Earlier, he had taken charge of his division, met with his brigade, battalion, and company commanders, introduced himself to the troopers, inspected them in ranks, and asked probing questions about their armor, equipment, and weapons. Grudo had had him bone up on these things and read the readiness reports the division’s commanders had submitted.
“You’re their leader,” he had said. “Soldiers don’t respect a commander who doesn’t know their weapons, equipment, and tactics better than they do. But remember this: all the clones are like brothers—twin brothers—and all clones think they’re the best. They work best under their own officers; they wouldn’t fight under me. Under you, yes, of course—you’re a Jedi. But although they respect you as a Jedi, now you must show them they can respect you as a soldier like them. You have to show them before we go into battle that you know what you’re doing.”
Anakin had done his best, and Grudo had been impressed with his handling of the troops. Now, as he headed for the Teyr, he was feeling more confident, eager to meet the clone commandos who were to be his to command.
The captain in charge of the commandos called them to attention when Anakin entered their bay.
Anakin traded salutes with the captain. “At ease!” he commanded. He spread his legs slightly and clasped his hands behind his back as he scanned the soldiers before him. There were two sergeants in the group, judging by the green markings on their armor.
“I am Commander Anakin Skywalker,” he began. “You have been assigned to the Second Division, which I command. You will serve as part of my headquarters battalion, under my personal direction. Captain, you will not report to or receive orders from any other officer during this campaign. I will assign you missions as required by the tactical situation on Praesitlyn. I will not ask you to do anything that I wouldn’t do myself. Is that clear?”
“Arrrrruuuhh!” the troopers shouted in unison, coming to attention with a loud slamming of boots on the deck. The compartment echoed with their shouts.
The captain permitted himself a slight smile. “My troopers are ready, sir!” he reported.
Anakin glanced at Grudo, whose face was pulled down in the Rodian smile. “Captain, have the troopers fall out and fall in by their assigned bunks. I wish to inspect their armor, weapons, and equipment.”
Anakin spent the rest of the night inspecting the troopers. He found no dust, grease, or dirty weapons. Throughout the inspection, the captain followed Anakin with a datapad at the ready, but he was never told to enter anything.
On the way back to the Ranger, Grudo leaned over and told Anakin, “You did a good job with that inspection. You looked at everything you should, and weren’t petty, like some might have been. The troopers appreciate that. They’ll fight well for you, I can tell.”
Feeling his chest swell with pride and excitement, Anakin swiftly ran through the Jedi Code in his mind: There is no emotion; there is peace…A Jedi does not act for personal power…He was here to do a job—and what was more, a job that would cost soldiers their lives. He would do well to remember his training, he told himself. He was a Jedi, and he would do the Order proud. Taking a deep breath, he reached out to the Force, seeking serenity…
11
Someone was pouring water over Odie’s face. The water was warmer than normal human body temperature, but to her it was as sweet and cool as any mountain freshet, heavenly balm to her blistered face and cracked lips, and she gulped it down for what it was: life. She luxuriated in the cooling wetness and tried to laugh, but her voice wouldn’t work. She opened her eyes and saw a shadowy figure bending over her.
She tried to speak, and managed to croak, “Erk.”
“Yes,” the shadowy figure standing over her said.
“Erk?” she said again, mustering what she could of her returning strength to get the name out. But the voice that responded was strange. “Who are…” was all she could get out.
“Sergeant Omin L’Loxx at your service,” the shadow replied. “Who did you expect?”
“Pilot,” she gasped.
“The flyboy? We’re pumping him up, too. We put him under another shelter, give you room to breathe under here. My partner is Corporal Jamur Nath. Come on, can you get up? We’re taking a big chance hanging around out here like this. There are droid patrols all over the place.” He poured more liquid into Odie’s mouth.
She felt less groggy and managed, with a little bit of help, to sit up. She looked around, but didn’t see anybody other than Erk and the two recon troopers. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Scouting. The Separatists have patrols out all over the place, looking for weak spots to hit. It’s our job to find them and disrupt their plans—and report any maneuver units we find trying to circle our positions.” He changed the subject. “I see by what’s left of your gear that you’re a recon trooper. Where’s your speeder?” He lifted her head gently and gave her more to drink, then shook the canteen. It was almost empty. “You sucked up a full two liters. It’ll bring you around in no time. Good thing you two aren’t one of the other species. This stuff is brewed up special for humans—restores fluids, electrolytes, minerals, all sorts of stuff you lose through dehydration. What happened to you two? If you hadn’t fired that shot, we’d never have known you were here, and you’d both be dead by now.”
Brokenly, Odie explained what had happened. “I—I don’t remember firing a shot,” she stammered.
“Well, must’ve been your boyfriend over there. Or you just don’t remember doing it. When you get into the last stages of death by dehydration you hallucinate all over the place. But I suppose you know that. We saw the flash and came to investigate. Whoever it was fired straight up into the air. We figured it was a signal.”
Odie wanted to deny that Erk was her “boyfriend” but didn’t have enough energy, so she let the man’s observation pass. Instead, she asked, “Wh-who are you?”
“I’m a recon trooper, just like you. Were you part of the garrison here? Poor devils. Come on, let’s get you on your feet and moving. You can ride on the back of my speeder. That sidearm of yours. Can you use it?”
“Y-yes. But where’d you come from? You weren’t part of General Khamar’s army.”
“No, we weren’t. We’ll explain everything later. Right now my first priority is to get out of this desert and back into our positions before one of their patrols spots us. While you were coming to, I reported in and got orders to bring you in immediately. Come on, take my hand, let’s get going.”
Odie staggered slightly as she stepped out from under the shelter half, involuntarily raising a hand to shield her eyes from the brilliant sunlight.
“Here,” L’Loxx said, handing her a helmet, “put it on. It’s a spare.” Gratefully, Odie donned the helmet, a standard recon trooper’s multipurpose field operating unit. She was feeling much better now. Expertly, she adjusted the helmet’s features. There stood Erk with the other trooper beside his speeder. It was like seeing two old friends again, Erk and the speeder. The latter was almost the image of her own machine.
“You ride with me, trooper,” L’Loxx said. “Come on!” he called to Corporal Nath. “Let’s get out of here!” Rapidly, L’Loxx repacked some of the gear on his speeder to make room for Odie. “Hold tight,” he cautioned, “we’re not going to waste any time getting back to base.” Odie knew from the instant the sergeant put his machine into motion that he was an expert.
Cautiously, L’Loxx guided them over some extremely rough terrain. He stopped below the crest of a long ridge. “Just below us is a dried-up riverbed. We’ll follow that almost all the way back. Do you know it?”
“Yes. Your base is near the Intergalactic Communications Center?”
“Right. We occupy the center and the foreground below the plateau. We’re dug in in front of them—our rear is in this direction. Their fleet can’t intervene because ours is holding them too close. The first day we fought off waves of battle droids, but we held our lines. Now we’ve settled down
into positional warfare, sniping at each other and sending out patrols to find weak places in the lines. It’s a standoff. Whoever gets reinforcements first wins.”
“Are reinforcements coming?”
“Ours? I don’t know. Our commander sent a message to Coruscant before we attacked, before we entered the zone where the enemy managed to block all other transmissions. Theirs? Yeah, they probably planned big reinforcements before they attacked. All right. Draw your weapon. I’ll drive, you shoot.”
Odie drew her blaster and took it off safe. “I’m ready,” she said, more strongly than she felt.
“Listen up,” L’Loxx said over the tactical net. “We have a long ride ahead of us. If we meet up with enemy patrols we have one advantage. We have an extra person on each speeder who can shoot while the other maneuvers. You can shoot, right, flyboy?”
“Sure can, dirt-eater,” Erk snapped back. “So can my copilot there.”
L’Loxx grinned. “Well, I guess you rescued us then, huh? The enemy is riding seventy-four-Zs. Your ‘copilot’ knows what that means if it comes to a running fight.”
Odie groaned. She certainly did know what that would mean.
“But we aren’t getting into any fights,” L’Loxx continued. “We’re taking it easy and we’re playing it very cool. So follow me.”
They descended rapidly into the riverbed. The bottom was strewn with boulders and debris. In some places water had cut deep, narrow gorges that temporarily blocked out the sunlight; in others it had meandered over the flat country, fully exposed to the surrounding terrain. Still, the banks were high enough that if they moved carefully they could find a degree of cover. They traveled that way for half an hour.
They were attacked at a point where the river rose to the surface in a floodplain. The first bolt sizzled between Odie and L’Loxx so close it singed the cloth on his shirt and burned the tip of her nose as it passed. For the briefest instant Odie wondered what had happened; then instinct honed by training took over. She swiveled and fired in the direction the shot had come from—and then she saw them: three 74-Z speeders coming like the wind across the floodplain. L’Loxx jumped his speeder over the low bank and gunned it directly at the attackers. Badly aimed blaster bolts sizzled past them. Odie leaned around his right side and snapped off two more blasts. She could clearly see one hit a speeder, but its armor absorbed the energy and bled it out onto the sand as an electrical discharge. The other hit the rider she had aimed at, and he flipped backward over the tail of his machine.
“Whooie!” someone—it sounded like Erk—yelled over the comm. Odie glanced to her left. A few meters behind them and a bit off to the side she could see Erk leaning forward around Corporal Nath’s side, firing methodically at the two remaining enemy speeders. The four racing speeders threw up tails of dust that hung suspended in the still air behind them.
“Break! Break!” L’Loxx shouted. He swerved to the right so sharply that Odie’s knee scraped the ground as he roared around the oncoming troopers. The maneuver confused the attackers. Behind them, instantly and at two hundred kph, L’Loxx aimed his speeder at the closest enemy rider, who broke to his left sharply. L’Loxx followed him around, keeping close on his tail. Odie kept firing, but her bolts disappeared harmlessly into the enemy speeder’s armor. Still, it forced the enemy trooper to keep his head down and concentrate on maneuvering his machine, so he couldn’t return the fire.
A huge cloud of dust rose up to cover the melee as the speeders pirouetted desperately around each other, seeking to ram their opponents or gain an opening for a shot that would count. Flashes from blaster bolts ripped through the curtains of dust so that anyone observing from a distance might have thought the cloud was pulsating with an energy and life of its own. The dust, thick and choking in the windless air, clung to them like a second skin and blinded them. Suddenly, L’Loxx stopped his speeder and took off his helmet. Odie was taken aback by the utter silence.
“Where are they?” she whispered, swiveling her head, listening carefully for the sound of the other speeders. There was none. No firing, either; the only sound was the air rasping in their lungs.
“Good shot,” L’Loxx whispered, meaning the one with which Odie had hit the first enemy trooper. “I can’t raise my partner,” he added. “He must be down.”
Odie pushed her helmet back behind her ears so she could hear better. It was then she felt the gentlest of breezes passing by her face. She looked up. The sun penetrated the dust like a small golden ball, but gradually it grew brighter. The cloud was dissipating. The two tensed like threatened feral beasts, not sure if they’d have to attack or run.
The wind grew stronger and the dust began clearing rapidly. Like a curtain being rolled back from a stage whereon a tragedy was about to unfold, the dust cloud trailed away on the wind to reveal, not ten meters from where they were standing, an enemy trooper sitting on his speeder. He was looking away from them.
Before Odie could swing around and fire, L’Loxx leapt off the speeder, sprinted across the space between them, and smashed into the enemy trooper. Odie could clearly hear the crash as the two slammed into the dirt. The enemy trooper was big, and he wasn’t human. The two grunted and cursed in different languages as they rolled in the dust, but the advantage was with the enemy trooper, who wasn’t as stunned as L’Loxx had thought.
Odie ran up and leveled her blaster at them. “Surrender or I’ll shoot!” she shouted. No good. She risked hitting L’Loxx if she fired. She holstered her piece and jumped into the fray.
The enemy trooper grunted as Odie’s weight came down on his back, but he didn’t loosen his grip on L’Loxx’s throat. He stood up slowly, holding L’Loxx by the neck with one arm and shaking him. With the other hand, he reached over his shoulder, grabbed Odie by the head, and wrenched her off his back. He flung her away like a doll; she crashed and rolled in the dust, stunned. He dropped L’Loxx to the ground, put a massive foot on his chest, and drew a macelike weapon from his belt. L’Loxx lay half stunned, gasping for breath. The enemy trooper, a Gamorrean, whirled the mace around his head several times, grunting victoriously in his own language. L’Loxx groped for his blaster, but he’d lost it in the struggle. He grabbed the foot pinning him to the ground and tried to wrench it to the side, but the Gamorrean was too strong for him to budge.
A blaster bolt hit the Gamorrean in the right pectoral. He grunted in pain and dropped the mace. With his left hand he drew his own sidearm and fired. Odie was finally able to get off a shot and hit him squarely between the shoulders. A parasitical morrt fastened behind the Gamorrean’s left shoulder detached itself and burrowed into the sand as its host staggered, whirled, and fired back, but his shot went wild and hit L’Loxx’s speeder instead. Another bolt hit the Gamorrean in the lower spine, forcing him to his knees. Unable to turn around and shoot back, he fired again in the direction where Odie lay. But now L’Loxx found his blaster and he put three quick bolts into the Gamorrean, who finally crumpled to the ground and lay still.
Erk walked up, his blaster covering the downed Gamorrean. “You picked the wrong guy to tangle with,” he said. With one arm he helped L’Loxx to his feet, keeping his blaster trained on the still form of the Gamorrean. “How many bolts did that guy absorb before he went down?” he asked in awe.
Odie limped up. “Five, at least. I think he’s still breathing. Are you all right?” She broke into a great grin as if she’d only just now recognized the pilot standing there.
“Where’s my trooper?” L’Loxx asked before Erk could say anything.
“I’m sorry, Sarge, the bad guy shot him. I dropped him with one shot. I’m sorry about your man, I really am.”
L’Loxx nodded. “My speeder is trash, but we now have two serviceable seventy-four-Zs. I’m going to collect my partner’s body. You come with me, Odie, and bring back the other seventy-four-Z. Flyboy, you stay here. I don’t know if they reported us or not before they attacked.” He nodded at the prostrate Gamorrean. “Our long-distance transmissions
are blocked, so maybe theirs are, too. But we’d better move out smartly, just in case. Where’d you leave Jamur?”
Erk pointed. “That way, about half a kilometer.”
“All right. You wait for us here.”
“I need those reinforcements, my lord,” Pors Tonith said to the image of Count Dooku floating in front of him.
The Count’s somber features twitched in annoyance. “I thought I told you to deal with Commander Ventress on all operational matters.”
“This operation will fail without those reinforcements,” Tonith continued, ignoring Dooku’s displeasure.
“You will learn to follow my orders.” At Dooku’s meaningful look, Tonith blanched. He remembered another time Dooku had taught him a lesson. At that time, he’d experienced a sudden shortness of breath as if a great weight had been placed on his chest. He’d struggled to draw in air. As quickly as the seizure had come over him, it had passed. Dooku wasn’t near enough to use the Force against him now, but Tonith knew he’d suffer in the future if he persisted.
“I am following your orders, my lord,” he said hastily. “They are to capture and secure this planet. The plan you devised for this campaign, which I’ve followed to the letter, called for immediate reinforcement once that was done. I repeat, lord, where are they? This rogue force is causing me problems, and if it is reinforced before I am, we will lose Praesitlyn.”
Dooku’s image floated silently before Tonith for a long interval before he replied. “They are on the way. Why did you not foresee this intervention?”
Tonith caught his breath. Now he was being blamed for not anticipating what had happened? Monstrous! Blast the Count. But he replied calmly, “It was one of the great imponderables of war, my lord, but we still hold the Intergalactic Communications Center intact. But I have lost many droids, and can replace only a few of those losses from my repair shops. For every one of them we kill, they destroy five or six of my droids.”
Star Wars: Jedi Trial Page 9