"I just need to know why you did that after all the trouble we went to in getting that data."
Ordo's jaw muscles twitched. He didn't look Skirata in the eye like he usually did. "This is all about having a choice. That's what matters, isn't it? But even now, we're still under a Kaminoan's control because she's got information she won't give us. Well, I'd rather live fifty years on my own terms than a hundred on hers. And now she'll know it. The information she's withholding is worthless. I've taken her power away for good."
"But I just wanted to give you a full life. You deserve that."
"But we're men, Kal'buir, and I know you've given up everything for us, but you can't keep making decisions for us like we're kids."
That hurt. The physical pain in Skirata's chest, like a heavy stone pressing down inside, got a little worse. "But what about your brothers, Ord'ika? What about all of the ad'ike who didn't get to choose?"
"There'll be other ways around this." No point arguing. He'll feel bad enough about it when he comes to his senses. "Sure. We'll forget it for the while and concentrate on Fi, and Etain's baby, and then we'll have a re-think. Ko Sai isn't the only geneticist in the galaxy. Is she?" But even the Kaminoan ones need to get her back, and they're the best. It s over. I'll keep trying, but unless there's a miracle. . .
The galaxy didn't do miracles. It only gave you what you took from it. Skirata was persistent to the point of wasted ob-session, and maybe even beyond, but even he reached a point where he sank beneath the weight of a task. There'd been just too much bad news today. Perhaps tomorrow would be better. They still had a fortune to fall back on. Ordo turned around, looking like a scared little boy again for the first time in ages. There was nothing Skirata couldn't forgive him.
"I've hurt you, Kal'.buir, and I can't undo that. But I'll make it up to you, I swear."
"You don't have to, son." I forgot they hadn't seen Ko Sai up close since she finished testing them and told them they were going to be put down. I stuck abused kids in front of their abuser and expected them to cope. What was I think-ing? "You don't owe me a thing."
Down below, Ko Sai was in bad shape. Skirata wasn't shocked to find himself satisfied to see it. She was behaving like a bereaved human, head bowed, making a little cooing sound-whimpering, in fact. If anyone thought aiwha-bait were emotionless, they were wrong. It was just that different things mattered to them. She looked up into his face and he knew that, for once, they understood that they shared the same emotion, if for very different reasons-irreplaceable loss.
Etain and Vau had retreated to the seating on the opposite side of the crew compartment, leaving Mereel to deal with the Kaminoan. He stood in front of her, arms folded.
"Sooner you stop wallowing in self-pity, the sooner you can start rebuilding that work," he said. "If you're nice to me, I'll give you a hand."
She raised her head slowly. "That was decades of my work, you imbecile. Decades"
"Ori'dush," Mereel said. "Too bad. But that's what you get for building us crazy. Sure you don't want to make a start on recording it all again? Might as well do it while your memory is still fresh."
"I can't even access the material on Kamino."
"Maybe I should make sure they can't, either, next time I drop in. Tipoca City security's no better than when I was a kid..."
"You're savages. Why should I cooperate with you now if I didn't before?"
"Because you're stuck in a ship with four creatively sadistic people who hate your gray guts, and maybe the strill and the Jedi aren't too fond of you, either, and all you've got is the clothes you stand up in. Not even a scrap of flimsi to make notes. See how long you last..."
Skirata met Ko Sai's eyes. She looked back and forth from him to Mereel and Ordo a few times as if calculating some-thing-don't even think about it, aiwha-bait-and then settled on Mereel again.
"And you'll starve me into submission, you think."
"Oh, you'll get well fed," Mereel said. "I want you healthy for a long time, so I can watch you suffer. I might not get a long life, but seeing you go crazy is cleaning some osik out of my heart that's been there for far too long."
"Cathartic," said Ordo. "It really is." He turned to the cockpit. "I need to check up on Fi's condition, and then we have to make a move, Kal'buir. Any preferences?"
The one place Skirata could guarantee to find some Sep-proof, Republic-proof, Jedi-proof accommodation was Mandalore. He had business to take care of there as well. He turned to Etain.
"Want to see the home turf, ad'ika? Visit Manda'yaim?
She still looked in shock. There were no fancy Galactic City doctors on Mandalore, but plenty of women who knew how to handle a pregnancy.
"What do I tell Zey?" she asked. "He was sold on your story that I was staying on after Qiilura was cleared to help the Gurlanins for a few months."
"I'll think of something. I always do."
She shrugged. "Okay. I've never seen Mandalore. What's it like?"
"I'd like to say it's paradise," Skirata said. "But it's as rough as a bantha's backside, and half as pretty."
"I never liked beach vacations anyway." Vau held his hand out to Ordo. "Better give me the code key for your shuttle. I'll take it back to Coruscant and meet you all there, as and when."
Maybe Vau had business to sort out. He had his inheritance, after all, and there were probably items he wanted to fence, because he had his expenses like everyone else. The shuttle needed to go home, too; they couldn't keep abandoning small vessels and charging new ones to the GAR budget. Enacca the Wookiee couldn't retrieve everything they were forced to dump.
"Thanks, Walon," Skirata said. "I might take a detour to Aargau, actually..." His bank was on Aargau. Business, then. That was fine. Skirata strapped himself into the third cockpit seat so Ordo could take the copilot's position with Mereel at the helm. Ordo was now talking directly to Leveler, whose comm officer seemed to think he was calling from Arca Barracks on Coruscant. A code scrambler was a wonderful thing.
Vau released the mooring lines and gave Skirata a mock salute from the pontoon, and Mereel took Aay'han out past the breakwater, accelerating her gradually toward the speed at which she'd rise on floats and then lift clear of the water. Skirata opened his comlink and keyed in Jusik's code. "We're out of here, Bard'ika. Thanks."
"Thank you for keeping me informed,"' Jusik said stiffly. So he had an audience: Delta must have been with him. "Is everything all right?"
"No. But it will be."
"Niner informed me about Fi."
"Ordo's on the case. Don't worry. And you don't have to worry about Ko Sai any longer, either."
"Okay..."
"Call me when you can talk freely. We're off to Mandalore."
Jusik was a good lad, Skirata reflected. He'd been good right from the start. They were lucky to find a few aruetiise with that kind of loyalty.
Aay'han took off in a storm of spray, lifting into the night sky. As she passed above the island that had once housed Ko Sai's base in its bowels, Skirata checked the sensors and couldn't help but notice that there was now an area of subsidence on the sports field, a shallow bowl about a hundred meters across. He could even see it; the shadow created by the illumigrids made it look like a big black lake.
"P for plenty," Skirata said. "I think we brought the ceiling down."
Mereel checked for himself. "Oops."
"You're taking this pretty well." Skirata now worried what was happening behind Mereel's cocky veneer, because he'd badly underestimated what was going on inside Ordo.
"There's always a bright side," said Mereel. "One day, we'll look back on all this and laugh."
Skirata doubted it. But one thing, at least, was settled: he didn't have to hunt for Ko Sai any longer.
He just had to work out what he was going to do with her.
Tropix island, Dorumaa, 479 days after Geonosis "So this is how the other half live," Sev said.
Delta Squad, clad in the dull but all-encompassing cover-alls of a utilities maintenance crew, tried to look routine as they made their way along the shoreline collecting garbage. There wasn't a lot, but the management liked the white sand to look pristine before the hotel guests emerged after break-fast. Some poor di'kut was even combing it with a big rake.
"I'm glad I'm in this half, then," Boss said. "The novelty of cleaning up after civvies would wear off fast."
"I meant the lounging-around-in-the-sun bit."
"Overrated." Fixer speared a scrap of flimsi wrapping with a special sharpened pole designed for doing just that, although Sev could think of much better uses for it. It was the first enemy contact Fixer had had for a while. Sev considered requesting a transfer to the infantry, where they seemed to be getting more droid action. "Ruins your skin. Gives you blisters. You have to coat yourself in slimy sun filter to stop it from killing you in the end."
Scorch stood back and let him kill another scrap of litter. "So how long have you been promoting the benefits of a vacation on Tropix?"
"Look, any job would be better than mine, because right now I feel I'm wasting my time." Fixer shoved his finger hard in his ear, adjusting the hidden comlink bead. "This is boring. Even the police comlink channel is tedious. Drunks, lost valuables, and collisions between rental speeders."
Jusik had finally let them loose on the island itself. Fixer and Boss weren't happy about the delay, but the Jedi had a point: it was hard to blend in here in a suit of Katarn armor, and they didn't have what he called Omega Squad's social skills. Scorch had helped him liberate a few maintenance crew uniforms overnight, a task so easy it was almost an insult to their skills at getting into places they shouldn't have been. As for the locks-he could have busted them open just by scowling at them. It was pathetic. It was a bummer about Fi, though. Sev didn't like the thought of being in a coma, just in case it was one of those conscious ones where you knew what was going on around you but you couldn't respond. Whatever happened to him, he decided, would be fast and final; no hanging around. At one point he thought of talking it through with the rest of the squad, but they'd noted Fi's state and then shut it out of conversation, so Sev knew they were as scared as he was.
"I know that Jedi sense stuff," Boss said carefully, "and that generals are privy to intel we don't get, but I get the feeling Bard'ika isn't leveling with us."
"Maybe he's too embarrassed to tell us he brought us all this way to buy us a Neuvian ice sundae," said Scorch. "Part of this new management drive to make us feel valued."
"Does Zey know he's having an identity crisis?" Boss asked.
"Who says he is?"
"Aw, c'mon ... the durasteel-undenvear syndrome?"
"So he likes Mandalorian stuff," Scorch said. "Maybe it's comforting for guys who aren't allowed to have violent feelings. He can act out a bit."
"He's got a lightsaber. He acts out violence just fine with that."
Sev didn't have a Jedi's Force radar but he certainly had a trooper's sixth sense for an officer approaching. Just as he looked up from the blinding white sand, feeling uneasy, he saw Jusik striding down the boardwalk in what Sev thought of as his "half Jedi," the anonymous white tunic and pants that they all wore under the layers of robes.
"Why don't you put your theory to him, then, Dr. Scorch?" said Sev. "Go on, ask him."
"Yeah, I always wondered where he keeps his lightsaber when he dresses like that."
"Result," Fixer muttered.
Sev prodded him with the litter pole. "What?"
"Police channel chat." This was as near as Fixer ever got to excited. "Folk were calling in saying they'd heard a mystery explosion, but no location. Now they've had a report of a sports field subsiding on the next island."
"As in underground explosion?"
"Maybe. Rescue Service is going over to check it out."
Jusik caught up with them. "I've rented a fishing vessel so we can move our ops away from prying eyes. How's the maintenance business?"
"Explosive," said Scorch. "Fixer says the locals reported a big bang followed by a hole in the ground not far from here. And as this isn't a big-bang kind of planet, we might as well check out the lead."
"Good idea," said Jusik.
"Sir, are you okay?"
"My apologies, Scorch. My mind's not wholly on the job. If anyone would like an update on Fi's condition, let me know." He looked around him, almost as if he'd heard some-thing and was trying to work out where it was coming from, but it was just one of his mannerisms. "No? Okay, let's take a look at this hole in the ground."
Fixer was still eavesdropping on the police comlink frequencies. "What cover are we going to use?"
"No need. Overfly it in the TIV, get a few coordinates out of it, then work out a way of assessing the point of the explosion."
"Might not be anything to do with Ko Sai, of course."
"Want to skip it?"
"No sir. But maybe the Twi'lek was decoying us." Jusik picked up a scrap of litter, examined it, and dropped it in the collecting sack that Fixer was carrying. "What makes you say that? He ran for his life pretty convincingly." Boss cut in. "Because we've turned up nothing, sir, except the traffic manager here who remembers someone hiring a utility barge for a delivery offshore, and then it was found drifting minus the employee."
"And nobody went looking for him."
"When they say don't go beyond the safety limits, they mean it. They have no idea what's lurking under the surface, and they're not too keen to find out."
Jusik shrugged. "Just as well we're made of sterner stuff. What a shabby attitude toward employee welfare."
Sev had seen Jusik hunting targets before, and he behaved like a man with a mission: single-minded, resourceful, and tenacious. On Coruscant, he'd even worried Sev with his wildly risky tactics. Now he was behaving differently. The fire had gone out of him. It was as if he didn't care if he found Ko Sai or not.
It could have been that he didn't want to find her, and that worried Sev for all kinds of different reasons. But maybe it was, as he said, because he was preoccupied by Fi. That was worrying in its own way, because an officer who was distracted when one man out of his commando group of five hundred was wounded really didn't have what it took. "Yes sir," Sev said.
The aerial view of the island sports resort to the south of Tropix-Action World, a name Sev found hilarious given its extensive array of visitor safety measures-was educational. Yes, it was an instant lake all right, minus the water. From the TIV, he could see how the ground had collapsed beneath the grass without breaking up much of the surface. Something underneath had caved in.
"Not too low, Boss," Jusik said. "What's our transponder telling their flight control?"
"Delivering ice desserts, sir," Scorch said, checking the charge on his Deece. "Yeah, put some syrup and crushed nuts on this."
Folks didn't use their eyes any longer. They believed everything their gadgets told them. Sev studied the chart on his database, mapped in the position of the subsidence, and compared it with the divers' hydrographic chart.
"The hole might not be directly above whatever blew up," he said, "but it's a fair assumption. That gives us a search area underwater."
"You're gagging to wear that scuba trooper's rig, aren't you?" said Scorch.
Sev didn't answer. He was starting to wonder what he'd say to Ko Sai when he found her. She was still a figure of dread, a name that even the Kaminoans used to mention in hushed tones, and not just because of her expertise; she had the power of life and death, the authority to say who came up to scratch and who didn't. Now that Tipoca City was far be-hind him, he was starting to realize why that wasn't such a great idea.
It was turning into a long, slow day. Transferring the kit from the TIV to the diving vessel without being spotted ate a couple of hours, and then they had to work out a search pattern without even knowing what they were looking for- except maybe a lot of rock.
And those scuba suits just processed oxygen from the surrounding water. There was no excuse for coming back to the surface because they were running out of air.
Fixer and Boss took the first shift, transmitting optical and sensor images back to the vessel. Sev, Scorch, and Jusik sat on the bridge, watching the output screens.
"Come on, Sev, cheer up." Scorch nudged him. He was suited up, slapping his flippers on the deck in a rhythm that annoyed Sev more with each thwack. "This is better than most of the stuff they show on HNE. It's really interesting rock. Great weeds, too."
If they didn't find Ko Sai, Vau would have something to say about it. Okay, he didn't know they were on the case, but he'd find out sooner or later if they failed.
Somehow that mattered to him more than coming up empty for Chancellor Palpatine.