“Yes, I told you to get some sleep. I make a convincing fallen tree, don’t I?” Jinart flowed and changed and reassembled herself into the epitome of a crone again. “I know, stereotypical, but effective. Old women are invisible. Like you, Darman, we go where others won’t and do what others can’t. The communications network here is totally controlled by the Trade Federation, and in practice that means a single relay and monitoring ground station at Teklet. And while my kind cannot transmit details over interstellar distances, we can communicate broad ideas and notions to each other. My consort and I are your comlink. Not perfect, but better than silence.”
The Gurlanin made a liquid sound like water boiling. “I’ve spent the last two days running myself ragged to gather this intelligence, and it’s as much for this young man as it is for you. Ghez Hokan now has command of the armed forces here, such as they are, and he’s no fool—he realizes Republic troops are here for Uthan’s box of tricks. Darman, he’s tracking your comrades.”
“We’re pretty good at evasion.”
“Yes, but they do tend to leave bodies and parts behind them. He admits he doesn’t know how many of you there are, and that troubles him.”
“You’re privy to his concerns, then?” Etain said. She trusted nobody now. She still didn’t know who had betrayed Master Fulier, and until she did she would keep an open and cautious mind. Although her Master hadn’t told her about the clones, he must have known if he had discovered Uthan’s activities. But he hadn’t trusted her. For all his kind words, when it came down to it he simply confirmed—even from the grave—that she was not fit to become a Jedi Knight.
“I know Hokan’s concerns because I can make a very convincing old man as well as an excellent grandmother,” Jinart said. The reply made no sense. “I’ll catch up with Darman’s comrades and try to direct them to somewhere safe. They have no reliable intel, as you call it, a finite amount of ordnance, and no advantage of surprise any longer. Hokan knows what you have come to do and he has enough firepower and droids to stop you. That makes your mission next to impossible without some change of plan or intervention.”
Darman considered her carefully. Jinart’s news hadn’t dented that tangible confidence: Etain saw not a flicker on his face. “It could be worse. I quite liked the sound of a single transmitter.”
“Might I also add that the locals will turn you in for one chance to get disgustingly drunk.”
Darman looked at Etain. She squirmed. “Out of ideas, soldier?” she asked.
“I await your orders, Commander.”
It was the final straw. Weeks of fear, hunger, and fatigue on top of years of doubt and disillusion suddenly brought Etain’s fragile edifice crashing down. She had done all she could do, and there was nothing left in her to give.
“Stop it, stop calling me Commander.” She felt her nails dig into her palms. “I am not your blasted commander. I haven’t a clue what to do next. You’re on your own, Darman. You’re the soldier. You come up with a plan.”
Jinart said nothing. Etain felt her face burn. She had lost all dignity. A lifetime of careful training in the art of control and contemplation had come to nothing.
Darman changed before her eyes. He transformed not in the physical sense that the Gurlanin had, but the change was just as startling because the sense of the child that Etain detected so clearly simply evaporated. Its place was taken by calm resignation and something else, a rather forlorn feeling. She couldn’t pin it down.
“Yes ma’am,” he said. “I’ll do that right away.”
Jinart jerked her head in the direction of the door. “Get some air, Darman—I need to talk to Commander Tur-Mukan.”
Darman hesitated for a moment and then slipped outside. Jinart rounded on Etain.
“Listen to me, girl,” she whispered, all harsh sibilants. Droplets of fine saliva glittered briefly in the dim light. “That soldier may think a Jedi’s every word is a divine pronouncement, but I don’t. You’d better sharpen up fast. The commandos and I are all that stands between maintaining some kind of order in the galaxy and its fragmentation, because if the clone army can be wiped out, then the Separatists will win.
“You can either help us or stand aside, but you will not be an obstacle, and that’s what you are if you can’t lead those men. They’ve been bred to obey Jedi without question. Sadly, in this case that means you.”
Etain was used to feeling worthless. There was no lower place that Jinart could cast her. “I didn’t ask for that responsibility.”
“And neither did Darman.” Jinart flashed back into a mass of seething black sinews for a terrifying second. “That’s the nature of duty. It calls and you give your all. He will. So will his comrades, every single one of them. They need you to help them do their job.”
“I’m still learning how.”
“Then learn fast. If those soldiers weren’t conditioned to obey you I’d consider cutting you down now and have done with it. My kind have nothing to thank Jedi for, nothing at all. But we share a common enemy, and I want to see Valaqil again. Think yourself lucky.”
Jinart swept out. Etain sank down on her knees in the hay and wondered how she had come to this. The barn door creaked open slowly, and Darman peered around.
“Don’t mind me,” she said.
“You okay, ma’am?” He winced visibly. “Apologies. Etain.”
“You probably think I’m useless as well, don’t you?”
“I came up with a plan, as you ordered.”
“Bred for diplomacy, too, eh?”
“If Hokan has set the facility as a decoy, then we need him to think that we believe it’s still the genuine target. So we split—”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
Darman lapsed into silence.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Carry on.”
He knelt down, facing her, and swept the floor clear with his hand, creating a clear space on which to demonstrate something. He reached for some crusts of bread and a lump of insect-eaten wood.
“What do you think I am?” he asked quietly.
“From what Jinart says, a clone soldier bred to obey.” She watched him break the wood and the crusts into separate chunks and place them in a row like game pieces. “No choice.”
“But I do have a choice,” he said. “A choice in how I interpret your orders. I’m intelligent. I’ve seen Jedi fight, so I know what you’re capable of. Once you’re exposed to situations that call on your skills, you’ll be the same.”
He was all contradictions. She wondered for a moment if he wasn’t a clone soldier at all but another Gurlanin playing spiteful games with her. But she could feel a combination of quiet desperation and … faith. Yes, faith.
He was the only person in many years who had shown any degree of confidence in her, and the first since Master Fulier who had shown her real kindness.
“Very well,” she said. “This is your overriding order. Whatever happens, you are to intervene if anything I do or say compromises your mission. No, don’t look at me like that.” She held up her hand to stifle the protest she could see forming on his lips. “Think of me as a commander in training. You must train me. That might mean showing me the correct way to do things, or even saving me from my own lack of … experience.” She could hardly bring herself to say it. “And … and that’s an order.”
He almost smiled. “This is why I have confidence in obeying a Jedi commander. Your wisdom is unequaled.”
Etain had to think about that for a few seconds. If Jinart had said it, she would have seethed. Darman meant it. And perhaps he meant it in a number of ways.
Yes, he was intelligent and subtle, not a droid at all. How did a ten-year-old get that way? Disturbed, she concentrated on the comfort of believing that he had seen things that she never had, and so knew best. “Go on,” she said. “You had a plan.”
RV Gamma, laying-up point, nightfall
“How do you feel now?” Niner asked.
Atin moved his arms, bent a
t the elbow in a swimming motion, testing his pectoral muscles. “Nearly good as new. No breathing problems, either. No, just a hard smack on the plate.”
Fi’s disembodied voice spoke up in their helmet comlinks. He was tucked under a bush on the edge of the ridge, keeping watch on the track below. “I’m such a good field medic. Wait till you see me do a tracheotomy.”
“I’ll pass if that’s all right with you,” Atin said, easing off his helmet. “Dinner?”
“What do you prefer,” Niner asked. “Dry rats, dry rats, or maybe dry rats?”
“Let’s go with the dry rats for a change.” Yes, Atin was definitely feeling better, and not just physically. “Who used to say that, then?”
“Uh?”
“The dry rations thing.”
“Oh. Skirata. Our old instructor sergeant.”
Atin took a bite out of the white cube and washed it down with a gulp of water from his bottle. “He never trained us. Heard a lot about him.”
“Trained Fi and Darman, too. Our squads were all in the same battalion.”
“We had Walon Vau.”
“That explains where you get your cheery outlook.”
“Sergeant Vau taught us the importance of planning for the worst scenario,” Atin said, all loyalty. “And maximizing your tech. Being hard is good, being hard with superior tech is better.”
“I’ll bet.”
“I’d heard everyone loved Skirata, though. Even if he was a bad-tempered drunk.”
Niner had never been drunk and he didn’t even know what alcohol tasted like. “He cared what happened to us. He was one of us, pretty much. Not just there because he couldn’t cope with not being in the army anymore, or had to disappear. No, he was a good man.” Niner would have given a great deal to have seen Skirata come limping through the trees right then, demanding to know what they were doing lounging around like a bunch of Kaminoan nahra artists. “No idea where he is now, not since we left Kamino. Best covert ops and sabotage man ever.”
“You’d know, of course.”
“We’ll all know soon. I’m relying on what he taught us to get this mission completed.”
Niner ate the perfectly balanced, sensibly designed, and utterly tasteless cube, and sat silently, still waiting for Darman. They couldn’t even trap something and cook it: the smell of roasting meat and the light of the fire would betray their position.
With Fi on watch, he could shut his eyes and sleep for a couple of hours. He put his helmet back on, partly to be ready to move fast if they had enemy contact, and partly to keep the temperature up in his suit. It was getting chilly. He allowed himself one comfort that he didn’t really need, for morale.
You scare me. You just absorb everything I tell you. Don’t you ever forget?
“No, Sarge,” Niner said.
He had no idea how long he’d been asleep. He woke with a start at the sound of Fi’s voice.
“Possible contact, due east, range forty klicks. Looks like it’s centered on Imbraani.”
Even through the visor, it wasn’t clear exactly what Fi had spotted, but Niner could see it now, too. A glow marked the horizon like a false sunrise. It was constant, the gentlest graduation from amber to deep red: it wasn’t an explosion.
Niner switched between visor modes, main spectrum to infrared to full spectrum, and then back again. The glow was hot, too. The infrared long-range picked it up.
“I reckon that’s one big fire coming,” Fi said.
They waited, watching: Niner could hear Atin a few meters away, gathering up equipment and assembling it, ready to pull out. With the binocs on full distance, they could see that the fire was being eclipsed in places by billows of smoke. Eventually, Atin joined them, and all three observed the distant blaze in silence.
“They’re not burning crop stubble at night,” Fi said. “They haven’t even finished harvesting that stinking barq stuff yet. They’ve found something.”
“I know.”
“Either they’ve found Darman, and they’re teaching the locals not to shelter the enemy, or they haven’t found Darman and they’re trying to flush him out.”
Niner thought it was relatively good news. “But it means he made the landing,” he said. “So we wait here right up to the last second, and maybe a little longer just to be sure.”
Atin laid the gear down again. He was too professional and disciplined to slam it on the ground, but Niner picked up on the slight sag of his shoulders. “And if he doesn’t show by then?” he asked, with a level tone that suggested he didn’t want to show dissent any longer. “Next plan?”
“We take another look at the whole area from Teklet to Imbraani,” Niner said. “We start from scratch.”
“This isn’t to scale,” Darman said. He scraped marks in the loose soil on the exposed dirt floor of the barn and placed pieces of stale bread carefully on the crude chart. “This is the river. These three crusts are RVs Alpha, Beta, and Gamma.” He snapped the wood into more pieces and placed them. “This is the droid base … and this is Uthan’s lab.”
Etain held out her cupped hand. He dropped two chunks of wood into it. “This is Lik Ankkit’s residence,” she said. “He’s the Neimoidian overlord, for want of a better word. He runs the agricultural produce export business, and that near enough makes him an emperor here.”
“Okay. What else have we got?”
Etain crumbled her remaining lump of wood into smaller pieces and scattered them carefully in patches. “Imbraani itself, and Teklet, which is the spaceport, and its storage and distribution depot.”
“And this was the last known position for my squad.”
Etain stared at the worm-eaten wood and the moldy crusts that might help them save the Grand Army from destruction. “Why are we scraping maps in the dirt when we’ve got perfectly good holocharts?”
“That’s what Sergeant Skirata used to do,” Darman said. “He didn’t like holos. Too transparent. He also thought that feeling the texture of dirt focused your mind.”
“And you don’t need any technology to do it.”
“He was a great believer in intuition.”
Darman drew his blaster and turned suddenly. The barn door opened. He relaxed and dropped his arm to his side. Jinart held more drab fabric bundled in her arms. “You have to go,” she said breathlessly. “Take a look out there to the east. They’re burning the fields to flush you out and deny you cover. There’s somewhere you can lie low, but you have to pass for farmers—that’s not going to be easy for you, lad. You’re too big and well fed.”
Etain didn’t rise to the bait. She knew she’d fit in fine with the undernourished, shabby locals.
“I have to take my gear,” Darman said. “I can lay up somewhere with it if I have to.”
“Can’t you leave any of it?”
“Not if we’re going to blow up that facility. I’ve got all the implosion ordnance to deal with the nanovirus, as well as the E-Web cannon. We need it.”
“Then take a cart. There’s a curfew on powered vehicles.” Jinart tossed one of the bundles to Darman. “And get out of that armor. You couldn’t be more conspicuous if you were wearing a wedding gown.”
“We can try to make RV Gamma.”
“No, go to the first safe house you can find. I’ll reach your squad and let them know, then I’ll return to you.”
There was an assortment of barrows and handcarts stored in the barn, all in various states of disrepair. They’d attract no attention: the network of dirt roads was well traveled by people trying to get their quota of barq and other crops to Teklet on foot or with merlie-carts.
Loading the sections of the blaster cannon on the sturdiest barrow they could find made Etain realize just how heavy a burden Darman had carried. When she tried to heave one of the gray packs into the cart, it nearly wrenched her shoulder from the socket, so she decided to enlist a little assistance from the Force. She hadn’t expected it to be so heavy. She wasn’t the only one with deceptive physical strength.
“Pretty much.”
“Not enough to take a hundred droids, though.”
“Depends how you use it,” Darman said.
Etain wondered if he looked more conspicuous out of his sinister gray armor than in it. The armor had made him look much bigger, but even without it he was so solidly built that it was obvious he’d spent his life training for strength, eating adequate protein. Subsistence farmers didn’t have that distinctive slope from neck to shoulder formed by overdeveloped trapezius muscles. Even the youngsters bore the marks of constant exposure to the elements; Darman simply looked strikingly healthy and unburned by the sun. He didn’t even have callused hands.
And then there was that ramrod parade-ground posture. He looked exactly like the elite soldier he was. He would never pass for a local. Etain hoped the farmers would be more terrified of him than they were of Hokan.
The night horizon was amber like the urban skies of Coruscant, but it was flame, not the light of a million lamps, that caused the reflection from the clouds. It looked like rain might follow; they could cover the cart with a tarpaulin and not cause any curiosity. Layers of barq stalk, sacks of barq grain, and strips of dried kushayan buried Darman’s “gear,” as he kept calling it. His language swung from slang and generality to highly educated subbtlety, from gear—his catchall noun for any artifact—to DC-17s and DC-15s and a whole slew of numbers and acronyms that left Etain befuddled.
“Look at that,” Darman said, assessing the skyline. “That flame front must be four klicks, at least.”
“That’s a million or more credits’ worth of barq going up in smoke. The farmers are going to be furious. The Neimoidians are going to be even angrier.”
“So will Birhan,” Jinart said. “That’s a fair whack of his barq you’re using for camouflage, girl. Get going.” The Gurlanin took Darman’s datapad and inserted a mem-stick. “These are all the relatively safe homes I could chart. Don’t advertise your identity, either of you. Even if the master of the house you call on knows who you are, do him the favor of not compromising him by admitting it.”
Hard Contact Page 13
