“Bang out, General, the larty's ready to lift” Clanky almost had to drag her off the pile of shattered droids and shove her into a run toward the gunship. “We've done all we can here and the bay's full. Go! Run!”
She grabbed the cone rifle as she ran back, retracing their line of advance, blind on adrenaline. But at the gunship's platform she still stopped dead, one foot on the edge of the rail, to look back and count men passing her. One—two—three—four troopers, and Clanky. All accounted for. She sprang up just as an armored hand gripped hers and yanked her inboard. She had no idea who the trooper was. But he was one of hers now.
The gunship lifted in a straight vertical so fast that her stomach plummeted back to ground level.
The forest and fertile delta plain of Dinlo shrank beneath the ship and grew dark. The bay hatches slid forward and slammed shut. Then she was standing in a warehouse of scorched, filthy armor and the stench of blood and seared flesh. Her primeval survival mechanisms yielded to shaking anticlimax.
Clanky pulled off his helmet and their eyes met, an odd moment that was almost a glance in a mirror: she knew that the unblinking wide-eyed shock on his face was exactly what he was seeing on hers. Instinctively, they both reached out to clasp forearms and their grips locked for a second or two. Clanky was also shaking.
Then they parted and turned away. It was synchronous.
Yes, Etain thought. We're just the same, all of us.
It was very, very quiet once she blocked out the thrum of the gunship's drive as it made 660 kph—off the dial—back to Fearless.
And no, the IM-6 droid could not deal with forty men crammed into a modified bay better suited to thirty, not if a quarter of them were injured.
Then, when Etain listened more carefully and her adrenaline had ebbed, she realized the bay wasn't as quiet as she had thought. There was ragged breathing and stifled yelps of pain and—the worst, this—incoherent whimpering that peaked to a crescendo of a single stifled scream and trailed off again.
She picked her way across the bay, stepping over men who were crouching or kneeling. Propped against the bulkhead, a clone trooper was being held in a sitting position by a brother. His helmet and chest plate were removed and Etain needed no med droid to provide a prognosis for a chest wound that was producing blood on his lips.
“Medic?” She whipped around. “Medic! Get this man some help, now!”
The med droid appeared as if from nowhere, jerking bolt upright from a knot of troopers where it was obviously working. Its twin photoreceptors trained on her.
“General!”
“Why is this man not being attended to?”
“Triage X,” the droid said, dropping down into the unbroken carpet of troopers again to resume its first aid.
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.