Red Zero. An emergency command for all vessels to respond to a disaster of some kind, something very serious indeed. Even extracting the Forty-first hadn't been a Red Zero signal.
“I'd always give a Red Zero top priority, too. Good call, Gett.”
“Thought you might.” He watched her drain the cup and held out his hand to take it. “Especially because this one's from Omega Squad. They're in very deep dwang, General.”
Darman, she thought. The Force always made sure she got the most important intel after all. Dar
4
DELTA SQUAD TO FLEET OPS. RESPONDING TO RED ZERO. POSITION: CHAYKIN SECTOR, ETA: 1 STANDARD HOUR 40. CAN ASSIST: MEDICAL AND OXYGEN. PLEASE NOTE: DEPLOYING IN REQUISITIONED NEIMOIDIAN VESSEL. NO DEFENSIVE CAPACITY. REPEAT: NEGATIVE ARMAMENT. STRONGLY ADVISE ANY GAR VESSELS TO PING TRANSPONDER BEFORE OPENING FIRE. BE AWARE THAT SEPARATIST TRAFFIC IN SECTOR HAS INCREASED IN LAST 20 MINUTES IN RESPONSE TO FLEET MOVEMENTS. PREP FOR UNWANTED COMPANY.
–Signal received at Fleet Ops. Passed to MILINT N-11 Captain Ordo and acknowledged. Vessels responding now: Fearless, Majestic, and impounded enemy shuttle. Advised to assume extraction may be opposed.
367 days after Geonosis
It was cold and pitch-black in the cockpit, but it certainly beat being dead.
Fi kept his suit temperature at the bare minimum to conserve power. He flicked on his spot-lamp briefly and checked the trussed and shivering suspects who were lying against the deck: a human, and—disturbingly—two Nikto. Fi had only seen Nikto in obscure databases devoted to identifying the best part of their anatomy to aim at to stop them dead. They were tough. Intel said they could defeat Jedi. They were even rumored to have a weapon that could deflect and destroy a lightsaber blade. Maybe Jedi needed to tool up with PEP lasers, then.
And all the prisoners had tested positive for explosives residue when Darman had run his sensor over them. With the intel and the heavily encrypted data on their 'pads, the three looked like being dead to rights, as Skirata would say. But it was a long way from being satisfied that they'd snatched the right people to actually extracting useful information from them.
Fi took his thermal plastifoil survival blanket from his backpack and folded it carefully over the human, who seemed to be more affected by cold than the Nikto. Losing a suspect to hypothermia after going to all this trouble to grab them wasn't an option. Wrapping a body wasn't an easy maneuver in zero-g, but at least he'd stopped feeling sick.
The ultralight plastifoil kept drilling away every time the man shuddered. Fi sighed and took out his universal solution to any problem, a roll of thick adhesive tape, and hooked his leg around a handrail to stop himself floating while he tore off lengths. He taped the blanket to the suspect. Then he secured the trussed suspects to the deck with more of the tape. It was amazing how handy tape could be.
“And don't ask me to tuck you in and read you a story.” The human just stared balefully at him. He had a lovely black eye now from resisting Darman a little too vigorously. “They never have happy endings.”
The man's ID said Farr Orjul but nobody took that too seriously. He was about thirty: fine blond hair, sharp features, very pale blue eyes. The Nikto claimed to be M'truli and Gysk, or at least their mining licenses did, because none of the suspects was talking.
SOPs—standard operating procedures—said they had to stop prisoners from talking to each other before processing. But SOPs hadn't allowed for the little complication of running out of air before an interrogator could be found.
Niner turned his head slightly to Orjul. “You can talk to us. Or you can wait until Sergeant Vau sits you down with a nice cup of caf and asks you to tell him your life story. He's a good listener. And you'll really want to talk to him.”
There was no response. Apart from the brief curses and grunts of pain they'd emitted when Omega stormed the cockpit and subdued them—Fi loved military understatement– none of the suspects had said a single word, not even name, rank, or serial number. And, of course, the two who were dry-frozen somewhere in the vacuum of space weren't going to provide many answers of their own free will, either.
“Look, shall I try to get some information out of these gentlemen just in case the taxi doesn't get here before our air runs out?” Fi asked.
“We're not trained to interrogate prisoners,” said Niner.
Fi maneuvered himself above the human. He didn't know what Nikto felt or feared, and suspected that it wasn't much, but he knew plenty about his own species' vulnerabilities. “I could improvise.”
“No, you'll bounce off the bulkheads, expend too much oxygen, and then we'll have to slot them to preserve the supply for us. It can wait. Vau isn't going anywhere, and neither are they.”
Niner was reclining in the pilot's chair, restraining belt buckled and staring straight ahead. The blue-lit T of his visor was reflected in the transparisteel viewscreen, making him look wonderfully droid-like. Fi wasn't sure if Niner was simply saying coldly brutal things to intimidate the prisoners or not. Fi wasn't entirely sure whether he was really joking some of the time.
War was nothing personal. But somehow Fi felt differently about people who didn't carry a rifle and who didn't kill in honest combat. They were an invisible enemy. Fierfek, even droids stood up where you could see them.
He put it out of his mind with a conscious effort, and not only because Ordo had insisted on undamaged prisoners. He knew how to kill, and he knew how to resist pain, but he wasn't sure how to inflict it deliberately.
But he was pretty sure that Vau did. He'd leave the job to him.
Darman had positioned himself against the bulkhead with his legs stretched out. He looked asleep. Arms folded, head lowered, his point-of-view icon in Fi's HUD showed only an image of his belt and lap. Dar could sleep anywhere, anytime. At one point he flinched, as if someone had said something to him, but there was nothing audible on the comlink.
Atin, belted in to the copilot's seat, worked on the assortment of datapads, datasticks, and sheets of flimsi that he'd taken from the suspects—dead and alive—and prodded probes into dataports, doing what he seemed to enjoy best: slicing, hacking, and generally dismantling things. Niner occasionally reached out to grab any of his prizes that floated free.
Fi propelled himself forward with a gentle push against the deck and offered his roll of tape. Atin managed a smile and trapped the wayward components on the sticky side, securing the other end on Niner's left forearm plate.
“Fi, you know I don't mean it, don't you?” Niner said suddenly. “When I get on your back about stuff. I'm just venting steam.”
It took Fi aback. “Sarge, I think the first thing you ever did was to tear me off a strip, and we're still brothers, aren't we? You're just like Sergeant Kal. He never meant any of it, either.”
“Did you see the state of him on the hololink?”
“He looked pretty exhausted.”
“Poor Buir. He never stops worrying.”
Fi paused. It was the first time he'd ever heard Niner use the word buir openly: father. Fi preferred to see everyone burying their fears in wisecracks. This was all too raw.
We could be dead in two hours. Well, we've been there a few times before …
He shrugged, desperately seeking the other part of him that always had the smart answer ready. “I don't know about you, vode, but I'm planning on getting back to base because Obrim still owes me a drink.”