When she got back, she would seek out Kal Skirata and beg him to help her make sense of it all. She would find Omega Squad and tell them face-to-face how much she cared about them before it was too late. She would tell Darman that most of all. She never stopped thinking of him.
“You meant what you said, General,” Gett said, steering her back toward her cabin.
“Oh yes. I did.”
“I'm glad. However powerless you feel, solidarity means a great deal to us.”
She suddenly wanted to see Gett go home to a house full of family and friends, and wondered if she wanted it for him or for herself.
“I was once taught to see while blindfolded,” she said. “It was a far more important lesson than I ever imagined. At the time I thought it was just a way of teaching me to strike with my lightsaber using the Force alone. Now I know what purpose the Force had. I look beyond faces.”
“But you won't change anything by blaming yourself.”
“No. You're right. But I won't change anything by pretending I have no responsibility, either.”
At that point she knew as surely as she had ever known anything that the Force had lifted her from one existence, turned her around, and dropped her on another path. She could change things. She wouldn't change them immediately, and she couldn't change them for any of the men here, but she would somehow change the future for men like this.
“If it's any comfort, General, I'm not sure what we'd do if we weren't doing this,” Gett said. “And you do get to hear an awful lot of good jokes.”
He touched his fingers to his brow and left her at her cabin.
They actually found things to laugh about even surrounded by pain and death. Gett had that understated, inventive, and irreverent humor, that seemed common to anyone in uniform: if you couldn't take a joke, apparently, you shouldn't have joined. She'd heard Omega quote that Skirata line more than once. You had to be able to laugh or else the tears would ambush you.
Etain stared at the dried blood on her robes and, while the memory appalled her, she couldn't bring herself to obliterate it by rinsing it away. She shoved the garment under the mattress of her bunk, shut her eyes, and then didn't even recall lying down.
She woke with a start.
She woke, and then the ship changed course and picked up speed: she felt it. That hadn't woken her. Some disturbance in the Force had.
Darman.
She could feel the very slight vibration that told her Fearless's drives were straining flat out.
She sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bunk, rubbing a painful cramp from her calves. A clean set of robes was hanging on a peg behind the hatch door of her cabin. She had no idea where the crew had acquired them, but she washed her face in the basin, and looked up at last at the small mirror to see the scratched, ashen, rapidly aging face of a stranger.
But at least she could meet her own eyes now.
She pulled on the clean robes and was pocketing both her own lightsaber and Master Kast Fulier's—which she always carried out of sheer sentimentality and pragmatic caution—when there was the sound of boots padding down the passage outside. Someone rapped on the hatch. She eased it open using the Force. It was reassuring to know she wasn't too beaten to do that.
“General?” Gett said. He handed her a mug of caf, remarkably relaxed for a man whose ship was clearly driven by new urgency. “Sorry to disturb you so soon.”
“That's very kind of you, Commander.” She took the caf and saw her hands shaking. “I felt something. What's wrong?”
“I took a liberty, General. I hope you won't be offended, but I overrode your orders.”
She couldn't imagine that ever bothering her. She'd once ordered Darman to do that if he ever felt she was screwing up. The clones knew their trade far better than she ever would.
“Gett, you know I trust you implicitly?”
He had a disarming grin, not unlike Fi, but with less of a sense of desperately trying to jolly everyone along. “I've diverted the ship to the Tynna sector. We received a Red Zero call and I thought you'd really want to respond. An extra day or so isn't going to make any difference to the survival rate of casualties now.”
Red Zero. An emergency command for all vessels to respond to a disaster of some kind, something very serious indeed. Even extracting the Forty-first hadn't been a Red Zero signal.
“I'd always give a Red Zero top priority, too. Good call, Gett.”
“Thought you might.” He watched her drain the cup and held out his hand to take it. “Especially because this one's from Omega Squad. They're in very deep dwang, General.”
Darman, she thought. The Force always made sure she got the most important intel after all. Dar
4
DELTA SQUAD TO FLEET OPS. RESPONDING TO RED ZERO. POSITION: CHAYKIN SECTOR, ETA: 1 STANDARD HOUR 40. CAN ASSIST: MEDICAL AND OXYGEN. PLEASE NOTE: DEPLOYING IN REQUISITIONED NEIMOIDIAN VESSEL. NO DEFENSIVE CAPACITY. REPEAT: NEGATIVE ARMAMENT. STRONGLY ADVISE ANY GAR VESSELS TO PING TRANSPONDER BEFORE OPENING FIRE. BE AWARE THAT SEPARATIST TRAFFIC IN SECTOR HAS INCREASED IN LAST 20 MINUTES IN RESPONSE TO FLEET MOVEMENTS. PREP FOR UNWANTED COMPANY.
–Signal received at Fleet Ops. Passed to MILINT N-11 Captain Ordo and acknowledged. Vessels responding now: Fearless, Majestic, and impounded enemy shuttle. Advised to assume extraction may be opposed.
367 days after Geonosis
It was cold and pitch-black in the cockpit, but it certainly beat being dead.
Fi kept his suit temperature at the bare minimum to conserve power. He flicked on his spot-lamp briefly and checked the trussed and shivering suspects who were lying against the deck: a human, and—disturbingly—two Nikto. Fi had only seen Nikto in obscure databases devoted to identifying the best part of their anatomy to aim at to stop them dead. They were tough. Intel said they could defeat Jedi. They were even rumored to have a weapon that could deflect and destroy a lightsaber blade. Maybe Jedi needed to tool up with PEP lasers, then.
And all the prisoners had tested positive for explosives residue when Darman had run his sensor over them. With the intel and the heavily encrypted data on their 'pads, the three looked like being dead to rights, as Skirata would say. But it was a long way from being satisfied that they'd snatched the right people to actually extracting useful information from them.
Fi took his thermal plastifoil survival blanket from his backpack and folded it carefully over the human, who seemed to be more affected by cold than the Nikto. Losing a suspect to hypothermia after going to all this trouble to grab them wasn't an option. Wrapping a body wasn't an easy maneuver in zero-g, but at least he'd stopped feeling sick.
The ultralight plastifoil kept drilling away every time the man shuddered. Fi sighed and took out his universal solution to any problem, a roll of thick adhesive tape, and hooked his leg around a handrail to stop himself floating while he tore off lengths. He taped the blanket to the suspect. Then he secured the trussed suspects to the deck with more of the tape. It was amazing how handy tape could be.
“And don't ask me to tuck you in and read you a story.” The human just stared balefully at him. He had a lovely black eye now from resisting Darman a little too vigorously. “They never have happy endings.”
The man's ID said Farr Orjul but nobody took that too seriously. He was about thirty: fine blond hair, sharp features, very pale blue eyes. The Nikto claimed to be M'truli and Gysk, or at least their mining licenses did, because none of the suspects was talking.