It was grim work for civilian police. Ordo knew that they had neither the expertise nor the numbers to handle what was happening lately. And how did they cope with the things they saw if they hadn't been trained to deal with them from childhood, as he had? For a moment he felt pity.
But there was work to do. Ordo flicked on the voice projection of his helmet with a quick eye movement. “Mind your backs, please.”
An HNE crew and a dozen other media representatives—some wets, as Skirata called organic life-forms, some tinnies, or droids—formed a cautious audience for the grisly aftermath of the explosion. They parted instantly, even before they looked around and saw Ordo striding toward them. Then they gave him an even wider berth. An ARC trooper cut an imposing figure, and a captain—marked in the brilliant scarlet that subconsciously said danger to many humanoid species—cleared a big path.
Obrim deactivated a section of the cordon to let Jusik and Ordo pass.
“This is General Bardan Jusik,” Ordo said. “He's one of us. Can he wander around and assess the site?”
Obrim looked Jusik up and down with the air of a man who believed more in hard data than the Force. “Of course he can. Mind the evidence markers, sir.”
“I'll be cautious,” Jusik said, meshing his fingers in front of him to do that little Jedi bow that Ordo found fascinating. Sometimes Jusik was one of the boys, and sometimes he was ancient, wisely sober, another creature entirely. “I won't contaminate evidence.”
Obrim waited for him to walk away and turned to Ordo. “Not that it'd matter. The forensic is getting us nowhere. Maybe we need the Mystic Mob to give us a break. How are you, anyway?”
“Focused. Very focused.”
“Yes, your boss is pretty focused, too. He can curse the slime off a Hutt, that man.”
“He takes all casualties personally, I'm afraid.”
“I know what you mean. I'm sorry about your boys, by the way. They catch it coming and going, don't they?”
Skirata was bent deep in conversation with a CSF officer, their heads almost touching, talking in low and agitated voices. He swung around as Ordo approached. His face was gray with suppressed anger.
“Fifteen dead.” Skirata clearly didn't care about civilian casualties, traffic disruption, or structural damage. He gestured toward a large fragment of white leg armor in the rubble of what had been a security post. “I'm going to rip some chakaar's guts out for this.”
“When we find them, I'll make sure you're first in line,” Obrim said.
There wasn't a lot any of them could do at that moment except to allow the largely Sullustan scenes-of-crime team to do their work. Skirata, chewing vigorously on that bittersweet ruik root that he'd recently taken a liking to, stood with his fists in his jacket pockets, watching Jusik stepping delicately between chunks of debris. The Jedi occasionally stopped to close his eyes and stand completely motionless.
Skirata's expression was one of cold appraisal. “He's a good kid.”
Ordo nodded. “Do you want me to look after him?”
“Yes, but not at the expense of your own safety.”
After a few minutes Jusik made his way back to the cordon, arms folded.
“You didn't pick up anything?” Skirata said, 'as if he expected Jusik to bay like a hunting strill latching on to a scent.
“A great deal.” Jusik shut his eyes for a second. “I can still feel the disturbance in the Force. I can sense the destruction and pain and fear. Like a battlefield, in fact.”
“So?”
“It's what I can't sense that bothers me.”
“Which is?”
“Malevolence. The enemy is absent. The enemy was never here, in fact.”
* * *
Republic Fleet Protection Group traffic inderdiction vessel (TIV) Z590/1, standing off Corellian–Perlemian hyperspace intersection, 367 days after Geonosis
Fi really didn't like zero-g ops.
He took off his helmet with slow care and put one hand on the webbing restraints that stopped him from drifting away from the bulkhead of the anonymous utility vessel that had been customized for armed boarding parties. If he moved a little too quickly, he drifted.
Drifting made him … queasy.
Darman, Niner, and Atin didn't seem bothered by it at all; neither did the pilot, who, for reasons Fi hadn't yet worked out, was called Sicko.
Sicko had shut down the drives. The unmilitary, unmarked, apparently unimpressive little TIV—a “plain wrapper,” as the pilots tagged it—hung with drives idling near an exit point of the hyperspace route, cockpit panels flickering with a dozen weapons displays.
Externally, it looked like a battered utility shuttle. Under the rust, though, it was a compact assault platform that could muscle its way onto any vessel. Fi thought that traffic interdiction operations was a lovely euphemism for “heavy-duty military hijack.”
“I do like a noncompliant boarding to start the day,” Sicko said. “You okay, Fi?”
“I'm sorted,” Fi lied.
“You're not going to throw up, are you? I just cleaned this crate.”
“If I can keep field rations down, I can handle anything.”
“Tell you what, chum, put your bucket back on and keep it to yourself.”
“I can aim straight.”
Fi had learned the skills of maneuvering in zero-g late in life—just before he turned eight and sixteen, not all that long before Geonosis—and it didn't come as naturally to him as those troopers trained specifically for deep-space duties. He wondered why the others had come through the same training with more tolerance of it.
Niner, apparently impervious to every hardship except seeing his squad improperly dressed, stared at the palm of his glove as if willing the wrist-mounted hololink from HQ to activate.
The squad now wore the matte-black stealth version of the Katarn armor that made them even more visibly different from the rest of the Republic Commando squads. Niner said it was “sensible” even if it made them pretty conspicuous targets on snow-covered Fest. Fi suspected he liked it better because it also made them look seriously menacing. Droids didn't care, but it certainly put the wind up wets—organic targets—when they saw it.
If they saw it, of course. They usually didn't get the chance.
An occasional click of his teeth indicated Niner was annoyed. It was Skirata's habit, too.
“Ordo's always on time,” Fi said, trying to take his mind off his churning stomach. “Don't fret, Sarge.”
“Your buddy … ,” Darman teased.
“Rather have him for a friend than an enemy.”
“Ooh, he likes you. Hobnobbing with ARC officers from the Bonkers Squad, eh?”
“We have an understanding,” Fi said. “I don't laugh at his skirt, and he doesn't rip my head off.”
Yes, Ordo had taken a shine to him. Fi hadn't fully understood it until Skirata had taken him to one side and explained just what had happened to Ordo and his batch on Kamino as kids. So when Fi had thrown himself on a grenade during an anti-terrorist op to smother the detonation, Ordo had marked him out as someone who'd take an awfully big risk to save comrades. Null ARCs were psychotic—bonkers, as Skirata put it—but they were unshakably loyal when the mood struck them.
And when the mood failed to strike them, they were instant death on legs.
Fi suspected that Ordo was bored out of his brain, stuck in HQ on Coruscant for most of the last year with nothing to kill except time.
So Fi stared at Niner's glove, too, willing his stomach to stay put. At precisely 0900 hours Triple Zero time, right on cue, Niner's palm burst into blue light.