-ARC Trooper A-17, preparing to destroy Tipoca City's clone children during the Battle of Kamino, three months after the Battle of Geonosis * * *
Ko Sai's research facility near Tropix island, Dorumaa, 478 days after Geonosis Skirata had taken an instant dislike to Kaminoans the day he'd found himself stranded on an indefinite contract to train a secret clone army in Tipoca City. After that, the relation-ship with them got worse by the day.
But compared with Mereel... no, he hadn't fully under-stood the depth of the Nulls' loathing until now. And it was the first time he'd heard a Kaminoan scream. It was a long high shriek that went off the audible scale and made his sinuses ache.
"Easy, son." Skirata kept his voice low and caught Mereel's arm, applying just enough pressure to show he meant it. "Not yet."
Mereel looked like a stranger; face drained of blood, knuckles white, pupils wide. He'd always seemed the most carefree lad of the six Nulls, the one who could be most charming, sociable, and entertaining. Skirata's grip seemed to pull him back from across the border of an uncharted dark wasteland. He flicked off the electroprod with his thumb.
"I'm not going to kill her," he said, voice hoarse. "I know too much about Kaminoan physiology to make a mistake like that."
He wasn't bluffing. Ko Sai, slumped in her chair, seemed more skeletal and fragile now than elegant. Her long gray neck was curved down like the stem of a wilted flower. It was amazing what a few volts could do.
"I said you were savages, and I was right." She raised her head and fixed Mereel with those awful eyes. It was the black sclera that did it: if the areas of pigment had been inverted- dark iris on a pale sclera-she might have had a serenely benign expression. As it was, to a human she looked permanently enraged. "Torturing me won't make you any more worthy of survival. You're genetically inferior. You weaken your species."
Her gray pupils marked her as the ruling caste, bred to rule. Mereel flicked the electroprod back on and rammed it into her armpit. The convulsions weren't a pretty sight.
"You created the recipe for my genome, sweetheart." He sounded a lot more controlled now. "And just look what you made me do."
Mereel pulled back and stood flicking the switch back and forth with his thumb. Skirata still hadn't heard every detail of what had happened to the Nulls before he first met them two years into their development-the equivalent of four-or five-year-olds-but he knew far too much already of the way they'd been mistreated. And the botched attempt to improve on Jango Fett's genome had given them a whole raft of problems beyond being traumatized and disturbed. Ko Sai was finally getting practical evaluation of her experiment.
"We had a dirtbag geneticist like you once," Skirata said. "Yes, a mad Mando scientist. Liked experimenting with kids. He's been dust for millennia, but we still know what the name Demagol means. The irony is that it can mean either 'sculptor of flesh' or 'butcher,' so I reckon you two would have had a lot of cozy chats about how to screw up living beings."
"I find the idea of an academic Mandalorian quite amusing," Ko Sai said, all venom and syrup. He hated that voice. "You're not a culture of thinkers."
"Shame on you, Chief Scientist. Have you forgotten the erudite Walon Vau? If you think Mereel's a bad boy with a nerf prod, you need to meet Walon ..."
"Your threats are predictable."
Skirata gestured to Mereel. "Start stripping the data, son. Clear the mainframe."
"Arkanian Micro won't know what to do with it," Ko Sai said. "They don't have the expertise."
"So who does? Who's bankrolling you, aiwha-bait?"
"Nobody."
"All this came from charitable donations, then?"
"I was given credits to carry on my research, yes, but I work for nobody now. Science can't breathe with a paymaster pressing down on it."
"And that's why you've got the Seps and your own government after you. You stiffed them, hence the Mando body-guards. You did a runner with the creds."
"Charming phrase." Her case-hardened arrogance began to crack a little. The faintest note of worry tinged her voice, and she swayed that long skinny neck-just like the ones Skirata had been tempted to grab so many times-to watch what Mereel was doing to her precious data. "If you're not in the pay of Arkanian Micro, then you must be working for Chancellor Palpatine."
Mereel actually laughed, but carried on plugging chip holders and bypass keys into the slots on Ko Sai's system. The wall of the office was rack upon rack of data storage.
"Yeah," Skirata said. "I bet he thinks we work for him, too. What made you leave Kamino? How much did they pay you?"
"I didn't leave for some paltry fee."
"You didn't leave for a sunnier climate, either."
"I left to prevent my research from being exploited by inferior species."
"Oh, you mean the ones that keep your economy afloat by buying slave armies from you?"
Mereel tutted, now fully engrossed in transferring the files. Indicator lights danced and shivered, adding a welcome rainbow of colors to the sterile white decor. "Kal'buir, just hit her, will you? You can't have a meaningful ethical debate with the thing."
Ko Sai seemed genuinely outraged. Even sitting down, she could draw herself up to an impressive height. Skirata wondered where to land a punch on something that skinny.
"Your Chancellor wanted me to use my research into aging to prolong his own life indefinitely. I told him it was a massive waste of my skills to do that for such a corrupted and diseased species."
That was interesting. No, it was more than interesting: it was bizarre. "I bet that went down really well. You need to work on the bedside manner, Prof."
"He's a most disturbing man."
"Yeah, he's a politician." And she was weapons-grade professional vanity through and through. It was worth a shot. "Could you even do it?"
Ko Sai's head swayed like a snake as she glanced at Mereel's back. Maybe she thought he couldn't bypass her encryption. She seemed to have no idea that he'd done it on Tipoca, too.
"Do you think I'd tell you?" Her attention was fixed on Mereel, and she was looking as worried as a Kaminoan ever could. "You're going to corrupt that data, clone."
"I'm not your clone," he said, an edge in his voice. "I have a name."
"I spent my life collating that. It's unique. You might destroy the most advanced body of genetic research in the galaxy. There are no copies of it."
Mereel burst out laughing. "Now, that's funny. No copies of cloning data?" He looked over his shoulder at her and gave her that harmless smile again. "But that's why we came to see you, Mama. Actually, I meant to ask you something. We're somatic cell clones, right? So where did the original enucleated eggs come from? Did you manufacture those somehow? Or was there a prime donor? No, don't tell me. I'd hate to think you found a way to use kaminii eggs."
Skirata watched with fascinated horror as Mereel man-aged to press every button on Ko Sai's eugenicist board.
Kaminoan emotion was so subtle as to be invisible to most humans, but living among them for those years had taught Skirata plenty. She was offended.
"That is repellent" she said. The words didn't match that gentle voice. "We would never pollute Kaminoan tissue that way."
"Good," Mereel said. "Just checking."
"You don't understand."
"I understand fine."
"The only reason we survived the environmental catastrophe on our planet was that we found the courage to weed out every characteristic that didn't make us stronger. Are you Mandalorians so different? How much do you know about your own genomes? You breed selectively for qualities, too, whether you know it or not. You even adopt to add those genes to your pool."
"But we didn't put down the defectives," Skirata said. "We didn't kill innocent kids."
Skirata stared into her face. He'd felt sorry for only one Kaminoan in his entire life: a female who'd produced a child with green eyes. He'd found her hiding in the clone training area, sneaking out to find food during the downtime hours. Green eyes weren't allowed. Gray, yellow, blue-that was the hierarchy that told Kaminoans where they stood and stayed in the scheme of things, whether they were genetically perfect for administration, skilled work, or menial labor. There was no room for any other color. It betrayed intolerable genetic difference.
The aiwha-bait found her, of course, but they only killed the kid. The mother's blue eyes meant that she could live.
"I fail to understand how you can judge us for being selective," Ko Sai said, "when you allowed the clones you claimed to love as sons to be killed."
It wasn't just Mereel who knew how to hit the raw nerves, then. For once Skirata managed to ignore the bait.
"Let me offer you a deal, Ko Sai." He shouldn't have done this on the fly, but he had no choice: it was next to impossible to make use of her data unless someone with her expertise could put it into action. It wasn't like following a recipe for uj'alayi. "We've got your data anyway. Nothing you can do about it. But I'd like your expertise, too."
"Not until you tell me who you're working for." She wasn't a closed door, then. "I'm not working for any-body. This is for my boys. I want to stop the accelerated aging so they can live out normal life spans."
Mereel didn't turn around. He just pulled out full datachips and inserted new ones. "Yes, let's talk about gene switching. Boy, you've got a lot of data in here. More than the Tipoca mainframe. You took a lot with you when you bolted."
Ko Sai didn't answer. Skirata checked the chrono and tested the signal to Aay'han. It was working again. "Walon?"
"I wondered when you'd remember me."
"Tatsushi to go, soon."
"Ahhhh. Give the good lady my regards. Private suite waiting for her."
"Any news from Ordo?" Skirata asked. "Not yet. But you need to get moving."
"Understood."
Ko Sai was getting rattled now. Kal could see it. "How we doing, Mer'ika?"
"Another ten minutes, even with this fast transfer. Then I've got to erase all the layers just in case. When this is gone, it's gone."
Skirata turned back to Ko Sai and took a set of restraints out of his belt pouch. "Either I'm more deaf than usual, or you didn't answer me."
"You can't make me work for you."
"I don't think you can do it."
"And you can't manipulate my self-esteem, either."
"Okay, I'll leave that to the Chancellor, because one of his personally tasked commando squads is coming for you in a few hours, but my boys' need is greater than his, whatever it is." Skirata could see from the head movement that Palpatine had really disturbed her. "Maybe he wants you to front up his secret clone production on Coruscant." No response: did she even know about it? "Whatever made Tipoca agree to ex-porting the technology?"
"A grave mistake."
"Must need Republic creds pretty badly."
"Using second-generation cloning, the Republic might as well hire Arkanian Micro..."
Mereel cut in. "Yes, they'd have to, with Jango dead. Hasn't been quite as successful. Has it?"
"No doubt you divined that from the Tipoca database, too," Ko Sai said. "But I can't think of anything you could you offer me that would persuade me to cooperate with you."
"What's it to you if clones live or die?" Skirata decided to let the Nulls exorcise their demons on her if she proved use-less in the end. "You might even learn something from stop-ping the process."
Her head stopped that slow swaying. He had her attention for a moment, which suggested it was a challenge that might lure her.
"I don't have to beat it out of you, of course," Skirata said slowly. "Plenty of folks around who can extract information by pharmaceutical methods."
"And if they were expert enough to understand Kaminoan biochemistry, you wouldn't need me to unlock the aging sequence."
"Let's see." Skirata gestured with the restraints. "Now be a good girl and let me slap these on you, and don't tempt me to make you wear them."
She paused for a few moments, then offered her wrists with the grace of a dancer. It wasn't the time to negotiate with her; there was a mountain of data to assess before he could be certain he needed her at all, and if she was driven to do this research without wanting to make a profit on it, then the prospect of being able to carry on with it might prove to be enough.
But he could test that.
"You done now, Mer'ika?"
Mereel had a small pile of datachips in one hand, jingling them like creds while he waited. "Just waiting for this erase program to run through the whole system. I don't think any-one's going to recover the data after we've trashed the place, but no point being careless."
It had always been part of the vague plan-asset denial- but Skirata wasn't sure if Mereel was playing the psychological game. It was as good a time as any, though. Skirata took a couple of thermal dets out of his belt and examined them, adjusting the controls with his thumbnail.
"Twenty minutes should be enough time to get clear."
Mereel shook his head. "Make it half an hour. We don't want to still be on the planet when this blows. It's going to at-tract attention."
"Good point."
Ko Sai watched them like lab specimens. "You're bluffing."
Skirata set the dets for remote detonation, then placed one in the center of the floor and the other by the exit. Ko Sai wouldn't know the difference between a timing device and a remote trigger. Mereel watched him with faint amusement, then put his helmet back on. "Fierfek, no. I can't afford to leave anything that Delta could recover. Come on."
Skirata hauled Ko Sai to her feet-she was more than two meters tall, so it wasn't an elegant maneuver-and shoved her out ahead of him, blaster in her back. If she reacted now, fine. If she didn't-they were out of here.
And now he had to pass the bodies of three Mandalorians. Somehow he'd put that out of his mind while shaking down Ko Sai. Now he had to look at them, wonder who they might be, and work out how he would inform their next of kin.
"Hang on to her, Mer'ika," he said. "I have to do some-thing."
He squatted down and eased off the helmets, possibly one of the most unpleasant and distressing tasks he'd ever had. No, he didn't know any of them; and one was a very young woman. That finished something in him. Females were expected to fight, and it was often hard to tell from the armor alone if the wearer was male or female, but it left him feeling hollow. He couldn't even recall if he'd been the one who killed her. A search of their pockets turned up little, so he took the helmets to trace them via their clan sigils later, and to give their families something for remembrance.
Mandalorians ended up killing one another for all kinds of reasons, personal and incidental. It still didn't make it right. The covert ops troopers sent after Sull, now these strangers-the thought of nek dogs came back to him, dog set on dog for sport, or just a killing machine to do the master's bidding. Skirata felt it was time Mando'ade stopped being everyone's nek.
Mereel patted him on the back. "Us or them, Buir."
"They're still our own."
Skirata stacked the helmets and carried them with his own. It was going to be a tight fit even with two vessels to make the short journey back down the tunnel. Ko Sai stopped dead. "Wait."
"Dets are counting down. That's not a good idea."
"This is a foolish game." Ko Sai turned around. "I have to go back."
"Why?"
"I have materials I need to remove."