“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “Is this your farm?”

Silence, except for that noise the man was making; he couldn’t understand it. He’d rescued them from their attack­ers, hadn’t he? What was there to fear?

“How many troops has Hokan got? Can you tell me?”

The woman found her voice, but it was shaky. “What are you?”

“I’m a soldier of the Republic. I need information, ma’am.”

“You’re not him?”

“Who?”

“Hokan.”

“No. Do you know where he is?”

She pointed south in the direction of Imbraani. “They’re down at the farm the Kirmay clan used to own before Hokan sold them to Trandoshans. About fifty, maybe sixty of them. What are you going to do to us?”

“Nothing, ma’am. Nothing at all.”

It didn’t seem to be the answer they were expecting. The woman didn’t move.

“He brought them here looking for him,” said the man who wasn’t whining, pointing at Darman. “We’ve got nothing to thank him for. Tell him to—”

“Shut up,” the woman said, glaring at the man. She turned back to Darman. “We won’t say a word. We won’t say we saw you. Just go. Get out. We don’t want your help.”

Darman was totally unprepared for the reaction. He’d been taught many things, but none of his accelerated learning had mentioned anything about ungrateful civilians, rescues thereof. He backed away and checked outside the barn door before darting from barn to bush to fence and up the slope to where he’d left his gear. It was time to move on. He was leaving a trail behind him now, a trail of engagements and bodies. He wondered if he’d see civvies, as Skirata called them, in quite the same benign way in the future.

He checked the chrono readout in his visor. It had been only minutes since he had run down the slope, firing. It al­ways felt like hours, hours when he couldn’t see anything but the target in front of him. Don’t worry, Skirata had said. It’s your forebrain shutting down, just a fear reflex. You’re bred from sodopathic stock. You’ll fight just fine. You’ll carry on fighting when normal men have turned into basket cases.

Darman was never sure if that was good or not, but it was what he was, and he was fine with that. He loaded his extra pack on his back and began working his way to the RV point. Maybe he shouldn’t have expended so many rounds. Maybe he should have just left the farmers to their fate. He’d never know.

Then it struck him why both the militia and the civilians had frozen when they first spotted him. The helmet. The armor. He looked like a Mandalorian warrior.

Everyone must be terrified of Ghez Hokan. The similarity would either work to his advantage or get him killed.

“Down!” Atin yelled.

Niner flung himself flat and heard Fi grunt as he did the same, the air knocked from his lungs.

An airspeeder flew overhead with a deceptively gentle hum. Atin, squatting in the cover of a fallen tree, followed it with his rifle scope.

“Two up, camo and custom armament,” he said. “Some­how I don’t think the locals drive those. Not with mounted cannons, anyway.”

The hum of engines faded. Niner struggled to his feet and regained his balance, wishing for the speeder bikes and an absence of armor. The squad was too heavily laden and the armor wasn’t designed for blending into the landscape, al­though it was the difference between life and death in hostile territory: protection against blasterfire, nerve agents, and even hard vacuum. And when they got to their target it would come into its own. The armor was designed for FIBUA ops, fighting in built-up areas and inside buildings, urban warfare of the kind the galaxy now had plenty to offer. For now, they’d just have to make the best of the scenic part of the mis­sion.

He was tired. They all were. Not even the animal panic brought on by the risk of discovery could shake that off. They needed to sleep.

Niner checked his datapad. They were still ten klicks from RV Beta and it was midday. It was much easier to move by night, so he wanted to press on and make the RV point by midafternoon, then lie up until nightfall. If Darman had made it—and maybe he hadn’t, but Niner’s mind was made up—they would wait for him.

“He’s back,” Atin said. “Everyone down.”

The quiet drone of engines interrupted Niner’s calcula­tions. The airspeeder was heading south toward them again. They froze, mud-smeared, invisible from that altitude—or so they hoped.

It wasn’t entirely training that produced the reaction.

Aerial surveillance was especially threatening. Niner re­called the Kaminoan KE-8 Enforcer craft cruising above the training grounds of Tipoca City, ready to pluckout and dis­cipline any defective clone who didn’t conform. They were equipped with electroshock devices.

He’d seen a KE-8 in action, just once. After that he worked extra hard to conform.

“He’s on a square search,” Atin said. He was turning into an excellent point man; for some reason he was slightly more attuned to his surroundings than Fi or even Niner himself. “He must be working out from the center.”

“Center of what, though?” Fi asked.

Niner forgot his fatigue. You never leave your mates be­ hind. “If he hasn’t seen us, he’s seen Darman.”

“Or what’s left of him.”

“Shut it, Atin. What’s your problem?”

“I’ve been Darman,” Atin said.

He said nothing more. Niner didn’t think it was a good time to ask for an explanation. The engines were overhead. Then the sound faded a little and dropped in pitch, but soon resumed full volume.

“He’s circling,” Atin said.

“Fierfek,” Niner said, and all three men reached for their anti-armor grenade attachments at the same time. “What’s he seen?”

“Maybe nothing,” Fi said. “Maybe us.”

They fell silent. The airspeeder was indeed circling. It had also dropped lower and was now about level with the tops of the trees. Niner could see its twin cannons. His helmet wasn’t telling him it had locked on, but that didn’t mean it [ hadn’t. You could never count on tech.

Best piece of gear is the eyeball. It was the first piece of advice Skirata had ever given him. Accelerated learning was fine, but anything direct from the mouths of men who had fought real engagements left a bigger impression.

Niner leveled his rifle and peered through the scope, trusting to BlasTech Industries that the sight really wasn’t reflec­tive. He’d find out the hard way if it was.

He could see the sun glinting off the human pilot’s goggles. The gunner was a droid. He wondered if they felt vulnerable without any armored canopy, heads conveniently skylined for a shot. He suspected that anyone looking down from that height with a cannon or two didn’t feel vulnerable at all.

The fuselage banked above him and turned slowly, rising well above the trees as if the pilot was trying to get a vi­sual fix again. It wasn’t coincidence. Niner kept the DC-17 trained on the central propulsion unit.

Then a red flashing symbol went off in his visor.

The thing had a lock on him.

He squeezed the trigger. The white-hot blast kicked his visor into blackness for an instant, and the detonation was so close that the shock wave hit him like a body blow.

He scrambled to his feet and ran. How he ran with more than fifty kilos of deadweight on his back he would never know, but adrenaline could do remarkable things. His in­stinct was to get clear before debris rained down on him. Armor and bodysuits could withstand a lot, but the human instinct buried deep inside him screamed get clear.

When he stopped he had covered a hundred meters even in the tangled undergrowth of the coppice. He was panting like a mott and the suit was struggling to cool him down.

Behind him, a fire burned, with smaller flames scattered around it like seedlings around a tree. He turned to look for Fi and Atin. His first thought was that he had brought the speeder crashing down on them.