Part 26 (2/2)

”What?”

”You can talk about Etain, you know. I'm not going to burst into tears or anything.”

Fi closed the door behind him, and Darman heard the sound of running water. Fi wasn't stupid and he'd probably heard every word anyway, but Darman still felt guilty at having a part of his limited life that put any kind of barrier between them.

Outside the hut, Niner and Atin were laying out equipment, checking it, and taking no notice of A'den's spirited argument with one of the Marits. It was another dominant one with a red frill at its throat, but it wasn't Cebz. The lizards were gathering: where there had been fewer than a hundred in the camp, there were now a few thousand in the area, coming to the rendezvous point from villages scattered through-out the countryside.

Darman stared at the pile of ordnance. There were enough thermal detonators to remove a large chunk of planet.

”Overkill,” he said.

Atin looked up. ”Whatever happened to P for plenty?”

”You've seen Eyat. They've got triple-A and traffic cops, not Acclamators. So we hammer them with the Thirty-fifth and then the lizards overrun them. Don't you think that's a waste of resources?”

”Dar, it's still a capital city,” Niner said. ”And we're not just fighting the Gaftikari. We're denying the place to the Seps.”

”And we're not footing the bill for it, either,” Atin said.

Darman pondered what possible use this planet would be to anyone except the mining companies. Did they even use kelerium and norax to build droids? Maybe it was the Re-public doing a favor for Shenio Mining in exchange for services rendered elsewhere. The galaxy seemed to work that way. Help us out in the war, buddy, and we 'II see you right when it comes to building your profits.

And it didn't matter to him at all. He had no stake in it, no interest, and no consequence to him except his life and his brothers' lives on the line, which was simply the job he did.

He bent down to pick up a small thermal det and rolled it in his hands, seeing the little restaurant opposite the Eyat government building. The minced roba pastry rolls washed down with sweet caf had been delicious; a charge of this size, detonated within twenty meters, would shatter the restaurant's transparisteel frontage into a thousand blades and send them flying at three thousand meters a second into anything and anybody within a thousand-meter range. Sometimes it paid not to think about it too much.

”Can I do the power station?” he asked.

Niner didn't turn his head. ”You recce'd the government buildings area.”

”Doesn't mean I can't take out the station.”

”I don't like changing plans this close to time.”

”What plans? We didn't even complete the first recce. We've scrubbed the a.s.sa.s.sinations. We're going to run the same risks.”

Niner didn't answer. They'd become so used to doing things on the fly with little or no planning that Darman began to wonder if they were getting sloppy. Special Operations was as much-no, more-about detailed surveillance, observation, and rehearsal than going in with Deeces blazing and blowing stuff up.

”A'den's going to brief us in around an hour,” Niner said at last.

”Great.” Darman tossed and caught the unprimed det like a toy a few times and then laid it back on the fabric sheet with the rest of the ordnance. ”I'm going for a walk.”

Niner could always recall him. He slipped his helmet over his head, sealed it, and strode off into the camp, seeing the world through the filter of his visor's HUD again, targets in an environment rather than beings in a landscape. Skirata said they were at the stage of life where they were making emotional connections that regular folk made much earlier in childhood, able to imagine themselves in the situations they created. But, he said, it was hard to picture yourself as the guy strolling past the restaurant at the moment the charge detonated when you'd never done ordinary things like that and had been given only a detached academic grasp of blast radii, overpressures, and fragment velocities.

Omega Squad, like all the clone army, had been little more than highly trained, superefficient, ultrafit children when the war started. It struck Darman that they were living life the wrong way around-given the maximum ability to fight long before they had the experience to identify with beings on the sharp end of the fighting.

Too late to worry about that. What am I going to do, warn Eyat? Join the Seps? Cry over dead strangers?

There was nothing else he could do but fight to win, and survive to ... what, exactly? The question never went away-When we win, what happens? What do soldiers like us do in peacetime? Maybe he'd end up doing refugee relief. Etain said Jedi did that sometimes. Maybe they'd still end up working together.

He walked among chattering, excited Marits with jewel-like scales who didn't seem to be anxious about the coming a.s.sault. They were swarming around artillery pieces, drilling with E-Webs. This was clearly something they'd been looking forward to for a long time.

Darman paused to watch them, realizing his main fear was that he'd get killed before he told Etain that he loved her, and wondered where the remaining humans would fit into a society run by efficient, orderly Marits whose lives seem to run like flow charts.

He gestured to the red-frilled boss lizard to come to him. They didn't seem to be offended by being summoned.

”What's going to happen when you take over?” Darman asked. ”What's going to happen to the people in Eyat?”

Boss Lizard did a bit of baffled head-c.o.c.king and looked as if he was calculating. ”There'll be roles for them in pro-portion to their population, of course.”

Darman realized he should have expected a sensible, numerical answer like that. ”So no bloodletting. No purges. No species cleansing.”

”Not for its own sake, no. What's the purpose of wanton destruction? We just want what we deserve. We are the majority”

”What if they refuse to fit in with that?”

”That,” said Boss Lizard, ”would be pointless.”

”What are you going to change when you seize power?”

”Nothing. Except we shall live in the cities and we shall have the majority of the elected posts according to our population.”

Darman could now see the mismatch between Gaftikari humans and their Marit workforce. They weren't even competing for the same thing, a nice tidy two-sided I-want-what-you've-got. The lizards thought differently. The two viewpoints didn't quite overlap, and the lizards were far more concerned with being proportionally represented than having power.

He didn't always understand politics and he was glad of it This was the point at which he preferred the order to go then and blow up that.

”We should have made a joint government a condition of building their cities,” Boss Lizard added, almost as an after-thought. ”Next time, we'll remember to do that.”

They were born engineers, all procedure and ratios. Dar-man nodded and walked on, out into the heathland to the south of the settlement. Now he could see across the flat terrain for kilometers: smoke from scattered cl.u.s.ters of huts in the distance threaded its way into the clear sky, and the occasional ancient speeder tracked across his field of vision. throwing up range and speed data onto his HUD.

He thought of the aerial recce images of Eyat, with its modest defense resources preparing for an attack, and wondered how long it would take.

Where do I belong? Where s home?

It sure as shab wasn't Tipoca City. Most days he didn't even think it was Coruscant.

Darman stood watching the late-afternoon sun slanting across the heath, wondering what it was like to have a job where you could stop work at the end of the afternoon and do anything you liked, when the audio link came to life in his helmet.

”Niner to Dar, RTB. Seps incoming.”

He activated his HUD displays, expecting to have data patched through to him. The image that rilled his field of view was a chart of the Gaftikar system, way out near the Tingel Arm-so close to Qiilura, close enough that it would have taken only a few hours to reach Etain-and the peppering of red points of light showed Separatist vessels on a course for Gaftikar.

There were a few blue lights, too. They were generated by the transponders of Republic vessels: the Third and Fourth battalions of the 35th Infantry embarked in Leveler, another two companies from the same regiment not far out of Qiiluran s.p.a.ce, and a fleet auxiliary converging on the same point at 180 degrees at sublight speeds.

”ETA?” Darman said. Life slipped immediately into acronyms and jargon, the language of the military comlink.

”At those speeds ... a day.”

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