[Republic Commando] - 03(32)

“Shut up and eat. You’ll think straighter on a full stomach and a few hours’ sleep.” Scorch grabbed a passing server droid. “Full Corrie breakfast for the young psychopath here, tinnie.”

Sev ate too fast to taste the food, but at least it filled a hole, as Fi would have said if the annoying little jerk had been here. Sev wasn’t sure if he missed Omega or not. On balance, he did.

And it was all for a few credits. There weren’t enough credits in the galaxy to make it worth leaving a comrade be-hind. Sev could imagine nothing worse.

If he ever saw Vau alive again, he wondered if he’d have the guts to apologize to him.



Mygeeto, DeepWater submersible Aay’han, depth fifty-eight meters, 471 days after Geonosis

Skirata wasn’t sure if the fluid dripping off his nose and chin was spray from the melting ice or his own sweat.

They’d been hacking at the ice face for an hour now, and the space was too confined for both of them to work at the same time. They took turns. Skirata found he needed it: it was hot, damp, and numbing labor. Melting was useless. It seemed to be freezing again as fast as it thawed. He put his full weight against an inadequate hydrocutter and took another chunk of ice out of what he saw as a six-meter tunnel. His hands were numb and tingling from the vibration.

I’m getting too old for this.

Vau, why the shab are we even bothering? I put my boy at risk for this?

Ordo tapped him on the shoulder. “Break, Kal’buir.”

Skirata put the cutter on standby and found he could hardly move his legs. Ordo, with that perfect silent understanding, grabbed him by his boots and hauled him out of the air lock tube. Skirata leaned against the bulkhead and then slid down it in exhaustion. His hands felt lifeless. He shook them hard to stop the tingling.

It wasn’t the time to say that they could have left Vau. They were both at the stage where they couldn’t think of much beyond the next minute and the next chunk of ice pulled free and pushed out onto the deck. The cargo bay deck was scattered with wet gravel freed by the melt: the pristine white landscape disguised how much debris there was in the compressed snow.

There was another thunk from the air lock like a brick falling off a wall. Skirata struggled to his feet and stepped in to clear the ice out of Ordo’s way. Even the noise of the cutting disc couldn’t drown out Mird’s whining and yelping, and he wondered if the strill would claw clean through the hatch to get out of the locked storage compartment. Even if no-body else loved Vau, that animal certainly did.

The good thing about repetitive and desperate physical labor was that it stopped you from speculating too much on things like the ice that had refrozen across the lake, the possibility that the lake wall would collapse under the weight of the water anyway, and that, working now without their sealed armor, they’d drown if the boarding tube gave way.

Clunk.

Ordo was young, strong, and fit. He was removing the ice a lot faster than Skirata could.

“Rewarming,” Ordo yelled. Skirata was partially deaf from too much time spent around loud explosions without a helmet, but he could hear him. “When we get Vau out, he’s bound to have hypothermia, however good his armor is. Got to get him thawed.”

“What?”

“Rescue breathing. Warm air in the lungs. Mouth-to-mouth.”

Skirata wasn’t thinking fast enough. “Osik.”

“Maybe Mird can do it…”

The one thing they had plenty of now was hot water. The tanks were full. Vau could at least have warm compresses.

“Warm sugar water.” Ordo grunted with effort, and there was another clunk. He was going well. “It’s all about raising core temperature.”

Skirata broke out his ration pack. He never imagined he’d give Walon Vau his last energy blocks. Here he was, worrying about a chakaar who’d beat his men badly enough to put them in a medcenter, when he had his boys, Jusik, a pregnant

Etain, and now Besany Wennen to fret over, and they all deserved his efforts a lot more than Vau.

“Chakaar,” he said to himself.

“A cryodroid might be a good investment.”

“What?”

“I said, I think a cryodroid might be a good investment. Icebreaking.” The drill drowned Ordo’s voice for a while. “Should be able to melt ice faster than this.”

It was a long half hour. The brief spells at the ice face were getting harder each time, and they needed to save their energy blocks for Vau. Skirata felt his strength ebbing faster. The gravel released from the ice dug into the palms of his hands when he crawled into the tube, but they were so numb now he could hardly feel it. Eventually he resorted to his blaster, and the steam made the compartment feel like a sanisteamer.