[Republic Commando] - 02(22)

“Whoa, tinnies breaking this way-“

Her focus narrowed. She no longer saw the five men around her except as white blurs and vortices of raw energy in the Force. The lead battle droid overran their position and she simply swung the dead rifle in a Force-driven arc right up into the thing’s chest, smashing the alloy and sending the droid’s sunken head assembly flying into the air.

She was suddenly aware of blue energy behind the next droid like a continuous backdrop, although it had to be interrupted bursts of DC-15 fire. She let the cone rifle drop and drew her lightsaber because she had nothing else left.

The blade of blue light sprang into life and she didn’t recall touching the control at all. She swept her arm around in a clean arc that brought the mountain of metal down without its legs, tipping like a felled tree to one side of her, falling flat on its firing arm and shuddering as its own discharging weapon tore it apart. Hot shrapnel sizzled on her robes and skin but she felt nothing.

And she was on her feet now, lightsaber gripped in both hands, point-blank with the next droid. She saw two of her squad blasting away from a prone position while Clanky scrambled to one knee to fire a grenade into the advancing rank of a dozen SBDs.

Droids kept advancing. So did clone troopers. And so did she.

We’re all the same. None of us is thinking. We’re just reacting.

She fended off a barrage of red fire, whirling and flicking the lightsaber without conscious decision. Each snazzz of colliding energy was the first and last: she went on, and on, and on, blocking each shot as if it would never end. And the next droid was upon her. She slashed. Cables and alloy fragments showered her. A white-gauntleted fist grabbed her shoulder and pulled her bodily out of the way.

“Bang out, General, the larty’s ready to lift” Clanky almost had to drag her off the pile of shattered droids and shove her into a run toward the gunship. “We’ve done all we can here and the bay’s full. Go! Run!”

She grabbed the cone rifle as she ran back, retracing their line of advance, blind on adrenaline. But at the gunship’s platform she still stopped dead, one foot on the edge of the rail, to look back and count men passing her. One-two–three-four troopers, and Clanky. All accounted for. She sprang up just as an armored hand gripped hers and yanked her inboard. She had no idea who the trooper was. But he was one of hers now.

The gunship lifted in a straight vertical so fast that her stomach plummeted back to ground level.

The forest and fertile delta plain of Dinlo shrank beneath the ship and grew dark. The bay hatches slid forward and slammed shut. Then she was standing in a warehouse of scorched, filthy armor and the stench of blood and seared flesh. Her primeval survival mechanisms yielded to shaking anticlimax.

Clanky pulled off his helmet and their eyes met, an odd moment that was almost a glance in a mirror: she knew that the unblinking wide-eyed shock on his face was exactly what he was seeing on hers. Instinctively, they both reached out to clasp forearms and their grips locked for a second or two. Clanky was also shaking.

Then they parted and turned away. It was synchronous.

Yes, Etain thought. We’re just the same, all of us.

It was very, very quiet once she blocked out the thrum of the gunship’s drive as it made 660 kph-off the dial-back to Fearless.

And no, the IM-6 droid could not deal with forty men crammed into a modified bay better suited to thirty, not if a quarter of them were injured.

Then, when Etain listened more carefully and her adrenaline had ebbed, she realized the bay wasn’t as quiet as she had thought. There was ragged breathing and stifled yelps of pain and-the worst, this-incoherent whimpering that peaked to a crescendo of a single stifled scream and trailed off again.

She picked her way across the bay, stepping over men who were crouching or kneeling. Propped against the bulkhead, a clone trooper was being held in a sitting position by a brother. His helmet and chest plate were removed and Etain needed no med droid to provide a prognosis for a chest wound that was producing blood on his lips.

“Medic?” She whipped around. “Medic! Get this man some help, now!”

The med droid appeared as if from nowhere, jerking bolt upright from a knot of troopers where it was obviously working. Its twin photoreceptors trained on her.

“General!”

“Why is this man not being attended to?”

“Triage X,” the droid said, dropping down into the unbroken carpet of troopers again to resume its first aid.

Etain should have known. The red X symbol glowed on his shoulder. She hoped the man hadn’t heard, but he probably knew anyway, because that was the unsentimental way the Kaminoans had presented their training to the clones. Triage code X: too badly injured. Not expected to survive despite intervention. Concentrate resources on code 3, then code 5.