1030.
“Breaching!” Captain Lomax hissed over Green Squadron’s internal comms, his lowered tones coming out slightly tinny in such close proximity.
The man wearing the gear of Second Lieutenant Derru Allen tightened his grip on the stock and barrell of the blaster rifle in his hands, keenly aware how critical these next few seconds would be for maintaining his cover. The assault maneuvers they would be performing had been drilled a thousand times before, even executed during live combat several times previous to this operation. Green Squadron knew the way each other moved, the way they thought.
All except Zero, who twenty four hours prior hadn’t had much more than a cursory knowledge of advanced Kommando field tactics, and whose life depended on the men and women around him perceiving him as one of their own. That had been part of the reason why he had chosen to take Allen’s place, as the Second Lieutenant was the lowest rated out of the entire assault group. The man’s record was still fairly exceptional from a certain perspective, but there were enough borderline marks and red flag language in Derru’s dossier to make him the most ideal candidate.
Candidate...he repeated to himself as the image of the real Derru Allen’s momentary look of confused horror right before the slug pierced his neck flashed across Zero’s mind in the same moment the breaching charge went off.
“Go!” the Captain’s voice echoing in his helmet forced him to compartmentalize his emotions as he executed a textbook Kommando maneuver into the cloning facility, hoping any ignorance of deviations their commanding officer might have made to standard procedure would simply be seen as Allen being Allen.
Zero’s cybernetic implants and enhanced perception registered no hostile activity long before the Kommandos around him came to the same conclusion, and once their focus shifted from heightened battle perception to corralling up scientists, it was an easier matter to slip away from his assigned sector for the few seconds it would require to insert the custom data stick into a nearby terminal. He had written the program himself, it was designed to slice into the facility’s records and attempt to locate a certain clone batch.
“The scientists have been apprehended and are contained,” he heard as he returned to his position, “No weapons detected.”
“Check them again, Captain. Look for anything that stinks of a bioweapon, too. Can't be too careful.”
Under the pretense of joining the search for possible bioweaponry, a factor his implants had already ruled out, Zero passed by the terminal once more, removing the stick and checking the results. The indicator flashed red, so he continued on with his search vector. The objective wasn’t here, so the pretense would have to continue a little longer.
Months Ago.
It was late in the evening when Zero’s passenger shuttle landed in Tipoca City, the landing bay periodically illuminated in a ghostly half-light by frequent lightning strikes shrouded in the distance, a phenomenon common to Kamino’s inclement climate patterns. He was traveling under a forged Zenithian visa. The world wasn’t exactly closed off, but neither was it a popular tourist destination by any means, and as his employers were currently in the process of perfecting such forged credentials, it was worth the mild risk to travel without risk of scrutiny.
The alien capital was strangely beautiful, and the cipher agent had time to marvel at its architectural wonder on his way to the designated meet coordinates. Other men in his position might be too distracted by the work ahead to take in the sights on the way, but cipher agents possessed a remarkable capacity to compartmentalize as a matter of course. Where Zero truly diverged from his contemporaries was in his appreciation for works of the so called lesser species. Some might see deviancy, but he only saw the infinite beauty of the universe.
Before he knew it, he was already standing before the nondescript looking office complex midway up one of Tipoca’s sloping towers, on the outer edge of the city’s protective shell. One of the few non-Zenithian, non-native staffed corporate outposts operating within the Kaminoan capital, it had taken some doing for Imperial Intelligence to infiltrate the enterprise so completely as to turn an entire floor into a listening post and safehouse, but the risky venture had paid dividends in helping to plan for the imminent assault and was nearing the end of its lifespan.
This time of night the office front was closed, but a discreet biometric scan of Zero’s implants allowed him to bypass the anti-theft countermeasures without having to draw attention to himself, and soon enough he was moving cautiously through the vacant reception area on his way to the turbolifts in the back. Normally past the office doors would be as good as safe haven in the flotilla, but things were far from normal these days.
It was the lift that made him nervous. There was a stairwell, but that was even more of a potential killing floor, and on the walk over the cipher agent had resolved himself to trust that whatever dangers might lie in wait, he was at least owed a death a little more magnanimous than a sabotaged turbolift. The Intelligence operative’s trust had its limits, however, as he stepped into what might end up his tomb he drew his slugthrower.
They were well past the point of finesse here.
The turbolift didn’t kill him, and whatever Zero may have expected to be waiting for him on the other side of the doors, it certainly wasn’t just what had been advertised. The safehouse was empty, listening equipment uncharacteristically abandoned completely, save for the ominous invitation of the door to the station head’s office ajar. Sweeping his sectors as he entered the room, he was befuddled to find it too was empty save for its lone occupant, a man Zero had known his entire life. A man who, until today, he had never before met face to face. His superior, the man who had betrayed him.
Keeper stood with his back to the door, behind the lone desk at the transparisteel window that took up the entire length of the far wall. Beyond, obscured in darkness and occasionally lit by lightning’s reflection, the Kaminoan seas raged.
“Have you come to kill me, Cipher Zero?” he asked, not turning around.
“Yes,” Zero answered.
1156.
He knew the general theory behind strangling a Kaminoan, but in practice and under such tense circumstances the act itself was considerably more difficult than he had anticipated. The first facility had been a bust, but luckily several men from Green Squadron had been requested to take over Gray’s position while they joined up with Black Squadron to assault the docking bay and secure the transports, and Lieutenant Derru Allen had volunteered.
The spread manpower had eased his burden both in the maintaining his cover and evading detection while he completed his objective. His resolve had been bolstered as he saw the team of flesh shapers fussing over a gibbering babe of a man most likely fresh from some tube. They would not have gone through such effort if it hadn’t been work worth salvaging, which meant this might be the place where the Kaminoans kept their special projects.
Emboldened at the prospect of achieving his goal, he must have grown complacent as he silently scaled a clone vat butting against a wall and hauled himself onto one of the catwalks above, for he hadn’t taken more than a few steps when he had come face to face with the strange looking alien creature. Zero wasn’t sure if the Kaminoan’s plan had been to attack him or simply surrender now that the Imperial trooper was approaching his hiding spot, but either way revealing itself had been a mistake, for any cry it might give could mean questions asked from the members of Green Squadron below that he wasn’t prepared to answer.
It took him a while to get the correct position and leverage, while maintaining his vice-like grip on the alien’s mouth, and he had to twist his body to avoid the long and flailing but less muscular limbs of the dying scientist until he was practically on top of the thing’s back, one arm across its throat while the other held its mouth.
Dimly, Zero became aware during the Kaminoans last spasms of resistance and consciousness that, directly below him, the defective clone was gazing up at them, and for a few long seconds the two of them made eye contact. The life drained out of the alien’s eyes, and he could have sworn for a moment that something registered in the clone’s eyes beyond brain death. Easing himself off the corpse, the agent had no time to dwell on it as a timer was ticking down even now until one of the Kommandos noticed the body.
His cover was blown, Derru Allen was effectively dead for good this time.
