Etain should have known. The red X symbol glowed on his shoulder. She hoped the man hadn't heard, but he probably knew anyway, because that was the unsentimental way the Kaminoans had presented their training to the clones. Triage code X: too badly injured. Not expected to survive despite intervention. Concentrate resources on code 3, then code 5.

She took a breath and reminded herself that she was a Jedi, and there was more to being a Jedi than wielding a lightsaber. She knelt down beside him and grabbed his hand. The grip he returned was surprisingly strong for a dying man.

“It's okay,” she said.

She reached out in the Force to get some sense of the injury, to shape it in her mind, hoping to slow the hemorrhage and hold shattered tissue together until the larty docked. But she knew as soon as she formed the scale of the damage in her mind that it wouldn't save him.

She had vowed never again to use mind influence on clones without their consent: she had eased Atin's grief, and given Niner confidence when he most needed it, both unasked for, but since then she had avoided it. Clones weren't weak-minded anyway, whatever people thought. But this man was dying, and he needed help.

“I'm Etain,” she said. She concentrated on his eyes, seeing behind them somehow into a swirl of no color at all, and visualized calm. She held out her hand to the trooper supporting his shoulders and mouthed medpacs at him. She knew they carried single-use syringes of powerful painkiller: Darman had used them in front of her more than once. “There's nothing to be afraid of. What's your nickname?”

“Fi,” he said, and it shocked her briefly, but there were many men called Fi in an army with numbers for names. His brother said no silently and held up spent syringes: they'd already pumped him full of what little they had. “Thank you, ma'am.”

If she could influence thought, she could influence endorphin systems. She put every scrap of her will into it. “The pain's going. The drug's working. Can you feel it?” If the Force had any validity, it had to come to her aid now. She studied his face, and his jaw muscles were relaxing a little. “How's that?”

“Better, thanks, ma'am.”

“You hang on. You might feel a bit sleepy.”

His grip was still tight. She squeezed back. She wondered if he knew she was lying and just chose to believe the lie for his own comfort. He didn't say anything else, but he didn't scream again, and his face looked peaceful.

She rested his head on her shoulder, one hand between his head and the bulkhead, the other still clutching his, and held that position for ten minutes, concentrating on an image of a cool pale void. Then he started a choking cough. His brother took his other hand, and Fi—a painful reminder of a friend she hadn't seen for months and might never see again—said, “I'm fine.” His grip went slack.

“Oh, ma'am,” said his brother.

Etain was aware in a detached way of spending the next twenty minutes talking to every single trooper in that bay, asking their names, asking who had been lost, and wondering why they stared first at her chest and then at her face, apparently bewildered.

She put her hand to her cheek. It stung. She brushed it and a fragment of alloy came away on her hand with fresh, bright blood. She hadn't felt the shrapnel until then. She aimed herself towards a familiar patch of green in the forest of grimy white armor.

“Clanky,” she said, numb. “Clanky, I never asked. Where do we bury our men? Or do we cremate them, like Jedi?”

“Neither, usually, General,” said Clanky. “Don't you worry about that now.”

She looked down at her beige robe and noticed that it was way beyond filthy: it was peppered with burns, as if she'd been welding carelessly, and there was a ragged oval patch of deep red blood from her right shoulder down to her belt, already drying into stiff blackness.

“Master Camas is going to fry me,” she said.

“He can fry us, too, then,” Clanky said.

Etain knew she'd think about the deftly evaded answer to her question sometime, but right then her mind was elsewhere. She thought of Darman, suddenly conscious that something was wrong: but something was always wrong for commandos on missions, and the Force was clear that Darman was still alive.

But the other Fi—the trooper—wasn't. Etain felt ashamed of her personal fears and went in search of men she could still help.

Bravo Eight Depot crime scene, Manarai, Coruscant, 367 days after Geonosis

Skirata took every clone casualty as a personal affront. His frustration wasn't aimed at Obrim: the two men respected each other in the way of time-served professionals, and Ordo knew that. He just hoped Obrim knew that Kal'buir didn't always mean the sharp things he said.

“So when are your people going to get off their shebse and tell us how the device got in here?” Skirata said.

“Soon,” Obrim said. “The security holocam was taken out in the blast. We're waiting on a backup image from the satellite. Won't be as clear, but at least we have it.”

“Sorry, Jailer,” Skirata said, still chewing, eyes fixed on the rubble. “No offense.”

“I know, comrade. None taken.”

It was another reason why Ordo adored his sergeant: he was the archetypal Mando'ad. A Mandalorian man's ideal was to be the firm but loving father, the respectful son learning from every hard experience, the warrior loyal to constant personal principles rather than ever-changing governments and flags.

He also knew when to apologize.

And he looked exhausted. Ordo wondered when he would understand that nobody expected him to keep up with young soldiers. “You could leave this to me.”

“You're a good lad, Ord'ika, but I have to do this.”

Ordo put one hand square on Skirata's back and one on Obrim's to steer them both a little farther from the scene of destruction, anxious not to make it obvious in front of the aruetiise—the non-Mandalorians, the foreigners, sometimes even the traitors—that his sergeant needed comforting. Waiting was the worst thing for Kal'buir's mood.

Obrim's comlink chirped. “Here we go,” he said. “They're relaying the image. Let's play it out to Ordo's link.”

The images emerged as a grainy blue aerial holo rising from the palm of Ordo's gauntlet, and they replayed it a few times. A delivery transport came up to the barrier and was waved in to land on the strip. Then the scene erupted in a ball of light followed by billows of smoke and raining debris.

The explosion blew out the transparisteel-and-granite walls of the Bravo Eight supply depot fifteen times before Ordo had seen enough.

“Looks like the device came in on that delivery transport,” Obrim said. Some of the recognizable debris scattered around the blast site confirmed that there had been a transport caught up in the explosion. “Nobody running away. So the pilot was inside, and …” He stopped to look down at data loading into his own 'pad. “I'm getting confirmation that it was a routine delivery and the pilot was a regular civilian driver. Nothing to suggest that it was a suicide mission, though. Just a routine run with some extra unwanted supplies.”

“Can we go back over the recordings from previous days?” Ordo said. “Just to see if anyone was doing a recce of vessels and movements in the run-up to this?”

“Archived for ten days. Won't be any better in terms of angle and clarity than this.”

“I'll still take it.”

Ordo looked to Skirata, who was silent and visibly angry, but clearly thinking hard. Ordo knew that calculating defocus all too well.

“Okay, the best lead we have right now is to track back the other way down the line—from confirmed explosives supply chains,” Kal said.