But the Weequay kept coming, right into the bushes. He stopped about ten meters from Darman and was casting around as if he’d followed something and lost the trail. Then he moved forward again.

Darman had almost stopped breathing. His helmet masked all sound, but it certainly didn’t feel that way. The Weequay was so close now that Darman could smell his distinctive sweat and see the detailed tooling on his sidearm—a KYD-21 with a hadrium barrel—and that there was a vibroblade in his other hand. Right at that moment Darman couldn’t even swallow.

It’s okay to be scared.

The Weequay stepped sideways, looking at waist height as if browsing for discs on a library shelf.

It’s okay to be scared as long as you…

The Weequay was right on him now, squatting over his po­sition. Darman felt boots depress branches that were touching his back, and then the creature looked down and said something that sounded like gah.

… as long as you use it.

Darman brought his fist up hard under the Weequay’s jaw, ramming his own vibroblade up into the throat and twisting his fist off to one side to sever blood vessels. He supported the deadweight of the impaled Weequay on one arm, until it stopped moving. Then Darman lowered his arm, shaking with the effort, and let the body roll to the ground as quietly as he could.

“What you find?” the other Weequay yelled. “Gar-Ul? Gar?”

No answer. Well, here we go. Darman aimed his DC-17 and waited.

The second Weequay began running in a straight line toward the bushes, and that was a stupid thing for him to do when he had no idea what had happened to his comrade. They’d been lording it over farmers for too long; they were sloppy. He also made the mistake of pulling out his blaster.

Darman had a clear head shot and he took it almost with­out thinking. The Weequay dropped, cleanly and silently, and lay crumpled, with wisps of smoke rising from his head.

“Oh, clever,” Darman sighed, as much to hear the reassur­ance of his own voice as anything. Now he’d have to break cover and retrieve the body. He couldn’t leave it there like a calling card. He waited a few minutes, listening, and then eased himself onto his injured leg to limp out into open ground.

He dragged the Weequay into the bushes, noting the smell of cooked meat. Now he could see what the first Weequay had been following: a broad path of tiny animal footprints. The curious gdans had given him away. He limped out again, checking carefully, and obliterated the drag marks with a branch.

Waste not, want not. The Weequays wouldn’t be needing the blasters or vibroblades now. Darman, pulse slowing to normal, searched the bodies for anything else of use, pocketing data cards and valuables. He didn’t feel that he was a thief; he had no personal possessions that weren’t the Grand Army’s property, and he felt no need to acquire any. But there was a chance the cards contained information that would help him achieve his objective, and the beads and coins would come in handy if he needed to buy or bribe something or someone.

He found a suitable spot to hide the bodies. He didn’t have time to bury them, but was suddenly aware of movement in the undergrowth, animal movement, and gradually small heads appeared, sniffing the air.

“You again, eh?” Darman said, although the gdans couldn’t possibly hear him beyond the helmet. “Way past your bed­time.” They edged forward and then swarmed across the

Weequay with the shattered head, taking tiny bites as they settled on him in a dark-furred blanket of snapping motion.

Darman wouldn’t have to worry about burying anyone.

The faintest of liquid sounds made him look around at the other Weequay. Darman had his rifle aimed instantly. The Weequay wasn’t dead, not quite. For some reason, that upset Darman more than he could have ever imagined.

He’d killed plenty of times at Geonosis, smashing droids with grenade launchers and cannons at a distance, hyped up on fear and the instinct to live. Survive to fight.

But this was different. It wasn’t distant, and the debris of the kill wasn’t metal. The Weequay’s blood had dried in a stream down his glove and right forearm plate. And he hadn’t managed a clean kill. It was wrong.

They had drilled him to kill, and kill, and kill, but nobody had thought to teach him what he was supposed to feel after­ward. He did feel something, and he wasn’t certain what it was.

He’d think about it later.

Aiming his rifle, he corrected his mistake before the small army of carnivores could move on to their next meal.

Think of yourselves as a hand. Each of you is a finger, and without the others you’re useless. Alone, a finger can’t grasp, or control, or form a fist. You are nothing on your own, and everything together.

–Commando instructor Sergeant Kal Skirata

Darman moved on fast, up a tree-covered slope a kilometer south. He planned on spending the rest of the daylight hours in a carefully constructed hide at the highest vantage point he could find, slightly below the skyline.

He concentrated on making a crude net out of the canopy cords he had salvaged. The activity kept him occupied and alert. He hadn’t slept in nearly forty standard hours; fatigue made you more careless and dangerously unfocused than al­cohol. When he had finished tying the cord into squares, he wove grass, leaves, and twigs into the knots. On inspection, he decided it was a pretty good camouflage net.

He also continued observation. Qiilura was astonishing. It was alive and different, a riot of scent and color and texture and sounds. Now that his initial pounding fear had subsided into a general edginess, he began to take it all in.

It was the little living noises that concerned him most. Around him, creatures crawled, flew, and buzzed. Occasion­ally things squealed and fell silent. Twice now he’d heard something larger prowling in the bushes.

Apart from the brief intensity of Geonosis, Darman’s only environmental experience had been the elegant but enclosed stilt cities of Kamino, and the endless churning seas around them. The cleanly efficient classrooms and barracks where he had spent ten years turning from instant child to perfect soldier were unremarkable, designed to get a job done. His training in desert and mountain and jungle had been entirely artificial, holoprojection, simulation.

The red desert plains of Geonosis had been far more arid and starkly magnificent than his instructors’ imaginations; and now Qiilura’s fields and woods held so much more than three-dimensional charts could offer.

It was still open country, though—a terrain that made it hard for him to move around unnoticed.

Concentrate, he told himself. Gather intel. Make the most of your enforced idleness.

Lunch would have been welcome about now. A decent lunch. He chewed on a concentrated dry ration cube and re­minded himself that his constant hunger wasn’t real. He was just tired. He had consumed the correct amount of nutrients for his needs, and if he gave in to eating more, he would run out of supplies. There was exactly enough for a week’s oper­ations in his pack and two days’ worth in his emergency belt. The belt was the only thing he would grab, apart from his rifle, if he ever had to make a last-ditch run for it without his forty-kilo pack.

Beneath him, farm transports passed along a narrow track, all heading in the same direction, carrying square tanks with security seals on the hatches. Barq. Darman had never tasted it, but he could smell it even from here. The nauseatingly musky, almost fungal scent took the edge off his appetite for a while. If he had his holochart aligned correctly, the trans­ports were all heading for the regional depot at Teklet. He twisted the image this way and that in his hands and held it up to map onto the actual landscape.