Star Wars_ The Old Republic_ Revan - Drew Karpyshyn [39]
It was over in minutes. Only then, standing alone amid the bodies, did Scourge notice that the sounds of battle from below had ended.
Moving quickly, he crossed the room and descended the staircase. The floor below was similar to the one above: except for a row of offices built along the east side of the building, there were no interior walls; the floor was stacked with crates and piled with supplies. Bodies were scattered everywhere. Most were separatists, but Scourge noticed three or four wearing Nyriss’s colors. The rest of Murtog’s team were methodically searching the dead, looking for survivors to interrogate.
Scourge shook his head, knowing it was a waste of time. The greatest fear of any separatist organization was betrayal from within. Only the two or three top people would know anything useful, and they would never have allowed themselves to be taken alive.
Confident that the building was secure, he deactivated his lightsaber and clipped it onto his belt. Then he activated the comlink on his wrist.
“All clear, Murtog. Get Sechel in here.”
“We’re already inside,” Murtog’s voice came back to him. “Found their control center in some offices at the back.”
Scourge had to clench his teeth to keep from screaming with rage. He had given specific orders, and Murtog and Sechel had willfully disobeyed them.
He made his way toward the offices with long, purposeful strides. As he approached, his anger gave way to suspicion. There had to be a reason they had defied him. Were they simply undercutting his authority, or was it something more sinister. Were they setting some kind of trap?
As he drew near the offices, he saw both Sechel and Murtog huddled at a comm terminal. Surprisingly, there were no other members of Murtog’s team nearby. Scourge approached cautiously, probing with the Force to see if he could detect any immediate threat.
Neither turned as he approached; their attention was focused entirely on the comm.
“Are there any others?” Murtog was asking.
“Not that I can find,” Sechel replied. “But I might be able to—”
“I gave you two an order!” Scourge barked as he came up behind them.
They both turned to face him. Murtog’s lips were pressed tightly together, and he seemed to have gone pale. But Sechel seemed more amused than scared.
“After you were gone I realized a flaw in your plan,” he said with an ingratiating smile. “If the separatists had anything incriminating here in the base, they’d probably try to destroy it before we could get our hands on it. I told Murtog I might be able to salvage something if he could get me inside. But the longer we waited, the less chance we’d have to recover anything useful.”
Scourge didn’t say anything, his eyes fixed on Sechel with a piercing glare.
“We would have tried to contact you, but you’d already started the mission. We didn’t want to distract you.”
“Do you take me for a fool?” Scourge asked softly, his hand casually falling to the hilt of his lightsaber.
Sechel’s smile faded, and Scourge caught a hint of fear in his eyes.
“I don’t normally disobey orders,” Murtog said, jumping in to try to defuse the situation. “But in this case Sechel was right. Once the separatists knew the battle was lost, they ran a cleaner program on their computers to erase all their datafiles. If we’d waited for your signal, everything would have been lost.”
Scourge let the hand drop from his weapon. Now was not the time to settle this. But it was one more thing Sechel would answer for once he finally got a chance to speak with him alone.
“What did you find?”
“A recording of a recent communication,” Sechel answered, pressing a button on the terminal.
A ghostly blue, three-dimensional image crackled into being, hovering a few centimeters above the holocomm. The frozen image was slightly under a meter in height,