I ordered this. I started it. I did it. I made the mistake about the minefield.
Etain was simply dismayed to take stock of the person she’d become, and how far her Jedi training-contemplation, reason, nonviolence-had receded into the distance.
“Ma’am? Time to move on and track down the others. This is going to be a long, fiddly job.”
“Okay.” Etain needed a moment. She stared down at the compressed pink snow where Ven had lain while his buddies worked on keeping him alive. There was more blood than she’d expected, but it was hard to tell when it had stained the snow and spread. Blood in water or slush always looked worse than it was. “I’ll be with you shortly.”
She stood thinking of Darman, picturing him so that the baby might possibly see what she saw in the Force, and then made her way to the LAAT/i gunship. The speeder buses had already left empty, with no farmers to evacuate. Levet walked behind.
“Ma’am,” he said. “Hang on.”
“What?”
“You’ve been hit, ma’am. Look…”
Etain turned around to face the commander and saw what he’d spotted: she’d left a trail of blood droplets in her wake. Instinctively, she looked for injuries, knowing how easy it was to be numbed to them until the adrenaline wore off.
Then it dawned on her. The blood wasn’t coming from an injury, but running down her leg. She could feel its brief warmth now as it cooled on her skin and froze where it soaked into her clothes. A searing cramp seized her and doubled her up.
She was hemorrhaging. She was losing the baby.
Nar Hej Shipping Company, Napdu, fourth moon of Da Soocha, Hutt space, 476 days after Geonosis
Sev stood to one side of the entrance, staring at Fixer on the other side as he had so many times before.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d walked through an unknown door without blowing it up, kicking it open, or melting its locks with a blaster bolt. One day he’d use the controls like everyone else. Scorch knelt between the two of them, edging the thin blades of the hydraulic spreader into the crack between the two halves of the door.
“I need an explosive fix,” Scorch said. “I’m fed up with opening things quietly.”
“We don’t want an audience arriving to admire your work.”
“Sev, I’m a surgeon among rapid entry artists.” Scorch grunted with the effort as he braced the spreader against his chest and leaned on it. The blades finally slipped into the gap. “You’re a nerf butcher.”
“Want to be on the menu, too?”
“Patience. Or we’ll lock you in a room with Fi and let him talk you to death.”
Fixer let out a long sigh, one of his eloquently wide repertoire of nonverbal responses, and held up his hand to do a mute countdown: four, three, two …
One.
Scorch pumped the hydraulics and the blades separated, sliding apart along the length of the bar. The doors were now open far enough for him to wedge the hydraulic ram between them and part them wide. Sev stepped over him, focused on not letting Ko Sai’s trail go cold.
So … they couldn’t let Skirata know about this.
Or Omega, come to that.
It bothered Sev a lot. He understood the need to know and not know, but something that had to be kept from specific people he knew and trusted-and who wouldn’t trust a brother commando?-troubled him.
We ‘re not like ordinary men. We ‘re professionals. We don’t play games.
But what puzzled him most was the order not to tell Vau, either. Maybe Zey thought Skirata would wheedle it out of him. The Jedi certainly didn’t trust Mandalorians, but maybe that was inevitable given the free-range nature of Vau’s and
Skirata’s black ops activities. They might have been old but they were still thoroughly bad boys.
The office was in darkness. Sev’s helmet spot-lamp picked out desks, grubby mats on the floor, and doors that led to what his sensors told him was a long hollow space-a corridor. It probably led to living quarters. It wasn’t unusual for traders to live in the same building as their offices on Napdu, because it was just a staging post for the sector’s freight-no nice residential neighborhoods. Sev knew that because his HUD-linked database said so, under a red glowing header that read LOCAL CONDITIONS. He saw too little of the galaxy’s day-to-day life to judge for himself, so he still relied on intel. He could see Scorch and Fixer’s view of the dark office in their point-of-view HUD icons, and Fixer was already slicing into the computer records.
And Ko Sai’s trail led here, after it was shaken and beaten out of reluctant informants. Vaynai, waterworld and smugglers’ haven, stopping off at Aquaris, another waterworld rife with piracy and other scum, to … Napdu.