Maybe not. He was angry enough when he found out I was pregnant. “I’m not going risk upsetting Kal. You know the politics of this.”
“I know he means what he says. He’ll have a warship re-duce Qiilura to molten slag if I cross him.”
Yes, he would. Etain believed him, too. Skirata would rip a hole in the galaxy if it improved the lot of the clone troops in his care. “Just under three months, and then I won’t be your problem any longer.”
“Local months or Galactic Standard months?”
Etain still felt queasy each morning. “Who cares? Does it matter?”
“What would your Jedi Masters do to you for consorting with a soldier?”
“Kick me out of the Order, probably.”
“You fear such trivial things. Let them.”
“If they kick me out,” Etain whispered, “I have to surrender my command. But I have to stay with my troops. I can’t sit out this war while they fight, Jinart. Don’t you understand that?”
The Gurlanin snorted, leaving little clouds of breath on the icy air. “To deliberately bring a child into this galaxy during a war, to have to keep it hidden and then hand it over to that…”
Etain held up her hand for silence. “Oh, so you and Kal have been talking, have you? I know. I was mad and selfish and irresponsible. I shouldn’t have taken advantage of Dar’s naivete. Go ahead. You won’t be saying anything that Kal didn’t, just minus the Mando ‘a abuse.”
“How can he possibly raise the child for you? That mercenary? That killer?”
“He’s raised his own, and he raised the Nulls.” don’t want that, believe me. “He’s a good father. An experienced father.”p>
Etain was too far ahead of Level for him to overhear, but she had the feeling that he would be conveniently deaf to gossip anyway. Now she could see the crowd of farmers massed at the gates in the perimeter fence, silent and grim, hands thrust into pockets. As soon as they spotted her, the rumbling chorus of complaint began. She knew why.
We armed them.
Me and General Zey… we turned them into a resistance army, trained them to fight Seps, made them guerrillas when it suited us, and now … it doesn’t suit us anymore. Throw ‘em away.
That was why she had to face them. She’d used them, maybe not knowingly, but they wouldn’t care’ about that academic point.
“Commander Levet,” she said. “Only open fire if you feel your men are in danger.”
“Hoping to avoid that, ma’am.”
“They’ve got DC-fifteens, remember. We armed them.”
“Not full spec, though.”
A cordon of clone troopers stood between Etain and the crowd, as white and glossy as the snow around them. In the distance, she could hear the grinding of gears as an AT-TE armored vehicle thudded around the perimeter of the temporary camp set up to oversee the human evacuation. The clone troopers, each man with Darman’s sweetly familiar face, had their orders: the farmers had to leave.
They handled humanitarian missions surprisingly well for men who’d been bred solely to fight and had no idea of what normal family life was like. Well, not much different from me, then. As she came up behind them, they parted without even turning their heads. It was one of those things you could do with 360-degree helmet sensors.
In the front of the crowd, she recognized a face. She knew nearly all of them, inevitably, but Hefrar Birhan’s eyes were the most difficult to meet.
“You proud of yerself, girl?”
Birhan stared at her, hostile and betrayed. He’d given her shelter when she’d been on the run from the local militia. She owed him more than kicking him out by force, tearing him away from the only home he’d ever known.
“I’d rather do my own dirty work than get someone else to do it,” said Etain. “But you can start over, and the Gurlanins can’t.”
“Oh-ah. That’s the government line all of a sudden, since we served our purpose and cleared the planet for you.”
The farmers had weapons, as farmers always did, most of which were old rifles for dealing with the gdans that attacked grazing merlie herds, but some also had their Republic-issue Deeces. They held them casually, some just gripped in their hands, others resting in the crooks of their arms or slung across their backs, but Etain could feel the tension rising among both them and the line of troopers. She wondered if her unborn child could sense these things in the Force yet. She hoped not. He had enough of a war waiting for him.
“I preferred you to hear it from me than from a stranger.” Not true: she was here to hide her pregnancy. She couldn’t help thinking that the awful duty served her right for deceiving Darman. “You have to leave, you know that. You’re being given financial aid to start over. There are established farms waiting for you on Kebolar. It’s a better prospect than Qiilura.”