By the time she teetered on the edge of the troop bay, somehow more wary of jumping down one meter than ten, Gett was waiting, expression carefully blank.
“The general’s got a taste for making shrapnel,” Clanky said approvingly. “You’re instant droid death, aren’t you, ma’am?”
Helmet off, he lowered his voice as he bent his head close to Gett’s, but she still heard him. She heard the words rough time.
“We’d better get you cleaned up,” Gett said. “I fear it’s the proverbial interview without caf when we get back to Fleet.”
Commander Gree limped past them with General Vaas Ga, both looking smoke-streaked and exhausted. “Oh, I don’t think so,” Vaas Ga said. “Well done. Thank you, Fearless.”
“Let me walk this off a little, please, Commander.” Etain looked around the hangar deck, now crowded with gunships disgorging men. Medical teams moved in. The smell of burned paint and lube oil distracted her. “Anyone want to give me the numbers?”
Gett glanced down at the panel on his left forearm. “Improcco Company—four KIA, fifteen wounded, total returned—one hundred and forty out of one hundred and forty-four. Sarlacc A and B Battalions, one thousand and fifty-eight extracted—ninety-four KIA, two hundred and fifteen injured. No MIA. Twenty Torrents deployed and returned That’s seven point five percent losses, and most of those were during the Dinlo engagement itself. So I’d call that a result, General.”
It sounded like a lot of deaths to Etain. It was. But most had made it. She had to be content with that.
“Back to Triple Zero, then.” She’d called it Zero Zero Zero originally—the street slang—but the troopers had told her that was confusing, and that over a comlink it wouldn’t be clear if she meant Coruscant or was simply using the standard military triple repeat of important data. She decided she liked Triple Zero better anyway. It made her feel part of their culture. “And not before time.”
“Very good, General,” Gett said. “Let me know when you want to refresh yourself and I’ll call a steward.”
Etain didn’t want to be back in her cabin on her own, not right now. There was a mirror on the bulkhead above the tiny basin, and she didn’t like the idea of looking herself in the eye yet. She wandered around the crowded hangar.
The bacta tanks were going to be fully occupied on the journey home.
And the clone troopers of the Forty-first Elite who were trying to find somewhere to get a few hours’ sleep seemed a different breed from the four almost-boys who had been her rough-and-ready introduction to unwanted command on Qiilura.
Men changed in a year, and these soldiers around her were men. Whatever naïve purity of purpose—this kote, this glory—fueled them when they left Kamino for the last time, it had been overwritten by bitter experience. They had seen, and they had lived, and they had lost brothers, and they had talked and compared notes. And they were not the same any longer.
They joked, and gossiped, and evolved small subcultures, and mourned. But they would never have a life beyond battle. And that felt wrong.
Etain could feel it and taste it as she wandered across the hanger deck, looking for more troopers she might be able to help. The sense of child that had so disoriented her when she first met Darman on Qiilura was totally absent. There were two shades of existence that tinted the Force in that vast hangar: resignation, and an overwhelming simultaneous sense of both self and community.
Etain felt irrelevant. The clones didn’t need her. They were confident of their own abilities, very centered in whatever identity had evolved despite the Kaminoan belief that they were predictable and standardized units, and they were bonded irrevocably with each other.
She could hear the quiet conversations. There was the occasional word of Mando’a, which few ordinary troopers had ever been taught, but had somehow flowed through their ranks from sources like Skirata and Vau. They clung to it. Knowing what she knew about Mandalorians, it made perfect sense.
It was the only rationale that could make sense when you were fighting for a cause in which you had absolutely no stake. It was the self-respect of a mercenary; internal, unassailable, and based on skill and comradeship.
But mercenaries got paid, and eventually went home, wherever that might be.
One trooper was waiting patiently for the medic. He had a triage flash stuck on his shoulder plate: the number “5,” walking wounded. There was blood streaked across his armor from a shrapnel wound to his head, and he was holding his helmet in his lap, trying to clean it with a scrap of rag. Etain squatted down and patted his arm.
“General?” he said.
She had so ceased to notice their appearance that it took her a few seconds to see Darman’s face in his. They were identical, of course, except for the thousand and one little details that made them all utterly unique.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“What’s your name, and not your number, okay?”
“Nye.”
“Well, Nye, here you go.” She handed him her water bottle. Apart from two lightsabers—her own and her dead Master’s—her concussion rifle, and her comlink, it was the only item she was carrying. “I have nothing else I can give you. I can’t pay you, I can’t promote you, I can’t give you a few days’ R and R, and I can’t even decorate you for valor. I’m truly sorry that I can’t. And I’m sorry that you’re being used like this and I wish I could put an end to it and change your lives for the better. But I can’t. All I can do is ask your forgiveness.”
Nye seemed stunned. He looked at the bottle and then took a long swig from it, his expression suddenly one of blissful relief. “It’s… okay, General. Thank you.”
She was suddenly aware that the hangar deck had fallen completely silent—no mean feat given the vast space and the numbers of men packed in it—and everyone was listening.
The unexpected audience actually made her face burn, and then a little ripple of applause went through the ranks. She wasn’t sure if that meant they agreed, or that they were just being supportive of an officer who—now that she had some embarrassing clarity of mind—looked like a walking nightmare and was clearly having trouble dealing with the aftermath of battle.
“Caf and a change of clothes, General,” Gett said, looming over her from nowhere. “You’ll feel a lot better after a few hours’ sleep.”
Gett was a gracious commander and a perfectly competent naval officer. He ran the ship. He was, to all intents and purposes, the commanding officer. She wasn’t. And had he been born to a family on Coruscant or Corellia or Alderaan, he would have had a glittering career. But he’d been hatched in a tank on Kamino, and so his artificially shortened life would be very different because of that.
When she got back, she would seek out Kal Skirata and beg him to help her make sense of it all. She would find Omega Squad and tell them face-to-face how much she cared about them before it was too late. She would tell Darman that most of all. She never stopped thinking of him.
“You meant what you said, General,” Gett said, steering her back toward her cabin.
“Oh yes. I did.”
“I’m glad. However powerless you feel, solidarity means a great deal to us.”
She suddenly wanted to see Gett go home to a house full of family and friends, and wondered if she wanted it for him or for herself.
“I was once taught to see while blindfolded,” she said. “It was a far more important lesson than I ever imagined. At the time I thought it was just a way of teaching me to strike with my lightsaber using the Force alone. Now I know what purpose the Force had. I look beyond faces.”
“But you won’t change anything by blaming yourself.”
“No. You’re right. But I won’t change anything by pretending I have no responsibility, either.”
At that point she knew as surely as she had ever known anything that the Force had lifted her from one existence, turned her around, and dropped her on another path. She could change things. She wouldn’t
change them immediately, and she couldn’t change them for any of the men here, but she would somehow change the future for men like this.
“If it’s any comfort, General, I’m not sure what we’d do if we weren’t doing this,” Gett said. “And you do get to hear an awful lot of good jokes.”
He touched his fingers to his brow and left her at her cabin.
They actually found things to laugh about even surrounded by pain and death. Gett had that understated, inventive, and irreverent humor that seemed common to anyone in uniform: if you couldn’t take a joke, apparently, you shouldn’t have joined. She’d heard Omega quote that Skirata line more than once. You had to be able to laugh or else the tears would ambush you.
Etain stared at the dried blood on her robes and, while the memory appalled her, she couldn’t bring herself to obliterate it by rinsing it away. She shoved the garment under the mattress of her bunk, shut her eyes, and then didn’t even recall lying down.
She woke with a start.
She woke, and then the ship changed course and picked up speed: she felt it. That hadn’t woken her. Some disturbance in the Force had.
Darman.
She could feel the very slight vibration that told her Fearless’s drives were straining flat out.
She sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bunk, rubbing a painful cramp from her calves. A clean set of robes was hanging on a peg behind the hatch door of her cabin. She had no idea where the crew had acquired them, but she washed her face in the basin, and looked up at last at the small mirror to see the scratched, ashen, rapidly aging face of a stranger.
But at least she could meet her own eyes now.
She pulled on the clean robes and was pocketing both her own lightsaber and Master Kast Fulier’s—which she always carried out of sheer sentimentality and pragmatic caution—when there was the sound of boots padding down the passage outside. Someone rapped on the hatch. She eased it open using the Force. It was reassuring to know she wasn’t too beaten to do that.
“General?” Gett said. He handed her a mug of caf, remarkably relaxed for a man whose ship was clearly driven by new urgency. “Sorry to disturb you so soon.”
“That’s very kind of you, Commander.” She took the caf and saw her hands shaking. “I felt something. What’s wrong?”
“I took a liberty, General. I hope you won’t be offended, but I overrode your orders.”
She couldn’t imagine that ever bothering her. She’d once ordered Darman to do that if he ever felt she was screwing up. The clones knew their trade far better than she ever would.
“Gett, you know I trust you implicitly.”
He had a disarming grin, not unlike Fi, but with less of a sense of desperately trying to jolly everyone along. “I’ve diverted the ship to the Tynna sector. We received a Red Zero call and I thought you’d really want to respond. An extra day or so isn’t going to make any difference to the survival rate of casualties now.”
Red Zero. An emergency command for all vessels to respond to a disaster of some kind, something very serious indeed. Even extracting the Forty-first hadn’t been a Red Zero signal.
“I’d always give a Red Zero top priority, too. Good call, Gett.”
“Thought you might.” He watched her drain the cup and held out his hand to take it. “Especially because this one’s from Omega Squad. They’re in very deep dwang, General.”
Darman, she thought. The Force always made sure she got the most important intel after all. Dar.
Chapter Four
DELTA SQUAD TO FLEET OPS. RESPONDING TO RED ZERO. POSITION: CHAYKIN SECTOR, ETA: 1 STANDARD HOUR 40. CAN ASSIST: MEDICAL AND OXYGEN. PLEASE NOTE: DEPLOYING IN REQUISITIONED NEIMOIDIAN VESSEL. NO DEFENSIVE CAPACITY. REPEAT: NEGATIVE ARMAMENT. STRONGLY ADVISE ANY GAR VESSELS TO PING TRANSPONDER BEFORE OPENING FIRE. BE AWARE THAT SEPARATIST TRAFFIC IN SECTOR HAS INCREASED IN LAST 20 MINUTES IN RESPONSE TO FLEET MOVEMENTS. PREP FOR UNWANTED COMPANY.
—Signal received at Fleet Ops. Passed to MILINT N-11 Captain Ordo and acknowledged. Vessels responding now: Fearless, Majestic, and impounded enemy shuttle. Advised to assume extraction may be opposed.
367 days after Geonosis
It was cold and pitch-black in the cockpit, but it certainly beat being dead.
Fi kept his suit temperature at the bare minimum to conserve power. He flicked on his spot-lamp briefly and checked the trussed and shivering suspects who were lying against the deck: a human, and—disturbingly—two Nikto. Fi had only seen Nikto in obscure databases devoted to identifying the best part of their anatomy to aim at to stop them dead. They were tough. Intel said they could defeat Jedi. They were even rumored to have a weapon that could deflect and destroy a lightsaber blade. Maybe Jedi needed to tool up with PEP lasers, then.
And all the prisoners had tested positive for explosives residue when Darman had run his sensor over them. With the intel and the heavily encrypted data on their ’pads, the three looked like being dead to rights, as Skirata would say. But it was a long way from being satisfied that they’d snatched the right people to actually extracting useful information from them.
Fi took his thermal plastifoil survival blanket from his backpack and folded it carefully over the human, who seemed to be more affected by cold than the Nikto. Losing a suspect to hypothermia after going to all this trouble to grab them wasn’t an option. Wrapping a body wasn’t an easy maneuver in zero-g, but at least he’d stopped feeling sick.
The ultralight plastifoil kept drifting away every time the man shuddered. Fi sighed and took out his universal solution to any problem, a roll of thick adhesive tape, and hooked his leg around a handrail to stop himself floating while he tore off lengths. He taped the blanket to the suspect. Then he secured the trussed suspects to the deck with more of the tape. It was amazing how handy tape could be.
“And don’t ask me to tuck you in and read you a story.” The human just stared balefully at him. He had a lovely black eye now from resisting Darman a little too vigorously. “They never have happy endings.”
The man’s ID said Farr Orjul but nobody took that too seriously. He was about thirty: fine blond hair, sharp features, very pale blue eyes. The Nikto claimed to be M’truli and Gysk, or at least their mining licenses did, because none of the suspects was talking.
SOPs—standard operating procedures—said they had to stop prisoners from talking to each other before processing. But SOPs hadn’t allowed for the little complication of running out of air before an interrogator could be found.
Niner turned his head slightly to Orjul. “You can talk to us. Or you can wait until Sergeant Vau sits you down with a nice cup of caf and asks you to tell him your life story. He’s a good listener. And you’ll really want to talk to him.”
There was no response. Apart from the brief curses and grunts of pain they’d emitted when Omega stormed the cockpit and subdued them—Fi loved military understatement—none of the suspects had said a single word, not even name, rank, or serial number. And, of course, the two who were dry-frozen somewhere in the vacuum of space weren’t going to provide many answers of their own free will, either.
“Look, shall I try to get some information out of these gentlemen just in case the taxi doesn’t get here before our air runs out?” Fi asked.
“We’re not trained to interrogate prisoners,” said Niner.
Fi maneuvered himself above the human. He didn’t know what Nikto felt or feared, and suspected that it wasn’t much, but he knew plenty about his own species’ vulnerabilities. “I could improvise.”
“No, you’ll bounce off the bulkheads, expend too much oxygen, and then we’ll have to slot them to preserve the supply for us. It can wait. Vau isn’t going anywhere, and neither are they.”
Niner was reclining in the pilot’s chair, restraining belt buckled and staring straight ahead. The blue-lit T of his visor was reflected in the transparisteel viewscreen, making him look wonderfully droid-like. Fi wasn’t sure if Niner was simply saying coldly brutal thing
s to intimidate the prisoners or not. Fi wasn’t entirely sure whether he was really joking some of the time.
War was nothing personal. But somehow Fi felt differently about people who didn’t carry a rifle and who didn’t kill in honest combat. They were an invisible enemy. Fierfek, even droids stood up where you could see them.
He put it out of his mind with a conscious effort, and not only because Ordo had insisted on undamaged prisoners. He knew how to kill, and he knew how to resist pain, but he wasn’t sure how to inflict it deliberately.
But he was pretty sure that Vau did. He’d leave the job to him.
Darman had positioned himself against the bulkhead with his legs stretched out. He looked asleep. Arms folded, head lowered, his point-of-view icon in Fi’s HUD showed only an image of his belt and lap. Dar could sleep anywhere, anytime. At one point he flinched, as if someone had said something to him, but there was nothing audible on the comlink.
Atin, belted in to the copilot’s seat, worked on the assortment of datapads, datasticks, and sheets of flimsi that he’d taken from the suspects—dead and alive—and prodded probes into dataports, doing what he seemed to enjoy best: slicing, hacking, and generally dismantling things. Niner occasionally reached out to grab any of his prizes that floated free.
Fi propelled himself forward with a gentle push against the deck and offered his roll of tape. Atin managed a smile and trapped the wayward components on the sticky side, securing the other end on Niner’s left forearm plate.
“Fi, you know I don’t mean it, don’t you?” Niner said suddenly. “When I get on your back about stuff. I’m just venting steam.”
It took Fi aback. “Sarge, I think the first thing you ever did was to tear me off a strip, and we’re still brothers, aren’t we? You’re just like Sergeant Kal. He never meant any of it, either.”
“Did you see the state of him on the hololink?”
“He looked pretty exhausted.”
“Poor Buir. He never stops worrying.”
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