"No, just saying..."
Scorch tried to avoid thinking too much because life was now full of questions that were beyond his power to answer or even influence. They crept up on him at unguarded moments: in the 'freshers, or while he sat in the gunship en route to an insertion, and just before he fell asleep. Where was the Grand Army going to get more troops? If they started cross-training more meat-cans as commandos, who backfilled their positions? Things looked more stretched every day.
And where were all those zillions of shabla droids the Separatists were supposed to have? They had plenty, but if they had as many as Intel claimed, they must have been having a party somewhere and sitting out the war. One of the Null ARCs swore blind that there was only a fraction of that number deployed.
The Nulls knew a lot that they didn't share with the commando squads. When they didn't know something, Scorch got worried. He kept forgetting how many zeros there were in a quadrillion, but whatever it was, it was a lot more droids than he'd encountered.
"Maybe Palpatine will have to start recruiting citizens," he said hopefully.
Sev laughed. He didn't do that often. "I'd rather work shorthanded than have to serve with mongrels. You've seen what they're like as fleet officers. You want them as infantry?"
"At least the war would be over quicker. We'd win or lose horribly."
"True. Brutal, but true."
But what happens to us when it ends?
It was the kind of question that whiny bunch Omega kept asking. Scorch couldn't plan that far ahead. All he knew was that the Grand Army would run out of troops in a year or so, if casualty rates held constant, and he wasn't seeing anywhere near enough replacements coming in.
"Someone said that Palpatine's started producing clones on Coruscant because he doesn't trust the Kaminoans not to get their facilities trashed by the Seps again," Scorch said.
Sev huffed and got on with calibrating. "Yeah, like the rumor that we were getting some super-duper new ion cannon..."
He was right. It was another dumb rumor like so many they'd heard before. If the Chancellor was breeding more clone troops, he'd have told everyone, just to boost morale and scare the Seps. And if he had them, he'd deploy them.
Scorch had seen evidence of neither.
But if he was breeding them... they wouldn't be ready for a long time. Kamino clones took ten standard years to mature.
No, it was all buzz, the stream of tall tales, general half-heard gossip, and occasional nuggets of truth that circulated among the ranks. There were no extra reinforcements on the horizon.
