Get a grip.

He could hear the sound of scurrying farther ahead, but it was moving away from him. His pack caught the roof of the tunnel, occasionally scraping loose soil and stones. The war­ren had been excavated by thousands of small paws, circular in section because gdans obviously didn’t need as much floor space as a tall human male. Darman almost felt that his hands and knees were against the sides of the tunnel because of the curvature of the floor, like negotiating a chimney when rock climbing. At times he felt he was losing his orientation and had to shut his eyes and shake his head hard to regain ac­curate proprioception.

“You okay, Dar?” Atin asked. Darman could hear labored breathing in his helmet and he thought it was his own, but it was Atin’s.

“Bit disoriented.”

“Let your head drop and look at the floor. The pressure on the back of your neck is going to make you feel giddy any­way.”

“You, too, eh?”

“Yeah, this is weird. Whatever we inherited from Jango, it wasn’t a love of caving.”

Darman let his head hang forward and concentrated on putting one hand in front of the other. He switched to voice projection. “Jinart, why do such small animals dig such big tunnels?”

“Have you tried dragging a whole merlie or vhek home for dinner? Gdans work as a team. That’s what enables them to take prey that’s many times their size. A point, I think, that would not be lost on men such as yourselves.”

“On the other hand,” Atin said cautiously, “you could say that sheer numbers overwhelm strength.”

“Thank you for that positive view, Private Atin. I suggest you select the interpretation that inspires you most.”

They didn’t talk much after that. As Darman progressed, sweating with the effort, he was aware of a particular scent. It was getting stronger. It was sickly at first, like rotting meat, and then more bitter and sulfurous. It reminded him of Geonosis. Battlefields smelled awful. The filtration mask was active against chemical and biological weapons, but it did nothing to stop smells. Shattered bodies and bowels had a distinctive and terrifying stench.

He could smell it now. He fought down nausea.

“Fierfek,” Atin said. “That’s turned me off my dinner for a start.”

“We’re near the facility,” Jinart said.

“How near?” Darman said.

“That odor is seepage from the drainage system. The pipe work is local unglazed clay.”

“Is that all we can smell?” said Darman.

“Oh, I imagine it’s also the gdans. Or rather their recent kills—they have chambers where they amass their surplus. Yes, it’s an unpleasant stench if you’re not accustomed to it.” She stopped unexpectedly, and Darman bumped into her backside. She felt surprisingly heavy for her size. “That’s good news, because it means we’re near a much larger cham­ber.”

Darman almost felt relief that it was simply rotting meat, although that was bad enough. It wasn’t his meat. He crawled farther, encouraged by the promise of a bigger space ahead, and then his glove sank into something soft.

He didn’t need to ask what it was. He looked down despite himself. In the way of men exposed to memory triggers, he was immediately back in training, crawling through a ditch filled with nerf entrails, Skirata running alongside and yelling at him to keep going because this was nothing, nothing compared to what you’ll have to do for real, son.

They called it the Sickener. They weren’t wrong.

Fatigue made nausea inevitable. He almost vomited, and that wasn’t something he wanted to do in a sealed suit. He fought it, panting, eyes shut. He bit the inside of his lip as hard as he could, and tasted blood.

“I’m okay,” he said. “I’m okay.”

Atin’s breathing was ragged. He had to be feeling it, too. They were physiologically identical.

“You can straighten up now,” Jinart said.

Darman flicked on his spot-lamp to find himself in a chamber that wasn’t just larger; it was big enough to stand up in. The walls were lined with what looked like tiny terraces spiraling up around the chamber from the floor. There were scores of twenty-centimeter tunnels leading off them.

“This is where the gdans retreat if rain floods the warren,” Jinart said. “They’re not foolish.”

“I’ll thank them one day,” Atin said. “How close are we to the drain? Can you locate it?”

Jinart put a paw against the wall where there were no tiny escape tunnels. “The gdans know there’s a solid structure be­hind this.” She paused. “Yes, there’s water trickling back there. The soil feels a meter thick, perhaps a little more.”

Darman would have removed his helmet, but thought bet­ter of it, and settled for letting his pack drop off his shoulders. He took out his entrenching tool and made an exploratory stab at the chamber wall. It was about the consistency of chalk.

“Okay, I do five minutes, then you do five,” he said to Atin.

“And me,” Jinart said, but Darman held up his hand to stop her.

“No ma’am. You’d better go back to Niner. We’re on our own now, and if this all goes wrong he’ll need your assis­tance even more.”

Jinart hesitated for a moment, then raced back up the tun­nel without a backward glance. Darman wondered if he should have said good-bye, but good-bye was too final. He planned on coming out that front door with Atin and Uthan.

He scraped out a guide circle with the tip of the tool and hacked into the hard-packed soil. It felt like slow going and he was surprised when Atin tapped him on the shoulder and took over. A man-sized hole began to emerge.

“Should we shore this up?” Darman said, wondering what he might have to sacrifice as a pit prop.

“We should only be going through it once. If it collapses after that, it’s too bad.”

“If we have to blast our way in, it might collapse. Alterna­tive exit?”

“You want to be pursued through those tunnels? They’d fry us. One flamethrower volley and we’d be charcoal.”

Atin was slowing. Darman took the other side of the opening and they worked together, removing progressively damper and darker soil, flattening out the sides of the excavation so that they had access to drill through without having to lean through a short tunnel. It was weakening the integrity of the soil wall: Darman willed it to hold together until they were through.

Maybe he should have brought Etain. She could have held the wall with that Jedi power of hers. Suddenly he realized that he missed her. It was amazing how fast you could form a bond with someone when you were under fire.

Atin’s tool hit something that made a distinctive chink noise.

“Drain,” he said. “Drill time.”

A few quick rounds from the Deece would have blown a good-sized hole in the thickest clay pipe. It would also have brought down the chamber roof, Darman suspected, and summoned a lot of droids. It was time for the slow, quiet route. A hand drill was part of their basic rapid entry kit, and they each took half the rough circle, drilling at five-centimeter intervals around the circumference, starting from the top. It wasn’t until they got down to the bottom that the ooze started appearing from the holes.

It had taken them an hour to excavate and drill. Darman couldn’t stand the sweat trickling down his face any longer and took off his helmet. The stench really was worse than ever. He shut his mind to it.

Atin took a swig from his water bottle and held it out to Darman. “Hydration,” he said. “Five percent fluid loss stops you thinking straight.”

“Yeah, I know. And above fifteen percent kills you.” Dar­man drank half the bottle, wiped the sweat away, and scratched his scalp vigorously. “Another thing to tell Rothana’s geeks when we get back—up the temperature conditioning in these suits.”

He lifted the ram and took a side-on stance to the disc of clay pipe visible through the soil. He gripped hard, fingers tight around each handle. He had to swing carefully this time or he might collapse the pipe. “Ready?”