At least she doesn't think I'm a crazed dark sider anymore. That's something. Nothing like a late epiphany, is there?

The pa.s.sage was a lot longer than she'd imagined. Leveler wasn't a full-sized a.s.sault ship, but she was big enough to leave Callista gasping for breath by the time she reached the turbolift that ran from the bridge down to the deck. Derel was waiting. She could see him all the way down the pa.s.sage from the final turn, hands clasped behind his back, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, head down, occasionally glancing up; another clone almost exactly like Ince in appearance, but giving a distinctively different impression in the Force.

He seemed remarkably relaxed. There was nothing he could do to make her run any faster, after all.

She skidded into the turbolift with Ahsoka behind her. Derel punched the controls and the cage fell like a stone. "This is a separate system," he said. "The missiles are independent of the main weapons systems because it's just a bolt-on for trialing. Do you need to know how it works?"

"Well, yes..."

The bridge deck levels flashed by the viewport in the turbo-lift. "What kind of detail?"

"Just tell me in the broadest terms, like it's an animal. I have to think myself into the computer. I don't need technical data to do that."

"Okay." Derel blinked a few times. "The concussion missiles have onboard computers that let them track a target. But they need to leave the ship with all kinds of information on what they're hunting, so they don't pick on the wrong prey. Like a friendly ship, for example. The missile computer needs to tell each missile what its prey looks like and where it needs to bite it, and how hard, to kill it. But the problem seems to be that the missiles can't hear it. Does that make sense?"

Perfect. "Yes. You give good briefing, Lieutenant."

The turbolift doors opened. Derel led Callista and Ahsoka down a ladder and keyed open a compartment. As soon as Callista put her hand on the bulkhead, she felt the ship respond to her like a tsaelke. She could almost feel a heartbeat. Warships each had their own unique sounds and vibrations that told those who lived in them that all was well, or if something was out of kilter, and she understood that completely now. The missile computer turned out to be a modest durasteel box about the size of a speeder drive. The only visible signs of activity were blue and green lights on the side, and a small diagnostics screen sunk into the metal.

"Where does it get its information on targets?" she asked. She placed both palms flat on its top. She could feel its sharp mind, its insatiable need to search. "Which systems talk to it?"

"It's got a database of known ship profiles from Rep Intel, and we augment that with sensor readings during missions. It should be able to see the Sep ships as confirmed targets."

Callista nodded. "I can do this." She could feel it; she could feel the targeting computer searching over and over for some-thing, constantly tripping over ... a gate, a closed door, something it simply could not pa.s.s through. "Okay, when the systems talk to one another, do the missiles launch?"

"If the launch key's open."

"Open it."

Whatever that meant, the key wasn't turned down here. Derel pressed his headset mouthpiece close to his lips and said something. But by then she was already losing herself in the crystals and circuits of the machine, feeling the zip and tingling of minute electrical impulses, seeing at first a wonderfully regular, intricate landscape of lines, lights, and gleaming metal. There was a sense of movement, of things happening at breakneck speed, yet frozen motionless. Then she felt overcome by the faintest vibration that seemed to start in her stomach. It filled the marrow of her bones; it traveled to her skin. She was somehow a very different shape now. Whereas she'd been aware all the time of existing at a fixed point-a perfect intersection of a line that ran from ear to ear, and another that pa.s.sed through the crown of her head to midway on her tongue-she was now everywhere on a flat plane. Everything that she'd understood of physical existence no longer applied.

She was the machine-she was the whole ship. She could feel the barrier that stopped the computer from reaching its ob-jective. She was also a ma.s.s of senses far beyond those of human flesh and blood, the ship's sensor arrays; she was the beating heart of its generators. She looked without eyes from one part of the infinite plane to another, saw the barriers, and opened them with a breath. She felt as if she were inhaling cool clean air after being trapped in a stuffy cage.

The sense of escape was wonderful. Somehow, she felt she was flying. It was like nothing she'd ever known before.

The world within her eyes-not before them, in them-was now velvet black and infinite. She was flying at incredible, ef-fortless speed, consumed with hunger for something, hunting. She found herself hurtling toward something as complex and alive as herself, but the two of them couldn't exist in the same world-she knew that more surely than anything at that mo-ment-and one had to die. The black velvet changed instantly to searing white-hot light. She thought that was the end of it, but she made the journey again and again, each time with more certainty.

It was bliss. It was unimaginable freedom. It was- She was jerked out of the silent idyll. She thought she fell a long way. The world around her was suddenly confused, soft, imperfect, dirty, noisy. And she was . . . flesh and blood again. A head, four limbs, weighed down and sluggish.

Already, she missed flying in that perfect infinity.

"Wow!" The voice was very distant. "I've never seen anything like that in my life! Hey, are you okay? You did it! You did it!"

She was almost sure she was Callista now, and she thought of a kelp farm. Maybe that was why the voice was m.u.f.fled; she was underwater. No, she was looking up into two faces-a young man and the vividly marked face of a nonhuman.

"That's very . . . weird," said a female voice. It wasn't her own. "I thought I was never going to get you out of that trance. You look terrible."

Ahsoka. Yes, that was Ahsoka, and the man was Derel, and she was Callista Masana.

"Where's Geith?" she asked. Geith! How could she have wanted to fly alone when Geith was still here? "Can we get out of here now?"

"No hurry," Derel said. He slapped her back enthusiastically. "You took out seven Sep ships. The last two aren't big enough to tackle us, even with half our systems down. Nice job, ma'am."

But she wasn't herself yet, not fully. She could still feel a sense of ship in her, of being a totally different shape and size.

Something was different; she felt as if she had water in her ears, as if her fine-tuned senses had been dulled a little. She wasn't sure what it was, but she knew she was different somehow.

Ahsoka had hold of her shoulders, eyes wide and anxious. "Are you okay?"

"Just a little groggy." Callista got to her feet. Now she knew what the problem was. She could barely sense anything in the Force. Even Ahsoka, standing right next to her, felt so muted that Callista had to concentrate hard to feel her as a Jedi at all. It was as if she'd been deafened by a blast. "Did I get hit by something?"

Ahsoka took her arm. "No. You just blanked out. You were just-right in with the targeting computer. I could see it. I don't know any Jedi who can do that with a machine. n.o.body."

She said it as if it was a dark art that scared her. At that moment, Callista had no recollection of the meld at all other than a wonderful clarity, an answer for everything when she reached for it, the most crisply detailed images of stars, and ships right down to their rust streaks, tiny meteor pocks and flaking livery. That intense clarity had gone now, leaving her with an unsettling fuzzi-ness. Perhaps that was all it was. She'd moved from machine perspective back to a fallible human one again, and it was simply the contrast that made her feel she'd lost her Force senses.

Like reading a holozine with the text magnified, and then going back to a regular page. It looks blurred for a moment. That's all it is.

Isn't it?

If it had scared Ahsoka, it had terrified her. She tried to work out what she needed to worry about.

"Is everyone okay?" she asked, still not sure who everyone was. "Someone was hurt."

"Ince," Ahsoka said. "Come on. Let's go to medbay and see how he is."

Callista had been to only a few areas of this huge ship, but somehow she now knew her way around without even looking for the stenciled numbers that identified the decks and sections. She headed for the medbay. If anyone had told her where it was, she couldn't have equated those directions with what she could feel somewhere in her brain.

So I do have a little of the ship left in me.

It wasn't the first time. She'd immersed herself in machines before, and they hadn't been anywhere near as complex or in-tense as this. But she'd always felt slightly altered afterward in ways she found hard to define.

If I tried to understand a droid at that level.. . if I melded with a droid . . .

Callista had always been curious, never afraid to confront her own limits or challenge beliefs she'd always held. But she could hardly bear to think of what might happen if she saw the galaxy from a droid's perspective.

Yes. I was the computer. I was the ship. I was every concussion missile. If I ever knew what it was to be a droid, could I fight this war?

She knew she had to avoid ever finding out. It was hard enough to stomach a war that churned out living men like machines on a production line. Clone troopers-she was right to feel outrage and sympathy for them. There was no other way to see them but as human beings. But if there was anything to feel in a droid, anything to understand, then destroying them would be agony.

She couldn't afford that. She had to close her eyes to it.

It was an ugly realization. She had made a decision there and then not to experience what it was to be a battle droid. She knew that they thought, by any definition of the word. But she didn't want to know if they felt.

You know the answer, don't you?

You know that life takes more forms than we can possibly imagine. But there comes a point where you daren't look.

"Expedience," she said, heading unerringly for the emergency compartment in medbay. "It gets us all in the end."

BRIDGE, REPUBLIC a.s.sAULT SHIP LEVELER.

Pellaeon stared at the slowly tumbling debris that had been a small fleet of Separatist warships, and waited for bad news, but none came.

Baradis kept pacing up and down in the gap between the weapons stations and the sensor operators, one arm folded across his chest, hand cupping his elbow, tapping his thumbnail against his teeth. He was waiting for bad news, too. There'd been so much of it that it hardly seemed believable that they were out of trouble now.

"Two Sep vessels withdrawing, sir," he said. "And we'll be ready to jump in roughly five minutes."

It had taken longer than the fifteen-minute estimate already, but that didn't matter now. The fight was over. The survivors simply stood breathless and wary, preparing to walk away. There were no winners.

"Do they know we're out of concs?" Pellaeon had gone beyond the sensible quitting point, but there was no point pursuing the stragglers, and there was nothing Leveler could do on her own about JanFathal even if she'd been fully operational. "Well, at least those missiles worked pretty well. Even if they did need a Jedi to kick-start them."

Benb watched impa.s.sively, arms folded on a rail. For a civilian who'd gone on a work-up expecting to do nothing more haz-ardous than tighten a few bolts, he seemed to have taken imminent death rather well.

"How's your team, Benb?" Pellaeon asked. Maybe they weren't quite so sanguine.

"Never better," the Sull.u.s.tan said casually. "We're on triple overtime. Hardship allowance kicks in once the shooting starts."

It was another universe, the civilian dockyards.

Ash tapped Pellaeon's shoulder. "Sir, we've identified a safe rendezvous point at Kemla to meet up with Wookiee Gunner for transfer."

"Good grief, no." The guilt had set in now. "We've interrupted your mission, put you at risk, and relied on you to save our skins. The least we can do is let you go on your way."

"You still can't jump accurately without a Jedi, sir."

She had a point. "I'll mention you in dispatches," he said. "If only to see the look on Master Yoda's face when he sees that the heretical anarchists rode to the rescue."

Ash looked slightly embarra.s.sed. Maybe gloating wasn't a very Jedi thing to do.

"Agent Devis is in medbay," she said cryptically, and walked away before he had the chance to work out how she knew.

He couldn't put it off any longer. He didn't want to. But it seemed indecent haste when his ship was limping back to the dockyard with damage and casualties.

"Go on, sir," Baradis said quietly, eyes still on the nav sensor screen. "I can finish up here just as easily without you fidgeting and fretting..."

Permission from his navigator or not, Pellaeon tried not to be seen to hurry.

Medbay was busy. Droids were tackling a lot of minor injuries-fractures and lacerations from being thrown around by impacts, some burns-but there were a few serious ones from the generator compartment that had taken a direct hit.

"Fatals?" he asked the physician commander.

"Ten, sir. Under the circ.u.mstances, we got off lightly."

"Give me the next-of-kin details, Commander, and I'll send personal messages."

"Eight clones, sir. Only two messages to write."

That reality never sat well with Pellaeon. It felt like erasure. They had no families. So he'd find out who their friends were among the crew, who would miss them most, and talk to them for a while. If he didn't-then he might as well have been a Neimoidian with a crew of droids that meant nothing to him. A man couldn't run a warship that way.

"And," said the commander, "she's over there."

The commander didn't need to say who she was. Pellaeon's private life was now no longer private. He wondered if it ever had been, but at least it was out in the open now, and there would be no sly looks in the wardroom.

Hallena's voice wafted from a screened cubicle. When he slid back the screen and stepped into the treatment area, he found it crowded-a med droid, a clone flat on the diagnostic table with tubes leading into arm and neck, and a small crowd of onlookers. Hallena had hold of the clone's free hand. Rex watched grimly, arms folded, gaze alternating between Ince and the biosigns screen on the bulkhead.

"Ince, you're going to be fine," Hallena said. "Ince? Have you ever been to the entertainment district on Coruscant? I bet you haven't. Well, I'm going to take you out for the biggest nerf steak ever."

Ince couldn't hear her, Pellaeon suspected, but even people in comas heard things sometimes. The med droid checked the catheter pumping fluid into his body via his jugular vein. Rex paced slowly around the edge of the treatment bay, occasionally stroking his palm over his scalp as if checking for stubble. Coric and Ahsoka were absent. It looked as if Rex had told him to get her out of the way for a while. There was no sign of Skywalker.

Pellaeon said nothing, but put his hand on Hallena's shoulder. She glanced back as if she hadn't realized he was there, then just looked up at him with an expression he hadn't seen before: regret.

"I put you all to a lot of trouble," she said quietly.

It was the first time they'd seen each other in weeks. Nothing unusual, given their jobs, but this wasn't the romantic reunion he'd planned.

"How's he doing?" Pellaeon asked.

He wasn't sure who was going to answer. There was a silent pause as the rest of the clones either looked at Rex, or didn't look up at all.

"His kidneys are failing," Rex said. "So that makes any brain damage from hypoxia a bit academic now. He lost too much blood."

Pellaeon wondered if it was better to take Hallena away. He squeezed her shoulder.

"Give his buddies a turn," he said tactfully, indicating the exit. "Not much room to move in here."

They stood outside in the lobby for a moment, trying to keep out of the way of rushing med droids and repulsor gurneys. Altis waited with Callista and Geith at a discreet distance, talking in hushed tones. Pellaeon caught Callista's eye and raised his thumb in silent approval for the missile strike, but then the Jedi all turned their heads at once, all looking toward the treatment cubicle. Pellaeon realized what had caught their attention. It wasn't him.

He couldn't hear or see it, of course. But they could.

"Oh, stang," he said.

Rex came out of the cubicle, his face ashen as if he was either scared or furious, but the set of his jaw said the latter. He had to pa.s.s Pellaeon to leave the medbay. He undipped his helmet from the back of his belt and rammed it on as if he didn't want to have any conversation.

"Make that two troopers I've got to replace," he said, and strode away at speed.

Hallena shut her eyes for a moment and let her chin drop.

"You should have left me," she said. "Look at all this. What was I thinking, calling for extraction? I didn't even have any intel worth rescuing. What do I say to those troopers? That it's all part of the job?"

She went as if to return to the cubicle, but Altis walked up to her and blocked her way with a quiet persistence. "I'd let them have a little time," he said. "Short of abducting them, Agent Devis, there's nothing you can do to stop this happening to them again."

Hallena gave Altis an odd look, then glanced at Pellaeon. He wondered if the old Jedi had tried a little of that mind influence on her, but he'd heard it only worked on the suggestible, and she was anything but that.

"I'll be in the wardroom," she said, walking away. "When I manage to find it."

Altis bowed his head slightly to Pellaeon. "Let a harmless old man go talk to her, Captain. I'd feel just like her in this situ-ation. Guilty."

But that's my beloved. The woman I want to marry. I should be the one she turns to in a crisis.