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.
It was a case of adding P for plenty, just to be sure. Niner liked to be sure.
“How much time are we going to spend looking for him?” Atin asked. “They know they’ve got company now. It wasn’t exactly a silent insert.”
“SOPs,” Niner said. Standard operating procedures: that was how things should be done; how commandos expected them to be done. “We get to each RV point for the time we agreed upon, and if he doesn’t show we’ll go to the position of the blast and see what’s left. Then we’ll decide if we’re going to consider him MIA or not.”
“You’d want us to search if it was you missing,” Fi said to Atin. “He can’t call in. Not at this range. Too risky.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to compromise the mission for me,” Atin said, distinctly acid.
“He’s alone, for fierfek’s sake. Alone.”
“Just shut it, will you?” Niner said. The good thing about ultra-short-range comlinks was that you could stand around and have a blazing argument inside those helmets, and nobody outside could hear you. “Finding him isn’t only the right thing to do, it’s the sensible thing to do. Locate him and we find his gear. Okay?”
“Yes Sarge,” Fi said.
“Got it,” Atin said. “But there has to be a point where we consider him dead.”
“Without a body, that’ll be when Geonosis freezes over,” Niner said, still angry and not knowing why. “Until then, we’re going to sweat our guts out to find him, provided it doesn’t blow the mission. Now let’s see if we can sling this gear between some poles or something. We’ll never keep this pace up for tens of kilometers unless we find a better way of transporting it.”
Niner set his helmet comlink to receive long-range anyway. There was no harm in listening. If Darman was out there, Niner wasn’t planning on abandoning him.
The clearing hadn’t been there yesterday.
Etain picked her way through flattened kuvara saplings and into a circle of blackened stubble, following Birhan’s steps. The air smelled of smoke and roasted barq.
He was swearing fluently. She didn’t know much Qiiluran, but she knew a curse when she heard one.
“This is your lot again,” Birhan said. He surveyed the field, hands to his brow to block out the sun breaking over the horizon. Now that it was daylight, they could see the extent of the damage from last night’s explosion. “What am I going to do? What’s going to happen to our contract?”
It wasn’t phrased like a question. The Neimoidians weren’t known to be sympathetic about the host of natural disasters constantly threatening the farming communities’ precarious existence. But this was no natural disaster.
The blast area spanned around five hundred meters, and the crater at the center was twelve, maybe fifteen meters wide. Etain didn’t know how deep it was, but a Trandoshan and an Ubese were standing at the edge of it, peering down, blasters in hand, looking as if they were searching in the soil. They didn’t take the slightest notice of her or Birhan. She must have looked suitably starved and dowdy, rough enough to pass for a farm girl.
It was probably too late to convince them the crater was caused by a meteor fragment. But at this point Etain didn’t know any more than they did.
“Why do you think it’s my lot?” she asked.
“Obvious,” Birhan said sourly. “I seen loads of speeders and freighters and sprayers come down hard. They don’t leave craters. They falls apart and burns, yes, but they don’t blow up half the countryside. This is off-planet. It’s soldiers .” He kicked around some of the charred and blackened stalks. “Can’t you have your fight on someone else’s planet? Don’t you think I got enough problems?”
She wondered for a moment if he was considering turning her in to Hokan’s men for a few credits to make up for the loss of the precious barq. She was already an extra mouth to feed at a time when money he was counting on had just gone up in a fireball with much of his crop. It was time to find somewhere else to hide, and some other plan for getting that information off Qiilura.
Etain was still considering the scorched land when the Ubese and the Trandoshan jerked upright and turned to jog away toward the dirt track beside the field. The Ubese had one hand pressed to the side of his helmet as if he was listening to something: a comlink, probably. Whatever the summons had been, it had been urgent enough to get them running. It also confirmed that this wasn’t just a Narsh sprayer making an all-too-frequent crash landing.
Etain waited a moment longer, then walked forward to peer into the pit to see what had so engrossed them.
It had been a monstrous blast. The sides of the blackened crater were blown almost smooth, and there was debris everywhere. It was an enormous blast area for a small craft.
She left Birhan and walked around inspecting the ground as Hokan’s men had done, not sure what she was seeking. She was almost at the kuvara orchard before she saw it.
The early sunlight caught a scraped metal edge of something embedded in the ground, rammed deep by the explosion. Etain crouched down, as casually as she could, and worked the soil loose from it with her fingers. It took her a few minutes to expose enough to understand the shape, and a few more to work out why the scorched colors were so familiar. It was distorted, the metal frozen in a moment of being torn apart by enormous force, but she was pretty sure she’d seen one intact before.
It was a plate from an R5 astromech droid—a plate with Republic markings.
They’re coming.
Whoever they were, she hoped they’d made it alive.
Darman knew it was risky moving around by day, and the fact that his right leg seemed to scream every time he put his weight on it didn’t help matters.
He’d spent two painful hours scooping out a shallow depression in a thicket about a hundred meters from what passed for a road. Roots and stones had slowed him down. So had the pounding he’d taken hitting the canopies of trees during his landing. But he’d dug in now, and he lay under a lattice of branches and leaves on his belly, watching the road, sometimes through his rifle sight, sometimes with the electrobinocular panel that flipped down in his visor.
At least the little animals that had swarmed over him in the night had disappeared. He’d given up trying to fend them off. They had explored his armor for a while and then moved on to watch him from distance. Now that it was daylight, there were no more glittering eyes staring out from the undergrowth.