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Rex grabbed his rifle and sprinted for the street. He didn’t look back at Coric or the injured trooper. The two Jedi generals—Kenobi and Skywalker—were already in the open, dodging blasterfire. When Rex got level with them, he could see a wall of droids, rank upon rank, marching toward them in that weird synchrony. It wasn’t the same as a well-drilled army of human beings. The precision was cold, unthinking, inexorable, as if the tinnies would keep marching right on over you and crush everything in their path. It was the SBDs, the super battle droids, that really got to him.

He sighted up and aimed.

It was the way they ran with their firing arms extended. And they had no visible heads. Any tinny could kill you, but at least the regular droids looked vaguely human.

Do they think? Do they feel? Do I care?

No.

Us or them.

Rex squeezed off a few rounds, smashing into the front rank. It wouldn’t do more than slow them down. It never did. The game was all about numbers, and the droids had them. Clone troopers, roused from brief sleep or caught while gulping down dry rations, took up defensive positions.

Clone Commander Cody sprinted to Kenobi’s side. “Where the stang did they come from?”

General Kenobi didn’t seem too pleased with his young general. “I told you they caved in too fast,” he said, swinging his lightsaber in an arc to deflect a volley of blaster bolts. It was hard to hear him over the blasterfire. “Some victory, Anakin …”

“I wasn’t the one who decided to send the ship for supplies …” Skywalker stood his ground, lightsaber grasped two-handed. “Master.”

“Neither of us is perfect, then, and let that be our lesson—second wave incoming, men. Stand to.”

Anakin swung around. “Platoon, on me!” he barked, tapping the top of his head in the signal to form up. Skywalker even sounded like a soldier. He was an easy general to follow. “Rex, see that building? The energy sphere? Best position, I think.”

Rex flicked the macrobinocular setting on his helmet to get a close-up view. “You want to go around behind.”

“It’s risky, but we can make it.”

“Okay, let’s go for it, sir.”

Chunk-chunk-chunk. The battle droids marched like a single machine. Rex hated that noise. It just would not stop.

Droids relied on numbers and keeping coming, and coming, and coming. Rapid reaction wasn’t their strong suit. They also preferred a nice level battlefield and wide open spaces. Rex signaled to the platoon, indicating that they should melt back into the deserted streets and alleyways of Crystal City, then transmitted the coordinates of the objective via his helmet comlink. A chart of the streets leading to the energy sphere appeared in the head-up display in every trooper’s helmet. Rex didn’t really need to use hand signals with that level of communications tech, but it was an instinctive thing to do—and if the HUD systems went down, they all had to fall back on good old-fashioned, nondigital soldiering.

Coric grabbed his medical field kit. The FAS moved with the front line.

General Skywalker darted for the entrance to a deserted office block, Rex at his heels, to pick through the rubble and passages of the city and make their way back behind the droid lines. The route ran parallel to the main street. Kenobi, Cody, and a company of troopers returned the heavy fire raining down on them from the advancing droids; Rex couldn’t see it, but he could hear it, and feel the shocks under his boots. Plumes of gray smoke bloomed into the air.

Keep ’em occupied, Cody …

Rex scrambled over a shattered fountain that was still gushing water from a broken conduit. This must have been a nice place to live, once; Rex tried to cast his mind back to just a few days earlier, when Crystal City had been a landscape that seemed carved out of glittering gems. The civilian population had already fled by the time ground troops had landed.

It felt like a lifetime ago, and he’d still not seen a live Christophsian. Plenty of dead ones, though. Plenty of them. His nightvision filter kicked in as he ran down a sloping passage