Karen Traviss - True Colors (Star Wars: Republic Commando, Book 3)

The wait for Niner and Fi to show up-two hours-was the longest of his life, and every creak and click made him think the Eyat police were surrounding the apartment. When his brothers finally arrived, he felt inexplicably guilty, as if he had to explain himself.

Niner stood staring down at the two troopers.

"Have you tidied them up, Dar?"

Darman had done his best. Apart from the damage to the one he'd shot in the face, they both looked quite peaceful now. They looked like him, but dead-and he was having a. hard time dealing with that. Their arms were neatly at their sides, legs straight.

"I felt bad leaving them lying around like meat. What are we going to do with them?"

Fi shrugged. "Can't leave them here as air fresheners ..."

"Fi, they're our own." Darman couldn't bear looking at the faces any longer, and grabbed a blanket from the bedroom. "We have to dispose of them properly."

"We've got their armor," Fi said. "Sergeant Kal will want the tallies. He's funny about that."

"Okay, let me put it another way-what if that was your carcass lying there? What would you want done with it?"

"I'd want someone to shake their head and say, What a waste of such a fine-looking and stylish young man! and then give me a big state funeral," Fi said, taking the blanket out of Darman's hands and rolling one of the covert ops troopers in it. "With loads of women weeping that they never had the chance to sample my charms. But apart from that, I wouldn't give a mott's backside by then, would I? It's just a temporary shell. Only the armor lasts."

Niner sneaked a glance out of the window. "It'll be dark in an hour or so. We'll take them back to camp and bury them. Dispose of the armor somewhere remote."

"And tell the lizards not to dig them up and eat them."

"Dar, Marks don't eat other sentients. Just their own dead."

"Oh, that's all right, then."

"Dar, these guys tried to kill you..."

"No, they came for Sull, Sarge, and that's just what you were ready to do not so long ago-remember?" Darman had no problem killing. It was his job, he'd grown used to it, and he didn't even get the bad feelings and nightmares afterward that they said humans usually had. But he'd killed his own comrades, not an enemy. The circumstances didn't make him feel any better. "I don't think I could ever go after my own like that, no matter what. Not unless it was personal and they'd done something terrible to me."

He realized he was blathering. Even Fi gave him an odd look. Niner bundled the second trooper into a blanket, and Darman helped him. The dead troopers' muscles hadn't stiffened yet, and when Darman bent one of them over, the movement forced the air from the man's lungs; he emitted a distressing sighing noise that made him sound as if he'd come back to life. Darman had seen some unpleasant things in battle, but that moment was seared into his memory as one he knew he'd never forget.

By the time the bodies were trussed with fibercord, they could have passed for lumpy carpets in bad lighting.

"A'den's been told that the assault on Eyat is probably going to be in a week's time," Niner said, seeming unconcerned. "So it wouldn't matter if we left them here."

"No, we bury them."

"Okay, okay."

"I mean it."

"Dar, am I arguing?"

It would have made more sense to run; the longer they waited here, the more at risk they were. It wasn't hot outside, and with the environment controls in the apartment turned right down and the windows sealed, it might have been a couple of weeks before the neighbors smelled that anything was amiss.

But that wasn't good enough, even if they had been sent to shoot Sull.

Fi wandered into the kitchen. The conservator door sighed open and then shut again; he came out with a plate of food in one hand and a single fritter cake in the other, which he held up to Darman.

"Eat," he said. "Go on, or I'll sulk."

Darman accepted the cake and chewed, but it stuck in his throat like sawdust. He had an urge to call Etain. It was the first time he'd ever felt the need to seek comfort from some-one outside rather than from his immediate circle of brothers, and it made him feel disloyal, as if their reassurance and support were no longer enough for him.

"You should talk to Kal'buir," Niner said quietly. "He killed a commando by accident. Remember? He probably knows better than anyone what you're going through."

"I'm not going through anything." Darman suddenly felt transparent and exposed. "I'm just getting jumpy waiting for the cops to show up. How nobody heard the blaster noise I'll never know."

"The place is well insulated," Fi said gently. "Pretty well soundproof, except for the floors creaking."

Darman knew he wasn't fooling anyone, and retreated to the kitchen to wait for darkness on the pretext of clearing out the cupboards. Yes, he'd talk to Skirata. Whatever Kal had been through was worse: he'd shot a commando in training during a live-fire exercise, one of his own boys, and even though everyone knew accidents like that happened, Skirata was never the same afterward. It had to be much, much harder to live with causing the death of someone you cared about. The covert ops troopers were relative strangers.

But Darman had heard that ARC troopers were ready to kill clone kids rather than let Sep forces take them during the attack on Kamino, not for their own good or to save them from anything, but to deny them as assets to the enemy. Would Sull have hesitated to kill a brother clone who got in his way? Darman doubted it.

It was all getting too blurred and messy lately. He longed for the good old days, when the enemy was just tinnies and very easy to spot.

"Okay, let's make a move," said Niner.

Niner brought a speeder right up to the front of the apartments-so that was what had taken two hours, then, ac-quiring more transport-and they moved the bodies like rolls of carpet. A few people were about on the street but they took no notice, probably thinking someone was moving house. Then Fi went to collect Darman's speeder while Niner and Darman waited in the vehicle with the bodies in the back.

It was just a simple drive back to the camp. Darman felt he could manage that, and began fretting about digging graves in the dark. He certainly didn't plan to leave the corpses overnight. He had an image of the Marits making a stew out of them, and it wasn't funny at all. It disturbed him in a way he hadn't thought possible, making his mouth fill with unwelcome saliva as if he was going to vomit, but he had to hold it together long enough to work with the lizards until the assault on Eyat began.

"Nice strong cup of caf when we get back," Miner said. His voice had every single intonation then that Skirata's did, all reassurance and concern. "You'll be okay, Dar."

What if they weren't actually going to kill me? I never waited to find out.