Thengil's ears twitched as he heard a new set of footsteps entering into the room. His eyes opened slowly at the scent the newcomer gave off.... a scent of freshly spilled blood. The newcomer was a Chiss, blue-skinned and red-eyed, with a roguishly sinister look about him. Thengil's hair stood on end and he warily watched the Chiss move deeper into the room. Something about the blue humanoid set off the Cathar's danger sense. Unconsciously, Thengil's claws sheathed and unsheathed. He noticed it and stopped.

Why did this blue newcomer carry the smell of death on him? Thengil had not been aware of any killing done recently. His eyes opened fully and he stood, crossing the room in that slinking gait only felines have to stand facing the Chiss.

"Therex, is it?" Thengil said in a low rasp. "The Wind has told me of blood that you spilled this day. What kill have you made?"

He did not know why he'd asked, or stood in the first place. Perhaps it was simply the will of the Wind whispering to his inner heart. Or maybe he was looking for someone who also kept a terrible secret. Thengil remembered the day on Thyveck when his vision had become red all too well. The flash of bone-white, the ripping and wet slopping gush as skin tore and scarlet blood fell, and the horrible sense of rage. Not rage toward anything specific, but a mindless, bestial rage that would kill anything just for the sake of killing. The day Thengil had killed one of the Vast Empire's own. No one knew, or even suspected. In the fighting there had been no time for anyone to recognize that one fallen stormtrooper's death had come from claws, not searing plasma. But Thengil knew.

He well remembered the fine red mist that seemed to settle over his vision as he cut down what he'd thought was an enemy. No doubt what Skarr would call an extreme case of friendly fire. Thengil had hoped to die that day in battle so he could regain his honor, but it was not the Wind's will. And that terrible knowledge of his ill deed seeped through Thengil like a black poison. Now he wondered if this newcomer, Therex, had a like poison.

Before Therex could reply, Skarr shouted an order. "Shut up, repulsors overhead!"

Thengil listened. The wind carried the high wine of the repulsor engines to his ears. He licked his lips. If the repulsor was searching for them... and carried sensory equipment... best they stayed silent. Thengil waited... and waited. Finally, the repulsorlift broke off its search pattern and sped into the distance, its high whine fading.

Therex said something in reply, but Thengil was only half-listening and decided to think about the reply in a moment. Now was a time for action. He bounded to the other side of the room in a leap and a half and retrieved his ICWS carbine, leaving the attachments in the duffel bag. He checked the power pack and the energy output levels and chambered tibanna gas. His sniffed the air. Something didn't smell right.

"I will go search for patrols and give preliminary warning," he said simply and stepped out into the day of long-shadows. He padded  down the alley until he found a suitable place to climb and bounded up onto a trash bin and then onto the roof. He took out a single lens binocular and began to study the area. He saw a few patrols pass, but nothing to be concerned about.

Hours passed and the sun set, but Thengil's eyesight was far better than humans in the dark and he became more alert, even eager. His eyes stared around like yellow orbs. Suddenly, the wind shifted and he smelled several scents, alert and dangerous. His ear tufts twitched and rotated. Someone was running up the street behind him. He pivoted and saw Razor running into the safehouse. Not a moment later a patrol came into view. Thengil flattened himself against the roof even further and edged back so they could not see him. He listened to their footsteps and terse voices. They grew closer. Thengil activated his headset.

"Hostile patrol is closing on our position. They might know where we are, they are not searching." The patrol headed with determined directness toward the safehouse. "Do I engage, sir? Or let them close?"

OOC:

WC: 740 Time is 20:02

Kaye closed her eyes and sighed deeply, her hand stress-reflexively running itself through her unkept hair. She had decided that the arrival of the new squad members marked the moment where their mission had officially gone to shit. Skarr's revelation that they would have to kill civilians was damning, the sudden appearence of Razorsedge was irritating, but this? This just would not stand, man. While en route to the resteraunt, Kaye had used her datapad to pull up the service records of the newest additions to their squad. Kaye didn't have the proper clearence to access the majority of the information on their records, much to her chagrine, but what little she managed to ascertain painted the operatives as having extensive field experience. That, at least, was good news. What was bad news was that they were also aliens; a Chiss and a Cathar, specifically.

Kaye had recieved a fair amount of flack over her xenophobic attitude over the years. Frankly, she'd actually recieved a fair amount of flack over her attitude in general over the years, but she saw no reason to change her ways. Aliens were, simply enough, untrustworthy. All of them. Some people in the galaxy claimed that the differences between something like a Chiss and a Human were only skin-deep, but Kaye didn't believe that for a second. Aliens didn't just look like aliens, they thought like aliens. They reasoned like aliens, and had alien practices and rituals. Men loved to joke about how mercurial women were. Like all girls, Kaye had grown up enduring the jokes boys made about her being on her period, or it being "her time of the month". If the subtle physiological changes in her body chemistry was enough to make her actions "mysterious" to members of the opposite-sex within her own race, how could anyone trust a blue-skinned freak with glowing red eyes, or a cat-man, or a walking talking lizard? No, Kaye would have been more than happy if Eclipse's membership was restricted to the original, (mostly) human cast it had at the beginning of the mission.

But even she realized that there was nothing to be gained by brooding over something that couldn't be changed. So instead of focusing on how shitty things had become, Kaye decided to at least take solace in the fact that everyone on the team was a highly-trained, highly-disciplined and professional fighter.

An hour later, she regret expending what little hope she possessed on such a false premise.

They'd returned to the safehouse and Kaye had immediately stashed herself and her gear as far away from the rest of the group as possible so that she could work on Pear without being interrupted. There wasn't a whole lot of time left before they embarked on the attack, and Kaye wanted to get some more technical work done on the recon-droid before they set out. In that short timeframe, a number of inexplicible things happened. Multiple alarms around the house tripped simultaneously,  causing  the datapad strapped to Kaye's wrist to vibrate and startle the hell out of her until she was able to confirm that they had been tripped by the blowback pressure from a low-flying ship's repulsor lifts. Apparently, the local authorites had deemed it prudent to start patrolling the area more intensively. Hardly a was good omen, that. To make matters worse, the sight of the patrol boat hovering past was enough to incite the Cathar, Kaye would forever refer to him as "Lion-O", into running out of the house and camping out on the roof which set off the motion alarms a second time. Mere moments after that, Razorsedge staggered through the front door. She could tell from his swagger and from the stench emminating from him that he was intoxicated.

What the flurk was going on?

Skarr called a meeting a few minutes after that, and thus, here they were.

Kaye closed her eyes and sighed deeply. Her hand stress-reflexively ran itself through her unkept hair. Skarr had been talking for some time, but Kaye was hardly listening. Initially she had tried to focus on his words, as the mission briefs were always important, but her mind was hell-bent on worrying about a dozen things at once, and it was hard for her to focus on any one subject. She was having trouble getting Pear to process her vocal commands. Playing back the recordings from the surveillence cameras she'd installed around the house showed that the frequency of law enforcement fly-by's had increased exponentially since they had arrived. She wasn't sure if the dank smell of curtled milk attacking her nostrils belonged to the Cathar standing next to her, or her own hair. The most pressing and distressing, thought of all, was that there was a very decent chance that she was going to die before the next sunrise. Most seasoned warriors knew how to deal with the pre-battle apprehension, but Kaye was not a seasoned warrior by  any stretch of the imagination. This was only her second mission, and her first  had been a disaster in so far as giving her any kind of faith in her own  abilities. She had performed atrociously, and while it seemed as if Skarr bore her no ill will for that, or at the least had forgiven her, Kaye did not. As much as she loathed certain members of their party, nothing disturbed her more than the idea that her own incompetence might bring any of them to harm, even the aliens.

Hooligans and undesireables they might have been, but when the shit hit the fan and the shooting started, Kaye was relatively sure that they would all perform well. But would she?

Razor screwed the flash suppressor onto the front of his 1sixteen inch barrel.  He clipped on his AN/PV 120 night scope twisting his calibrating knob and dialing in his sight to razor-edged precision.  He unfolded the upper receiver group from the lower receiver group and clipped the two pieces together.  The fasteners were specially designed to keep the rifle together through the toughest of terrains. This simple design had saved the sniper from losing his rifle many times.  He pushed a fresh battery cell into the charging slot and racked back the charging handle.  The now combat ready rifle vibrated gently in his loving grip.  His final touches were his personal additions to the rifle.  He attached the standard bi-pod to the casing around the free floating barrel and flicked the legs up so they would not be in his way while he ran.  Finally he attached the combat sling to its receptacles on the butt stock and on the casing around the free floating barrel. He slung the long rifle over his back and stood.

As he stood he swept his cloak grandly around him.  The cloak covered all his weapons except for the very tip of his sniper rifles barrel.  Razor's helmet clicked into place and he powered up the HUD with a gentle touch to the control buttons on the side.  There was a slight moment of vertigo as Razor became aware of his three sixty instead of just what was directly in front of him. His brain bucket instantly tagged the other troopers around him as well as showed him the transport they had tagged earlier.  The transport had landed a few streets over by one of the local cantinas.

Razor click his comm on and called to the rest of the squad saying, "Razor out." He walked down the stairs and into the street.  The rough cobblestone feeling good under his well worn combat boots.  Being largely sobered up helped him to better understand why the patrols had been on the street instead of his drug addled brain telling him to freak out. The patrols had been in the area because it had been reported that there was heavy resistance activity in the area.

The group of snipers was setting out individually so they could get into their own support positions before the ground crew ever even attempted to violate the perimeter of the factory.  Razor climbed onto one of the skytrams that rushed him over to the other side of the city.  He had seen his other squad members fidgeting while they were waiting in the house.  He had kept an outward appearance of calm to try and help keep the quad under control.  He thought it would be important for the rest of the squad to see its senior members at least keeping their clam a little.  Now that he was with complete strangers he let his nervousness out.  He continuously flicked his vibro-knucklers on and off.  It helped to calm his mind.  It also served another purpose.  It pushed the people on the train away.  Anyone who came near him was someone who obviously had an agenda.  People tended to shy away from him.

He got off the skytram and buzzed Skarr letting him know that he was in the area of the factory.  He stepped off the train and into a large crowd which swept him off directly toward the factory.

The building was cold to Razor's stomach.  He had cramps from lying on the roof for three hours.  He had been sighted in on the factory since he had climbed to the roof of one of the shanty buildings that seemed to ring the factory.  As he had ventured through the building raggedy children had peeked out of doors at him.  He had given the adults what he had hoped were encouraging nods.  He was walking a fine line and was hoping to tred lightly so as not to stir up too much dust.  He had reached the top of the building without incident.  He had dropped the bipod on the ledge and sighted in.  He had counted patrols and times in between slowly relaying bits of information that hopefully combined with the other spotters it would give the ground crew a good plan of attack.

The other troopers had slowly reported in that they were in position.  The alley was finally full and the rest of the squad was ready to move.  Razor attached a small dart to the front of his rifle. The movement was hard after the hours of just observing.  The dart was backed with cortosis. The tip was a hollowed out plasteel spear. 

Razor carefully sighted in.  The glow was just a tiny dot.  Skarr had sent a message to all the snipers saying. "Turn out the lights at 2300." 

Razor took a deep breath and as he exhaled he pulled the trigger straight back.  The dart blasted out of the rifle flying toward its target and just like that, precisely on time, all the lights went out around the factory.