[Republic Commando] - 03(74)

It wasn’t the kind of place he would have picked to live, Darman decided. There was no rear exit, and the windows were poorly placed to keep watch. Sull must have felt unusually safe to risk living in such an indefensible location, and that in itself was unexpected in an ARC trooper.

Sull hadn’t amassed a lot of effects in the couple of months he’d lived here. He had two changes of clothes in the closet, basic hygiene kit in the refresher, and a conservator full of food, as if he spent all his wages on it. That’s what we ‘re all like, isn’t it? No idea what to do with possessions, but always hungry. Darman checked for anything else that might identify the ARC as being a GAR officer, and found a packet of crumbly, very sweet cookies that were irresistibly coated with seeds of some kind. He munched happily as he rummaged through the apartment. The place was military-tidy and anonymous, apart from a neat stack of holozines next to an equally neat stack of holovid chips that showed Sull stayed home at night.

Caged nuna. Yeah, even an ARC found it hard to step outside the cage when someone opened it. Maybe Sull had been sampling the outside world at a distance, through the entertainment that regular folks took for granted. Darman wondered where Sull was now: well clear of Gaftikar space, anyway.

The apartment’s comm was flashing with unanswered messages. When Darman played them back they were-predictably-a broken stream of angry invective from a male voice demanding to know why Cuvil-not Sull to his new acquaintances, then-hadn’t shown up for work again. There were also a couple of silent calls, brief clicks before someone shut the link again. Darman wondered where Sull had picked the name Cuvil and went on sorting through bins and other hiding places for any telltale links back to the Grand Army.

It wasn’t the Gaftikari that he was trying to throw off Sull’s trail. It was his own side. Suddenly that bothered him, because now they were all complicit in helping the man desert, and that was a lot more serious than going outside their rules of engagement on Triple Zero to take out a few terrorists. There was no way this could be spun as getting the job done.

Darman was still checking the holovids to make sure there was no rental code on them that would lead back to Sull when his fine-tuned instincts told him something wasn’t right.

It was the way the silence outside seemed … heavy.

Sometimes there was the kind of quiet that was just ambient sound with nothing to disturb it. Then there was what he thought of as an effort to be silent. That was what he could sense now. Somewhere in his subconscious, his brain had processed something he hadn’t even noticed hearing and tripped his alarm.

There was someone outside.

The blinds were still drawn. Darman knelt on the floor and placed a sensor on the exposed tiles, trying to detect the faintest vibration. The red bars of the readout showed occasional spikes that usually meant footsteps, even though he couldn’t hear movement when he concentrated. He took out his blaster, checked the charge, and squatted down behind a chair to see what happened next, holding his breath.

When the doors opened-very quietly-he didn’t dare look around the chair and expose his position. Whoever had let themselves in held the two sections of the door apart so that it didn’t close with a characteristic faint slap, but eased slowly back again. Then he smelled something very familiar: the faint scent of lubricating oil, the kind used on blasters and vibroblades.

Darman wondered for a moment if Sull had given his key code to a girlfriend and not mentioned it, but he knew what females smelled like and this wasn’t female. He wondered what kind of company Sull kept at work, and if his boss had run out of patience and sent someone around to teach him what happened to no-shows.

But Eyat didn’t seem like that kind of place. People here seemed … almost friendly.

Darman watched a shadow fall across the carpet against the hazy light filtering through the blinds. Then another one joined it, and there was the faintest creak.

They knew he was here.

But maybe it was the local police, and the neighbor had realized he wasn’t Sull after all, and alerted them to an intruder.

“So, Alpha-Thirty, you thought you’d try a new career, did you?”

He thought he knew that voice.

No, that wasn’t something the Eyat cops would care about. The faint rustling of fabric and the occasional snatched breath came closer. Darman squatted with his sidearm steadied in both hands. Then the shadow fell on him.

He looked up into a masked face, eyes covered by a sun visor, and he was staring at a blaster muzzle as he fired. He pulled the trigger even before he consciously registered the blaster aimed at him because his training and common sense and raw instinct told the primitive, self-protecting parts of his brain that a masked man sneaking around was a bad, bad sign. He shot him in the face. It was a simple reflex.