501st: An Imperial Commando Novel Read Online Free Page A

anything. When they got outside, he walked into the center of the parade ground, took off his helmet, and gestured to Darman to do the same.
    This had to be done in silence. Normally, they could have switched to a secure comm circuit and safely discussed anything within the privacy of their helmets, but Niner had no idea if the new kit had comm overrides that he didn’t know about. It was the kind of thing he could have handed to Jaing or Mereel to pull apart, but the Null ARCs were half a galaxy away. He’d improvise.
    “What are you doing?” Darman asked.
    Niner held up his forefinger for silence. “Testing the proximity sensors. Put your helmet down.”
    As far as onlookers were concerned, they were just two clones testing new and still unfamiliar armor systems. Niner laid his helmet on the ground and walked away from it, beckoning Darman to follow suit. When they were far enough from the helmets to be out of audio range—and then some, just in case—Niner stopped.
    “Okay, Dar, we walk back toward those buckets in a few moments, like nothing happened. Got it?”
    “You’re paranoid.”
    “I’m
sensible
. Look, Dar, what do you want most right now?”
    “Does it matter?”
    “Yes. It does. Do you want to leave? Do you want togo to …” Niner hardly dared say it, but at some point it had to be said. “You want to go find Kad? Look after him?”
    Darman’s expression was unreadable. If only
Bard’ika—
Bardan Jusik—had been here now; he could have Force-sensed Darman’s real mood. But he wasn’t, and Niner could only guess, because the Darman he knew didn’t react the way this Darman did. Niner had spent two days reading medical texts while he was recovering. He didn’t understand a lot of it, but he now knew there were states of mind called dissociative amnesia, where the mind shut out the memory of terrible events just to be able to cope with everyday life. He was sure Darman was doing that.
    “I don’t know that name,” Darman said at last.
    Niner had no idea how to handle this. All he could do was keep an eye on his brother and hope that time really did heal. “Okay,” he said. “You want to stay here.”
    “What else would I want to do? I’m a commando.”
    “It’s all right, Dar. You’re going to be fine.”
    There was nothing else Niner could say. Darman hadn’t mentioned Etain since the night she was killed. Niner decided it was still too risky to raise the subject. But he made up his mind that he’d get Darman out of the Imperial Army by brute force if necessary. How—that was another matter. But he was a commando. He’d think of something.
    “Are we done?” Darman asked. “Because Vader’s giving us our briefing in a few minutes, and I hear he’s pretty tough on bad timekeeping.”
    There was no more Sergeant Kal, the indulgent father, and his loose regulations. There was a command structure of officers, and things were a lot tighter all around. The only part of their previous lives as Republic commandos that they’d kept—apart from the Deece—was their ID numbers, now with an
IC
prefix.
    They’d think that changing our numbers was like changing our names, wouldn’t they
?
    Niner began to wonder if he was making excuses forthe Empire, attributing gestures that it simply wasn’t making. Perhaps that was his own way of staying sane.
    They kept up the pretense of walking toward their helmets to see if the alarm kicked in, which at least told Niner that something in Darman still knew he had a secret to keep. For a moment he wondered if Darman’s paranoia about the Empire was even worse than his own, and this was just a conscious act maintained twenty-four hours a day so that it never slipped. But it was hard to tell. Darman put on his helmet, killing any further chance of private conversation, and they strode off in silence to the briefing hall.
    Niner wasn’t sure what he was expecting to see when he got there. The ranks of commandos waiting for Lord Vader