[Republic Commando] - 03(61)

But Darman went on thinking about it as they checked their position and hunted for Sull’s armor. He was sure that Niner was thinking about it, too.



Tilsat, Qiilura, day three of the evacuation, 476 days after Geonosis

“This,” said Levet, “is what happens when you give a lot of overpowered, easily portable hardware to locals who know the terrain better than we do.”

Etain knew the farmers would use every trick General Zey had taught them during the resistance, but that didn’t make capturing them much easier. So far, the troopers had seized five hundred or so alive and bundled them into transports; the rest had scattered into small groups, taking the abundance of Republic-supplied weapons with them.

If the farmers had been Separatists, the planet would have been cleared by now. But hands were tied. These were Republic citizens, and this was the Gurlanins’ planet, which meant it couldn’t be reduced to a wasteland.

It wasn’t the way any of them wanted to fight, except maybe her.

But so far the fighting had followed a pattern. After the farmers had taken a few fatalities, they surrendered. They seemed to feel they’d made their point, and now that they were scared and exhausted, they wanted an end to it. With that in mind, Etain pursued the strategy of picking off a few in each group and inviting a surrender.

It didn’t seem to be working this time.

The platoon was pinned down in the river valley north of Tilsat. The seven other platoons were scattered, chasing the largest rebel groups that had broken away. Five to one had looked like easy odds for clone troops, but the complication of trying to remove the colonists in one piece had handicapped them badly, and the time was fast approaching when Etain was going to give that up as a bad job.

“Incoming!”

An artillery round smashed through the trees behind

Etain’s position, showering the line of troops with shards of ice and branches. She ducked instinctively, Force or no Force.

Levet, usually glued to her side, sprinted away behind the defensive wall that had been a merlie shed and dropped to his knees to operate an E-Web repeating blaster that was now standing idle on its tripod. The gunner lay sprawled with his leg at an awkward angle; another trooper was trying frantically to remove his helmet. Levet laid down fire as two clones worked on their fallen brother’s injuries, and Etain realized that she could no longer prioritize as a commander had to.

All she could see was the wounded trooper. Who is he?

She always tried hard to learn their names-they always had names among themselves, not just the numbers their Kaminoan masters gave them-and this one escaped her. She felt she was denying him. She couldn’t let him be a stranger. But now she had to.

You have to fight. You can’t fall back and play medic. The farmers were spread across the hillside above the platoon, hiding in ice-glazed crags and hollows, and somewhere up there they had a small but devastating artillery piece, supplied by the Republic to help them drive out the Separatists. They also had a lot of blaster rifles-and what was effective against droids could also be lethal applied to regular trooper armor. Her lightsaber and Force powers were of limited use for attacking dispersed fire. All she could do was fend off rounds and debris, because her concentration had vanished. Once, she could have centered herself and visualized the threat, taking in the very fabric of the air and land and water, and deflected plasma bolts or sent snipers crashing against the rocks. Now she tried to locate each firing position to focus on that alone.

Pregnancy’s changed me. Not that I was that strong in the Force to start with.

To her left, Levet directed fire into the hillside, placing E-Web rounds in a neat sequence that sent small avalanches down the hill, exposing grass and rock. Troopers were ranged around her, targeting sniper positions at either end of the valley. She waited for him to pause firing and adjusted her headset comlink.

“Casualties, Commander?” She should have had a lieutenant in command or a captain at most, not the services of a full commander, but every Jedi general got one, even insignificant Jedi Knights like her. “When this starts to cost too much, I think arrest isn’t an option.”

“Ten men injured, two serious.”

“Get them casevacked.”

“We’d have to recall the A-tee to do that at the moment, ma’am, and there’s the small matter of where we evacuate them to anyway. If the bacta and med droids can’t fix them, nobody can.”

Some generals might have thought that ten men down out of a platoon of thirty-six was acceptable, but Etain didn’t. “Let’s take the hillside out, then.”

“Let me confirm that… you no longer want to take prisoners?”