Dear @loving-the-cambridges - I'm so sorry that your gift is late! It got away from me in the planning stages, but here's a teaser, and I'll update with a link to AO3 as soon as it's posted with the rest (it got so long )
I chose 'Favorite flowers' -- it's hard to tell in this exerpt orz
Obi-wan’s vambrace comm crackles to life at the same time that Cody’s head lifts up.
“Report,” Cody says.
“Command, this is Davijaan. Recon squad has finished our second search pattern. Still no sight of the target. Should we fly a third?”
Cody’s helmet tips toward him. “General?”
“…The report did say that the comms array might be camouflaged in the canyon.” He says it like a riddle, turning the words over as he speaks as if they were the same as the stones and chips of loose scree around them.
“It’s got to have something above-ground, or it wouldn’t be much of a comms array,” Cody points out.
Obi-wan scans what is visible of the skyline.
They’re marching down a lip of one of the canyons that breaks through the dry land of this remote moon– a precarious jut of rock that can fit four men side by side, barely. When they first descended into the canyon, the path could support six abreast, and an AT-TE well in the rear. But the TE had been forced to climb back to the top of the rock walls an hour back, and ahead Obi-wan can see the path continuing to narrow….
Thin columns of glinting rock rise up from the ravine floor far below, knobby insets of harder rock supported by thin necks of the limestone. They look like ornaments. Or spikes at the bottom of a trap.
A scan should reveal a camouflaged comms array among them– should, and yet their intel suggested that the rocks had a way of baffling scanners.
And yet, this mysterious resource didn’t stifle the communications array?
He reaches out to the Force, and finds only unease and a sense of imbalance. Something is wrong, but something has been wrong since this war began. The Cosmic Force is vast, and so is its warning. It’s warning him of something larger than this one moon, this one speck in the void– it calls his attention out, out further than he can perceive, a divide between his mind and the body that is marching, hot, exhausted.
The moon feels like a dozen other dry battlefields, and he knows it is a distinct and thriving place but the sunlight through its atmosphere seems artificial and the richly colored layers of clay and stone feel flat. Plantlife clings to the canyon walls, stubby waxy vines and rockplants with defiantly bright colors that must attract the insects that drone past his ears, but all of it is half-real.
Even this seemingly barren landscape is rich in the Living Force– he knows that, but he can barely feel it.
Perhaps it is a small blessing, that he connects so much more easily to the one aspect of the Force than the other. Perhaps it is why he functions better in a warzone than so many of his contemporaries who are more in tune with the Living Force and the way war bends and distorts it.
“General?”
He jerks back to himself. “Your call, Commander.”
“Any bad feelings?”
“Unease. Something on the tip of my tongue…” he shoots a wry look sideways. “Nothing actionable.”
“I’ve learned to stop asking that,” his commander says wryly. He glances around and leads Obi-wan a few strides ahead out of casual earshot.
“Do you think there’s actually a secret Seppy comms station on this rock?” Cody pitches his voice down, low and soft through his vocoder. He’s become bolder about questioning the quality of their intel, but he’s too good a soldier to do it where his troops can hear.
“No,” Obi-wan sighs. “No, but I have no proof that it’s not. No justification to deny a priority order based on official intel.”
“Understood.” There’s an edge of irony that rings true through the helmet’s vocoder. It’s gone when Cody speaks again, back straightened and head tilted ever so slightly in the manner he uses to indicate to Obi-wan that he’s speaking on his helmet comms. “Davijaan, come in.”
“Sir?” says Obi-wan’s vambrace.
“Fly a third, and expand the perimeter by ten kilometres. Run a full topographical scan over the EM sensors. Keep an eye inward, but don’t look like it.”
“Yes sir,” Davijaan says. Looking again to the skyline, Obi-wan can just see a glint of what must be the survey shuttle turning above them.
“Speaking of official intel,” Cody says, that touch of irony back to his voice, “I note that the planetary scans were taken before this ridge started shedding material. We’re going to have a bit of a detour ahead.”
“Yes. I don’t like our options. I think this route will only get narrower, but the bottom of the ravine is an ideal ambush point.”
“Suggestion, sir?”
“Always, my dear.”
“Let’s call an early halt; we’ve got a little shade now, and the men could use a refuel. I’d like to send a couple troopers ahead under full stealth to do a recce on both paths, and re-establish our maps based on Davijaan’s scans.”
“We’re quite exposed here, Commander.” Obi-wan prods the Force again. …it feels less tight with unease now. “But… perhaps it will do. Yes, this will do.”
Cody is watching him intently. The dark visor may obscure his eyes but Obi-wan can feel his focus. His troopers are a constant in the haze of this war, alive and solid, and Cody is the brightest in a sea of bright lights.
“Something on your mind?”
“Well, sir. Let’s say I’ve got a good feeling.”
Cody steps back towards the men, relaying the orders, and morale rises like a river in the rain. Even without the Force, Obi-wan thinks he would feel it– could see it in the way that weary shoulders lift, and the smiles on the troops’ faces as buckets come off and ration packs start to come out.
He busies himself setting up the portable holoprojector. Hurry, from Engineering, sees him struggling with the one fussy tripod leg and trots over to offer his wordless support. Obi-wan smiles his relief at him as he holds the rig steady so that Obi-wan can straighten the reluctant joint, and is rewarded with an answering smile back. He’s so glad that they’ve all found the comfort to step outside the expectations trained into them of perfect soldiers every waking minute. That they are willing to include him into these moments of open camaraderie…
It is perhaps the only constant source of peace for him, anymore, however undeserved when he may be leading them to their deaths. They understand what happens in war. They forgive with the ease of trained Exploracorps Jedi teams, with more grace than the combatants Obi-wan has had to fight beside in his life before.
Cody has pulled two of the ARF teams into conference a few meters away from the rest. Waxer and Boil are putting away a ration-bar apiece between words, with practiced efficiency– Cato is standing a little too straight, still, in his new armor, and Ajax is all but bouncing on his toes with eagerness to get to it. It will be Ajax and Cato’s first solo mission as an ARF team since their return from training. Obi-wan spares a plea to the Force that it be an uneventful one. Let them be disappointed in their need for action, let them be bored-- they will have their fill of danger before the war is all over.
Beside him, he sees Hurry signal for Cato’s attention: when he has it, he straightens up and puts his chin in the air, striking a somewhat heroic pose. Cato glares daggers at him– for the moment before his Commander draws his attention again and he pulls himself together with desperate poise.
“Gentlemen– I have the updated planetary scans ready,” Obi-wan calls, beckoning them over.
Hurry starts back to the cluster of Engineers with his trademark speed, but Cody catches him with a word.
“Eat fast, trooper. I’m going to want descent guides for our walkers set up at that decline over there.”
To his credit, Hurry doesn’t flinch at being directly addressed. He tracks the eyeline that Cody carves out of the air with two fingers, squinting down at the terrain in question.
“All the way to the bottom of the ravine, sir? We’ll need to double-back to get our equipment. We left it about half a klick back… and we’ll need to reinforce the ridge as a transition point if we don’t want everyone and everything on the bottom of the ravine, too.”
“Then you’d better eat faster.”
“Yessir!”
Cody passes him a ration-bar as they’re mapping the scouting path, and pushes two more onto Ajax and Cato– “You’ll want them before you’re done, take them–” and then finger-skates a route over the new topography. He doesn’t use the tracing feature on the holoprojector, pointing to landmarks on the display instead. Obi-wan is far from scoffing at the caution.
Perhaps at the beginning of things he would have said it smacked of paranoia not to leave a digital record.
This has been… a very characteristic mission. They were given a simple objective, a rather over-specified plan of attack that required the objective being where the initial surveys placed it– and implied that if the 212th were as competent as their reputation, it should be an easy victory like so many disastrous missions before.
There is no objective here, may never have been, and they are operating on an unknown agenda. GAR command is not immune to the Senate funding committee’s whims, and the funding committee is… full of politicians.
What mining magnate might have wanted this moon and its useful mineral deposit under Republic control? Who might have needed attention in this system instead of another nearby? How petty is the reason his men have been set to thankless march, maybe to death if there are Separatist forces here? Who has been given access to their reports, their tactics?
No, there does not need to be a record of these small details.
Cato and Ajax opt to rappel down the cliff instead of taking the decline ahead– Boil and Waxer stroll ahead along the lip and vanish in the broken colors of the rock walls.
Obi-wan watches them both along until they are out of sight, and then sits against the rock wall to make an attempt at meditation. He can calm his body, his mind, but the Force is still hazy, distant from him. At least it’s a rest, and though he finds no guidance the Force does provide the strength to bear him up, to ease the ache in his feet and the dull pounding of his head that the heat and hours of direct sun brought on.
Cody holds the men back until they can see the Engineering corps starting work, AT-RTs repurposed for draft work bustling around at the top of the cliff.
He comes to to stand by Obi-wan, companionably, comming the survey team again; “All right, boys, if it’s all clear come set down by the Engineering Corps, lend a hand.” He clicks his back teeth twice, jaw pulsing, and casually adds: “You can power down; doesn’t look like we’ll be seeing action.”
Obi-wan pushes himself to his feet. “…Commander, that looked for all the world like a helmet control action.”
“Did it, sir?”
“Coincidence, certainly. Out of curiosity, which one?”
“Mute, sir.”
…hmm. Which might well mean disregard the orders following.
“Has anyone told you you’re untrusting?”
“Alpha-17 did, once.”
“I daresay he meant it as a compliment.”
“He did.” Cody gives him a tiny smile, a roguish little twist of his lips that’s there and gone.
