“I'm sorry, lads.” Skirata spun around to face them. “Udesii, udesii … relax. It's ours.”

“I'm glad you pointed that out, Sarge,” Niner muttered. He lowered his Deece. Fi followed his lead, and glanced behind him.

Etain was still lying prone with her concussion rifle aimed in the right direction, no easy task with a weapon that size, but her arc of fire left something to be desired. He hoped that her Jedi sense of right place and right time would have stopped her from blowing them all to pieces if she had opened fire.

Fi gestured to her to stand down, and then gave up and just shook his head at her. No. She gestured back, palm up, and jumped to her feet. He wondered if anyone had thought to teach her basic hand signals.

Skirata was still apologizing. “I should have warned you I had transport coming. That was sloppy of me.” The taxi's hatch opened and a Wookiee—not a big one, just over a couple of meters tall—unfolded itself from the taxi and clambered out, throwing its head back and yawling in complaint.

“Okay, my fault,” Skirata said. He held both hands up in admission to the mountain of glossy brown fur. “They're just jumpy, that's all. We'll load now.”

“All of us, in that?” Niner asked. It wasn't a very big taxi. “With the Wookiee, too?”

“No, the prisoners. Just load 'em in.”

“Where are they going?”

“That's all you need to know right now.”

Niner paused, then shrugged and beckoned Boss, Fixer, and Atin to follow him back on board Fearless.

Etain had moved forward by now and walked up to Skirata, rifle slung across her back; she was so small that she looked more like a bolt-on accessory to the weapon. Darman reacted and stepped in to get Skirata's attention. It wasn't that he needed to, of course. Skirata was watching Etain, and he seemed to have one eye on Fearless's ramp, and he was placating the clearly irritated Wookiee, somehow juggling situations as skillfully as he had ever done.

“General,” he said. He paused to nod formally to Etain, which—given Skirata's general contempt for anyone not in armor—seemed quite an encouraging start, Fi decided. “We've got a nice new job, and that includes you.”

“Sergeant,” she said, and bowed her head. “You're not what I expected.”

Skirata raised an eyebrow. “Nor are you, General.” He shoved the Wookiee back a few meters, apparently untroubled by the fact that the creature could have used him for a cleaning rag. He rounded on it. “No, just put them on the back seat and drive. Let Vau do the rest.”

The mention of Vau gave Fi a hint of what he couldn't grasp from the Shyriiwook words. So the Wookiee was delivering the prisoners to Walon Vau. It seemed to have volunteered to do something that Skirata preferred to leave to Old Psycho, then. The Wookiee obviously wasn't asking if they wanted to stop for lunch.

“What's happening here?” Etain asked. “What's happening to the prisoners?”

“Civilian matter, General,” Skirata said, and stood back as Niner and Boss jogged past steering a medbay repulsor with what looked like three large rolls of blanket on it. They bundled each into the back of the taxi with a little grunting and cursing, then slammed one hatch closed. “Don't you worry about it.”

“But I am worrying about it.”

The Wookiee barked once and folded itself back into the taxi. The vessel lifted off and swung back over the parapet, dropping below their view into one of the artificial canyons that seemed to reach down into Coruscant's core. Fi fought the urge to peer after it, then lost and walked a few paces to gaze over the edge.

It was a long, long way down. He was thrilled by the sheer scale and variety of it: polished stone, sparkling glass, a blur of vessels in the skylanes, hazy sunlight. Alien, utterly alien.

Skirata blew out a breath and rocked his head slightly as if easing tense neck muscles. “General,” he said. “You and I need to talk. Omega, Delta—a transport will be taking you back to barracks.” He paused to check his chrono. “You just relax until fifteen-hundred hours and then you report to the briefing room at HQ Main Admin Building.”

“Yes, Sarge,” said Niner and Boss, absolutely synchronized.

But Etain wasn't giving up. Fi rather liked that about her, but she could be a pain in the shebs when she persisted. She stepped a little closer to Skirata.

“I don't like being left in the dark, Sergeant.”

“Then this galaxy is going to be a constant source of disappointment to you, General.” For a second Skirata had that edge in his voice that made Fi stiffen. But it softened as soon as it had hit its target. “Things change. You can say no to this, and I'm rather hoping you won't, but if you do, then Omega, Delta, and my Null boys will do it without you.”

Etain lapsed into silence. Skirata could motivate a brick if he put his mind to it. She wanted to stick with the squad and everyone knew it.

She looked at him as if she was listening to other voices. “If Omega can't say no, then neither can I.”

“Good,” said Skirata. He peeled back the collar of his jacket and muttered into a tiny comlink. It looked as if General Jusik still had a taste for supplying unusual kit. “Standing by.”

Fi peered back over the dock platform parapet, gripping the safety rail to lean out a little more and get a better look. It was the kind of view the very wealthy paid a fortune to see from their window, but you could get it for free in the Grand Army, as long as you didn't mind getting your head shot off to qualify for the privilege.

Skirata leaned against the parapet beside him.

“I'd like to fast-rope down there,” Fi said. He'd always enjoyed that in training on Kamino. He preferred endless vistas to cramped spaces, as did many of his brothers. They said it was the legacy of being gestated in glass vats; Ordo claimed he could even remember it. “How long have we got here, Sarge? Can we see some of the city? Please?”

“Yeah, I promised you all a night out, didn't I? How long ago?”

“Eight months.” Fi remembered, all right: straight after the spaceport siege, the promise of a drink from Captain Obrim for a job well done—and then Ordo hauled them straight off for another mission. “I'd love to see it once before I—” He paused. “I'd just like to explore a bit.”

Skirata's brow creased briefly and he put his hand on Fi's back. “Don't talk like that, son. You'll see plenty of this, I promise.”

“Now?” Far below, something that might have been a bird leapt suddenly into the yawning crevasse of buildings and plummeted at high speed with wings folded back until Fi lost sight of it. The platform was at least five thousand meters high. “That'd be a nice change.”

“So you like the new battlefield, then.”

Fi dragged himself away from the apparently limitless view. “So we get a spell in a stone frigate?”

“What?”

“Just something I picked up from the lads on board Fearless.” So he'd taught Sergeant Kal some new slang: that was something. “A shore-based job. Filing flimsi and answering the comlinks. Lots of caf breaks.”

“Try threat resolution. Interdiction.”

“Oh.”

“Welcome to the world of euphemism, Fi. We're going to be fighting in the hardest terrain of all. Right in the middle of billions of civvies. Slotting bad guys on Coruscant.”

“Good,” said Fi. “I hate commuting.”

Arca Company Barracks, SO Brigade HQ, Coruscant

Etain trailed Skirata down the long passage that ran from the main doors of the Arca barrack wing and felt like she was following a gdan.

Omega Squad's description had made her think of him as a kindly old uncle, a veteran soldier with a facade of tough talk who had sweated blood to give a generation of boys the benefit of his wisdom. But what she experienced in the Force was very different, just as his appearance was unlike her mental image of him.