Skirata raised an eyebrow. “Nor are you, General.” He shoved the Wookiee back a few meters, apparently untroubled by the fact that the creature could have used him for a cleaning rag. He rounded on it. “No, just put them on the back seat and drive. Let Vau do the rest.”
The mention of Vau gave Fi a hint of what he couldn't grasp from the Shyriiwook words. So the Wookiee was delivering the prisoners to Walon Vau. It seemed to have volunteered to do something that Skirata preferred to leave to Old Psycho, then. The Wookiee obviously wasn't asking if they wanted to stop for lunch.
“What's happening here?” Etain asked. “What's happening to the prisoners?”
“Civilian matter, General,” Skirata said, and stood back as Niner and Boss jogged past steering a medbay repulsor with what looked like three large rolls of blanket on it. They bundled each into the back of the taxi with a little grunting and cursing, then slammed one hatch closed. “Don't you worry about it.”
“But I am worrying about it.”
The Wookiee barked once and folded itself back into the taxi. The vessel lifted off and swung back over the parapet, dropping below their view into one of the artificial canyons that seemed to reach down into Coruscant's core. Fi fought the urge to peer after it, then lost and walked a few paces to gaze over the edge.
It was a long, long way down. He was thrilled by the sheer scale and variety of it: polished stone, sparkling glass, a blur of vessels in the skylanes, hazy sunlight. Alien, utterly alien.
Skirata blew out a breath and rocked his head slightly as if easing tense neck muscles. “General,” he said. “You and I need to talk. Omega, Delta—a transport will be taking you back to barracks.” He paused to check his chrono. “You just relax until fifteen-hundred hours and then you report to the briefing room at HQ Main Admin Building.”
“Yes, Sarge,” said Niner and Boss, absolutely synchronized.
But Etain wasn't giving up. Fi rather liked that about her, but she could be a pain in the shebs when she persisted. She stepped a little closer to Skirata.
“I don't like being left in the dark, Sergeant.”
“Then this galaxy is going to be a constant source of disappointment to you, General.” For a second Skirata had that edge in his voice that made Fi stiffen. But it softened as soon as it had hit its target. “Things change. You can say no to this, and I'm rather hoping you won't, but if you do, then Omega, Delta, and my Null boys will do it without you.”
Etain lapsed into silence. Skirata could motivate a brick if he put his mind to it. She wanted to stick with the squad and everyone knew it.
She looked at him as if she was listening to other voices. “If Omega can't say no, then neither can I.”
“Good,” said Skirata. He peeled back the collar of his jacket and muttered into a tiny comlink. It looked as if General Jusik still had a taste for supplying unusual kit. “Standing by.”
Fi peered back over the dock platform parapet, gripping the safety rail to lean out a little more and get a better look. It was the kind of view the very wealthy paid a fortune to see from their window, but you could get it for free in the Grand Army, as long as you didn't mind getting your head shot off to qualify for the privilege.
Skirata leaned against the parapet beside him.
“I'd like to fast-rope down there,” Fi said. He'd always enjoyed that in training on Kamino. He preferred endless vistas to cramped spaces, as did many of his brothers. They said it was the legacy of being gestated in glass vats; Ordo claimed he could even remember it. “How long have we got here, Sarge? Can we see some of the city? Please?”
“Yeah, I promised you all a night out, didn't I? How long ago?”
“Eight months.” Fi remembered, all right: straight after the spaceport siege, the promise of a drink from Captain Obrim for a job well done—and then Ordo hauled them straight off for another mission. “I'd love to see it once before I—” He paused. “I'd just like to explore a bit.”
Skirata's brow creased briefly and he put his hand on Fi's back. “Don't talk like that, son. You'll see plenty of this, I promise.”
“Now?” Far below, something that might have been a bird leapt suddenly into the yawning crevasse of buildings and plummeted at high speed with wings folded back until Fi lost sight of it. The platform was at least five thousand meters high. “That'd be a nice change.”
“So you like the new battlefield, then.”
Fi dragged himself away from the apparently limitless view. “So we get a spell in a stone frigate?”
“What?”
“Just something I picked up from the lads on board Fearless.” So he'd taught Sergeant Kal some new slang: that was something. “A shore-based job. Filing flimsi and answering the comlinks. Lots of caf breaks.”
“Try threat resolution. Interdiction.”
“Oh.”
“Welcome to the world of euphemism, Fi. We're going to be fighting in the hardest terrain of all. Right in the middle of billions of civvies. Slotting bad guys on Coruscant.”
“Good,” said Fi. “I hate commuting.”
Arca Company Barracks, SO Brigade HQ, Coruscant
Etain trailed Skirata down the long passage that ran from the main doors of the Arca barrack wing and felt like she was following a gdan.
Omega Squad's description had made her think of him as a kindly old uncle, a veteran soldier with a facade of tough talk who had sweated blood to give a generation of boys the benefit of his wisdom. But what she experienced in the Force was very different, just as his appearance was unlike her mental image of him.
He was a whirlpool of balanced conflict—truly cold black violence shot through with deep red passionate loves and hatreds. It marked him out as a complex man who had built a warrior elite. If she looked at him another way, though, he was very much the dark side—everything she had been taught to shun.
Yes, he reminded her of a gdan, the nasty little carnivores that hunted in packs on Qiilura and would take on any prey; small by comparison with his strapping troops, but ferociously, tenaciously aggressive.
And he wasn't quite the elderly man the squad had first described, either. To twenty-year-old boys, he must have seemed ancient. But he was about sixty standard years—just middle-aged—and obviously fit except for his tendency to drag his left leg.
And he looked armored.
He was only wearing a civilian jacket—polished tan bantha leather with a high black collar—and plain brown pants, but he had that same presence that all the commandos had. He was ready for something. Given that he was a head shorter than his squad, had a pronounced limp, and yet still looked like trouble, Etain decided he must have once been a formidable soldier. She realized he still was.
“In here, ma'am.” He could make ma'am sound like girl somehow; he could do the same with General. But as a Jedi she had no right to feel affronted by lack of deference. She realized that she simply wished he would like her. “Just a little chat and then you can find General Jusik and catch up on events.”
Yes, Skirata gave the orders.
He ushered her into a side room that turned out to be a cabin with a table, a chair, and narrow bed with a half-packed carryall sitting on it. There was a neat pile of clothing, military-grade fabric equipment cases with unidentifiable lumpy items in them, and a set of sand-gold, battle-scarred Mandalorian armor.
The Force told her this was a tidy room filled with the wretched chaos of broken lives, pain, and misery. She wondered if it was entirely his, but she stopped herself from probing further in case he felt it and reacted. He was a dangerously perceptive man. She had no sense at all of any animosity directed at her.
“That's a fine helmet,” she said. It had detailed crimson and gold sigils, and the alloy section that formed the eyepiece T of the visor was jet black. There were telltale scrapes and gouges as if some huge creature had clawed at it. “Does Fi still have Hokan's armor?”