“Well, we've probably lost two prisoners now,” Darman said. “Better make sure we haven't lost the rest.”

There was no telling what had dislodged the TIV and whether they were going to meet someone boarding to deal with them. They made their way back up the passage to the entry hatch, DC-17s raised, and there was no sign of the two prisoners they'd left cuffed, nor anybody else.

And the hatch—about two meters by two—was wide open, star-speckled void visible beyond.

Fi gripped the rail on one side of it and leaned out a little. It was a good way to get your head blown off but he decided that the urgency of the situation warranted it.

There was no sign of the TIV. There was no sign of anything. He pulled himself back inboard. At least the gravity was still functioning.

Niner checked the environment sensors on his forearm plate. “Atmosphere's fully vented now.”

“They have to have a foam system in these things.”

“Yeah, but if you had us running around your vessel, would you seal the hull and help us out?”

“Is the cockpit airtight?” Fi asked.

“We won't know for sure until they go cold and we can't pick them up in the infrared.” Niner switched on his tactical spot-lamp and began searching the bulkhead for panels. “And by that time we'll be ice cubes ourselves.”

Katarn armor—even the Mark III version—was only good against vacuum for twenty minutes without a backup air supply. And they hadn't counted on being exposed that long.

For some reason Fi was distracted by Sicko's fate. It was a strange thing to discover when you were on borrowed time yourself. But Sicko had said the power conduits were routed via a panel three meters from …

… here.

Fi ejected the vibroblade from his knuckle plate and pried open the panel. Niner stood behind him and directed his spot-lamp into the recessed mass of cabling, pipes, and wires.

“That one's labeled ISOLATION BULKHEAD,” Niner said.

“Yeah, but where does that come down?”

They looked up at the deckhead for shutter housings. There were at least three back down the passage that they could see.

“Let's play safe and withdraw to the one nearest the cockpit,” Niner said.

“We could blow the whole panel here and shut everything down.” Including the gravity. Lovely. “Usually triggers emergency containment.”

Niner put his glove to the side of his helmet. It was a nervous habit of his, just like the way he grew increasingly irritable with Fi as his stress levels peaked. “Dar, are you getting this?”

“Halfway there already,” said Darman's voice.

Fi's chrono said they had fifteen minutes left to make this work. “Okay, if Dar blows this remotely and it activates the emergency bulkhead, then we'll be stuck between that and the cockpit hatch.”

“And if there's atmosphere in there, we can open it and cozy up to the other three huruune.”

“Or,” Fi said, “we find it's hard vacuum, too, and then we'll be completely stuffed.”

“Stuffed if we don't,” said Darman, appearing at Fi's shoulder with a ribbon of thermal detonator tape. “Go on. Get back there and wait for me while I set the timer.”

“We ought to call in a Red Zero.”

“Let's wait until we know if there'll be anything left of us to make it worth rescuing,” Niner said, trotting back down the passage. Fi watched him go, shrugged at Darman, and then patted the wide-open cover of the control panel.

“Thanks, Sicko,” he said.

3

MRU. Already committed.

–Much Regret Unable, signal relayed from CO, RAS Fearless, on receipt of request to withdraw to Skuumaa and abort extraction of Sarlacc Battalions

The windchill factor in the open troop bay of a LAAT/c gunship flying at five hundred kph was sobering, but then so was the deafening roar of air and the swoops and dips of the flight path as the pilot jinked to stop ground-based AA fire from getting a lock.

Etain realized why the troopers' sealed armor and body-suit was a good idea. She had only her Jedi robes and the sensible precaution of upper-body armor plates, which did little to insulate on their own. She summoned the Force to help her withstand the icy blast and made sure her safety line was hooked securely to the bulkhead rail.

“You're going to be in the dwang when you get back to HQ, General,” the clone trooper sergeant said with a grin. He slipped on his helmet and sealed it. His nickname was Clanky. She'd made a point of asking.

“I really did not see the signal,” she said carefully. “Or at least I looked at it a little too late.”

His voice emerged now from the projection unit of the anonymous helmet. “It was very funny, signaling MRU.”

“Funny? Oh …”

There was a frozen pause. “It's how you decline a social invitation, an RPC.Request the Pleasure of your Company? Much Regret Unable.”

Yes, she was in the dwang indeed, as he put it. She wasn't fully up to speed with the mass of acronyms and slang that had erupted in the last year. She could hardly keep up with the clone troopers' inventiveness: their extraordinary capacity to appropriate language and habits and shape them to their needs had spawned subcultures of clone identity everywhere. She almost felt she needed a protocol droid.

But she knew what a larty was. Darman had said the LAAT/i—or in this case, the bigger cargo variant—was the most beautiful vessel imaginable when you needed an urgent lift out of trouble. It certainly felt like it now.

MRU indeed. How could I be so stupid? So the troopers thought she was a smart-mouth like Fi, flourishing a little bravado. Instead, she was simply ignorant of the rapidly evolving and idiosyncratic jargon and used it carelessly. “I'm sure they'll forgive me if you pull this off, Sergeant.”

Her voice was drowned by the roar, and falling note of V-19 Torrent drives as two of the fighters streaked past them and disappeared into the distance. They were heading off to soften the droid positions that stood between the heavily forested terrain where both Sarlacc Battalions were pinned down and there was a narrow ribbon of delta shoreline where pilots could land. Droids, as Darman had once pointed out, were rubbish in dense forests.

Etain hoped so.

The gunship dropped suddenly, now level with the tree canopy, and the streaked image of green foliage showed her just how fast they were flying. Another larty came up on their port side. There were thirty-four gunships somewhere near, strung out in a loose formation, heading for the extraction zone.

“Three minutes, General,” the pilot's cockpit intercom said. There was a crack and flare of something exploding off to their starboard side. “Getting some attention from the tinnies' triple-A, so we'll drop a little more. Hold tight.”

It hardly made her flinch now. She had reached the saturation level of adrenaline where she was vividly aware of every hazard but running on some primeval automatic level of painless cold reason—too scared to panic, as one of the clone troopers had described it.

Three minutes became three hours became three seconds.

Red blasterfire from droids lit up the tree line as the larty banked to come around in a spiral descent. Etain didn't think, and she didn't feel, and she simply jumped the last ten meters from the open deck over the fast-roping four-man squad of clone troopers and the green-trimmed sergeant. Force skills came in very useful at the most unlikely times. She landed in front of the squad and brought the conc rifle up level—one hand on the stock, the other on the barrel grip—to sweep the forest edge in front of her.

She felt other gunships landing all around them, whipping up soil and leaves, but she saw only what was in front—about two platoons of Sarlacc men exchanging fire with super battle droids on the edge of the clearing—and her squad to either side of her.