501st: An Imperial Commando Novel

by Karen Traviss

  “He trained as a squad battlefield medic,” Jusik said. “I always think of him as just the sniper. I tend to forget the medic side.”

  “This is the first time she’s been too far out of it to wash and dress herself. That’s why I’m worried.”

  “What were the hallucinations about?”

  “The only thing I could understand was that she thought she was burning. There were flames coming toward her.”

  Jusik didn’t know enough to even guess if that was a clue to an underlying problem. And he’d never seen anyone suffer withdrawal symptoms before. It was distressing. When he opened the door, Arla was thrashing around on the bed, clearly in pain, panting for breath. Her eyes were half open.

  “Let me die,” she mumbled, apparently lucid. “If you understood, you’d end this for me.”

  Jusik turned to Laseema. “Better get Mij’ika.” This was medically beyond him. “Arla, this is going to pass. I know it doesn’t feel like it, but it will be over soon.”

  He put his hand under her head, feeling the matted, sweaty hair, and wondered how medics ever coped daily with the smell of illness. She struggled to focus on him.

  “It won’t pass,” she whispered. “It’s not the drugs. It’s me.”

  “When that stuff is out of your system, then we can fix you. We can.”

  “No. It’s still there. It always will be.”

  Gilamar arrived with an assortment of hyposprays. For a man who’d just killed a former comrade, he looked oddly calm. “What’s wrong, Arla? Stomach cramps? Throwing up? Head hurt?” He placed a blood pressure sensor in the crook of her elbow. “That’s a bit low. Let’s fix that first.”

  “Twitching muscles … stang, my legs …”

  “Two for two, so far.” Gilamar gave her two shots and stood back. “Should be kicking in anytime, Arla. Hang in there. Now, where are you, and what can you see?”

  “Bedroom … window … you … Bardan … and Laseema was here.”

  “You’re not hallucinating, then. You’re going to feel like a speeder wreck for a couple of days yet. What’s your biggest problem right now?”

  Arla rolled over on one side and flung off one of the blankets. “I want to stop thinking. I want it all to stop.”

  Gilamar bent down to whisper in Jusik’s ear. “She’s lucid and feeling ropey. Apart from monitoring her blood pressure that’s all I can do until something else mechanical or chemical goes wrong.”

  Jusik sat with Arla for half an hour, trying to feel her mental state, and all he could get was a sensation in his mind of her constantly trying not to look at something hanging in front of her eyes. He tended to see solid images superimposed at a point that felt somewhere behind his eyes and level with the roof of his mouth. Then he felt Zey and Kina Ha approaching. Kina Ha was distinctive in the Force, such a weight of time and experience stored in her being that the Force felt as if it curved around her. Zey was an odd mix now: the old Master, impatient and frustrated like an escaping sigh, but almost completely engulfed in a terrible regret that peaked and fell on a cycle like a heartbeat.

  “If we can help,” Zey said. “Just say.”

  Kina Ha settled down with majestic slowness and dipped her long neck to gaze into Arla’s face.

  “I’m old,” she said. “And there’s nothing you have done that can shock me. I’ve seen so many. Whatever it is, you’re not the most terrible being who ever lived. It won’t let you go, so you can’t run from it, but you can grab it and hold it where you can see it for what it is.”

  Jusik had no idea what the Kaminoan was going on about, although she seemed to sense that thing that Arla was trying not to see. It was obvious: a terrible memory. It would be agony to relive what the Death Watch did to her family and then to her, but it seemed to be the only option left.

  Zey just watched. Jusik moved back a little. Kina Ha took Arla’s arm and examined the cuts and deep wounds.

  “What are you trying to cut out of yourself?” she asked.

  Jusik tried not to jump too far ahead, but he could guess guilt, taste guilt, calculate guilt. Arla didn’t know her brother Jango had survived. But there wasn’t a happy ending to that, either, so Jusik decided to save it until she was a lot stronger.

  “What I am,” Arla said at last.

  “And what are you?”

  “One of them.”

  “Who?”

  Jusik looked at Zey, who seemed just as lost as he was. Kina Ha’s thousand years of life—what had she seen and experienced? More than any human, ten times over, even more than any Hutt, even if she spent it all in secluded contemplation. She’d had time to listen to whole worlds.

  “Look,” Arla said. “I can’t say it.”

  She scrambled into a sitting position, and struggled to lift the back of her shirt. Jusik didn’t know what to expect; he just knew that she’d been hurt, physically and emotionally. Jango had told Vau just the barest detail about the Death Watch punishing his father for harboring Jaster Mereel, and his mother shooting one of them dead so Jango—eight, maybe—could get away. That was the last he saw of all of them, his mother shielding fourteen-year-old Arla, his father on his knees yelling at him to run.

  Jango thought they’d all died. Arla seemed to think she was the lone survivor, too. Between those two views lay a mystery.

  Arla still fumbled with her shirt. Jusik didn’t dare touch her to help her. He left it to Kina Ha.

  “Look,” Arla said. Kina Ha lifted the fabric higher. “I can’t reach it. If I could, I’d cut it out. But I’d still be in here. It’s me who needs to go.”

  Jusik steeled himself to look. He was expecting worse. He wasn’t sure if the dark brown mark was a tattoo, or a scar, or a branding mark, but he knew exactly what it was because he’d seen one only hours ago, or a version of it: the Death Watch emblem, the ragged winged W shape. It didn’t surprise him. She’d been spoils of war as far as they were concerned, an animal to be used, and marked as their property.

  “A surgeon can remove that,” Kina Ha said. “Would that help?”

  Arla pulled down her shirt again. “You don’t get it. You can’t guess because it’s so bad.”

  “Whatever it was, you were a child of fourteen, Walon tells me. When we’re adult, we look back and judge our childhood actions by unfairly adult rules.”

  Arla didn’t turn around. “It’s not a wound or a humiliation. It’s a badge.”

  “Explain.”

  “After I was kidnapped, after it stopped being a nightmare, I stayed with them. I became one of them. I stayed. I could have run away. But I stayed.” She looked over her shoulder at Jusik. “Could you stand being me?”

  “Oh, shab,” Jusik said.

  “Stop me remembering it all,” she begged. “Let me die, or kill me, but I can’t live in this head anymore. I kept trying to die. But the doctors wouldn’t let me.”

  Arla was frighteningly lucid now. Jusik wasn’t sure if Kina Ha had induced some state of clarity, but whatever it was, he’d rescued a woman who didn’t want to stay rescued. There was no point telling her that kidnap victims, hostages, and abused, helpless kids often found themselves depending on the very people hurting them, and even growing to like them, because their own lives were held in those hands. Humans generally weren’t the magnificent heroes of holovids who fought back, but simply normal beings doing instinctive things just to stay alive.

  “You know you’re not evil or unusual for doing that,” he said. “Don’t you?”

  “Maybe.” Arla started scratching her forearm, as if the muscle relaxant was wearing off. “But that doesn’t change how hard it is to make it through the next second from the moment I wake up to the moment I fall asleep.”

  “When did you get away from them?”

  Arla went quiet for a moment. “When I got arrested for the last shooting. Five, six years? Something like that.”

  “Try ten,” said Jusik.

  Arla shut her eyes for a second. “That long?”

 
Zey didn’t even seem to be breathing. Kina Ha looked as if she was resting now, having unlocked that mental door. Now Jusik had to sweep up the Arla that was falling out of it. He wasn’t going to start asking her about the killings, not now.

  “Your brother Jango survived,” he said. “He went on to be a legendary soldier and—well, most of my brothers here were cloned from him. He founded the finest army in galactic history.”

  “I sort of knew he was doing okay as a bounty hunter,” Arla said. “The Watch was aware of stuff. But you talk as if he’s dead now.”

  That was a shock; Jusik had no idea she even knew he’d survived. But that was before he knew she’d been living with the Death Watch for most of her life. She’d shifted from tragic lost youth to something he didn’t understand yet, a sister who never let her brother know she was still alive, but still observed him from afar.

  I need to stop filling gaps in history with pieces from the obvious.

  “He was killed at the outbreak of the Clone War. I’m sorry.” It didn’t feel like a good idea right then to tell her that a Jedi killed him, and how much Jango had grown to loathe them.

  “We were all good shots,” Arla said. “That was why I did so many assassinations for the Death Watch.” She looked over her shoulder again. “Now are you going to give me a quick way out? What do you think Jango would have done to me if he’d known I was with them.”

  Jusik felt Jango would have forgiven her. “Would the Death Watch be looking for you now, if they were still around?”

  That made her flinch. “Are they?”

  “If they are, they won’t get near you.”

  Arla looked at Jusik for a long time. “You know,” she said at last, “that this lull will wear off, and I’ll crash again, don’t you?”

  “You don’t want the medication, obviously.”

  “Try it sometime. It doesn’t stop you remembering. Just stops you doing something about it.”

  Jusik knew what he might be able to do. He was about to do it to Kina Ha, Scout, and Zey, after all: he could blank out parts of her memory. He didn’t know whether to offer.

  Shab, he had to. She was his personal responsibility.

  “I used to be a Jedi,” he said. “I can erase memories. But beyond just removing recollection of the last five minutes or so, I don’t know how safe it is, or what else I’ll remove in the process.”

  Arla reached down for the discarded blanket and pulled it around her.

  “I was going to die first chance I got anyway,” she said. “If you can make this go away—no, I don’t think I deserve to feel better.”

  Jusik moved automatically into that game of guessing the motivator. She was still trying to atone for letting her parents’ murderers become her family. “Well, if I practice on you,” Jusik said, “I’ll be much safer when I come to wipe my Jedi friends’ memories, and you can still give me useful intel on the Death Watch. A few years out of date beats zero any day.”

  Zey gave him a look that said his little earnest Jedi Knight had grown up rather fast since leaving the Order.

  “Do it,” Arla said. “And if you turn me into a vegetable, you shoot me. Deal?”

  Jusik nodded. “Deal,” he said.

  Kyrimorut

  Skirata couldn’t find it in himself to be annoyed with Gilamar, let alone angry. Priest got what was coming to him. And leaving him alive to tell the tale—no, that hadn’t been an option. Gilamar had done what Skirata should have done years ago, just by way of cleansing the Mando gene pool. Vau agreed.

  But things were still getting a little too close to home. Clan Skirata didn’t have the monopoly on Mandalorian resourcefulness. Sooner or later, someone was going to track them down. Skirata flipped Priest’s shoulder plate between his fingers like meditation beads, staring at the emblem and wondering just what was out there waiting to return from ba’slan shev’la.

  Does it matter who kills you in the end? Yes, I think it does.

  “So what if Reau works out it was one of us?” Ordo leaned on the roba pen wall, watching one of the sows with her new litter. Fi was going to get his smoked roba slices one day soon. “Is that going to make us any more wanted by the Empire than we already are? There’s no trail back to this place either way.”

  “Bardan’s planning a relocation for Kyrimorut in case the worst happens. Ret’lini.” It was the Mando watchword for prudence; just in case. Everyone had a plan B. Jaing, in his business-minded way, had taken to calling it offsite hot standby. “I’m thinking that we should have a bolt-hole on Cheravh.”

  “Why stay in the Mandalore sector?”

  “Yeah, we could just walk away from Mandalore and the Empire,” Skirata said. “Find a remote planet. Build a small town. Move in. Let the Death Watch make a big mistake with Palps and get eaten alive, or let Shysa fight his guerilla war. Churn out cutting-edge pharmaceutical products. Drink ne’tra gal on the porch, indulge a vast army of spoiled grandchildren, get old, and let everyone else do the fighting.”

  Ordo gave him a little frown. “Logistics, Kal’buir. We’d have to ship in everything on a dump like Cheravh, and freight gets noticed.”

  That was Ordo, all common sense. Skirata reminded himself that this whole thing was about Ordo and the rest of the boys.

  The sow got to her feet and trotted off, pursued by her litter. Skirata liked Kyrimorut. The stay so far had been short, but it was already full of bittersweet memories. The unfinished memorial for the fallen clone army, the crops breaking the surface of the soil, and the idyllic spots around the lake where he could fish were all things he didn’t want to leave. And wherever he looked, he could see Etain, from the moment she let him first hold newborn Kad to the moment he stood by her funeral pyre. This was his shabla clan home, and everyone living here had put their blood and sweat into it. So had Rav Bralor. She’d restored the place brick by stone by plank for him. Part of Skirata refused to be driven from it. It was a very un-Mandalorian thought.

  We’re nomadic. Isn’t that what Mando’ade were all about? Isn’t that what we still are at heart? It’s dangerous to get too attached to one place.

  He thought of Master Altis, smart enough to base his Jedi academy on a ship. He was actually looking forward to meeting the man. He had to. He wasn’t sure why. He was certain that a Jedi Master would know how to take care of his own kind. In a few hours, he’d rendezvous with him in neutral space and look the man in the eye.

  “They’re very appealing when they’re little,” Ordo said absently.

  “What are?”

  “Roba. They’re cute.”

  The babies were play-fighting, ramming one another with their snouts and squealing as if they were having fun. They still had coats of striped ginger hair that camouflaged them in undergrowth until they were big enough to cope without their mother. Roba sows were fearsomely protective. Skirata gave them a wide berth.

  “Doesn’t pay to get too attached to them,” he said. “That’s going to be our breakfast.” He felt bad about that for a moment. “Like Mij getting too fond of Scout. She’s going to want to go back to her Jedi buddies one day soon.”

  Ordo was still staring at the baby roba. “Where do you draw the line?”

  “What, between house pet and food?”

  “Protectiveness. Saving folks. Maze saved Zey, just like you saved us. Mij and Uthan seem to want to save Scout. When does it become crazy to keep rescuing things?”

  Rescue was an instinct, a moment’s unconscious reflex. Skirata hadn’t even had to think about stepping between Orun Wa and the young Nulls to save them. It was simply something that demanded doing. He didn’t regret a second of it; it never occurred to him that it might risk his own life, or cause endless ripples of trouble down the years, and even if he had he wouldn’t have cared. It just didn’t matter. Maze obviously felt the same about Zey. Soldiers would die for their buddies. It was the way of the galaxy, the best part of it, that beings cared so much for others that they did dangerous things so that someone else
could live.

  “Is this another hypocrisy lecture?” Skirata asked.

  “Never, Buir.”

  “It’s okay. Even I can see that I’ve got double standards. Ny keeps me fully aware of that.”

  Skirata realized he’d started referring to her as casually as if she were his longtime wife. He edged into the open pen and stood still, one eye on the huge sow. The animal would break his legs if she charged him, and he didn’t want to think what her sharp tusks would do to soft tissue. Two of the litter broke away from the others and trotted up to him.

  Breakfast or pets? You’re right, Ordo, there’s no logic in it.

  The babies just wanted to see if he had food for them. They were already learning to root in the mud and find their own dinner. He felt a tug at his heart, but it wasn’t quite an overwhelming drive to pick them up and keep them in the house, although he knew many folks would do exactly that.

  “In the end,” he said, “we know which lives we have to save, and those come first. Even if we take insane risks to do it.”

  Ordo just nodded. The sow turned toward Skirata and let out a long warning grunt that sounded as if she was gearing up to ram him. As soon as her head dipped for her attack run, Skirata found agility he thought he’d lost twenty years ago and almost vaulted over the wall. She raced up to the half-open gate and stood rumbling a warning, even though she could have carried on and chased Skirata around the yard. This was her turf. She wanted the filthy human interloper to leave her kids alone, that was all.

  “She knows she’ll be on Fi’s plate one day,” Ordo said. “What has she got to lose?”

  Skirata decided to leave a couple of weeks before he let anyone venture into Keldabe again to check if there was any aftermath from Priest’s death. They might not have found his body yet. But Reau would know something bad had happened to him.

  “Come on,” Skirata said. “Let’s clean our boots and then go rendezvous with Altis.”

  Altis was due to comm them anytime now to say he was inbound. All Skirata could think of was how different things might have turned out if this Altis had run the Jedi Council, and not Yoda and his cronies. That was the trouble with the people who should have been in charge. They never really wanted the power that they were better equipped than others to wield.