“I’ll bet.”
“I’d heard everyone loved Skirata, though. Even if he was a bad-tempered drunk.”
Niner had never been drunk and he didn’t even know what alcohol tasted like. “He cared what happened to us. He was one of us, pretty much. Not just there because he couldn’t cope with not being in the army anymore, or had to disappear. No, he was a good man.” Niner would have given a great deal to have seen Skirata come limping through the trees right then, demanding to know what they were doing lounging around like a bunch of Kaminoan nahra artists. “No idea where he is now, not since we left Kamino. Best covert ops and sabotage man ever.”
“You’d know, of course.”
“We’ll all know soon. I’m relying on what he taught us to get this mission completed.”
Niner ate the perfectly balanced, sensibly designed, and utterly tasteless cube, and sat silently, still waiting for Darman. They couldn’t even trap something and cook it: the smell of roasting meat and the light of the fire would betray their position.
With Fi on watch, he could shut his eyes and sleep for a couple of hours. He put his helmet back on, partly to be ready to move fast if they had enemy contact, and partly to keep the temperature up in his suit. It was getting chilly. He allowed himself one comfort that he didn’t really need, for morale.
You scare me. You just absorb everything I tell you. Don’t you ever forget?
“No, Sarge,” Niner said.
He had no idea how long he’d been asleep. He woke with a start at the sound of Fi’s voice.
“Possible contact, due east, range forty klicks. Looks like it’s centered on Imbraani.”
Even through the visor, it wasn’t clear exactly what Fi had spotted, but Niner could see it now, too. A glow marked the horizon like a false sunrise. It was constant, the gentlest graduation from amber to deep red: it wasn’t an explosion.
Niner switched between visor modes, main spectrum to infrared to full spectrum, and then back again. The glow was hot, too. The infrared long-range picked it up.
“I reckon that’s one big fire coming,” Fi said.
They waited, watching: Niner could hear Atin a few meters away, gathering up equipment and assembling it, ready to pull out. With the binocs on full distance, they could see that the fire was being eclipsed in places by billows of smoke. Eventually, Atin joined them, and all three observed the distant blaze in silence.
“They’re not burning crop stubble at night,” Fi said. “They haven’t even finished harvesting that stinking barq stuff yet. They’ve found something.”
“I know.”
“Either they’ve found Darman, and they’re teaching the locals not to shelter the enemy, or they haven’t found Darman and they’re trying to flush him out.”
Niner thought it was relatively good news. “But it means he made the landing,” he said. “So we wait here right up to the last second, and maybe a little longer just to be sure.”
Atin laid the gear down again. He was too professional and disciplined to slam it on the ground, but Niner picked up on the slight sag of his shoulders. “And if he doesn’t show by then?” he asked, with a level tone that suggested he didn’t want to show dissent any longer. “Next plan?”
“We take another look at the whole area from Teklet to Imbraani,” Niner said. “We start from scratch.”
“This isn’t to scale,” Darman said. He scraped marks in the loose soil on the exposed dirt floor of the barn and placed pieces of stale bread carefully on the crude chart. “This is the river. These three crusts are RVs Alpha, Beta, and Gamma.” He snapped the wood into more pieces and placed them. “This is the droid base … and this is Uthan’s lab.”
Etain held out her cupped hand. He dropped two chunks of wood into it. “This is Lik Ankkit’s residence,” she said. “He’s the Neimoidian overlord, for want of a better word. He runs the agricultural produce export business, and that near enough makes him an emperor here.”
“Okay. What else have we got?”
Etain crumbled her remaining lump of wood into smaller pieces and scattered them carefully in patches. “Imbraani itself, and Teklet, which is the spaceport, and its storage and distribution depot.”
“And this was the last known position for my squad.”
Etain stared at the worm-eaten wood and the moldy crusts that might help them save the Grand Army from destruction. “Why are we scraping maps in the dirt when we’ve got perfectly good holocharts?”
“That’s what Sergeant Skirata used to do,” Darman said. “He didn’t like holos. Too transparent. He also thought that feeling the texture of dirt focused your mind.”
“And you don’t need any technology to do it.”
“He was a great believer in intuition.”
Darman drew his blaster and turned suddenly. The barn door opened. He relaxed and dropped his arm to his side. Jinart held more drab fabric bundled in her arms. “You have to go,” she said breathlessly. “Take a look out there to the east. They’re burning the fields to flush you out and deny you cover. There’s somewhere you can lie low, but you have to pass for farmers—that’s not going to be easy for you, lad. You’re too big and well fed.”
Etain didn’t rise to the bait. She knew she’d fit in fine with the undernourished, shabby locals.
“I have to take my gear,” Darman said. “I can lay up somewhere with it if I have to.”
“Can’t you leave any of it?”
“Not if we’re going to blow up that facility. I’ve got all the implosion ordnance to deal with the nanovirus, as well as the E-Web cannon. We need it.”
“Then take a cart. There’s a curfew on powered vehicles.” Jinart tossed one of the bundles to Darman. “And get out of that armor. You couldn’t be more conspicuous if you were wearing a wedding gown.”
“We can try to make RV Gamma.”
“No, go to the first safe house you can find. I’ll reach your squad and let them know, then I’ll return to you.”
There was an assortment of barrows and handcarts stored in the barn, all in various states of disrepair. They’d attract no attention: the network of dirt roads was well traveled by people trying to get their quota of barq and other crops to Teklet on foot or with merlie-carts.
Loading the sections of the blaster cannon on the sturdiest barrow they could find made Etain realize just how heavy a burden Darman had carried. When she tried to heave one of the gray packs into the cart, it nearly wrenched her shoulder from the socket, so she decided to enlist a little assistance from the Force. She hadn’t expected it to be so heavy. She wasn’t the only one with deceptive physical strength.
“This is all weapons?” she asked.
“Pretty much.”
“Not enough to take a hundred droids, though.”
“Depends how you use it,” Darman said.
Etain wondered if he looked more conspicuous out of his sinister gray armor than in it. The armor had made him look much bigger, but even without it he was so solidly built that it was obvious he’d spent his life training for strength, eating adequate protein. Subsistence farmers didn’t have that distinctive slope from neck to shoulder formed by overdeveloped trapezius muscles. Even the youngsters bore the marks of constant exposure to the elements; Darman simply looked strikingly healthy and unburned by the sun. He didn’t even have callused hands.
And then there was that ramrod parade-ground posture. He looked exactly like the elite soldier he was. He would never pass for a local. Etain hoped the farmers would be more terrified of him than they were of Hokan.
The night horizon was amber like the urban skies of Coruscant, but it was flame, not the light of a million lamps, that caused the reflection from the clouds. It looked like rain might follow; they could cover the cart with a tarpaulin and not cause any curiosity. Layers of barq stalk, sacks of barq grain, and strips of dried kushayan buried Darman’s “gear,” as he kept calling it. His language swung from slang and generality to highly educated subbtlety, from gear–his catchall noun for any artifact—to DC-17s and DC-15s and a whole slew of numbers and acronyms that left Etain befuddled.