[Republic Commando] - 02(27)

Men changed in a year, and these soldiers around her were men. Whatever naŻve purity of purpose-this kote, this glory-fueled them when they left Kamino for the last time, it had been overwritten by bitter experience. They had seen, and they had lived, and they had lost brothers, and they had talked and compared notes. And they were not the same any longer.

They joked, and gossiped, and evolved small subcultures, and mourned. But they would never have a life beyond battle. And that felt wrong.

Etain could feel it and taste it as she wandered across the hanger deck, looking for more troopers she might be able to help. The sense of child that had so disoriented her when she first met Darman on Qiilura was totally absent. There were two shades of existence that tinted the Force in that vast hangar: resignation, and an overwhelming simultaneous sense of both self and community.

Etain felt irrelevant. The clones didn’t need her. They were confident of their own abilities, very centered in whatever identity had evolved despite the Kaminoan belief that they were predictable and standardized units, and they were bonded irrevocably with each other.

She could hear the quiet conversations. There was the occasional word of Mando ‘a, which few ordinary troopers had ever been taught, but had somehow flowed through their ranks from sources like Skirata and Vau. They clung to it. Knowing what she knew about Mandalorians, it made perfect sense.

It was the only rationale that could make sense when you were fighting for a cause in which you had absolutely no stake. It was the self-respect of a mercenary; internal, unassailable, and based on skill and comradeship.

But mercenaries got paid, and eventually went home, wherever that might be.

One trooper was waiting patiently for the medic. He had a triage flash stuck on his shoulder plate: the number “5,” walking wounded. There was blood streaked across his armor from a shrapnel wound to his head, and he was holding his helmet in his lap, trying to clean it with a scrap of rag. Etain squatted down and patted his arm.

“General?” he said.

She had so ceased to notice their appearance that it took her a few seconds to see Darman’s face in his. They were identical, of course, except for the thousand and one little details that made them all utterly unique.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“What’s your name, and not your number, okay?”

“Nye.”

“Well, Nye, here you go.” She handed him her water bottle. Apart from two lightsabers-her own and her dead Master’s-her concussion rifle, and her comlink, it was the only item she was carrying. “I have nothing else I can give you. I can’t pay you, I can’t promote you, I can’t give you a few days’ R and R, and I can’t even decorate you for valor. I’m truly sorry that I can’t. And I’m sorry that you’re being used like this and I wish I could put an end to it and change your lives for the better. But I can’t. All I can do is ask your forgiveness.”

Nye seemed stunned. He looked at the bottle and then took a long swig from it, his expression suddenly one of blissful relief. “It’s … okay, General. Thank you.”

She was suddenly aware that the hangar deck had fallen completely silent-no mean feat given the vast space and the numbers of men packed in it-and everyone was listening.

The unexpected audience actually made her face burn, and then a little ripple of applause went through the ranks. She wasn’t sure if that meant they agreed, or that they were just being supportive of an officer who-now that she had some embarrassing clarity of mind-looked like a walking nightmare and was clearly having trouble dealing with the aftermath of battle.

“Caf and a change of clothes, General,” Gett said, looming over her from nowhere. “You’ll feel a lot better after a few hours’ sleep.”

Gett was a gracious commander and a perfectly competent naval officer. He ran the ship. He was, to all intents and purposes, the commanding officer. She wasn’t. And had he been born to a family on Coruscant or Corellia or Alderaan, he would have had a glittering career. But he’d been hatched in a tank on Kamino, and so his artificially shortened life would be very different because of that.

When she got back, she would seek out Kal Skirata and beg him to help her make sense of it all. She would find Omega Squad and tell them face-to-face how much she cared about them before it was too late. She would tell Darman that most of all. She never stopped thinking of him.

“You meant what you said, General,” Gett said, steering her back toward her cabin.

“Oh yes. I did.”

“I’m glad. However powerless you feel, solidarity means a great deal to us.”