“Want a hand?”
“No. Get some sleep.”
“Where’s Sergeant Kal?” Fi had quite enjoyed calling him Kal’buir. But he donned old habits along with his armor. “I hope he hasn’t knifed Vau.”
“They’re liberating a speeder on behalf of the Skirata Retirement Fund.”
“Come on, he’ll never retire.”
“He still wants the speeder. Merc habits die hard.”
Fi found it hard to think of his sergeant as having any interest in a life beyond the army. He spent a while wondering what the man might really want, and apart from a wife to look after him, Fi had problems imagining what that might be. It was the same problem he had with his own dreams. They were intrusive and insistent-but they were limited. He only knew there was something missing, and when he looked at Darman and Etain, he knew what it was; he also wondered how it could work out even if he got it. He wasn’t stupid. He could count and calculate odds of survival.
“Good night, ner vod.” He left Mereel to his task and wandered around, unclipping his armor plates as he went and stacking them in a pile by the bedroom door. Black bodysuits and briefs hung drying on every peg and rail. However exhausted they were, the squads still washed their kit conscientiously.
Fi glanced into some of the rooms to check who might be awake and willing to chat, but the Delta boys were all out cold, not even snoring. Niner and Corr slumped in chairs in one of the alcoves with a plate of half-eaten cookies sitting on the small table between them. Darman was stretched out on his bed in the room he shared with Fi, apparently none the worse for his ordeal, and Ordo was curled up in the next room with a blanket pulled over his head. Odd: he always seemed to do that, as if he wanted total darkness.
There was no sign of Jusik or Etain. Farther along the passage, Fi struck lucky. Atin was sitting in the chair in his room, cleaning his armor.
“I’m on watch until Skirata gets back,” he said, without waiting for Fi’s question.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“I’m sure Laseema will wait for you.”
“It’s not about Laseema.”
“So it’s something.”
“You never give up, do you?” Atin had always been the private type, even though he’d settled into a very different squad culture from the one he’d been raised in. There was always something new to learn about a brother who’d been trained in another batch. “Okay, now that the job’s done, I’ve got matters to address with Sergeant Vau.”
“He’s not a sergeant any longer.”
“I’m still going to kill him.”
It was just talk. Men said things like that. Fi closed the doors and sat down on the bed opposite.
“I’m supposed to be on watch,” Atin said.
“I made Sev tell me how you got the wound to your face.”
“So now you know. Vau gave me a good hiding for being whiny about surviving Geonosis when my brothers didn’t.”
“It’s even more than that. You know it. You wouldn’t be the first commando to get in a fistfight with his sergeant.”
“You know, I like you better when you’re being mindless and funny.”
“We need to know.”
“Usen’ye.” It was the crudest way to tell someone to go away in Mando ‘a. “It’s none of your business.”
“It is if you pick a fight with Vau, and he kills you and we have to get a replacement.”
Atin laid the back plate he was cleaning on the floor and rubbed his eyes. “You want to know? Really? Look.” He hooked his fingers inside the neck of his bodysuit and jerked down the front panel. The gription seams yielded. It was nothing Fi hadn’t seen before in the refreshers: Atin’s shoulders and arms were laced with long white streaks of scar tissue. It was common in the GAR. Men got injured in training and in the field, armor or not. But Atin seemed to have acquired more spectacular ones than average.
Scars happened, especially if you didn’t get bacta on a wound fast enough.
“Vau gave you those, too, didn’t he?”
“Vau nearly killed me, so when I finally got out of the bacta tank, I said I’d kill him one day. Fair enough, yes?”
No wonder Corr said he found commandos a little “relaxed.” They must have seemed dangerously chaotic to a clone trooper raised and trained by sober Kaminoan flash-instruction and simulation.
“Kill is a bit strong,” Fi said. “Break his nose, maybe.”
“Skirata did that already. Look, if Vau felt you lacked the killer edge, he’d crank it up a little. He’d make you fight your brother. We had a choice. We could fight each other until one was too badly hurt to stand up, or we could fight him.”