They were supremely fit warriors displaying their discipline and reflexes: any flesh-and-blood enemy would have been adequately warned of the power of the forces that awaited them.
But droids didn't have the sense to be scared. That was a pity, really.
Etain winced. The blows looked real. They were putting all their weight behind every one.
Astonishingly, none of the initiates had yet timed the movements badly enough to receive an accidental blow in the face. Fi and Scorch demonstrated another sequence. Armor clashed. Sev abandoned his feigned disinterest, took off his helmet and joined in. Then Darman appeared and they formed a line of four in the front.
It was strange to watch Darman actually enjoying himself, oblivious to his surroundings: she had no idea that he had' such a powerful voice or that he could—for want of a better word—dance.
“Jusik always talks about this,” said Etain.
“I've seen a few squads do it,” Gett said. “It came via Skirata, I hear.”
“Yes.” Etain was wondering how she would ever measure up to that man. Halfway would have been enough. “He taught all the commandos to live up to their Mandalorian heritage. You know—customs, language, ideals.” She was mesmerized by the unconscious precision of men who were all exactly the same height. “It's very weird. It's like they have a compulsion to do it.”
“Yes, we do,” Gett said. “It's very stirring.”
“I'm sorry. That was rude of me.”
“No problem, General. It certainly wasn't part of our trooper training on Kamino. It gets passed on from man to man now.” He looked restless. She knew what he was thinking. “General—”
“Give me the recorder,” she said, and smiled. “Go ahead.”
Gett touched his glove to his brow and shot off down the ladder to the deck, sliding the last three meters on the handrails. It was delightful to see the mix of armor—yellow-striped commanders and pilots, plain white troopers, and the motley mix of commando colors—drawn together in one ancient Mandalorian ritual, every face the same.
Etain felt adrift, excluded.
She had never truly felt this degree of bond with her Jedi clan. The connection in the Force was there, yes, but … no, the real strength here was attachment, passion, identity, meaning.
She thought of Master Fulier, the man who insisted she have a second chance as a Padawan and not be consigned to build refugee camps because she lacked control. The man who was also passionate and prone to taking on causes: the Jedi who lost his life because he couldn't stay out of a fight when Ghez Hokan's militia roughed up the locals on Qiilura.
Etain thought that wasn't such a bad sort of Jedi to be. Not textbook, but centered on fair play and justice. The clone soldiers were worth that, too.
She was suddenly aware of Darman looking up at her, grinning, and if it hadn't been for his armor and surroundings he could have been any young man showing off his prowess to a woman. She smiled back.
She still envied him his focus and discipline, especially as he had somehow managed not to lose it after being exposed to a galaxy that didn't quite resemble the ideal he had probably been taught about on Kamino.
But Kal Skirata had largely been responsible for his training. She didn't know Skirata yet, but one thing she was certain of was that he was—just like a Jedi—a pragmatic man who dealt in reality.
The Dha Werda went on for verse after repeated verse. Then the klaxon sounded and the pipe came over the address system.
“Port duties men close up. Damage and fire control parties to stations. Prepare to dock.”
Commander Gett broke out of the ranks and came bounding back up the ladder, wiping sweat from his face with a neatly folded piece of cloth.
“General, will you come to the bridge to see the ship alongside?”
“I won't be much help, but I'd like that, yes.”
It was as if she were leaving a ship after a long association, a retiring captain. She was only a temporary officer, but still Gett treated her as if she actually had some importance to the crew, and she found that touching. She stood at the command console and watched as the docking grapnels and platforms slipped past the viewscreen and the crew maneuvered Fearless on instruments. Gett had the con. “Stop reactor.”
“Stop reactor, Commander … reactor stopped.”
Fearless's secondary propulsion shivered into silence. The vessel slipped gradually into dock on the power of tugs bringing her alongside port-side-to, as Etain had now learned to call it. She walked slowly across the bridge to watch the dockside team getting a brow in place to disembark those members of the crew being transferred and to allow maintenance and replenishment teams to board.
There was the slightest of jarring sensations as the ship came to rest against huge dock fenders. Fearless was back safely in her home port—for the time being.
Etain held out her hand to Gett. “Gloves off, my friend.”
He shrugged, smiling, and slipped off the entire gauntlet. They shook hands as equals. Then she pressed a key on the console, opening the public address system that reached every cabin and flat and hangar and mess deck in the huge warship.
“Gentlemen,” she said. “It's been an honor.”
6
In five millennia, the Mandalorians fought with and against a thousand armies on a thousand worlds. They learned to speak as many languages and absorbed weapons technology and tactics from every war: And yet, despite the overwhelming influence of alien cultures, and the absence of a true homeworld and even species, their own language not only survived but changed little, their way of life and their philosophy remained untouched, and their ideals andsense of family of identity, of nation, were only strengthened. Armor does not make a Mandalorian. The armor is simply a manifestation of an impenetrable, unassailable heart.
–Mandalorians: Identity and Language, published by the Galactic Institute of Anthropology
RAS Fearless, upper dock, Fleet Support Depot, Coruscant, 370 days after Geonosis
The ramp went down, and for once the scene that greeted Fi wasn't hostile droid-infested territory and red blasterfire.
But Coruscant—impossibly high towers and deep canyons of skylanes—was every bit as alien as Geonosis. Fi had seen it once before, all too briefly, on the way to break a siege at the spaceport. It had been an exotic, exciting lightscape at night, but in daylight it was breathtaking in a totally different way.
“Can we have a run ashore?”
Niner stood with his hands clasped behind him, with his Deece slung across his back. “Not my call. I'm not the sergeant now.”
Boss and the rest of Delta had formed up behind Omega in a neat line, presenting a more orderly rank. They were on the same comlink. Niner said it was ungrateful to block them out, seeing as they'd ridden to the rescue. But Omega would never hear the end of it, Fi was sure of that.
The Forty-first Elite were disembarked first.
Scorch leaned a little closer to Fi. He was right behind him. The nice thing about Katarn helmet comlinks was that you could switch between circuits and have totally private exchanges without any external sign that you were talking—or even having a stand-up fight, come to that. “So you want a run ashore?”
“What's that?” Sev said.
Fi enjoyed Skirata's wide-ranging and often bizarre language. No other squads talked quite like Sergeant Kal's. “A night out on the town. Dinner at a fine restaurant, perhaps take in a Mon Cal ballet …”