“And where were you, Fi? Thanks a bunch. I could have been filleted. You were suppose to slot him.”
Fi searched through the decapitated Hokan’s jacket. “Ah, I could see Dar and Commander Etain behind him. I knew you were probably okay.” He paused, and the rifling grew more vigorous. “Here you go, ma’am. I think you ought to have this.” Fi handed a short cylinder back to Etain. It was Master Kast Fulier’s lightsaber. It was a matter of honor to return it. “They do work well against Mandalorian armor, don’t they?”
Etain didn’t seem remotely triumphant. She took the hilt and turned it over in her hand before placing it in her pocket. Darman wondered how long it would be before she sheathed her own lightsaber. She was still clutching it in one hand, its blue blade humming and shimmering as she trembled. She wasn’t focusing. Darman willed Fi not to make the obvious comment that killing someone with a lightsaber was nice and clean, no guts, no mess. For once he kept his gallows humor to himself, and simply walked a few paces away to recover the genuine Mandalorian helmet he had decided to appropriate.
“You want to put that away now, ma’am?” Darman said gently. “We’re done here.”
Niner got to his feet and saluted her in best formal parade fashion. “Thank you, Commander. You don’t mind me calling you that now, do you?”
She seemed to come back to the here and now. The shaft of blue light vanished.
“It’s an honor,” she said.
Darman called back on the comlink: General Zey had kept his word. The gunship was still waiting. They set off in column, picking up speed until they broke into a trot.
The gunship was surrounded by a skirt of billowing dust. Its drive had been idling so long that the heat of the downdraft had dried the top layer of soil.
Etain didn’t care if the ship had taken off. She hadn’t abandoned her squad. Nothing else mattered after that. And although she knew it had been a deliberate decoy, the sound of Niner screaming would haunt her forever. He must have heard that for real at least once in his life to have mimicked it so horribly well. She felt sick, and it was not because she had killed Ghez Hokan, and that filled her with shame.
She understood fully now why attachment was forbidden to Jedi.
The ARC trooper was pacing a slow, regular square, hands clasped behind his back, head down, and Etain would no longer make the assumption that he was lost in thought. He was probably listening to comm traffic in the private world of his helmet.
General Zey was sitting patiently on the ship’s platform. “Are you ready now?”
She held out Master Fulier’s lightsaber to him. “Omega Squad recovered it. I felt I should return it to you.”
“I know what you’re going through, Padawan.”
“But that’s no comfort, Master.”
“A concern for those under your command is essential. But it carries its own pain if you identify too much with your troops.” Yes, it did sound as if Zey had known that dilemma. “There are always casualties in war.”
“I know. But I also know them now as individuals, and I can’t change that. No clone trooper, no commando, not even an ARC trooper will ever be an anonymous unit to me now. I’ll always wonder who’s behind that visor. How can I be a true Jedi and not respect them as beings, with all that entails?”
Zey was studying his hands a little too carefully. “Every good commander in history has had to face that. And so will you.”
“If I’m a commander, then may I accompany them on their next mission?”
“I suspect that would not be for the best.”
“And what do I do now? How can I go back to everyday duties after this?”
“There are no everyday duties now we’re at war. I will not be leaving. I have come to do what work I can here.”
“Work?”
“What will happen to our allies—the Gurlanins—if we abandon them now, with enemy forces in the area? I’m here to operate with them, and try and make Qiilura as inhospitable to Separatists as we can.”
“I’m glad we’re honoring our commitment, Master.”
“You know this land better than anyone now. You would be a valuable asset here.”
“And when will more troops join you?”
“I’m afraid we’ll have to continue the covert work for the time being. We would need to disappear.”
We. Etain could think of nothing worse than staying on Qiilura, with its terrible memories and uncertain future. The nearest she had to friends was a squad of commandos who would be deployed on another mission within days. She would be working with a Master she didn’t know. She was alone again and scared.
“Etain, you have duties,” Zey said quietly. “We all have. We talk about duty when it’s easy, but living it is hard.” And he didn’t need to add what she knew he was thinking—that she needed to be separated from the object of her recent and desperate wartime attachment. She needed to let her squad go.
It was no different from what was asked of soldiers every day.
“I—I would like to play a useful role in the future of Qiilura, Master.” She hoped Darman wouldn’t think she was turning her back on him and that he was after all just a glorified droid to her, an asset to be used in battle and expended if necessary. “But I would still find it a comfort one day to know how Omega Squad is faring.”
“I understand,” Zey said. “The choice is yours, though. You can go with Omega Squad. Or you can stay. You might even request that one of the squad remain here.”
One of the squad. Maybe he thought she was just a girl who’d become too attached to a young man when neither of them would ever be able to take the relationship farther. He was testing her, challenging her to make the choice a proper Jedi Knight should make. Yes, she had become close to Darman: he’d been the making of her. But she cared at an inexplicably fundamental level about all of them.
“I don’t think caring about your troops is a weakness,” she said. “The day we stop caring is the day we turn our back on the Force.”
She dug her nails into her palms. Zey was right, though. And it was going to hurt. She sat on the platform beside Zey in silence, eyes closed, composing herself.
The ARC trooper suddenly jerked his head up. “General, sir, we absolutely must go now.”
“General Zey,” Niner said, and touched his glove to his temple. “Sorry we kept you. Are we ready to lift?”
“We don’t have time for a mission debriefing, but perhaps you’d like a moment with your commander,” Zey said, and beckoned the ARC trooper to follow him. It was a gracious gesture. Etain watched him walk to the rear of the ship to offer her some privacy, apparently supervising the offloading of equipment. She wondered if they had managed to land Zey’s starfighter somewhere.
She’d worry about that later. She beckoned the commandos to her.
“What’s going to happen to you now?” she said.
“Next mission. Have they assigned us to you?”
She wondered whether a lie might be in order. She looked at Darman. “Not exactly,” she said. “I’m staying here with General Zey.”
Darman and Niner both averted their eyes, looking at the ground, nodding as if in agreement. Fi raised his eyebrows. “I’m really going to miss you, Commander. Just when we were shaping up. Typical of the army, eh?” He rapped his knuckles on Niner’s back plate, pushing him a fraction toward the gunship. “Make a move, then, Sarge.”
“Hope to serve with you again, Commander,” Niner said, and saluted her. “And don’t ever think you didn’t earn that rank, will you?”
Etain wished they hadn’t left her alone with Darman. She wanted a quick exit with no time to think and make a stupid, emotional comment.
“I chose to stay,” she said. “I really would have liked to have stayed part of the team, but I’m not the officer you need.”
Darman said nothing. Of course: how could he ever have learned how to take his leave of a friend? All his brief life had been spent among his own kind, immersed in warfare re
al or virtual. This was where he became a ten-year-old child again. His embarrassment and confusion were palpable.
“You could remain here with me and General Zey,” she said. And I’d know you were safe. “You have that choice.”
He really was a child now. His eyes were fixed on the ground. He was flicking one of the switches on his rifle, back and forth, over and over.
“Just me, ma’am?”
She felt she was testing him now. “Yes.”
The gunship’s drive rose in frequency, a high whine: the pilot was more than impatient to leave.
“I’m sorry, Commander,” Darman said at last. For a moment, he really did seem to be considering it seriously. “I have a job to do.”
“I can’t pretend I won’t miss you,” she said.
Darman’s gaze didn’t flicker. “I’ve got about ten years left. But I’ll be with my brothers, doing what I do best. It’s all I’ve ever known—like going home, really.” He bent his head and snapped on his helmet, becoming one of the faceless again. “You take care, Commander.”
“And you,” she said, and watched him run to the platform and grasp Fi’s outstretched arm to be hauled inboard.
The drive roared into higher gear, and the gunship shook slightly.
Etain turned and walked away in a crouch to steady herself against the downdraft. She speeded up into a hunched run until she found a tree and sat down in the lee of it with her back to its trunk.
And she let the tears run down her face.
All that she was, and all that she would be in the future, was because a clone soldier had put such undeserved faith in her that she had become that Jedi he imagined she was. She could now harness the Force in a way she had never been able to at Fulier’s side.
She thought of that look of complete faith. She thought of his stoic acceptance of his duty and of the fact that his life would be brief and bright, whatever happened. He had never known a moment of self-pity. She had learned the most important lesson of all from him.
She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand and hoped Zey wasn’t watching.
Etain didn’t know if she would ever see Darman or Omega Squad again. She did know, though, that in days to come, every clone trooper or commando or ARC that she might have to order into battle would be neither anonymous, nor meaningless, nor expendable. Under that grim helmet was a man, someone just like her, a human being, but one without the freedom or the life span afforded to her.
Etain Tur-Mukan stood up and walked back into the clearing at the edge of the field to watch the gunship lift into the early-morning sky.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Novelist, screenwriter, and comics writer KAREN TRAVISS is the author of five Star Wars: Republic Commando novels, Hard Contact, Triple Zero, True Colors, Order 66, and Imperial Commando: 501st; three Star Wars: Legacy of the Force novels, Bloodlines, Revelation, and Sacrifice; two Star Wars: The Clone Wars novels, The Clone Wars and No Prisoners; two Gears of War novels, Aspho Fields and Jacinto’s Remnant; her award-nominated Wess’har Wars series, City of Pearl, Crossing the Line, The World Before, Matriarch, Ally, and Judge; and a Halo novella, Human Weakness. She’s also the lead writer on the third Gears of War game. A former defense correspondent and TV and newspaper journalist, Traviss lives in Wiltshire, England.
BY KAREN TRAVISS
STAR WARS: REPUBLIC COMMANDO
Hard Contact
Triple Zero
True Colors
Order 66
Imperial Commando: 501st
STAR WARS: LEGACY OF THE FORCE
Bloodlines
Sacrifice
Revelation
STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS
STAR WARS: NO PRISONERS
GEARS OF WAR
Aspho Fields
Jacinto’s Remnant
Anvil Gate
WESS’HAR WARS
City of Pearl
Crossing the Line
The World Before
Matriarch
Ally
Judge
STAR WARS—The Expanded Universe
You saw the movies. You watched the cartoon series, or maybe played some of the video games. But did you know …
In The Empire Strikes Back, Princess Leia Organa said to Han Solo, “I love you.” Han said, “I know.” But did you know that they actually got married? And had three Jedi children: the twins, Jacen and Jaina, and a younger son, Anakin?
Luke Skywalker was trained as a Jedi by Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda. But did you know that, years later, he went on to revive the Jedi Order and its commitment to defending the galaxy from evil and injustice?
Obi-Wan said to Luke, “For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before the dark times. Before the Empire.” Did you know that over those millennia, legendary Jedi and infamous Sith Lords were adding their names to the annals of Republic history?
Yoda explained that the dreaded Sith tend to come in twos: “Always two, there are. No more, no less. A Master, and an apprentice.” But did you know that the Sith didn’t always exist in pairs? That at one time in the ancient Republic there were as many Sith as Jedi, until a Sith Lord named Darth Bane was the lone survivor of a great Sith war and created the “Rule of Two”?
All this and much, much more is brought to life in the many novels and comics of the Star Wars expanded universe. You’ve seen the movies and watched the cartoon. Now venture out into the wider worlds of Star Wars!
Turn the page or jump to the timeline of Star Wars novels to learn more.
1
Find Skirata. He’s the only one who can talk these men down. And no, I’m not going to obliterate a whole barracks block just to neutralize six ARCs. So get me Skirata: he can’t have traveled very far.
—General Iri Camas, Director of Special Forces, to Coruscant Security Force, from Siege Incident Control, Special Operations Brigade HQ Barracks, Coruscant, five days after the Battle of Geonosis
Tipoca City, Kamino, eight years before Geonosis
Kal Skirata had committed the biggest mistake of his life, and he’d made some pretty big ones in his time.
Kamino was damp. And damp didn’t help his shattered ankle one little bit. No, it was more than damp: it was nothing but storm-whipped sea from pole to pole, and he wished that he’d worked that out before he responded to Jango Fett’s offer of a lucrative long-term deployment in a location that his old comrade hadn’t exactly specified.
But that was the least of his worries now.
The air smelled more like a hospital than a military base. The place didn’t look like barracks, either. Skirata leaned on the polished rail that was all that separated him from a forty-meter fall into a chamber large enough to swallow a battle cruiser and lose it.
Above him, the vaulted illuminated ceiling stretched as far as the abyss did below. The prospect of the fall didn’t worry him half as much as not understanding what he was now seeing.
The cavern—surgically clean, polished durasteel and permaglass—was filled with structures that seemed almost like fractals. At first glance they looked like giant toroids stacked on pillars; then, as he stared, the toroids resolved into smaller rings of permaglass containers, with containers within them, and inside those—
No, this wasn’t happening.
Inside the transparent tubes there was fluid, and within it there was movement.
It took him several minutes of staring and refocusing on one of the tubes to realize there was a body in there, and it was alive. In fact, there was a body in every tube: row upon row of tiny bodies, children’s bodies. Babies.
“Fierfek,” he said aloud.
He thought he’d come to this Force-forsaken hole to train commandos. Now he knew he’d stepped into a nightmare. He heard boots behind him on the walkway of the gantry and turned sharply to see Jango coming slowly toward him, chin lowered as if in reproach.
“If you’re thinking of leaving, Kal, you knew the
deal,” said Jango, and leaned on the rail beside him.
“You said—”
“I said you’d be training special forces troops, and you will be. They just happen to be growing them.”
“What?”
“Clones.”
“How the fierfek did you ever get involved with that?”
“A straight five million and a few extras for donating my genes. And don’t look shocked. You’d have done the same.”
The pieces fell into place for Skirata and he let himself be shocked anyway. War was one thing. Weird science was another issue entirely.
“Well, I’m keeping my end of the deal.” Skirata adjusted the fifteen-centimeter, three-sided blade that he always kept sheathed in his jacket sleeve. Two Kaminoan technicians walked serenely across the floor of the facility beneath him. Nobody had searched him and he felt better for having a few weapons located for easy use, including the small hold-out blaster tucked in the cuff of his boot.
And all those little kids in tanks…
The Kaminoans disappeared from sight. “What do those things want with an army anyway?”
“They don’t. And you don’t need to know all this right now.” Jango beckoned him to follow. “Besides, you’re already dead, remember?”
“Feels like it,” said Skirata. He was the Cuy’val Dar—literally, “those who no longer exist,” a hundred expert soldiers with a dozen specialties who’d answered Jango’s secret summons in exchange for a lot of credits … as long as they were prepared to disappear from the galaxy completely.
He trailed Jango down corridors of unbroken white duraplast, passing the occasional Kaminoan with its long gray neck and snake-like head. He’d been here for four standard days now, staring out the window of his quarters onto the endless ocean and catching an occasional glimpse of the aiwhas soaring up out of the waves and flapping into the air. The thunder was totally silenced by the soundproofing, but the lightning had become an annoyingly irregular pulse in the corner of his eye.
Skirata knew from day one that he wouldn’t like Kaminoans.
Hard Contact Page 29
