“And you don’t need any technology to do it.”

“He was a great believer in intuition.”

Darman drew his blaster and turned suddenly. The barn door opened. He relaxed and dropped his arm to his side. Ji­nart held more drab fabric bundled in her arms. “You have to go,” she said breathlessly. “Take a look out there to the east. They’re burning the fields to flush you out and deny you cover. There’s somewhere you can lie low, but you have to pass for farmers—that’s not going to be easy for you, lad. You’re too big and well fed.”

Etain didn’t rise to the bait. She knew she’d fit in fine with the undernourished, shabby locals.

“I have to take my gear,” Darman said. “I can lay up some­where with it if I have to.”

“Can’t you leave any of it?”

“Not if we’re going to blow up that facility. I’ve got all the implosion ordnance to deal with the nanovirus, as well as the E-Web cannon. We need it.”

“Then take a cart. There’s a curfew on powered vehicles.” Jinart tossed one of the bundles to Darman. “And get out of that armor. You couldn’t be more conspicuous if you were wearing a wedding gown.”

“We can try to make RV Gamma.”

“No, go to the first safe house you can find. I’ll reach your squad and let them know, then I’ll return to you.”

There was an assortment of barrows and handcarts stored in the barn, all in various states of disrepair. They’d attract no attention: the network of dirt roads was well traveled by peo­ple trying to get their quota of barq and other crops to Teklet on foot or with merlie-carts.

Loading the sections of the blaster cannon on the sturdiest barrow they could find made Etain realize just how heavy a burden Darman had carried. When she tried to heave one of the gray packs into the cart, it nearly wrenched her shoulder from the socket, so she decided to enlist a little assistance from the Force. She hadn’t expected it to be so heavy. She wasn’t the only one with deceptive physical strength.

“This is all weapons?” she asked.

“Pretty much.”

“Not enough to take a hundred droids, though.”

“Depends how you use it,” Darman said.

Etain wondered if he looked more conspicuous out of his sinister gray armor than in it. The armor had made him look much bigger, but even without it he was so solidly built that it was obvious he’d spent his life training for strength, eating adequate protein. Subsistence farmers didn’t have that dis­tinctive slope from neck to shoulder formed by overdevel­oped trapezius muscles. Even the youngsters bore the marks of constant exposure to the elements; Darman simply looked strikingly healthy and unburned by the sun. He didn’t even have callused hands.

And then there was that ramrod parade-ground posture. He looked exactly like the elite soldier he was. He would never pass for a local. Etain hoped the farmers would be more terrified of him than they were of Hokan.

The night horizon was amber like the urban skies of Cor­uscant, but it was flame, not the light of a million lamps, that caused the reflection from the clouds. It looked like rain might follow; they could cover the cart with a tarpaulin and not cause any curiosity. Layers of barq stalk, sacks of barq grain, and strips of dried kushayan buried Darman’s “gear,” as he kept calling it. His language swung from slang and generality to highly educated subbtlety, from gear–his catchall noun for any artifact—to DC-17s and DC-15s and a whole slew of numbers and acronyms that left Etain befud­dled.

“Look at that,” Darman said, assessing the skyline. “That flame front must be four klicks, at least.”

“That’s a million or more credits’ worth of barq going up in smoke. The farmers are going to be furious. The Neimoid­ians are going to be even angrier.”

“So will Birhan,” Jinart said. “That’s a fair whack of his barq you’re using for camouflage, girl. Get going.” The Gurlanin took Darman’s datapad and inserted a mem-stick. “These are all the relatively safe homes I could chart. Don’t advertise your identity, either of you. Even if the master of the house you call on knows who you are, do him the favor of not compromising him by admitting it.”

Etain had covered her distinctive Jedi cloak with an Im­braani ankle-length tunic. Jinart indicated her hair. “And that,” she said.

“The braid, too?”

“Unless you want to advertise what you are.”

Etain hesitated. She had once heard someone say they could never remove their betrothal ring, not until they died. Her Padawan’s braid felt equally permanent, as if her soul was woven in with it, and that removing it after so long—even temporarily—would rend the fabric of the universe and underscore her belief that she was not Jedi material. But it had to be done. She unfastened the single thin braid and combed the strands of wavy hair loose with her fingers.

She felt less like a Jedi than ever, and not even remotely close to a commander.

“I imagine you never thought a Jedi commander would run away from a fight,” she said to Darman as they made their carefully unhurried way up the track.

“Not running away,” Darman said. “This is E and E. Escape and evasion.”

“Sounds like running to me.”

“Tactical withdrawal to regroup.”

“You’re a very positive man.” The child was almost com­pletely absent now. She could mainly sense focus and pur­pose. He shamed her without intention. “I’m sorry that I lost my composure earlier.”

“Only in private. Not under fire, Commander.”

“I said not to call me that.”

“Where we can be overheard, I’ll obey your order.” He paused. “Everyone loses it now and then.”

“I’m not supposed to.”

“If you don’t crack sometimes, how do you know how far you can go?”

It was a good point. For some reason he was far more re­assuring than Master Fulier had ever been. Fulier, when not getting caught up in putting the galaxy right, was all effort­less brilliance. Darman was expert at his craft, too, but there was a sense of hard-won skill, and there was no randomness or mystery to that.

She liked him for being so pragmatic. It crossed her mind that she might be saving clone soldiers from death by biologi­cal agent so they could die from blaster and cannon round. It was a horrible thought.

She didn’t like having to kill, not even by another’s ac­tions. It was going to make life as a commander exception­ally hard.

The droids advanced along the edge of the wood with flamethrowers borrowed from the same farmer whose fields they were burning. Ghez Hokan and his lieutenants Cuvin and Hurati stood in the path of the blaze, staring back at it from three hundred meters.

“We’ll have to burn a great deal of land to deny all cover to the enemy, sir,” Cuvin said.

“That isn’t the point,” Hurati said. “This is as much to cre­ate the impression of protecting the facility as it is to flush out troops.”

“Correct,” Hokan said. “There’s no point alienating the natives, and I can’t afford to compensate them all for lost production. This is sufficient. We’ll use droids on the remaining boundaries.”

Cuvin seemed undeterred. “May I suggest we use hunting strills? We could bring in a pack with their handlers in two days. The Trade Federation won’t welcome the disruption to the barq harvest, and a shortage of the delicacy will be no­ticed by some very influential people.”

“I don’t care,” Hokan said. “The same influential people will be even more inconvenienced by the arrival of millions of Republic clones on their homeworlds.”

Hokan was in full Mandalorian battle armor now, not so much for protection as to convey a message to his officers. Sometimes he had to indulge in a little theater. He knew that the glow of the flames illuminating his traditional warrior’s armor made a fine spectacle, calculated to impress and over­awe. He was at war. He didn’t have to prostitute his martial skills as an assassin or bodyguard for weak and wealthy cow­ards any longer.