Fi studied his datapad and considered his brief and busy one-year career as an elite commando.
He'd fought at Geonosis. He'd taken out a Sep research base, nearly slotted his beloved Sergeant Kal, and ended the careers of eighty-five assorted Seps and more droids than he bothered to count. And he'd denied the CIS an awful lot of assets, from replenishment depots to a capital ship and a fighter squadron that didn't even have the chance to fly its first sortie.
Some of it had been fun, most of it had been a grim hard slog, and all of it had been frightening. And now the cheerful euphemism was over; he was probably going to die. And he didn't want Skirata to witness that.
He looked up from the expired op orders on his datapad and saw that the holoimage of Skirata was still much as it had been for the best part of two hours. Sergeant Kal waited. He wouldn't leave.
Niner continued to stare out the viewscreen.
Then he sat bolt upright, prevented from shooting forward by the restraining belt. Fi checked his viewpoint icon and saw he had activated his electrobinocular visor.
“Visual contact,” Niner said quietly. “Fierfek, it really is a Sep crate. Neimoidian.”
The whole squad maneuvered so they could see what he was looking at.
“About time,” Niner said. Fi listened in. “Delta, Niner here. You been sightseeing?”
“Boss receiving. Sorry, we had to stop and ask for directions.” He had a voice very like Atin's but with a stronger accent. “My boys are now going to show you how to do an extraction properly, so take notes because you might blink and miss it. There's a Sep ship with missiles up the spout about three minutes behind us.”
“Can we bring some friends?”
“The more the merrier. We're going to align with your cockpit, slap an isolation seal on the viewport, and Scorch will cut through. Then you shift it fast, and we RV with Fearless for caf, cakes, and hero worship. Got it?”
“Copy that.”
“I love emotional reunions,” Fi said. “And hero worship.”
“Boss, that Sep's getting awfully close.” Another voice: Fi couldn't identify any of them yet. “This might have to beat the galactic record.”
“How close? Close enough to make me mad?”
“They could launch a missile in two minutes and it'd singe your shebs overtaking us.”
“Okay. Close. Omega, you heard the man.” Boss sounded unperturbed. “Powder your noses and get ready to party.”
Fierfek, Fi thought. He rolled carefully to peel Orjul off the deck and haul him upright for a hasty exit with jet-pack assist.
The human prisoner looked straight at him. And he spoke. “You're really not very good at this, are you?”
“Now you decide to get chatty.”
“We'll all be charcoal in a few minutes, and that gives me some satisfaction.”
“Okay, I'm now really motivated to introduce you to Sergeant Vau.”
“Whoa, cut it out,” Darman said. One of the Nikto tried to gore him with its short horns as he lifted it ready for escape. “Ungrateful di'kut.” He brought his helmet hard down in its face in a perfect head-butt; only the pilot's seat stopped them from being catapulted by the inertia of the impact. Darman looked around at the other Nikto. “Want some?”
“Udesii, boys, udesii.” Niner raised his Deece. “Push comes to shove, we only need one of them alive, so next one to look like a safety risk isn't going home. Okay?”
The small Neimoidian assault vessel now filled their field of vision as it came to nestle partly across the freighter's viewscreen. Fi watched, mesmerized. A hatch opened and something distressingly reminiscent of a wide mouthed worm emerged and sucked against the transparisteel. A familiar blue light loomed from the darkness of its maw. Through the plate, Fi saw a helmet very like his and an exaggerated thumbs-up gesture.
“Stand back and watch a pro at work,” said a disembodied voice on the comlink.
For a second Fi thought Scorch was attaching a frame charge. Yeah, that's. clever, I don't think. But the large ring of alloy pipe sat snugly on the plate and began to glow white-hot. Scorch's thumbs-up became a jerked move away gesture.
“Scorch, sooner rather than later, okay?” Boss's voice said.
“One minute, tops.”
“We haven't got a minute—”
“What d'you want me to do, chew through it?”
The transparisteel plate was distorting as the hot frame burned through from the outside. Niner gathered up the hololink and snapped it back on his forearm plate. Atin shoved datapads and tools in his belt.
“Tell you what, shall we just float here and panic incoherently while we're waiting?” Fi said.
“Good idea,” Scorch said, unmoved.
“Very good idea, panicking,” Boss said. “Guess what I just eyeballed from the port-side screen.
RAS Fearless, ops room, ETA to target: two minutes
The assault ship had to decelerate to drop from hyperspace and open fire. It cost critical time. Etain watched while Tenn made rapid calculations to see if they could find that single critical firing solution that balanced losing speed with firing missiles and would not only make up those seconds, but also take out the Sep ship before it had a chance to target Omega.
The ops room was crowded with white armor and yet utterly silent as Fearless's crew watched the tracking screen repeater on the bulkhead. It mirrored what Tenn, Gett, and Etain could see in smaller format at the PWO's station.
Tenn didn't seem to have blinked in the last three minutes.
“Firing solution, General.” His hand rested on the firing key, his gaze welded to the screen. “Target acquired. Best solution we're going to get and our window is ten seconds or we'll take out Omega and Delta, too. Now, General?”
Etain glanced at Gett, her mind partly sensing the ripples in the Force. And the Force agreed with Tenn, to the very second.
“Take it, Tenn.”
“Yes, ma'am.” The key made a small snipping noise as he depressed it. “Fire one, fire two. Missiles away—”
Two huge trails of savage energy sped away from the decelerating assault ship and into the void. Etain could feel too much imminent disaster in the Force: she didn't want to watch it as well. She cupped her hands over her nose and shut her eyes for a second, and then made herself look back at the screen.
The tracking screen followed the missiles as steady white lines. They looked as if they had overlapped the pulsing red point of light that was the Separatist fighter. All the traces winked out of existence at the same time.
“Splash one,” said a trooper at another station. “Visual confirmation. Target destroyed.”
“And who else?” Commander Gett asked.
“Whoaaaa … !”
Fi wasn't certain if it was his own cry of shock or Scorch's voice in his comlink, but he saw the ball of white-and-gold flame expanding toward them, silhouetting the section of Neimie ship that partly obscured the shield, and he ducked instinctively.
A hailstorm of debris rained on the screen. Something large and metallic skidded along the casing of the freighter with a long dull screech. Fi straightened up as the hammering faded to the occasional rattle, like stones being tossed onto a roof. Then it stopped completely.
“Fierfek,” Scorch said. “Now, if they'd only added a spot of maranium to the warhead, it would have burned a really pretty purple.”