Republic Commando: Triple Zero

3

MRU. Already committed.

–Much Regret Unable, signal relayed from CO, RAS Fearless, on receipt of request to withdraw to Skuumaa and abort extraction of Sarlacc Battalions

The windchill factor in the open troop bay of a LAAT/c gunship flying at five hundred kph was sobering, but then so was the deafening roar of air and the swoops and dips of the flight path as the pilot jinked to stop ground-based AA fire from getting a lock.

Etain realized why the troopers' sealed armor and body-suit was a good idea. She had only her Jedi robes and the sensible precaution of upper-body armor plates, which did little to insulate on their own. She summoned the Force to help her withstand the icy blast and made sure her safety line was hooked securely to the bulkhead rail.

“You're going to be in the dwang when you get back to HQ, General,” the clone trooper sergeant said with a grin. He slipped on his helmet and sealed it. His nickname was Clanky. She'd made a point of asking.

“I really did not see the signal,” she said carefully. “Or at least I looked at it a little too late.”

His voice emerged now from the projection unit of the anonymous helmet. “It was very funny, signaling MRU.”

“Funny? Oh …”

There was a frozen pause. “It's how you decline a social invitation, an RPC.Request the Pleasure of your Company? Much Regret Unable.”

Yes, she was in the dwang indeed, as he put it. She wasn't fully up to speed with the mass of acronyms and slang that had erupted in the last year. She could hardly keep up with the clone troopers' inventiveness: their extraordinary capacity to appropriate language and habits and shape them to their needs had spawned subcultures of clone identity everywhere. She almost felt she needed a protocol droid.

But she knew what a larty was. Darman had said the LAAT/i—or in this case, the bigger cargo variant—was the most beautiful vessel imaginable when you needed an urgent lift out of trouble. It certainly felt like it now.

MRU indeed. How could I be so stupid? So the troopers thought she was a smart-mouth like Fi, flourishing a little bravado. Instead, she was simply ignorant of the rapidly evolving and idiosyncratic jargon and used it carelessly. “I'm sure they'll forgive me if you pull this off, Sergeant.”

Her voice was drowned by the roar, and falling note of V-19 Torrent drives as two of the fighters streaked past them and disappeared into the distance. They were heading off to soften the droid positions that stood between the heavily forested terrain where both Sarlacc Battalions were pinned down and there was a narrow ribbon of delta shoreline where pilots could land. Droids, as Darman had once pointed out, were rubbish in dense forests.

Etain hoped so.

The gunship dropped suddenly, now level with the tree canopy, and the streaked image of green foliage showed her just how fast they were flying. Another larty came up on their port side. There were thirty-four gunships somewhere near, strung out in a loose formation, heading for the extraction zone.

“Three minutes, General,” the pilot's cockpit intercom said. There was a crack and flare of something exploding off to their starboard side. “Getting some attention from the tinnies' triple-A, so we'll drop a little more. Hold tight.”

It hardly made her flinch now. She had reached the saturation level of adrenaline where she was vividly aware of every hazard but running on some primeval automatic level of painless cold reason—too scared to panic, as one of the clone troopers had described it.

Three minutes became three hours became three seconds.

Red blasterfire from droids lit up the tree line as the larty banked to come around in a spiral descent. Etain didn't think, and she didn't feel, and she simply jumped the last ten meters from the open deck over the fast-roping four-man squad of clone troopers and the green-trimmed sergeant. Force skills came in very useful at the most unlikely times. She landed in front of the squad and brought the conc rifle up level—one hand on the stock, the other on the barrel grip—to sweep the forest edge in front of her.

She felt other gunships landing all around them, whipping up soil and leaves, but she saw only what was in front—about two platoons of Sarlacc men exchanging fire with super battle droids on the edge of the clearing—and her squad to either side of her.

A spread of ten EMP grenades from the squad and a volley from her conc brought half the super battle droids to a halt. It was at times like this that she longed for the comlink convenience of a helmet instead of one strapped to her arm in just the wrong place: the Force was short on specifics like SBD strength one hundred units, closing up at green twenty. And there was so much chaos and pain in the Force right then that she couldn't harness it to focus.

So she did what she had been drilled to do without thinking since she was four years old. She fought.

She ran, the squad matching her pace and firing a blue stream into the droid line in odd silence until Clanky activated his voice projector and she heard him say, “—they're closing up all along the shoreline. Sorry, General! Big holes now in the droid lines.”

“No link,” she said, superfluous words stripped from her mind. The concussion rifle was getting heavy and running out of charge: the power indicator was edging back down to zero. Two more volleys knocked three SBDs flat and a small tree with them. “How many more?”

“Forward Air Control says two hundred SBDs and tanks bearing twenty degrees with four Torrents on their case—”

More V-19s screamed low overhead and a yellow-fringed ball of white fire backlit the forest, suddenly throwing silhouetted trees and running men into sharp contrast. Fearless's air group commander certainly had a grip on the reality of the situation. No wonder everybody loved pilots.

Clanky dropped flat and began firing prone at the stream of SBDs that had turned toward the gunship landing area. Etain followed him without thinking. He was listening to data in his helmet, judging by his occasional emphatic nod.

“Sarlacc's breaking out all along the shoreline, General, and Fearless is directing the rest of the larties north.”

“Any word on General Vaas Ga?”

Clanky went silent for a moment, to her at least. “One klick north with Commander Gree, calling in air strikes.”

Two gunships moved in close enough to catch Etain's peripheral vision and knots of men broke from the trees, some carrying wounded comrades between them. Etain hoped the single IM-6 medical droid on each larty could handle the triage of dozens of men at once. One gunship set down again at right angles to the tree line, its starboard hatch shut tight and taking droid fire that scattered sparks while it trained composite beam lasers on the SBDs.

The starboard gunner—horribly exposed in the transparisteel bubble set in the wing—was hosing the droids at waist height. Etain saw movement and white-armored shapes race behind the vessel and disappear, presumably into the port side of the troop bay. The torrent of comp beam laser was like a freeze-frame in its unbroken, steady stream.

For a slow-motion moment Etain reasoned: using the forward cannon and deploying the heavier and nastier armaments—radiation burst missiles—would cause heavy trooper casualties in this position. Her mouth was dry, her heart pounding so fast that she could hardly distinguish between beats, and yet she could stop the chrono to think these odd things.

She resumed firing. She held her fingers tight on the trigger until the conc died in her hands.

“Whoa, tinnies breaking this way—”

Her focus narrowed. She no longer saw the five men around her except as white blurs and vortices of raw energy in the Force. The lead battle droid overran their position and she simply swung the dead rifle in a Force-driven arc right up into the thing's chest, smashing the alloy and sending the droid's sunken head assembly flying into the air.

She was suddenly aware of blue energy behind the next droid like a continuous backdrop, although it had to be interrupted bursts of DC-15 fire. She let the cone rifle drop and drew her lightsaber because she had nothing else left.

The blade of blue light sprang into life and she didn't recall touching the control at all. She swept her arm around in a clean arc that brought the mountain of metal down without its legs, tipping like a felled tree to one side of her, falling flat on its firing arm and shuddering as its own discharging weapon tore it apart. Hot shrapnel sizzled on her robes and skin but she felt nothing.

And she was on her feet now, lightsaber gripped in both hands, point-blank with the next droid. She saw two of her squad blasting away from a prone position while Clanky scrambled to one knee to fire a grenade into the advancing rank of a dozen SBDs.

Droids kept advancing. So did clone troopers. And so did she.

We're all the same. None of us is thinking. We're just reacting.

She fended off a barrage of red fire, whirling and flicking the lightsaber without conscious decision. Each snazzz of colliding energy was the first and last: she went on, and on, and on, blocking each shot as if it would never end. And the next droid was upon her. She slashed. Cables and alloy fragments showered her. A white-gauntleted fist grabbed her shoulder and pulled her bodily out of the way.

“Bang out, General, the larty's ready to lift” Clanky almost had to drag her off the pile of shattered droids and shove her into a run toward the gunship. “We've done all we can here and the bay's full. Go! Run!”

She grabbed the cone rifle as she ran back, retracing their line of advance, blind on adrenaline. But at the gunship's platform she still stopped dead, one foot on the edge of the rail, to look back and count men passing her. One—two—three—four troopers, and Clanky. All accounted for. She sprang up just as an armored hand gripped hers and yanked her inboard. She had no idea who the trooper was. But he was one of hers now.

The gunship lifted in a straight vertical so fast that her stomach plummeted back to ground level.

The forest and fertile delta plain of Dinlo shrank beneath the ship and grew dark. The bay hatches slid forward and slammed shut. Then she was standing in a warehouse of scorched, filthy armor and the stench of blood and seared flesh. Her primeval survival mechanisms yielded to shaking anticlimax.

Clanky pulled off his helmet and their eyes met, an odd moment that was almost a glance in a mirror: she knew that the unblinking wide-eyed shock on his face was exactly what he was seeing on hers. Instinctively, they both reached out to clasp forearms and their grips locked for a second or two. Clanky was also shaking.

Then they parted and turned away. It was synchronous.

Yes, Etain thought. We're just the same, all of us.

It was very, very quiet once she blocked out the thrum of the gunship's drive as it made 660 kph—off the dial—back to Fearless.

And no, the IM-6 droid could not deal with forty men crammed into a modified bay better suited to thirty, not if a quarter of them were injured.

Then, when Etain listened more carefully and her adrenaline had ebbed, she realized the bay wasn't as quiet as she had thought. There was ragged breathing and stifled yelps of pain and—the worst, this—incoherent whimpering that peaked to a crescendo of a single stifled scream and trailed off again.

She picked her way across the bay, stepping over men who were crouching or kneeling. Propped against the bulkhead, a clone trooper was being held in a sitting position by a brother. His helmet and chest plate were removed and Etain needed no med droid to provide a prognosis for a chest wound that was producing blood on his lips.

“Medic?” She whipped around. “Medic! Get this man some help, now!”

The med droid appeared as if from nowhere, jerking bolt upright from a knot of troopers where it was obviously working. Its twin photoreceptors trained on her.

“General!”

“Why is this man not being attended to?”

“Triage X,” the droid said, dropping down into the unbroken carpet of troopers again to resume its first aid.

Etain should have known. The red X symbol glowed on his shoulder. She hoped the man hadn't heard, but he probably knew anyway, because that was the unsentimental way the Kaminoans had presented their training to the clones. Triage code X: too badly injured. Not expected to survive despite intervention. Concentrate resources on code 3, then code 5.

She took a breath and reminded herself that she was a Jedi, and there was more to being a Jedi than wielding a lightsaber. She knelt down beside him and grabbed his hand. The grip he returned was surprisingly strong for a dying man.

“It's okay,” she said.

She reached out in the Force to get some sense of the injury, to shape it in her mind, hoping to slow the hemorrhage and hold shattered tissue together until the larty docked. But she knew as soon as she formed the scale of the damage in her mind that it wouldn't save him.

She had vowed never again to use mind influence on clones without their consent: she had eased Atin's grief, and given Niner confidence when he most needed it, both unasked for, but since then she had avoided it. Clones weren't weak-minded anyway, whatever people thought. But this man was dying, and he needed help.

“I'm Etain,” she said. She concentrated on his eyes, seeing behind them somehow into a swirl of no color at all, and visualized calm. She held out her hand to the trooper supporting his shoulders and mouthed medpacs at him. She knew they carried single-use syringes of powerful painkiller: Darman had used them in front of her more than once. “There's nothing to be afraid of. What's your nickname?”

“Fi,” he said, and it shocked her briefly, but there were many men called Fi in an army with numbers for names. His brother said no silently and held up spent syringes: they'd already pumped him full of what little they had. “Thank you, ma'am.”

If she could influence thought, she could influence endorphin systems. She put every scrap of her will into it. “The pain's going. The drug's working. Can you feel it?” If the Force had any validity, it had to come to her aid now. She studied his face, and his jaw muscles were relaxing a little. “How's that?”

“Better, thanks, ma'am.”

“You hang on. You might feel a bit sleepy.”

His grip was still tight. She squeezed back. She wondered if he knew she was lying and just chose to believe the lie for his own comfort. He didn't say anything else, but he didn't scream again, and his face looked peaceful.

She rested his head on her shoulder, one hand between his head and the bulkhead, the other still clutching his, and held that position for ten minutes, concentrating on an image of a cool pale void. Then he started a choking cough. His brother took his other hand, and Fi—a painful reminder of a friend she hadn't seen for months and might never see again—said, “I'm fine.” His grip went slack.

“Oh, ma'am,” said his brother.

Etain was aware in a detached way of spending the next twenty minutes talking to every single trooper in that bay, asking their names, asking who had been lost, and wondering why they stared first at her chest and then at her face, apparently bewildered.

She put her hand to her cheek. It stung. She brushed it and a fragment of alloy came away on her hand with fresh, bright blood. She hadn't felt the shrapnel until then. She aimed herself towards a familiar patch of green in the forest of grimy white armor.

“Clanky,” she said, numb. “Clanky, I never asked. Where do we bury our men? Or do we cremate them, like Jedi?”

“Neither, usually, General,” said Clanky. “Don't you worry about that now.”

She looked down at her beige robe and noticed that it was way beyond filthy: it was peppered with burns, as if she'd been welding carelessly, and there was a ragged oval patch of deep red blood from her right shoulder down to her belt, already drying into stiff blackness.

“Master Camas is going to fry me,” she said.

“He can fry us, too, then,” Clanky said.

Etain knew she'd think about the deftly evaded answer to her question sometime, but right then her mind was elsewhere. She thought of Darman, suddenly conscious that something was wrong: but something was always wrong for commandos on missions, and the Force was clear that Darman was still alive.

But the other Fi—the trooper—wasn't. Etain felt ashamed of her personal fears and went in search of men she could still help.

Bravo Eight Depot crime scene, Manarai, Coruscant, 367 days after Geonosis

Skirata took every clone casualty as a personal affront. His frustration wasn't aimed at Obrim: the two men respected each other in the way of time-served professionals, and Ordo knew that. He just hoped Obrim knew that Kal'buir didn't always mean the sharp things he said.

“So when are your people going to get off their shebse and tell us how the device got in here?” Skirata said.

“Soon,” Obrim said. “The security holocam was taken out in the blast. We're waiting on a backup image from the satellite. Won't be as clear, but at least we have it.”

“Sorry, Jailer,” Skirata said, still chewing, eyes fixed on the rubble. “No offense.”

“I know, comrade. None taken.”

It was another reason why Ordo adored his sergeant: he was the archetypal Mando'ad. A Mandalorian man's ideal was to be the firm but loving father, the respectful son learning from every hard experience, the warrior loyal to constant personal principles rather than ever-changing governments and flags.

He also knew when to apologize.

And he looked exhausted. Ordo wondered when he would understand that nobody expected him to keep up with young soldiers. “You could leave this to me.”

“You're a good lad, Ord'ika, but I have to do this.”

Ordo put one hand square on Skirata's back and one on Obrim's to steer them both a little farther from the scene of destruction, anxious not to make it obvious in front of the aruetiise—the non-Mandalorians, the foreigners, sometimes even the traitors—that his sergeant needed comforting. Waiting was the worst thing for Kal'buir's mood.

Obrim's comlink chirped. “Here we go,” he said. “They're relaying the image. Let's play it out to Ordo's link.”

The images emerged as a grainy blue aerial holo rising from the palm of Ordo's gauntlet, and they replayed it a few times. A delivery transport came up to the barrier and was waved in to land on the strip. Then the scene erupted in a ball of light followed by billows of smoke and raining debris.

The explosion blew out the transparisteel-and-granite walls of the Bravo Eight supply depot fifteen times before Ordo had seen enough.

“Looks like the device came in on that delivery transport,” Obrim said. Some of the recognizable debris scattered around the blast site confirmed that there had been a transport caught up in the explosion. “Nobody running away. So the pilot was inside, and …” He stopped to look down at data loading into his own 'pad. “I'm getting confirmation that it was a routine delivery and the pilot was a regular civilian driver. Nothing to suggest that it was a suicide mission, though. Just a routine run with some extra unwanted supplies.”

“Can we go back over the recordings from previous days?” Ordo said. “Just to see if anyone was doing a recce of vessels and movements in the run-up to this?”

“Archived for ten days. Won't be any better in terms of angle and clarity than this.”

“I'll still take it.”

Ordo looked to Skirata, who was silent and visibly angry, but clearly thinking hard. Ordo knew that calculating defocus all too well.

“Okay, the best lead we have right now is to track back the other way down the line—from confirmed explosives supply chains,” Kal said.

“Omega's on a TIOPS run checking that right now,” Ordo said. “They might come back with some suspects for Vau to work on.”

“I'm turning a blind eye to that, right?” said Obrim, a man who left the impression he would have given a lot to be back in the front line instead-of supervising others. “Because suspects are my part of ship to deal with. But I do have this annoying eyesight problem lately.”

“Long-term condition?” Skirata asked, moving Ordo out of his way with a gentle pat on the forearm.

“As permanent as you want it to be, Kal.”

“Make it incurable for the time being, then.”

Skirata picked his way past the forensics team, who were still setting marker holotags at various points in the rubble: red holos for body parts, blue for inorganic evidence. Ordo wondered if the civilians who'd been gawking from behind the barrier would see anything about that on the HNE bulletin.

Skirata paused and leaned over a Sullustan technician who was sensor-scanning the rubble on hands and knees. “Can I have the armor tallies when you find them?”

“Tallies?” The Sullustan sat back on her heels and looked up at him with round black liquid eyes. “Explain.”

“The little sensor tags that identify the soldier. On the chest plates.” Skirata held finger and thumb a little apart to indicate the size. “There'll be fifteen around here somewhere.”

“We can sort the admin for you, Kal,” Obrim said. “Don't worry about all that.”

“No, it's not to account for them. I want a piece of their armor. To pay our respects, the Mando way.”

Ordo noted Obrim's puzzled expression. “Bodies are irrelevant to us. Which is just as well, really.”

Obrim nodded gravely and ushered them behind another plastoid screen where the SOCO team was assembling and logging fragments of alloy and other barely identifiable materials on a trestle table. “You can take over all this if you want.”

Skirata motioned Ordo across to the trestle. “It's Ordo's area, but I'm happy for your people to process it. I've got faith in Sullustan diligence.”

Maybe it was just Skirata indulging in harmless hearts and-minds work. But it seemed to do the job for the SOCO personnel.

One of them looked up. “It's good to know that military intelligence respects CSF.”

“I've never been called military intelligence before,” Skirata said, as if he hadn't realized that was what he had been doing every waking moment since five days after Geonosis.

Ordo held out one hand to the nearest scenes-of-crime officer and crooked a finger to gesture for their datapad. “You'll need this,” he said, and linked it to his own 'pad. “Here's our latest IED data.”

Yes, the CSF's anti-terrorism unit and Skirata's tight-knit team had become very close indeed in the last year. Going through official Republic security clearance channels just wasted time, and there was always the chance its civil servants would behave like petty fools across the galaxy and mark data as top secret for their own dreary little career reasons. Ordo didn't have time for that.

He was checking that the data had transferred cleanly when the hololink on the inner side of his forearm plate activated again and his hand was filled with a small scene of blue chaos.

For a split second he thought it was an image in his HUD, but it was external, and it was Omega Squad.

“Omega—Red Zero, Red Zero, Red Zero, over.”

The holoimage showed the four commandos pressed against a bulkhead with an occasional fragment of debris floating into view. They were all alive, anyway.

Skirata whipped around at the sound of Niner's voice and the code they all dreaded: Red Zero, request for immediate extraction.

Ordo switched instantly and without conscious thought into emergency procedure, capturing coordinates from the message and holding up his datapad so that Skirata could see the numbers and open a comlink to Fleet. Their language changed: their voices became monotone and quiet, and they slipped into minimal, direct speech. The SOCO team froze to watch.

“Sitrep, Omega.”

“Target's boarded. Unplanned decompression, and our pilot and the TIV are missing. No power, but no squad casualties.”

“Fleet, Skirata here, we have a Red Zero. Fast extraction please—on these coordinates. Pilot down, too, no firm location.”

“Stand by, Omega. We're scrambling Fleet assistance now. Time to critical?”

“Ten minutes if we don't get the hatch on this side of us open, maybe three hours if we do.”

Skirata stopped, comlink still held to his mouth. Obrim was staring at the little blue hologrammic figures with the expression of a man realizing something terrible.

We could be watching them as they die.

“Go on,” Ordo said.

“Three suspects the other side of that hatch, and they can't open it now even if they wanted to. Dar's got to blow it.”

“In a confined space?”

“We've got the armor.”

Well, that was true: Fi had withstood a contact blast from a grenade in Mark II armor. “You don't have any choice, do you?”

“We've had worse days,” Fi said cheerfully.

Ordo knew he meant it. He could feel the other part of him, the Ord'ika who wanted to cry for his brothers, but he was very distant, as if in another life: there was just absolute cold detachment in the physical shell where his mind was situated now.

“Do it,” he said.

“The Red Zero's been transmitted to all GAR ships in striking distance,” Skirata said. Ordo didn't want him to watch the hololink in case things didn't go as planned, and turned his back to him. But Skirata turned him around by his arm and stepped into the holo pickup's field of view so the squad could see him. “I'm here, lads. You're coming home, okay? Sit tight.”

There was a certainty about Skirata regardless of how impossible that assurance sounded in cold reality. But Ordo could feel his utter helplessness, and shared it: Omega was light-years from the Coruscant system, far beyond the sergeant's ability to step into the firing line in person. The two soldiers turned together to shield the holoimage, and then Obrim moved in close, diplomatically blocking the view of his own team.

“Your lad Fi,” he said, “—my boys still want to buy him that drink.”

It was Obrim's men Fi had saved from the grenade. And that was probably as openly sentimental as Jailer Obrim would ever be.

“In five,” Darman said. “Four …”

Like a HoloNet drama whose budget hadn't run to a decent set, the image in Ordo's cupped hand showed the squad curling themselves against the far bulkhead, grasping conduit to anchor themselves in zero-g, heads tucked to their chests and hunkering down.

The image disappeared as Niner—whose gauntlet obviously carried the holofeed—buried his head, too.

“Three, two, go!”

The picture flared into a ball of blue light and the silent explosion looked even more like a poor-quality holovid whose audio track had failed.

The holoimage dimmed for a moment and then the squad's jet packs ignited and they surged forward in free fall, rifles raised, and the video feed broke up into wildly random movement with two more blinding flashes.

“Okay, three bandits down, not slotted, not fragmented, but not very happy either,” said Fi's voice, clearly relieved. “And oxygen.”

“Nice one, Omega.” Skirata had his eyes shut for a moment. He pinched the bridge of his nose hard enough to leave a temporary white mark. “Now take it easy until we get to you, okay?”

Obrim's face was ashen. “I wish the public realized what those boys do,” he said. “I hate kriffing secrecy sometimes.”

“Shabu'droten,” Skirata muttered, and walked away. No, he didn't care much for the public at all.

“What's that mean?” Obrim asked.

“You don't want to know,” said Ordo, mulling over Jusik's tenuous analysis of the Force around the blast scene. The enemy was never here.

So … maybe there was nobody watching.

There was nobody waiting for precisely the most damaging moment to detonate the device from nearby.

Remote detonation of a moving device required one of two things: either a very good view of the target, or, if the target wasn't visible, a precise timetable so the terrorist would know exactly where the device might be at any given time.

And that meant either a very good knowledge of GAR logistics, or—if the terrorist wanted to see the whole area, not just the immediate base—access to security holo networks.

Ordo felt a sudden cool clarity settle in his stomach, a satisfying sense of having learned something new and valuable.

“Gentlemen,” he said. “I think we have a mole.”

RAS Fearless: hangar deck

Clanky kept a tight grip on Etain's upper arm until she felt the drag of deceleration and the thud through the soles of her boots as the gunship docked in Fearless's hangar.

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