Darman tried to lighten the mood. “Ordo’s been telling him stories again.” Sull was still waiting there. Darman wondered if he would have pulled the trigger on the ARC if he’d been ordered to. “Never teach clones to read.”
“Ordo doesn’t know anything about peace, either,” Atin said.
Darman felt he was equally ignorant, but he reserved the right to keep thinking about it. If the point was winning the war, then someone had to have thought what would happen to the army afterward.
“Do you think Sev’s got a girlfriend?” Fi asked.
“If he has, she probably escaped from the Galactic City violent offenders’ unit.” Darman nudged his brother. Come on, Fi, don ‘t obsess. “Not your type.”
“I’d never hold it against a girl for being a psychopath.” Fi made a visible effort to be his other self. “Can’t be too picky.”
“Well, much as I love soaking up the wisdom of you great philosophers, I’ve got things to do.” A’den gestured to Dar-man to get up. “Go retrieve Sull’s kit. He’ll tell you where he buried it. Meanwhile he’s going to tell me all he knows about Eyat. Deal, Sull?”
The ARC shrugged. “So you can wipe ‘em out better?”
“If you’ve got a little friend in Eyat that you want to rescue, now’s the time to mention it.”
Sull shook his head. “Nobody. Funny, even the lizards don’t recognize me now. I must make a big impression.”
“You going to debrief on Eyat or not?”
Sull seemed to consider it. “Okay, but there’s nothing you don’t already have from the guys who built the place.”
Darman diverted to find Niner on his way to dig up Sull’s armor. He was standing by a tree looking out over the escarpment, fingers hooked in the rear waistband of his undersuit. and he didn’t turn around as Darman walked up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Armor up, Sarge. Let’s find Sull’s kit.”
Niner turned, and Darman had expected to see some remnant of anger. But he looked more upset than bottling up fury. It was as if he’d had bad news.
“Okay …,” he said, still distracted.
“Are you all right, vod’ika?”
“Can I ask you a question?”
That wasn’t Niner at all. He didn’t edge around issues. Darman felt uneasy. “Well… yeah, go ahead.”
“If you could go now-if you could get on a transport and go wherever you want, no consequences, even take Etain with you-would you go?”
“Leave the army?”
“Leave the squad. Leave us behind.”
Darman chewed the idea over, and it made his gut churn.
These weren’t the men he’d been raised with in his first pod of four clones: every member of Omega was the sole survivor from his last squad. But these were still his brothers in arms, men who knew exactly what he was thinking, how he felt about everything, what would make him annoyed, what he liked to eat, every last tiny detail of every breath taken each day. He would never have that degree of intimacy with anyone else-maybe not even Etain. He could hardly imagine a day without them. He wasn’t sure how that would fit into the vague idea of being with Etain in some state of domestic bliss that he didn’t understand and had only glimpsed around him, but he knew that being separated from his brothers would rip a hole in him that would never heal.
He’d never come to terms with losing Vin, Jay, and Taler, when they were all part of Theta Squad, and-just like Delta, even now-thought death happened to other squads, never theirs.
That was before they faced the real war. That was when an accidental death in training shocked them into silence for days.
Niner was still waiting for his answer. “It’s not about serving the Republic, Dar. I don’t even know what the Republic is now or why it’s better than the Seps. All I know is that I go out each day trying not to get killed and making sure you guys don’t die, either, nothing more than that. So … what fills that space when you leave your brothers behind?”
Niner was still thinking about Sull and why he could walk away while his comrades stayed. It was more than loyalty to the Republic and all that guff that Jango had hammered into them.
“Wouldn’t you rather be somewhere nice, doing something other than fighting?” Darman asked.
“Dar, would you leave?”
“It’s not going to happen,” Darman said at last. Is that yes or no? He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t even certain what a Dar-man outside the army would be, let alone separated from his brothers. “So don’t even think about it.”