[Republic Commando] - 03(63)

“Okay.” She walked forward a few more meters and called out lo them. “You’ve got nothing to fear. No reprisals, I swear. We’re just going to take your weapons.”

There was no response. They seemed lo be laking a long lime lo gel down the slope, but the snow was more like packed ice, and treacherously slippery. She turned lo Levet, nodded, and then waved some of the platoon forward to relieve the farmers of their weapons. Fifteen troopers advanced through what had been a field of barq grain in the summer, ghosts against the white landscape picked out by the black of their bodysuits visible between the plates of plastoid alloy, and the single green rank flash of a sergeant.

Etain checked one more thing off her mental list. It was slow going, but they were getting there. “Levet, evacuate the…”

That was as far as she got. An explosion peppered her face with dirt and lifted two troopers meters into the air. One fell screaming, and the other couldn’t because he was blown apart.

Mines.

The platoon froze, trapped in an uncharted minefield.

Trap. You don’t do that, you just don’t surrender and lure my men to their deaths…

Etain’s sense of time evaporated. She saw some of the farmers grab their weapons again, and an instinct overtook her that wasn’t Jedi at all, an instinct lo kill for this act of betrayal. Levet was yelling over the comlink as the remaining men still behind cover opened up with rifle and E-Web fire.

Etain raised her lightsaber before she even realized she’d seen the muzzle flash of a blaster bolt, batting it away. Her comlink was filled with a cacophony of orders and responses, some from the assault walker. Another mine detonated. Another man screamed. Blasterfire and artillery rounds rained down from the hillside.

Etain took a moment lo realize it was her own voice calling in fire from the assault walker. “A-tee, bearing five-five-six-zero, take it out, I repeal, take it out…”

Shouldn’t get in Levet’s way. He s the commander. He knows what he’s doing. They’re killing my men. They’ll pay for that.

There was no moral argument left in her about who had first betrayed whose trust here. All that was left was her will to survive and to save her comrades. It was that visceral, that stark, that un-Jedi. She had no sense of anyone else around her except the dead and wounded troopers; she had no sense of anything beyond stopping the incoming fire and venting this red-hot rage that was choking her and tightening a band around her forehead.

She hadn’t even realized she’d gone into the minefield. She felt she could see through the snow and soil to the devices beneath, devices they should have detected-no, they were custom anti-droid trip mines, plastoid and remotely armed. Somehow she was avoiding them all, but the troopers had no such Force-senses and simply knelt where they’d been forced to stop and returned fire.

Out of all the things she saw that day, that was the most extraordinary: men pinned down on an exposed field, still fighting, when the slightest movement might set off an unseen mine next to them. None of them was paralyzed by panic. No wonder fools thought that clones felt no fear.

“Ma’am, stop! Hold it, for fierfek’s sake!” Levet’s voice rang in her comlink. No, she wasn’t going to stop. She couldn’t. The hillside ahead of her erupted in a massive plume of snow and dirt that rose into the air and fell again like hail. Then there was a rumbling sound. A section of the hillside gave way, taking rocks and soil with it. The sheet of compacted snow slid off like frosting separating from a cake and came to rest like an avalanche.

The walker fired again, shuddering with the recoil, and the stony ridge near the crest shattered as if a fist had punched through a sheet of transparisteel. The explosion deafened her for a few moments and then she felt grit and ice pepper her face, and ducked. There was a second explosion, and a third, and when she raised her head again she couldn’t see the hill through the storm of debris that was rolling toward her like a giant foaming wave. The soil beneath her shook as intensely as a groundquake. And then the airborne debris began to hit the ground, the huge billowing wave collapsing, leaving be-hind it a reshaped hill and a road blocked by rock, soil, and ice.

The rebel fire was now coming only from the position to the south of them, not the hill. And men were still stranded in the minefield.

“Ma’am, I said stay where you are,” Levet shouted.

“No, you stay where you are, Commander.” Etain’s anger always got the better of her. She’d never learned to control it If the dark side wanted her now, then it could lake her as long as she got her people clear. “Take out the other artillery position. Just suppress it. Okay?”