Clone Commander Gett stood at her side, hands clasped behind his back as they waited on the repulsor platform that shunted ammo boxes from the magazine to the hangar deck.
“No way to die,” he said.
Etain turned to look at the troops around them. “Neither is this.”
They were set to go. Fearless was half an hour out from Dinlo and the gunship pilots were making their way down the passage from the flight briefing to carry out their pre-sortie checks, yellow-trimmed helmets tucked under one arm. They all held the helmets exactly the same way, no doubt the result of thorough drill. General Etain Tur-Mukan noted that.
She stood back from the hatch to let them through and got a salute from each as he passed. One glanced at the somewhat unconventional weapon slung across her shoulder and grinned. He indicated the huge LJ-50 concussion rifle that almost dwarfed her.
“Does that thing light up blue, General?”
“Only if you're on the receiving end, trooper,” she said, and gave him her most reassuring smile.
She knew they were afraid, because a commando called Darman had taught her that only idiots didn't fear combat. Fear was an asset, an incentive, a tool. She knew how to use it now, even if she didn't embrace it.
Today she needed to tell Improcco Company that. They knew it already, but this was her first mission with them, and she had learned that a little openness with the troops went a long way. And she wanted them to know that she saw them for the human beings they were. Meeting Republic commandos on Qiilura for the first time had been a painful revelation for her.
“Are you okay with that, General?” Gett seemed to be able to guess what she was thinking almost all the time, and she wondered briefly if telepathy was in their genetic mix. Then she reminded herself that men who all looked the same learned to be very, very sensitive to tiny behavioral cues. “We've got a DC-15 if you prefer. Nice piece of kit.”
The LJ-50 was exhaustingly heavy. She'd developed her arm muscles in the last year, but it still took some handling.
“Some very competent gentlemen taught me to use a conc rifle,” she said. “They persuaded me to keep my lightsaber for close-combat. Besides, the LJ's got a four-meter spread at a thirty-meter range. I'm a great believer in efficiency over style.”
Gett smiled. He knew the stories about the Qiilura mission. They all did, it seemed. Gossip traveled at light speed in a closed community, and it'd had months to make the rounds. “I understand Omega are okay and on TIOPS in the Outer Rim right now.”
“It's kind of you to check for me, Commander.” She had to ask. “What's TIOPS?”
“Captain Ordo makes a point of giving your signals priority.” He lowered his voice. “Traffic interdiction operations. Boarding the bad guys' vessels.”
“Thank you. I've never met Ordo, but he does seem to take care of me very well.”
“One of Kal Skirata's Null ARCs.”
“Oh, Kal again …”
“You've never met him, have you?”
“No, but I hope I do. I feel as if he's been walking behind me for a long time.” She looked around the hangar and noted there was one platoon still missing. She'd wait. She needed them all to hear this. “I envy his ability to inspire people.”
Gett said nothing. Tact, perhaps, or merely nothing to add; Etain feared that she still projected her own doubts onto others. She was a Jedi Knight now. She had passed her trials on Qiilura with Master Arligan Zey, working under deep cover with him to mobilize the colonists against the remnants of the Neimoidian and Trandoshan occupation. It was silent, grim, secret work, and even though a Republic garrison had now been established on the planet, she still felt that the dwindling population of native Gurlanins and the human farmers were set on a collision course. The Republic had promised the Gurlanins that they would remove the human colony from their world.
So far, they hadn't.
It would have been a simple case of broken promises—like many others in the galaxy's history—had the Gurlanins not been a race of shapeshifting predators, working as spies for the Republic. This was their bargain: they would provide their unique espionage skills if the farmers stopped driving away the prey on which Gurlanins depended. As far as the Gurlanins were concerned, that meant the removal of the human settlements on Qiilura.
Etain knew Gurlanins made bad enemies. They were more than capable of killing farmers, as they'd proved when they exacted revenge on informers on Qiilura. But the war came first, and diplomacy had to take a backseat.
“All present and correct now, General,” Gett said. He flicked the controls of the repulsor platform and it lifted them about a meter above the deck, so that the assembled company of 144 clone troopers could see and hear her clearly. There was no noise apart from the occasional clack of armor plates as one soldier brushed too close to another, or the quiet clearing of throats. They didn't chat.
Gett still defaulted to drill. “Company—a … ten … shun!”
The chunkkk of armor and rifles being slapped hard against chest plates was one synchronous noise. Etain waited a few moments and concentrated on projecting her voice across the cavern of the hangar. She hadn't been trained as an officer. It didn't come naturally.
They needed her to be one, though, just as Darman had when he had expected all Jedi to be competent commanders. She inhaled slowly and felt her voice lift from her stomach through her chest.
“Stand easy,” she said. “And buckets off.”
The clack and hiss of helmets being removed was a little more ragged than the snap to attention. They weren't expecting that. She stared down into identical faces, reaching out into the Force to get some sense of who they might be and their state of mind, much as she had with Omega. It was a complex tapestry, and yes, there was fear; there was an intense sense of belonging and focus, too. And there was not a trace of the hopeful child that had once so confused her when she felt Darman long before she saw him for the first time.
Clones grew fast and learned even faster. A year at war—real war, not just fatally realistic training—had made them a lot more worldly-wise and less idealistic.
“We have two battalions pinned down on Dinlo,” she said. “You've seen the op order. We open up that exit route for them by cutting through droid lines so they can reach the extraction point. You'll have air support, but we'll be relying predominantly on your infantry skills.” She paused. They listened politely. Whatever focus they had appeared to come not from her but from something inside them. “I'm not going to shoot you any line about glory, because this is about survival. That's my first rule as a Jedi, you know that? Survive. And so should it be yours. I don't want any wild sacrifices. I want to come out of this with as many of you and the Forty-first alive as possible—not because you're assets we need to use again, but because I don't want you to die.”
She felt the silence change, not in quality but in the realization that shivered almost imperceptibly through the Force. This wasn't how they were used to seeing themselves.
“We weren't exactly queuing up for it ourselves, ma'am,” said a pilot, one boot on the step to his cockpit. There was a ripple of laughter, and Etain laughed, too.
“I'll try to keep my arc of fire under control, then,” said Etain, and patted the Stouker. She glanced at Gett's forearm; he tilted it so that she could see his chrono readout. “Ramps down in twenty-four minutes. Dismissed.”