“Yeah. Right.”
“Don't, Fi,” Niner said. “You're just being cruel to the Weequay team here.”
“Okay, ale and warra nuts. No ballet.”
“And maybe a little shopping with your spook squad buddy?” Scorch said. “New kama, maybe?”
Ah, news did travel, then. “Don't let Ordo hear you say that,” Fi said. “He'll rip your leg off and hit you with the soggy end.”
“Yeah? ARCs are all mouth and kamas.”
“Ooh, hard man, eh?”
“I've seen Twi'lek dancing girls tougher than you,” said Scorch. “How many times are we going to have to save your shebs, then?”
“Probably as many times as we have to clean up your osik,” said Niner. “Can't you two talk about blowing stuff up and play nicely?”
“Where's the general?” Fi said.
Darman interrupted. “Saying good-bye to Gett.” He seemed to be taking a keen interest in Etain's whereabouts. “Can you see Sergeant Kal yet? She said he was meeting us.”
“So … you've been ordered around by a geriatric and a child, have you?”
Darman's voice frosted over. “Scorch, do you like medcenter food?”
“Touchy, touchy …”
There was a faint click on the helmet comlink.
“Delta! This is the geriatric. Get down and give me fifty, now!”
“Fierfek,” Sev sighed.
Omega parted ranks to give Delta the room to perform fifty press-ups in full armor, with backpacks. Fi watched appreciatively. He didn't care for Sev at all.
But he was also scanning the landing platform for Skirata, desperate to see his real sergeant again: when Skirata was around, Niner ceased to play the senior NCO. Generals tended not to get much of a look in, either. Skirata was his own command chain.
“That was forty, not fifty,” Skirata said from somewhere behind them. “I hate innumeracy almost as much as I hate cracks about my personal state of disrepair.”
Skirata just had a knack for sliding around unnoticed. There had been times when Fi had wondered if he was a Force-user, because only Jedi were supposed to be able to pull those kinds of stunts. But Kal'buir was adamant that he was simply good at his job, because he'd been doing it since he was seven years old.
That made him a late starter—by clone standards.
He appeared suddenly from between a knot of Forty-first men and ambled over to Omega, not limping quite as badly as usual and looking rather dapper in a smart leather jacket. In rough working clothes, he could disappear, but the jacket changed him utterly. Yet there was always something about the man that inspired relief and confidence. Fi felt instantly ready for anything, just as he had when Skirata had been the highest authority in his limited world on Kamino.
Skirata paused for a moment in front of him. He didn't seem worried whether Delta had cranked out the extra ten press-ups or not. He just clutched Fi's arm, and hugged Darman, and slapped Niner across the shoulders, and grabbed Atin's hand. He never seemed to have the slightest trouble now in showing how much he cared about them. Over the years he'd changed from shielding his emotions behind a veneer of good-natured abuse to abandoning the pretense altogether.
Nobody had ever been fooled by it anyway.
“Don't scare me like that again, ad'ike.” He turned to Delta, easing themselves up from the floor. “And you bunch of di'kute, too. I'd better keep a tighter rein on you.” He watched the last of the Forty-first men disappearing into transfer vessels, presumably for return to barracks, and something appeared to amuse him. “Scorch, if you're not a good boy then I'm going to make you wear a kama.”
“Sorry, Sergeant. Is it true that Sergeant Vau's back?”
“He's back, but he's not a sergeant. I'm your sergeant now, 'Scorch.”
“And General Jusik?”
“He's not your sergeant, either.” Skirata looked past Scorch and seemed suddenly startled. Fi turned and saw what he was staring at: Etain Tur-Mukan walked across the huge landing platform hauling the LJ-50 as if it were putting up a fight. “That has to be General Tur-Mukan, yes?”
“That's her,” Darman said. “She's very keen to meet you.”
Fi was distracted by a blip of movement in his HUD. A scruffy civilian air taxi had risen over the parapet of the landing platform. And it shouldn't have been able to do that.
His unconscious brain said danger and reacted a split second before his ingrained training reminded him that unidentified civvie vessels shouldn't penetrate the Fleet base cordon. He was on one knee with his Deece charged and aimed before he even noticed from his HUD that Omega and Delta had both formed up into a single front contact formation.
The taxi stopped dead in midair.
“Check!” Skirata stepped in front of them. Fi froze but Delta aimed around the sergeant. “Stand down!” One fist held up clenched to hold off the squads, Skirata signaled vigorously to the taxi with his other hand held flat, slapping down on the air. Drop.
The taxi settled slowly on the platform.
Omega stopped dead at the check command; Delta took a second longer. Maybe it hadn't been drilled into them as it had Skirata's batch. But all of them still had their rifles trained. Fi's heart pounded. They were all wound tight and still alert to any threat, alert enough to let hard-trained reactions take over. It was what kept you alive. You could never switch it off. Your muscles learned to do things and then stopped asking your brain's permission.
“I'm sorry, lads.” Skirata spun around to face them. “Udesii, udesii … relax. It's ours.”
“I'm glad you pointed that out, Sarge,” Niner muttered. He lowered his Deece. Fi followed his lead, and glanced behind him.
Etain was still lying prone with her concussion rifle aimed in the right direction, no easy task with a weapon that size, but her arc of fire left something to be desired. He hoped that her Jedi sense of right place and right time would have stopped her from blowing them all to pieces if she had opened fire.
Fi gestured to her to stand down, and then gave up and just shook his head at her. No. She gestured back, palm up, and jumped to her feet. He wondered if anyone had thought to teach her basic hand signals.
Skirata was still apologizing. “I should have warned you I had transport coming. That was sloppy of me.” The taxi's hatch opened and a Wookiee—not a big one, just over a couple of meters tall—unfolded itself from the taxi and clambered out, throwing its head back and yawling in complaint.
“Okay, my fault,” Skirata said. He held both hands up in admission to the mountain of glossy brown fur. “They're just jumpy, that's all. We'll load now.”
“All of us, in that?” Niner asked. It wasn't a very big taxi. “With the Wookiee, too?”
“No, the prisoners. Just load 'em in.”
“Where are they going?”
“That's all you need to know right now.”
Niner paused, then shrugged and beckoned Boss, Fixer, and Atin to follow him back on board Fearless.
Etain had moved forward by now and walked up to Skirata, rifle slung across her back; she was so small that she looked more like a bolt-on accessory to the weapon. Darman reacted and stepped in to get Skirata's attention. It wasn't that he needed to, of course. Skirata was watching Etain, and he seemed to have one eye on Fearless's ramp, and he was placating the clearly irritated Wookiee, somehow juggling situations as skillfully as he had ever done.
“General,” he said. He paused to nod formally to Etain, which—given Skirata's general contempt for anyone not in armor—seemed quite an encouraging start, Fi decided. “We've got a nice new job, and that includes you.”
“Sergeant,” she said, and bowed her head. “You're not what I expected.”