Jedi Trial (26 page)

The minutes dragged by. At precisely 0613, the battalion commander’s vehicle roared over the bank, followed by scores of Republic transports.

“Get me up there right now!” Anakin ordered his driver, and the tank droid shot forward. The first dozen or so transports over the bank succeeded in cutting a deep furrow in the soil, and the rut deepened as more followed. This was planned for and would give the following troop transports cover as they negotiated the bank as well as an easy path to follow. But Anakin’s vehicle surged over a bit to one side of the beaten path, and the going was very rough for the clones inside.

“Stop here!” Anakin ordered. He climbed into the commander’s cupola.

“Sir,” the sergeant protested, “you’re exposed.”

Anakin toggled his throat mike. “Better to see from up here.”

“We should keep moving, sir. We’re too good a target stopped like this!”

“Don’t worry. The law of averages is with us. This
is a target-rich environment.” The sight that greeted Anakin’s eyes would never leave him: the entire plain was full of moving vehicles, huge clouds of dust and smoke, and burning fires. As he watched, a transport about a kilometer away suddenly blossomed into a ball of fire. He could see one of Halcyon’s transports dimly through the drifting smoke and dust. It had suffered a direct hit from a blaster cannon. Burning clones poured out of the vehicle and whirled and twisted awkwardly in their armor, like living torches, before collapsing; the transport exploded in an enormous flash, and then, mercifully, battlesmoke closed over the scene.

Ahead, his own transports were making good headway so far. The battalion commander had positioned several machines along the route of attack, and they were already taking the distant hilltop under fire with their guns. The others were firing as they moved. “Get ready,” Anakin told the transport commander waiting patiently in the riverbed for the signal to start advancing. Suddenly a dozen or more enemy tank droids surged forward out of a depression in the ground, guns blazing. Two of Anakin’s vehicles were hit immediately. One was the battalion commander’s vehicle. It started burning. No one tried to get out.

“Unit Six is taking over!” Anakin announced on the command net. “Concentrate your fire on those tank droids!”

Blaster cannon bolts flashed overhead from the enemy vehicles, bouncing off the ground and into the air over them, making sizzling noises as they passed. Anakin
smiled. The Separatists had begun their counterattack too soon.

“Get me over on that firing line right now!” he ordered his driver. “Gunner, open fire when ready!”

Calmly Anakin’s gunner announced the range—“Twenty-one hundred meters”—and fired his blaster cannon. The transport bounced and swerved as it moved forward, but the stabilized blaster-control system was unaffected by the motion and the second bolt hit one of the enemy machines squarely on its front armor. That bolt bounced harmlessly off the machine, but the second bolt disabled its right tread and it began to turn helplessly in a circle before several other gunners destroyed it with their own cannons.

“Sir, I suggest you get down from there before you’re hit,” the sergeant advised.

“If I’m hit, you take charge, Sergeant.” Anakin reached down impatiently and tapped the driver on his helmet. “Come on, come on, get us over there!”

Odie and Erk sat in the aid station, listening to the thunder of the guns supporting Halcyon’s attack. The assault had been going on for ten or fifteen minutes before the chief surgeon accosted them.

“You can walk now, Lieutenant, so shove off,” he told Erk. “I’ll need all the space I can get in this station in the next few minutes.”

Odie, who’d been keeping Erk company while he was in the aid station, helped him to his feet. “Doctor, when will you be able to see him again?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” the surgeon replied. “Not for a
while. He may have to go into a bacta tank to regenerate the skin. We’ll have to send him up to the
Respite
for that. In the meantime, he needs to keep that burn clean. If infection sets in, he could be in real trouble. Here.” He grabbed a medpac and shoved it at Odie. “You don’t seem to have anything better to do—take care of him for the next couple of days. Everything you need is in there, including painkillers. Hear those blasters? I want you out of the way before the casualties start streaming in here. Now go!”

“We need to hunker in a bunker, Odie,” Erk said, then corrected himself quickly: “No—no more bunkers for us. Let’s head over to the command post. Maybe we can be of some help there.”

But before they could get out of the aid station, casualties from the ongoing assault started coming in and all the pair could do was step aside and wait for the flow of injured to stop. It didn’t, and what they saw on the litters bearing the wounded was horrible. Odie gasped and put her hands to her mouth; Erk blanched at the sight of the mangled bodies. Never had either of them seen so much destruction of living beings. Erk had done all his killing at high speed in the soundless reaches of space or far above the ground in atmosphere environments. It had been a clean bloodletting, more like playing a hologame than actually killing anyone. Now he was seeing what weapons technology could do to living bodies up close, where he could smell the blood and burned flesh.

The surgeons established a triage. One had the job of examining each litter case as it came in and, depending
on whether he thought the victim could be saved or not, determining where to put the soldier; these decisions were made in a matter of seconds. The unsaved far outnumbered the saved.

The worst were the burn cases, clones stripped of their armor, so badly incinerated that their limbs had been reduced to charred sticks, their faces to blackened skulls, uniform fragments fused to their flesh. Yet somehow they lived. None of these were put into the saved category. Others lay in pools of their own blood, limbs missing, internal organs exposed. Still others had obviously died before they were brought to the field hospital. They lay still on their litters, bodies bouncing as the litter bearers jounced them along. Over all was a dreadful silence; hardly any of the wounded screamed or moaned—they were all in shock, an orderly informed Erk as he brushed by.

Odie picked up two one-liter bottles of water from a nearby supply and shouldered her way to the unsaved. She knelt, lifted a badly wounded clone’s head, and put the bottle to his lips. It was then that she noticed a huge gash on his back that went all the way from his shoulder down to his hips. She could see his spine and ribs. “Thank you,” he sighed after he had drunk. When she put his head back on the litter her hand was covered in blood. She wiped it on her tunic and moved to another litter. When the bottles were empty she knelt on the floor in a state of nervous exhaustion and cried.

“Let’s go,” Erk said, kneeling beside her. “They’ve stopped coming in for now. Come on, we can’t do any
more here.” He helped her to her feet using his good arm.

“They’re clones, Erk,” she whispered, “but they’re still living beings—a-and they’re put together exactly like us. They bleed, they hurt, they die, just like we do …”

“Come on, Odie, let’s get out of here,” Erk repeated. Outside, he stumbled, and Odie rushed to support him. He didn’t get anything on her when he vomited.

The attack wasn’t going as planned. As the first wave of the assault breached the mesa, the enemy troops had pulled back to prepared positions; the attackers were exposed to raking fire as they tried to close the gap. Nervously, Halcyon paced back and forth in the command post. Slayke sat unperturbed a few steps away, eyes glued to the battlefield monitors, listening intently to the reports coming in from the attacking units.

“They’re pinned down on the mesa,” Halcyon observed. “Anakin hasn’t been able to take those hills.”

“The last word we had from him, sir,” an operations officer responded, “was that he was taking over the transport battalion. I don’t even know if the infantry has been deployed to take the hill.”

“Casualties?”

“We’ve several hundred so far, sir,” the division surgeon replied. “More coming in every minute. May I have your permission to go to the aid station and help out?”

Halcyon nodded and the surgeon hurried out. Halcyon came over and sat down beside Slayke. “Our
attacks have failed,” he admitted. He smashed a fist into one hand to express his anxiety. “Somehow they stymied Anakin. His taking those hills was the key to our whole plan. I’m going to withdraw the troops.”

“Anakin may have succeeded in taking his objective,” Slayke reasoned.

“No, he hasn’t. He’s alive and still fighting, but not on the hills. We need to reassess the situation and try something else. I’m not going to exhaust my army attacking those heights in frontal assaults. There’s nothing but dust, fire, smoke, and confusion over on Anakin’s side, and he hasn’t been in touch with us since twenty minutes ago when he announced he was taking over the transport battalion. I knew before we started if we couldn’t crack that line within twenty minutes we’d never break it the way we’d planned.”

“Now you know what it’s like to command an army like this,” Slayke said. “My troopers are ready. Give me the word and we’ll support you wherever you need us. But I agree. I think we need to revise our battle plan.”

“As soon as our troops begin their retrograde movement, move yours to the old riverbed. Establish a defensive line. It’ll be tricky, our attackers passing back through your brigade, but you can handle that. Entrench there and prepare for a counterattack. Signals, issue an order for all units to break contact and withdraw to our lines as quickly as possible. Where are you going?” he asked Slayke, who had gotten up.

“To lead my troops.”

Halcyon shook his head. “I suppose there’s no sense
me trying to talk you into staying here with me. You and Anakin—you’re fighters. Try not to get yourself killed.” Halcyon knew Anakin was still alive and fighting, but that was all he knew.
Anakin
, he thought,
where are you? What are you doing?

W
hat are you doing here?” a harried staff officer demanded when he saw two strangers standing in the command center.

“We just came from the aid station, sir,” Lieutenant Erk H’Arman answered.

“Well, get back over there, then, we don’t need any hangers-on.”

“He’s wounded, sir,” said recon trooper Odie Subu, “and I’ve been assigned to look after him.” She displayed the medpac the surgeon had given her. “We thought we could help out here.”

“Help us out? You look like you two should be on the
Respite
yourselves! Well, go see a doctor, then, but get out of here. We’re busy.”

At that point Zozridor Slayke happened to walk by. “Well, well,” he said, “if it isn’t my prodigal twins. What are you two up to?” He remembered Odie in particular, because she had volunteered to accompany the pilot to Izable. He’d also heard what had happened to them and how they’d gotten out of the collapsed bunker. “These are two good soldiers,” he remarked to the staff officer. Realizing his commander knew the
pair, the officer excused himself to go about his duties. Briefly, Odie outlined the situation at the aid station.

“Look, it’s going to get real busy here in a minute and I’ve got to go fire up my commanders,” Slayke told them. “Why don’t you two go down to the Fire Direction Center? See Colonel Gris Manks, my artillery commander—he’s big, you can’t miss him. Tell him I sent you. See if he can use a hand.” Slayke knew very well that the pair would be of no help to Colonel Manks, but after all they had been through, he felt they deserved a rest and a chance to avoid the crisis that was about to come. At least they’d be safe down in the FDC. With that, he was on his way.

The Fire Direction Center was literally “down,” accessed by a sloping tunnel that labor droids had constructed under the supervision of Halcyon’s engineers. The FDC itself was large and crammed with equipment that enabled the dozens of experts who staffed the place to communicate directly with the two divisional artillery headquarters and through them to coordinate and give missions to every single piece of artillery in the army. When the pair entered the FDC, Gris Manks was shouting loudly at a clone sergeant. He saw the newly arrived pair in his peripheral vision and whirled on them. “Who are you?” he demanded.

“Captain Slayke sent us to help out,” Erk answered.

“Help out? You two? Lieutenant, you look all shot up—and you, trooper, you look all shot down. How can you help me?”

“Sir, I’m the one who was shot down,” Erk answered, “and burned up, too. The trooper is my wingmate.”
He explained briefly how they’d gotten to the FDC.

Colonel Manks stared at the two in disbelief. “All right,” he said at last, “the captain sent you? All right, then, you two go over there and sit by that droid. Don’t pay any attention to what it might try to tell you. Keep out of the way and keep your eyes and ears open and you might learn something.” He whirled, stomped over to a console, and began shouting loudly at a clone lieutenant.

The pair recognized the droid at once as a standard military protocol unit, the kind often found performing administrative duties in personnel offices and orderly rooms, and thought it strange to find one here in the FDC.

“Good day,” the droid said as the pair sat down beside it, “I am very proud to announce that I am a modified military protocol droid. I have been modified to operate effectively at battalion-, regimental-, and division-level artillery fire direction centers—which, I am proud to say, I can run with expert efficiency. I know the nomenclature, ranges, maintenance requirements, and firing data of more than three dozen artillery pieces; I can prepare firing tables for all these pieces and plot ranges obtained from orbital satellites, forward observers, or maps; I can integrate and control their fires for destructive, neutralizing, and demoralizing missions in either concentration fire, barrages, standing barrages, box barrages, or rolling barrages. I am also qualified to arrange scheduled fires and fires on targets of opportunity, whether observed or unobserved. And, I might add, I am an expert on the employment of
tactical fires whether in a supporting role, preparatory role, counterpreparatory role, or counterbattery role, or as interdiction or harassing fire. I am, in short, the top of the line of cannon operators.”