“Sorry, Sergeant. Is it true that Sergeant Vau’s back?”
“He’s back, but he’s not a sergeant. I’m your sergeant now, ‘Scorch.”
“And General Jusik?”
“He’s not your sergeant, either.” Skirata looked past Scorch and seemed suddenly startled. Fi turned and saw what he was staring at: Etain Tur-Mukan walked across the huge landing platform hauling the LJ-50 as if it were putting up a fight. “That has to be General Tur-Mukan, yes?”
“That’s her,” Darman said. “She’s very keen to meet you.”
Fi was distracted by a blip of movement in his HUD. A scruffy civilian air taxi had risen over the parapet of the landing platform. And it shouldn’t have been able to do that.
His unconscious brain said danger and reacted a split second before his ingrained training reminded him that unidentified civvie vessels shouldn’t penetrate the Fleet base cordon. He was on one knee with his Deece charged and aimed before he even noticed from his HUD that Omega and Delta had both formed up into a single front contact formation.
The taxi stopped dead in midair.
“Check!” Skirata stepped in front of them. Fi froze but Delta aimed around the sergeant. “Stand down!” One fist held up clenched to hold off the squads, Skirata signaled vigorously to the taxi with his other hand held flat, slapping down on the air. Drop.
The taxi settled slowly on the platform.
Omega stopped dead at the check command; Delta took a second longer. Maybe it hadn’t been drilled into them as it had Skirata’s batch. But all of them still had their rifles trained. Fi’s heart pounded. They were all wound tight and still alert to any threat, alert enough to let hard-trained reactions take over. It was what kept you alive. You could never switch it off. Your muscles learned to do things and then stopped asking your brain’s permission.
“I’m sorry, lads.” Skirata spun around to face them. “Udesii, udesii .
. . relax. It’s ours.”
“I’m glad you pointed that out, Sarge,” Niner muttered. He lowered his Deece. Fi followed his lead, and glanced behind him.
Etain was still lying prone with her concussion rifle aimed in the right direction, no easy task with a weapon that size, but her arc of fire left something to be desired. He hoped that her Jedi sense of right place and right time would have stopped her from blowing them all to pieces if she had opened fire.
Fi gestured to her to stand down, and then gave up and just shook his head at her. No. She gestured back, palm up, and jumped to her feet. He wondered if anyone had thought to teach her basic hand signals.
Skirata was still apologizing. “I should have warned you I had transport coming. That was sloppy of me.” The taxi’s hatch opened and a Wookiee-not a big one, just over a couple of meters tall-unfolded itself from the taxi and clambered out, throwing its head back and yawling in complaint.
“Okay, my fault,” Skirata said. He held both hands up in admission to the mountain of glossy brown fur. “They’re just jumpy, that’s all. We’ll load now.”
“All of us, in that?” Niner asked. It wasn’t a very big taxi. “With the Wookiee, too?”
“No, the prisoners. Just load ‘em in.”
“Where are they going?”
“That’s all you need to know right now.”
Niner paused, then shrugged and beckoned Boss, Fixer, and Atin to follow him back on board Fearless.
Etain had moved forward by now and walked up to Skirata, rifle slung across her back; she was so small that she looked more like a bolt-on accessory to the weapon. Darman reacted and stepped in to get Skirata’s attention. It wasn’t that he needed to, of course. Skirata was watching Etain, and he seemed to have one eye on Fearless’s ramp, and he was placating the clearly irritated Wookiee, somehow juggling situations as skillfully as he had ever done.
“General,” he said. He paused to nod formally to Etain, which-given Skirata’s general contempt for anyone not in armor-seemed quite an encouraging start, Fi decided. “We’ve got a nice new job, and that includes you.”
“Sergeant,” she said, and bowed her head. “You’re not what I expected.”
Skirata raised an eyebrow. “Nor are you, General.” He shoved the Wookiee back a few meters, apparently untroubled by the fact that the creature could have used him for a cleaning rag. He rounded on it. “No, just put them on the back seat and drive. Let Vau do the rest.”
The mention of Vau gave Fi a hint of what he couldn’t grasp from the Shyriiwook words. So the Wookiee was delivering the prisoners to Walon Vau. It seemed to have volunteered to do something that Skirata preferred to leave to Old Psycho, then. The Wookiee obviously wasn’t asking if they wanted to stop for lunch.