“What do you think I am?” he asked quietly,
“From what Jinart says, a clone soldier bred to obey.” She watched him break the wood and the crusts into separate chunks and place them in a row like game pieces. “No choice.”
“But I do have a choice,” he said. “A choice in how I interpret your orders. I’m intelligent. I’ve seen Jedi fight, so I know what you’re capable of. Once you’re exposed to situations that call on your skills, you’ll be the same.”
He was all contradictions. She wondered for a moment if he wasn’t a clone soldier at all but another Gurlanin playing spiteful games with her. But she could feel a combination of quiet desperation and… faith. Yes, faith.
He was the only person in many years who had shown any degree of confidence in her, and the first since Master Fulier who had shown her real kindness.
“Very well,” she said. “This is your overriding order. Whatever happens, you are to intervene if anything I do or say compromises your mission. No, don’t look at me like that.” She held up her hand to stifle the protest she could see forming on his lips. “Think of me as a commander in training. You must train me. That might mean showing me the correct way to do things, or even saving me from my own lack of… experience.” She could hardly bring herself to say it. “And… and that’s an order.”
He almost smiled. “This is why I have confidence in obeying a Jedi commander. Your wisdom is unequaled.”
Etain had to think about that for a few seconds. If Jinart had said it, she would have seethed. Darman meant it. And perhaps he meant it in a number of ways.
Yes, he was intelligent and subtle, not a droid at all. How did a ten-year-old get that way? Disturbed, she concentrated on the comfort of believing that he had seen things that she never had, and so knew best. “Go on,” she said. “You had a plan.”
RV Gamma, laying-up point, nightfall
“How do you feel now?” Niner asked.
Atin moved his arms, bent at the elbow in a swimming motion, testing his pectoral muscles. “Nearly good as new. No breathing problems, either. No, just a hard smack on the plate.”
Fi’s disembodied voice spoke up in their helmet comlinks. He was tucked under a bush on the edge of the ridge, keeping watch on the track below. “I’m such a good field medic. Wait till you see me do a tracheotomy.”
“I’ll pass if that’s all right with you,” Atin said, easing off his helmet. “Dinner?”
“What do you prefer,” Niner asked. “Dry rats, dry rats, or maybe dry rats?”
“Let’s go with the dry rats for a change.” Yes, Atin was definitely feeling better, and not just physically. “Who used to say that, then?”
“Uh?”
“The dry rations thing.”
“Oh. Skirata. Our old instructor sergeant.”
Atin took a bite out of the white cube and washed it down with a gulp of water from his bottle. “He never trained us. Heard a lot about him.”
“Trained Fi and Darman, too. Our squads were all in the same battalion.”
“We had Walon Vau.”
“That explains where you get your cheery outlook.”
“Sergeant Vau taught us the importance of planning for the worst scenario,” Atin said, all loyalty. “And maximizing your tech. Being hard is good, being hard with superior tech is better.”
“I’ll bet.”
“I’d heard everyone loved Skirata, though. Even if he was a bad-tempered drunk.”
Niner had never been drunk and he didn’t even know what alcohol tasted like. “He cared what happened to us. He was one of us, pretty much. Not just there because he couldn’t cope with not being in the army anymore, or had to disappear. No, he was a good man.” Niner would have given a great deal to have seen Skirata come limping through the trees right then, demanding to know what they were doing lounging around like a bunch of Kaminoan nahra artists. “No idea where he is now, not since we left Kamino. Best covert ops and sabotage man ever.”
“You’d know, of course.”
“We’ll all know soon. I’m relying on what he taught us to get this mission completed.”
Niner ate the perfectly balanced, sensibly designed, and utterly tasteless cube, and sat silently, still waiting for Darman. They couldn’t even trap something and cook it: the smell of roasting meat and the light of the fire would betray their position.
With Fi on watch, he could shut his eyes and sleep for a couple of hours. He put his helmet back on, partly to be ready to move fast if they had enemy contact, and partly to keep the temperature up in his suit. It was getting chilly. He allowed himself one comfort that he didn’t really need, for morale.
You scare me. You just absorb everything I tell you. Don’t you ever forget?
“No, Sarge,” Niner said.
He had no idea how long he’d been asleep. He woke with a start at the sound of Fi’s voice.
“Possible contact, due east, range forty klicks. Looks like it’s centered on Imbraani.”
Even through the visor, it wasn’t clear exactly what Fi had spotted, but Niner could see it now, too. A glow marked the horizon like a false sunrise. It was constant, the gentlest graduation from amber to deep red: it wasn’t an explosion.
Niner switched between visor modes, main spectrum to infrared to full spectrum, and then back again. The glow was hot, too. The infrared long-range picked it up.
“I reckon that’s one big fire coming,” Fi said.
They waited, watching: Niner could hear Atin a few meters away, gathering up equipment and assembling it, ready to pull out. With the binocs on full distance, they could see that the fire was being eclipsed in places by billows of smoke. Eventually, Atin joined them, and all three observed the distant blaze in silence.
“They’re not burning crop stubble at night,” Fi said. “They haven’t even finished harvesting that stinking barq stuff yet. They’ve found something.”
“I know.”
“Either they’ve found Darman, and they’re teaching the locals not to shelter the enemy, or they haven’t found Darman and they’re trying to flush him out.”
Niner thought it was relatively good news. “But it means he made the landing,” he said. “So we wait here right up to the last second, and maybe a little longer just to be sure.”
Atin laid the gear down again. He was too professional and disciplined to slam it on the ground, but Niner picked up on the slight sag of his shoulders. “And if he doesn’t show by then?” he asked, with a level tone that suggested he didn’t want to show dissent any longer. “Next plan?”
“We take another look at the whole area from Teklet to Imbraani,” Niner said. “We start from scratch.”
“This isn’t to scale,” Darman said. He scraped marks in the loose soil on the exposed dirt floor of the barn and placed pieces of stale bread carefully on the crude chart. “This is the river. These three crusts are RVs Alpha, Beta, and Gamma.” He snapped the wood into more pieces and placed them. “This is the droid base … and this is Uthan’s lab.”
Etain held out her cupped hand. He dropped two chunks of wood into it. “This is Lik Ankkit’s residence,” she said. “He’s the Neimoidian overlord, for want of a better word. He runs the agricultural produce export business, and that near enough makes him an emperor here.”
“Okay. What else have we got?”
Etain crumbled her remaining lump of wood into smaller pieces and scattered them carefully in patches. “Imbraani itself, and Teklet, which is the spaceport, and its storage and distribution depot.”
“And this was the last known position for my squad.”
Etain stared at the worm-eaten wood and the moldy crusts that might help them save the Grand Army from destruction. “Why are we scraping maps in the dirt when we’ve got perfectly good holocharts?”
“That’s what Sergeant Skirata used to do,” Darman said. “He didn’t like holos. Too transparent. He also thought that feeling the texture of dirt focused your mind.”