“And your free warra nuts.” So Darman wasn't asleep, then. “Fierfek, I keep getting this weird feeling like someone's here next to me.”
“It’s me, Dar. But don’t ask me to hold you hand.”
“Di’kut.” He unfolded his arms slowly and turned to Atin. “At’ika, if you can’t decrypt that data, why not just try to send the whole memory back down the hololink as is?”
“That’s what I’m doing,” Atin said without looking up. The only light in the compartment now was the blue glow from their helmets. Fi noted that Atin had his night-vision filter in place to see the small ports on the datapads. “You’re right. I can’t crack the encryption here, but I can dump the data down the link now and let Ordo play with it if I can override the anti-tampering. Otherwise it’ll just delete everything on here. Ten minutes, maybe? I’m not letting this beat me.”
Niner eased himself out of the seat and gave Atin a pat on the shoulder as he floated past him. “I’m going to keep the hololink open. Time to update Fleet on our rate of drift anyway.”
They had nothing to say at the moment. And the link was a power drain that they might regret later if things didn’t pan out quite as they were hoping.
But Fi understood. Kal Skirata would be going crazy not being able to keep an eye on them at a time like this. It was what he always, always said when things got tough: I’m here, son. He felt he had to be there for them. And he always had been.
Buir was exactly the right word. Fi had no idea how he had managed to keep faith with more that a hundred commandos.
The link flared into blue light again. Ordo appeared, in full armor and looking away form the cam. He must have been at Fleet HQ, then, to be working with his helmet on like that, and the holo unit must have been placed in his desk.
“Omega here,” Niner said. “Captain, mind if we keep the link open until further notice?”
Ordo looked around, and Skirata’s voice cut in from outside the video pickup’s field: “I’d kick your shebs if you didn’t, ad’ike. You okay?”
“Bored, Sarge,” Said Fi.
“Well, you won't be bored much longer. Majestic and Fearless are on their way, ETA under two hours—”
“Good old ma'am,” Niner said.
“—but you'll probably have help sooner, because Delta Squad are in transit.”
“Oh, we'll never hear the last of this …”
“You haven't met them yet, son.”
“Heard enough.”
“Rough, rude boys,” Fi said. “And rather full of themselves.”
“Yes, but they have oxygen, a functioning drive, and they're just gagging to get to you first. So play nicely with them.” Skirata moved into the hololink's visual range and sat down on Ordo's desk, swinging one leg, his injured one. He looked the way he always looked on training exercises: grim, focused, and constantly chewing something. “Oh, and don't open fire. They're driving a Sep ship.”
“How did they get hold of that? Not that the cannon on this crate is working now anyway.”
“Well, I don't think the Sep pilot was keen to part with it, but maybe they promised that they'd bring it back when they were finished.”
Fi cut in again. “Anyone looking for Sicko, Sarge? Our TIV pilot?”
“Yes. We'll keep you posted.” Skirata glanced at Ordo as if he'd said something. “Atin, son, you know Vau's back, don't you?”
Atin paused for a second and then carried on tapping a probe on the entrails of a dismantled datapad. He nodded to himself. “Yes, Sarge. I noted that.”
“You're coming back to Brigade HQ when we get you out of there, but you steer clear of him, okay? You hear me?”
Fi was riveted. Atin had never said a word about Vau, other than that he was hard, but his reactions were telling.
He didn't even look toward the holoimage. “I promise, Sarge. Don't worry.”
“I'll be around to make sure, too.”
Atin inhaled audibly, a sign that usually meant he was either exasperated or burying his anger. Fi thought better of asking which.
Niner detached the holo emitter and pickup from his forearm plate, unlatched the small disc from inside the wrist section and stuck it on the flat shelf that ran along the freighter's console with a rolled-up piece of tape. The holoimage of Ordo and Skirata was silent, as was Omega. There was nothing more to discuss. Just having that visual link was enough to comfort everyone.
It was a long, silent half hour. Maybe Darman slept and maybe he didn't, but Fi suspected he was just thinking. Atin's ten-minute estimate had stretched somewhat but he plowed on, head down, completely focused. Atin was exactly what he was. Not “stubborn,” as Basic translated the word, a negative refusal to change; but atin in the Mando'a sense—courageously persistent, tenacious, the hallmark of a man who would never give up or give in.
Eventually he let out a breath. “Sorted.” He leaned forward to connect the dataport to the hololink. “Downloading now. Plus Dar's explosives profiling and some images of the prisoners. Sorry we didn't get pictures of the dead ones, but they wouldn't look too cute now anyway. All yours, Captain.”
“That's my boy,” Skirata said.
Well, he was now. He wasn't Vau's batch any longer. They all settled back and relaxed as best they could. Fi could hear it in his helmet. They were breathing in unison now, slow and shallow.
Ordo disappeared from the holoimage, no doubt to take the prized data somewhere else to crack it. Skirata simply stayed where he was, occasionally turning to check a screen behind him.
After an hour he spoke again. “Update position and intended movement, Omega. Fearless on station in forty-three minutes, Majestic fifty-nine … Delta thirty-five.”
“They're so competitive and macho,” Fi said. “We're going to have to teach them how to relax.”
There was a brief snort of amusement from Darman's audio and then everyone was silent again. The three prisoners shifted from time to time: the human Farr Orjul was shuddering uncontrollably in the cold despite being wrapped like a roasting joint of nerf in all four of the squad's emergency plastifoil blankets. Condensation was forming on the bulkhead next to Fi and he ran his gloved fingertip across it, making the moisture bead and run.
It was just as well that the vessel's electrical power was down. It would be shorting out by now.
And just when things were going so well—all things considered—Skirata jumped upright from the desk and rushed out of camshot. When he came back seconds later it was clear something had gone osik'la, as he always put it—badly wrong.
“Omega, you've got company. There's a Sep vessel on an intercept course with you, unidentified but armed and going fast. Have you any power at all you can divert to cannon? Are you certain it's offline?”
Niner swallowed hard. The problem with a shared helmet comlink was that you heard your brother's every reaction, even the ones you really didn't want to. It was one reason why they checked each other's biosign readouts only when they had to.
“We blew all the power relays to trigger the emergency bulkheads, Sarge. It's dead.”
Skirata paused for a heartbeat. “Their ETA at that speed is thirty-five minutes. Ad'ike, I'm sorry—”
“It's okay, Sarge,” Niner said. He sounded flat calm now. “Just tell Delta not to stop for caf, okay?”
Fi's adrenaline flooded his mouth with a familiar tingling sensation, and a great cold wash of ice flowed into his leg muscles.
You couldn't defend yourself against cannon with a DC-17, not in a sealed and crippled section of a slowly drifting ship. Fi hadn't found himself helpless for a long time. He knew he wasn't going to handle it well.
Darman looked up suddenly. He hadn't reacted at all to the grim news until then. He turned to face Fi, just a ghostly blue T-shaped light on the other side of the cockpit.
“I don't want to throw any more cold water on this party,” he said. “But has anyone thought through the logical sequence of this extraction? Because I bet Delta has …”
&n
bsp; RAS Fearless, time to target: twenty minutes
Commander Gett leaned over the ops room trooper, the one he called Peewo.
It had taken Etain a while to realize that he called all the men who took watches at that console Peewo; it was simply an acronym for “principal weapons officer.” The man's name was actually Tenn.
Tenn's face was blank with total concentration, thrown into sharp relief by the yellow light from the screens in front of him.
“There it is,” he said.
The Separatist ship—appearing on the tracking screen as a visibly shifting red pulse—was now within their scanning range. Omega's wasn't, although Tenn had programmed in a blue marker that corresponded with their last position and projected drift.
“How many minutes are we still behind them?” Etain asked.
If Tenn didn't like having a commander and a general breathing down his neck, he showed no sign of it. Etain admired his ability to ignore distractions, even without a little Force help from her. He didn't seem to need it. “Five, maybe four if the velocities hold constant.”
“Now, what's that?” Gett said.
A smaller target had appeared on the screen, first red, then blue, then flashing red with a cursor saying UNCONFIRMED.
“Sep drive profile, but the scan is probably detecting a GAR encrypted transponder,” Tenn said. “I think we can guess who's in the driver's seat there.”
“Wasn't Delta carrying out a rummage of Prosecutor?” Gett asked.
“I gather they had expected visitors.”
“Doesn't Delta file full contact reports?” Etain interrupted.
“No more detail than they have to, I understand,” Gett said. “Silent ops. I think they get out of the habit of talking to the regular forces side of things. Perhaps General Jusik might have a word with them.”
Delta, like Omega, was part of Jusik's battalion, Zero Five Commando, which was one of ten in the Special Operations Brigade commanded by Etain's former Master, Arligan Zey. A year before, there had been two brigades; casualties had slashed their strength in half.
And like all the commando squads, Delta was utterly self-reliant and operated largely without command, merely receiving intelligence support and a broad objective. It was the kind of command that was ideal for a very smart but inexperienced general. And there was no other way for one Jedi to run five hundred special forces men: clones led clones, as they did in the regular GAR. So Delta did more or less as they pleased within the overall battle plan. Fortunately, it seemed to please them to be blisteringly efficient, a quality Etain noted and respected in every clone soldier she met.
“Get me a link to them, Commander,” she said. “I need to talk to them. As do you, I have no idea how they're going to play this.”
Gett just raised his eyebrows and turned to the signals officer to request a secure link via Fleet. It took thirty seconds. They were eighteen minutes to target. Time was running out. Tenn moved his seat a little so Gett could place the hololink transmitter on the console where they could see both the link and the tracking screen.
“Delta, this is General Tur-Mukan, Fearless.”
The image that shimmered before her showed one man in a familiar suit of Katarn armor, squatting with a DC-17 across his thighs. The blue light distorted natural color, but the dark patches on his armor suggested red or orange identity markings.
“RC-one-one-three-eight, General, receiving.”
It was time for names. “You're Boss.”
“Yes, General, Boss. Our ETA is fourteen to fifteen minutes.”
“You don't have any armament, do you?”
“No, and we're aware that there's another Sep ship right up our shebs that does.” Boss appeared to check himself. “Apologies for the language, General. But you're the ones carrying the cannon.”
“Boss, how do you plan to execute this?”
“Get there first, get them out fast, and bug out even faster. That usually works pretty well.”
She bristled, but she knew that wasn't fair to him. “Could you be more specific?”
“Okay, we get alongside, access the cockpit, seal against vacuum, and extract personnel.”
“Access means a big bang, yes?”
“No. Scorch would usually love that, but this is a cutting job if you want those prisoners alive because that'll mean an instant decompression. If you don't want them alive, then that's easier. Omega has enough air, so their suits are still good for another twenty minutes in vacuum. In that case we just blow the cockpit viewscreen and haul them out.”
Boss had his helmet cocked slightly to one side as if he was asking her to make a command decision. He was.
It was the mission objective versus Omega's safety.
And that's what command is all about. Etain suspected this was where she finally stopped playing at being a general.
Omega didn't have to survive, but a few terrorists who might hold the key to a wider terror network did. Accessing the cockpit carefully with cutting equipment would take more time, time that might mean the Sep ship arrived before Omega was safe and clear.
Her personal choice was immediate. But she wavered over the professional one. She was aware of Gett glancing at her and then looking down at something of overwhelming interest on the deck.
Boss showed unusual diplomacy for a squad that had a name for being unsubtle. He wasn't blind. He could see her as well as she could see him, and he probably saw a child out of her depth.
“General, I've spoken to Niner,” he said. “He's clear. They're all clear. This is as close as we've come to grabbing some key players for a long, long time, and it probably cost their pilot his life as well. We have to make prisoner retrieval the priority. We all know the game by now. It's a risk for us, too. We might all get vaped.”
“I know you're correct,” Etain said. “But none of you is expendable as far as I'm concerned. And I know you'll do everything you can to get them out alive.”
“General, is that an order, and if so, what is it? Extract Omega and abandon the prisoners? Or what?”
She felt her stomach fall. It was relatively easy to be the commander who held a trooper as he was dying. It was much, much harder to stand there and say Yes, rescue three terrorists and let my friends die—let Darman die—if that's what it takes.
Had they asked Skirata? What did he say?
Gett touched her arm and indicated the tracking screen. He held up three fingers. Three minutes behind the Sep vessel now. They were gaining on them.
“Extract the prisoners,” Etain said. It was out of her mouth before she could think further. “And we'll be right behind you.”
Unnamed commercial freighter, drifting three thousand klicks Core-side of Perlemian node: Red Zero first responder ETA six minutes
Fi studied his datapad and considered his brief and busy one-year career as an elite commando.
He'd fought at Geonosis. He'd taken out a Sep research base, nearly slotted his beloved Sergeant Kal, and ended the careers of eighty-five assorted Seps and more droids than he bothered to count. And he'd denied the CIS an awful lot of assets, from replenishment depots to a capital ship and a fighter squadron that didn't even have the chance to fly its first sortie.
Some of it had been fun, most of it had been a grim hard slog, and all of it had been frightening. And now the cheerful euphemism was over; he was probably going to die. And he didn't want Skirata to witness that.
He looked up from the expired op orders on his datapad and saw that the holoimage of Skirata was still much as it had been for the best part of two hours. Sergeant Kal waited. He wouldn't leave.
Niner continued to stare out the viewscreen.
Then he sat bolt upright, prevented from shooting forward by the restraining belt. Fi checked his viewpoint icon and saw he had activated his electrobinocular visor.
“Visual contact,” Niner said quietly. “Fierfek, it really is a Sep crate. Neimoidian.”
The whole squad maneuvered so they could see what he was
looking at.
“About time,” Niner said. Fi listened in. “Delta, Niner here. You been sightseeing?”
“Boss receiving. Sorry, we had to stop and ask for directions.” He had a voice very like Atin's but with a stronger accent. “My boys are now going to show you how to do an extraction properly, so take notes because you might blink and miss it. There's a Sep ship with missiles up the spout about three minutes behind us.”
“Can we bring some friends?”
“The more the merrier. We're going to align with your cockpit, slap an isolation seal on the viewport, and Scorch will cut through. Then you shift it fast, and we RV with Fearless for caf, cakes, and hero worship. Got it?”
“Copy that.”
“I love emotional reunions,” Fi said. “And hero worship.”
“Boss, that Sep's getting awfully close.” Another voice: Fi couldn't identify any of them yet. “This might have to beat the galactic record.”
“How close? Close enough to make me mad?”
“They could launch a missile in two minutes and it'd singe your shebs overtaking us.”
“Okay. Close. Omega, you heard the man.” Boss sounded unperturbed. “Powder your noses and get ready to party.”
Fierfek, Fi thought. He rolled carefully to peel Orjul off the deck and haul him upright for a hasty exit with jet-pack assist.
The human prisoner looked straight at him. And he spoke. “You're really not very good at this, are you?”
“Now you decide to get chatty.”
“We'll all be charcoal in a few minutes, and that gives me some satisfaction.”
“Okay, I'm now really motivated to introduce you to Sergeant Vau.”
“Whoa, cut it out,” Darman said. One of the Nikto tried to gore him with its short horns as he lifted it ready for escape. “Ungrateful di'kut.” He brought his helmet hard down in its face in a perfect head-butt; only the pilot's seat stopped them from being catapulted by the inertia of the impact. Darman looked around at the other Nikto. “Want some?”
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