Hard Contact

by Karen Traviss

  “Not seen him, sir, honest. Never.”

  “Then get out on the route they were patrolling and see what you can find.” Hokan reached across his desk and took out the electroshocker. It was only an agricultural instrument for herding, but it worked fine on most nonanimal species. Guta-Nay eyed it cautiously. “This is why I disapprove of undisciplined acts like thieving and drinking. When I need to be certain of someone’s whereabouts, I can’t be. When I need resources, they’re already committed. When I need competence, my staff is … distracted.” He pushed the shocker up into the Weequay’s armpit. “There is a Republic presence here. We don’t know the size of the force, but we do have a speeder down and a large black crater at Imbraani. The more data I have, the more I can assess the size of the threat and deal with it. Understood?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Hokan lowered the shocker and the Weequay shot out the door, his enthusiasm for his career refreshed. Hokan prided himself on motivational skills.

  It’s started, he thought. He shut himself in his room and switched on all the comlink screens. They’re coming to take Qiilura.

  Hokan had some idea of what kind of deal Ankkit had with the Separatists. There had been a significant amount of construction work carried out to convert a grain store into the kind of building that had triple-sealed doors, and the type of walls that could be sterilized with extreme heat. Then he’d had to try to make credible bodyguards out of the rabble he employed because important Separatist scientists came and went, and the Neimoidians saw conspiracy everywhere they looked. They weren’t always wrong about that.

  Then the Jedi came to Imbraani, and it all fell into place, as neatly as the arrival of the Republic forces now on the planet. There was a military target here.

  I’m my father’s son, though. I’m a warrior. Hokan wondered if all cultures separated from their heritage were unable to move on, doomed to relive old glories. I’d rather be fighting a worthy opponent than terrorizing farmers who haven’t got the guts to stand up for themselves.

  Fighting soldiers also commanded a higher fee, of course. And the greater the fee, the quicker he would be off this planet and heading … somewhere.

  There was no longer a home for him, and few of his kind left. But things could change. Yes, they very well might one day.

  Hokan leaned back in the chair and let the chatter of comlinks wash over him.

  6

  You want to know how clones tell each other apart? Who cares? They’re here to fight, not to socialize.

  —Sergeant Kal Skirata

  “Get out,” Birhan yelled. “Get out and don’t come back! You’ve brought all this on us. Go on, clear off.”

  The farmer shied a clod of dirt at Etain, and she sidestepped it. It broke into dust behind her. The old woman—who wasn’t Birhan’s wife, she’d discovered—came up from behind and grabbed his arm.

  “Don’t be a fool,” she said. “If we take care of the Jedi, then they’ll take care of us when the Republic comes.”

  Birhan was still staring at Etain as if he was debating whether to go and grab his pitchfork. “Republic my rump,” he said. “Them’s no different to Neimies when it comes to it. We’ll still be bottom of the pile whoever runs the show.”

  Etain stood with her arms folded, wondering how the old woman, Jinart, had managed to attach herself to Birhan’s sprawling family. She was an appalling cook and couldn’t have been much help with heavy farm labor. Etain imagined she earned her keep spinning merlie wool like the rest of the elderly Qiilurans she’d met.

  But right now, Etain doubted even Jinart’s powers of persuasion. She decided to try her own again.

  “Birhan, you want me to stay,” she said carefully, concentrating as Master Fulier had taught her. “You want to cooperate with me.”

  “I rotten well don’t want to cooperate with you, missy,” he said. “And say please.”

  She’d never quite mastered Jedi persuasion when under stress. Unfortunately, that was always the time when she needed it.

  Jinart nudged Birhan roughly, no mean feat for such a short woman. “If them Jedi have landed, fool, then she’ll bring them around here to sort you out,” she said. “This is no time to make new enemies. And if they haven’t—well, it’ll all blow over and then you’ll have someone who can make things grow. That’s right, innit, girl? Jedi can make crops grow?”

  Etain watched the display of rustic logic with growing respect. “We can harness the Force to nurture plants, yes.”

  That was all too true: she had heard the stories of Padawans joining the agri corps when they didn’t perform well during training. That was all she needed—life on a backwater planet, talking to fields of grain. It wasn’t just the intelligence data she had hidden in her cloak that made her want to get off the planet as fast as she could. Agriculture spelled failure. She didn’t need further reminding of her inadequacy.

  “Yah,” Birhan spat, and trudged off, muttering profanities.

  “We all get nervous when Hokan’s thugs start burning down farms,” Jinart said. She took Etain’s arm and steered her back to the barn that had become her home. No, it wasn’t home. There could never be home for her. No loves, no attachments, no commitments except the Force. Well, at least it wouldn’t be hard to tear herself away from here. “And killing farmers, of course.”

  “So why aren’t you nervous?” Etain asked.

  “You’re a cautious child.”

  “I have a dead Master. It encourages you somewhat.”

  “I have a broader view of life,” Jinart said, not at all like a wool-spinning old woman. “Now you keep yourself safe and don’t go wandering about.”

  Etain was developing a Neimoidian level of paranoia and wondered if even her own instincts were deceiving her. She had at least always been able to sense another’s emotions and condition. “So they know where to find me?” she said quietly, testing.

  Jinart stiffened visibly. “Depends on who they might be,” she said, wafting the pungent scent of merlie as she walked. “I don’t care for urrqal much, and at my time of life there’s little left to covet.”

  “You said they were coming.”

  “I did indeed.”

  “I have no patience for riddles.”

  “Then you should have, and you should also be reassured, because they’re here and they’ll help you. But you also need to help them.”

  Etain’s mind raced ahead. Her stomach knotted. No, she was falling for carnival fortune-teller’s tricks. She was adding her own knowledge and senses to vague generalities and seeing meaning where there was none. Of course Jinart knew strangers had arrived. The whole of Imbraani had known about Master Fulier, and it was very hard not to know something had happened when vessels crash-landed on your farm, and when every hiding hole in the area was being searched by Hokan’s militia. For some reason or another, Jinart was playing a guessing game.

  “When you specify something, I’ll take you seriously,” Etain said.

  “You should be less suspicious,” Jinart said slowly, “and you should look at what you think you see much more carefully.”

  Etain opened the barn door and the scent of straw and barq tumbled out, almost solid. She felt suddenly calmer, and even hopeful. She had no idea why. Perhaps Jinart was naturally reassuring, as comforting as a grandmother, despite all her odd talk.

  Etain couldn’t actually remember a grandmother, or any of her biological family, of course. Family wasn’t familiar or soothing because she had grown up in a commune of Jedi novices, educated and raised and cared for by her own kind, and by that she never meant human.

  But family, even from what she had seen briefly of squabbling farmers’ clans, suddenly seemed desirable. It was difficult to be alone right then.

  “I wish I had time to educate you in survival,” Jinart said. “That task will have to fall to someone else. Be ready to come with me when it gets dark.”

  Jinart was becoming much more articulate. She was more than she appeared to
be. Etain decided to trust the old woman because she was the nearest she had to an ally.

  She still had her lightsaber, after all.

  Darman came to the edge of the wood and found himself facing an open field the size of Kamino’s oceans.

  It seemed like it, anyway. He couldn’t see the boundary on either side of him, just straight across where the trees began again. The rows of grain—steel gray, shining, sighing in the wind—were only waist-high. He was thirty klicks east of RV Gamma, desperate to reach it and get some sleep while waiting for the rest of the squad.

  Following the cover of the hedge—wherever that might take him—would cost him a lot of time. He opted to take the direct route. He removed one of the three micro-remotes from his belt pack and activated it. The tiny viewing device was about the size of a pygmy hummer, small enough to grasp in his palm, and he set it to scout the area for five kilometers around him. He didn’t like using them unless he absolutely had to. On a planet like this, their shiny metallic coating was hardly geared toward stealth. They also had a tendency to go missing. And because they recorded as well as transmitted, they were one of the last things he wanted to let fall into the enemy’s hands.

  But he wasn’t exactly invisible, either. He glanced down at his filthy armor, streaked with dried mud, wet green moss, and far, far worse, and knew he was still a big plastoid-alloy industrial object in a gentle organic environment.

  He lowered himself onto all fours, adjusting his balance carefully so the packs sat squarely down the length of his back. His knee still hurt. Crawling through a field wasn’t going to help it. The sooner you get there, the sooner you rest.

  The remote soared vertically into the air, playing back a rapidly shrinking view of the field, then the wider landscape of farmland and woods, all within Darman’s visor display. There were no buildings as far as he could see. That didn’t necessarily mean the area was deserted.

  Crawling with his packs generated a lot of heat, but the bodysuit regulated it obediently. The armor system had more pluses than disadvantages. He didn’t have to worry about wildlife waiting to bite, sting, poison, infect, or otherwise ruin his entire day.

  But it was slow going. He had to loop wide if he was going to avoid the little town, Imbraani. In fact, the whole day had been one of slow progress, although the only timetable he could latch on to now was that of his comrades, and how long it would take them to make RV Gamma. Then they’d move on if he didn’t show by the appointed time. After that—well, after that they were off the chart, so to speak. It would be a matter of regrouping and gathering enough intel to take the target.

  Darman suspected it would take longer than a few days. A lot longer. He had started making notes of what local flora and fauna might be edible, and the positions of springs and watercourses that hadn’t shown up on the high-altitude recce. He wondered if the gdans made decent eating. He reckoned it might not be worth trying.

  Every so often he paused to kneel and sip some water from his bottle. His stomach’s fantasies were no longer of sizzling nerf strips but of sweet, filling, sticky, amber uj cake. It was a rare treat. His training sergeant had allowed his squad—his original squad—to try it, breaking the Kaminoan rules on feeding clones carefully balanced nutritional mixes. “You’re still just boys,” he’d told them. “Fill yer boots.” And they had. Good old Kal.

  The flavor was still achingly vivid in Darman’s mind. He wondered what other normal civilian indulgences he might enjoy if he had access to them.

  He slapped the thought down hard. His discipline was his self-esteem. He was a professional.

  He still thought about that uj cake, though.

  “Come on, get moving,” he said, very tired of the absence of comrades’ voices and seeking comfort in his own. He would be his commanding officer, just to stay sharp. “Shift it.”

  The remote continued to relay predictable images of bucolic peace, neat patchworks of fields punctuated by the wild tangled woods, reminders of an unsettled and untamed world. There were no giant harvester droids out yet. At one point, he thought he saw a dark form moving through the field some way to his left, but when he focused on it there was simply a gap opened by the wind.

  Then there was a sudden patch of darkness in his visor.

  Darman stopped dead. The thing had malfunctioned. But the image returned, glowing, red, and wet, and he realized he was looking into the digestive tract of a living creature.

  Something had swallowed the remote.

  A few moments later a large bird, slowly flapping four wings, sailed overhead and cast an alarming shadow before him. He glanced up. It was probably the same kind that had been sucked into the Narsh sprayer’s atmos engine.

  “I hope it gives you gutache, you scumbag,” he said, and waited for it to dwindle to a black speck before moving on.

  It took more than half an hour to reach the other side of the field, and he still had twenty-five klicks to go to the RV point. He’d decided to go north of the town, although he shouldn’t have risked moving by day at all. Get there early. Wait for them, just in case they decide I’m dead and they don’t hang about. He eased into the bushes, scattering small creatures that he could hear but not see, and considered taking off his packs just for a moment’s relief.

  But he knew that would make it much harder to move when he slotted them back into place again. Exhausted, he fumbled in his belt for a ration cube and chewed, willing the nutrients to hit his bloodstream as fast as they could, before he slumped into sleep and didn’t get up again. Lights danced in front of his eyes. Fatigue was giving him a heads-up display of its own.

  The last of the cube dissolved in his mouth. “Come on, soldier, haul it up,” he said. Playing mind games could keep him going. The trick was to remember where the game ended and then snap back to reality. Right then he decided to let his commander-self shout him into action.

  “Sir!” he said, and sprang up from a kneeling position in one move. He tottered slightly when his knees locked out, but he stayed upright and leaned against a tree. He made a mental note that he needed to keep better hydrated.

  It was so dark in the wood that his night vision kicked in from time to time, superimposing ghostly green images on the trunks and branches. He’d grown used to the range of animal sounds, and the occasional whisper of leaves or snap of twigs blended into the pattern of what his brain was cataloging as NFQ—normal for Qiilura. From time to time a slightly abnormal snap or rustle would make him drop to a squat and turn, rifle ready; but he was clear.

  He followed the river on his holochart for part of the way, although it was actually more of a stream. The faint trickle of liquid over rocks was reassuring in the way that the sound of water could be, and after an hour he came upon a break in the tree canopy that allowed sunlight to filter down on the stream in slanted shafts. Brilliantly colored insects circled and danced above the surface.

  Darman had never seen anything quite like it. Yes, he knew all about geological formations and what they foretold for soldiers: sources of water, treacherous scree, risk of landslide, caverns to shelter in, high ground for defense, passes to block. Accelerated learning packaged the natural world for him and explained how he could use it to military advantage.

  But nobody told him it looked so … nice. He had no words for it. Like the uj cake, it was a glimpse of another world that wasn’t his.

  Sit down and rest. You’re too tired. You’ll start making fatal mistakes.

  It was weakness talking. He shook his head rapidly to clear it. No stims, no, not yet. He had to press on. The insects kept up a constant circuit of the stream like recce aircraft, circling, seeking.

  You’re hours ahead. Stop. No sleep makes you careless. You can’t afford to be careless.

  It did sound like common sense. It wasn’t the game-voice, his imaginary commander, giving him orders: it felt deep within him, instinct. And it was right. He was making slower and slower progress and he had to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the oth
er.

  He stopped and unclipped one pack, then the other. It was a good enough place to camp. He filled his water bottle and hauled a few half-decayed logs into place to build a defensive sanger, just as Sergeant Kal had taught them. It was only a low defensive circle of rocks—or whatever came to hand—but it made a difference on a battlefield when you couldn’t dig in. He sat in the walled hollow he had created, staring at the water.

  Then he cracked the seal on his helmet and breathed unfiltered air for the first time in many hours.

  It smelled complex. It wasn’t the air-conditioning of Tipoca City and it wasn’t the dry dead air of Geonosis. It was alive. Darman released all the gription panels on his armor and stacked the plates inside the circle of the sanger, set his helmet to detect movement, and left it on the makeshift wall. Then he peeled off his bodysuit section by section and rinsed it in the flowing water.

  The day was surprisingly warm; he’d had no way of telling what it felt like while he was sealed in the suit, just the ambient environment data on his display.

  But the water was shockingly cold when he stepped in. He washed quickly, sat in the pool of sunlight to dry off, and then replaced the panels of bodysuit. They’d dried a lot more quickly than he had.

  Before he let himself nod off he put his armor back on. There was no sense in getting used to the pleasant sensation of not wearing it. It was drilled so thoroughly into him that he was surprised he’d thought otherwise even for a second: in enemy territory, you slept in full gear with your blaster ready. He cradled his rifle in his arms, leaned back on his pack, and watched the insects dancing on the sunlit water.

  They were hypnotically beautiful. Their wings were electric blues and bright vermilion and they wove a figure-eight. Then, one by one, they dropped down and floated on the surface, drifting with the current, still wonderfully vivid, but now apparently dead.

  Darman reacted. Airborne toxin. He shut his eyes tight, puffed out the air in his lungs, and snapped his helmet back into place, drawing breath again only when the seal was secure and his filtration mask could take over. But there was no data on his visor to indicate a contaminant. The air was still clean.