“I know, but what does Kal’buir want her data for?”
At least Atin wasn’t feeling sorry for the aiwha-bait. Darman had built up a good solid hatred of Kaminoans since leaving his cloistered existence in Tipoca City, and sometimes wished he’d felt this way when he was close enough to settle a few scores. It was amazing how much human beings could accept as normal if they had nothing else to compare it with.
“I don’t know,” said Darman. “Maybe he’s going to sell it to the highest bidder.”
Niner locked a new power pack into his Deece. “Have you asked him?”
“No,” said Atin. “Why don’t you ask him, Dar? You’re one of his favorites. Like Ordo and Fi. And maybe he wants a half-Jedi grandchild one day.”
Corr laughed. “But he’s got Bard’ika, so he’s got a full-Jedi son, hasn’t he?”
Darman felt uncomfortable. He didn’t want to alienate his brothers, and he’d never thought of any one of them as being treated differently. “Kal’buir doesn’t have favorites. He probably thinks I’m the idiot of the litter who needs looking after. You want me to ask him?” Darman didn’t know how he’d broach it, but Skirata had infinite patience where his boys were concerned. “I’ll ask him.”
But now the question had started to bother him. It didn’t make any difference how Skirata treated them, but the doubt had wormed its way into his head and it wasn’t going to go away. He settled down into a more comfortable position, Deece resting in the crook of his arm and his visor’s magnification set on maximum range, and waited.
“Which moron in Procurement ordered Deeces with the clip on the left?” Corr muttered. He’d never seemed to like the commando-issue DC-17 very much; the original brigades of commandos had been raised with the rifle since they were old enough to hold one, but cross-trained men like Corr came to it new, and they griped. “And on the sidearm, too. Can’t holster it right.”
“A moron who never had to fire it to save his life,” said Niner. “Or thought that if you aimed right-handed, then your left was free to reach for a reload…”
“What a bunch of useless bev’ikase.”
“Did you make that word up?”
“That’s the right word, isn’t it? It means—”
“Well, yes, but I’ve never heard it used as a term of abuse before… just anatomical.”
“He’s right,” said Atin. “I reckon that’s the real reason we were trained to be ambidextrous. To allow for those or’diniise in Procurement.”
Darman liked his Deece. Okay, the clip was a nuisance, but the thing never jammed in heat, cold, or dust, it was accurate, and even swapping out the attachments was no more trouble than reloading.
“I’d like a Verp,” he said. “They’re lovely. Remember when we went out tagging terrorists with them on Triple Zero?”
Atin rolled his head to ease his neck muscles. “That was you and Fi.”
“So it was,” Darman said, missing Fi badly but careful not to hurt Corr’s feelings by saying so. Corr was a good comrade. After a few weeks, it had felt like he’d been part of Omega forever. But if Fi could have come back as well, it would have been great.
The heat haze broke the ocher desert into shimmering mirages, dark pools that came and went as Darman stared at them; the Fleet Met forecast said there was an 80 percent chance of sandstorms. Haurgab was yet another backworld whose strategic value Darman couldn’t work out. Yes, there was ore mining here, and the Separatists needed plenty of ore if they were going to keep churning out droids, but why didn’t Palpatine concentrate on hitting the major population centers of Sep worlds? Why was the clone army spread so thinly?
Darman answered himself aloud. “All he’s doing is stretching our supply chains.”
“Kal’buir?”
“Old Slimy. Palps. He should leave the military stuff to the generals. Typical shabla civvy. The strategic genius sitting on his backside in his nice safe office.”
If there was anywhere that typified the thoroughly stupid strategy of this war, it was Haurgab. The GAR had too few resources to take the place, but too many to be so thoroughly defeated that the politicians took the hint and withdrew. It was a nicely sustainable operation. It could keep simmering at this level of grinding misery for years, and probably would.
Across a riverbed that hadn’t seen flowing water in decades, about twenty klicks to the northeast, two companies of the 85th Infantry were shoring up the regional government at Hadde. A distant boomp-boomp-boomp like a slow heartbeat started up, answered by the higher-pitched and more rapid bark of cannon fire. Darman saw fresh palls of black smoke forming in the distance. He could almost set his chrono by the regularity of the bombardment; the local Mauja clans rolled out their collection of artillery pieces just after lunch, driving Hadde’s population into shelters at the hottest time of the day, and made the city a miserable place to be until the wind picked up at nightfall and the Maujasi went home for the night. It was as if they were doing a day’s work, using their contracted hours for a bit of bombardment, then heading home to watch the holovids.
Two companies: fewer than three hundred men. It was pitifully inadequate and there was little air support. The rest of the battalion was scattered across the region in platoons, taking ground one day and losing it again the next.
That was why the squad had been sent in. They had one target—a key Maujasi leader called Jolluc. Now they were waiting for him to show.
“You know,” said Corr, “if we just committed a few more air assets to this and bombed the osik out of the settlements around this dump, nobody would have to boil their shebs off and we could all go somewhere with better nightlife. Look at the place. It’s all mountains.”
“Hills,” said Atin.
“They’re still in the way. Air assault.”
Corr had started life as a bomb disposal trooper, so he was still learning Mando’a as he went along. Predictably, he picked up profanities and slang first, just like Etain had. He was even creating his own.
“Cor’ika, we’d be sent somewhere equally pointless to do it all over again,” Atin said. “And we’ve been told to win hearts and minds. No obliterating civilian villages.”
“Civilians, my shebs. They’re all armed. They don’t need a uniform to be hostiles. Why does every species with a grievance against its neighbor end up being classed as a Sep and added to our list?”
“They’re not even a different species here.” Darman joined in the grumbling. “Not like Gaftikar, where you could see who was who. They’re all humans. They all look the same, too.”
A tiny dust storm on the horizon indicated ground vehicles moving in their direction. Niner clicked his teeth, mildly annoyed. It was a habit he seemed to have picked up from Skirata. “I hate it when he thinks. Thinking just makes you dissatisfied.”
“Yeah, that’s my job,” said Atin.
“Heard from Laseema?”
“Not yet, Sarge.”
“She’ll send a message. Don’t worry.”
“I know she will,” Atin said peevishly. “We’re getting married.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
The news didn’t take their attention off the road, but it certainly diluted it. Darman’s gut flipped over. This was a whole new world. This was—
“Impossible,” Niner said. “You can’t get married. You’re in the army.”
Atin meant stubborn in Mando’a, but it wasn’t a negative word to Mandalorians. It implied tenacity and courage rather than bloody-mindedness. Atin was quiet and relentlessly methodical until something really riled him, and then he reverted to type as one of Vau’s men—fighting mad and unwilling to back down until someone knocked him down. Vau had beaten an animal reaction into them, a savage will that he said would keep them alive long after more reasonable men had given up and died.
“Show me the regs,” Atin said. Darman could see his chin jut out in defiance, even with his helmet in place. “Go on. Show me the regulation that says we can’t
marry.”
“We were never intended to have families.”
“But there are no specific regs against it, are there?”
“No. But it’s still stupid.”
“Why?”
No clone needed to see his brother’s face to know what was going on in his head. Darman could tell from the faint clicks and breaths over the helmet comlink that Niner was jumpy, as if he was panicking about something. But Niner was definitely not one of life’s panickers. He was upset. He was trying to make an uncomfortable reality go away.
“Because you don’t get a salary,” Niner said at last. “So you can’t support a wife and kids. There are no married quarters, either. There’s—”
Atin dug in for the full argument. He sounded as if he’d clamped his teeth together. “Laseema’s a Twi’lek. Twi’leks and humans can’t interbreed. And she’s got an apartment. Kal’buir paid for it. And she’s got a job. So I don’t need to support her. Bang goes your case, Sarge.”
Corr muttered to himself. “Kept man, eh? Nice work.”
“You’re still crazy,” Niner said. “And it’s not my case. It just is.”
Darman’s plans for some kind of domestic happiness were now under threat. He pitched in to back up Atin. They were men, not droids; they had a right to expect more from life. Skirata told them so.
“You think we can’t marry because we’re property, Sarge?” Darman asked.
Niner’s voice hardened a fraction. “I don’t know. Go ask General Zey.”
“Zey won’t give a shab,” Atin snapped. “And if he did, what’s he going to do about it? How’s he going to tell the difference between what we do now and what happens when I’ve exchanged vows with Laseema?”
“He’s got a point,” Darman said. “It’s academic.”
“And I want a life.” Atin was getting really angry now. “If I survive, then I’m not going to be a soldier forever.” He paused for a few moments as if gearing up for something difficult. “I want out. I want to leave.”
It was the first time any of them had said that aloud. Maybe it was the first time any of them had wanted it. Fi’s departure had somehow opened the door to dissent and real ambition beyond the GAR.
In the awkward silence, Corr seemed to be studiously avoiding the argument. Sometimes he still behaved in a temporary I’m-just-filling-in kind of way, even if it was clear that Fi was never coming back.
Niner had his sergeant’s don’t-argue-with-me voice on now. “Your mind should be on the operation, not on getting out of the army.”
“It is,” Atin said, moving up beside Corr and taking a firing position next to him. “I can do both at the same time. In fact, one helps me do the other…”
No, it wasn’t Fi’s escape. Darman decided it was the arrival of Skirata’s grandson that had started it. The child had given all of them the feeling that real life was going on without them and leaving them behind. If they’d been like the white jobs, the regular clone troopers who had limited contact with normal civilian life, then they might have managed to kid themselves that things weren’t so bad. But they’d all spent time doing things that nonclones took for granted. By giving them as much freedom as he could, Skirata had made them far less satisfied with their lot.
“What about you and Etain, Dar?” Atin asked.
“What, you mean are we going to settle down?”
“Yeah.”
Etain would have to leave the Jedi Order. They didn’t hold with relationships—attachment, they called it—but they didn’t expect Jedi to be celibate, either. That seemed to be asking for trouble, Darman thought. One day they’d get some lovesick Jedi doing something crazy, whatever the training was supposed to knock out of them, and it wouldn’t end well. You couldn’t turn flesh and blood into unemotional droids, neither clone nor Jedi. It wasn’t healthy. It wasn’t fair.
“We haven’t talked detail,” Darman said. “But yeah, that’s what I want.”
“Kids?”
Darman thought of Skirata’s grandson. Babies were all demand and hunger. Force-sensitive babies—well, Etain would have to sort that out. It was all a long way off, if ever, and he didn’t have to think about it.
“One day,” he said. “But not yet.”
“Better get cracking on it,” Corr said helpfully. “Before you get too old.”
“Talking of cracking on,” said Niner, “stand by…”
Darman’s gut knotted as it always did before action. He scrambled into a better vantage point and spotted what had grabbed Niner’s attention: a thin line of repulsortrucks carrying routine supplies from the port, kicking up dust like a smokescreen. Atin released a reconnaissance remote, tossing the tiny sphere into the air to make its way across the narrow pass and hover, relaying images from the ground beneath.
Corr scrolled through magnifications in his HUD; Darman could see his brother’s changing field of view in the point-of-view icons in his own head-up display. It settled on the southern wall of crumbling cliffs that flanked the road, and when Darman switched to the same view he could see shapes suddenly emerging from the fissures like insects.
“I still reckon they’ve got tunnels into those positions,” Corr said irritably. “Or we’d have seen them move in.”
Niner had a good line of sight down the wadi. “Well, as long as they didn’t see us move in… remember, we’re only after Jolluc. Don’t waste ammo on anyone else unless you need to.”
Each week, a rebel platoon had come along the dirt road to intercept shipments moving to Hadde from the port city of Rishun, and Omega had let them, simply observing and collecting intel. It was Jolluc they needed to take out; smart, resourceful, and the main man for planning, Intel said. Now the rebels were getting lairy, to use Mereel’s favorite word. They weren’t taking as many precautions.
It still seemed pretty pointless to Darman, seeing as the Mauja tribes weren’t actually a threat to the Republic. He doubted they could even spell Separatist. They just liked thieving and didn’t like their government, which sounded an awful lot like Skirata. They wanted whatever they could grab. Hadde probably looked like a nice place to pillage.
But they’d fire back when Omega targeted them, so Darman’s vague sympathy evaporated faster than spit on the hot rocks around him. He sighted up. The rebels had to assault the convoy at close quarters if they wanted to pillage, because an artillery bombardment would trash everything they wanted to take, and that made them vulnerable. Jolluc would be with them—if Intel was right—and fair game in open ground.
“They could have a warren of tunnels in there.” Corr was persistent. “And we won’t even dent that if we can’t call in air strikes. When we’re clear, I say we wander down and run a few scans. See what we can do to shut them down.”
Some of the Maujasi spilled down onto the road carrying parts of dismantled repeating blasters, and sprinted across to scramble up the rocks and take up positions on the other side and assemble the weapons; there were now around thirty of them. There was no sign of Jolluc. Darman had various images of the man in his HUD, checking them against each rebel he could get a clear focus on through the DC-17’s optics.
“A few more than usual,” Atin said. “Maybe there’s nothing worth watching on HNE today.”
Niner shook his head. “Intel didn’t say there was anything different about this supply run.”
“Here we go again.” Darman sighed. “Intel’s as useful as a third nostril. Stop listening to them.”
The convoy of repulsortrucks was a few minutes from the ambush point now, their security speeders riding ahead. They knew they’d have company. They always got hit one way or another. It was just a question of how hard, so why didn’t the Republic just supply Hadde with air transport to freight supplies into town? They were as stupid as those shabla beetles. It would have stopped this ritual. It just proved to Darman that Palpatine was either running out of creds and resources, or he hadn’t a clue how to run a war, or maybe both.
“Stand by,” said
Niner.
“We should warn the convoy we’re here.”
“I’m not risking it. One minute they’re government sympathizers, the next they’re rebels… you can’t trust any of ’em.”
Darman planned to put a grenade or three into the northern face of the slope if things got too hot, starting with the rebels’ rotary blaster position. The thing looked ancient. Warfare was a lot less high-tech here, but underestimating it was a good way to end up dead.
There was still no sign of Jolluc.
“Two hundred meters,” said Niner. Darman heard the repeater’s magazine click into position. “Boy, there’s definitely more of them than usual…”
“We could abort,” Atin said.
Niner had his finger on the trigger. The rebels were now all between Omega’s position and the convoy. “Not now.”
“I make it thirty-one.”
On top of a rock in the middle of nowhere. We’re going to have to run for it… should have brought the speeder bikes…
“When you see Jolluc, take him,” Niner said. “If you don’t see him, hold fire, shut your eyes, and leave the convoy to look out for itself. No heroics.”
It was brutal, but they weren’t here to babysit supply chains for civvies. Darman motivated himself with the thought of the jug of iced water back at base and checked the range on the Deece. The reticule lined up on the antique rotary and the grenade’s charge glowed red.
The first bdapp of rebel blasters split the heavy afternoon air. The convoy’s escort returned fire while the convoy tried to scatter, but there was no open ground.
“No Jolluc,” said Niner calmly.
“Give it time…” Atin turned away from the assault below. “Shab, I hate this.”
“We’re not here to police traffic.”
It was still tough to stand back and let the convoy take it. Darman itched for an excuse to open fire. He’d gone charging to the rescue before on Qiilura, breaking cover to save civilians, but he’d been a kid then on his second deployment. The longer you spent fighting, the more cautious you became. Battle hardening meant that you knew how dead you could really get. Darman would leave the derring-do to the new boys now.
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