A stream of blasterfire spat out of one door and caught the strill on its quarters. Etain heard Vau gasp. Mird shrieked and spun around, one leg dragging, and then made to go in after its assailant, but she held out one arm and it stopped dead.
“Leave, Mird!” she whispered.
Etain took a breath then stepped into the room to meet another hail of blasterfire. She crossed the blue blades of energy and batted the bolts aside with a parting motion of her arms. I didn’t know I could do that. It was pure instinct, drawn from deep within her and many years in the past.
She lunged forward for the kill. As always, she saw little and felt nothing tangible, no shock up her arms, no resistance as she swept the blades, but she felt the Force change. A brief light blazed and died.
She thumbed off Master Fulier’s lightsaber and slid it into her tunic one-handed while keeping her own drawn just in case. She sensed nobody else. Mird limped into the room after her and she knew it was looking up into her face even though there was only the scattered light through the window from a city that was never completely dark.
“Oya,” she whispered, not knowing quite what the command might mean in this case.
But Mird rumbled quietly and sprang onto the body of the man she had killed. She shut down her lightsaber and walked out of the apartment, and Mird limped out a few moments later, crunching happily. She didn’t look too closely at what it had in its jaws. It swallowed noisily.
“Poor Mird.” Vau sighed. “Here, baby, come here.” He scooped the strill up in both arms and carried it to the turbolift. One of its legs had been seared raw by the blaster.
Etain opened her comlink. “Kal, everyone is accounted for.”
“Good work,” Kal’s voice said. He sounded tired. “See you at the RV point.”
Mird let Etain place her hands on its leg to heal it as the lift made its way down to the ground floor. Vau carried it all the way back to the speeder. It was a big, heavy animal, but he refused to let it walk. Etain took it on her lap and eased its pain as Vau started the speeder and they headed for the RV point.
There seemed to be nothing Vau wouldn’t do for Mird. He loved that animal.
RV point,
two kilometers from CoruFresh depot,
2320 hours, 385 days after Geonosis
The strike team rendezvoused at a droid-operated construction site to the north of the depot. The droids needed no light to work by and the presence of a few strangely dressed humanoids in the near darkness would draw no attention.
Skirata counted the six speeders back in, gut churning until the last of the speeders arrived with Mereel and Corr astride. Corr was clutching the rotary blaster like a long-lost friend.
Good lad. I’ll shift Coruscant and all its rotten moons to hang on to him, Zey. We can always train more troopers as commandos. Just watch me.
“All thermal plastoid accounted for?”
“Yes, Sarge.” Boss leaned against the bodywork of a speeder. “Want to check?”
“I trust you to count. Ordo can slip that back into stores tomorrow after it’s been neutralized.”
“What’s the final score?” Fi said.
Niner eased off his helmet. Even with the environment control inside his sealed suit, he looked as if he’d sweated out an ocean. He rubbed his face slowly with the palm of his glove. “Er… I think we took out twenty-six bad guys.”
“Twenty-four at the site,” Mereel said. “We swept the site and did a tally. It was a bit hard to tell in some places but we logged the blasters that had been fired by their EM traces. So I say twenty-four.”
“Plus Perrive and our friend in the apartment block,” Etain said.
“Definitely twenty-six.” Jusik was subdued. “I felt them.”
“Okay, Shiny Boys twenty-six, Hut’uune nil,” Corr said. He was picking up Mando’a fast. “I call that a home win.”
Jusik stood staring into the inside of his helmet as he held it in his hands. “No witnesses left standing. Just a nasty argument between crime gangs.”
“You’ll never get any public praise for this,” Skirata said. “But let me tell you now that every last one of you made me a proud man.” He looked down at the strill, limping on one of its six legs as it circled Vau, grumbling deep in its throat. “Even you, Mird, you stinking heap of drool.”
The strill looked up at Etain and made a musical warbling sound. She’d wrapped one arm around Darman’s waist, head resting on his chest plate with her eyes closed, but she opened them and watched Mird.
“Mird likes you,” Vau said. “You took care of it and let it have its kill.”
Fi gave Darman a weary slap on the back. “She has a way with dumb animals, ner vod.”
An exhausted silence settled on the team. The droids labored around them, carrying girders, stacking duraplast sheets, oblivious. If anyone thought wild celebrations followed operations like this, they were wrong. The instant elation of seeing a vessel go up in flames or an enemy drop from a well-placed shot was very short-lived. The hyperalertness of adrenaline lingered for a while, and then was swallowed up quickly by fatigue and a sense of… of void, of odd purposelessness, of looking for the next task.
The adrenaline had to drain away. They’d be back to normal after some rest. Skirata was determined they’d get some.
“Let’s get back to base,” he said. “We can clear out of Qibbu’s in the morning.”
He got no response.
“Anyone hungry? Maybe an ale or two?”
“’Freshers,” Niner said. “Shower.”
“Who’s on watch roster tonight?”
“Me,” Vau said before Skirata could open his mouth. “Go on, Bardan. You head back with Etain and Mird. I’ll take Kal.”
Skirata hauled himself onto Vau’s speeder. The painkiller was wearing off and the ache had started gnawing his ankle again. He opened his comlink and called Jaller Obrim.
“Kal here. How’s it going?”
Obrim sounded as if he was in the middle of a riot. There was a lot of shouting in the background and then a loud muffled whump. Commandos weren’t the only ones who laid charges for a spot of rapid entry, then.
“Busy,” said the CSF captain. “We’ve pulled in around sixty suspects so far. Pretty low on the food chain, but they lead to all kinds of other people CSF has an interest in, and they’re off the streets for a while.” He paused as another loud whump interrupted. “I don’t know where we’re going to put them all, though. The lockup is filling fast.”
“Never had that problem. Our targets don’t get out on parole, either.”
“I’ll bet. You all okay?”
“No serious injury. Everyone’s walking. Quite a mess for you to clear up, though.”
“My pleasure. CSF Staff and Social Club, all of you. End of the week. I will not take no for an answer and neither will CSF. Be there.”
“Count on it.”
Skirata closed the link and let his head drop so that his chin rested on his chest plate.
Vau squeezed into the seat in front of him and powered up the speeder. He reached behind him and passed Skirata a datapad. “Perrive’s pad. Enjoy its contents at your leisure, ner vod. So, a drink or a fight? What’s it to be?”
“Walon, you’re very lucky I’m too tired.” Skirata pocketed the datapad, another little treasure trove for his Null boys to play with. “I’d just slap you.”
“I need to make my peace with Atin.”
“He’ll still kill you after he’s had a good night’s sleep.”
“The brief unity of triumph, and then back to the fray. Crushing, isn’t it? The victories seem so insignificant compared with the size of the war.”
“Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try,” Skirata said. “It’s only what individuals do that adds up to history.”
“We’ve written ours, then.”
It was one of the few times that Skirata found himself staring at Vau’s back without feeling the urge to reach for his knife. “Tell you what,” he said
. He took out the disabled remote det from his pocket. “Why don’t we swing by the diplomatic quarter and pick up that nice green speeder? Perrive’s not going to need it now. Can you still hotwire a speeder?”
“You bet,” said Vau.
Chapter Twenty-Three
When you can no longer know what your nation or your government stands for, or even where it is, you need a set of beliefs you can carry with you and cling to. You need a core in your heart that will never change. I think that’s why I feel more at home in the barracks than I do in the Jedi Temple.
—General Bardan Jusik, Jedi Knight
Operational house, Qibbu’s Hutt,
0015 hours, 386 days after Geonosis
The suite of rooms on the top floor of Qibbu’s hotel looked like inventory day in the GAR equipment stores.
Fi stepped over stacked piles of armor and packs of five-hundred-grade plastoid explosive and flopped into the first chair he found.
“You going to sleep in that bucket?” Mereel said.
Fi took the hint and popped his helmet seal, inhaling warm air scented with sweat, stale carpet, caf, and strill. There were times when the buy’ce was a comfort and a quiet haven, insulating him from the world, and he felt in need of that now for reasons he didn’t understand or want to think about.
Mereel sat at the scratched, battered table unwrapping packs of thermal plastoid and working a colorless liquid into them. Fi wanted to get up and look but he was simply too tired. He could see Mereel pressing a hollow into the cakes of brown plastoid with his thumb, pouring in a few drops of the liquid from a small bottle, and then kneading it in with a steady folding motion.
“Ah,” Fi said, remembering.
“Got to add the stabilizer compound before we put it back into stores or else this is going to kill a lot more vode than the bad guys ever could.”
“Want a hand?”
“No. Get some sleep.”
“Where’s Sergeant Kal?” Fi had quite enjoyed calling him Kal’buir. But he donned old habits along with his armor. “I hope he hasn’t knifed Vau.”
“They’re liberating a speeder on behalf of the Skirata Retirement Fund.”
“Come on, he’ll never retire.”
“He still wants the speeder. Merc habits die hard.”
Fi found it hard to think of his sergeant as having any interest in a life beyond the army. He spent a while wondering what the man might really want, and apart from a wife to look after him, Fi had problems imagining what that might be. It was the same problem he had with his own dreams. They were intrusive and insistent—but they were limited. He only knew there was something missing, and when he looked at Darman and Etain, he knew what it was; he also wondered how it could work out even if he got it. He wasn’t stupid. He could count and calculate odds of survival.
“Good night, ner vod.” He left Mereel to his task and wandered around, unclipping his armor plates as he went and stacking them in a pile by the bedroom door. Black bodysuits and briefs hung drying on every peg and rail. However exhausted they were, the squads still washed their kit conscientiously.
Fi glanced into some of the rooms to check who might be awake and willing to chat, but the Delta boys were all out cold, not even snoring. Niner and Corr slumped in chairs in one of the alcoves with a plate of half-eaten cookies sitting on the small table between them. Darman was stretched out on his bed in the room he shared with Fi, apparently none the worse for his ordeal, and Ordo was curled up in the next room with a blanket pulled over his head. Odd: he always seemed to do that, as if he wanted total darkness.
There was no sign of Jusik or Etain. Farther along the passage, Fi struck lucky. Atin was sitting in the chair in his room, cleaning his armor.
“I’m on watch until Skirata gets back,” he said, without waiting for Fi’s question.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“I’m sure Laseema will wait for you.”
“It’s not about Laseema.”
“So it’s something.”
“You never give up, do you?” Atin had always been the private type, even though he’d settled into a very different squad culture from the one he’d been raised in. There was always something new to learn about a brother who’d been trained in another batch. “Okay, now that the job’s done, I’ve got matters to address with Sergeant Vau.”
“He’s not a sergeant any longer.”
“I’m still going to kill him.”
It was just talk. Men said things like that. Fi closed the doors and sat down on the bed opposite.
“I’m supposed to be on watch,” Atin said.
“I made Sev tell me how you got the wound to your face.”
“So now you know. Vau gave me a good hiding for being whiny about surviving Geonosis when my brothers didn’t.”
“It’s even more than that. You know it. You wouldn’t be the first commando to get in a fistfight with his sergeant.”
“You know, I like you better when you’re being mindless and funny.”
“We need to know.”
“Usen’ye.” It was the crudest way to tell someone to go away in Mando’a. “It’s none of your business.”
“It is if you pick a fight with Vau, and he kills you and we have to get a replacement.”
Atin laid the back plate he was cleaning on the floor and rubbed his eyes. “You want to know? Really? Look.”
He hooked his fingers inside the neck of his bodysuit and jerked down the front panel. The gription seams yielded. It was nothing Fi hadn’t seen before in the refreshers: Atin’s shoulders and arms were laced with long white streaks of scar tissue. It was common in the GAR. Men got injured in training and in the field, armor or not. But Atin seemed to have acquired more spectacular ones than average.
Scars happened, especially if you didn’t get bacta on a wound fast enough.
“Vau gave you those, too, didn’t he?”
“Vau nearly killed me, so when I finally got out of the bacta tank, I said I’d kill him one day. Fair enough, yes?”
No wonder Corr said he found commandos a little “relaxed.” They must have seemed dangerously chaotic to a clone trooper raised and trained by sober Kaminoan flash-instruction and simulation.
“Kill is a bit strong,” Fi said. “Break his nose, maybe.”
“Skirata did that already. Look, if Vau felt you lacked the killer edge, he’d crank it up a little. He’d make you fight your brother. We had a choice. We could fight each other until one was too badly hurt to stand up, or we could fight him.”
Fi thought of Kal Skirata, as hard and ruthless as anyone he had ever known, making sure his squads were fed and well rested, finding illicit treats for them, teaching them, encouraging them, telling them how proud they made him. It seemed to work pretty well.
“And?” said Fi.
“I opted to take on Vau. He had a real Mando iron saber, and I was unarmed. I just went at him. I never wanted to kill so badly in my life and he just cut me up. And Skirata beat the osik out of Vau when he found out. They never did get on, those two.”
“So… the thing with Sev. You told Skirata.”
“No, Skirata just found out. I didn’t even know he knew me until we met at the spaceport siege.” Atin picked up his plate and started cleaning it again. “So now you know.”
Fi thought that a quick swing at Vau might purge Atin’s hatred. Then it occurred to him that his brother was absolutely literal.
“At’ika, ever thought what’s going to happen to you if you do kill him?”
“I’ve killed people outside my legitimate rules of engagement tonight. One more won’t make a difference. And I’ll die soon enough anyway.”
“Yeah, but there’s Laseema.”
Atin paused, cloth gripped in one hand. “Yes, there is.”
“And how are you going to kill Vau anyway?”
“With a blade.” He picked up his right gauntlet and ejected the blade with a loud shunk. “The Mando way.�
�
This isn’t bravado. Fi struggled for a moment, wondering what the right thing to do might be. He’s really going to do it.
Fi decided he’d wait near the doors to the landing platform, ready for the moment that Vau walked through them.
Etain found sleep impossible. She sat out on the landing platform with Jusik, meditating. For all the violence of the day she had put behind her, she found a serene core within her that had never been there before, the inner calm she had sought so many years through study and struggle.
All I had to do was have a life beside my own to care for. That is the true detachment we ought to seek, putting another person above ourselves—not denying our emotions. The attachment to self is the path to the dark side.
The intricate silver threads of her child in the Force were more complex now, more interconnected. She sensed purpose and clarity and passion. He would be an extraordinary person. She could hardly wait to get to know him.
And when it was the right time, she would explain what she sensed to Darman. She imagined the joy on his face.
She brought herself out of the trance and Jusik was standing a few meters away, looking out over the ravine of towers in the direction of the Senate.
“Bardan, I have a question I can only ask of you.”
He turned and smiled. “I’ll answer if I can.”
“How do I tell Darman in Mandalorian that I love him?”
She waited for Jusik to express some shock or disapproval. He blinked a few times, focusing on a nonexistent spot a few meters ahead. “I don’t think he’s completely fluent in Mando’a. The Nulls are, though.”
“I don’t want to declare my love for Ordo, thanks.”
“Okay. Try… ni kar’tayli gar darasuum.”
She repeated it under her breath a few times. “Got it.”
“It’s the same word as ‘to know,’ ‘to hold in the heart,’ kar’taylir. But you add darasuum, forever, and it becomes something rather different.”
“That tells me a great deal about the Mandalorian view of relationships.”
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