If the farmers had been Separatists, the planet would have been cleared by now. But hands were tied. These were Republic citizens, and this was the Gurlanins’ planet, which meant it couldn’t be reduced to a wasteland.
It wasn’t the way any of them wanted to fight, except maybe her.
But so far the fighting had followed a pattern. After the farmers had taken a few fatalities, they surrendered. They seemed to feel they’d made their point, and now that they were scared and exhausted, they wanted an end to it. With that in mind, Etain pursued the strategy of picking off a few in each group and inviting a surrender.
It didn’t seem to be working this time.
The platoon was pinned down in the river valley north of Tilsat. The seven other platoons were scattered, chasing the largest rebel groups that had broken away. Five to one had looked like easy odds for clone troops, but the complication of trying to remove the colonists in one piece had handicapped them badly, and the time was fast approaching when Etain was going to give that up as a bad job.
“Incoming!”
An artillery round smashed through the trees behind Etain’s position, showering the line of troops with shards of ice and branches. She ducked instinctively, Force or no Force.
Levet, usually glued to her side, sprinted away behind the defensive wall that had been a merlie shed and dropped to his knees to operate an E-Web repeating blaster that was now standing idle on its tripod. The gunner lay sprawled with his leg at an awkward angle; another trooper was trying frantically to remove his helmet. Levet laid down fire as two clones worked on their fallen brother’s injuries, and Etain realized that she could no longer prioritize as a commander had to.
All she could see was the wounded trooper.
Who is he?
She always tried hard to learn their names—they always had names among themselves, not just the numbers their Kaminoan masters gave them—and this one escaped her. She felt she was denying him. She couldn’t let him be a stranger. But now she had to.
You have to fight. You can’t fall back and play medic.
The farmers were spread across the hillside above the platoon, hiding in ice-glazed crags and hollows, and somewhere up there they had a small but devastating artillery piece, supplied by the Republic to help them drive out the Separatists. They also had a lot of blaster rifles—and what was effective against droids could also be lethal applied to regular trooper armor. Her lightsaber and Force powers were of limited use for attacking dispersed fire. All she could do was fend off rounds and debris, because her concentration had vanished. Once, she could have centered herself and visualized the threat, taking in the very fabric of the air and land and water, and deflected plasma bolts or sent snipers crashing against the rocks. Now she tried to locate each firing position to focus on that alone.
Pregnancy’s changed me. Not that I was that strong in the Force to start with.
To her left, Levet directed fire into the hillside, placing E-Web rounds in a neat sequence that sent small avalanches down the hill, exposing grass and rock. Troopers were ranged around her, targeting sniper positions at either end of the valley. She waited for him to pause firing and adjusted her headset comlink.
“Casualties, Commander?” She should have had a lieutenant in command or a captain at most, not the services of a full commander, but every Jedi general got one, even insignificant Jedi Knights like her. “When this starts to cost too much, I think arrest isn’t an option.”
“Ten men injured, two serious.”
“Get them casevacked.”
“We’d have to recall the A-tee to do that at the moment, ma’am, and there’s the small matter of where we evacuate them to anyway. If the bacta and med droids can’t fix them, nobody can.”
Some generals might have thought that ten men down out of a platoon of thirty-six was acceptable, but Etain didn’t. “Let’s take the hillside out, then.”
“Let me confirm that… you no longer want to take prisoners?”
Etain could hardly believe what she was saying. “They’re farmers. You’re elite troops. With the gloves off, this would have taken you no time at all.”
“You want one last try at talking them down, ma’am?”
Levet knew her better than she thought. He seemed to understand that she’d blame herself later if she didn’t offer them one last chance to surrender. How many more times she had to offer she had no idea. They’d made their intentions clear.
“Okay. Bring up the A-tee.”
Blaster exchanges continued, but the troopers seemed to be fighting in complete silence. They could hear their comlink circuit in their helmets; she couldn’t. There was just the crack of blaster rounds and the rain of frozen soil as cannon rounds ripped into the farmland around them. When she remembered to click her teeth to activate the platoon comlink circuit, the voices switched on in her earpiece and she was plunged into the chaotic noise of battle, of men calling positions and range and elevation, and one voice repeating, “Is he okay? Is Ven okay? Is Ven okay?”
Ven. He did have a name. She knew it now.
Etain switched back to her closed circuit with Levet. “How long before the A-tee’s in range, Commander?”
“Twelve standard minutes, ma’am.”
“Okay.” She concentrated on the hillside opposite, thinking into the minds of the men and women she’d known—trained—and tried to persuade them by thought influence that they were hesitant, uncertain if they wanted to continue this, anxious to leave for a better life. “Cease fire. Stand by.”
The troopers lowered their blasters immediately and edged back from the wall, some dragging wounded comrades. One of them wasn’t showing any signs of movement at all. Ven lay a little way from the E-Web, helmet beside him, bright scarlet blood leaking into the snow and melting it. His comrade was still pumping his chest two-handed.
The firing from the hillside tailed off into silence.
Etain could sense the emotions around her like patches of colored light; sharp yellows of fear, the blue-white pulsing intensity of ebbing life, and something she could only identify as child-like, faint and gray. It was an echo of what she’d first sensed of Darman. It wasn’t innocence, though: it felt lost and in need.
The baby kicked again. For a moment she thought it was him. One day he would need to know that his mother had done everything she could to give the farmers a way out.
“Birhan?” she yelled. “Birhan, are you out there?”
The valley echoed. On rural Qiilura, sounds carried a long way. She thought she could hear the distant ee-unk ee-unk of the assault walker picking its way through the fields toward the road.
“It’s not Birhan.” The voice that called back to her was a woman’s.
“You can stop this now. You can all walk out of here.” There was a long pause. “You’re the ones who are cut off on both sides…”
“And we’re the ones who’ve been trying to take you alive… up till now.” The yelling was making Etain’s throat sore. She checked her chrono. “I’ll give you five standard minutes to lay down your weapons and surrender.”
Silence. Absolute silence, other than the backdrop of wild sounds that Darman had labeled NFQ—Normal For Qiilura.
“I suspect that’s going to be a no,” Etain said.
She waited, glancing at her chrono from time to time. It was so quiet that she could hear the snow flurries hitting the troopers’ armor, rattling like beans. Levet worked his way back toward her and signaled to check ahead.
Narrowing her eyes against the snow, she could see movement. From the lower slopes of the hill, figures in drab working clothes, faces swathed in scarves, rose slowly and held their hands up in surrender. Thank the Force. Some sense at last. She watched carefully for weapons, but they really did seem to have thrown down their rifles. She risked standing up, lightsaber in hand.
“Ma’am, when will you learn to keep your head down?” Levet said sharply. “Jedi doesn’t mean invulnerable.”
?
??I’ve got armor,” she said, “and I can deflect blaster bolts if they take a potshot at me.” It seemed unnecessarily aggressive to activate her lightsaber, but she did it anyway. She wasn’t taking any chances. As she edged forward, with the weapon held away from her body, more figures popped up from snow-covered crags, some with hands on heads, some simply holding blasters and rifles aloft. The farmers on the lower slopes had started to pick their way down toward the road.
Their resistance seemed to be a gesture now. They just wanted to show some fight, save face, and be able to tell their children that they hadn’t gone quietly. Pride mattered to them. She understood that.
“Okay.” She walked forward a few more meters and called out to 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 to be taking a long time to get down the slope, but the snow was more like packed ice, and treacherously slippery. She turned to 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 to 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 to realize it was her own voice calling in fire from the assault walker. “A-tee, bearing five-five-six-zero, take it out, I repeat, 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 behind 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 take her as long as she got her people clear. “Take out the other artillery position. Just suppress it. Okay?”
And I’m pregnant. Am I crazy? I’m risking my child’s life. It’s not mine to risk.
But the AT-TE was already in action, pounding the southern position at the other end of the small valley with its cannon. It felt like a holovid was playing in the background, something utterly divorced from what was happening on the minefield. And it was: there was nothing it could do for them other than suppress fire. She was in a minefield surrounded by stranded men, some of them bleeding to death.
It was the sound that tipped her over the edge. They said wounded men cried for their mothers, but troopers had no mothers; they didn’t even have a father figure like Skirata. They called for their brothers.
She knew now because one was doing just that. He was calling for Bek, or at least it sounded like that. Bek wasn’t responding. Maybe Bek was one of the dead.
It broke her heart, and her last fragile ties to the Jedi.
She looked over her shoulder: Levet was edging his way through the minefield. She didn’t just try to influence his mind. She put all her effort into making him stop dead. He hesitated for a moment, but kept coming.
“You can’t detect these mines with your sensors, Levet. Don’t try.” She waved him back. “I can sense what you can’t. I’m okay. Don’t do this.”
Something caught her peripheral vision, a flicker of movement, nothing more. She stared, and then the snow seemed to ripple like an oil-covered sea. Shapes emerged from it, white Gurlanin shapes, and a dozen or more crept into the minefield.
Gurlanins could sense variations in soil density. Of course. Jinart had located gdan tunnels for her during Omega’s first mission, so they could detect buried trip mines. One of the Gurlanins tiptoed over to her.
“Jinart,” Etain whispered. “Go careful…”
“Valaqil,” said the Gurlanin. It was Jinart’s consort, once Zey’s personal spy. “Can’t you even tell us apart?”
“I can’t even see you half the time.”
“We’ll mark a clear path so you can rescue your wounded. I’ll lead your other men out of here.”
“I owe you.”
“Yes, you do, Jedi, and if anything happens to you then we may pay the price, so shut up and follow me.”
“I can sense where the mines are. I’m okay.”
“Pity you didn’t sense they were there before you sent your men in.”
It was brutally true. Etain’s moment of qualified relief was destroyed by shame and guilt. This was her fault. She’d caused these troopers’ deaths through her own incompetence, and not military incompetence at that: she hadn’t used her own Force-senses well enough.
But she didn’t have the luxury of self-pity now. She called to the stranded troops who could still walk, unsure if the anti-
droid mines had emitted EM pulses, too. “Can you still hear me?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Follow the Gurlanins. Walk in their footprints. They can lead you out.”
It was going to be harder moving the wounded men, but she’d do it. She wasn’t going to leave a single man behind, dead or alive.
Levet clicked back into her comlink circuit. “Ma’am, a larty will be here in a few minutes. We’ll winch them clear. Back out of there… please.”
“What about the downdraft? Might detonate some more devices.”
“I have orders, ma’am. My general’s safety comes first.”
“No, it doesn’t.” Etain thought again about her child, but his father was one of these men. None of their lives could count for less than hers, or there was no meaning to having this baby. “I’m a Jedi. I can do this.”
There was one man she could reach easily. He was ten meters away, not moving, but she sensed he was alive. His right leg was shredded below the knee. Her Force-sense of danger was fully alert now, and when she looked at the snow, churned up with debris and blood, she could see where the mines were, like heat haze in her field of vision. She placed her boots carefully. If she could get a hold on him, lifting him with Force assistance would be relatively easy.
There was a meter-wide safe area she could see. Keeping her balance would be a problem, but if she could get him across her shoulders, she could lift him. She’d watched Darman lift Atin by rolling on him first, but she didn’t have enough safe space to do that. All she could do was kneel—carefully, one foot a hand span from a haze that indicated a mine—and ease her head and shoulders under his body.
He made a sound as the air was pushed from his lungs, but he wasn’t conscious; he’d lost too much blood. She was stuck now, the full weight of him across her back, and as she shuffled her legs into a kneeling position she nearly rolled him out of the safe zone. It took a little more maneuvering to get where she could straighten up and try the movement that needed a lot of help from the Force—to stand with an eighty-kilo man across her back.