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Rain pecking at transparisteel rouses me from a light doze. I roll my neck and unfold my legs from the cockpit chair, extending my limbs in a deeply satisfying stretch.
Droplets of water coalesce as they slip down the forward viewport of the Havoc Marauder , and I stand up to lean over the pilot’s console and look at the grey, cloudy sky beyond the lip of the Ord Mantell City spaceport landing bay. It’s a normal rainy day on Ord Mantell, but I wish the weather hadn’t picked this moment to precipitate. Nothing I can do about it now, though.
I straighten up and listen to the other sounds in the ship. Besides the rain on the hull, there is little else to be heard but the soft taps and clicks of someone at a computer console. I walk aft to the narrow passageway connecting the cockpit and the rear cabin, stopping to lean against the cockpit bulkhead.
Seated at the port computer station is Echo, oblivious to my presence—and the rain—in casual clothes that make him look like a regular civilian like me, not an elite veteran and now mercenary. His features are illuminated by the bright blue light of the computer display, and I take felicitous delight in watching him work the console for a while, content and feeling refreshed from my nap. Echo and I had agreed to share a meal in the market together before the rest of his squad returned, but only after we had both rested from a long session of grueling repairs on the Marauder from damage sustained during their most recent job.
I enjoy working with Echo so much, and it kills me that Echo has to be away all the time. Every second that he’s gone I worry that something might happen to him, and I lose my mind with the thought that no one will know to tell me if someday the unthinkable happens. I might never know. I might be staring at my comlink for years, begging the universe to just tell me that he’s okay, as illogical as that sounds. It’s what I do regardless, in between short messages shot across the stars while I try to focus on my job as a mechanic, a job that I love, a job where I bring order to chaos and solve identifiable problems, where the unknowns can be quantified in a list and checked off, forgotten.
While lost in my thoughts, Echo must have stopped working. He is facing me in the console chair now, watching me. The edges of his eyes wrinkle in the faintest hint of a smile that blossoms into the rest of his face like sunshine rolls out from behind the clouds. I can feel that warmth, and it’s how I see him in my memory when I need reassurance that he’s come back before and he probably will again.
I walk through the passageway into the rear cabin, and he stands up.
“How was your nap?” he asks.
“Pleasant,” I say. “And hunger-inducing.”
“Well, it’s a good thing we planned on dinner together, then, isn’t it?”
I smile at him. “Unfortunately, we planned dinner on a rainy day.”
Echo steps past me and ducks down to catch a glimpse out the forward viewport. When he comes back, he takes my hand and gives it a squeeze. “All the more reason to do something nice.”
Echo releases my hand and walks aft to the storage bins, riffling around in one and returning to me with an odd, long, rod-like object.
“Where I’m from,” he says, “it rained every day of the year. Nothing we can’t handle. Come on.”
I follow him to the cockpit, and he lowers the ramp. A cold breeze slips into the ship, bringing with it the smell of the rain. Water pelts the ramp stairs and drips from the hull above the opening. Echo holds out the rod into the rain as if it’s a sword and presses a button with his thumb. Six evenly-spaced spines spring out from the rod in radial symmetry, hinged at the top of the rod and connected to each other by triangles of thin membrane.
Looking rather proud of himself, Echo smirks at me.
“It’s a combat umbrella,” he explains, “for commandos jumping from high-orbit. But it’ll keep the rain off us all the same.”
I grin and shake my head at him. “I bet you impress all the girls with that fancy thing.”
“I only break out the umbrella for girls I’m dating,” he teases.
“Wait. We're dating? Since when?”
For a moment, Echo gives me a horrified look before catching on.
“I know I haven’t been a civilian for long, but if there’s one thing I’ve figured out it’s that we’re dating,” he says in good humor. “And if we hadn’t been, well, that would be the first thing I’d get sorted out.”
We smile at each other, and I say, “Shall we?”
Echo offers me his prosthetic elbow, and I hook my arm around his. As we disembark, he swings the umbrella up over our heads, and we walk right through the rain. I cling to him as we dodge puddles and pedestrians on our way to our favorite hole-in-the-wall dive. We pause under the awning and Echo shakes the rain from the umbrella, trying to fold it back down. As if it has a will of its own, the umbrella springs open once or twice and he grumbles at it, which makes me giggle because it’s cute when he’s grumpy at silly little things.
When he triumphs, we head inside and share a big bowl of green curry because it’s all he can afford after purchasing supplies to repair the ship. I always offer to pay when we’re out together, though I’m not exactly rolling in credits myself, and he always turns me down with a patient kindness. I think he’s uncomfortable letting me help financially, which I understand, but I also think that he enjoys the agency credits afford in life beyond a military that never once considered paying him or any clone wages. I don’t want to take that away from him.
The Rodian owner clears our bowl and spoons when we finish our meal and tries to offer us something new and experimental to try for dessert. She says it has frozen insect legs and it’s very sweet, but after glancing at Echo attempting to keep a grimace off his face, I politely decline. The Rodian shrugs, fills our water glasses, and disappears back into the kitchen.
“It’s quiet in here today,” Echo notes.
“Not everyone has a handsome, intelligent boyfriend with an umbrella like I do.”
He blushes and fidgets with the condiments in the middle of our tiny, square table. “I forget sometimes that Kamino weather isn’t normal on every planet. I didn’t even know what sunlight felt like until I was ten years old.” He glances up at me. “Ten clone years, that is.”
I place my elbows on the table and rest my chin on my folded hands. “Do you miss Kamino?”
Echo looks out the restaurant window, the skin between his eyebrows creasing ever so slightly. “Yes. And no. I think of it as my homeworld, but I don’t think of it as home, not anymore. When we deployed, my brothers were my home, and when I lost them, Clone Force 99 became home.”
He pauses for a moment. I watch the soft orange light of a street sign ripple across his face as it passes through streaks of water pouring down the window.
“I do miss the rain,” he says. “It was always there, like my brothers.”
I follow his gaze out the window and try to imagine what it might be like to be on a planet that never stopped raining, millions of identical drops all with the same purpose, the same short lives, with no control over where they went or when they would disappear. Yet they became something more when they joined together.
With a finger, I wipe a droplet of condensation off my glass and hold it in front of my eyes. A tiny bulb of water hangs from my fingertip, threatening to let go at any moment, and before it can, I see the restaurant inside its fragile, clear body, I see the orange light outside, I see myself, and, just beyond the droplet, I see Echo.
I suck the droplet from my finger and stare at the marred surface of the table, mildly embarrassed. I rub a deep scratch with my thumb. Echo reaches his hand across the table and rests it on my wrist.
“Find anything interesting?” he asks.
I close my eyes for a few seconds, the cold of the metal table contrasting with the heat of Echo’s hand on my arm, the smell of spicy curry filling my nose, splashes from speeders’ repulsorlifts disturbing pools of rainwater on the street.
I open my eyes again and find his. “Nothing we can’t handle.”
