“Go go go—”
Fi, buoyed up on a wave of adrenaline, plunged through after him, DC-17 set to blaster mode. The TIV and Sicko were swept from his mind from that moment as time disobeyed all the rules and he was caught in an infinite, slow-motion split second while the squad burst through the hatch and the L-6’s artificial gravity smacked him down hard on the deck. The impact ran up through the soles of his boots. He was running for seconds before his proprioception caught up with the gravity and his body said I remember this.
But there weren’t many places to run on an L-6 freighter. It was a cockpit and a couple of cabins bolted to a durasteel box of nothing. Atin moved ahead and simply opened up with the Deece’s new PEP laser, knocking two men flat in a massive shock wave of sound and light as they came out of the starboard cabin firing blasters.
Fi’s anti-flash visor darkened instantly. Even with armor, he felt the shock of the PEP’s unleashed energy. They all did.
Fi ran on over Atin as he dropped to one knee to cuff and search the men, wrists to ankles, as they lay struggling for breath, whimpering. A PEP round was like being flash-banged and hit in the chest by several plastoid rounds at once.
It was usually nonlethal. Usually.
Two down, three—maybe—to go.
The cockpit doors didn’t open when Niner stood back and hit the controls. Atin caught up with Fi again and they stood catching their breath.
Niner motioned Darman into position at the cockpit doors. “Shame that PEP doesn’t work through bulkheads.”
“Confirmed, three still inside,” Darman said, running the infrared sensor sweep in his gauntlet up and down the seam of the doors. “Nothing in the port cabin.”
Intel had it right for once: there were five bandits on board.
“Encourage them to step outside, Dar,” Niner said, checking his Deece’s PEP setting. He peered at the power readout. “This thing actually scares me.”
Darman unrolled a ribbon of adhesive thermal charge and pressed it around the doors’ weak points. Then he pushed the det into the soft material and cocked his head to one side as if calculating. “All that fuss getting in and now we just walk over them. Anticlimactic, I think the word is…”
There was a dull echoing thud and screech of metal that vibrated through the deck. For a second Fi thought the det had gone off prematurely and that it was all a trick of his adrenaline-distorted perception, and that he was dead but didn’t know it yet.
But it wasn’t the det.
Fi looked at Niner, and Niner looked at Atin, and Fi saw in Darman’s viewpoint icon that he was staring at a fragment of flimsi that whipped past him as if snatched by a sudden wind.
It was being carried on a stream of air. Escaping air. Fi felt it grab him and they all reached instinctively for a secure point to anchor them.
“Hull breach,” Fi said, arms tight around a stanchion. “Check suit seals.”
They went into an automatic and long-drilled check of their suit systems. Katarn armor was vacuumproofed. Fi’s glove sensor confirmed his suit was still airtight and the thumbs-up from the rest of the squad indicated that their suit integrity was holding up too. The temporary gale of escaping air was abating.
“Sicko, you receiving?” said Niner.
Fi had the same thought, and judging by the rapid breathing on the shared comlink, so had Atin and Darman. The decompression was via the hatch. And that meant the seal formed by the TIV had been breached.
On their comlink there was only faint static and the sound of their own breathing and swallowing.
“Fierfek,” Atin said. “Whatever it is, he’s gone.”
Niner motioned Darman to stay by the cockpit hatch and beckoned Fi to follow him. “Let’s see if it’s fixable. You two stay there.”
“Well, we’ve probably lost two prisoners now,” Darman said. “Better make sure we haven’t lost the rest.”
There was no telling what had dislodged the TIV and whether they were going to meet someone boarding to deal with them. They made their way back up the passage to the entry hatch, DC-17s raised, and there was no sign of the two prisoners they’d left cuffed, nor anybody else.
And the hatch—about two meters by two—was wide open, star-speckled void visible beyond.
Fi gripped the rail on one side of it and leaned out a little. It was a good way to get your head blown off but he decided that the urgency of the situation warranted it.
There was no sign of the TIV There was no sign of anything. He pulled himself back inboard. At least the gravity was still functioning.
Niner checked the environment sensors on his forearm plate. “Atmosphere’s fully vented now.”
“They have to have a foam system in these things.”
“Yeah, but if you had us running around your vessel, would you seal the hull and help us out?”
“Is the cockpit airtight?” Fi asked.
“We won’t know for sure until they go cold and we can’t pick them up in the infrared.” Niner switched on his tactical spot-lamp and began searching the bulkhead for panels. “And by that time we’ll be ice cubes ourselves.”
Katarn armor—even the Mark III version—was only good against vacuum for twenty minutes without a backup air supply. And they hadn’t counted on being exposed that long.
For some reason Fi was distracted by Sicko’s fate. It was a strange thing to discover when you were on borrowed time yourself. But Sicko had said the power conduits were routed via a panel three meters from…
… here.
Fi ejected the vibroblade from his knuckle plate and pried open the panel. Niner stood behind him and directed his spot-lamp into the recessed mass of cabling, pipes, and wires.
“That one’s labeled ISOLATION BULKHEAD,” Niner said.
“Yeah, but where does that come down?”
They looked up at the deckhead for shutter housings. There were at least three back down the passage that they could see.
“Let’s play safe and withdraw to the one nearest the cockpit,” Niner said.
“We could blow the whole panel here and shut everything down.” Including the gravity. Lovely. “Usually triggers emergency containment.”
Niner put his glove to the side of his helmet. It was a nervous habit of his, just like the way he grew increasingly irritable with Fi as his stress levels peaked. “Dar, are you getting this?”
“Halfway there already,” said Darman’s voice.
Fi’s chrono said they had fifteen minutes left to make this work. “Okay, if Dar blows this remotely and it activates the emergency bulkhead, then we’ll be stuck between that and the cockpit hatch.”
“And if there’s atmosphere in there, we can open it and cozy up to the other three hut’uune.”
“Or,” Fi said, “we find it’s hard vacuum, too, and then we’ll be completely stuffed.”
“Stuffed if we don’t,” said Darman, appearing at Fi’s shoulder with a ribbon of thermal detonator tape. “Go on. Get back there and wait for me while I set the timer.”
“We ought to call in a Red Zero.”
“Let’s wait until we know if there’ll be anything left of us to make it worth rescuing,” Niner said, trotting back down the passage. Fi watched him go, shrugged at Darman, and then patted the wide-open cover of the control panel.
“Thanks, Sicko,” he said.
Chapter Three
MRU. Already committed.
—Much Regret Unable, signal relayed from CO, RAS Fearless, on receipt of request to withdraw to Skuumaa and abort extraction of Sarlacc Battalions
The windchill factor in the open troop bay of a LAAT/c gunship flying at five hundred kph was sobering, but then so was the deafening roar of air and the swoops and dips of the flight path as the pilot jinked to stop ground-based AA fire from getting a lock.
Etain realized why the troopers’ sealed armor and bodysuit was a good idea. She had only her Jedi robes and the sensible precaution of upper-body armor plates, which did little to insulate
on their own. She summoned the Force to help her withstand the icy blast and made sure her safety line was hooked securely to the bulkhead rail.
“You’re going to be in the dwang when you get back to HQ, General,” the clone trooper sergeant said with a grin. He slipped on his helmet and sealed it. His nickname was Clanky. She’d made a point of asking.
“I really did not see the signal,” she said carefully. “Or at least I looked at it a little too late.”
His voice emerged now from the projection unit of the anonymous helmet. “It was very funny, signaling MRU.”
“Funny? Oh…”
There was a frozen pause. “It’s how you decline a social invitation, an RPC. Request the Pleasure of your Company? Much Regret Unable.”
Yes, she was in the dwang indeed, as he put it. She wasn’t fully up to speed with the mass of acronyms and slang that had erupted in the last year. She could hardly keep up with the clone troopers’ inventiveness: their extraordinary capacity to appropriate language and habits and shape them to their needs had spawned subcultures of clone identity everywhere. She almost felt she needed a protocol droid.
But she knew what a larty was. Darman had said the LAAT/i—or in this case, the bigger cargo variant—was the most beautiful vessel imaginable when you needed an urgent lift out of trouble. It certainly felt like it now.
MRU indeed. How could I be so stupid? So the troopers thought she was a smart-mouth like Fi, flourishing a little bravado. Instead, she was simply ignorant of the rapidly evolving and idiosyncratic jargon and used it carelessly. “I’m sure they’ll forgive me if you pull this off, Sergeant.”
Her voice was drowned by the roar and falling note of V-19 Torrent drives as two of the fighters streaked past them and disappeared into the distance. They were heading off to soften the droid positions that stood between the heavily forested terrain where both Sarlacc Battalions were pinned down and there was a narrow ribbon of delta shoreline where pilots could land. Droids, as Darman had once pointed out, were rubbish in dense forests.
Etain hoped so.
The gunship dropped suddenly, now level with the tree canopy, and the streaked image of green foliage showed her just how fast they were flying. Another larty came up on their port side. There were thirty-four gunships somewhere near, strung out in a loose formation, heading for the extraction zone.
“Three minutes, General,” the pilot’s cockpit intercom said. There was a crack and flare of something exploding off to their starboard side. “Getting some attention from the tinnies’ triple-A, so we’ll drop a little more. Hold tight.”
It hardly made her flinch now. She had reached the saturation level of adrenaline where she was vividly aware of every hazard but running on some primeval automatic level of painless cold reason—too scared to panic, as one of the clone troopers had described it.
Three minutes became three hours became three seconds.
Red blasterfire from droids lit up the tree line as the larty banked to come around in a spiral descent. Etain didn’t think, and she didn’t feel, and she simply jumped the last ten meters from the open deck over the fast-roping four-man squad of clone troopers and the green-trimmed sergeant. Force skills came in very useful at the most unlikely times. She landed in front of the squad and brought the conc rifle up level—one hand on the stock, the other on the barrel grip—to sweep the forest edge in front of her.
She felt other gunships landing all around them, whipping up soil and leaves, but she saw only what was in front—about two platoons of Sarlacc men exchanging fire with super battle droids on the edge of the clearing—and her squad to either side of her.
A spread of ten EMP grenades from the squad and a volley from her conc brought half the super battle droids to a halt. It was at times like this that she longed for the comlink convenience of a helmet instead of one strapped to her arm in just the wrong place: the Force was short on specifics like SBD strength one hundred units, closing up at green twenty. And there was so much chaos and pain in the Force right then that she couldn’t harness it to focus.
So she did what she had been drilled to do without thinking since she was four years old. She fought.
She ran, the squad matching her pace and firing a blue stream into the droid line in odd silence until Clanky activated his voice projector and she heard him say, “—they’re closing up all along the shoreline. Sorry, General! Big holes now in the droid lines.”
“No link,” she said, superfluous words stripped from her mind. The concussion rifle was getting heavy and running out of charge: the power indicator was edging back down to zero. Two more volleys knocked three SBDs flat and a small tree with them. “How many more?”
“Forward Air Control says two hundred SBDs and tanks bearing twenty degrees with four Torrents on their case—”
More V-19s screamed low overhead and a yellow-fringed ball of white fire backlit the forest, suddenly throwing silhouetted trees and running men into sharp contrast. Fearless’s air group commander certainly had a grip on the reality of the situation. No wonder everybody loved pilots.
Clanky dropped flat and began firing prone at the stream of SBDs that had turned toward the gunship landing area. Etain followed him without thinking. He was listening to data in his helmet, judging by his occasional emphatic nod.
“Sarlacc’s breaking out all along the shoreline, General, and Fearless is directing the rest of the larties north.”
“Any word on General Vaas Ga?”
Clanky went silent for a moment, to her at least. “One klick north with Commander Gree, calling in air strikes.”
Two gunships moved in close enough to catch Etain’s peripheral vision and knots of men broke from the trees, some carrying wounded comrades between them. Etain hoped the single IM-6 medical droid on each larty could handle the triage of dozens of men at once. One gunship set down again at right angles to the tree line, its starboard hatch shut tight and taking droid fire that scattered sparks while it trained composite beam lasers on the SBDs.
The starboard gunner—horribly exposed in the transparisteel bubble set in the wing—was hosing the droids at waist height. Etain saw movement and white-armored shapes race behind the vessel and disappear, presumably into the port side of the troop bay. The torrent of comp beam laser was like a freeze-frame in its unbroken, steady stream.
For a slow-motion moment Etain reasoned: using the forward cannon and deploying the heavier and nastier armaments—radiation burst missiles—would cause heavy trooper casualties in this position. Her mouth was dry, her heart pounding so fast that she could hardly distinguish between beats, and yet she could stop the chrono to think these odd things.
She resumed firing. She held her fingers tight on the trigger until the conc died in her hands.
“Whoa, tinnies breaking this way—”
Her focus narrowed. She no longer saw the five men around her except as white blurs and vortices of raw energy in the Force. The lead battle droid overran their position and she simply swung the dead rifle in a Force-driven arc right up into the thing’s chest, smashing the alloy and sending the droid’s sunken head assembly flying into the air.
She was suddenly aware of blue energy behind the next droid like a continuous backdrop, although it had to be interrupted bursts of DC-15 fire. She let the conc rifle drop and drew her lightsaber because she had nothing else left.
The blade of blue light sprang into life and she didn’t recall touching the control at all. She swept her arm around in a clean arc that brought the mountain of metal down without its legs, tipping like a felled tree to one side of her, falling flat on its firing arm and shuddering as its own discharging weapon tore it apart. Hot shrapnel sizzled on her robes and skin but she felt nothing.
And she was on her feet now, lightsaber gripped in both hands, point-blank with the next droid. She saw two of her squad blasting away from a prone position while Clanky scrambled to one knee to fire a grenade into the advancing rank of a dozen SBDs.
Dro
ids kept advancing. So did clone troopers. And so did she.
We’re all the same. None of us is thinking. We’re just reacting.
She fended off a barrage of red fire, whirling and flicking the lightsaber without conscious decision. Each snazzz of colliding energy was the first and last: she went on, and on, and on, blocking each shot as if it would never end. And the next droid was upon her. She slashed. Cables and alloy fragments showered her. A white-gauntleted fist grabbed her shoulder and pulled her bodily out of the way.
“Bang out, General, the larty’s ready to lift.” Clanky almost had to drag her off the pile of shattered droids and shove her into a run toward the gunship. “We’ve done all we can here and the bay’s full. Go! Run!”
She grabbed the conc rifle as she ran back, retracing their line of advance, blind on adrenaline. But at the gunship’s platform she still stopped dead, one foot on the edge of the rail, to look back and count men passing her. One—two—three—four troopers, and Clanky. All accounted for. She sprang up just as an armored hand gripped hers and yanked her inboard. She had no idea who the trooper was. But he was one of hers now.
The gunship lifted in a straight vertical so fast that her stomach plummeted back to ground level.
The forest and fertile delta plain of Dinlo shrank beneath the ship and grew dark. The bay hatches slid forward and slammed shut. Then she was standing in a warehouse of scorched, filthy armor and the stench of blood and seared flesh. Her primeval survival mechanisms yielded to shaking anticlimax.
Clanky pulled off his helmet and their eyes met, an odd moment that was almost a glance in a mirror: she knew that the unblinking wide-eyed shock on his face was exactly what he was seeing on hers. Instinctively, they both reached out to clasp forearms and their grips locked for a second or two. Clanky was also shaking.
Then they parted and turned away. It was synchronous.
Yes, Etain thought. We’re just the same, all of us.
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