“Logging,” Fi said quietly.
“What?”
“The missing coppice. It’s coming up on autumn. They’ve been out cutting trees for winter since the recce was done.”
“That’s the problem with intel,” Niner said. “Goes stale really fast.”
“Not like exercises.”
“No. It’s not. This is going to be invaluable for training updates when we get back.”
Fi sounded as if he had sighed. That was the funny thing about helmet comlinks. One got used to listening to every nuance of breath and tone and even the different ways his brothers swallowed. They couldn’t see each other’s facial expressions, and had to listen for them. It was probably like being blind. Niner had never known any blind people, but he had heard of a batch of clones whose eyesight wasn’t 20/20 disappearing after their first exercise. Kaminoans were obsessive about quality control.
He might have been bred for selfless obedience, but he wasn’t stupid. The Kaminoan technicians were the only things that truly terrified him, and what he felt when he obeyed their instructions was different than the feelings he had when a Jedi gave him orders. He wondered if Fi and Atin felt the same way.
“You don’t think we’re going to make it, do you, Fi?”
“I’m not afraid to die. Not in combat, anyway.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“It’s just…”
“Ten-meter range, son. No Kaminoans listening.”
“It’s just so inefficient. You said it yourself. You said it was a waste.”
“That was Geonosis.”
“They spend so much time and trouble making us perfect and then they don’t give us what we need to do the job. You remember what Sergeant Kal used to say?”
“He used to swear a lot, I remember that.”
“No, he used to get upset when he’d had a few drinks and say that he could make us better soldiers if we had time to go out and live. Data-rich, experience-poor. That’s what he used to say.”
“He used to slur the words quite a bit, too. And he didn’t like clones.”
“That was all bluster. And you know it.”
Yes, Kal Skirata said awful things about clones, but it never sounded as if he meant them, not to the clones, anyway. He got uj cake from home, no easy feat on secret, sealed Kamino, and shared it with the commando squads he was responsible for training. He called them his Dead Men, his Wet Droids, all kinds of abusive things. But if you caught him off duty in his cabin, he would sometimes fight back tears and make you eat some delicacy smuggled in for him, or encourage you to read one of his illicit texts that wasn’t on the accelerated training curriculum. They were often stories of soldiers who could have done many other things, but chose to fight. Sergeant Kal was especially eager for his Wet Droids to read stuff about a culture called Mandalorian. He admired Jango Fett. “This is who you really are,” he’d say. “Be proud, however much these ugly gray freaks treat you like cattle.”
No, he didn’t like Kaminoans much, did Kal Skirata.
Once he signed up with the Kaminoans, he said, they never let him go home again. But he’d told Niner that he didn’t want to. He couldn’t leave his boys now, not since he knew. “Brief,” he’d say, gesturing with a glass of colorless alcohol, “is never glorious.”
Niner was determined to work out what Kal Skirata had come to understand, and why it upset him so much.
“Nobody has all the answers,” Niner said. “The trouble with getting used to being powerful is that you can forget the small details that’ll bring you down.”
Fi made thatffff sound as if he was about to start laughing. “I know who you’re quoting.”
Niner didn’t even realize he’d said it. It was Sergeant Kal all right. He’d even started using the word son.
He missed him.
Then the comlink warning light in his HUD interrupted his thoughts. Medium range. What was Atin—
“Contact, five hundred meters, dead on your six.” Atin’s voice cut through. “Droids. Ten, one humanoid—confirm ten tinnies, one wet, looks like an officer.” There was a loud blast behind them. “Correction—hard contact.”
Niner knew this by rote and Fi didn’t even exchange words with him. They dropped the gear and darted back the way they had come, rifles up, safetys off, and when they got within fifty meters of Atin’s location they dropped into the prone position to aim.
Atin was pinned down at the foot of a tree. There was one droid slumped on its side with wisps of smoke rising from it, but the others were formed up, laying down covering fire while two advanced in short sprints, zigzagging. Atin was managing to get off the occasional shot. If they’d wanted him dead, they probably had the blaster power to do it.
They wanted Atin alive.
“I can see the wet,” Fi said. He was to Niner’s left, staring down the sniperscope. “Aqualish captain, in fact.”
“Okay. Take him when you’re ready.”
Niner snapped on his grenade launcher and aimed at the line of droids. They were spread, maybe forty meters end-to-end. It might take two rounds to knock them out if they didn’t scatter. Droids were great on battlefields. But they weren’t made for smart stuff, and if their officer was down...
Crack.
The air expanded instantly with the release of heat and energy. That was what gave plasma bolts their satisfying sound. The Aqualish fell backward, chest plate shattered, and lumps that looked like clods of wet soil but weren’t flew from him and dropped. The droids stopped for a fraction of a second, men carried on their course as if that was the best idea they had.
Fi scrambled away from his position and rolled.
No, they really weren’t good at close-quarters combat, at least not without direction from a wet. But there were always a lot of them, and they could return fire as well as any organic life-form. Three of the seven remaining droids turned their attention to the direction of Fi’s bolt.
The bushes where Fi had been firing exploded in flame. Niner perceived that it was all happening slowly—at heartbeat pace—but it wasn’t, not at all. He aimed and fired, once, twice. The twin explosions almost merged into one. Soil and grass and metal fragments rained down around him. At close range, droids were almost as dangerous when you hit them as when they hit you: they were their own shrapnel.
The firing stopped. Smoke drifted from at least five impact points. Niner could see nothing moving.
“One tinnie intact but immobile,” Fi said.
“Got it,” Niner said. He fired again, just in case.
“Looks sorted out there,” Fi said. He lowered his rifle. “Atin? You okay?”
“Nothing missing that I can’t bolt back on.”
“You’re a laugh a minute,” Niner said, and started to ease up on one arm. It was amazing how he could forget the weight of his pack for the few moments it took to save his life. “Now, how did they—”
“Down!” Atin yelled.
A bolt flew a meter above Niner’s head and he dropped back on his belly. It sounded like two shots. Then there was silence.
“Now it’s sorted,” Atin said. “Someone help me get up, please?”
When Niner managed to get into a kneeling position he could see a thoroughly shattered pile of droid, a bit closer to him than the line. It had been two shots he’d heard: one had been aimed at him and one had come from Atin, to make sure there wasn’t a second.
“Coming, brother,” Niner said.