"I have a mission for you."

Odie stood at attention before the reconnaissance platoon commander and another officer whom she recognized by his collar tabs as an engineer.

"This is Lieutenant Colonel Kreeri, the commander of our engineer battalion. That rock formation where you met Sergeant Maganinny, I want you to take Colonel Kreen back there. Right now."

"Yessir," Odie responded.

"Let's go, trooper/' Colonel Kreen said. He stepped off with a short nod at the lieutenant. As he and Odie briskly headed for the engineer battalion's bivouac, he briefed her on the mission.

"I have a convoy of cargo skiffs all loaded and ready to go. I want you to lead it back to that rock formation, where they'll unload and prepare another defensive position." He smiled down at her, but her heart skipped a beat as she instantly interpreted the nature of this move for what it really was. "It's not a withdrawal," he cautioned her. "We're just establishing a rear supply base." He smiled rea.s.suringly, seeing her expression.

"Are you ready to leave right now?" He grinned. His confidence was rea.s.suring, but that slight pause spoke volumes.

"Yessir!" Odie replied enthusiastically. Since she wasn't needed for any reconnaissance missions at the moment, she'd been put into the army's field communications center to work in her secondary specialty-and she was bored to death.

Reconnaissance trooper Odie Subu straddled her speeder as she closely watched the three hundred vehicles of the engineering battalion finish forming up for the rearward movement to the redoubt. There were dirt movers, bridgers, graders, ground clearers, diggers, and more exotic machines whose uses she couldn't guess. The most numerous, though, were cargo carriers, many of which were marked with symbols she recognized as indicating their cargoes were explosive ordnance.

She estimated there were enough explosives in the convoy to obliterate the army's entire position. She briefly wondered why General Khamar didn't order the engineers to use the explosives to destroy the droid army. Then she realized the army had no way to get the explosives into the midst of the droid army without whoever was doing the job getting killed before they could accomplish their mission. Still, she thought, it seemed a waste to not set some of them in the droids' path, to destroy as many as possible when they followed the retreating army.

Well, she decided, General Khamar must know what he's doing. Besides, how did she know the engineers hadn't already em-placed explosives to kill the droids when they pa.s.sed over this ground?

"Recon scout," Lieutenant Colonel Kreen's voice came through her helmet comm.

"Recon here, sir," she said into her mike.

"We're ready. Move out."

Odie took a last look at the convoy. Whatever route she chose had to accommodate the largest of the engineering vehicles. The shake of her head went unseen inside her helmet. The biggest of those machines was so big, she was going to have to lead them in a roundabout manner.

"Moving out, sir," she said, and eased her speeder into gear.

She wasn't able to lead the convoy at speed, not even the paltry 250 kilometers per hour that was all her speeder was capable of. Over this rugged terrain, she had to keep her speed down to under fifty kph, which was the fastest the slower vehicles in the convoy could manage-at times she had to slow to little more than a trot for them to keep up, and sometimes she had to slow because Colonel Kreen said they were raising too much of a dust cloud. The distance they had to cover was only ten kilometers, line of sight. But the route she had to follow, this way and that, and sometimes doubling back, made it nearly four times that distance-and more than four times the length of time to cover.

But at last they made it. She stopped and pulled aside, while the engineering vehicles trundled past.

Colonel Kreen had his command vehicle pull off the trail next to her.

"Well done, trooper," he said. "I'll see to it General Khamar and your platoon commander both get a report on how well you did. Now you'd better get back."

"Thank you, sir." Odie saluted and waited until the engineering commander was back in his vehicle before she turned her speeder around and gunned it. She headed back at top speed.

Lieutenant Erk H'Arman knew he was going down, but even as he plummeted toward the ground he remained cool, calling upon every fiber in his body and all the skill he could muster to save his starfighter. The hit from the enemy fighter had slammed into him like a hammer and sent him into an uncontrolled spin downward. He had only just been able to pull out and stabilize his machine at a mere thousand meters above the ground. His hydraulic system was failing fast, and he knew he had but two choices: eject or ride his fighter in. So far there was no fire inside the c.o.c.kpit. A pilot's worst fear was to burn alive in his or her c.o.c.kpit; crashing was no problem-that would be over quickly.

This was the most target-rich environment Erk and his fellow pilots had ever encountered. Not even in the many simulated practice sessions had anyone thought to program this many marks. Already, three pilots in Erk's wing had been killed crashing into enemy fighters-not on purpose, but simply because there were too many of them to fly through without hitting one. The fight continued far, far above Erk. The enemy was winning, but now Erk H'Arman was intent on saving his life and, if possible, his ship.

A dust storm had developed below, obscuring the terrain. Erk's suit was filled with perspiration, and he knew he must have lost two liters of fluid during the dogfight. Already that loss of fluid was making him thirsty. But he had no choice: he'd have to go down in that storm. He made his decision. "Well, old girl," he muttered as he struggled to keep his starfighter level, "I'm not going to leave you." He would go in with his fighter.

Odie was only halfway back to the main army after guiding the engineers to the rock formation where they were to dig the new defensive positions when the storm hit with a suddenness and ferocity typical of such events on Praesitlyn. The wind quickly rose to fifty or sixty kilometers an hour, buffeting her from all sides and making controlling her speeder difficult. She stopped and zipped up. Millions of granules of sand blasted at her. When at last the storm was over, which could be in ten minutes or ten days, she knew her helmet would be scoured white by the sand. Right now, though, she couldn't see two meters in front of her. She dismounted and, turning off the repul-sors, she tipped her speeder over and curled up beside it to wait out the storm.

A ground-shaking roar, momentarily louder than even the howling wind, washed over her as an enormous object pa.s.sed no more than ten meters above where she lay. The ground trembled beneath her, and the huge tail of flame that came out of the dust cloud was so hot she could feel it even through her protective clothing. She heard a screeching, smashing noise as if some metallic object had impacted. Some distance off to her right, there was a brief reddish glow that was immediately obscured by the rolling clouds of dust. A fighter had just crashed only a short distance from where she lay. She didn't hear an explosion, so she presumed the fighter had come down mostly intact. Would the pilot have survived? she wondered. Then she wondered whose ship it was. She lay beside her speeder, undecided whether to investigate.

The wind suddenly abated somewhat, and raising her head above the frame of her speeder, Odie saw a faint glow from the downed fighter's engines.

She was familiar with the design of all types of Separatist craft-that was one of her jobs as a reconnaissance trooper-but at this distance in the bad visibility she couldn't tell which side the crashed machine might belong to. All she could see was that it hadn't broken up on impact.

She righted her speeder, mounted, and started out toward the downed machine. As she eased her way along, she unsnapped her holster and withdrew her hand blaster.

When she got close enough to see the fighter's markings, she identified it as a Praesitlyn defense force fighter. The canopy was closed and she couldn't see the pilot. The fighter ticked and creaked and groaned like a living thing in pain as its overheated components began to cool. She wondered if it would explode. No time to lose. She jumped off her speeder and clambered onto the fighter's airfoil. She couldn't see through the canopy. She banged on it with her fist, and suddenly it popped open. The pilot sat there in his harness, a blaster pointed directly at her face.

"Don't shoot!" she screamed, instinctively leveling her own blaster at the man.

They froze there for a very long moment, weapons leveled at each other.

"Well," the pilot said at last, lowering his blaster, am I ever glad to see you!"

Odie helped him out of his harness and they crouched on the ground in the lee of the fighter. "Do you have any water?" he asked. "I came off in such a hurry my ground crew didn't have time to load my hydration system."

She unfastened the two-liter canteen strapped to her speeder and pa.s.sed it to him. He drank sparingly and pa.s.sed it back with thanks. As he did so, he studied his new companion. She was small, and he judged she might be pretty by what he could see of her chin and lips beneath her helmet.

Likewise, Odie scrutinized him. A fighter jock! Fighter pilots were the only other people in the army with whom reconnaissance troopers felt any bond. Like the recon troopers, fighter pilots operated on their own, out in front of everyone else, surviving on their guts and skill.

At the same instant each realized what the other was thinking, and they both laughed.

"Well," the pilot said, "I guess whatever we're going to do, we'll be doing it together. I'm Erk H'Arman. Who're you?" He reached out with one hand.

Odie was surprised that an officer would speak to her so casually-he hadn't even identified himself as an officer-but quickly recovered.

"Trooper Odie Subu, reconnaissance platoon, sir." She took his hand and shook it.

"Reconnaissance? That's good, very good. You can get me back to base, and I can get back into the fight."

Odie liked the sound of his voice. He had sustained a gash on his forehead in the crash, but the blood that had trickled down one side of his face had dried. His short black hair and striking blue eyes offset by a ruddy complexion made him look like an athletic outdoorsman just come in from a long hike.

The wind had diminished significantly by now. Odie stood. "Sir, follow me!" she said, extending her hand to help him up.

At that instant the world around them exploded.

6.

The fight for the Intergalactic Communications Center was fierce but short-lived, and the outcome was never in doubt. The valiant Commander Llanmore and the mixed human and Siuissi soldiers in his battalion knew that the rest of their army, even if it was still fighting and hadn't already been destroyed, wasn't able to come to their aid. They knew that now their mission was to delay the capture of the center long enough for Reija Momen and her technicians to destroy the communications equipment.

They were only partially successful.

"Stop!" Reija ordered her technicians as the first battle droids burst into the control room. "Don't resist them. I don't want any of you killed." But she couldn't save them all. Three technicians didn't hear her command and continued destroying equipment. They died when droids blasted them.

"I think, Mistress, that we are about to become prisoners," Slith Skael muttered. He stepped in front of Reija to protect her from the advancing droids, while everyone else was raising his or her hands in surrender.

With blows and shoving, the droids forced the technicians into the center of the control room and surrounded them, weapons leveled.

Cleaning droids scurried about the bodies of the three technicians, scrubbing at the mess on the floor. One of them, programmed to haul away small amounts of trash, vainly tried to move one of the bodies.

Frustrated, it emitted a whirring noise but wouldn't give up trying. If the situation hadn't been so desperate, Reija would have found the droid's attempts highly amusing.

"What next?" someone asked.

"Si-lence!" one of the droids commanded.

"I demand to speak with your commander!" Reija said in a voice of authority. A droid darted around Slith and jabbed the muzzle of its blaster into Reija's midsection, knocking the wind out of her. Slith spun about and grabbed her in time to keep her from falling. He raised his caudal appendage protectively between Reija and the droid as he cradled her in his arms.

"Silence!" the droid repeated.

"Ah, most touching." A tall, cadaverous figure stepped into the control room. He bowed slightly toward Reija, who stood bent over, gasping in Slith's arms. "May I introduce myself? I am Admiral Pors Tonith of the InterGalactic Banking Clan, and I am now in charge of this miserable rock." He bowed again. Pretending diffidence, he brushed some dirt off his cloak. He grinned at Reija, revealing his horribly stained teeth. "I presume, madam, that you are the chief administrator of this facility?"

He did not wait for an answer, but signaled the droids to stand back. The room's quiet was broken by a whirrr, whirrr, whirrr.

"What is that infernal noise?" Tonith looked about the s.p.a.ce until he saw the cleaning droid that was making the noise. "Blasted things are always underfoot. Destroy it," he snapped at one of the battle droids. In a moment, the cleaner was crushed. Components clattered to the floor, and other droids scuttled over to sweep up the debris.

Tonith smiled, shrugged as if settling his cape more comfortably, and reached out for Reija, but Slith hissed and raised his appendage defensively.

"How gallant!" Tonith smirked, but he stepped back quickly. "Oppose me again, you Sluissi garbage, and I will have you killed. Come here, woman!" He pointed to the floor in front of himself.

"General-Khamar-" Reija struggled to get her breath. "G-general Khamar and his forces are not that far away, and he's coming to-"

Tonith shook his head, pretending sadness. "Alas, no. Your tiny and ineffectual army has been destroyed. Now, come here."

"Mistress?" Slith asked, reluctant to let her go.

"I'm all right, my friend," Reija gasped. Slith released her, and she walked unsteadily to stand in front of Tonith. He smiled broadly. She was close enough to smell his breath, which was exceedingly foul. Grinning even wider, Tonith deliberately exhaled in her face.

"I've always hated your kind," Reija gritted. Years before, one of the clan families had helped her father with the mortgage on his farm during a period of bad harvests, but when he couldn't make the loan repayments on time, they seized his property. All very legal and very unfortunate, but the old man lost his farm. The Momens had had to move to the city, and the loss of his beloved farm had caused Reija's father to fall into a state of depression that eventually led to his death.

"Oh?" Tonith leaned very close to Reija now. "Love? Hate? Those emotions mean nothing to me. Neither does your life, woman. I am here to do a job and you are a.s.sets to me, nothing more than a.s.sets."

Reija had had enough. Her hand shot out reflexively to slap the face of this creature who had come to ruin her life and kill her people. The smack of her hand startled everyone, but no one as much as Pors Tonith, who staggered backward into one of his droids, a hand clasped to his cheek and a look of total surprise on his face so ludicrous that Reija, knowing she had nothing to lose, started to laugh.

With unexpected strength and agility, Tonith lurched forward, grabbed Reija by the hair, and threw her to the floor. Slith leapt up to protect his boss, and Tonith whirled on him. "Kill this reptile!" he shouted. The nearest droid shifted its blaster in Slith's direction while the technicians, some screaming in fear, crouched out of the line of fire.

"No! No!" Reija screamed from where she lay on the floor. "No more!

Please, no more!"

Tonith gestured to the droid to lower its weapon. "Listen to me, all of you," he said, addressing the small group. "You are totally abandoned by the Republic, and / own Praesitlyn now. You are my prisoners. You will be treated well if you follow my orders."

Reija had managed to get back on her feet. "I dispatched a distress message to Coruscant," she began, knowing it was a bluff but determined to say something defiant.

Tonith waved her into silence. "You mean, you tried to send such a message. But you know it was never received. We blocked all transmissions to and from Praesitlyn. No message from here will ever reach Coruscant unless I will it." He grinned again. "No one even knows what's going on here, and by the time they find out, it will be too late. Well..." He nodded at the frightened technicians and bowed again at Reija. "It has been a rather touching experience, this brief interview, but now I must be getting back to my army."

He turned and walked toward the door, but just as he was about to exit the control room, he stopped as if he'd remembered something and turned back toward Reija. "Madam, one more little thing. Keep that big mouth of yours shut from now on, or I'll turn you over to the droids." With that, swirling his cloak, he stepped through the door.

The dust storm had started up again, and worse, the temperature had plummeted, Odie and Lieutenant Erk H'Arman found shelter in a clump of rocks and huddled shivering under the scant protection offered by the ground sheet she had unfolded from her equipment pack. "What do we do now, sir?"

"Hey, let's get one thing straight: none of this military protocol stuff, okay? I'm Erk and you're Odie. I'm a fighter jock, remember? Not a staff officer. Besides, if we ever get out of this I think it's going to be you who gets us through. Now, if we were in a fighter-" He laughed and punched Odie lightly on the shoulder. A strong gust of wind threatened to blow off the ground sheet, but they grabbed handfuls of the light fabric and managed to hold on.

The ma.s.sive attack by Tonith's ships in orbit against General Khamar's army had caught the pair in the open, between the main lines and the fortified position. Both positions had been blasted and then a.s.saulted by ground troops. Unable to do anything to help, they had taken cover and waited for the battle's outcome, which was neither long in coming nor ever in doubt. Using her electrobinoculars, Odie had seen no sign of resistance in either place once the righting subsided.

"Battle droids," she had said, her voice wavering. "Thousands of them. "

Battle droids were on the ridge where General Khamar's army had been camped. And then, as if even the weather were allied with the invaders, the dust storm had started up again, and Odie and Erk had been forced to find precarious shelter.

"How much water do we have?" Erk asked now.

Odie checked her canteen. "Little less than a liter."

"Well, surrender's no option."

"No."

"Is there anyplace we can hide out for a while?"

"Yes, but shouldn't we go back to the center? Maybe they're still holding out."

Erk shook his head. "Maybe, but the center has to be the Separatists'

objective, and I think we ought to stay out here until we're sure who's holding the place. Besides, you saw yourself how powerful this landing force is." He shook his head. "No, n.o.body's holding out back there."

"Oh, no!" Odie's shoulders began to quake as the impact of what had happened sank in. "All my friends! Everyone..."

Erk laid a hand on her shoulder. "Mine too, Odie, mine too. That's what happens in war. Ah, we were a heck of a crew," he muttered. He took a deep breath. "Look. We're still alive and we're going to stay that way,"

he said, as much to rea.s.sure himself as her. "Hey, I'm no pebblepusher. I won't last long down here if you give out on me."

"Y-yes. Yes. I mean, no, I won't give out on you. Let me think. There are some caves about seventy-five kilometers to the southeast of here," she began. "I've seen them on patrols. We can hide out there. I don't know what's in them, maybe there's water. I have a small supply of rations on my speeder. They'll last us awhile if we take it easy."

"Can you get us there in-this?" Erk nodded at the storm all around them.

"Hey! Can you ny a fighter? Sure I can get us there!" She laughed without humor.

"You know, once we get out of this, why don't you volunteer for flight training?" Erk said.

She snorted. "Are you serious?"

"Sure I am. You've got the right att.i.tude. Come on. We may be on our own, but two hotshots like us? Sheesh, with your skill and my brains-"