And now he was close enough to see the face with the mouth wide open. The man had his arms folded tight across his chest. He was sobbing.
It was Jango Fett, many years before.
Hokan drew himself up on his knees and knelt a couple of meters from the wounded commando, absolutely astonished.
“I’m sorry, my brother,” he said. The lightsaber would have been fast, but it was a disgrace to use a Jedi weapon to kill a Mandalorian man. It was too much like reenacting Jango’s fate at Geonosis. Hokan drew his vibroblade instead. “It’s not your fault. They made you like this.”
The commando opened his eyes and focused at a point just past him, as Hokan had seen many dying men do. They all seemed to see ghosts at the final moment.
It was only then that Hokan heard the sound of a lightsaber. And it was too late.
“You cut that fine,” Niner said.
It was the only time Darman had ever seen him look shocked. He wiped his face with the palm of his glove.
“And where were you, Fi? Thanks a bunch. I could have been filleted. You were suppose to slot him.”
Fi searched through the decapitated Hokan’s jacket. “Ah, I could see Dar and Commander Etain behind him. I knew you were probably okay.” He paused, and the rifling grew more vigorous. “Here you go, ma’am. I think you ought to have this.” Fi handed a short cylinder back to Etain. It was Master Kast Fulier’s lightsaber. It was a matter of honor to return it. “They do work well against Mandalorian armor, don’t they?”
Etain didn’t seem remotely triumphant. She took the hilt and turned it over in her hand before placing it in her pocket. Darman wondered how long it would be before she sheathed her own lightsaber. She was still clutching it in one hand, its blue blade humming and shimmering as she trembled. She wasn’t focusing. Darman willed Fi not to make the obvious comment that killing someone with a lightsaber was nice and clean, no guts, no mess. For once he kept his gallows humor to himself, and simply walked a few paces away to recover the genuine Mandalorian helmet he had decided to appropriate.
“You want to put that away now, ma’am?” Darman said gently. “We’re done here.”
Niner got to his feet and saluted her in best formal parade fashion. “Thank you, Commander. You don’t mind me calling you that now, do you?”
She seemed to come back to the here and now. The shaft of blue light vanished.
“It’s an honor,” she said.
Darman called back on the comlink: General Zey had kept his word. The gunship was still waiting. They set off in column, picking up speed until they broke into a trot.
The gunship was surrounded by a skirt of billowing dust. Its drive had been idling so long that the heat of the down-draft had dried the top layer of soil.
Etain didn’t care if the ship had taken off. She hadn’t abandoned her squad. Nothing else mattered after that. And although she knew it had been a deliberate decoy, the sound of Niner screaming would haunt her forever. He must have heard that for real at least once in his life to have mimicked it so horribly well. She felt sick, and it was not because she had killed Ghez Hokan, and that filled her with shame.
She understood fully now why attachment was forbidden to Jedi.
The ARC trooper was pacing a slow, regular square, hands clasped behind his back, head down, and Etain would no longer make the assumption that he was lost in thought. He was probably listening to comm traffic in the private world of his helmet.
General Zey was sitting patiently on the ship’s platform. “Are you ready now?”
She held out Master Fulier’s lightsaber to him. “Omega Squad recovered it. I felt I should return it to you.”
“I know what you’re going through, Padawan.”
“But that’s no comfort, Master.”
“A concern for those under your command is essential. But it carries its own pain if you identify too much with your troops.” Yes, it did sound as if Zey had known that dilemma. “There are always casualties in war.”
“I know. But I also know them now as individuals, and I can’t change that. No clone trooper, no commando, not even an ARC trooper will ever be an anonymous unit to me now. I’ll always wonder who’s behind that visor. How can I be a true Jedi and not respect them as beings, with all that entails?”
Zey was studying his hands a little too carefully. “Every good commander in history has had to face that. And so will you.”
“If I’m a commander, then may I accompany them on their next mission?”
“I suspect that would not be for the best.”
“And what do I do now? How can I go back to everyday duties after this?”
“There are no everyday duties now we’re at war. I will not be leaving. I have come to do what work I can here.”
“Work?”
“What will happen to our allies—the Gurlanins—if we abandon them now, with enemy forces in the area? I’m here to operate with them, and try and make Qiilura as inhospitable to Separatists as we can.”
“I’m glad we’re honoring our commitment, Master.”
“You know this land better than anyone now. You would be a valuable asset here.”
“And when will more troops join you?”
“I’m afraid we’ll have to continue the covert work for the time being. We would need to disappear.”
We. Etain could think of nothing worse than staying on Qiilura, with its terrible memories and uncertain future. The nearest she had to friends was a squad of commandos who would be deployed on another mission within days. She would be working with a Master she didn’t know. She was alone again and scared.
“Etain, you have duties,” Zey said quietly. “We all have. We talk about duty when it’s easy, but living it is hard.” And he didn’t need to add what she knew he was thinking—that she needed to be separated from the object of her recent and desperate wartime attachment. She needed to let her squad go.
It was no different from what was asked of soldiers every day.
“I—I would like to play a useful role in the future of Qiilura, Master.” She hoped Darman wouldn’t think she was turning her back on him and that he was after all just a glorified droid to her, an asset to be used in battle and expended if necessary. “But I would still find it a comfort one day to know how Omega Squad is faring.”
“I understand,” Zey said. “The choice is yours, though. You can go with Omega Squad. Or you can stay. You might even request that one of the squad remain here.”
One of the squad. Maybe he thought she was just a girl who’d become too attached to a young man when neither of
them would ever be able to take the relationship farther. He was testing her, challenging her to make the choice a proper Jedi Knight should make. Yes, she had become close to Darman: he’d been the making of her. But she cared at an inexplicably fundamental level about all of them.
“I don’t think caring about your troops is a weakness,” she said. “The day we stop caring is the day we turn our back on the Force.”
She dug her nails into her palms. Zey was right, though. And it was going to hurt. She sat on the platform beside Zey in silence, eyes closed, composing herself.
The ARC trooper suddenly jerked his head up. “General, sir, we absolutely must go now.”
“General Zey,” Niner said, and touched his glove to his temple. “Sorry we kept you. Are we ready to lift?”
“We don’t have time for a mission debriefing, but perhaps you’d like a moment with your commander,” Zey said, and beckoned the ARC trooper to follow him. It was a gracious gesture. Etain watched him walk to the rear of the ship to offer her some privacy, apparently supervising the offloading of equipment. She wondered if they had managed to land Zey’s starfighter somewhere.
She’d worry about that later. She beckoned the commandos to her.
“What’s going to happen to you now?” she said.
“Next mission. Have they assigned us to you?”
She wondered whether a lie might
be in order. She looked at Darman. “Not exactly,” she said. “I’m staying here with General Zey.”
Darman and Niner both averted their eyes, looking at the ground, nodding as if in agreement. Fi raised his eyebrows. “I’m really going to miss you, Commander. Just when we were shaping up. Typical of the army, eh?” He rapped his knuckles on Niner’s back plate, pushing him a fraction toward the gunship. “Make a move, then, Sarge.”
“Hope to serve with you again, Commander,” Niner said, and saluted her. “And don’t ever think you didn’t earn that rank, will you?”
Etain wished they hadn’t left her alone with Darman. She wanted a quick exit with no time to think and make a stupid, emotional comment.
“I chose to stay,” she said. “I really would have liked to have stayed part of the team, but I’m not the officer you need.”
Darman said nothing. Of course: how could he ever have learned how to take his leave of a friend? All his brief life had been spent among his own kind, immersed in warfare real or virtual. This was where he became a ten-year-old child again. His embarrassment and confusion were palpable.
“You could remain here with me and General Zey,” she said. And I’d know you were safe. “You have that choice.”
He really was a child now. His eyes were fixed on the ground. He was flicking one of the switches on his rifle, back and forth, over and over.
“Just me, ma’am?”
She felt she was testing him now. “Yes.”
The gunship’s drive rose in frequency, a high whine: the pilot was more than impatient to leave.
“I’m sorry, Commander,” Darman said at last. For a moment, he really did seem to be considering it seriously. “I have a job to do.”
“I can’t pretend I won’t miss you,” she said.
Darman’s gaze didn’t flicker. “I’ve got about ten years left. But I’ll be with my brothers, doing what I do best. It’s all I’ve ever known—like going home, really.” He bent his head and snapped on his helmet, becoming one of the faceless again. “You take care, Commander.”
“And you,” she said, and watched him run to the platform and grasp Fi’s outstretched arm to be hauled inboard.
The drive roared into higher gear, and the gunship shook slightly.
Etain turned and walked away in a crouch to steady herself against the downdraft. She speeded up into a hunched run until she found a tree and sat down in the lee of it with her back to its trunk.
And she let the tears run down her face.
All that she was, and all that she would be in the future, was because a clone soldier had put such undeserved faith in her that she had become that Jedi he imagined she was. She could now harness the Force in a way she had never been able to at Fulier’s side.
She thought of that look of complete faith. She thought of his stoic acceptance of his duty and of the fact that his life would be brief and bright, whatever happened. He had never known a moment of self-pity. She had learned the most important lesson of all from him.
She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand and hoped Zey wasn’t watching.
Etain didn’t know if she would ever see Darman or Omega Squad again. She did know, though, that in days to come, every clone trooper or commando or ARC that she might have to order into battle would be neither anonymous, nor meaningless, nor expendable. Under that grim helmet was a man, someone just like her, a human being, but one without the freedom or the life span afforded to her.
Etain Tur-Mukan stood up and walked back into the clearing at the edge of the field to watch the gunship lift into the early-morning sky.
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