“I could help,” he said.
“I can manage.” Her voice sounded like she was straining it through her teeth. “If this is lightweight gear, I’d rather not see the regular variety.”
“I meant I could help with martial skills. If you want to train with your lightsaber.”
“I’d probably end up slicing off something you’d miss later.”
No, she wasn’t what he was expecting at all. They walked on, trying hard to look downtrodden and rural, which wasn’t so much of a challenge when you were hungry, wet, and tired. The dirt road was deserted: at this time of year there should have been visible activity at first light. Ahead of them was the first safe house, a single-story hut topped by a mixture of straw thatch and rusting metal plates.
“I’ll knock,” Etain said. “They’ll probably run for their lives if they see you first.”
Darman took it as a sensible observation rather than an insult. He pulled his cloak up across his mouth and pushed the cart out of sight behind the hut, looking around slowly and carefully as if he were casually taking in the countryside. There were no windows at the rear, just a simple door and a well-worn path in the grass leading to a pit with an interesting aroma and a plank across it. It wasn’t an ideal location for an ambush, but he wasn’t taking chances. Stopping in the open like this made you vulnerable.
He didn’t like it at all. He wished he could feign invisibility like Sergeant Skirata, a short, wiry, nondescript little man who could pass completely unnoticed, until he decided to stop and fight. And Skirata could fight in a lot of ways that weren’t in the training manual. Darman recalled all of them.
He pressed his elbow into his side to reassure himself that his rifle was within easy reach. Then he slipped his hand under his cloak and felt for one of the probes in his belt.
When he reached the front again, Etain was still rapping on the doorpost. There was no response. She stood back and seemed to be looking at the door as if willing it to open.
“They’re gone,” she said. “I can’t sense anyone.”
Darman straightened up and walked casually toward the rear of the house. “Let me check the regular way.”
He beckoned her to follow. Once around the back, he took a probe and slid the flat sensor strip carefully under the gap beneath the back door. The readout on the section that he was holding said there were no traces of explosive or pathogen. If the place was booby-trapped, it would be very low tech. It was time for a hands-on check. He pressed on the door with his left hand, rifle in his right.
“It’s empty,” Etain whispered.
“Can you sense a tripwire that’ll send a row of metal spikes swinging into you?” he asked.
“Point taken.”
The door swung slowly open. Nothing. Darman took a remote from his belt and sent it inside, picking up low-light images from the interior. There was no movement. The room appeared clear. He let the door swing back, recalled the remote, and stood with his back to the entrance for one final check around him.
“I go in, look again, then you follow me if you hear me say in, in, in, okay?” he said, almost under his breath. He didn’t meet her eyes. “Lightsaber ready, too.”
As soon as he was inside, he pulled his rifle, stood hard up in the corner, and scanned the room. Clear. So clear, in fact, that last night’s meal was still half eaten on the table. There was a single door that didn’t appear to open to the exterior. A cupboard, a closet—maybe a threat. He trained his rifle on it.
“In, in, in,” Darman said. Etain slipped through and he gestured her to the corner opposite, then pointed: Me, that door, you, back door. Etain nodded and drew her lightsaber. He walked up to the closet and tried to raise the latch, but it didn’t open, so he took two steps back and put his boot to it, hard.
They didn’t build well around here. The door splintered and hung on one rusted hinge. Behind it was a storeroom. It made sense now: in a poor country, you locked away your food supply.
“They left in a hurry,” Darman said.
“Are you wearing your armored boots?” Etain said.
“I wouldn’t be kicking down a door without them.” He’d covered them in tightly wound sacking. “No boots, no soldier. As true as it ever was.” He stepped through the gap into the store and studied the shelves. “You’re just learning the first step in clearing a house.”
“What’s that?” Etain reached past him for a metal container marked gavvy-meal.
“Who’s watching the door? Who’s watching our gear?”
“Sorry.”
“No problem. I expect it never occurs to you when you have Jedi senses to rely on.” There: he hadn’t even tried to call her ma’am this time. “If we knew why the occupants left in such a hurry, this might have made a decent place to lay up. But we don’t. So let’s grab some supplies and move on.”
He took dried fruit and something that looked like cured leathery meat, making a mental note to test all of it with the toxin strip in his medpac. It was too kind of the locals to leave all this. There was, of course, every chance they had fled in terror from the same violence that he had witnessed looking down from his observation point just after he landed.
Etain was filling a couple of water bottles from a pump outside.
“I’ve got a filter for that,” Darman said.
“Are you sure you weren’t trained by Neimoidians?”
“You’re in enemy territory.”
She smiled sadly. “Not all soldiers wear uniforms.”
She’d catch on. She had to. The thought that a Jedi might be unable to offer the leadership he had been promised was almost unbearable. His emotions didn’t have names. But they were feelings that had memories embedded in them—finishing a fifty-kilometer run thirty-two seconds outside the permitted time, and being made to run it again; seeing a clone trooper fall on a beachhead landing exercise, weighed down by his pack and drowning, while no directing staff paused to help; a commando whose sniping score was only 95 percent, and whose whole batch disappeared from training and were never seen again.
They were all things that made his stomach sink. And each time it did, it never quite regained the same level as before.
“Are you all right?” Etain asked. “Is it your leg?”
“My leg’s fine now, thank you,” he said.
Darman wanted his trust back, and soon.
They resumed their path along the dirt track that was gradually liquefying into mud, the rain at their backs. By the time they got to the next farm the rain seemed to have set in for the day. Darman thought of his squad making their way through sodden countryside, perfectly dry in their sealed suits, and he smiled. At least this made it harder for anyone to track them.
A woman with a pinched expression like a gdan stared at them from the front step of the farmhouse. It was a grander building than the last one: not by much, but the walls were stone and there was a lean-to shelter along one side. Etain walked up to her. Darman waited, looking, aware of an outdoor refresher to the right that might contain a threat, keeping half an eye on a group of youngsters tinkering with a large machine on rollers.
They all looked so different. Everyone was so different.
After some conversation, Etain beckoned him and indicated the lean-to. So far, so good. Darman still didn’t plan on relinquishing his ordnance. He reached into the barq for his helmet and detached the comlink, just in case Niner tried to contact him.
“Are you coming?” Etain asked.
“Just a moment.” Darman took out a string of AP micro-mines and trailed them around the front of the house as far as the cable would stretch. He set them to run off a remote signal and tucked the transmitter section of the detonator in his belt. Etain watched him with an unspoken question, perfectly clear from her expression. “In case anyone gets any ideas,” Darman said.