Etain felt irrelevant. The clones didn't need her. They were confident of their own abilities, very centered in whatever identity had evolved despite the Kaminoan belief that they were predictable and standardized units, and they were bonded irrevocably with each other.
She could hear the quiet conversations. There was the occasional word of Mando'a, which few ordinary troopers had ever been taught, but had somehow flowed through their ranks from sources like Skirata and Vau. They clung to it. Knowing what she knew about Mandalorians, it made perfect sense.
It was the only rationale that could make sense when you were fighting for a cause in which you had absolutely no stake. It was the self-respect of a mercenary; internal, unassailable, and based on skill and comradeship.
But mercenaries got paid, and eventually went home, wherever that might be.
One trooper was waiting patiently for the medic. He had a triage flash stuck on his shoulder plate: the number “5,” walking wounded. There was blood streaked across his armor from a shrapnel wound to his head, and he was holding his helmet in his lap, trying to clean it with a scrap of rag. Etain squatted down and patted his arm.
“General?” he said.
She had so ceased to notice their appearance that it took her a few seconds to see Darman's face in his. They were identical, of course, except for the thousand and one little details that made them all utterly unique.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes ma'am.”
“What's your name, and not your number, okay?”
“Nye.”
“Well, Nye, here you go.” She handed him her water bottle. Apart from two lightsabers—her own and her dead Master's—her concussion rifle, and her comlink, it was the only item she was carrying. “I have nothing else I can give you. I can't pay you, I can't promote you, I can't give you a few days' R and R, and I can't even decorate you for valor. I'm truly sorry that I can't. And I'm sorry that you're being used like this and I wish I could put an end to it and change your lives for the better. But I can't. All I can do is ask your forgiveness.”
Nye seemed stunned. He looked at the bottle and then took a long swig from it, his expression suddenly one of blissful relief. “It's … okay, General. Thank you.”
She was suddenly aware that the hangar deck had fallen completely silent—no mean feat given the vast space and the numbers of men packed in it—and everyone was listening.
The unexpected audience actually made her face burn, and then a little ripple of applause went through the ranks. She wasn't sure if that meant they agreed, or that they were just being supportive of an officer who—now that she had some embarrassing clarity of mind—looked like a walking nightmare and was clearly having trouble dealing with the aftermath of battle.
“Caf and a change of clothes, General,” Gett said, looming over her from nowhere. “You'll feel a lot better after a few hours' sleep.”
Gett was a gracious commander and a perfectly competent naval officer. He ran the ship. He was, to all intents and purposes, the commanding officer. She wasn't. And had he been born to a family on Coruscant or Corellia or Alderaan, he would have had a glittering career. But he'd been hatched in a tank on Kamino, and so his artificially shortened life would be very different because of that.
When she got back, she would seek out Kal Skirata and beg him to help her make sense of it all. She would find Omega Squad and tell them face-to-face how much she cared about them before it was too late. She would tell Darman that most of all. She never stopped thinking of him.
“You meant what you said, General,” Gett said, steering her back toward her cabin.
“Oh yes. I did.”
“I'm glad. However powerless you feel, solidarity means a great deal to us.”
She suddenly wanted to see Gett go home to a house full of family and friends, and wondered if she wanted it for him or for herself.
“I was once taught to see while blindfolded,” she said. “It was a far more important lesson than I ever imagined. At the time I thought it was just a way of teaching me to strike with my lightsaber using the Force alone. Now I know what purpose the Force had. I look beyond faces.”
“But you won't change anything by blaming yourself.”
“No. You're right. But I won't change anything by pretending I have no responsibility, either.”
At that point she knew as surely as she had ever known anything that the Force had lifted her from one existence, turned her around, and dropped her on another path. She could change things. She wouldn't change them immediately, and she couldn't change them for any of the men here, but she would somehow change the future for men like this.
“If it's any comfort, General, I'm not sure what we'd do if we weren't doing this,” Gett said. “And you do get to hear an awful lot of good jokes.”
He touched his fingers to his brow and left her at her cabin.
They actually found things to laugh about even surrounded by pain and death. Gett had that understated, inventive, and irreverent humor, that seemed common to anyone in uniform: if you couldn't take a joke, apparently, you shouldn't have joined. She'd heard Omega quote that Skirata line more than once. You had to be able to laugh or else the tears would ambush you.
Etain stared at the dried blood on her robes and, while the memory appalled her, she couldn't bring herself to obliterate it by rinsing it away. She shoved the garment under the mattress of her bunk, shut her eyes, and then didn't even recall lying down.
She woke with a start.
She woke, and then the ship changed course and picked up speed: she felt it. That hadn't woken her. Some disturbance in the Force had.
Darman.
She could feel the very slight vibration that told her Fearless's drives were straining flat out.
She sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bunk, rubbing a painful cramp from her calves. A clean set of robes was hanging on a peg behind the hatch door of her cabin. She had no idea where the crew had acquired them, but she washed her face in the basin, and looked up at last at the small mirror to see the scratched, ashen, rapidly aging face of a stranger.
But at least she could meet her own eyes now.
She pulled on the clean robes and was pocketing both her own lightsaber and Master Kast Fulier's—which she always carried out of sheer sentimentality and pragmatic caution—when there was the sound of boots padding down the passage outside. Someone rapped on the hatch. She eased it open using the Force. It was reassuring to know she wasn't too beaten to do that.
“General?” Gett said. He handed her a mug of caf, remarkably relaxed for a man whose ship was clearly driven by new urgency. “Sorry to disturb you so soon.”
“That's very kind of you, Commander.” She took the caf and saw her hands shaking. “I felt something. What's wrong?”
“I took a liberty, General. I hope you won't be offended, but I overrode your orders.”
She couldn't imagine that ever bothering her. She'd once ordered Darman to do that if he ever felt she was screwing up. The clones knew their trade far better than she ever would.
“Gett, you know I trust you implicitly?”
He had a disarming grin, not unlike Fi, but with less of a sense of desperately trying to jolly everyone along. “I've diverted the ship to the Tynna sector. We received a Red Zero call and I thought you'd really want to respond. An extra day or so isn't going to make any difference to the survival rate of casualties now.”