Chapter 10: Discussing Defeat
The setting sun provided the scattered members of Deredith's Memory ample shadow to feel safe enough to emerge from their hiding spots, and settle into an uncomfortable dialogue. It had been almost two whole days since the failed attempt at capturing Bakura's principal communications facility, and the survivors of the botched attack had kept out of sight as they had planned should something go wrong. Mace Windu's suggestion that, in case of failure, the surviving pilots first meet at a neutral location hadn't been well received or understood. Most of the others were, after all, novices when it came to implementing battle plans, but they had done their best to follow the well conceived, if not overly cautious, escape plan. As it turned out, Mace Windu had devised a flawless design to avoid capture, and none of the pilots had been tracked to this secret location some fifteen kilometers away from the home base where the others, presumably, waited anxiously for their pilots' return. Unfortunately, the fact that they had had to use the escape plan at all did not sit well with some of the people packaged into the small cave that had been chosen as the emergency rendezvous point.
One of those people was Implik Gulliston; former leader of Deredith's Memory.
"What did I say? What did I say?" Implik spoke to everyone present, and to no one at all.
Mace Windu had been the last to join the other four men seated around the makeshift, and hastily prepared fire which crackled and spit like a small predatory creature, cornered and desperate, Mace remembered seeing before on Haruun Kal a few months after the start of the Clone Wars. It reminded him too that at least three of the people in the shelter, surely feeling equally cornered and desperate, were still reeling over the recent events involving some of their comrades-in-arms. While Implik Gulliston had forbidden his tears from making an appearance in front of the others, the same could not be said about Jolk Fabaree and Sacca Chiff. Both strong but normally silent men had, upon seeing the few who had also escaped harm, wept openly for their lost friends, and in at least one case family, but had soon settled down into a morose silence. Mace even noticed his own apprentice, Makkan Libb, had lowered his eyes and chin so as to not upset the men beside him who might consider his lack of tears to be offensive and uncaring. Finally, with an iron edge to his voice, Mace Windu spoke aloud.
"Sit down, Implik. That's enough. We were all there, and we're all suffering in our own ways. But that's enough."
Implik's next words died in mid-air, only to be replaced by an incredulous "What?".
Mace's eyes narrowed perceptibly. "I said that's enough. It's over, Implik. We have to look forward now. I'm sorry."
"You're sorry. You're sorry. Are you kidding me? You heartless bastard. Did you not see those people, our people, killed…slaughtered? Those ships came out of nowhere and blew our guys into dust. And all you can say is 'that's enough. It's over.' It was you're stupid plan in the first place, and all you can say is 'sorry'. What is wrong with you?"
But before Mace could say anything, Implik roared again.
"Some of our best men and women died out there today. Rayna, Thull, Sorro-Nu, the list goes on. We lost twelve, no, thirteen ships out there. We…" Implik's voice cracked for the first time since he'd begun speaking. "…I lost some good friends today, and you, Jedi, you don't care one bit." Implik stopped talking, and stomped out towards the entrance of the cave where he gazed at the gathering darkness, and sighed noisily hoping in some way that the sound further demonstrated just how angry he was.
Mace pinched the bridge of his nose until it actually hurt. His vision swooned and clouded over while in his mind the sight of Implik Gulliston's wry smile across his thin face stared back into Windu's soul. A shatterpoint perhaps? Windu would have liked to have had more time to think about, to consider, what he was seeing, but the vision quickly faded away at the sound of Makkan Libb's voice.
"Master. Master Windu, they're leaving. You have to stop them."
Mace looked down into the coal black eyes of his dark-haired Padawan, then searched the cave for the other men. From the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of Sacca Chiff's tight, teal jumpsuit disappear behind a bulge in the rock that formed the cave's opening. Mace made to follow them but found that the mechanical legs beneath him did not want to respond as efficiently as they ought to. There was no problem with his prosthetics, they were functioning within normal and expected parameters, but, at that moment, they seemed too bulky to offer Windu the speed he felt he needed to cover the relatively short distance that lay between him and the entrance from which Implik and the other two men had just left. Eventually, he brought the short, but trying journey to an end.
"Where are you going?" Windu almost expected the men to continue on their way, ignoring the Jedi, and was pleasantly surprised when the three of them turned around to face him. As they did, he ran his hand over his shaved skull, and felt the jagged scar that he'd earned in his battle with Palpatine and Skywalker so many years ago.
"If you leave now, you're turning your back on those people who died in the skies above us. You're turning your backs on the people waiting our return in the valley below. You're turning your back on Deredith's Memory. Everything we've earned, and won, and, yes, lost, will mean nothing. Nothing. I think we would dishonor the sacrifices our people, our friends made for our cause, for a better life, if we turn our backs on this endeavor now. I can live with their deaths on my conscience provided we don't give it all up because we lost a fight. I can't live with the disgrace of making their deaths just another empty promise of 'well, we tried'. Can you? Can you live with that?"
Jolk and Sacca shuffled towards Windu before the invisible grasp of Implik Gulliston's gaze grabbed them both by their collars and held them in place. The two bulky men looked at each other, then, as if they had rehearsed it, they shrugged simultaneously. Sacca, the more vocal of the otherwise quiet duo, shifted his mass back towards Implik, the smaller man's arms placed rigidly at his sides, and whispered, "He's right, you know. We can't just leave now. We owe it to…them." Sacca had almost said his sister's name, Liolla, but the memory of her final words, 'I'm hit. I'm done', still echoed in his mind. He had tuned into Liolla's comm unit after he'd witnessed a TIE fighter's green lasers chew up his sister's port side, and had hoped to talk her down safely to the planet's surface. Instead, he had only permanently superimposed the final brilliant image of her Buzzard disintegrating into a million pieces onto his mind's eye. There, they burned brightly enough so that even the few fits of sleep he'd managed over the last forty-eight hours were spent in agony and despair.
Implik's glare softened, he knew intuitively what Sacca had meant to say, and the fight in him disappeared. He staggered to the rock wall to his left, supported himself with the palm of his hand against the cold, hard stone, and muttered something no one else could hear.
Mace took the incident as an indication that his men needed more time before returning to the base camp, before having to return to the others with the smell of defeat still clinging to their bodies, and with the knowledge that defeated men did not always speak honestly with their words but with the sadness in their eyes. He nonchalantly ordered them back into the cave for the night. None of them resisted, but Implik managed a long moment of unspoken, but clearly hateful, words directed at Master Windu as he passed the Jedi to gain entrance to the burrow that would protect them from the coldness of Bakura's night.
It would not protect them, however, from what wait for them fifteen kilometers away at, what was for the moment to them, a safe retreat.