Sev was first out as the starboard hatch swung open, drop-ping into grass that came up to his shoulders and smeared his visor plate with water. The ground squelched under his boots. He ran with his head lowered, shielded by the grasses, and Delta went into a sequence they'd drilled for a hundred times: storming an enemy vessel. Once they were close in to the fighter, there was little it could do, and with one wing missing it wasn't going anywhere in a hurry. Scorch fired a rappel line to hook onto the superstructure, then hauled him-self up to slap a strip of flexible charge around the hatch.
"I'd knock," Scorch said, dropping down again and diving for cover, "but I think they'll be upset about the wing ..."
Bang.
The hatch blew out, flinging twisted metal into the air, and Sev dodged a chunk that whistled past his helmet. His legs moved before his brain engaged and he leaned partway through the hatch, suddenly face-to-face with a human female pilot who had an impressive blaster. The shot knocked him backward, but blasterfire wasn't enough to penetrate Katarn armor, and he simply shook himself and raised his Deece again, finding his mind completely blank except for the single purpose of returning fire.
Sev fired. There was no such thing as winging someone or shooting them in the leg, whatever the holovids depicted, and he did what he was trained to do. The cockpit was full of smoke, the pilot draped at an awkward angle across the seat. It was only when the smoke began clearing that Sev realized there was a copilot, a man, and he was dead, too.
"Shab," Sev said. "Maybe I could have done that better."
Scorch peered into the cockpit. "Let's try that again with-out the dead bit, shall we?"
"I wanted a chat with them...," Boss said. He hauled Sev back by his shoulder and rapped him in the chest plate. "Now how am I going to work out who they are?"
"Leave it to me." Fixer pushed past them and scrambled into the cockpit, hauling the bodies out of the way and push-ing them out onto the grass with a wet thud. "At least I can interrogate the onboard computer and tell you where they came from."
Boss and Scorch contemplated the bodies in the grass, turning them over and rifling through their flight suits. Now that the adrenaline was ebbing, Sev felt a mix of vague dread flood him just as it had when he'd screwed up in training. There was no Sergeant Vau around to give him a good hiding for his incompetence, but it was as bad now as it ever was. Next time he saw Vau, he knew that his old sergeant would see the failure on his face and give him grief for it. There was no good enough. There was only perfect. Sev had no excuse for not being perfect, because he'd been designed from the genome up to be the galaxy's best. Anything he got wrong was down to laziness.
There were no excuses. Vau said so.
It was like waiting for the blow to hurt.
"Well," Fixer said. "Interesting." He jumped out of the Crusher and brandished his datapad. "They passed through Kamino. And they transmitted data back. I'll unscramble that later."
Scorch sucked his teeth noisily. "Tipoca's not exactly the crossroads of the Outer Rim . .."
So the Kaminoans had sent someone after them-after Ko Sai, in fact. Nobody popped into Tipoca City uninvited or stopped to refuel. You only went there if you had business with the Kaminoans.
"Bounty hunters?" Sev asked.
Boss examined a handful of chips and flimsi. "We can crack the identichips later. The important thing is that we know we're not the only ones who've tracked Ko Sai this far, and the aiwha-bait will know all about Da Soocha by now."
Sev was starting to feel anxious. They were definitely going up against the Kaminoans and the Seps now. It was going to be a race. Tipoca would send someone else as soon as they knew the Crusher was missing, if they didn't already.
"Better get a move on," said Scorch. "No telling who else we'll have to elbow out of the way."
Sev trailed the others back to the TIV, still uneasy and angry with himself for not taking the Crusher's crew alive.
"No," he said. "Could be anybody."
Chapter 8.
Soldiers of the Grand Army, in honor of your courage and service in the fight against oppression, you shall want for nothing, and become instructors of the next generation of young men to defend the Republic.
-Chancellor Palpatine, in a message to all ARC troopers, commanders, and GAR commando units on Republic Day * * *
Caftikar, 477 days after Geonosis Darman was making sure the Marits knew how to lay charges for rapid entry-they did, all too well-when the woman walked into the camp.
He couldn't tell it was a woman at first because she was wearing a freighter pilot's rig, multipocketed gray coveralls that engulfed her, and a heavy pair of durasteel-capped safety boots. But when she turned down the collar that was shielding the lower half of her face from the wind, he could see it was a female human about Skirata's age, with short, light brown hair and a gaunt face that gave him the feeling she checked out the latest in blasters rather than fashion.
She didn't walk like any of the women he knew, but maybe that was the boots. He'd grabbed his Deece before it dawned on him that A'den wouldn't be such a slacker on security as to allow just anyone to approach.
Even so, Darman checked the charge on his Deece and stood by just in case. If an Alpha ARC could be caught off his guard, there was always the chance that the Nulls weren't as omnipotent as everyone thought, either. A'den strode toward her, Sull ambling behind him in the same drab working clothes.
Fi and Atin wandered out from the main building to watch. Fi held Sull's gray leather kama in one hand with half the blue lieutenant's edging removed. He'd insisted on having it. With the blue bits unpicked, he said, it went with the red-and-gray armor he'd salvaged from Ghez Hokan. Fi liked order in his wardrobe.
"Who's she?" Atin asked.
"K'uur!" Darman strained to listen. "I can't hear with you yapping."
A'den obviously knew her. He shook her hand, indicated Sull with a jerk of his head, and handed something to her, which she waved away, but A'den shoved it into her top pocket. All Darman heard of her response was, ". . . rather have news of..."
The wind took the rest. There was a storm coming. At least Darman had the speeder to take him to Eyat to clear out Sull's apartment rather than trudging through the rain again. Sull seemed to be listening intently to the exchange between A'den and the woman, and then they both turned to him and A'den slapped him on the back. Sull's expression was set on what Darman now thought of as ARC default: deliberately blank, with one eyebrow slightly raised as if in disdain for the rest of the galaxy. That probably summed up ARCs pretty well.
"Come on, there's a good boy," the woman said, and beckoned to Sull to follow her. Astonishingly, he did. "Long way to go."
A'den called after her. "I'll do what I can, Ny, okay?"
So her name was Ny, and that could have been the entirety of it, or short for any number of names. She paused to glance at the squad as if she'd never seen clones together before- chances were she hadn't, he thought-and went on her way.
Darman could only imagine that she was Sull's transport out of the system, and that guaranteed his obedience at least for a while. But if an ARC wanted to leave Gaftikar under his own steam, he could have found any number of ways to do it-Whatever A'den had said to him during that ARC-to-ARC chat must have been very persuasive.
Fi watched the incongruous pair vanish among the trees at the edge of the camp. The woman looked like a kid alongside Sull.
"Maybe it's his mother," Fi said, trying on the kama with a critical frown. "And he's grounded for a month for not doing his chores."
"Stop going on about mothers." Atin seemed to have lost interest. "You don't know what any of that means. It's all off the holovids. Like some new alien species learning about humans."
"Yeah, well, maybe that's what we are." Fi undipped his helmet from the back of his belt and rammed it onto his head, shutting out the world again. His voice emerged from the audio projector. "Aliens in a society of human beings. Excuse me, will you, gentlemen? I have to go play with some lizards."
Cebz, the dominant Marit, scuttled around the camp but seemed to be keeping an eye on the squad. She could, after all, count, and maybe she was curious about the fluctuating number of clones in the area. If A'den hadn't leveled with her, then Darman wouldn't, either.
"I better go and clear any evidence out of Sull's place," Darman said to Atin. He prodded his brother in the chin, right at the end of the thin white scar that crossed his face from the opposite brow. It was still visible through his beard. " 'Cos I can look like him and you can't."
"You say that like it's a good thing .. ."
That was another advantage of being a clone. It was easy to take a brother's place; few folks would be any the wiser, except those who really knew you. Darman put on Sull's original clothes, noted that they were loose on him-had he lost that much weight?-and set off in the speeder for Eyat.
On the journey, he pondered the nature of mothers and what it might have felt like to have one, deciding it must have been a lot like having Sergeant Kal around all the time. Kal'buir said they'd all missed the necessary nurturing of a parent when they most needed it as babies. Darman often wondered if he would have been a different man had he been nurtured- whatever that meant in real terms-but he couldn't feel what was missing in his life, only that something was.
Lots of things were, in fact. He'd only known what some of them were when he touched Etain for the first time. And Fi seemed to see many more things that were missing than even he did.
Can 't change the past. That was what Sergeant Kal said. Only the future, which is whatever you choose to make it.
Darman couldn't feel angry about Sull's decision to make a run for it, only a vague envy, and an uncertainty about whether he would have done the same.
Can't leave my brothers in the lurch. They put their lives on the line for me, and I do the same for them.
He put it out of his mind and concentrated on the road, knowing that if he ventured any further into those thoughts, then things would start to become confusing and painful. He distracted himself with finding the route to Sull's apartment again, reversing the route he'd taken out of Eyat.
Almost without thinking, Darman set the speeder down a little way from the apartment, walked around the block to check if he was being followed, and then ran up the external stairway to let himself in. A human male coming along the access walkway toward him nodded in acknowledgment to Darman, as if he knew him.
"Your boss was here, hammering on your door," he said, not stopping. He kept talking and walking as he looked back at Darman. "You been away?"
Darman was a lot more confident about his acting skills since the Coruscant deployment. "Yeah ... I suppose I better explain myself to him ..."
The man shrugged and went on his way. So far, so good. Inside the apartment, the place was as they'd left it after the scuffle with Sull: Darman hadn't cleared it out while he'd been waiting for Atin to return with transport, partly because he didn't know if they'd need to use the place for cover in the near future. The back of his hand still showed the neat purple depressions of Sull's no-holds-barred bite.
It wasn't the kind of place he would have picked to live, Darman decided. There was no rear exit, and the windows were poorly placed to keep watch. Sull must have felt unusually safe to risk living in such an indefensible location, and that in itself was unexpected in an ARC trooper.
Sull hadn't amassed a lot of effects in the couple of months he'd lived here. He had two changes of clothes in the closet, basic hygiene kit in the refresher, and a conservator full of food, as if he spent all his wages on it. That's what we 're all like, isn't it? No idea what to do with possessions, but always hungry. Darman checked for anything else that might identify the ARC as being a GAR officer, and found a packet of crumbly, very sweet cookies that were irresistibly coated with seeds of some kind. He munched happily as he rummaged through the apartment. The place was military-tidy and anonymous, apart from a neat stack of holozines next to an equally neat stack of holovid chips that showed Sull stayed home at night.
Caged nuna. Yeah, even an ARC found it hard to step out-side the cage when someone opened it. Maybe Sull had been sampling the outside world at a distance, through the entertainment that regular folks took for granted. Darman wondered where Sull was now: well clear of Gaftikar space, anyway.
The apartment's comm was flashing with unanswered messages. When Darman played them back they were- predictably-a broken stream of angry invective from a male voice demanding to know why Cuvil-not Sull to his new acquaintances, then-hadn't shown up for work again. There were also a couple of silent calls, brief clicks before someone shut the link again. Darman wondered where Sull had picked the name Cuvil and went on sorting through bins and other hiding places for any telltale links back to the Grand Army.
It wasn't the Gaftikari that he was trying to throw off Sull's trail. It was his own side. Suddenly that bothered him, be-cause now they were all complicit in helping the man desert, and that was a lot more serious than going outside their rules of engagement on Triple Zero to take out a few terrorists. There was no way this could be spun as getting the job done.
Darman was still checking the holovids to make sure there was no rental code on them that would lead back to Sull when his fine-tuned instincts told him something wasn't right.
It was the way the silence outside seemed ... heavy.
Sometimes there was the kind of quiet that was just ambient sound with nothing to disturb it. Then there was what he thought of as an effort to be silent. That was what he could sense now. Somewhere in his subconscious, his brain had processed something he hadn't even noticed hearing and tripped his alarm.
There was someone outside.
The blinds were still drawn. Darman knelt on the floor and placed a sensor on the exposed tiles, trying to detect the faintest vibration. The red bars of the readout showed occasional spikes that usually meant footsteps, even though he couldn't hear movement when he concentrated. He took out his blaster, checked the charge, and squatted down behind a chair to see what happened next, holding his breath.
When the doors opened-very quietly-he didn't dare look around the chair and expose his position. Whoever had let themselves in held the two sections of the door apart so that it didn't close with a characteristic faint slap, but eased slowly back again. Then he smelled something very familiar: the faint scent of lubricating oil, the kind used on blasters and vibroblades.
Darman wondered for a moment if Sull had given his key code to a girlfriend and not mentioned it, but he knew what females smelled like and this wasn't female. He wondered what kind of company Sull kept at work, and if his boss had run out of patience and sent someone around to teach him what happened to no-shows.
But Eyat didn't seem like that kind of place. People here seemed ... almost friendly.
Darman watched a shadow fall across the carpet against the hazy light filtering through the blinds. Then another one joined it, and there was the faintest creak.
They knew he was here.
But maybe it was the local police, and the neighbor had realized he wasn't Sull after all, and alerted them to an intruder.
"So, Alpha-Thirty, you thought you'd try a new career, did you?"
He thought he knew that voice.
No, that wasn't something the Eyat cops would care about. The faint rustling of fabric and the occasional snatched breath came closer. Darman squatted with his sidearm steadied in both hands. Then the shadow fell on him.
He looked up into a masked face, eyes covered by a sun visor, and he was staring at a blaster muzzle as he fired. He pulled the trigger even before he consciously registered the blaster aimed at him because his training and common sense and raw instinct told the primitive, self-protecting parts of his brain that a masked man sneaking around was a bad, bad sign. He shot him in the face. It was a simple reflex.
The man fell backward with a grunt and a flash of blue light. Another shot sizzled past Darman's ear, but his brain didn't bother to get involved as his hand aimed of its own free will and sent blaster bolts-one, two, three-into an-other moving object that was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The shots must have hit the second intruder: Darman smelled burned hair. He instinctively dropped and found himself lying on the floor next to the inert body of the first man he'd shot, a figure in black coveralls with a charred hood covering the face. He scrambled to grab the man's dropped weapon-a DC-15s sidearm-and took cover behind the angle of a wall, listening for movement.
The Deece handgun bothered him, because he had one, too; but Sull hadn't. It wasn't issued to ARCs, not that they didn't acquire whatever took their fancy. He folded the magazine flat and shoved it in his belt.
Now there was no way out of the apartment other than back through the doors-or out through one of the front windows. Getting cornered was a weird mistake for an assassin to make. Darman was trapped in an apartment with someone who was trying to kill him-or Sull to be precise.
Darman knew he should have simply rushed the second man, firing both blasters, but he'd lost his momentum. If this was Republic Intelligence, they were badly misnamed. They hadn't done a recce of the apartment.
Republic Stupidity, more like.
Or maybe they'd been very sure they could take Sull any-way.
Holovid directors would have been disappointed, he knew, but he didn't bother to call a challenge to the other man. He sprang to his feet and came out firing, because there was nowhere to hide in a place this small, and no real protection offered by the furniture. It was simply a matter of who hit who first.
Darman fired, and fired, and fired.
The man, all in black, stepped out from the alcove near the door and took the blaster barrage full in the chest. It knocked him back a few paces, but he didn't drop-and that was when Darman knew he was in real trouble and simply charged him. He knocked the man flat with sheer brute force and got a grip on his head, jerking it so hard to one side that there was a wet, muffled snap and the man went limp.
All Darman could hear now was his own breathing. He sank back on his heels and listened hard in case there were more men coming. But there was nothing.
Had the neighbors heard? Were the police on their way?
He had two dead men on his hands. That wasn't an unusual situation for a commando, but it was bad news in a city that wasn't supposed to know it had been infiltrated.
Before he decided whether to make a run for it, though, there was something he had to find out. Blaster aimed squarely at the head, he checked each body, grabbing the hood-like mask by the seam at the top and working it loose. Doing that one-handed was harder than it looked. The first man he'd shot was hard to identify with his face blackened and shattered, but he had familiar black hair. The second- he was recognizable, all right: and so was the gunmetal-and-purple armor disguised by his coveralls.
It was the face Darman saw every morning when he shaved.
He'd shot two clones, men just like him right down to the last pair of chromosomes. He'd killed two covert ops troopers.
The GAR was sending clone assassins after their own men.
Mong'tar City, Bogg V, Bogden system, 477 days after Geonosis "I think you should leave this to me," Vau said as gently as he could. Laying down the law never worked with Skirata. "A little cold distance might be called for."
Skirata leaned on the rail of the bridge with one hand while he honed his three-sided knife on the metal. The thin rasping sound set Vau's teeth on edge; Mird rumbled with annoyance at each scrape, too. Beneath them, the most filthy and polluted river Vau had ever seen attempted to flow like curdled milk. There was more debris than liquid.
"I'm not sharpening it for the pilot," Skirata said.
"That's what I meant. Kaminoans don't answer questions when they're in slices."