Chapter Text
The holotable threw Umbara into the air like a bruise.
Serra had studied ugly planets. She'd garrisoned swamps that smelled like the inside of a rancor, defended infrastructure on worlds where the rain stripped paint from armor, spent three weeks on a moon so humid the men's socks had developed ecosystems. She had, by this point in the war, a working taxonomy of planetary misery — atmospheric, geological, biological, bureaucratic — and she could usually place a new world within seconds of seeing its tactical profile.
Umbara didn't fit the taxonomy. Umbara looked like someone had taken a perfectly serviceable planet and turned off the lights.
Permanent twilight. Bioluminescent flora that shed just enough glow to ruin your night vision without actually letting you see anything. Fauna that was, according to the xenobiology brief she'd read at 0300 because she couldn't sleep, "adapted to low-light predatory behavior" — which was the scientific community's polite way of saying everything on this planet hunts in the dark and is very good at it.
The holo rotated slowly above the table, sickly violet light playing across the faces of the sixteen people crammed into the Resolute's main tactical suite. Generals, commanders, senior staff. The combined brain trust of the Republic's Outer Rim campaign, assembled to plan an invasion of a world that did not, by any reasonable assessment, want to be invaded.
Serra stood at the far end of the table, between Anakin Skywalker's elbow and a structural column that was slightly too close to her left shoulder. The room had been designed for twelve. Sixteen was ambitious. The ventilation was losing.
"Umbara controls one of the primary hyperspace junctions linking the Core Worlds to the Mid Rim," General Kenobi was saying, one hand resting on the table's edge, his voice carrying the measured cadence he used for briefings. "As long as the Separatists hold it, they can reinforce either of their fronts within hours. Taking Umbara doesn't just give us the planet — it gives us the corridor."
He touched the holo and it expanded, the planet shrinking to show the surrounding hyperspace lanes. Blue for Republic. Red for Separatist. A web of intersecting lines that converged on Umbara like threads pulled to a knot.
"The Umbarans have formidable ground defenses," Obi-Wan continued. "Mobile heavy cannons, starfighter superiority in-atmosphere. Their technology is, in some areas, significantly more advanced than ours. Their militia is well-trained and fighting on home ground, in conditions they've evolved to exploit."
Serra watched the room absorb it — the slight shifts in posture, the narrowing of eyes, the quiet calculations behind every face. Anakin was already leaning forward, jaw set, running scenarios. Saesee Tiin stood like a wall, arms folded, processing at whatever speed Iktotchi processed things, which in Serra's experience was faster than they let on.
And Pong Krell.
He stood along the wall behind the main table, in the position reserved for support staff and coordinators. Logistics and Supply Coordination, Outer Rim Theater. That was his current title, the latest in a series of titles that each carried the same institutional subtext: too effective to dismiss, too dangerous to trust with troops, too politically complicated to resolve. The Council's recall and review had stripped him of field command. It had not stripped him of access.
He was here because the invasion needed supply lines, forward staging, and ammunition projections. He was here because someone had to coordinate the logistics of landing forty thousand troops on a planet that didn't believe in daylight, and Krell — whatever else he was — understood large-scale military operations at a level that made him useful enough to keep in the room.
Four arms folded. Yellow eyes half-lidded. Taking up space along the wall with a dense, cold patience.
Serra kept her eyes on the holo. She could feel him in the Force though, as a gravity at the edge of her awareness, pulling light inward.
She hadn't seen him since the Temple. Since the hallway. Since equipment.
She'd learned to manage the anger. The first time she'd read his name on a joint-operation roster, two months after his recall, she'd spent an hour in a maintenance crawlspace talking to a filtration pump about the fundamental inadequacy of institutional accountability. The pump had been sympathetic. Hotfix, who'd been in the adjacent crawlspace replacing a circuit board, had listened to the entire monologue without comment and then offered her a wrench.
Now she managed it the same way she managed all the impossible things the war kept handing her: she compartmentalized, she breathed, and she kept her hands loose at her sides.
"The invasion plan calls for a three-pronged assault," Obi-Wan was saying, bringing up the tactical overlay. The holo shifted to terrain, rendering the planet's surface in ghostly topography. Mountains. Dense, alien forest. The capital city glowing like a cold star at the center of a defended plateau. "The 212th and 17th will lead the primary push from the southern landing zone toward the capital. General Skywalker's 501st will advance along the northern corridor, cutting off reinforcement routes. General Tiin will hold the western flank and provide overwatch."
Three arrows on the holo. South, north, west. Neat lines converging on a single point, the way battle plans always looked neat on a holo and never looked neat on the ground.
Serra studied the terrain between the arrows. The spaces where the lines didn't go.
"Questions," Obi-Wan finished.
Anakin spoke first, because Anakin always spoke first. "What's our intel on anti-air capability? If their starfighters are as good as the brief says, the landing is going to be the hard part."
"Agreed," Obi-Wan nodded. "We'll need fighter superiority established before the ground assault begins. Admiral Yularen is coordinating the orbital phase — we anticipate twenty-four to thirty-six hours of space engagement before the first boots hit dirt."
"And the ground defenses?" Tiin's voice was gravel. "The mobile cannons. If those are operational when we land —"
"Then we take significant casualties in the landing zones." Obi-Wan didn't soften it. He rarely did, these days. "Which is why the advance team's role is critical. We need the heaviest emplacements neutralized or degraded before the main force arrives."
Serra's eyes moved back to the terrain. The dark spaces. The valleys and ridgelines between the three arrows, where the Zabrak Spine forests grew thick and the canopy reached forty meters, blocking even the meager ambient light that Umbara's star provided.
There.
She traced the ridgeline with her eyes, followed it north from the southern landing zone, across the flank of the capital's plateau, past a series of geological formations the holo rendered as craggy, uneven terrain — karst, maybe, or something analogous. Honeycombed rock. Landscape that swallowed people.
Landscape that hid them.
She kept her eyes on the holo and said nothing. An idea was forming with the itch that meant her Service Corps brain was waking up.
At the head of the table, Obi-Wan's gaze moved to her for a fraction of a second, barely a glance, reading where her attention had gone, and then away.
"I'd like everyone to take fifteen minutes with the terrain data," he said. "Fresh perspectives on the approach corridors when we reconvene."
Serra found a corner with a viewport and pulled up her datapad, scrolling through the Umbaran terrain data with the kind of intensity she usually reserved for structural load calculations.
The planet was a logistics nightmare. Electromagnetic interference would degrade long-range comms. The perpetual twilight would mess with standard optical systems. The vegetation was semi-sentient and, in some cases, actively predatory. Republic intelligence had managed to acquire partial maps of the terrain, but "partial" was doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
And yet.
She'd spent four years of her life looking at terrain like this, as infrastructure. Water tables. Structural integrity. The questions were different now, but the instincts were the same.
If you needed to hide two thousand people underground for weeks, could you do it?
She started running numbers.
"What are you seeing?"
She didn't startle. She'd felt Obi-Wan approaching in the Force.
"Possibly nothing," she said, without looking up. "Possibly caves."
"Caves." He came to stand beside her at the viewport, close enough that their sleeves almost brushed. "I thought the geological surveys might catch your eye."
She glanced up. "You've been putting geological surveys in every briefing packet since Halamine."
"Yes, well. I've developed a healthy respect for what happens when they are overlooked." His mouth twitched. "Those canyon walls rather made the point."
They had. The assault plan on Halamine had called for advancing through a canyon that everyone assumed was solid basalt. Serra had looked more closely at the terrain analysis and recognized sedimentary layering, ready to slide if hit with artillery in the right spots. After that, geological data had become a standing item in Kenobi's briefing packets. He didn’t always know what to do with it, but he'd learned that someone at the table might.
"So," he said. "Caves."
"I don't know yet." She turned the datapad so he could see the karst formations east of the capital — the honeycombed ridgeline, the deep geological fractures. "This terrain. If it's anything like the survey suggests, the subsurface could be extensive. Interconnected. The kind of geology that supports sustained habitation, not just shelter."
"You're thinking about this as infrastructure."
"I'm thinking about this as someone who spent four years living in places that weren't designed for people and making them work anyway." She pulled the datapad back, scrolled to another section. "I have an idea. It's not fully formed yet."
"How not fully formed?"
"Enough that you should probably brace yourself."
His eyebrow moved. "Should I be concerned?"
"I'd say somewhere between 'unconventional' and 'insane,' and I haven't decided which end yet."
He studied her for a moment, reading the seriousness underneath the self-deprecation.
"Don't hold back in there," he said. "If you see something the rest of us missed, the room needs to hear it."
She nodded and turned back to the datapad. In addition to the numbers and the geological surveys and the itch of an idea still taking shape, she also felt the quiet certainty that came from being trusted to think, not just to follow.
"Obi-Wan?"
"Mm?"
"Thank you for the geology."
He quirked an eyebrow. "I put it in for everyone, Serra."
"I know. But I'm the one who reads it."
The room reassembled. The fifteen minutes had done what fifteen minutes always did in a room full of tacticians: sharpened some questions, raised new ones, and given everyone time to find the specific thing about the plan that worried them most.
Obi-Wan reopened the floor. "Approach corridors. What are we seeing?"
Anakin went first, outlining a fighter screen for the northern landing zone that was aggressive, expensive, and would probably work. Tiin raised concerns about the western flank's supply line. One of the senior staff officers — a logistics commander whose name Serra didn't catch — flagged the ammunition consumption rates for sustained operations in low-visibility conditions, which were ugly.
Then the discussion turned to the southern corridor, and the room got quieter.
"The southern approach is the most exposed," Tiin said. "The defensive emplacements along that corridor are dense, overlapping, and well-positioned for coordinated fire. An advancing column takes heavy casualties."
"Which is why the advance team matters," Obi-Wan explained. "The commando squads are tasked with degrading the southern emplacements. If they achieve primary objectives ahead of schedule, secondary targets along the northern corridor —"
"How many teams?" Serra asked.
The interruption wasn't sharp, but it was precise. She'd been listening to the southern corridor discussion with the same intensity she'd been studying the terrain, and the math had fallen into place.
"Two commando teams," Obi-Wan answered. "Eight to twelve operators, inserted seventy-two hours ahead of the main force."
"For the southern emplacements."
"Correct."
"And the northern corridor stays untouched unless they finish early."
There was a beat as everyone felt the subtle collective tension that arises when someone pulls a thread that unravels an assumption they’d all been stepping around.
"They won't finish early," Serra continued evenly. "Not with two teams on a planet they've never operated on, in conditions that negate most of their technological advantages."
The silence held for two beats longer than comfortable.
"What are you suggesting, General Vey?" Tiin's arms were still folded, but his head had tilted — the Iktotchi tell for genuine interest.
Serra touched the holo. The terrain expanded under her fingers, showing the ridgeline she'd been tracing, the dark valleys, the karst formations. She drew a line with her fingertip from a point twenty klicks east of the southern primary landing zone, arcing north through the forest canopy, crossing the northern corridor's defensive perimeter from behind.
"A sabotage force," she said. "More than commandos — a full legion. Inserted ahead of the main invasion, operating independently in the deep terrain. The mission wouldn’t be to destroy the defenses outright. It would be to degrade them. Disrupt supply lines, knock out comm relays, disable targeting systems, poison the Umbarans' coordination across the entire theater. By the time the main force lands, the southern corridor is at half capability and the northern approach benefits from system-wide disruption."
She tapped the karst formations. "The terrain supports it. This geology is honeycombed with cave networks. That means natural cover, defensible positions. A force that knows how to live off hostile terrain could operate from these formations for weeks without detection. Hit the infrastructure in the dark — which, on Umbara, is all the time — and fall back into ground the Umbarans themselves don't use because it's too broken to build on."
Anakin was nodding slowly. "Guerrilla ops. Behind enemy lines."
"Advance sabotage with sustained covert presence," Serra said. "Drop them early, let them work the terrain, and by the time the invasion starts, Umbara's defensive network has holes in it that nobody on the ground can explain."
"An entire legion." Obi-Wan's right eyebrow had risen, which meant he was genuinely considering something and also genuinely concerned about it. "Operating without reinforcement or resupply on the most hostile planet in the theater."
"That's the requirement," Serra said. "Commandos can't do this. It's too big, too distributed, too sustained. You need enough people to run simultaneous operations across a wide front, and you need them self-sufficient enough to survive without a supply line. That means a full unit. Engineers, medics, combat teams, technical specialists — the whole organism."
"And which legion," Tiin said quietly, "do you have in mind?"
"The Seventeenth."
She said it simply. No dramatic pause, no rhetorical buildup.
From the wall, Krell stirred. Not much, just a rearrangement of folded arms, but Serra felt it in the Force: a sharpening of attention, cold and precise, like a lens focusing.
"We held a dam against a full tactical droid assault on Hydraal IV," she continued, addressing the room. "We were outnumbered, undersupplied, and operating on infrastructure we'd had three days to learn. We held the dam. We lost six." She paused. "My people know how to fight with less. That's what this mission needs."
"Your people," Krell said.
The room went very still.
His voice carried a subsonic harmonic she'd forgotten, or made herself forget, that pressed against the inside of her chest like a second heartbeat.
"Forgive me, General Vey." The word General carried no inflection, which was itself an inflection. "A logistical question, if I may. Your legion's equipment readiness — the 17th is still operating on surplus allocation, correct? Hand-me-down armor, refurbished vehicles, second-line munitions?"
Serra met his eyes. "Correct."
"And your troops. A mix of —" he paused, as if consulting memory, though she knew he wasn't — "shattered-unit veterans and accelerated-training replacements. Some with extensive combat trauma from prior commands." Another pause, precisely weighted. "Difficult material to build with."
Material.
"My troops are ready," Serra said. "Their equipment readiness is my problem, not yours."
"On the contrary." Krell's mouth curved into a not-smile. "Equipment readiness is precisely my concern, General. Logistics and supply coordination. I'll need full manifests from your quartermaster before any insertion can be staged. Ammunition loads, ration projections, medical supplies, communications equipment. If your legion is going to operate without a supply line, I need to know exactly what you're bringing and how long it will last."
He was right. That was what made it annoying — he was right, and every word was technically appropriate for his role, and the request was procedurally impeccable, and none of it explained why Serra felt her heart rate pick up.
"You'll have the manifests," Serra said with a nod.
"Excellent." He settled back against the wall. Folded all four arms again.
"I'll want a detailed operational plan within forty-eight hours," Obi-Wan said, reclaiming the room's center of gravity. "Insertion method, target prioritization, communications protocol, extraction contingencies. If the plan holds up, I'll recommend it to Command."
"You'll have it in twenty-four," Serra said.
A murmur around the table. Obi-Wan's eyebrow rose another fraction.
"Twenty-four hours, then." He looked around the room. "Other questions?"
The briefing continued. Serra pulled her hand back from the holo and folded her arms, watching the plan evolve around her proposal like water around a stone — other units adjusting, other approaches recalibrating, the campaign reshaping to accommodate a new element. Anakin was already sketching fighter coverage for an early insertion. Tiin was asking about orbital windows.
Krell said nothing more. He stood along the wall with his yellow eyes half-lidded and the cold weight of his attention resting on the holo.
Serra told herself that the chill along her spine was the ventilation.
She was three steps out of the tactical suite when Obi-Wan fell in beside her.
He looked like he’d been waiting for the room to clear. His expression was the one she privately thought of as his Council face: composed, warm, revealing exactly as much as he intended and not a fraction more.
Behind him, five steps back but keeping pace, was Cody.
Serra's awareness of him was instant and involuntary — armor immaculate, the 212th's orange sharp against the Resolute's grey corridors, bucket under one arm. He was here because he was Kenobi's commander, because the scope of the mission she'd just proposed affected 212th operations. All of which was true, and none of which was the whole truth.
"Walk with me," Obi-Wan said.
They walked. The corridor was quieter here, away from the tactical suite's foot traffic, and Obi-Wan matched her pace without speaking for long enough that she knew the silence was deliberate — giving her the space to settle after the briefing's intensity before he said whatever he'd come to say.
"You saw it," she said. "The gap in the southern corridor. Before I raised it."
"I saw the problem," Obi-Wan said. "I didn't see the solution. Not the one you proposed." He glanced at her. "A full legion underground for weeks. I won't pretend that occurred to me. I was thinking about additional commando teams. Conventional answers to a conventional gap."
"And you didn't raise it yourself."
"No."
"Why?"
He slowed his pace. Behind them, Cody's footsteps adjusted to maintain the distance, close enough to hear, far enough to give the conversation room. Serra wondered if that spacing was instinct or deliberate. With Cody, it was often both.
"Because if I'd raised it," Obi-Wan said, "and proposed the 17th for the mission, every officer in that room would have heard the same thing: senior general assigns the patchwork legion to the job nobody else wants. Confirmation of what half the command structure already believes — that the 17th is the expendable unit. The spare parts." He stopped walking. "And you would have been the general who was sent, not the general who chose."
The corridor hummed around them. Serra nodded slowly, beginning to recognize the shape she'd sensed underneath the briefing without being able to name it.
"There's a difference," he continued quietly, "between a commander being deployed and a commander volunteering her people because she knows what they can do. The first makes you a tool. The second makes you a general. I wasn't going to take that from you."
She looked at him. She knew what that steadiness cost. He'd stood in that room and watched her propose a mission that might kill her, and he'd held still, because the alternative did her more harm.
"I know." She held his gaze. "Thank you, Obi-Wan."
He nodded. "Twenty-four hours for the operational plan," he said, stepping back onto practical ground before the moment could settle into anything heavier. "I'll have the Geonosis catacombs file and the Rishi outpost after-action sent to your datapad. Anything else you need in terms of reference material?"
"Anything you have on sustained operations in subterranean terrain. Ventilation, water sourcing, light discipline in cave systems."
"I'll pull what's available." He paused, and his gaze stayed on her a beat longer than the conversation required. "It's a good plan, Serra. If anyone can make it work, it's you and the 17th."
She nodded. Her throat was tighter than she wanted it to be.
Obi-Wan turned to Cody, who had stopped a few paces back.
"Commander, I believe General Vey will need those reference files by 2200 at the latest. See to it, and coordinate with her on the operational plan timeline." His voice was neutral. His eyes were not. "I'll be in the command center if either of you need me."
He walked away unhurriedly, his boots ringing on the deck plates. He didn't look back. He didn't need to.
Serra watched him go, and then it was just her and Cody in a stretch of corridor that the war had briefly, improbably, left empty.
Cody closed the distance — two steps, maybe three — enough to bring them into the space where conversation became private.
"General," he said.
"Commander."
His jaw was set, the first step in the sequence she’d learned to read: jaw first, then the shift of weight, then the thing behind his eyes that he never let reach the surface in public.
"Weeks," he said. "Behind enemy lines. No resupply, no comms relay, no extraction."
"Yes."
"On a planet without sunlight."
"Yes."
She watched him process it systematically, locking the parts that scared him somewhere deep and quiet where they couldn't compromise his judgment, and she willed her hands to stay at her sides.
"You'll have the reference files by 2200," he said.
"Thank you, Commander."
There was a pause after the professional obligations were discharged. And then his gaze dropped to her armor and he blinked.
She'd been wearing the 17th's teal for months, but he'd only ever seen it in holo transmissions, the color washed flat by compression and distance. In person it was vivid, bright against the Resolute's grey.
"You look good," he said suddenly.
The silence that followed lasted approximately two seconds and contained whole novels.
"In the — the teal." His hand came up in a half-gesture toward her chestplate that he abandoned midway. "The color is — it suits the unit. And the orange on the vambraces, that's — the contrast is effective, it —" He stopped and closed his mouth. His jaw tightened in a way that was not, for once, about operational risk. The tips of his ears were pink.
"The paint scheme works," he finished.
Serra had to bite the inside of her cheek.
Marshal Commander Cody, who had coordinated planetary evacuations without breaking stride, who delivered casualty reports with steady precision, who had once told a Separatist negotiator exactly where to file his terms with the same inflection he used to order lunch, was standing in a corridor on the Resolute trying to recover from a compliment about paint.
"Thank you, Cody." She said his name quietly. "You look good too."
She watched the tension drain out of him and something worse take its place, and it was worse because it was simple, and unguarded, and not what he usually showed in a public corridor.
"You kept the orange,” he observed.
She'd painted the stripes herself, one night during her second week with the 17th, sitting cross-legged in her quarters with a thin brush and a pot of paint she'd asked Crate to requisition without explaining why. 212th orange, bright beside the 17th's teal. She hadn't told anyone what it meant. She hadn't needed to.
"Of course I did," she replied, as though he’d stated something obvious. Because he had.
The corridor hummed around them with ventilation, distant footsteps, the ambient machinery of a Star Destroyer preparing for war. Someone laughed in a room down the hall. A droid beeped and was shushed.
"Serra,” Cody murmured, almost subvocal.
She looked at him.
"Come back," he said.
Two words. No context needed, no elaboration. Just the raw, unadorned truth of watching the person he loved walk toward the darkest place in the galaxy.
"I will," she said.
She reached out and touched his hand for a moment. Just her fingertips against his glove, gone before anyone turning the corner could have seen. But her eyes held his, and everything she couldn't say in a corridor on a warship — I missed you, I'm scared, I'll carry you with me the way I carry the orange — she let him see.
She walked away before either of them could make it harder. Her boots were steady on the deck plates. Her hands were loose at her sides. The pressure behind her sternum hadn't eased, but she'd learned that it didn't need to, that she could carry it alongside everything else the war handed her: with open hands and a spine that didn't bend.
Behind her, she heard him push off the bulkhead and walk the other direction. Toward the 212th. Toward the part of the war that was his.
Ahead of her, through the Resolute's corridors and down the docking tube to the TBD's familiar hum, two thousand men were waiting for her to tell them where they were going next.
The TBD smelled like recycled air and fresh paint and the faintly burnt caf that Hotfix's jury-rigged dispenser produced when it was feeling cooperative.
She made it eleven steps down the main corridor before Jet fell in beside her.
"So," he said.
"So."
"I hear we're going behind enemy lines on a planet that doesn't believe in sunlight."
Serra stopped walking and turned to stare at him. “How do you already know that? The briefing ended fifteen minutes ago.”
Jet waved away the question. "Clone gossip, confirmed by the fact that you're walking at planning speed and your jaw is doing the thing."
Serra's jaw was not doing the thing. She made a conscious effort to unclench it, which somewhat undermined her position, and started down the corridor again.
"Briefing room," she said. "Twenty minutes. Senior NCOs, department heads, and —"
"Pebble?"
Serra hesitated. Then: "Yes."
"Copy." Jet didn't break stride. "One question."
"Go."
"Is this a good idea, or is this the other kind, where it's a good idea wrapped inside a terrible idea and you're hoping we won't notice the terrible part until we're already committed?"
Serra considered this with more honesty than was probably advisable. "It's a good plan."
"That's not what I asked."
"It's a good plan, Jet. The terrain supports it, the tactical logic is sound, and the 17th is the right unit for the job."
"Because no one else wanted it."
"Because we're good at operating with less. Because our veterans know what it means to fight from a position no one's coming to reinforce. Because our shinies have spent four months learning to improvise under pressure, and this mission is nothing but improvisation under pressure." She glanced at him. "And yes. Because no one else wanted it."
Jet processed this. His mouth flattened into the expression he wore when he'd heard worse plans and survived them and was mentally cataloguing what this one would cost.
"Twenty minutes," he said, and peeled off toward the comm station.
Serra continued down the corridor alone. Past the mess, where second shift was eating and someone had drawn a truly terrible caricature of a tactical droid on the menu board. Past the medbay, where Scar was inventorying supplies, probably already calculating how many of each item he'd need and adding twenty percent because experience had taught him projections were optimistic. Past the training bay, where the distant sound of blaster drills echoed off the bulkheads. Gauge's platoon by the sound of it, running patterns with mechanical precision, finding safety in repetition.
She paused at the viewport at the junction of corridors C and D. Through the transparisteel, the Ghost Nebula hung in the far distance — a dark smear against the stars, a region where the light thinned and the galaxy seemed to fray at the edges. Umbara was in there somewhere, invisible, waiting in its cocoon of dust and shadow.
Perpetual twilight. Bioluminescent, predatory fauna AND flora. Technologically superior hostile population. Honeycombed terrain that hasn't been properly surveyed.
She leaned her forehead against the cool transparisteel.
We're going to need a lot of glowsticks.
"General?"
She turned. Pebble was standing in the corridor with two cups of caf and the wide-eyed look he got when he was too committed to retreat.
"I heard there's a briefing," he said. "In twenty minutes. Someone said." He held out one of the cups. "I brought caf. In case you hadn't had any. Because the briefing is in twenty minutes. Which I heard."
"From who?"
"Clone gossip, sir."
Serra took the caf. It was terrible. Hotfix's dispenser was not feeling cooperative today.
"Thank you, Pebble."
"You're welcome, General." He fell in beside her as she resumed walking, matching his stride to hers with earnest over-precision. He was still getting the hang of keeping pace with officers without looking like he had practiced it. "Is it true we're going behind enemy lines?"
"Briefing in twenty minutes."
"Right. Yes. Of course." A pause that lasted approximately four seconds. "Is it a dark planet?"
"Briefing in —"
"Because I read that Umbara doesn't have normal light cycles and I was wondering if that affects standard operating procedures for —"
"Pebble."
"Sir."
"Twenty minutes."
"Yes, sir." Another pause, this one slightly shorter. "I'll be quiet now."
"I appreciate that."
They walked in silence for six seconds.
"It's just," Pebble said, "I've never been to a planet without sunlight before, and I want to make sure I pack the right —"
"Pebble."
"Quiet. Being quiet. Right now."
Serra took a sip of the terrible caf and walked toward the briefing room with Pebble's nervous energy buzzing beside her like a moon in a slightly too-close orbit, and behind them, through the viewport, the Ghost Nebula waited with its dark planet hidden inside.
This is a good plan, she told herself.