[Republic Commando] - 03(99)

“Dar, it’s still a capital city,” Niner said. “And we’re not just fighting the Gaftikari. We’re denying the place to the Seps.”

“And we’re not footing the bill for it, either,” Atin said.

Darman pondered what possible use this planet would be to anyone except the mining companies. Did they even use kelerium and norax to build droids? Maybe it was the Republic doing a favor for Shenio Mining in exchange for services rendered elsewhere. The galaxy seemed to work that way. Help us out in the war, buddy, and we ‘II see you right when it comes to building your profits.

And it didn’t matter to him at all. He had no stake in it, no interest, and no consequence to him except his life and his brothers’ lives on the line, which was simply the job he did.

He bent down to pick up a small thermal det and rolled it in his hands, seeing the little restaurant opposite the Eyat government building. The minced roba pastry rolls washed down with sweet caf had been delicious; a charge of this size, detonated within twenty meters, would shatter the restaurant’s transparisteel frontage into a thousand blades and send them flying at three thousand meters a second into anything and anybody within a thousand-meter range. Sometimes it paid not to think about it too much.

“Can I do the power station?” he asked.

Niner didn’t turn his head. “You recce’d the government buildings area.”

“Doesn’t mean I can’t take out the station.”

“I don’t like changing plans this close to time.”

“What plans? We didn’t even complete the first recce. We’ve scrubbed the assassinations. We’re going to run the same risks.”

Niner didn’t answer. They’d become so used to doing things on the fly with little or no planning that Darman began to wonder if they were getting sloppy. Special Operations was as much-no, more-about detailed surveillance, observation, and rehearsal than going in with Deeces blazing and blowing stuff up.

“A’den’s going to brief us in around an hour,” Niner said at last.

“Great.” Darman tossed and caught the unprimed det like a toy a few times and then laid it back on the fabric sheet with the rest of the ordnance. “I’m going for a walk.”

Niner could always recall him. He slipped his helmet over his head, sealed it, and strode off into the camp, seeing the world through the filter of his visor’s HUD again, targets in an environment rather than beings in a landscape. Skirata said they were at the stage of life where they were making emotional connections that regular folk made much earlier in childhood, able to imagine themselves in the situations they created. But, he said, it was hard to picture yourself as the guy strolling past the restaurant at the moment the charge detonated when you’d never done ordinary things like that and had been given only a detached academic grasp of blast radii, overpressures, and fragment velocities.

Omega Squad, like all the clone army, had been little more than highly trained, superefficient, ultrafit children when the war started. It struck Darman that they were living life the wrong way around-given the maximum ability to fight long before they had the experience to identify with beings on the sharp end of the fighting.

Too late to worry about that. What am I going to do, warn Eyat? Join the Seps? Cry over dead strangers?

There was nothing else he could do but fight to win, and survive to … what, exactly? The question never went away-When we win, what happens? What do soldiers like us do in peacetime? Maybe he’d end up doing refugee relief. Etain said Jedi did that sometimes. Maybe they’d still end up working together.

He walked among chattering, excited Marits with jewel-like scales who didn’t seem to be anxious about the coming assault. They were swarming around artillery pieces, drilling with E-Webs. This was clearly something they’d been looking forward to for a long time.

Darman paused to watch them, realizing his main fear was that he’d get killed before he told Etain that he loved her, and wondered where the remaining humans would fit into a society run by efficient, orderly Marits whose lives seem to run like flow charts.

He gestured to the red-frilled boss lizard to come to him. They didn’t seem to be offended by being summoned.

“What’s going to happen when you take over?” Darman asked. “What’s going to happen to the people in Eyat?”

Boss Lizard did a bit of baffled head-cocking and looked as if he was calculating. “There’ll be roles for them in proportion to their population, of course.”

Darman realized he should have expected a sensible, numerical answer like that. “So no bloodletting. No purges. No species cleansing.”