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.