[Spots]

As the crab-monster sagged forward in a feeble, dying lunge, Spots jammed the muzzle of her blaster into its maw and pulled the trigger. And that was it. Battle over. She pushed the now-unmoving carcass off her to see that all other hostiles had been eliminated. DL-8192 looked fine. Tico was on her knees dry heaving with Chewbacca at her side.

Finn was back on his feet, but cradling one arm and bleeding copiously from it. Dameron was next to him looking at the wound. H-482 was still on alert, head on a swivel, looking unconvinced the encounter was over. DL-1364 was as lifeless as a set of armor on a rack, but she was standing with blaster in hand and no evident injury.

Spots looked around again, counting helmets. "Ten-ten? TN …" She shoved herself to her feet. She could see him. He was still on his back, but he was moving. He had a knee up, legs moving restless and uncoordinated. One arm was pulled across his chest, reaching toward his other arm. She clambered over the crab to get to him. "TN-1017?"

"You're not supposed to," he said weakly as she reached him.

"What?"

"You're not supposed to pay attention to fallen troopers."

"Not until the battle's over, idiot, and it is." She knelt next to him, but she didn't know what to do. One of his arms had been bitten off right above the elbow. Blood was spurting from it even faster than from Finn. The armor of his breastplate was fine, but the strap that connected it to the back plate had been sheared off and there was a matching chunk taken out of the jawline of his helmet as well. The bite power required to do such a thing was enormous. He was bleeding from a deep wound to his shoulder underneath. But … the arm. "Your arm."

"I think it … bit it off." His head lolled back, breath rasping unevenly in his helmet.

"I think it did, too," she said faintly.

H-482 came up behind them and took a good, long look at Ten-ten. "Well, kriff."

Spots, on her knees, didn't get any warning of H-482's intentions. A blaster bolt burned through the air next to her, catching TN-1017 in the neck seal of his under-armor. He made a gurgle and a jerk, the noises lost to her as blood spattered her visor and painted the world red. She shuddered. All she could think was that H-482 had turned somehow. He was the enemy.

She lunged upward, bringing her blaster to bear on H-482. They were so close that he smacked it out of the way with his own, making her shot go wild. She tried to bring it back. He rammed her with his shoulder, knocking her off her feet. He was yelling. A lot of people were yelling.

DL-1364 grabbed her, fell on top of her maybe. But at least Spots registered her as a squad mate, as much as she was coming to realize the Old Man was not some enemy simulation to be destroyed.

H-482 said, "Take her blaster! Get a hold of yourself, soldier!" Then he jerked to the side, blaster leveled that way as his attention shifted to Dameron, who had just come dashing up. "This is none of your business, scum!" Some degree of silence fell over the group.

DL-1364 took Spots' blaster. Spots told her, "I didn't … I … I thought …"

DL-1364 said, "It'll be okay. It's okay. Just calm down. Just like they told me. Just be calm. It'll be okay. Follow orders. Don't think about it. It'll be okay." The vocoder stripped out much of the emotion from her voice, but the advice was strangely heartfelt nonetheless.

Spots laughed morbidly and looked over at Ten-ten. He wasn't going to be okay. He was dead – H-482's bolt had killed him instantly. She got to her feet and wiped at the blood on her visor, although that only made things worse. "My mistake," she said to H-482. "I thought you were … someone else."

"You still think that?"

"No. No sir."

He reached over and took Spots' blaster from DL-1364. "We are in the middle of who-knows-where. There is no medbay in reach. There is no extraction coming. We didn't even bring a first aid kit!" He shook the rifle for emphasis, holding it by the stock so the barrel was pointed at the sky.

H-482 went on, "He was bleeding out. These things are meat-eaters and scent-trackers. If we left here right now, we couldn't get back to the shuttle before dark. You know why these things were lying in wait here?"

She shook her head dumbly.

"Because it's dark under that wing."

She looked at it, eyes wide behind the visor of her helmet.

"Out of all of you misfits, I liked him the best. But if any of us are going to make it back alive, we have to be able to pull our own weight."

She nodded. He offered the blaster rifle. She took it silently, still processing the brutal practicality of his words, along with how dire he must think the situation to be if he was leaving her alive after what she'd done.

Dameron had been standing there all along, not saying anything as H-482 had his say. Now he said simply, "You try to kill another one of them and I'm killing you."

"Thanks for the warning, sleemo," H-482 said.

"That applies to all of us." This came from Tico, who was back on her feet looking recovered.

"That's not helping" H-482 said in the flat tone of the vocoder.

"Killing your own people is not helping!" Dameron said in sudden, frustrated outrage.

"He was dying anyway!" H-482 insisted.

"So are all of us, at some point. Don't hurry it along. Okay?" Dameron seemed to be genuinely asking, pleading, under the anger.

H-482 made an eye-rolling head-wobble and moved past Dameron, avoiding the obvious opportunity to shoulder-check him. "DL-8192, status report."

"Fit for duty, sir," DL-8192 said.

Dameron muttered sarcastically, "Yeah, I'm sure everyone's going to say that. Stars." He turned to Spots. "You okay? For real?"

She nodded slowly and reached up to take off her helmet. "I need to wipe this clear. There's blood … But I don't have a cloth." Once the helmet was off, there was no way to conceal that her voice was shaking. DL-1364 was still next to her, closer than normal. There was something comforting in that.

"Kay. Give it here." Dameron took the helmet from her and scrubbed the visor on the arm of his shirt, soiling the fabric but clearing the visor. "I'm sorry," he said as he handed it back.

"For what?"

"For …" He gestured toward TN-1017's corpse.

"I hardly knew him."

"Don't do that," Dameron said curtly.

"Do what?"

"Don't let what they've done to you kill your spirit. Your soul. You're a person. You're not a machine. None of us are. He wasn't."

She swallowed and fidgeted with the helmet, thinking about how mechanical it had felt to turn on H-482. It should have been impossible, but she'd felt like she was on autopilot. Wasn't that the point of all their endless training? DL-1364 bumped her with an elbow and told her quietly, "He's right."