[Republic Commando] - 02(107)
“Well, you’re just Vau’s perfect little soldier boys, then, aren’t you? We screw up. And then we get up and go on.”
“I have to complete this mission?’
“Not if you’re a liability you don’t. Look, injuries happen. Stay at base and monitor the comlinks.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Really?” Fi racked his brains for first-aid training.
“Funny, I thought we did the same job. Look, get in here and let me have a look.”
They slipped into the sheltered lobby of an office block and hid behind a pillar. Fi detached Sev’s bodysuit sleeve from the shoulder seam and took a look in the dim security lights.
The line of the shoulder looked unnaturally square where the ball of the humerus had shifted out of the socket and was pushing the deltoid muscle up and out of shape. This was going to hurt.
“Okay, on the count of four:’ Fi said. He took Sev’s wrist in his right hand, stretching out the arm, and braced his left hand against the man’s chest. Then he paused and looked him in the eye in his most reassuring I-know-what-I’m-doing way. “See, when you get a dislocation like this, you have to do what they call reducing it by-four’
Sev yelped. The joint made a wet shhhlick sound as it slipped back into the socket.
“Sorry, ner vod.” Fi folded Sev’s arm back against his chest and held it there while he struggled to get the sleeve section reattached. He could almost feel the torn ligaments and muscle fibers screaming. Sev’s face was white, his lips compressed. “Nothing worse than bracing for it, though.”
“For a moron, you’re not a bad medic!”
“Kal said that if we could take a body apart, we ought to learn a bit more about putting it back together again if we needed to.”
“Fi, I have to be fit to fight.”
“Okay, okay. Bacta and ice packs. Right as rain in no time.”
“Vau’ll kill me.”
“Look, what is this thing with Vau?” Fi pulled Sev out into the walkway again, and they jogged back to the speeder they’d left a block away. “I know he had a reputation for beating the stuffing out of trainees, but why are you ready to gut Atin?”
“Atin’s sworn he’ll kill Vau.”
Fi almost stopped dead.
“Atin? Old don’t-interrupt-me-I’m-working-on-a-really-interesting-circuit? Our At’ika?”
“Seriously?” Sev asked.
“Yeah, sometimes I get serious. It happens?’
“Okay. Atin’s pod was the only one that ever lost men!”
“Geonosis. Ruined Vau’s clean record?”
“It’s not that simple. Atin was doing that survivor guilt thing when he got back, and Vau just focused him a bit.”
Odd: Skirata hadn’t been around when Fi returned from Geonosis. But he’d worry about that later. “That explains the scar on his face.”
“You got it.”
“Doesn’t explain the rest of the scars he was showing you.”
“You ask him about that.”
Sev was as near to scared as Fi had seen him. He couldn’t imagine being afraid of Skirata. The man might have sworn himself to a standstill when he was angry, but nobody in Skirata’s company ever felt they had to fear him. He was Kal’buir: he lavished ferocious care on his commandos to the exclusion of all else.
But Sev didn’t want Vau to know that he’d injured himself doing something reckless. Whatever the reason, Fi owed his brother some support.
“Okay, we don’t mention the shoulder?’ Fi started up the speeder. “We’ll get it sorted ourselves. Bard’ika can do that Force healing if the bacta doesn’t do the trick. But Vau needn’t know?’
For the first time since he’d met the man, Sev softened visibly.
“Thanks, ner vod,” he said. “I owe you.”
17
So you want a knife, a nice sharp knife. You hone that blade to its limits. It even cuts through stone when you want it to. It saves your life. And then you’re outraged when it cuts you accidentally. You see, knives don’t switch off And neither do people, not when you hone them to a fine edge.
-Sergeant Kal Skirata to General Arligan Zey, on the nature of training
Operational house, Qibbu’s Hut, 0115 hours, 385 days after Geonosis
The Gurlanin opened its eyes, panting.
Etain couldn’t tell one Gurlanin from another unless they allowed her to. They could shut out her Force-senses just as easily as they could reach out to her. She could detect nothing from the creature: no sense of identity, no emotion, and no purpose.
And then the air around her came to life with a shuddering sense of past, of long memory, and of betrayal.