head again, as though trying to shake off the smell.

[5ame_heart]

"It's not the beetles I'm worried about," Fives points out, trailing along helplessly behind her. But when he sees the droid, his manner changes, and he walks up to it in order to nudge it with a foot.

"Okay, this wasn't one of us."

In case that wasn't obvious.

[for_everyone]

Hera steps over the torn droid and carefully avoids the dried blood in the dust. While Fives' boots will protect him, those ants could gnaw through her thin shoes.

But the smell, even as it gets stronger, doesn't stop her from moving forward. More than anything, it's all strange enough that she mostly feel curious. She knows the smell of something dead, though Twi'leks were so quick to burn their own dead that even at the worst times, it wasn't like this. But she hadn't heard anything new about nearby villages being attacked, and the fighters were the battle going on above them -

Hera does stop when she's close enough to the slope to see what's at the base, though she only says, softly, "Oh."

She's never seen this many gutkurrs before, and the droid pieces strewn among their bodies only makes it all look stranger.

[5ame_heart]

Seeing the bodies of animals that are clearly not sapient is like a massive weight being lifted from Fives' shoulders. He walks down towards them more steadily, the filters on his helmet doing a fair job of keeping the smell from being overwhelming.

"Well this is a battlefield I wasn't expecting. Looks like the clankers won this one."

[for_everyone]

"Can't eat droids," Hera says, staying where she is for now.

"Maybe the droids attacked them."

[5ame_heart]

"Droids can't eat beasts either," Fives says thoughtfully, standing and turning slowly to look around at the carnage as he tries to figure out why droids would attack these animals.

"Hera, where do these things live?"

[for_everyone]

Hera lifts her left foot, then lightly touches it to the ground again.

"They make dens underground," she says, "and come up at night to hunt."

[5ame_heart]

"Underground..." he repeats out loud, tapping his foot as he looks around again.

His gaze falls on disturbances in the ground - ruts from dragging things in the dirt, tracks from fast moving animals and droids. It's hectic, but there's definitely a direction.

He glances back up to Hera. "I need to find these dens."

[for_everyone]

Hera is quiet for a long moment, before she lifts her arm, pointing to the pile of dead gutkurrs.

"Their dens?" she asks.

Because even Twi'lek hospitality has its limits, and that is definitely at 'going into a live gutkurr den.'

[5ame_heart]

"Yes," says Fives, regretting instantly that it comes out snappish and impatient.

"You don't have to come with me, just point me at where they are."