Niner was hauling in his canopy when the explosion jerked him upright. A column of white roiling fire shot into the night sky above the tops of the trees. He knew it was hot and bright because his helmet visor’s filter kicked in to stop it from overwhelming his night vision.
Even though he knew it was coming, his heart sank. Darman probably hadn’t made it. He’d disobeyed his order. He hadn’t jumped when he told him to.
So maybe you’ve lost a brother. Maybe not. Either way, you’ll lose two more if you don’t get your act together fast.
Niner triangulated the position of the blast and then went on bundling up the free-fall canopy, cutting away the lengths of cord before burying it. With a breaking strength of five hundred kilos, the cord was bound to come in handy. He wound each length in a figure-eight around his thumb and smallest finger and slipped the skeins into a belt pouch, then went in search of his extra pack.
It hadn’t fallen far from him. The low-opening technique worked well if you needed accuracy. Niner found the pack at the edge of a field, covered in small dark-furred animals that seemed fascinated by it and were gnawing at the soft padding strip on one side. He flashed his spot-lamp to scatter them, but they stared back up the beam, burst into angry chatter, and then turned toward him.
It was unnerving, nothing more. Their little teeth snapped impotently on his armor. He stood still, assessing them, his data bank scrolling in front of his eyes and telling him that they were gdans, and that they weren’t logged as a hostile alien species. All the nonhuman life Niner had ever seen for real, other than Kaminoans and various instructors, had been on Geonosis and through a blaster sight. He was utterly dependent on the intelligence loaded into his database—that, or finding things out for himself.
All but one of the gdans gave him up as inedible within a minute and disappeared into the waist-high crop. The remaining creature worried away at his left boot, a tribute to its tenacity, if not its intelligence. Those boots were specced to withstand every assault from hard vacuum to acid and molten metal. The little animal clearly believed in aiming high.
Darman would have found it fascinating, he was sure. It was a pity to lose him. He had all the makings of a good comrade.
“Come on,” Niner said, nudging the animal with the butt of his blaster rifle. “I’ve got to get to work. Shove off.”
The gdan, teeth locked around a clamp, looked up and met his eyes, or at least it seemed like it. It could only have really seen a faint blue light. Then it let go and trotted back toward the field, pausing once to stare back at him before disappearing into a hole in the ground with all the ease of a diver.
Niner took out his datapad and calculated his position. There was no GPS he could lock in to without the Neimoidians detecting him, but he could at least use dead reckoning based on the sprayer’s last position, matching features on the landscape to his chart. It was old-fashioned soldiering. He liked it. He had to be able to do the business when the tech wasn’t there, even if that meant using nothing but a Trandoshan blade.
If you stab someone in the heart, they can still run. I once saw a man run a hundred meters like that, screaming as well. Go for the neck, like this. Sergeant Skirata had taught them a lot about knives. Put a bit of weight behind it, son.
Still, tech had its place. A speeder bike would have been handy, although they hadn’t thought they’d need them. The insert was supposed to be five klicks from the target.
Never mind, he thought. It would make me look pretty con spicuous out here anyway. The gear would slow him on his way to the pre-agreed rendezvous point, but he’d get there. If Fi and Atin had landed safely, they’d be heading for RV Alpha, too.
He started tabbing, trying to make ten klicks an hour, avoiding tracks and open ground. In the end he had to drag the extra pack behind him on straps like a sled. Tactical advance into battle—tabbing, as Skirata called it—meant walking at six to ten klicks an hour with a twenty-five-kilo pack. “But that’s for ordinary men,” the instructor would say, as if nonclones were subhuman. “You are clone commandos. You will do better because you are better.”
Niner was lugging nearly three times that load now. He didn’t feel better at all right then. He decided to add a portable repulsorlift to his new list of gear to request upon return.
Qiilura’s moon was in its new phase, and he was grateful for that. In his light gray armor, he would have stood out like a beacon. Hadn’t the top brass thought of that, either? He stifled the uncharacteristically critical opinion about his superiors and decided there had to be something he didn’t know but they did. He had his orders.
Even so, he diverted to a narrow river shown on the holochart and stopped long enough to smear mud over his armor and gear. There was no point chancing his luck.
At four hundred meters from RV point Alpha, he slowed down, and not because he was struggling under the weight. A silent approach was necessary. He hid the pack he was dragging deep in the undergrowth and recorded its location to collect later. Fi and Atin might have been tracked. They might not have made it at all. There was always the possibility of ambush. No, he definitely wasn’t taking chances.
For the last two hundred meters, he got down in the grass and crawled.
But they were there, and alone.
Niner found himself staring up into the beam from Fi’s helmet and he knew that the infrared targeting was centered at the point between his filtration mask and the top of his chest plate. It was a vulnerable point, provided one got close enough and used the right caliber rounds. Not many hostiles could get that close, of course.
“You gave me a start, Sarge,” Fi said, holding his blaster clear and looking him over. He killed the light and indicated his chest plate. “Great minds, eh?”
Fi’s armor was no longer pristine, either. Niner wasn’t sure what he’d smeared over it, but it disrupted his outline well enough. The thought had obviously occurred to all of them. Atin was daubed with something dark and matte as well.
“Shape, shine, shadow, silhouette, smell, sound, and movement,” Niner said, repeating the rules of basic camouflage. If it hadn’t been for Darman’s absence, he would have found the situation funny. He tried. “Shame they couldn’t find something beginning with S to complete the set.”
“I could,” Atin said. “Any contact from Darman?”
They were forty kilometers from the point where Niner had landed. “I saw the blast. He was last off.”
“You saw him jump, then.”
“No. He was grabbing as much gear and ordnance as he could salvage.” Niner felt he needed to explain. “He shoved me out the hatch first. I shouldn’t have let that happen. But I didn’t abandon him.”
Atin shrugged. “So what have we got, then?”
“We’ve got a brother missing.”
“I meant by way of resources. He had most of the demolition ordnance.”
“I know you meant that, and I don’t want to hear it.” If he could feel concern—even sorrow—for Darman, then why couldn’t Atin? But it was no time to start a fight. They had to stick together now. A four-man mission with three men: their chances of succeeding had plummeted already. “We’re a squad now. Get used to it.”
Fi interrupted. He seemed to have a knack for defusing situations. “All our gear’s intact, anyway. We can still put quite a dent in them if we have to.”
And what did they have to put a dent in, exactly? They had high-altitude drone recces of the target building, but no idea yet if the walls were just plastered blocks or if they were lined with shock-absorbing alloy plates. There could be just the thirty or so guards seen walking the perimeter, or hundreds more holed up in underground barracks. Without better intelligence, they had no way of knowing just how much gear was enough for the job.