Republic Commando_ True Colors Part 26

Rebel camp, near Eyat, Gaftikar, 478 days after Geonosis The Marits were scuttling everywhere in a state of excitement, and there were a lot more of them today than Darman had seen before.

He leaned against the doorway of the hut, brus.h.i.+ng his teeth, collapsible plastoid bowl in one hand as he contemplated what was going to be a busy few days.

"s.h.i.+ft it, Dar." Niner was in full armor. He'd had word-then: they were going in. "Thirty-fifth's moving. They're finis.h.i.+ng up on Qiilura. Let's make sure they've got an open door."

Qiilura. Darman spat foam into the bowl. "Have I got time to call Etain?"

"Do you have to?"

"Well, I might get killed, and..."

Niner's expression was hidden behind his visor, but Dar-man knew every nuance of his breathing by now, every faint sound that indicated swallowing or licked lips, every click of the jaw when words didn't emerge.

"You'll be fine," Niner said at last, and slapped him on the shoulder. He was playing the rea.s.suring ruus'alor, the sergeant; the word was derived from runs, a rock, and it summed up his solidly pivotal role pretty well. "But call her anyway. Say hi from me."

Niner walked away toward the Marits. He never talked much about what he wanted from life. He never confided in his brothers about fears and loneliness, or talked about girls, or showed any sign that he didn't think the war was a good idea. It was the last bit that worried Darman most. Niner probably kept his yearnings to himself for the sake of maintaining morale-did he think they didn't know that?-but everyone griped about the war and every aspect of it out of habit and custom. It was the only leeway clone troopers had-to express opinions that the command was clueless, that the food was garbage, that the kit was osik, and that it was all a waste of time, but it was better than being a civilian. And it was a veneer, a kind of bonding ritual to show how much you didn't care, when in reality you were scared witless, always hungry, and usually disoriented. Being the best army in the galaxy didn't stop any of those feelings. At first, Darman-like all of them-had thought their role in life was n.o.ble and inevitable; now the indoctrination had been worn thin by seeing the galaxy beyond Kamino, and even some ARCs were deserting. The rank and file were grumbling-in private. If they'd had somewhere to go and the bonds had been weaker, Darman suspected a lot more would have vanished from the ranks.

But they stayed for their brothers. They stayed because their only source of self-esteem was being the best at what they did.

And they had nowhere else to go. Once more of them worked out what happened to those who couldn't-or wouldn't-fight any longer, what would happen?

Yes, the GAR might have been better off with tinnies. They never worked things out.

"How many teeth have you got, Dar?" Niner yelled. He'd stopped to look back. Darman paused with the brush still in his mouth. "Because you're taking an awful long time cleaning them."

Darman mumbled through a mouthful of foam. "Sorry, Sarge."

He went back to the refreshers to rinse his mouth and clean up, then changed from his fatigues into his bodysuit before was.h.i.+ng the clothing in the refresher's basin with a rock-hard lump of the local soap and shaking it out so that it dried in minutes. Habit-ritual-was a soothing thing. By the time he'd attached his armor plates to the bodysuit, the fatigues were dry and he could fold them tightly into a small roll that he slipped into his backpack.

He couldn't even recall putting on his plates. His mind was on Etain. He shut the door and commed her.

She took some time to answer. He was on the point of just recording a message when he heard her voice, and he felt instantly foolish, tearful and excited. It was audio only, no holoprojection, but he never questioned that because she was on deployment and she had her reasons for not showing him where she was.

He worried anyway. He wanted to see her again, quite literally. He was worried he'd forget her face.

"Can you talk?" he asked.

There was a brief pause. "Are you okay, Dar?"

"I'm fine. I got bitten by an ARC trooper."

"That's gross. Are they poisonous?"

She seemed to think he was joking. Darman wondered whether to blurt out that Sull had been under a death sentence, but decided that kind of thing needed saying in per-son. "It's okay, I just sucked out the venom and shot him. Anyway, Fi wanted his armor. Hey, I miss you. What's happening on Qiilura?"

Another pause. "It's not good. Most of them went quietly but some dug in, and ... well, you know."

"Casualties?"

"Yeah."

"Ah."

"Not me, obviously."

"I'm glad." He caught a note in her voice that said she was holding back; maybe there was someone with her. The holovids showed clandestine love affairs as exciting, but Darman just found the secrecy miserable. "What's Level like?"

"Solid guy."

"We'll be working with his battalion pretty soon. Does that mean you'll be coming back to Triple Zero? Sorry-I shouldn't ask. Just thought you'd be finished there, and ..."

"It'll be a few more months. Three, maybe."

"Oh." Where? Why? "Okay."

"I miss you too, Dar. Think of something you'd like to do when we meet up. I'm not good at planning things like that."

Darman wasn't, either. He suspected she didn't mean a drink from a grimy gla.s.s at Qibbu's sleazy cantina for old times' sake. "Mereel might have some ideas. He seems to know every tapcaf between Galactic City and the Outer Rim."

"Okay. I don't mind as long as you're there."

"Me, too." Darman worried that he didn't have any smart talk or witty lines. He sounded like a total di'kut, he knew it.

There was a loud rapping on the door. "Dar?" It was Fi. Dar, are you in there?"

Darman rolled his eyes and addressed the ether. "What, Fi?"

"Are you going to be in there all day? I'm not going to dig a latrine because you're still doing your hair ..."

"Okay, okay. Give me a moment." He lowered his voice. "I'm sorry, cyar'ika, I have to go."

"I'll call you in a while. Stay safe. I love you."

"Look after yourself." Darman was working up to saying that he loved her, too, when the link closed from her end of the channel, and the moment was gone. He took a deep breath before yanking the door open, brokenhearted that he might never get the chance to tell her. He had a bad feeling about the coming a.s.sault on Eyat. It was vague and nagging, probably just his growing awareness and resentment of the way things were, but possibly-just possibly-an omen. Mixing with Jedi made you almost believe in that kind of stuff. "Fi, I'm going to break your shabla neck ..."

Fi stepped back with his hands held up in mock submission. "Steady on, ner vod."

"You really pick your moments."

"I want to use the 'freshers."

"Yeah, and I was-" Darman stopped himself. There was no point ranting at Fi for interrupting a call to Etain. It would be particularly tactless. "Okay." He patted his brother's cheek with exaggerated care, and realized he was doing a very Skirata-like thing. "I'm going to check the ordnance again."

"Atin's been through it twice."

"Then I'll do it a third time."

"Dar..."

"What?"

"You can talk about Etain, you know. I'm not going to burst into tears or anything."

Fi closed the door behind him, and Darman heard the sound of running water. Fi wasn't stupid and he'd probably heard every word anyway, but Darman still felt guilty at having a part of his limited life that put any kind of barrier between them.

Outside the hut, Niner and Atin were laying out equipment, checking it, and taking no notice of A'den's spirited argument with one of the Marits. It was another dominant one with a red frill at its throat, but it wasn't Cebz. The lizards were gathering: where there had been fewer than a hundred in the camp, there were now a few thousand in the area, coming to the rendezvous point from villages scattered through-out the countryside.

Darman stared at the pile of ordnance. There were enough thermal detonators to remove a large chunk of planet.

"Overkill," he said.

Atin looked up. "Whatever happened to P for plenty?"

"You've seen Eyat. They've got triple-A and traffic cops, not Acclamators. So we hammer them with the Thirty-fifth and then the lizards overrun them. Don't you think that's a waste of resources?"

"Dar, it's still a capital city," Niner said. "And we're not just fighting the Gaftikari. We're denying the place to the Seps."

"And we're not footing the bill for it, either," Atin said.

Darman pondered what possible use this planet would be to anyone except the mining companies. Did they even use kelerium and norax to build droids? Maybe it was the Re-public doing a favor for Shenio Mining in exchange for services rendered elsewhere. The galaxy seemed to work that way. Help us out in the war, buddy, and we 'II see you right when it comes to building your profits.

And it didn't matter to him at all. He had no stake in it, no interest, and no consequence to him except his life and his brothers' lives on the line, which was simply the job he did.

He bent down to pick up a small thermal det and rolled it in his hands, seeing the little restaurant opposite the Eyat government building. The minced roba pastry rolls washed down with sweet caf had been delicious; a charge of this size, detonated within twenty meters, would shatter the restaurant's transparisteel frontage into a thousand blades and send them flying at three thousand meters a second into anything and anybody within a thousand-meter range. Sometimes it paid not to think about it too much.

"Can I do the power station?" he asked.

Niner didn't turn his head. "You recce'd the government buildings area."

"Doesn't mean I can't take out the station."

"I don't like changing plans this close to time."

"What plans? We didn't even complete the first recce. We've scrubbed the a.s.sa.s.sinations. We're going to run the same risks."

Niner didn't answer. They'd become so used to doing things on the fly with little or no planning that Darman began to wonder if they were getting sloppy. Special Operations was as much-no, more-about detailed surveillance, observation, and rehearsal than going in with Deeces blazing and blowing stuff up.

"A'den's going to brief us in around an hour," Niner said at last.

"Great." Darman tossed and caught the unprimed det like a toy a few times and then laid it back on the fabric sheet with the rest of the ordnance. "I'm going for a walk."

Niner could always recall him. He slipped his helmet over his head, sealed it, and strode off into the camp, seeing the world through the filter of his visor's HUD again, targets in an environment rather than beings in a landscape. Skirata said they were at the stage of life where they were making emotional connections that regular folk made much earlier in childhood, able to imagine themselves in the situations they created. But, he said, it was hard to picture yourself as the guy strolling past the restaurant at the moment the charge detonated when you'd never done ordinary things like that and had been given only a detached academic grasp of blast radii, overpressures, and fragment velocities.

Omega Squad, like all the clone army, had been little more than highly trained, superefficient, ultrafit children when the war started. It struck Darman that they were living life the wrong way around-given the maximum ability to fight long before they had the experience to identify with beings on the sharp end of the fighting.

Too late to worry about that. What am I going to do, warn Eyat? Join the Seps? Cry over dead strangers?

There was nothing else he could do but fight to win, and survive to ... what, exactly? The question never went away-When we win, what happens? What do soldiers like us do in peacetime? Maybe he'd end up doing refugee relief. Etain said Jedi did that sometimes. Maybe they'd still end up working together.

He walked among chattering, excited Marits with jewel-like scales who didn't seem to be anxious about the coming a.s.sault. They were swarming around artillery pieces, drilling with E-Webs. This was clearly something they'd been looking forward to for a long time.

Darman paused to watch them, realizing his main fear was that he'd get killed before he told Etain that he loved her, and wondered where the remaining humans would fit into a society run by efficient, orderly Marits whose lives seem to run like flow charts.

He gestured to the red-frilled boss lizard to come to him. They didn't seem to be offended by being summoned.

"What's going to happen when you take over?" Darman asked. "What's going to happen to the people in Eyat?"

Boss Lizard did a bit of baffled head-c.o.c.king and looked as if he was calculating. "There'll be roles for them in pro-portion to their population, of course."

Darman realized he should have expected a sensible, numerical answer like that. "So no bloodletting. No purges. No species cleansing."

"Not for its own sake, no. What's the purpose of wanton destruction? We just want what we deserve. We are the majority"

"What if they refuse to fit in with that?"

"That," said Boss Lizard, "would be pointless."

"What are you going to change when you seize power?"

"Nothing. Except we shall live in the cities and we shall have the majority of the elected posts according to our population."

Darman could now see the mismatch between Gaftikari humans and their Marit workforce. They weren't even competing for the same thing, a nice tidy two-sided I-want-what-you've-got. The lizards thought differently. The two viewpoints didn't quite overlap, and the lizards were far more concerned with being proportionally represented than having power.

He didn't always understand politics and he was glad of it This was the point at which he preferred the order to go then and blow up that.

"We should have made a joint government a condition of building their cities," Boss Lizard added, almost as an after-thought. "Next time, we'll remember to do that."

They were born engineers, all procedure and ratios. Dar-man nodded and walked on, out into the heathland to the south of the settlement. Now he could see across the flat terrain for kilometers: smoke from scattered cl.u.s.ters of huts in the distance threaded its way into the clear sky, and the occasional ancient speeder tracked across his field of vision. throwing up range and speed data onto his HUD.

He thought of the aerial recce images of Eyat, with its modest defense resources preparing for an attack, and wondered how long it would take.

Where do I belong? Where s home?

It sure as shab wasn't Tipoca City. Most days he didn't even think it was Coruscant.

Darman stood watching the late-afternoon sun slanting across the heath, wondering what it was like to have a job where you could stop work at the end of the afternoon and do anything you liked, when the audio link came to life in his helmet.

"Niner to Dar, RTB. Seps incoming."

He activated his HUD displays, expecting to have data patched through to him. The image that rilled his field of view was a chart of the Gaftikar system, way out near the Tingel Arm-so close to Qiilura, close enough that it would have taken only a few hours to reach Etain-and the peppering of red points of light showed Separatist vessels on a course for Gaftikar.

There were a few blue lights, too. They were generated by the transponders of Republic vessels: the Third and Fourth battalions of the 35th Infantry embarked in Leveler, another two companies from the same regiment not far out of Qiiluran s.p.a.ce, and a fleet auxiliary converging on the same point at 180 degrees at sublight speeds.

"ETA?" Darman said. Life slipped immediately into acronyms and jargon, the language of the military comlink.

"At those speeds ... a day."