The Gurlanin twitched visibly. "I wasn't offering, but if there was anything I might do—"
"You've done more than enough already." Darman tilted his head this way and that, studying the plans. "The main drain chamber is nearly a hundred centimeters wide here, though. It only tapers to thirty centimeters at the wall. Is there any other way of getting into that main?"
"Short of walking up to the wall and digging under it like a gdan, in full view of the droids, no."
Jinart sat upright. "Gdan warrens."
"They tunnel, don't they?"
"Everywhere. They even cause subsidence."
"Are there tunnels around there? Could we locate them? Would they be wide enough?"
"Yes, there are warrens, because it was once a farm site and gdans like eating merlies. The tunnels can be quite wide. And I can certainly locate them for you. In fact, I will lead you through the warrens. You might have to excavate some of the way, though."
"Basic sapper procedure," Darman said. "Except we don't have proper equipment, so we'll be digging with these." He took a folding sharp-edged trowel from his belt. "Entrenching tool. Also used for 'freshers. Apt."
"What is it between you and the gdans?" Etain asked. "Why do they avoid you and your scent?"
"Oh, we eat them," Jinart said casually. "But only if they try to approach our young."
"That's it, then," Darman said. "Get me into that central chamber from below, and I'll work my way out through the facility."
"Take Atin with you," Niner said. He didn't want to say in case you get killed, but he wanted another technically minded man in there to lay charges and blow doors. "Fi and I can lay down fire out front and deal with any droids we see. When you bring Uthan out, Etain can help us get her clear and then you blow the place. Then we do a runner for the extraction point."
"Gets my vote," Atin said. "You okay with that, ma'am?"
Etain nodded reluctantly. "If that's plan C, it sounds as impossible as plans A and B." She patted Darman's arm, not quite focusing, as if she was lost in thought about something. "But I don't have a better suggestion."
"Okay," Niner said. "Everyone take a stim now. Be ready to move out at nightfall. We've got four hours to prep for this. I'll notify Majestic."
"What if this fails?" Etain asked.
"They'll send in another squad."
"And lose more men?" She shook her head. "If it's down
to me, I'll happily give the order for Majestic to pound this facility to dust, with Uthan inside or not."
"Do you think we're going to fail?"
Etain smiled. There was something mildly unnerving about the way she was smiling. "No. I don't. You're going to pull this off, believe me."
Niner kept a tight grip on his breathing. If he gave the slightest hint of a sigh of doubt, they'd pick it up. It was crazy. But, as Skirata said, they went where others wouldn't, and did what nobody else could.
And fighting your way out from the heart of an alloy-plated, heavily guarded facility designed to be impregnable to any life-form certainly lived up to that boast. For some reason he felt fine about it all.
You 're going to pull this off, believe me.
He wondered if his thoughts were actually his own. If Etain was influencing his mind to improve his confidence, that was okay by him. Officers were supposed to inspire you. Right then he didn't much care how she did it.
16
What do I think about it? I don't know, really. Nobody's ever asked me for my opinion before. ,
—Clone Trooper RC-5093, retired, at CF VetCenter Coruscant. Chronological age: twenty-three.
Biological age: sixty.
An autumnal mist had settled over the countryside. It wasn't dense enough to provide cover, but it did give Darman a sense of protection. He tabbed behind Atin as Jinart led the way.
He was a walking bomb factory. Why was he even worried about being spotted? The ram and its attachments clunked against his armor and he adjusted them, fearing discovery. Atin walked ahead, Deece held in both hands with his finger inside the trigger guard, a small but significant expression of his anxiety level.
"Matte-black armor," Darman said. "First thing we ought to slap in for when we get back. I feel like a homing beacon."
"Does it matter?"
"Does to me."
"Dar, it's one thing for the enemy to spot us coming. It's another thing entirely for them to do anything about it." Atin was still checking all around him, though. "I was knocked flat by a round and it didn't penetrate the plates."
Atin had a point. The armor might have been conspicuous, but it worked. Darman had taken a direct hit, too. Maybe in the future the sight of that armor alone would deter enemies,
a touch of what Skirata called assertive public relations. Myth, he said, won almost as many engagements as reality.
Darman was all for a little help from the myth department.
They were four hundred meters southeast of the facility. Jinart stopped in front of a gentle slope and thrust her head through a break in the foliage. Her sniffing was audible.
"We enter here," she said.
There didn't even appear to be a hole. "How do you know what's in there?"
"I can detect solid surfaces, movement, everything. I don't need to see." She sniffed again, or at least Darman assumed she was sniffing; it occurred to him that she might have been echolocating. "Do you want to stand here and present a target all night?"
"No ma'am," Darman said, and got down on all fours.
Jinart might not have needed to see, but he did. He could have relied on the night-vision visor, but he felt the need for real, honest light. He switched on his tactical spot-lamp. He switched it off again, fast.
"Uh..."
"What's wrong?" Atin asked.
"Nothing," Darman said. It was natural not to like confined spaces, he told himself. With the light projected forward, he could see just how suffocatingly small a space he was in. With his night vision in place, he was simply looking down a narrow field of view, safe inside his armor, cocooned from the world in a way he was not only used to, but actually needed.
Get a grip.
He could hear the sound of scurrying farther ahead, but it was moving away from him. His pack caught the roof of the tunnel, occasionally scraping loose soil and stones. The warren had been excavated by thousands of small paws, circular in section because gdans obviously didn't need as much floor space as a tall human male. Darman almost felt that his hands and knees were against the sides of the tunnel because of the curvature of the floor, like negotiating a chimney when rock climbing. At times he felt he was losing his orientation
and had to shut his eyes and shake his head hard to regain accurate proprioception.
"You okay, Dar?" Atin asked. Darman could hear labored breathing in his helmet and he thought it was his own, but it was Atin's.
"Bit disoriented."
"Let your head drop and look at the floor. The pressure on the back of your neck is going to make you feel giddy anyway."
"You, too, eh?"
"Yeah, this is weird. Whatever we inherited from Jango, it wasn't a love of caving."
Darman let his head hang forward and concentrated on putting one hand in front of the other. He switched to voice projection. "Jinart, why do such small animals dig such big tunnels?"
"Have you tried dragging a whole merlie or vhek home for dinner? Gdans work as a team. That's what enables them to take prey that's many times their size. A point, I think, that would not be lost on men such as yourselves."
"On the other hand," Atin said cautiously, "you could say that sheer numbers overwhelm strength."
"Thank you for that positive view, Private Atin. I suggest you select the interpretation that inspires you most."
They didn't talk much after that. As Darman progressed, sweating with the effort, he was aware of a particular scent. It was getting stronger. It was sickly at first, like rotting meat, and then more bitter and sulfurous. It r
eminded him of Geonosis. Battlefields smelled awful. The filtration mask was active against chemical and biological weapons, but it did nothing to stop smells. Shattered bodies and bowels had a distinctive and terrifying stench.
He could smell it now. He fought down nausea.
"Fierfek," Atin said. "That's turned me off my dinner for a start."
"We're near the facility," Jinart said.
"How near?" Darman said.
"That odor is seepage from the drainage system. The pipe work is local unglazed clay."
"Is that all we can smell?" said Darman.
"Oh, I imagine it's also the gdans. Or rather their recent kills—they have chambers where they amass their surplus. Yes, it's an unpleasant stench if you're not accustomed to it." She stopped unexpectedly, and Darman bumped into her backside. She felt surprisingly heavy for her size. "That's good news, because it means we're near a much larger chamber."
Darman almost felt relief that it was simply rotting meat, although that was bad enough. It wasn't his meat. He crawled farther, encouraged by the promise of a bigger space ahead, and then his glove sank into something soft.
He didn't need to ask what it was. He looked down despite himself. In the way of men exposed to memory triggers, he was immediately back in training, crawling through a ditch filled with nerf entrails, Skirata running alongside and yelling at him to keep going because this was nothing, nothing compared to what you'll have to do for real, son.
They called it the Sickener. They weren't wrong.
Fatigue made nausea inevitable. He almost vomited, and that wasn't something he wanted to do in a sealed suit. He fought it, panting, eyes shut. He bit the inside of his lip as hard as he could, and tasted blood.
"I'm okay," he said. "I'm okay."
Atin's breathing was ragged. He had to be feeling it, too. They were physiologically identical.
"You can straighten up now," Jinart said.
Darman flicked on his spot-lamp to find himself in a chamber that wasn't just larger; it was big enough to stand up in. The walls were lined with what looked like tiny terraces spiraling up around the chamber from the floor. There were scores of twenty-centimeter tunnels leading off them.
"This is where the gdans retreat if rain floods the warren," Jinart said. "They're not foolish."
"I'll thank them one day," Atin said. "How close are we to the drain? Can you locate it?"
Jinart put a paw against the wall where there were no tiny escape tunnels. "The gdans know there's a solid structure behind this." She paused. "Yes, there's water trickling back there. The soil feels a meter thick, perhaps a little more."
Darman would have removed his helmet, but thought better of it, and settled for letting his pack drop off his shoulders. He took out his entrenching tool and made an exploratory stab at the chamber wall. It was about the consistency of chalk.
"Okay, I do five minutes, then you do five," he said to Atin.
"And me," Jinart said, but Darman held up his hand to stop her.
"No ma'am. You'd better go back to Niner. We're on our own now, and if this all goes wrong he'll need your assistance even more."
Jinart hesitated for a moment, then raced back up the tunnel without a backward glance. Darman wondered if he should have said good-bye, but good-bye was too final. He planned on coming out that front door with Atin and Uthan.
He scraped out a guide circle with the tip of the tool and hacked into the hard-packed soil. It felt like slow going and he was surprised when Atin tapped him on the shoulder and took over. A man-sized hole began to emerge.
"Should we shore this up?" Darman said, wondering what he might have to sacrifice as a pit prop.
"We should only be going through it once. If it collapses after that, it's too bad."
"If we have to blast our way in, it might collapse. Alternative exit?"
"You want to be pursued through those tunnels? They'd fry us. One flamethrower volley and we'd be charcoal."
Atin was slowing. Darman took the other side of the opening and they worked together, removing progressively damper and darker soil, flattening out the sides of the excavation so that they had access to drill through without having to lean through a short tunnel. It was weakening the integrity of the soil wall: Darman willed it to hold together until they were through.
Maybe he should have brought Etain. She could have held
the wall with that Jedi power of hers. Suddenly he realized that he missed her. It was amazing how fast you could form a bond with someone when you were under fire.
Atin's tool hit something that made a distinctive chink noise.
"Drain," he said. "Drill time."
A few quick rounds from the Deece would have blown a good-sized hole in the thickest clay pipe. It would also have brought down the chamber roof, Darman suspected, and summoned a lot of droids. It was time for the slow, quiet route. A hand drill was part of their basic rapid entry kit, and they each took half the rough circle, drilling at five-centimeter intervals around the circumference, starting from the top. It wasn't until they got down to the bottom that the ooze started appearing from the holes.
It had taken them an hour to excavate and drill. Darman couldn't stand the sweat trickling down his face any longer and took off his helmet. The stench really was worse than ever. He shut his mind to it.
Atin took a swig from his water bottle and held it out to Darman. "Hydration," he said. "Five percent fluid loss stops you thinking straight."
"Yeah, I know. And above fifteen percent kills you." Darman drank half the bottle, wiped the sweat away, and scratched his scalp vigorously. "Another thing to tell Rothana's geeks when we get back—up the temperature conditioning in these suits."
He lifted the ram and took a side-on stance to the disc of clay pipe visible through the soil. He gripped hard, fingers tight around each handle. He had to swing carefully this time or he might collapse the pipe. "Ready?"
"Ready."
One, two—
"Three," Darman grunted. The ram hit with a couple of metric tons of force and the perforated section fell inward as a waterfall of stinking dark slime shot out and splashed across Darman's legs and boots.
"Oh, that's just great," he sighed. "Definitely matte black next time, okay?"
Atin took his helmet off and Darman realized he was struggling not to laugh. Now that the drain was open to the air, it was a perfect conduit for sound to the building above. Atin put his hand to his mouth, bent over slightly, and appeared to be biting down hard on the knuckle plate. He was actually shaking. When he straightened up, tears were streaming down his face. He wiped them away and gulped, then bent over again.
Darman had never even seen the man smile. Now he was in hysterics because Darman was spattered with the accumulated waste of total strangers. It wasn't funny.
Yes, it was, actually. It was hilarious. Darman felt his stomach begin to shake in a completely involuntary reflex. Then he wasn't certain that it was funny, but he still couldn't stop. He shook in painfully silent laughter until his abdominal muscles ached. Eventually, it subsided. He straightened up, inexplicably exhausted.
"Shall I let Niner know we're through?" he said, and they both managed to stay completely calm for a count of three before the hysteria overtook them again.
Once you knew what laughter really was, and what primitive reflex triggered it, it wasn't funny at all. It was the relief of danger passed. It was a primeval all-clear signal.
And that wasn't the reality of their situation at all. The real danger was just starting.
Darman, suddenly his usual self again, replaced his helmet and opened the comlink.
"Sarge, Darman here," he said quietly. "We're into the drain. Ready when you are."
Niner and Fi set up the E-Web repeating blaster half a kilometer from the front of the facility. That was pretty close. If anyone had spotted them, they weren't reacting.
"Copy that, Dar." Niner checked the chrono on the forearm of his lef
t gauntlet. "Can you see the drainage cover yet?"
The comlink crackled. Niner was yet again faintly pleased with himself that he'd decided to take that trip to Teklet. They'd never have stood a chance of pulling this off in comm silence. There were too many unknowns to do it by op order and chronosynch.
"I just followed the trail of crud and there it was," Darman said. "Want a look?"
Niner's HUD flashed up a grainy green image of huge dripping tubes that could have been a klick wide or just a centimeter. Come to that, it could have been an endoscopic view of someone's guts. It didn't look like fun, either way.
"What's above you?"
"Dirty square plate and it's not a drain. The water's feeding down here from other pipes." The image jerked as Darman's head lowered to look at his datapad. It threw up eerie ghost images of the building. "If they stuck to the blueprints, then this is a hazmat filter and the maximum containment chambers are above it." There was a scraping noise. "Yeah, the serial numbers match the schematic. If they had to hose down after a mishap in there, this is where the screened water or solvent would come out."
"Are you going to need to blow it?"
"Well, it doesn't look as if I can unscrew it with a hairpin. It's permacreted in place. It's not the sort of thing you want coming loose, I suppose."
"Good timing for a spot of pyro at the villa, then. Let's sync that up."
"Okay. Give me a couple of minutes to set the charges."
Two minutes was a long time. Niner counted it down in seconds. He was aware of Etain pacing up and down behind him—but you didn't tell a commander to pack it in and stop fidgeting. He focused on Fi, who was kneeling behind the E-Web tripod, checking the sights, utterly relaxed. Niner envied him that ability. His own stomach was churning. It always did on exercise: it was much worse now. His pulse was pounding in his ears and distracting him.
Darman responded eleven seconds late. "All done. I'll count you down. We're moving back out of the drain now. If we bring the outer chamber down, then we might take a little time to work our way back in."
"What's a little time in your book?"
"Maybe forever. It might kill us."
Star Wars - Republic Commando - Hard Contact Page 23