"Taking care of myself." The droid bowed his head. "The monastery has been utterly defiled again. I thought those Hutt gangsters were bad enough, but the droid army has reached new depths of profanity." He glanced at Rotta. "No offense, little one. Your path in life may yet be innocent."
"So this is your ship," said Anakin, ready to do a deal-or take what he needed-as long as it was now. "You're leaving?"
"I've retrieved the few holy scrolls and devotional artifacts that have not been pillaged or destroyed, and I shall keep them safe until I find monks who'll accept them." 4A-7 indicated the packing crates stacked nearby. "Yes, I intend to leave this wretched place, and as soon as possible."
"So do we." Anakin was poised to silence Ahsoka, who just frowned at 4A-7 and seemed to be gearing up for something. "Shall we leave together, then? If you don't have a destination in mind, I can think of a few."
"A reasonable suggestion, sir. Please, board my vessel and make the child comfortable. The monks I served believed that giving aid freely to another being was the highest form of worship."
Anakin was about to start softening up 4A-7 to the idea that he'd have to divert or return to rescue his men, but he decided it was best left for when they were airborne. The droid might have included clone troopers in the heathen despoilers bracket. Anakin didn't want an argument on the landing pad, or to be obliged to use force. The ship was leaving, Ahsoka and Rotta would be on it, and, when he'd worked out the details, it would be saving Rex and his surviving troopers. Anything that stood in the way of that-too bad.
He stood to the side of the hatch and gestured to Ahsoka to board the ship. R2-D2 was still trundling around checking its undercarriage and making critical beeps. Ahsoka put one foot on the ramp, then froze, and looked down in defocus at her boot as if straining to hear something. When she looked up again, her eyes were wide and the pupils fully dilated; not fear or surprise, but that feral look again, a hunter who'd detected something to chase or fight.
Sometimes she wasn't the overeager kid at all. It was all the more unsettling for that.
"Snips?"
"Artoo," she said quietly. "Artoo, take Stinky for me, will yon? Just for a moment."
Anakin didn't ask any stupid questions, and took her cue. "Smell finally got to you, then?" He watched R2-D2 take the pack and roll quietly away from the ship. "No throwing up, okay?"
She held her arms loose at her sides and took another step up the ramp. Anakin tried to sense what might have spooked her, but he couldn't tell, and combat zones were awash with disruptions in the Force.
"We really must make a move now, sir," 4A-7 said. "The fighting here is escalating. We don't want to be trapped here."
"No," said Ahsoka. "We don't."
She'd drawn her lightsaber even before the first metal boot hit the ramp. Two battle droids suddenly appeared at the hatch, barring her way. Anakin drew his weapon and turned to check on R2- D2, but the droid was well clear, and 4A-7 would have to get past Anakin to reach him.
The battle droids opened fire on Ahsoka. She charged them, swatting aside the blaster bolts and slashing into their bodies before disappearing into the ship. Anakin was going to rush in after her, but she was clearly in control, and he had other business to attend to. He rounded on 4A-7.
"You nearly had me." Anakin held his lightsaber to the droid. There was no telling what else this "caretaker" had hidden. "You're Ventress's droid, aren't you? She's sent you to kill the Hutt."
4A-7 still had that smug calm about him, even now his ambush had failed. "I suppose I'm only obliged to give you my name, model number, and parts code ..."
Anakin noted that the blasterfire had stopped abruptly. "Funny."
"I have no orders to kill the Huttlet. I'm unarmed."
"Spy, then. You'll be even more useful when your data is extracted ..."
Ahsoka came running toward them with her lightsaber held so tightly that her knuckles were white. She seemed lost for words for second. But she'd find some harsh ones pretty soon, he knew.
She'll have to do something about that temper. Maybe I'm the wrong Master for her.
"You're a traitor," she said. As her lips moved, Anakin could see the little killer teeth, the ones she usually didn't show. "A traitor."
"No, I'm not a traitor," 4A-7 said. "I'm just not on your side. I serve another government, one no less valid than yours. There is always more than one side to any story, youngling."
She had no answer to that. Anakin realized he now had a logistics problem, as Rex would call it. I'm coming, Rex. Hang on. He'd have to take this spy with him, because he couldn't leave him here; and spies were no ordinary prisoners. They were dangerous every second of the day, and a droid spy-it was almost too much to think about. He could be a booby trap or a sabotage device or a surveillance system as well.
Anakin felt he was collecting problems, not solving them. Time mattered.
"Come on," he said, and went to usher the spy droid onto the ship with the intention of having R2-D2 render him safe, like some kind of elaborate bomb.
But Ahsoka was still fuming. If she'd had fur, it would have been standing on end. She had this way of being absolutely still and then exploding into movement. Right now, she was a statue.
"You're still a traitor," she said. She never raised her voice. The S was hiss. "Still aiding a monster."
"If you truly believe that the Republic and the Jedi Order are wholly good, and that the Confederacy is wholly evil, then you're even more dangerous than my mistress thinks."
Ahsoka snapped from freeze to explosion and swung her lightsaber.
Anakin was standing too close; he jumped back instinctively as 4A-7's head hit the ground and bounced once before rolling to the foot of the ramp. In the shocked silence, Anakin could hear the droid's voice repeating something.
He ran to it and squatted down to listen, trying to make sense of what had just happened. 4A-7's voice was fading, repeating snatches of his final words. Anakin had taken the heads off many, many droids in the war so far, and it hadn't troubled him one bit, but the disembodied head-lights still active-and the very human voice still talking gripped something deep in his gut.
"... you're even more dangerous . . . you're even more dangerous . . . you're even more dangerous . . ."
The voice faded to nothing and the lights died.
Ahsoka stood over him. He looked up at her, for once.
"Creepy," she said.
"Volatile memory." Anakin had to move on to the next task, to the Hutt and to Rex. "Spy droids don't store their data when they're terminated, for obvious reasons. I believe they transmit it."
"So he's scrap."
Anakin watched R2-D2 roll up the ramp carrying Rotta. If Hutts could be traumatized in childhood, that kid was going to be a basket case after what he'd seen in the last day or two.
"Yeah," Anakin said. "You could say that."
He sealed the hatch behind them. R2-D2 had to work some of his astromech magic to fire up the drives, but they lifted clear in one piece.
Scrap.
Where did scrap end, and being begin?
"You did a great job, Artoo," Anakin said. "Thanks, buddy." R2-D2 whistled. He said it was a pleasure.
* * *
COURTYARD, TETH MONASTERY
Rex had stopped thinking some minutes ago, but he was still on his feet and firing.
The tinnies hadn't knocked him down yet. He reached for a reload. He'd perfected the technique of jamming the muzzle of his discharged blaster in a slot in the AT-TE's carcass to hold it steady while he removed the spent power pack and replaced it one-handed, without needing to stop firing the blaster in his other hand.
It was quite a skill to learn in the last minutes of his life.
"Get down, sir," Attie said, squatting to his left and sliding a round into the launcher. "Mortar surprise coming . . ."
Rex conceded. He dropped and turned his back to the launcher.
"Cover-fire!" Whoomp. "Cover-fire!" Whoomp. "Cover-fi
re!"
The explosions had become a continuous wall of noise and smoke. The six men were in a square now, facing out on four fronts, and relying on the generous supply of mortars still in the dead AT-TE interspersed with blasterfire and anti-armor rounds. Zeer had crawled into the wreckage of the walker for some respite while he worked on something. When he emerged, he was hauling a flamethrower.
"New and improved," he said. "Removes those difficult, ground-in tinnies that other flamethrowers can't touch."
Zeer defaulted to stock phrases under extreme pressure, as if he had a script he could turn to when he was too hyped up or scared to think. It made him sound like a relaxed wisecracker. Rex knew different. They were all running on empty, spinning a credit, and the moment they stopped spinning it the chip would collapse flat, and that was what would happen to them. They kept moving and they stopped thinking beyond the next second. Even though Rex knew that was how it happened, he was still stunned by it. And he was proud.
They were an island sinking in an ocean of droids.
"Just end it," Coric said to himself. He was facing the other side of the assault, almost back-to-back with Rex, emptying clip after clip from a repeating blaster through a gap in the barrier. "Got to stop sometime."
Rex gestured to Zeer. "Hang on to that. Droid flamb� for dessert." He wanted the battle droids a lot closer to make that count. "Coric, you okay?"
"Always am, sir."
"Good man."
Rex had set his helmet comm circuit to cycle automatically through the frequencies. He was only monitoring subconsciously; he fired a grenade over the top of the barrier to give himself a second's grace to get into position, and opened up with both blasters again. Droids fell, but there were plenty more where those came from. Ocean. Yes, it was a good word for it. The scene in front of him was in constant motion, with waves, and the droid shrapnel and smoke forming spray.
They will never stop.
But he still had five men, and to hold off a droid army even for this long was exceptional. It was a shame that nobody would ever know.
You can't give up on Skywalker.
Heavy arty pieces would have been nice. And maybe some air support, which was beginning to take on the mythic aura of spiced creams, a delicacy everyone craved but never found on the menu. He almost didn't hear the burst of chatter in his ear. It was breaking up.
"...Five-oh-first..."
But it wasn't jammed; he could hear something.
"Twenty-twelfth inbound-air group-time on target fourteen-oh-seven..."
Now he knew where the vulture droids had gone. Kenobi was here, with the 212th Attack Battalion. It was the help they thought they'd never live to receive, and he was elated, disbelieving, and oddly disappointed at the same time.
The enemy fire stopped. Rex ducked down.
In the relative silence-in the background fires still roared, superheated metal still clicked and groaned-they listened.
"Kenobi's coming," he said. "Listen for the larties ..."
There was a chunk-chunk-chunk of a single pair of droid feet picking its way over the carpet of fallen tinnies.
"Republic cannon fodder!" a droid's voice shouted. "Surrender! You can't carry on."
It was the droid commander. Rex peered through a gap and saw the yellow markings on the torso.
"They're not going to sing a rousing chorus as a tribute to our manly clone grit, then Coric murmured.
Rex stood up and faced the droid commander across a gulf of about twenty meters.
"Who're you calling cannon fodder, clanker?"
"Surrender immediately."
Maybe it was what droids were programmed to do, and maybe they really did want him and his men as bait for Skywalker. It probably wouldn't matter in a few minutes.
Rex adjusted his external audio pickup to maximum. He heard it: the unmistakable drone of a LAAT/i drive. Lots of LAAT/i drives. And the whine of fighters. And a lovely, familiar, whistling note . . .
"I wish you'd asked earlier," Rex said mildly. "Because then..."
The droids behind the commander all looked up at once.
Then they exploded as a missile smashed into their position.
"-you wouldn't have been outnumbered."
LAAT/i gunships rose all around the edge of the plateau as if on cue. That was some flying; they must have hugged the tops of the trees for some distance to sneak up like that. Some of the larties laid down suppressing fire while Clone Commander Cody's troops rappelled down from others to land in the courtyard, firing before their boots hit the ground. The ocean was changing color from dull droid tan to orange and white.
" 'Bout kriffing time," said Nax. "No Skywalker?"
A Jedi Interceptor appeared from nowhere over the monastery and screamed down to land on the flattened roof of an outbuilding. Rex expected Skywalker to come bounding out, batting away blasterfire with his lightsaber, but when the canopy popped, the flurry of brown robes and whirling blue blade that leaped from the roof and landed-perfectly, like a gymnast-right next to Rex was General Kenobi.
"Good timing, sir." Rex reloaded, two-handed this time.
"Obviously not good enough, Captain," Kenobi said. A droid popped up above the barricade, and he Force-threw it back across the lines as if he didn't like eavesdroppers. "Just these men left?"
"Sir."
"I'm sorry. So where's Skywalker?"
"Last known position somewhere in the monastery, sir, but that was some hours ago. We've had no further contact."
"I'll go look for him."
"Watch out for a woman with my taste in hairstyles and a double-ended red light saber."
"Ventress ..."
"Smack her one for me, will you, sir? She gave me a few fractures."
"Count on it."
Kenobi bounded off. Rex would have liked to have that amount of energy left, but he was flagging. He almost felt that the battle now raging around the temporary and fragile sanctuary of the AT-TE was happening somewhere else. His wrist comlink beeped.
"Captain Rex, this is General Skywalker."
Rex's gut tightened. So he's alive. The relief made his scalp prickle. "Go ahead, sir."
"Apologies for vanishing. Been a little busy."
Rex assumed he knew Kenobi and Cody had shown up with all lasers firing. "Comm working now, sir?"
"Ah, yes . . . we've got a problem, Rex. The Hutt kid is getting sicker. I've commandeered a ship and I'm going to transfer the kid to Admiral Yularen's vessel. We're not going to be able to get to you yet. I'm sorry."
Rex often felt sorry for Skywalker. Guilt seemed to get the better of him sometimes. "The mission comes first, sir," he said. "You'd have to wait in line anyway-Cody's lads have taken all the best seats. We can't move for orange stripy armor. Hurts the eyes."
There was a crackling pause, very brief but telling. "So you don't need us, then."
"We're fine, sir. Good luck with the Hutt. I'll let General Kenobi know you're okay, because he's just gone looking for you in the monastery."
"I didn't mean to waste his time."
"Oh, I don't think he'll mind, sir." Ah, he still worries what his Master thinks of him, even when he's got a Padawan of his own. "He'll probably take the opportunity to catch up on old times with Ventress."
Skywalker laughed, but there wasn't any humor in it. Rex closed the link.
"Well, that's a relief," Coric said.
The six men, all that was left of Torrent Company, 501st Legion, stood in the center of the chaos that only moments before had been their fort, and might well have been their grave, and felt oddly irrelevant. The 212th had taken over and was sweeping back the droids. The adrenaline was ebbing, and though it would take a while to settle completely, Rex already had that shaky, drained, lost feeling.
Yeah, we know how it feels not to be needed, sir.
"Well, that's a different ending to your holovid, Sarge," Attie said to Coric. "We all lived happily ever after."
"No," said Del. "Most of us didn
't."
Rex holstered his short blasters and picked up his rifle.
"In that case," he said, "let's commemorate them the Five-oh-first way. By wiping out every last tinny on this rock."
Tomorrow, they'd start all over again.
SIXTEEN
Enemies are not accidental or unfortunate. We make them, we earn them, and we nurture them, whether we realize it or not. If we can't find real enemies, we'll invent them and make them as big as we can. They become our justification for existing, or excuses for our own failings. Many of us would suffer if we didn't have them-who would need Jedi if there were no dark Force users?
Lord Gajakur Biul, Kilian Ranger
* * *
TETH MONASTERY
Ventress had thought there was nothing left that the Jedi could take away from her, but she was wrong.
The last moments of intelligence droid 4A-7 unfolded as a holorecording. After she'd acted on that transmission, coldly rational, to alert vessels to look for Skywalker's ship, she had a moment to reflect.
She watched it two, three, then four times in the semidarkness of an alcove in the passageway, shutting out the battle raging in the monastery grounds outside. Artillery fire smashed into the building and the volcanic rock of the plateau. The floor trembled beneath her feet.
They had to take him from me, too, didn't they? Without a second thought.
4A-7 was designed to upload stored data and his temporary volatile memory if he was too badly damaged to function, to stop information from falling into enemy hands. His backup power supply was set to detect a catastrophic failure and then transmit everything, both stored and volatile, to a secure location. When the system finally failed-when the droid died-there would be no data left in his components for an enemy to extract.
So he'd continued to dump data-still running on that short-lived backup power, still conscious-even after the Jedi brat decapitated him. That realization disturbed Ventress more than anything else.
It means nothing to you, does it, Jedi?
The droid had been the only trustworthy entity in her world. Ventress heard his words, and saw the events from the perspective of the holorecorders embedded in the side of each photoreceptor. No, eyes; he had eyes, and the recorded data were his thoughts. She refused to use that sterile machine language. 4A-7 had died like ... a man. He was more of a real being than most organics she had to endure. He'd done his duty, and, irrelevant as it was now, he'd told the Jedi some home truths about the dictatorship of the Republic. His termination on active service was as heroic to Ventress as any flesh-and-blood soldier's.
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