Part 16 (1/2)
”You don't know anything about peace,” said Atin. ”None of us does.”
Darman tried to lighten the mood. ”Ordo's been telling him stories again.” Sull was still waiting there. Darman wondered if he would have pulled the trigger on the ARC if he'd been ordered to. ”Never teach clones to read.”
”Ordo doesn't know anything about peace, either,” Atin said.
Darman felt he was equally ignorant, but he reserved the right to keep thinking about it. If the point was winning the war, then someone had to have thought what would happen to the army afterward.
”Do you think Sev's got a girlfriend?” Fi asked.
”If he has, she probably escaped from the Galactic City violent offenders' unit.” Darman nudged his brother. Come on, Fi, don 't obsess. ”Not your type.”
”I'd never hold it against a girl for being a psychopath.” Fi made a visible effort to be his other self. ”Can't be too picky.”
”Well, much as I love soaking up the wisdom of you great philosophers, I've got things to do.” A'den gestured to Dar-man to get up. ”Go retrieve Sull's kit. He'll tell you where he buried it. Meanwhile he's going to tell me all he knows about Eyat. Deal, Sull?”
The ARC shrugged. ”So you can wipe 'em out better?”
”If you've got a little friend in Eyat that you want to rescue, now's the time to mention it.”
Sull shook his head. ”n.o.body. Funny, even the lizards don't recognize me now. I must make a big impression.”
”You going to debrief on Eyat or not?”
Sull seemed to consider it. ”Okay, but there's nothing you don't already have from the guys who built the place.”
Darman diverted to find Niner on his way to dig up Sull's armor. He was standing by a tree looking out over the escarpment, fingers hooked in the rear waistband of his undersuit. and he didn't turn around as Darman walked up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder.
”Armor up, Sarge. Let's find Sull's kit.”
Niner turned, and Darman had expected to see some remnant of anger. But he looked more upset than bottling up fury. It was as if he'd had bad news.
”Okay ...,” he said, still distracted.
”Are you all right, vod'ika?”
”Can I ask you a question?”
That wasn't Niner at all. He didn't edge around issues. Darman felt uneasy. ”Well... yeah, go ahead.”
”If you could go now-if you could get on a transport and go wherever you want, no consequences, even take Etain with you-would you go?”
”Leave the army?”
”Leave the squad. Leave us behind.”
Darman chewed the idea over, and it made his gut churn.
These weren't the men he'd been raised with in his first pod of four clones: every member of Omega was the sole survivor from his last squad. But these were still his brothers in arms, men who knew exactly what he was thinking, how he felt about everything, what would make him annoyed, what he liked to eat, every last tiny detail of every breath taken each day. He would never have that degree of intimacy with anyone else-maybe not even Etain. He could hardly imagine a day without them. He wasn't sure how that would fit into the vague idea of being with Etain in some state of domestic bliss that he didn't understand and had only glimpsed around him, but he knew that being separated from his brothers would rip a hole in him that would never heal.
He'd never come to terms with losing Vin, Jay, and Taler, when they were all part of Theta Squad, and-just like Delta, even now-thought death happened to other squads, never theirs.
That was before they faced the real war. That was when an accidental death in training shocked them into silence for days.
Niner was still waiting for his answer. ”It's not about serving the Republic, Dar. I don't even know what the Republic is now or why it's better than the Seps. All I know is that I go out each day trying not to get killed and making sure you guys don't die, either, nothing more than that. So ... what fills that s.p.a.ce when you leave your brothers behind?”
Niner was still thinking about Sull and why he could walk away while his comrades stayed. It was more than loyalty to the Republic and all that guff that Jango had hammered into them.
”Wouldn't you rather be somewhere nice, doing some-thing other than fighting?” Darman asked.
”Dar, would you leave?”
”It's not going to happen,” Darman said at last. Is that yes or no? He wasn't sure. He wasn't even certain what a Dar-man outside the army would be, let alone separated from his brothers. ”So don't even think about it.”
But Darman went on thinking about it as they checked their position and hunted for Sull's armor. He was sure that Niner was thinking about it, too.
Tilsat, Qiilura, day three of the evacuation, 476 days after Geonosis ”This,” said Levet, ”is what happens when you give a lot of overpowered, easily portable hardware to locals who know the terrain better than we do.”
Etain knew the farmers would use every trick General Zey had taught them during the resistance, but that didn't make capturing them much easier. So far, the troopers had seized five hundred or so alive and bundled them into transports; the rest had scattered into small groups, taking the abundance of Republic-supplied weapons with them.
If the farmers had been Separatists, the planet would have been cleared by now. But hands were tied. These were Re-public citizens, and this was the Gurlanins' planet, which meant it couldn't be reduced to a wasteland.
It wasn't the way any of them wanted to fight, except maybe her.
But so far the fighting had followed a pattern. After the farmers had taken a few fatalities, they surrendered. They seemed to feel they'd made their point, and now that they were scared and exhausted, they wanted an end to it. With that in mind, Etain pursued the strategy of picking off a few in each group and inviting a surrender.
It didn't seem to be working this time.
The platoon was pinned down in the river valley north of Tilsat. The seven other platoons were scattered, chasing the largest rebel groups that had broken away. Five to one had looked like easy odds for clone troops, but the complication of trying to remove the colonists in one piece had handicapped them badly, and the time was fast approaching when Etain was going to give that up as a bad job.
”Incoming!”
An artillery round smashed through the trees behind Etain's position, showering the line of troops with shards of ice and branches. She ducked instinctively, Force or no Force.
Levet, usually glued to her side, sprinted away behind the defensive wall that had been a merlie shed and dropped to his knees to operate an E-Web repeating blaster that was now standing idle on its tripod. The gunner lay sprawled with his leg at an awkward angle; another trooper was trying frantically to remove his helmet. Levet laid down fire as two clones worked on their fallen brother's injuries, and Etain realized that she could no longer prioritize as a commander had to.
All she could see was the wounded trooper. Who is he?
She always tried hard to learn their names-they always had names among themselves, not just the numbers their Kaminoan masters gave them-and this one escaped her. She felt she was denying him. She couldn't let him be a stranger. But now she had to.
You have to fight. You can't fall back and play medic. The farmers were spread across the hillside above the platoon, hiding in ice-glazed crags and hollows, and somewhere up there they had a small but devastating artillery piece, sup-plied by the Republic to help them drive out the Separatists. They also had a lot of blaster rifles-and what was effective against droids could also be lethal applied to regular trooper armor. Her lightsaber and Force powers were of limited use for attacking dispersed fire. All she could do was fend off rounds and debris, because her concentration had vanished. Once, she could have centered herself and visualized the threat, taking in the very fabric of the air and land and water, and deflected plasma bolts or sent snipers cras.h.i.+ng against the rocks. Now she tried to locate each firing position to focus on that alone.
Pregnancy's changed me. Not that I was that strong in the Force to start with.
To her left, Levet directed fire into the hillside, placing E-Web rounds in a neat sequence that sent small avalanches down the hill, exposing gra.s.s and rock. Troopers were ranged around her, targeting sniper positions at either end of the valley. She waited for him to pause firing and adjusted her headset comlink.
”Casualties, Commander?” She should have had a lieu-tenant in command or a captain at most, not the services of a full commander, but every Jedi general got one, even in-significant Jedi Knights like her. ”When this starts to cost too much, I think arrest isn't an option.”
”Ten men injured, two serious.”