Nax glanced at the chrono on his forearm plate. "You think Skywalker stopped to pick up a pot of caf for us?"
"I still can't raise him," Rex said, mouth full. Skywalker couldn't have started out any farther from them than the western boundary of the monastery. A Random mollusk on crutches could have covered that in the time since the general said he was on his way. "I just hope it's not connected to the big rumbling noise and the smoke we saw a while ago. But he'll be here. He said he would, so he will be."
Coric edged up the barricade and poked a strip-cam over the top. The image appeared in Rex's HUD and he surveyed the view of the droid position. It was just a big courtyard, now almost unrecognizable as a place of contemplation, with a lot of deep craters, dead tanks, and the wreckage of assorted vessels of various sizes. Fires still burned. Rex's squad-he'd stopped kidding himself by calling it a company-was barricaded behind a burned-out AT-TE that they'd gradually reinforced with dead droids and anything else they could drag into position.
It was now just him, Coric, Del, Attie, Zeer, and Nax. The droids knew that.
So the fact that they were still alive after an hour or so troubled Rex greatly. The droids had to have some plan up their sleeves, or wherever droids kept plans.
He didn't know exactly how many tinnies were left, but there were an awful lot more than six of them.
Drive noise overhead distracted him, but he couldn't see what it was, not without moving beyond the barricade. It sounded like vulture droids. Those were the tinnies that bothered him most. Anything packing that much firepower that could fly, run, and learn was his worst nightmare.
And his broken rib hurt. He decided to lay off the painkillers until he really needed them again.
"I don't get it," said Zeer, one of the company combat engineers. He had both arms deep in the chest cavity of a super battle droid, as if he was doing heart surgery. "If this had been Jabiim, they'd have been all over us by now and our heads would be stuck on poles. What's stopping the tinnies from doing that? They know how few men we've got because they were guarding us."
"They're dumb," Del said. "At least, the regular tinnies are. If they're not lined up in a row and just firing, they're lost. I don't think the SBDs are that much smarter."
"This barve wasn't, for a start." Zeer knelt back on his heels and began bolting the SBD's plates back into place. "But he's got a new outlook on life."
Nax still clutched his bolt cutters. "They're waiting for that mad bald woman to think for them, but she's too busy looking for the general."
"No, we're bait," said Attie. "As long as we're alive, they know Skywalker's going to come for us. It's him they want, and the slug."
Rex checked his HUD again. No comms, no tactical display worth a mott's backside, nothing to indicate anyone was coming to extract them. He didn't even have access to HNE networks, and when he didn't know things for sure, Rex tended to plan for the very worst.
He hadn't given up on Skywalker yet, though.
"Okay, lads," he said. "Caf break over. Now, we could wait until the tinnies start up again, or we could send our special ambassador to explain our position. How's he doing, then, Zeer?"
"I think he's ready to walk, sir."
The squad maneuvered the eviscerated SBD into a position where it would stand upright again once its power pack was activated. Zeer had loaded the chest cavity with a few thermal dets. The tinny would march back to his lines, rejoin his brothers, and then blow them to pieces when remotely detonated, which wouldn't solve all Rex's problems, but it would certainly ruin the Seps' day and buy some more time.
And, of course, it was a few more scores settled. Ged would have loved to see it. So would Hez.
Rex checked his chrono. He could hear the all-too-familiar sounds of droids moving back and forth, and he wondered what they actually did when they milled about like that. It wasn't as if they had the same physical reactions and needs as an organic soldier. He'd spent so much time recently being a hostile next-door neighbor to them, often only meters apart, and yet he felt he knew less about droids now than he did when the war began.
Maybe there wasn't that much to know, only how to line up a Deece's reticle on the best and most destructive point.
"Okay, Zeer," he said. "Let's get into position before we send him back to the bosom of his family."
Where was Skywalker? Come to that, where was Kenobi?
In the absence of any command, all Rex could do was fight, and then either escape or put as big a dent in the enemy as he could before someone killed him. Sitting around waiting for Republic Day wasn't an option.
The clones settled back into their positions, Coric and Del on a repeating blaster that they'd taken off the Seps the hard way, and Attie with his mortar. Rex knelt, sighting up through carefully excavated gaps in the barricade of debris.
Zeer tinkered with something in the SBD's armpit, and then it came to life. Its blaster arm lifted forty-five degrees into the safety position. Rex watched, distracted by seeing the brute mobile, and he only breathed freely again when it crunched its way past the line of the AT-TE.
"Say hi to your mother for me," Zeer muttered, and took up his position between Rex and Attie.
"I hope the stupid thing doesn't fall down one of those craters."
"Nah, sir, they've got independent processors. I've programmed in his target coordinates, and he'll walk the best route avoiding obstacles before he becomes a martyr to the Republic's cause."
The SBD clunked back to his lines. A couple of battle droids on observation points looked up; Rex could see them in his optics. But they just looked, and carried on. He wasn't the enemy. His transponder data said he was still one of them. He marched on through the lines into the heart of the enemy position.
"I'll give him a few more moments," Zeer said.
The vulture activity overhead was getting more urgent. Rex found himself-again-playing the droid commander in his head: pinpointing the location of the Republic troublemakers, estimating their strength, and then blowing the poodoo out of them in an air strike. He couldn't imagine why droids-or whoever tasked them-fought wars this way and didn't use every advantage they had. They were right overhead; why didn't they attack? Okay, they didn't have line of sight, but it didn't take a genius to pinpoint six men well enough to reduce them to minced nerf.
Be thankful for morons.
"Is he far enough in yet?" Rex asked.
"I can see him," Zeer said. "I want him to move into the staging area. Pity it hasn't got a roof. That'd magnify the damage nicely."
"We kill what we can. Count us down, trooper."
Zeer flourished the remote detonator in his left hand, his Deece held pistol style in his right with the muzzle resting on the barricade. "Three . . . two ..."
Stang, those vultures were really bothering Rex now.
He turned his head slightly to look at Zeer's hand. The man's thumb curled down onto the pressure plate.
"One!"
The infinitesimal moment of silence between pressing the det and the explosion always fascinated Rex. It was as if it was never going to happen, as if time stood still and would need kick-starting.
Time did, and it got the mightiest kick in the backside imaginable.
The flash of searing white fire plunged Rex's visor into temporary darkness as the sensors shielded his eyes from the intense light, and then the explosion shut down his audio to a muffled oomph. But he felt the shock wave punch up through the ground-through his legs and belly, and finally into his throat. At the same time, the blast wave shoved him in the chest. If it felt like that at this range . . . Rex decided that if he was going to go, then he wanted to be at that exact point on the targeting laser, and know absolutely nothing about it.
Nax adjusted his optics, a nervous tic that belied his mocking, casual impression of a sportscaster. "Republic-one; Confederacy of Independent Systems-nil."
"Well, that worked rather well . . . ," Zeer said modestly. "I wonder if they'll fall for it again?"
For a few moments, the entire courtyard was a quiet blizzard of gray ash. Then metal fragments started falling back down from the sky, clattering and crashing on the flagstones. Just in front of the AT-TE, the smaller, lighter particles that had been hurled farther fizzed as they rained down and hit the ground cold, but Rex didn't see a single piece big enough to pick up, let alone identify.
"Here we go," Attie muttered to himself. He slipped a mortar round down the tube and waited. "If we're going to make a tactical withdrawal, sir, it's now or never."
In the next few minutes, any droid that hadn't been reduced to components and metal filings was going to come boiling over that dune of rubble. The lull was almost unbearable.
"Anyone for now?" Rex asked, and waited for the answers.
"Not really, sir."
"Yeah, never's good for me, too."
"I'm comfy here. Nothing better to do."
Coric brushed ash from his shoulder plates. Under the fine dusting of gray powder, his once-pristine white and blue armor was charred by blasterfire.
"I saw a holovid like this once." His tone was the deadpan one he used to tell jokes. "All very stirring stuff. The vast enemy hordes besieging the fort were so impressed by the brave stand of the handful of troops defending it that they sang songs of tribute to them."
"How did it end?" Del asked.
"They all got shot."
Rex wanted this moment to be over. It was-as usual-on the cusp of hilarity and sobbing despair. For all his training and his loyalty to the state, all the theoretical reasons why he was doing what was right, the only thing that made him sit and wait for the inevitable was that he was doing it for the men next to him, and for Skywalker-wherever he was-and even for Kenobi, but for nothing and nobody else. That was as far as any man could think.
And it was far enough.
The rattling noise began, distant at first, and then resolved into the chunk-chunk-chunk of perfectly synchronized metal feet. The sound rose like a tide. It came not only from in front of them, where they expected it to start, but also from behind, and to either side.
Rex knelt back on one heel, and wondered if there was any point doing the tactically correct thing-fighting from cover-or if it was best to stand up now in full view both of his comrades and whatever it was that made up a droid.
"Either way, we fight to win.
He got to his feet, laid his rifle on the nearest flat surface, and took a DC-15 short blaster in each hand.
"Torrent Company," Rex said. ''Stand to."
FIFTEEN
I can't define a hero. All I know is that it's someone you probably don't notice, but when you find out what they did and how modestly they did it, you can never shake off the feeling that you're cut from a lesser cloth, and you find that braggarts suddenly offend you a great deal more than usual.
ADMIRAL YULAREN, Republic Fleet, declining to discuss the matter of the Republic's war heroes with HoloNet News
* * *
SECOND LANDING PLATFORM, THREE KILOMETERS FROM TETH MONASTERY
Anakin wondered if a three-meter carnivorous hunting fly bore grudges.
He still held the creature in a Force grip as it flew in a straight line-more or less-toward the ship that held out the last hope of pulling off this mission. The fly didn't want to go there, and it didn't want passengers. It took all Anakin's concentration to control its direction and stop it from plunging down through the trees to scrape off what it clearly regarded either as parasites or an up - pity lunch item.
"When we get close enough to solid ground, Snips, jump and run."
Ahsoka was now sitting astride the fly just behind its wings and in front of Anakin. "You think it's that dangerous?"
"It's an ornithopter with the mind of a womp rat, and we caught it by luring it with a mating call, so work it out for yourself."
"I thought you were supposed to be good with animals." "Machines. I'm good with machines." And that was what he was banking on; as the landing platform got nearer, he could see that the ship standing on it was a freighter that had seen better days. "I can get anything to fly. But I pushed my luck with this guy."
Neither would say it aloud, but Anakin thought it: if he couldn't get that ship airborne, they'd be stuck on yet another plateau in hostile territory, with no way out but down into the jungle, or wrestling with the local flying fauna. Anakin glanced to one side to check that R2-D2 was keeping up. From the backpack, Rotta made awful gagging and wheezing sounds.
"Rotta's sounding pretty rough, Master."
"He's up one moment and down the next, and he's still alive. Do you know how hard it is to kill a Hutt? You can't even poison them. They regrow body parts. They can live for a thousand years. Rotta isn't some delicate snowbloom or anything."
"What is it with you and Hutts?"
"I spent too much time with them to ever like them. And that's all you need to know."
Anakin regretted it as soon as he said it. He'd made it sound more as if he had some wild, dark past, and nothing was better guaranteed to keep Ahsoka asking questions than that. If he explained he'd been a Hutt's slave, she'd dig away at it until all the bad stuff came out. It was hard enough telling Padme, and she was his wife.
Wife.
It was such a serious and wonderful word. It shouldn't have been a guilty secret. Anakin wondered what would happen if he told Yoda straight out that he had a wife, that he didn't agree with all the arbitrary Jedi rules on avoiding love and attachment, and ask him-respectfully-what he was going to do about it.
He'd have to tell Kenobi first, though. And that was going to be much harder, because he heard that Kenobi had faced the same choice as Anakin, but had walked away from the love of his life, and done things strictly by the Jedi book.
How can that he right? How can that make us better Jedi?
No. Anakin would say nothing. He weighed the corrosive effect of keeping secrets from his old Master against the storm that would be unleashed if he confessed to his marriage.
I have a war to fight. And Padme is nobody's business but mine.
"That ship's looking worse by the minute," Ahsoka said. "But it only has to get us to Tatooine, right?"
"That's the spirit. The cup is half full."
"How are you going to land this bug?"
"Seriously?"
"Yes."
"Okay, I'll make it settle with a Force push and hold it there while you get away with Rotta. Then I'll back away, release the Force hold, and hope it flies off relieved to be rid of us."
Anakin had tried to reach out to the hunting fly in the Force, and calm it the way he'd seen Kenobi do with dangerous animals. But its mind was so alien, so unfathomable, that Anakin had backed off in case he made matters worse. The plateau loomed. What had been a slowly resolving blur of vegetation, ferrocrete, and transparisteel now rushed at him at collision speed.
He checked his comlink again. The frequencies were still jammed.
Rex, I'm coming. I swear it. Just dig in.
Ahsoka hadn't mentioned the beleaguered 501st men since he'd given her the pep talk. She might have been avoiding a sore subject.
"Here we go . . ."
He visualized down, a growing pressure on the fly's back and wing surfaces, and it began to drop at a shallow angle. Then he concentrated on what was, if he thought consciously about it, like a headwind in the Force to slow its approach. Weeds and surface cracks in the permacrete platform passed beneath. The combined Force influences brought the fly down a safe distance from the edge, and Anakin held the creature in position with a steady Force push while Ahsoka scrambled to release the backpack. She hauled Rotta clear and ran for the shelter of a tree.
Anakin leaped down. He would have patted the fly's back, but its whipping tail said he should quit while he was ahead. "Thanks, and sorry for tricking you," he said. "You'll find a nice female fly one day, I promise."
Then he ran, releasing his hold on it in the Force. Without the weight of the Huttlet on his back, h
e almost felt he could fly himself. The sudden turbo-saw buzz of wings behind him faded fast to silence, and when he dared to stop running and look behind, the fly was gone.
For all he knew, the creature could have been female, soaring away to tell her much, much bigger and angrier spouse about this human's outrageous hijack, and Anakin would be on the run from giant hunting flies forever.
Ahsoka fussed over Rotta and eased him out of the backpack. I don't even want to think about cleaning that pack out. Anakin decided that fussing duties were adequately covered and walked over to the freighter.
The meteor-pocked panel on the hatch read twilight.
"Apt," he said. Please start. Please fire up. Please get us out of here. "The old crate's fading fast by the looks of it."
R2-D2 rolled up next to Anakin and let out a mournful whistle.
"Defeatist." Anakin patted him on his cranial dome. "We've fixed worse. Hey, Snips-I'll show you how to hotwire a ship. Essential Jedi training they tend to omit at the Temple."
R2-D2 trundled beneath the airframe, opened a cover plate, and began trying various extending probes in the slots. Ahsoka came up carrying Rotta in her arms. There were water splashes on her clothing.
"I gave him a quick rinse from my water bottle," she said. "Hutts in confined spaces, and all that."
"Good thinking."
Ahsoka had the makings of a good Jedi, and she was going to butt more than a few heads with the Jedi Council. He'd bet on it. Maybe those were one and the same thing. He thought of Rex and his handful of troops, and gestured to R2-D2 to open the hatch.
Hang in there, Rex.
The main hatch popped and air hissed from the seals. Anakin stood back to let the ramp lower.
"Can I help you?" said a voice from behind.
Anakin spun around. He was hard to startle. But he'd been preoccupied, and droids didn't leave impressions in the Force the way living objects did.
"Just leaving." Anakin was on his guard. What else had he overlooked? "Hey, you're..."
"You're the caretaker droid," Ahsoka interrupted, doing that little irritated frown. She'd never make a sabacc player. "Four-A-Seven, right? I thought you looked after the monastery. What are you doing here?"
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