[Republic Commando] - 02(21)

Etain hoped so.

The gunship dropped suddenly, now level with the tree canopy, and the streaked image of green foliage showed her just how fast they were flying. Another larty came up on their port side. There were thirty-four gunships somewhere near, strung out in a loose formation, heading for the extraction zone.

“Three minutes, General,” the pilot’s cockpit intercom said. There was a crack and flare of something exploding off to their starboard side. “Getting some attention from the tinnies’ triple-A, so we’ll drop a little more. Hold tight.”

It hardly made her flinch now. She had reached the saturation level of adrenaline where she was vividly aware of every hazard but running on some primeval automatic level of painless cold reason-too scared to panic, as one of the clone troopers had described it.

Three minutes became three hours became three seconds.

Red blasterfire from droids lit up the tree line as the larty banked to come around in a spiral descent. Etain didn’t think, and she didn’t feel, and she simply jumped the last ten meters from the open deck over the fast-roping four-man squad of clone troopers and the green-trimmed sergeant. Force skills came in very useful at the most unlikely times. She landed in front of the squad and brought the conc rifle up level-one hand on the stock, the other on the barrel grip-to sweep the forest edge in front of her.

She felt other gunships landing all around them, whipping up soil and leaves, but she saw only what was in front-about two platoons of Sarlacc men exchanging fire with super battle droids on the edge of the clearing-and her squad to either side of her.

A spread of ten EMP grenades from the squad and a volley from her conc brought half the super battle droids to a halt. It was at times like this that she longed for the comlink convenience of a helmet instead of one strapped to her arm in just the wrong place: the Force was short on specifics like SBD strength one hundred units, closing up at green twenty. And there was so much chaos and pain in the Force right then that she couldn’t harness it to focus.

So she did what she had been drilled to do without thinking since she was four years old. She fought.

She ran, the squad matching her pace and firing a blue stream into the droid line in odd silence until Clanky activated his voice projector and she heard him say, “-they’re closing up all along the shoreline. Sorry, General! Big holes now in the droid lines.”

“No link,” she said, superfluous words stripped from her mind. The concussion rifle was getting heavy and running out of charge: the power indicator was edging back down to zero. Two more volleys knocked three SBDs flat and a small tree with them. “How many more?”

“Forward Air Control says two hundred SBDs and tanks bearing twenty degrees with four Torrents on their case—”

More V-19s screamed low overhead and a yellow-fringed ball of white fire backlit the forest, suddenly throwing silhouetted trees and running men into sharp contrast. Fearless’s air group commander certainly had a grip on the reality of the situation. No wonder everybody loved pilots.

Clanky dropped flat and began firing prone at the stream of SBDs that had turned toward the gunship landing area. Etain followed him without thinking. He was listening to data in his helmet, judging by his occasional emphatic nod.

“Sarlacc’s breaking out all along the shoreline, General, and Fearless is directing the rest of the larties north.”

“Any word on General Vaas Ga?”

Clanky went silent for a moment, to her at least. “One klick north with Commander Gree, calling in air strikes.”

Two gunships moved in close enough to catch Etain’s peripheral vision and knots of men broke from the trees, some carrying wounded comrades between them. Etain hoped the single IM-6 medical droid on each larty could handle the triage of dozens of men at once. One gunship set down again at right angles to the tree line, its starboard hatch shut tight and taking droid fire that scattered sparks while it trained composite beam lasers on the SBDs.

The starboard gunner-horribly exposed in the transparisteel bubble set in the wing-was hosing the droids at waist height. Etain saw movement and white-armored shapes race behind the vessel and disappear, presumably into the port side of the troop bay. The torrent of comp beam laser was like a freeze-frame in its unbroken, steady stream.

For a slow-motion moment Etain reasoned: using the forward cannon and deploying the heavier and nastier armaments-radiation burst missiles-would cause heavy trooper casualties in this position. Her mouth was dry, her heart pounding so fast that she could hardly distinguish between beats, and yet she could stop the chrono to think these odd things.

She resumed firing. She held her fingers tight on the trigger until the conc died in her hands.