“Omega's on a TIOPS run checking that right now,” Ordo said. “They might come back with some suspects for Vau to work on.”

“I'm turning a blind eye to that, right?” said Obrim, a man who left the impression he would have given a lot to be back in the front line instead-of supervising others. “Because suspects are my part of ship to deal with. But I do have this annoying eyesight problem lately.”

“Long-term condition?” Skirata asked, moving Ordo out of his way with a gentle pat on the forearm.

“As permanent as you want it to be, Kal.”

“Make it incurable for the time being, then.”

Skirata picked his way past the forensics team, who were still setting marker holotags at various points in the rubble: red holos for body parts, blue for inorganic evidence. Ordo wondered if the civilians who'd been gawking from behind the barrier would see anything about that on the HNE bulletin.

Skirata paused and leaned over a Sullustan technician who was sensor-scanning the rubble on hands and knees. “Can I have the armor tallies when you find them?”

“Tallies?” The Sullustan sat back on her heels and looked up at him with round black liquid eyes. “Explain.”

“The little sensor tags that identify the soldier. On the chest plates.” Skirata held finger and thumb a little apart to indicate the size. “There'll be fifteen around here somewhere.”

“We can sort the admin for you, Kal,” Obrim said. “Don't worry about all that.”

“No, it's not to account for them. I want a piece of their armor. To pay our respects, the Mando way.”

Ordo noted Obrim's puzzled expression. “Bodies are irrelevant to us. Which is just as well, really.”

Obrim nodded gravely and ushered them behind another plastoid screen where the SOCO team was assembling and logging fragments of alloy and other barely identifiable materials on a trestle table. “You can take over all this if you want.”

Skirata motioned Ordo across to the trestle. “It's Ordo's area, but I'm happy for your people to process it. I've got faith in Sullustan diligence.”

Maybe it was just Skirata indulging in harmless hearts and-minds work. But it seemed to do the job for the SOCO personnel.

One of them looked up. “It's good to know that military intelligence respects CSF.”

“I've never been called military intelligence before,” Skirata said, as if he hadn't realized that was what he had been doing every waking moment since five days after Geonosis.

Ordo held out one hand to the nearest scenes-of-crime officer and crooked a finger to gesture for their datapad. “You'll need this,” he said, and linked it to his own 'pad. “Here's our latest IED data.”

Yes, the CSF's anti-terrorism unit and Skirata's tight-knit team had become very close indeed in the last year. Going through official Republic security clearance channels just wasted time, and there was always the chance its civil servants would behave like petty fools across the galaxy and mark data as top secret for their own dreary little career reasons. Ordo didn't have time for that.

He was checking that the data had transferred cleanly when the hololink on the inner side of his forearm plate activated again and his hand was filled with a small scene of blue chaos.

For a split second he thought it was an image in his HUD, but it was external, and it was Omega Squad.

“Omega—Red Zero, Red Zero, Red Zero, over.”

The holoimage showed the four commandos pressed against a bulkhead with an occasional fragment of debris floating into view. They were all alive, anyway.

Skirata whipped around at the sound of Niner's voice and the code they all dreaded: Red Zero, request for immediate extraction.

Ordo switched instantly and without conscious thought into emergency procedure, capturing coordinates from the message and holding up his datapad so that Skirata could see the numbers and open a comlink to Fleet. Their language changed: their voices became monotone and quiet, and they slipped into minimal, direct speech. The SOCO team froze to watch.

“Sitrep, Omega.”

“Target's boarded. Unplanned decompression, and our pilot and the TIV are missing. No power, but no squad casualties.”

“Fleet, Skirata here, we have a Red Zero. Fast extraction please—on these coordinates. Pilot down, too, no firm location.”

“Stand by, Omega. We're scrambling Fleet assistance now. Time to critical?”

“Ten minutes if we don't get the hatch on this side of us open, maybe three hours if we do.”

Skirata stopped, comlink still held to his mouth. Obrim was staring at the little blue hologrammic figures with the expression of a man realizing something terrible.

We could be watching them as they die.

“Go on,” Ordo said.

“Three suspects the other side of that hatch, and they can't open it now even if they wanted to. Dar's got to blow it.”

“In a confined space?”

“We've got the armor.”

Well, that was true: Fi had withstood a contact blast from a grenade in Mark II armor. “You don't have any choice, do you?”

“We've had worse days,” Fi said cheerfully.

Ordo knew he meant it. He could feel the other part of him, the Ord'ika who wanted to cry for his brothers, but he was very distant, as if in another life: there was just absolute cold detachment in the physical shell where his mind was situated now.

“Do it,” he said.

“The Red Zero's been transmitted to all GAR ships in striking distance,” Skirata said. Ordo didn't want him to watch the hololink in case things didn't go as planned, and turned his back to him. But Skirata turned him around by his arm and stepped into the holo pickup's field of view so the squad could see him. “I'm here, lads. You're coming home, okay? Sit tight.”

There was a certainty about Skirata regardless of how impossible that assurance sounded in cold reality. But Ordo could feel his utter helplessness, and shared it: Omega was light-years from the Coruscant system, far beyond the sergeant's ability to step into the firing line in person. The two soldiers turned together to shield the holoimage, and then Obrim moved in close, diplomatically blocking the view of his own team.

“Your lad Fi,” he said, “—my boys still want to buy him that drink.”

It was Obrim's men Fi had saved from the grenade. And that was probably as openly sentimental as Jailer Obrim would ever be.

“In five,” Darman said. “Four …”

Like a HoloNet drama whose budget hadn't run to a decent set, the image in Ordo's cupped hand showed the squad curling themselves against the far bulkhead, grasping conduit to anchor themselves in zero-g, heads tucked to their chests and hunkering down.

The image disappeared as Niner—whose gauntlet obviously carried the holofeed—buried his head, too.

“Three, two, go!”

The picture flared into a ball of blue light and the silent explosion looked even more like a poor-quality holovid whose audio track had failed.

The holoimage dimmed for a moment and then the squad's jet packs ignited and they surged forward in free fall, rifles raised, and the video feed broke up into wildly random movement with two more blinding flashes.

“Okay, three bandits down, not slotted, not fragmented, but not very happy either,” said Fi's voice, clearly relieved. “And oxygen.”

“Nice one, Omega.” Skirata had his eyes shut for a moment. He pinched the bridge of his nose hard enough to leave a temporary white mark. “Now take it easy until we get to you, okay?”

Obrim's face was ashen. “I wish the public realized what those boys do,” he said. “I hate kriffing secrecy sometimes.”

“Shabu'droten,” Skirata muttered, and walked away. No, he didn't care much for the public at all.

“What's that mean?” Obrim asked.

“You don't want to know,” said Ordo, mulling over Jusik's tenuous analysis of the Force around the blast scene. The enemy was never here.