So I do have a little of the ship left in me.
It wasn’t the first time. She’d immersed herself in machines before, and they hadn’t been anywhere near as complex or intense as this. But she’d always felt slightly altered afterward in ways she found hard to define.
If I tried to understand a droid at that level … if I melded with a droid …
Callista had always been curious, never afraid to confront her own limits or challenge beliefs she’d always held. But she could hardly bear to think of what might happen if she saw the galaxy from a droid’s perspective.
Yes. I was the computer. I was the ship. I was every concussion missile. If I ever knew what it was to be a droid, could I fight this war?
She knew she had to avoid ever finding out. It was hard enough to stomach a war that churned out living men like machines on a production line. Clone troopers—she was right to feel outrage and sympathy for them. There was no other way to see them but as human beings. But if there was anything to feel in a droid, anything to understand, then destroying them would be agony.
She couldn’t afford that. She had to close her eyes to it.
It was an ugly realization. She had made a decision there and then not to experience what it was to be a battle droid. She knew that they thought, by any definition of the word. But she didn’t want to know if they felt.
You know the answer, don’t you?
You know that life takes more forms than we can possibly imagine. But there comes a point where you daren’t look.
“Expedience,” she said, heading unerringly for the emergency compartment in medbay. “It gets us all in the end.”
BRIDGE, REPUBLIC ASSAULT SHIP LEVELER
PELLAEON STARED AT THE SLOWLY TUMBLING DEBRIS THAT had been a small fleet of Separatist warships, and waited for bad news, but none came.
Baradis kept pacing up and down in the gap between the weapons stations and the sensor operators, one arm folded across his chest, hand cupping his elbow, tapping his thumbnail against his teeth. He was waiting for bad news, too. There’d been so much of it that it hardly seemed believable that they were out of trouble now.
“Two Sep vessels withdrawing, sir,” he said. “And we’ll be ready to jump in roughly five minutes.”
It had taken longer than the fifteen-minute estimate already, but that didn’t matter now. The fight was over. The survivors simply stood breathless and wary, preparing to walk away. There were no winners.
“Do they know we’re out of concs?” Pellaeon had gone beyond the sensible quitting point, but there was no point pursuing the stragglers, and there was nothing Leveler could do on her own about JanFathal even if she’d been fully operational. “Well, at least those missiles worked pretty well. Even if they did need a Jedi to kick-start them.”
Benb watched impassively, arms folded on a rail. For a civilian who’d gone on a work-up expecting to do nothing more hazardous than tighten a few bolts, he seemed to have taken imminent death rather well.
“How’s your team, Benb?” Pellaeon asked. Maybe they weren’t quite so sanguine.
“Never better,” the Sullustan said casually. “We’re on triple overtime. Hardship allowance kicks in once the shooting starts.”
It was another universe, the civilian dockyards.
Ash tapped Pellaeon’s shoulder. “Sir, we’ve identified a safe rendezvous point at Kemla to meet up with Wookiee Gunner for transfer.”
“Good grief, no.” The guilt had set in now. “We’ve interrupted your mission, put you at risk, and relied on you to save our skins. The least we can do is let you go on your way.”
“You still can’t jump accurately without a Jedi, sir.”
She had a point. “I’ll mention you in dispatches,” he said. “If only to see the look on Master Yoda’s face when he sees that the heretical anarchists rode to the rescue.”
Ash looked slightly embarrassed. Maybe gloating wasn’t a very Jedi thing to do.
“Agent Devis is in medbay,” she said cryptically, and walked away before he had the chance to work out how she knew.
He couldn’t put it off any longer. He didn’t want to. But it seemed indecent haste when his ship was limping back to the dockyard with damage and casualties.
“Go on, sir,” Baradis said quietly, eyes still on the nav sensor screen. “I can finish up here just as easily without you fidgeting and fretting …”
Permission from his navigator or not, Pellaeon tried not to be seen to hurry.
Medbay was busy. Droids were tackling a lot of minor injuries—fractures and lacerations from being thrown around by impacts, some burns—but there were a few serious ones from the generator compartment that had taken a direct hit.
“Fatals?” he asked the physician commander.
“Ten, sir. Under the circumstances, we got off lightly.”
“Give me the next-of-kin details, Commander, and I’ll send personal messages.”
“Eight clones, sir. Only two messages to write.”
That reality never sat well with Pellaeon. It felt like erasure. They had no families. So he’d find out who their friends were among the crew, who would miss them most, and talk to them for a while. If he didn’t—then he might as well have been a Neimoidian with a crew of droids that meant nothing to him. A man couldn’t run a warship that way.
“And,” said the commander, “she’s over there.”
The commander didn’t need to say who she was. Pellaeon’s private life was now no longer private. He wondered if it ever had been, but at least it was out in the open now, and there would be no sly looks in the wardroom.
Hallena’s voice wafted from a screened cubicle. When he slid back the screen and stepped into the treatment area, he found it crowded—a med droid, a clone flat on the diagnostic table with tubes leading into arm and neck, and a small crowd of onlookers. Hallena had hold of the clone’s free hand. Rex watched grimly, arms folded, gaze alternating between Ince and the biosigns screen on the bulkhead.
“Ince, you’re going to be fine,” Hallena said. “Ince? Have you ever been to the entertainment district on Coruscant? I bet you haven’t. Well, I’m going to take you out for the biggest nerf steak ever.”
Ince couldn’t hear her, Pellaeon suspected, but even people in comas heard things sometimes. The med droid checked the catheter pumping fluid into his body via his jugular vein. Rex paced slowly around the edge of the treatment bay, occasionally stroking his palm over his scalp as if checking for stubble. Coric and Ahsoka were absent. It looked as if Rex had told him to get her out of the way for a while. There was no sign of Skywalker.
Pellaeon said nothing, but put his hand on Hallena’s shoulder. She glanced back as if she hadn’t realized he was there, then just looked up at him with an expression he hadn’t seen before: regret.
“I put you all to a lot of trouble,” she said quietly.
It was the first time they’d seen each other in weeks. Nothing unusual, given their jobs, but this wasn’t the romantic reunion he’d planned.
“How’s he doing?” Pellaeon asked.
He wasn’t sure who was going to answer. There was a silent pause as the rest of the clones either looked at Rex, or didn’t look up at all.
“His kidneys are failing,” Rex said. “So that makes any brain damage from hypoxia a bit academic now. He lost too much blood.”
Pellaeon wondered if it was better to take Hallena away. He squeezed her shoulder.
“Give his buddies a turn,” he said tactfully, indicating the exit. “Not much room to move in here.”
They stood outside in the lobby for a moment, trying to keep out of the way of rushing med droids and repulsor gurneys. Altis waited with Callista and Geith at a discreet distance, talking in hushed tones. Pellaeon caught Callista’s eye and raised his thumb in silent approval for the missile strike, but then the Jedi all turned their heads at once, all looking toward the treatment cubicle. Pellaeon realized what had caught their attention. It wasn’t him.
He couldn’t hear or see it, of course. But they could.
“Oh, stang,” he said.
Rex came out of the cubicle, his face ashen as if he was either scared or furious, but the set of his jaw said the latter. He had to pass Pellaeon to leave the medbay. He unclipped his helmet from the back of his belt and rammed it on as if he didn’t want to have any conversation.
“Make that two troopers I’ve got to replace,” he said, and strode away at speed.
Hallena shut her eyes for a moment and let her chin drop.
“You should have left me,” she said. “Look at all this. What was I thinking, calling for extraction? I didn’t even have any intel worth rescuing. What do I say to those troopers? That it’s all part of the job?”
She went as if to return to the cubicle, but Altis walked up to her and blocked her way with a quiet persistence. “I’d let them have a little time,” he said. “Short of abducting them, Agent Devis, there’s nothing you can do to stop this happening to them again.”
Hallena gave Altis an odd look, then glanced at Pellaeon. He wondered if the old Jedi had tried a little of that mind influence on her, but he’d heard it only worked on the suggestible, and she was anything but that.
“I’ll be in the wardroom,” she said, walking away. “When I manage to find it.”
Altis bowed his head slightly to Pellaeon. “Let a harmless old man go talk to her, Captain. I’d feel just like her in this situation. Guilty.”
But that’s my beloved. The woman I want to marry. I should be the one she turns to in a crisis.
Altis had a point. Feeling responsible for this mess was typically Hallena. She always felt she could manage things, and that if they went wrong, it was due to error, not bad luck. Perhaps she was right. When you worked alone, you tended not to see the million ways that an interconnected group of beings could run into problems without any single definable mistake being responsible for the way events turned out.
“Tell her I’ll be along later.” Pellaeon felt the rising frequency of a telltale vibration as Leveler powered up to jump. That, at least, was going to plan. In a few hours, they’d be back at Kemla to start all over again. “A pity this journey will be so brief. I would have enjoyed dinner, Master Altis.”
“I’m sure we’ll get another chance one day,” the Jedi said, and walked away with Geith and Callista.
Leveler jumped, Jedi-assisted. This part of the ordeal, at least, was over.
CHIEF PETTY OFFICERS’ MESS, LEVELER, ON COURSE FOR RV AT KEMLA WITH WOOKIEE GUNNER
“REX?”
He looked up without lifting his head, chin resting on clasped hands.
He hadn’t even heard Ahsoka approaching. Jedi could do that kind of stealth thing, but for a moment he was worried that he was losing his edge. The little Togruta was wearing a smart gray naval tunic and pants. He had no idea where she’d found a uniform to fit her, but she was so touchingly earnest, so intent on doing things right and fitting in, that it almost upset him.
“You’re too young to drink in here,” he said.
“And you’re younger than me—from a certain point of view.”
She could always make him laugh, too, however bad he felt. Being a Jedi, she didn’t need him to explain that to her. She knew. He knew she knew.
She sat down beside him at the table and leaned close as if she had some joke to share. He was wondering how he was going to handle her well-meaning attempts at cheering him up.
“Do you ever have days,” she said, “where everything you thought you knew for sure is just gone, overturned, and you don’t know where to start again to make sense of it all?”
So she wasn’t here to improve his morale. He thought for a moment that she was hitting his own problem square on the head. Then he realized she was describing her own.
“You bet, littl’un,” he said quietly.
“How do you cope?”
“Good question.”
“Do you cope?”
“I’m still standing …”
“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
“Okay,” Rex said. “I’m a soldier. It’s all I am. I don’t know a lot about the outside world, but I’m pretty sure that other soldiers have families and lives outside fighting. We don’t. Is that why I feel so bad about guys like Vere and Ince getting killed so soon out of training?”
“And nobody should die that young.”
“But whole regiments of us are going to die, sooner or later. Maybe all of us. Young men. We knew that. Why does it make me feel cheated?”
Ahsoka grabbed his hand as if she’d been suddenly scared by something. Rex had seen some of the little clones do that when they got their first taste of live ordnance. The Kaminoans didn’t approve; clones weren’t supposed to show fear, not even as children.
But Ahsoka’s grip was like nothing he’d ever felt, not just because Togrutas had strangely cool skin, but because he felt as if he’d been connected to something he didn’t understand, plugged into a universe too vast to grasp. Now he was the one who was scared.
“Rex, is it true what Geith says? That we’re all guilty of using you?” She was distraught. He could hear the rasping wild undertone in her voice. “That we’re all following orders blindly and not asking questions?”
Rex felt his world beginning to unravel. If he let Ahsoka go too far down that path—no, if he let himself go down that path, then he wouldn’t be able to do the job, and if he didn’t do this job, then he had no idea what his life was about. If he let that doubt take hold, he would never be able to deal with Skywalker again, or be able to lead his men. And he had to lead them because they depended on him. His whole existence depended on believing in what he was doing.
The little nagging voice that he tried to ignore was actually being more constructive this time. Don’t even think about it, the voice said. Because you can’t change a thing. So what if it’s true? Where are you going to go? What else could you do? And what would happen to your men?
Some things were so overwhelming and beyond your control that simply noticing they were there would destroy you. Rex decided he could shut it out. He could shut out anything if he put his mind to it.
“I don’t know,” he said at last.
“You said orders were there for a reason. That they kept us alive.”
“That’s true.”
“Jedi have orders as well. Like no attachments. And … well, you’ve seen Callista and Geith. Master Altis lets all his Jedi marry if they want. But they’ve not fallen to the dark side, so what’s really true?”
The best Rex could do was help her live with uncertainty. He couldn’t tell her what was true. And the fact that the Seps were trying to kill them—that was true. Did the rest matter?
Pull one brick out of the wall, and the whole edifice comes crashing down. For any of us.
“Remember how I said that you don’t always have the bigger picture, that you get orders because someone higher up the chain of command has information that you don’t, so they don’t necessarily make sense? Maybe your orders are like that.” It wasn’t a lie. It might not have been what Rex actually wanted to say—I don’t understand what’s happening, I don’t like what’s happening, something’s wrong—but if he said that, then he was adrift, too, and that didn’t help anybody stay alive. “And maybe Jedi end up in the places they’re meant to be—that the ones who can handle attachment find their way to Altis, and the ones who can’t …”
Well, maybe that wasn’t the smartest thing to say. Ahsoka’s agitated expression—head-tails more deeply colored, chin down—made him wonder if she was sweet on somebody and facing the reality of orders for the first time. But it had to be kinder than agreeing that yes, it was weird that Yoda and all the Jedi Masters had told her something that now looked … untrue.
Cope with it. That’s the best anyone can hope for. To cope with life.
“The world’s full of attachment,” Ahsoka said. “I just don’t know why it’s only wro
ng for Jedi.”
“You think the last couple of days would have been simpler if everybody had decided that it was only one woman stuck in Athar, and rescuing her would risk too many lives?”
“Yes, but that wouldn’t have been the right decision.”
“Why? You see, that’s the kind of decision a commander has to make all the time—when to call a halt because you’ll be losing more lives than you’re saving. Remember we talked about that?”
Ahsoka didn’t answer. She stared into mid-distance for a while and chewed her lip. She still had a ferocious grip on his hand; he almost expected her to unsheath claws.
“Yes, I remember,” she said. “And I argued with my Master about it, too, except he was the one who said we should never abandon anyone.”
“Well, General Yoda faces the same dilemmas. Maybe the Jedi found out a long time ago that it’s easier to make tough calls if you don’t get emotionally involved. A bit of cold distance. Easier to make the decisions, easier to live with them afterward. That’s command.”
Now Rex felt better. He was back to solid truth again, not just avoiding outright lies. He and Ahsoka—all the clones, all the Jedi—were in a spot they didn’t choose, and making the best of it. All he and Ahsoka could do was try to make the right call every time, decisions they could live with, and accept that the bigger game wasn’t theirs to play.
“Do you understand the dark side?” she asked.
“Not really.”
“Neither do I.”
“Explain something to me, littl’un,” Rex said. Maybe he could have asked Skywalker this same question, but something told him it was a bad idea. “What’s the difference between Jedi who fall to the dark side, and do whatever it is that dark siders do, and Jedi who just let bad things happen on their watch?”
He really wanted to know.
No Prisoners Page 19
