Darman stifled an urge to laugh. It wasn’t funny at all.

She’d achieved something he found almost magical. At that point in the crisis, it was the best military option, better than letting loose with all the ordnance at his disposal, and some­thing even Kal Skirata couldn’t do.

They were alive. They could move on.

“Nice job, commander,” he said. “Very nicely done.” He touched his glove to his forehead and grinned. “Let’s get our­selves sorted, eh?”

Darman took out his medpac and removed two sharps of painkiller and the bacta spray. He fixed his own shoulder first, jabbing the needle hard into the blue vein in the crook of his left elbow so that the drug dispersed faster. But it still made his eyes water when he sprayed the blaster burn.

Etain watched with grim resignation and swallowed visi­bly.

“Come on, Etain,” Darman said. “Hold still.”

He aimed the spray like a pistol into her left ear.

Darman had no idea that Jedi could curse fluently in Huttese, but he was learning more about them every minute. A lot more.

The excavation droid rattled down the road, managing to find every pothole and rut between Imbraani and the screening plant. Niner bounced each time, too. Buried in the scoop under a layer of loose rubble, with enough explosives to level everything within half a kilometer, he was … anxious.

The detonators were disabled. He kept checking that.

Now that night had fallen and the rain stopped, he could ease himself into a position where he could see ahead. Blue navigation lights picked out the droid’s front fender, and an amber hazard light whirled on its canopy, illuminating the trees on either side of the track. It was a lumbering thing that wouldn’t get out of anyone’s way. Behind it, a convoy of identical droids followed. They were an intimidating proces­sion.

Even the column of tinnies marching toward Niner moved to one side of the road.

He picked them out in his night-vision visor, although the sound alone identified them. Clink-rasp-clink-rasp. It was the knee joints. Nothing but battle droids marched that regu­larly, not even clone troopers. There were no voices, not even the occasional command to form single file, or shut it back there. It was all grim mechanical purpose.

Niner closed his fingers around the grips of the DC-17. He really didn’t want to engage them. It was going to be hard enough to direct the excavator to the target and get away in one piece without pausing for skirmishes along the route. Walk on, will you? Just walk on. He didn’t want to test the manufacturer’s assurance that a few blaster bolts wouldn’t set off the charges. He was sprawled on top of them. Proxim­ity made you skeptical.

There were fifty battle droids in the column heading for Imbraani. If he managed to knock out the ground station, that would be the first message he’d send on his long-range comlink.

The chunk-chunk-chunk of their feet drew level with him and he froze.

Chunk-chunk-chunk-chunk-chunk.

It began to fade behind him. He breathed again. Once the excavator droid was coaxed past its logical destination of the screening plant, it would be that much more conspicuous. At least the tinnies looked busy. The worst part was having a pretty good idea about what orders they’d been given.

Just ten klicks. He was minutes away from the point where the droid would attempt to deliver its load. At that moment, he’d divert it toward Teklet itself, through the center of the town and into the ground station compound. At least the aer­ial recce appeared to have been right about that. Teklet was a sprawl of storage silos and shipping facilities for getting pro­duce off the planet, and not much else.

The worst that the Trade Federation had ever anticipated dealing with was a band of angry farmers. It was going to make his job a good deal easier.

Just ahead, the droid’s flashing light bounced off a sign pointing left: all contractor traffic—no entry via main gate. The excavator knew its way and began slowing for the turn. Niner took Atin’s jury-rigged cables and unplugged one strand. Go on. Go on. Go…

The droid was almost at the turn. It was moving at around twenty-five klicks now, threatening to veer off. But it carried on, past the sign, past the slip road, and on toward Teklet. “That’s my boy,” Niner said. The sweat prickled between his shoulder blades, despite his suit’s environment controls. “Couldn’t speed up a bit, could you?” Maybe that was asking for trouble. When he eased his head clear of the layer of rub­ble and peered around the side of the scoop, he could see a procession of droids strung out behind him along the curve of the road, neatly line astern like battle cruisers, each flashing an orange hazard light with its outline picked out in blue.

It was actually pretty, all things considered. Then the near­est droid slowed and peeled off down the slip road, the light show behind Niner fading, then disappearing altogether. He was on his own. He settled back under the rubble with his head tilted so that he could see ahead through a channel in the debris.

Teklet had little in the way of street lighting, and there were few people about. As architecture went, this wasn’t tasteful, elegant Tipoca. It was a service depot and it looked like one. A couple of Trandoshans were sitting under an awning outside a hut, blasters across their laps; they stared at the droid with vague curiosity but didn’t appear to move. Niner was almost past the ribbon of huts when the thought struck him that a five-hundred-meter blast zone would take out a lot of Teklet, and people with it. Not all of them were Separatists.

Once you make that your concern, they’ll always have a weapon to use against you. Skirata said they had to get used to it. Achieving your objective sometimes had a high price.

A bonded cargo transporter with red security straps sealing its containers crossed in front of him. The droid missed it by two seconds. If the driver was cutting it that close, then they hadn’t taken much notice of the machine. So far, so good… and getting better. As the droid pressed on, Niner was checking his escape route. It was a good two-hundred-meter sprint to the nearest cover from any part of the road. It was going to be tight.

He had to get the droid to halt right alongside the ground station. If it kept going, the blast would be centered else­where. He could set the dets now, slide out of the scoop, and run for it, but that meant observing the droid up to the last second, and that meant he’d probably be too close when it blew.

But he was committed now. The ground station had to go. It would put a serious dent in the Separatists’ defenses for a few critical days, maybe even weeks, and that was an edge they needed.

Working some rubble aside with his finger, Niner could see the lights of the compound. He flicked to night vision, and the green image showed him flimsy mesh fencing and a waist-high retaining wall. The excavator would roll right over it on its path to the building itself.

They’d know he was there, all right.

He’d left the dets until last. The charges were linked by cord in series, just waiting for the final connection to the three detonators that—in theory—Niner could trigger re­motely. He clamped the cords together and shoved them into the aperture of the det housings, snapping them shut.

The explosives were now live. He wasn’t just sitting on a bomb; he was sitting in one. The charges, dispersed among the rubble, were up to his neck. He began to ease his legs clear, ready to jump.

If he didn’t walk away from this, then that was the way it had to be. For a moment Niner felt a cold spasm in his gut that he recognized from a dozen all-too-real exercises. He was probably going to get killed. He was possibly going to get killed. If anyone thought intensive training wiped out the fear of dying, they were wrong. He was as afraid as he was when live rounds had flown past him for the first time. It never went away. He just learned to live with it, and tried to learn well enough that he could use it to work for him, and get him out of trouble faster.