[Tasale, Exarch Station] Bad Medicine

Jil'Korah was safely out the door and the retrieval team was on their way up, which left Shirin. A smoke grenade and a cloak later (the turrets alone would've probably kept her covered, but since Jil's escape the guards outside the checkpoint had become increasingly aggressive and didn't seem too interested on waiting for the law to show up), she dropped low and scrambled out of the security checkpoint. The door to the stairwell closed behind her, and with only a few seconds before the drones defabricated and left the guards more or less unopposed, Shirin was in a hurry to get down the steps.

She caught up with Jil two flights down, matched pace with him, and tapped the comm. "Retrieval team, we're away and incoming. Open the maintenance hatch, hit the release inside, and get ready, we'll be there in a second."

Given everything that had managed to go awry, it was a relief to see that Ana, Kirok, and Ali had all survived and were waiting at the rendezvous point. The hatch had already been opened, and...wait, no, they had vials. Jumping with vials wouldn't do. Shirin brought up the hazmat case and quickly began collecting toxin vials from the team.

"Once you've handed over your vial, grab the ladder and slide down," she ordered, plucking a vial from Ana's hand and slotting it into a padded cryo module inside the case. "At the end, just drop out of the hatch; there's a sanitation platform right under the opening. Once we're all on, we're lowering it to the ground."

Confident that this would not go as planned, Shirin had, of course, arranged for backup. She'd paid off a maintenance team to take one of the platforms used to wash the side of the building and put it right where the hatch opened, and then placed a rented skyvan in a nearby alley. It was kind of a perfect storm of environmental factors - there wasn't another maintenance hatch in the building where they could've pulled this off.

Granted, it wasn't all unicorns and rainbows yet. If the workers had forgotten to do what they'd been bribed to do, well...they were currently four stories above solid ground, so the team would have time to do little more than swear loudly.

Ana, not wanting to stick around when security was surely on their tail, handed her vial over to Shirin, slid down the latter and jumped.

“…FUCK!”

Kirok smiled at Shirin as he looked over the edge.

"Ain't never a dull moment, izzit?"

Then, with a mighty krogan war cry, Kirok whooped and hollered as he dove into the void below.

"Here you go," he handed over the sample and went down the hatch.

"Hey do you know there’s a platform here after all." Ali shouted up.

Having wisely (at least in his opinion) waited for the others to jump first, Jil'Korah disabled his external suit speakers and muted his comm, then leapt, screaming the entire way.

Having secured all three vials inside the hazmat case, Shirin slid down the ladder and dropped into the Exarch skyline...but not, of course, without pausing at the bottom and glancing down to make sure the sanitation platform was in place. Presumably the rest of the Band had checked before hurling themselves down the hatch, but at this point she wouldn't put it past them to just make a leap of faith.

Thankfully, it was there.

"Jil, get somebody from KSK on the line." She'd barely landed, and the platform was only just starting to slide down the back side of the hospital, when the drell spoke. "Tell them we've got everything and ask where they want us to hand off the target."

There was a tremendous pain in Shirin's head, directly behind her eyes.

"Ali, good work down there. Kept it together. You get the bonus for this one."

She was reasonably sure they qualified as terrorists thanks to this escapade ('they' as a unit; she'd met the prerequisites for several years now). Thankfully, assuming everyone had done their jobs properly, there wasn't exactly any evidence tying them to the crime scene.

"Ana, Kirok, when we get back to the ship, you two are in a world of shit."

Mathematically, it totaled out to an average heist. Still, looking back on the last hour, 'average' was the last word that came to her mind.


End