“Next time, let me jump, will you?” she hissed. “I’m not completely helpless.”
“Sorry.” He checked his grenades. “I’m going to run short of ammo soon. I’m going to have to sacrifice some demolition ordnance.”
“Tell me what you’re planning.”
“Bringing down the slope. With them on it.” He paid out the line of micromines and scrambled a few meters back to string them horizontally between the trees. “Can you dig out some of the bore-bangs from that pack, please? Four should do it.”
“What are they?”
“The long red sticks. Custom ordnance.”
He heard her gasping her way up the slope behind him. When he turned his head she was gripping a bush with one hand, and holding out tubes of explosive in the other. Her fingers were covered in blood. He felt suddenly guilty, but he’d have to worry about that later.
“Thanks, ma’am,” he said automatically. He balanced precariously, feeling the strain in his calves, and scrambled from bush to bush. He held each bore-bang perpendicular to the slope and twisted the end cap; the cylinder whirred and burrowed deep into the ground. He spaced them at five-meter intervals.
The chinking noise of droids on the move was getting closer, carrying on the still, damp air.
“Run!” Darman hissed.
Adrenaline was a wonderful thing to see in action. Etain grabbed her pack and bolted along the gully. Darman followed. Fifty meters—a hundred—two hundred. He paused to look back and saw one thin metal faceplate peer over the edge.
“Down!” he yelled, and squeezed the detonator in his palm.
A chunk of Qiilura blew apart at approximately eight thousand meters a second. Darman heard it and regretted not seeing it, but his head was shielded by his crossed arms and he was facedown in the dirt. It was pure instinct. He should have told Etain to cover her ears, although it wouldn’t have helped her much. He should have made her run a lot sooner. He should have done a lot of things, like ignoring Jinart, and instead stayed on the mission.
He hadn’t. He’d deal with it.
The noise of the blast overloaded his helmet for a few moments; there was a crackling silence. Then sound rushed back in again and he could feel clods of soil plopping against his back like heavy rain. When he got to his knees and turned around, there was a brand-new landscape to be seen. Trees jutted out from a sharp cliff of packed mud at bizarre angles. Some had intact branches, and others were snapped off and splintered. A single metallic leg protruded from the debris. Dirt was crumbling away from the face of the cliff like wet permacrete, and one tree was sliding slowly downward.
Darman looked around for Etain. She was a few meters ahead, kneeling back on her heels with her hand to one ear. When he drew closer he could see a thin trickle of blood running down the side of her face.
“Okay?” he asked.
Etain stared at his mouth. “I can’t hear you,” she said. She nursed her left ear, face contorted with pain.
“You’ve blown an eardrum. Take it easy.” Stupid: she couldn’t hear, and she couldn’t see his lips with his helmet on. It was reflex reassurance. He was about to look for his bacta spray when she looked past him and pointed frantically. He turned. A droid was peering over the edge of the crater. It didn’t appear to have seen them.
Darman didn’t know how many there might be. He debated whether to deploy a remote, then wondered what he’d do if it showed him a hundred more tinnies coming. He wasn’t sure where else to run. He estimated that he could hold them off for about an hour, and then they’d be out of everything except his vibroblade and Etain’s lightsaber.
Then he heard a shout.
“Droids, report!”
Darman flattened himself into the side of the slope beside Etain. He could hear the voices, even if she couldn’t. She stared up at the cliff and squeezed her eyes shut. For a moment Darman thought it was plain terror, and he wouldn’t have blamed her. He’d blown away half a hillside and still hadn’t stopped the droids. He was starting to feel a gnawing emptiness in his gut as well.
He concentrated on the voices, trying to guess numbers. Two humans, two men.
“… they’ve booby-trapped…”
“… can you see anything?”
“… there’s nothing else down there.”
Darman held his breath.
“No, they’re gone. Must have speeders.”
“Droids, form up and return …”
The metal face pulled back and the clinking gait faded on the air, along with the whir of a speeder engine. Then there was silence, broken only by the occasional creak of a splintered tree being pulled slowly apart on its journey down the shattered slope.
Darman glanced at Etain. Her eyes were still shut, and she was breathing hard.
“I didn’t think I could do that,” she said.
“Do what?” She stared at him. He took off his helmet so she could see his mouth. “Do—what?” Darman mouthed, exaggerating the syllables. Her gaze fixed on his lips.
“Influence them. Both of them.”
“Was that some sort of Jedi thought trick?”
She looked baffled. She obviously wasn’t used to lip-reading. “It’s sort of a Jedi thought trick,” she said.
Darman stifled an urge to laugh. It wasn’t funny at all.
She’d achieved something he found almost magical. At that point in the crisis, it was the best military option, better than letting loose with all the ordnance at his disposal, and something even Kal Skirata couldn’t do.
They were alive. They could move on.
“Nice job, commander,” he said. “Very nicely done.” He touched his glove to his forehead and grinned. “Let’s get ourselves sorted, eh?”
Darman took out his medpac and removed two sharps of painkiller and the bacta spray. He fixed his own shoulder first, jabbing the needle hard into the blue vein in the crook of his left elbow so that the drug dispersed faster. But it still made his eyes water when he sprayed the blaster burn.
Etain watched with grim resignation and swallowed visibly.
“Come on, Etain,” Darman said. “Hold still.”
He aimed the spray like a pistol into her left ear.
Darman had no idea that Jedi could curse fluently in Huttese, but he was learning more about them every minute. A lot more.
The excavation droid rattled down the road, managing to find every pothole and rut between Imbraani and the screening plant. Niner bounced each time, too. Buried in the scoop under a layer of loose rubble, with enough explosives to level everything within half a kilometer, he was … anxious.
The detonators were disabled. He kept checking that.
Now that night had fallen and the rain stopped, he could ease himself into a position where he could see ahead. Blue navigation lights picked out the droid’s front fender, and an amber hazard light whirled on its canopy, illuminating the trees on either side of the track. It was a lumbering thing that wouldn’t get out of anyone’s way. Behind it, a convoy of identical droids followed. They were an intimidating procession.
Even the column of tinnies marching toward Niner moved to one side of the road.
He picked them out in his night-vision visor, although the sound alone identified them. Clink-rasp-clink-rasp. It was the knee joints. Nothing but battle droids marched that regularly, not even clone troopers. There were no voices, not even the occasional command to form single file, or shut it back there. It was all grim mechanical purpose.
Niner closed his fingers around the grips of the DC-17. He really didn’t want to engage them. It was going to be hard enough to direct the excavator to the target and get away in one piece without pausing for skirmishes along the route. Walk on, will you? Just walk on. He didn’t want to test the manufacturer’s assurance that a few blaster bolts wouldn’t set off the charges. He was sprawled on top of them. Proximity made you skeptical.