For a moment Darman thought Niner was going throw the door open and knock the guy down, but he gritted his teeth and popped the rear hatch.
Fi's voice filled Darman's skull. "He's on his own, Dar. I can drop him from here."
"Wait. .."
Darman got out of the speeder slowly and left the door open for a rapid retreat, but he edged far enough down the length of the speeder to keep an eye on Niner. The officer leaned into the small cargo space at the back of the speeder, still keeping his hand on the butt of his blaster as if it was some comfort to him. He didn't seem to realize that turning his back on a suspect-two suspects, in fact-was risky, and Darman looked hard to see if he had some headset linking him to another officer nearby.
But there was nothing. He was simply not used to dealing with serious criminals-or commandos.
"Had a report of a speeder being used to remove items from a residence, sir," the officer said. His voice was muffled as he leaned in, one hand taking some of his weight on the tailgate. "This one, in fact. Now, what do you reckon you've got here..."
The moment the cop moved his hand to the tightly wrapped body in the cargo area, his fate was sealed. It was almost as if they'd drilled for it: Niner jumped him and pinned him flat, facedown, arm locked around his throat to silence him, while Darman stepped in and checked him for comlinks. Fi was now right behind them in the other speeder, shielding the tussle from view.
Unlike the holovids, there was no quick blow to the head to render someone conveniently unconscious while you made your getaway, with no harm done beyond a headache when they regained consciousness. This was just a poor cop, like any of Obrim's team. He'd stopped the wrong men at the wrong time. Darman's eyes met Niner's, and he knew he should have simply shot the cop as his instinct told him to, but he couldn't.
Fi stepped in and rifled through the array of weapons on the officer's belt. "Ah," he said-the only word spoken in the whole incident-and selected a stun baton. He shoved it into the cop's armpit; it crackled just as Niner let go of him. The man stopped struggling and convulsed a couple of times.
"There," said Fi. He hauled the officer onto the curb, where he slumped in a heap, hidden from the oncoming traffic by the other speeder. "Sorry about that, Sarge."
"It's okay, I broke contact before I got a shock . . ."
"Time to bang out, fast"
"Sorry." Darman jumped back into the passenger's seat. There was more traffic around than he expected, but Niner shot straight out into it and burned toward the city exit. "Sorry, I should have..."
"No harm done," Niner said.
Fi overtook them and disappeared into the distance. Darman took out his DC-15 and kept it cradled in his lap, checking in the rearview until they were clear of the city limits. He was starting to worry that he'd lost his nerve. He'd never hesitated over taking a shot before. His thought process wasn't supposed to kick in and start arguing with his risk assessment.
I could have compromised this mission. And that means I put my brothers at risk.
"If you'd shot him, it would have been another mess to clean up," Niner said, veering away from the road and weaving through the trees. "Can't leave civvy cops dead all over the place. It's not Galactic City, is it?"
"You're telepathic, Sarge."
"I was thinking what Skirata would have said, actually."
"We've still left a cop in Eyat who's seen us up close."
"Well, next time he sees us we'll have our helmets on, so a fat lot of good that'll do him."
A'den and Fi were already waiting in the makeshift ops room when they reached the rebel camp, which appeared to be in darkness like the rest of the base. All the windows were shielded by blackout material. Inside the fragile-looking house, the two of them were sitting at the table and gazing forlornly at a datapad, and A'den had his hand held against his ear as if he was concentrating on a signal he could barely hear.
Fi didn't look up. A'den did.
"Wow, you're good," the Null said wearily. "How many stiffs have you racked up tonight? Two troopers and a cop. You're going to beat your own dumb record at this rate."
"We never killed a cop," Niner said.
Fi simply looked over his shoulder at them. "I didn't plan to. Stun batons are tricky things if you don't know the medical history of your target."
"Oh, great. Great."
Fi tapped his datapad, and a crackling stream of audio filled the room: it was voice traffic from a police control room, judging by the jargon and codes.
"Say again, three-seven. Last call shown on the onboard log was a vehicle stop on Bidean Way."
"No dear surveillance holocam view available . . ."
"Confirm ID on the suspect speeder. Rental, fake identichip used to secure it. . ."
"Hey, did anyone know he had a heart problem? "
Fi silenced it again and got up. "Atin's digging a hole. I'll go and help him. I'm good at digging holes, really deep ones."
A'den shrugged and went back to listening to the circuit. "I think the cops got excited when they found the stun baton burn on their buddy. Joining up the dots to work out that it was actually a covert commando team cleaning up a spillage is a step too far for them, thankfully." He leaned backward as far as his chair would go and grabbed another datapad. "Now take a look at these aerial recce images."
Darman took the pad, but Niner was still focused on the previous issue. "So, Sergeant, what would you have done differently?"
"I'd have shot the cop," said A'den.
"And that would have solved the problem how, exactly?"
"It wouldn't have changed a thing. It just worries me that you put being nice before doing the job right. We do extreme stuff. That means some unlucky saps get caught as collateral damage. Deal with it."
Darman knew A'den was right, and he was troubled by the fact that he'd hesitated; he was reacting to an internal template of police as Jailer Obrim's kind-allies, comrades, friends-and it was wholly wrong and a recipe for disaster at some point in the future. He couldn't afford to judge anyone by their uniform. He couldn't even assume all Jedi were on his side now. If he found out that Zey was tasking Special Operations personnel to deal with deserters like that, he wasn't sure how he'd take it.
"I realize you're the explosive ordnance man," A'den said "but can't you manage to interpret aerial images?"
Darman jerked out of his thoughts. "Okay."
"Well?"
Darman stared at the flat images of what looked like the two-dimensional map of a city with a chron that showed it was recorded a few hours earlier. It was part of Eyat, not as a schematic of the construction that the Marits had worked c", but a real image. He could see tiny dots moving along road A large compound in the heart of the city was packed full of repulsor trucks and armored vehicles of various types that hadn't been there a few days earlier when Omega was inserted. There was even mobile anti-air cannon. He handed the datapad to Niner for inspection.
"They're getting ready for our visit, then ..."
A'den nodded. "No doubt their Sep allies have aerial reconnaissance of the accumulation of Republic souvenirs we've given the lizards. We can both spy on each other, when we know where to look."
So Eyat was bracing for a Marit assault. "Other cities?" Darman asked.
"All doing the same. I'm not sure if they understand how the lizards here cascade things. But it's unlikely they'll know about Leveler until she's looking for a parking space."
A warship had been identified to deploy to Gaftikar, then. It was imminent. "Leveler."
"With a few thousand of the Republic's finest embarked Thirty-fifth Infantry and Tenth Armored. Just to soften up Eyat and a few other major cities to allow the Marits to move in, then pull out when the dust has settled."
Eyat wasn't well defended at all. From what Darman had seen, even one ship was overkill. "Shenio Mining has enough resources to roll over Eyat and the government on its own without any military support if it wants to strip-mine the place that badly."
"Yeah, but you know how companies like to look like they've been invited legally, or else people scream that it's corporate invasion."
"It is corporate invasion," Darman said.
"Maybe there's some strategy, some big picture we're not privy to," A'den said. "But in the end, all wars are about someone wanting something the other guy's got. If I thought that throwing a hydrospanner in the works would change the nature of the galaxy, I'd do it, but this is the way life works, chum. Let's just do the job and hope we stay alive long enough to move on."
Niner didn't seem bothered. He looked much more interested in the recce data. Darman left the two sergeants to their own devices, retrieved his entrenching tool from his back-pack, and went in search of Fi and Atin.
In the quiet night air, it was easy to follow the sound of a shovel biting into the soil with that familiar metallic chinking sound. Fi and Atin-totally silent-were hacking away in a clearing fringed by small bushes, somewhere that roots would be less of a problem. Darman paused to look at the two bodies and joined in the digging by the faint, shielded light of a glow rod laid on the ground.
Two meters was deeper than it sounded. The three of them eventually stopped to stare down into the pit.
"Should we have dug two graves?" Atin asked.
"Sergeant Kal said that Mando'ade use communal graves if they bury at all." Darman racked his brain, trying to re-member what else Skirata had taught them about disposing of fallen comrades. He didn't care about what the book said about concealing signs they'd ever been there. This was about respect for men who were one simple designation prefix away from being him. "And no soldier wants to be separated from his brothers."
"Unless they're particularly di'kutla," Fi said.
Atin squatted down over the bodies. "Okay, let's roll them in."
"Can't we lower reverently instead?" Darman went over to the pile of purple armor and pried the ID tallies from the breastplates. When he ran his pocket sensor over them, they gave him the readouts CT-6200/8901 and CT-0368/7766. There was no indication of what they actually called each other, of course; the Grand Army didn't give a motla'shebs about how clones liked to be addressed, on the record at least. He did what he'd been avoiding for the last few hours, and interrogated the copy of the Nulls' database that Ordo had given them all back on Triple Zero. Once he knew their real names, he would feel even worse. But he needed to if he was going to give them any sort of farewell rite. "They're... Moz and Olun." And this was the worst bit. "Jaing trained them at one time."
If Moz and Olun had harbored any ambitions beyond surviving the war, Jaing might have been the only one who knew what they were. Those dreams probably didn't include getting killed by another clone. Fi and Atin lowered them into the pit, still wrapped.
"Ni su'cuyi, gar kyr'adyc, ni partayli, gar darasuum," Darman said. It was the ritual remembrance of those who'd passed on, recited daily with the names of all the people the mourner committed himself to immortalizing: I'm still alive, you're dead, I'll remember you, so you're eternal. Sergeant Kal said that Mando'ade got straight to the point, even in spiritual matters. "Moz and Olun."
Fi threw a few handfuls of dirt into the pit, then picked up his shovel. "You know you've got to recite that every day for the rest of your life now, don't you?"
"I know," said Darman, pitching loose soil back into the grave.
And how many more names by the time this war is over?
It wasn't going to be hard to remember them. It was going to be much, much harder to forget.
Ore terminal, Kerif City, Bogg V, 478 days after Geonosis Twi'leks were much heavier than they looked. Maybe it was the lekku, because that tissue had to be pretty dense; or maybe they were all muscle. Either way, it took a little more effort than Sev expected to restrain one.
"My, my," he said, grabbing Leb Chura in a headlock and slamming him into the warehouse wall. "You get around, don't you, delivery boy?"
The Twi'lek hit the permacrete slabs with a loud wet grunt, and Sev was sure he had a good grip on him until the pilot struggled free and made a run for it across the pitch-black landing strip.
It was always a challenge when you couldn't immobilize targets the quick way. But Delta needed this one alive and talking. Sev tracked him in his night-vision visor, a speed-blurred green figure with head-tails flapping as he ran.
"Coming your way, Fixer . . ."
Leb ran full-tilt toward his ship on the freight pad, and Sev raced after him. One downside of Katarn armor was that it was heavy-okay for short panicky sprints, but over any distance it slowed a man down-and Leb was opening the gap between them.
No problem. Fixer and Scorch were waiting.
The Twi'lek cannoned into a solid wall of commando, plastoid, and Deece as the two men intercepted him the hard way. Sev heard the ooof of air expelled from his lungs. Leb was knocked flat on his back before being hauled upright and pinned between Fixer and Scorch.
"I know Sev's weird, pal, but it's rude to run away when he tries to be sociable." Scorch could put a charmingly menacing leer into his voice that Sev couldn't emulate. His gloved fingers tightened slowly on the Twi'lek's neck. "He doesn't mean to bite. He's just being playful."
"What do you want?" Leb gasped, getting his breath back. "I've done nothing. I'm all legit. Who are you, anyway? Mandalorians? 'Cos I've-"
Boss ambled across the landing strip. "Don't break any-thing. General on deck." He tilted his head to indicate that Sev should look behind him. "Bard'ika on your six ... very anxious to do some interrogating."
"Leb, now's the time to enjoy the hospitality of the Republic," Scorch said, hauling the Twi'lek bodily toward Delta's traffic interdiction vessel. "We just want to ask you a few harmless questions about your itinerary."
"Yeah, the questions might be harmless, but you're not..." Leb now looked past Scorch and spotted Jusik jogging across the permacrete, Jedi robes flapping. "Oh yeah, now the Jedi's going to zap me with his Force powers, isn't he? Shove a lightsaber in..."
Jusik caught up with them. He always looked as if a strong breeze would knock him over. "No lightsaber necessary, my friend. You haven't got any reason to withhold information, have you?"
When Jusik used that especially quiet, reasonable tone- and he never raised his voice anyway-Sev wasn't sure if he was using Jedi mind influence or not. There was always something disturbing about Jedi, even the approachable ones like Jusik. Sergeant Vau said it was a good idea never to turn your back on one. They weren't like regular folks.
Would I know if he was using that mind stuff on me?
Sev thought about that more and more lately. He still liked Jusik, though.
It was a tight fit in the TIV crew compartment now-four armored commandos, a scared Twi'lek, and General Jusik- and Leb seemed not to realize it was hard to give a prisoner a good hiding in such a confined space. His eyes went from visor to visor. He really didn't have a clue who they were. But then very few beings ever got to see a Republic commando close up, and the helmet always seemed to bother them when they did. Eye contact was everything for most humanoid species. Without it, they couldn't gauge how much trouble they were in.
"So you've been delivering specialist equipment shipped in from Arkania," Boss said. "And you don't have a permit for it."
"I don't need one. Do I?"
"You're from Ryloth, so you're a Republic citizen, and that makes trading in cloning equipment illegal."
"I'm not trading in anything, and I don't look in the crates..."
"Arkania. They don't export fruit, do they?"
"I'm a delivery boy, like you said."
"Your name showed up in a list we happen to have."
"Okay, arrest me, then."
Boss turned his head slowly to Sev, his silent cue to play the heavy. Jusik just watched, impassive.
"We don't do arrests," Sev said. "We get answers. Give us one and we'll go away."
"Or... ?"
"Or I'll be very upset." Sev could make his knuckles crack alarmingly just by closing his fist. "Tell me where you took the consignment."
Leb's gaze wandered to the hatch as if he was calculating what he'd have to do to escape. Maybe it was just a reflex. His lekku were moving slightly in some wordless reaction. "Why's everyone so interested in this stuff? Is it really glitterstim or something? The Mandalorians asked me the same thing-where I took it. I thought it was just vats and permacrete and stuff."
"What Mandalorians?"