Skirata didn't look up. His head was tilted down as if his focus was fixed on the blade, although it was always hard to tell where a helmeted man was looking. Eventually, after a dozen more intensely irritating scrapes of the knife, he sheathed it in the housing on his right forearm plate and paced along the bridge, then back again.
Mereel was late, and he hadn't commed Skirata.
"He'll be here," said Vau.
"I know."
"Even if he doesn't get the pilot, you've got the planet."
"He'll get the pilot"
Maybe it didn't matter if Mereel didn't find him. Dorumaa was 85 percent ocean except for the artificial resort islands, so any landing was easy to track. There was nowhere that Ko Sai could hide a laboratory on the surface, either; she'd have to go underwater.
It explained the equipment being freighted around. Ko Sai was looking to build a hermetically sealed lab, and maybe not just because she wanted it to be hyperclean.
Skirata flipped open his datapad and thrust it under Vau's nose. "There's the hydrographic charts, anyway."
Vau tried to make sense of the three-dimensional maze of colored contours. "Remember it only goes down to fifty meters. The developers were too scared to risk surveying any deeper."
"Then the same goes for her. And she'd have to pick a natural rock formation to hide in, or she'd need to import a lot of heavy engineering to excavate something."
"You better hope it's within the fifty-meter depth, then ..."
"Kaminiise aren't a deep-sea species." Skirata held out his hand for the datapad. "If they were completely aquatic or could cope with depths, they wouldn't have been nearly wiped out when the planet flooded. They just like to be near water, preferably without too much sunshine. So ... what better place to hide than a nice sunny pleasure resort? Who's going to look for her there?"
Vau snorted. "Delta Squad . .. the Seps ... us .. ."
"I didn't say she had any common sense. Typical scientist. All theory. No idea how bounty hunters work."
"Well, she's evaded you for well over a year."
"Yeah? And now she's run out of road."
Vau hadn't actually disliked Tipoca in the eight years he'd been cooped up there. Inside the pristine stilt-city, it could have been any urban environment; he didn't miss shopping and entertainment, so it was largely indistinguishable from Coruscant, although the lack of hunting troubled Mird. The strill stalked Kaminoans instead. It even caught one once, but its prey was just the blue-eyed variety, the lowest genetic caste of Kamino, and the gray-eyed elite seemed only annoyed at the loss of a menial.
Yes, that was probably the day Vau's ambivalence toward Kaminoans evaporated, and he joined Skirata in thinking of them as aiwha-bait.
"And what are you going to do when you get hold of her?"
"Take her research."
"And?"
"And what?"
"You think she'll have a file marked SECRET FORMULA FOR STOPPING THE AGING PROCESS IN CLONES----DO NOT COPY?".
Skirata clicked his teeth, impatient. "She'll need to be persuaded"
"No, you'll need to get her to work for you. That means no choppy-choppy slicey-slicey."
"Or get another geneticist on the case."
"Of course. They're ten a credit. They queue up at employment centers."
"Look, Walon, I'm not stupid. I know there'll be a gap to fill between getting hold of the research and making it into something my boys can use."
"Just reality-checking."
Skirata's voice had the tinge of a smirk in it. "And I can get my hands on a geneticist who knows her way around a Fett genome."
Vau kept his gaze on the riverside path, distracted slightly by a loud glop as something leapt from the river beneath and snatched a low-flying creature that might have been avian or insectoid. Either way, it was lunch now.
"Tell me you're not thinking what I think you're thinking," he said slowly.
Skirata ejected his knife from his forearm plate again and resumed sharpening. "Atin nearly got killed hauling her shebs back from Qiilura. Might as well make it worth the journey."
"Oh, you are thinking it. You're insane. Dr. Uthan's kept under tight Republic security. Chancellor's office level."
Skirata just laughed. Vau suspected he had no idea what his limits were, and that he'd get killed finding out the hard way. The fool should have grown out of it at his age.
"Last I heard," Skirata said, "was that she was bored out of her skull and reduced to trying to interbreed soka flies in her cell to stay sane. They don't care who they work for, these folks. No ideology. They just want to play with their toys. If she can develop a clone-specific pathogen for the Seps, she can apply Ko Sai's research-if you can take it apart, you can rebuild it, right?"
Vau had to hand it to Skirata. He always thought outside the box. "I'll consider that an incentive for getting Ko Sai to do the work."
Skirata sheathed his knife again, and the two of them leaned on the bridge rail to contemplate the twin evils of pol-luted waterways and having to wait so long at their time of life. Mird wandered around, rubbing its jowls on the bridge balusters to mark its territory.
"Here he comes," said Vau.
Mereel had acquired yet another form of transport. He had a great fondness for speeder bikes, and he seemed to be riding a different one every time Vau saw him. He had no idea whether Mereel came by them legally or not, but the Null trooper had a pillion passenger this time, and as the speeder drew closer it was clear that the being sitting behind him was a very scared green Twi'lek male. Vau could tell from the way his lekku looked rigid. It was the Twi'lek equivalent of white knuckles.
"He's very persuasive, is Mer'ika." Skirata ambled off the bridge and stood blocking the path, hands on hips. "So you stopped for caf and cake somewhere, son?"
"Had to take a call from A'den, Kal'buir" Mereel gestured to the Twi'lek to dismount. "But I thought you'd want a face-to-face chat with our esteemed colleague here." He slid off the speeder and nudged the Twi'lek. "Okay, Leb, tell Kal 'buir about your job on Dorumaa."
"It was legal," the Twi'lek said. "I didn't do anything wrong."
" 'Course you didn't." Skirata always sounded at his most menacing when he was doing his paternal-reason act. "Just tell me about it."
"I delivered a consignment of six construction droids and dry-lining materials to a barge half a klick off the coast of Tropix Island Resort."
Vau tilted his head at Mird, and the strill went into its softening-up routine, padding around the Twi'lek, brushing against his legs, and occasionally stopping to gaze up at him and display a yawning mouthful of teeth. It was a sobering spectacle. It sobered the Twi'lek right away.
"Can you show me on this chart?"
Leb the Twi'lek grabbed Skirata's proffered datapad and tapped frantically on the small screen, lekku quivering. "There," he said. "I checked the coordinates. The barge was there. Moored out to sea."
Skirata held the shaking datapad steady for him. "Did you collect anything later?"
"No. Nothing. One-way journey."
"What did the barge look like? Any propulsion unit on it?"
"Only a maneuvering repulsor. The kind the resort hotels use to round up the pleasure craft after a storm."
Vau started calculating in his head. "And you'd recall the weight of materials you delivered."
"I had to make several trips from the resort because the barge couldn't handle it all at once."
"So the barge was unloaded a few times?" Skirata asked.
"Oh yes."
"How long did that take?"
"I waited maybe twenty, thirty standard minutes after each drop."
"And who collected the stuff?"
"Human male, not very old, brown hair ..."
The Twi'lek ground to a halt, eyes darting from Skirata to Vau to Mereel as if he was going make a run for it. It was easy to forget how intimidating a Mandalorian helmet looked to outsiders when they were deprived of all the visual cues of facial expression, and couldn't work out how well their information had been received.
Skirata moved his hand to his belt, and Leb flinched. He seemed surprised to get a credit chip rather than a blaster in the face.
"Thank you for your cooperation, son," Skirata said, and patted him on the cheek with exaggerated care.
Leb hesitated and then jumped on the speeder. So it was his after all: Mereel turned to watch it go.
"What a helpful fellow," Vau said. "Are you going to draw the search radius on the holochart or shall I?"
"Well, better find out the maximum speed of a Dorumaa resort barge first." Mereel took off his helmet and scratched his cheek. "I'm piloting, yes?"
Skirata nodded. "You okay with that?"
"If Ord'ika can drive the crate straight out of the manual, so can I. Let's get moving. And . . . A'den had some worrying news."
Skirata stopped in his tracks. "How worrying? Why didn't he call me?"
"He called me. It's tangential, let's say."
"Spit it out, Mer'ika."
"Someone sent two covert ops troopers after the ARC who went AWOL on Gaftikar. Sent after, as in assassination, but they ran into Darman instead and he slotted both of them. He's pretty upset."
Vau didn't need to see Skirata's face to guess what he was thinking. They made their way back to Aay'han in silence and sealed the hatches, preparing for takeoff. Skirata sat in the copilot's seat and flipped switches.
"Who ordered it, Mer'ikal" he asked quietly.
Mereel propped his datapad on the console, glancing at it as he carried out his instrument checks. "I don't know, but it's not necessarily Zey."
The news was a nasty little time bomb. Tangential-no, for once Mereel was wrong. It wasn't tangential at all. It was about trust and loyalty. It was the kind of revelation that would gnaw at all of them more deeply as time wore on, and combined with whatever Mereel had dug up on Kamino about the future plans for troop strengths, it proved none of them had quite as full a picture as they'd imagined, and also that there were things they weren't trusted with.
Like not being told that Delta is going after Ko Sai.
Vau strapped himself into the third cockpit position and tried not to think about the identity of the unfortunate covert ops troopers, because there was a good chance that Prudii- Null ARC N-5-had trained them. They were just ordinary troopers who'd shown a bit of promise for dirty work, selected from the ranks to backfill some of the roles that would have otherwise fallen to Republic commando squads.
"If it was Zey," Vau said carefully, "the chakaar should have told us they were operating on the same turf as Omega simply for everyone's safety."
"Covert ops gets tasked by the regular GAR as well as SO, Walon." Skirata was usually quick to pounce on any perceived Jedi failing: maybe he was developing a soft spot for Zey, who did seem remarkably understanding of Skirata's idiosyncratic style of command-a command Skirata didn't technically hold. He was a sergeant who pushed generals around. "Or maybe Zey knows exactly how I'll express my disapproval of putting down clones when they get too free-thinking, so he forgot to mention it."
"Then again, maybe it's Republic Intelligence."
"But that nice Chancellor Palpatine assured our lads that they'd have a secure future in recognition of their loyalty and sacrifice."
Mereel took exaggerated interest in the controls and lifted Aay'han from the landing strip. "Either way, we clone boys know just how much the Republic loves us when push comes to shove, don't we? And we won't forget that in a hurry."
Skirata put his hand on Mereel's shoulder. "We can only trust our own, son."
"Like the covert ops guys ..."
"You think they had all the facts in front of them? You think they had any choice?"
These were almost certainly men they knew, and that made it hard to swallow. Vau wondered if they would still have carried out their orders if they'd been sent after Prudii-or Mereel, or Ordo, or any of the Special Operations men or Mandalorian instructors who'd taught troopers their commando skills. Vau marveled at Skirata's continuing ability to absolve clones of all blame, but he did have a point.
"Humans follow orders," Vau said. "Even human Republic Intel agents, of course. We're herd animals. We all default to training."
"Well, I'm defaulting to mine." Skirata gave his restraining belt a couple of tugs as if he didn't quite trust Mereel's ability to execute a smooth acceleration to the jump point. "Which is covering my shebs, and my boys'."
"How, exactly?" Vau asked.
"Safe haven, a few credits, set 'em up in a better line of work. New identity and a new life."
"Yes, I know all that, but how are you going to do it? You can't exactly place an ad." Vau traced the outline of an imaginary holoboard in the air with his fingers. "Troopers! Fed up with your life in the Grand Army? Feeling undervalued and unloved? Call Kal!"
Skirata scratched his forehead. "Word gets around."
"Word gets around to the wrong people, too ..."
"Escape networks have always run that risk."
"That's not an answer."
"I'll just have to pick my network very carefully, then, won't I?"
Aay'han was clear of the atmosphere now, maneuvering carefully through the maze of gravitational fields in the Bog-den system to reach a safe hyperjump point. Mird, who never liked takeoffs and landings, climbed onto Vau's lap and buried its head under his arm with a lot of whining and snorting to ensure that he knew it was displeased. He rubbed the strill's back to reassure it, and marveled at Mereel's ability to pilot a ship like a Deep Water with just the manual open on the console and a little intuition. They were clever boys in-deed, these Nulls.
I think I like clones better than regular beings. They 're superior in every way. Maybe we should keep them at how and send the Republic's random humanity to be the cannon fodder.