DELTA SQUAD TO FLEET OPS. RESPONDING TO RED ZERO. POSITION: CHAYKIN SECTOR, ETA: 1 STANDARD HOUR 40. CAN ASSIST: MEDICAL AND OXYGEN. PLEASE NOTE: DEPLOYING IN REQUISITIONED NEIMOIDIAN VESSEL. NO DEFENSIVE CAPACITY. REPEAT: NEGATIVE ARMAMENT. STRONGLY ADVISE ANY GAR VESSELS TO PING TRANSPONDER BEFORE OPENING FIRE. BE AWARE THAT SEPARATIST TRAFFIC IN SECTOR HAS INCREASED IN LAST 20 MINUTES IN RESPONSE TO FLEET MOVEMENTS. PREP FOR UNWANTED COMPANY.
–Signal received at Fleet Ops. Passed to MILINT N-11 Captain Ordo and acknowledged. Vessels responding now: Fearless, Majestic, and impounded enemy shuttle. Advised to assume extraction may be opposed.
367 days after Geonosis
It was cold and pitch-black in the cockpit, but it certainly beat being dead.
Fi kept his suit temperature at the bare minimum to conserve power. He flicked on his spot-lamp briefly and checked the trussed and shivering suspects who were lying against the deck: a human, and—disturbingly—two Nikto. Fi had only seen Nikto in obscure databases devoted to identifying the best part of their anatomy to aim at to stop them dead. They were tough. Intel said they could defeat Jedi. They were even rumored to have a weapon that could deflect and destroy a lightsaber blade. Maybe Jedi needed to tool up with PEP lasers, then.
And all the prisoners had tested positive for explosives residue when Darman had run his sensor over them. With the intel and the heavily encrypted data on their 'pads, the three looked like being dead to rights, as Skirata would say. But it was a long way from being satisfied that they'd snatched the right people to actually extracting useful information from them.
Fi took his thermal plastifoil survival blanket from his backpack and folded it carefully over the human, who seemed to be more affected by cold than the Nikto. Losing a suspect to hypothermia after going to all this trouble to grab them wasn't an option. Wrapping a body wasn't an easy maneuver in zero-g, but at least he'd stopped feeling sick.
The ultralight plastifoil kept drilling away every time the man shuddered. Fi sighed and took out his universal solution to any problem, a roll of thick adhesive tape, and hooked his leg around a handrail to stop himself floating while he tore off lengths. He taped the blanket to the suspect. Then he secured the trussed suspects to the deck with more of the tape. It was amazing how handy tape could be.
“And don't ask me to tuck you in and read you a story.” The human just stared balefully at him. He had a lovely black eye now from resisting Darman a little too vigorously. “They never have happy endings.”
The man's ID said Farr Orjul but nobody took that too seriously. He was about thirty: fine blond hair, sharp features, very pale blue eyes. The Nikto claimed to be M'truli and Gysk, or at least their mining licenses did, because none of the suspects was talking.
SOPs—standard operating procedures—said they had to stop prisoners from talking to each other before processing. But SOPs hadn't allowed for the little complication of running out of air before an interrogator could be found.
Niner turned his head slightly to Orjul. “You can talk to us. Or you can wait until Sergeant Vau sits you down with a nice cup of caf and asks you to tell him your life story. He's a good listener. And you'll really want to talk to him.”
There was no response. Apart from the brief curses and grunts of pain they'd emitted when Omega stormed the cockpit and subdued them—Fi loved military understatement– none of the suspects had said a single word, not even name, rank, or serial number. And, of course, the two who were dry-frozen somewhere in the vacuum of space weren't going to provide many answers of their own free will, either.
“Look, shall I try to get some information out of these gentlemen just in case the taxi doesn't get here before our air runs out?” Fi asked.
“We're not trained to interrogate prisoners,” said Niner.
Fi maneuvered himself above the human. He didn't know what Nikto felt or feared, and suspected that it wasn't much, but he knew plenty about his own species' vulnerabilities. “I could improvise.”
“No, you'll bounce off the bulkheads, expend too much oxygen, and then we'll have to slot them to preserve the supply for us. It can wait. Vau isn't going anywhere, and neither are they.”
Niner was reclining in the pilot's chair, restraining belt buckled and staring straight ahead. The blue-lit T of his visor was reflected in the transparisteel viewscreen, making him look wonderfully droid-like. Fi wasn't sure if Niner was simply saying coldly brutal things to intimidate the prisoners or not. Fi wasn't entirely sure whether he was really joking some of the time.
War was nothing personal. But somehow Fi felt differently about people who didn't carry a rifle and who didn't kill in honest combat. They were an invisible enemy. Fierfek, even droids stood up where you could see them.
He put it out of his mind with a conscious effort, and not only because Ordo had insisted on undamaged prisoners. He knew how to kill, and he knew how to resist pain, but he wasn't sure how to inflict it deliberately.
But he was pretty sure that Vau did. He'd leave the job to him.
Darman had positioned himself against the bulkhead with his legs stretched out. He looked asleep. Arms folded, head lowered, his point-of-view icon in Fi's HUD showed only an image of his belt and lap. Dar could sleep anywhere, anytime. At one point he flinched, as if someone had said something to him, but there was nothing audible on the comlink.
Atin, belted in to the copilot's seat, worked on the assortment of datapads, datasticks, and sheets of flimsi that he'd taken from the suspects—dead and alive—and prodded probes into dataports, doing what he seemed to enjoy best: slicing, hacking, and generally dismantling things. Niner occasionally reached out to grab any of his prizes that floated free.
Fi propelled himself forward with a gentle push against the deck and offered his roll of tape. Atin managed a smile and trapped the wayward components on the sticky side, securing the other end on Niner's left forearm plate.
“Fi, you know I don't mean it, don't you?” Niner said suddenly. “When I get on your back about stuff. I'm just venting steam.”
It took Fi aback. “Sarge, I think the first thing you ever did was to tear me off a strip, and we're still brothers, aren't we? You're just like Sergeant Kal. He never meant any of it, either.”
“Did you see the state of him on the hololink?”
“He looked pretty exhausted.”
“Poor Buir. He never stops worrying.”
Fi paused. It was the first time he'd ever heard Niner use the word buir openly: father. Fi preferred to see everyone burying their fears in wisecracks. This was all too raw.
We could be dead in two hours. Well, we've been there a few times before …
He shrugged, desperately seeking the other part of him that always had the smart answer ready. “I don't know about you, vode, but I'm planning on getting back to base because Obrim still owes me a drink.”
“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 …”
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-sideof 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?”
“Udesii, boys, udesii.” Niner raised his Deece. “Push comes to shove, we only need one of them alive, so next one to look like a safety risk isn't going home. Okay?”
The small Neimoidian assault vessel now filled their field of vision as it came to nestle partly across the freighter's viewscreen. Fi watched, mesmerized. A hatch opened and something distressingly reminiscent of a wide mouthed worm emerged and sucked against the transparisteel. A familiar blue light loomed from the darkness of its maw. Through the plate, Fi saw a helmet very like his and an exaggerated thumbs-up gesture.
“Stand back and watch a pro at work,” said a disembodied voice on the comlink.
For a second Fi thought Scorch was attaching a frame charge. Yeah, that's. clever, I don't think. But the large ring of alloy pipe sat snugly on the plate and began to glow white-hot. Scorch's thumbs-up became a jerked move away gesture.
“Scorch, sooner rather than later, okay?” Boss's voice said.
“One minute, tops.”
“We haven't got a minute—”
“What d'you want me to do, chew through it?”
The transparisteel plate was distorting as the hot frame burned through from the outside. Niner gathered up the hololink and snapped it back on his forearm plate. Atin shoved datapads and tools in his belt.
“Tell you what, shall we just float here and panic incoherently while we're waiting?” Fi said.
“Good idea,” Scorch said, unmoved.
“Very good idea, panicking,” Boss said. “Guess what I just eyeballed from the port-side screen.
RAS Fearless, ops room, ETA to target: two minutes
The assault ship had to decelerate to drop from hyperspace and open fire. It cost critical time. Etain watched while Tenn made rapid calculations to see if they could find that single critical firing solution that balanced losing speed with firing missiles and would not only make up those seconds, but also take out the Sep ship before it had a chance to target Omega.
The ops room was crowded with white armor and yet utterly silent as Fearless's crew watched the tracking screen repeater on the bulkhead. It mirrored what Tenn, Gett, and Etain could see in smaller format at the PWO's station.
Tenn didn't seem to have blinked in the last three minutes.
“Firing solution, General.” His hand rested on the firing key, his gaze welded to the screen. “Target acquired. Best solution we're going to get and our window is ten seconds or we'll take out Omega and Delta, too. Now, General?”
Etain glanced at Gett, her mind partly sensing the ripples in the Force. And the Force agreed with Tenn, to the very second.
“Take it, Tenn.”
“Yes, ma'am.” The key made a small snipping noise as he depressed it. “Fire one, fire two. Missiles away—”
Two huge trails of savage energy sped away from the decelerating assault ship and into the void. Etain could feel too much imminent disaster in the Force: she didn't want to watch it as well. She cupped her hands over her nose and shut her eyes for a second, and then made herself look back at the screen.
The tracking screen followed the missiles as steady white lines. They looked as if they had overlapped the pulsing red point of light that was the Separatist fighter. All the traces winked out of existence at the same time.
“Splash one,” said a trooper at another station. “Visual confirmation. Target destroyed.”
“And who else?” Commander Gett asked.
“Whoaaaa … !”
Fi wasn't certain if it was his own cry of shock or Scorch's voice in his comlink, but he saw the ball of white-and-gold flame expanding toward them, silhouetting the section of Neimie ship that partly obscured the shield, and he ducked instinctively.
A hailstorm of debris rained on the screen. Something large and metallic skidded along the casing of the freighter with a long dull screech. Fi straightened up as the hammering faded to the occasional rattle, like stones being tossed onto a roof. Then it stopped completely.
“Fierfek,” Scorch said. “Now, if they'd only added a spot of maranium to the warhead, it would have burned a really pretty purple.”
“Fearless Fearless Fearless calling Delta. Are you clear, repeat, are you clear, respond.”
A large rectangle of hot softened glass peeled slowly away from the screen, helped by Scorch's fist, and drifted off serenely into a silent, slow-motion collision with the headrest of the pilot's seat.
“Delta here, Fearless. Just extracting Omega and cargo now.”
Fi fought to stop himself from sounding breathless and shaky. It would let the squad down. “I'm glad the navy's here,” he said. “Because if it had been down to you, Greased Lightning, we'd be an asteroid belt by now.”
Scorch's visor poked through the aperture at last, followed by his arm, and he made an unmistakable gesture of displeasure.
Fi felt his mouth take over, fueled by shock. “My hero! You finally made it!”
“You want to walk back to base?”
Niner lifted the plastifoil-wrapped Orjul with one hand and lined him up with the opening. “Fi's going to give his mouth a nice rest now and help me cross-deck the garbage.”
“Gift-wrapped? Aww, you shouldn't have.” Scorch hauled himself a little farther down the access tube and hung motionless at 135 degrees, assessing the three bound prisoners. “Feet first, please. Then if the di'kut tries to kick out I can break his legs. Don't want this tubing breached.”
It proved harder than expected. But by the time the second Nikto had been rammed up into the connecting tube like a torpedo, the warm air from the hijacked Neimoidian vessel had worked its way into the freighter cockpit and made Fi feel a lot more comfortable. He stood back to let Atin then Darman make their way up the tube.
Scorch hauled Darman inboard by his webbing. Fi waited for his boots to disappear and then rolled to peer up the aperture into a circle of dim light.
“Next!”
Fi lined up and then pushed off with one boot. As he passed through the open hatch at the other end, he felt artificial gravity seize him, and he rolled onto the deck with a clatter of armor plates. It took him a few seconds to get to his feet. Niner collided with him from behind. It wasn't a very big ship.
Boss—his armor daubed with chipped and peeling orange paint—slammed the hatch behind Niner and sealed it. Niner stared at him as if he wasn't sure what should happen next and then the two men simply shook hands and slapped each other on the back.
“Like what we've done with the place?” Boss said, taking off his helmet. The flight deck looked as if someone had been dismantling it the hard way: panels had been ripped out, wires hung from the deckhead, and there were empty slots in the console where units had either been removed or not installed in the first place. “Okay, perhaps it's a little basic, but we call it home.”
“You nicked this?”
“No, they let us take it on a test drive.” Boss gestured at the rest of his brightly painted squad. “Fixer, Sev, and you already know Scorch. Say hello to the boys in boring black.”
“Thanks, vode,” Fi said. He wondered why Atin wasn't joining in; he had turned away and seemed to be taking a technical interest in a run of conduit. “Any word on Sicko?”
“If that's your pilot, Majestic's been diverted now. They picked up his beacon and that's all we know.” Boss looked down at the three prisoners, lined up on the deck like corpses. He gave each of them a nudge with his boot. “You'd better be worth everyone's effort.”
Fi eased off his helmet and inhaled almost fresh air. Except for Scorch, they had all taken off their helmets. Delta was one of fewer than a dozen squads that had survived intact since decanting, a true pod as the Kaminoans had called it, and they seemed to think that made them an elite within an elite. They had been raised and trained together, and they had never fought with anyone but their brothers. It was a luxury few squads now enjoyed.
Fi suspected it meant they didn't play well with others. He remembered only too well how ferociously competitive and inward looking his own pod had been, and how badly his confidence had been dented when he lost his brothers at Geonosis and was then dumped in Niner's care.
“You do okay for a mongrel squad,” Sev said, and Fi chose not to react. He knew he was on autopilot now and that he should shut up. Niner's glance helped him decide. “I don't suppose you did a rummage on that ship, did you?”
“Not with a rapid decompression on our hands, no,” said Niner. “Word was that it was carrying explosives.”
“Okay, we're going to be coated in Seps anytime now, so let's get this crate into Fearless's hangar and then they can blow the freighter. If there's anything useful in it, at least the Seps don't get it.”
Darman slid down a bulkhead onto the deck, and Niner sat down beside him. They were nearly back aboard Fearless, and that meant they were nearly home, and home meant Arca Company Barracks and—at last—a good night's sleep after two months on patrol. Fi never got enough. None of them ever did. And fatigue could make you dangerously careless.
“So, Atin … ,” Sev said. He wandered up behind Atin and stood close enough to be annoying. Atin didn't turn around. “Sargent Vau asked to see you again, vod'ika.”
“I'm not your little brother,” Atin said quietly. He kept his back to Sev. “I just work with you.”
Ah, so there was some history between those two. Fi bristled: he rallied to his adopted brother. He could see that the prospect of actually meeting Vau again was stoking something inside that wasn't typically Atin.
Sev didn't let up. “I don't forget, you know.”
This time Atin did wheel around, face-to-face with Sev, so close that Fi thought his placid brother was actually going to lose it for once. He prepared to intervene.
“It's my business,” Atin said. “Stay out of it.”
Sev stared into his face. “And disagreements stay inside the company.”
Atin hooked his fingers in the neck of his bodysuit and yanked it down to the left as far as the edge of the armor, exposing his collarbone. He had a lot of raised white scars. Nobody took much notice of them because injuries in training and combat were so common that they rarely drew comment. “You got worse than that, did you? You spent a week in bacta, did you?”
Atin looked about to snap, and Fi stepped forward to intervene. Then Niner was across the cabin in three strides and slammed in between the two men. He had to break them up by putting his arms between them and knocking them apart with his arm plates. But Sev's unblinking gaze was still fixed on Atin as if Niner weren't there.
“I think we all need to reach a comradely understanding,” Niner said, blocking Sev with his body. “Back at the barracks, if that's okay with you, ner vod.”
Sev looked murderous. His eyes were still fixed on Atin's. “Anytime, vod'ika.”
“Okay, you two can shut it now. And you, Fi. Stand down. We've all had a bad day, so let's throttle back on the testosterone and play nicely.”
Sev held his hands away from his sides in a gesture of reluctant submission and went to sit beside Scorch in the cockpit. Boss didn't say a word, but Niner grabbed Fi and Atin by their shoulders and shoved them farther away.
“You're going to tell me what that's all about.”
“No, I'm not, Sarge. It's personal.”
“There's no personal where this squad is concerned. Later, okay? I'm not having you brawling like a pair of civvies. If there's a needle match between you two, we all sort it together. Got it?”
“Yes, Sarge.”
Niner emphasized his warning with a prod in Atin's chest and moved back to stand with Boss while Scorch brought the vessel alongside Fearless and began negotiating with the flight deck controller on how they might make space in the hangar for it. Fi waited with Atin in case he decided to resume his little chat with Sev. He had never seen Atin flare up even under the most extreme pressure, but he seemed ready to swing at anyone now. And even a brain-dead Weequay could have spotted that it had something to do with Vau.
“At'ika, you want to tell me about it sometime?”
“Not really.” Atin patted Fi on the shoulder. “I have to deal with it myself sooner or later.”
Fi glanced at Sev and got a blank stare that wasn't even hostility, just an absence of anything comradely. It wasn't going to be a bundle of laughs if they ever had to work together again.
Fi hadn't thought he would get on with Niner on first meeting, either. But there had never been anything about Niner that had made Fi want to punch him in the face and get it over with, just to save time.
It was going to happen, sooner or later. Fi knew it.
He'd never had a disagreement, let alone a fight, with a brother before. It made him uneasy. He distracted himself with dreams of a hot shower, hot food, and the luxury of five hours' unbroken sleep.