“But before you eat, gentlemen, here’s your new brief.” Zey flicked a holochart into life, and the familiar planet-studded grid settled in the air over the briefing table. “And this comes straight from the Chancellor—a direct personal order. Find Chief Scientist Ko Sai.”
Boss was still doing the talking, which suited Sev just fine, because he was far more interested in Vau’s fate and was now watching Jusik carefully. The kid was like a holoreceiver. He picked up all kinds of stuff from distant events. Maybe he’d detected something now. He certainly looked distracted.
“And when we find her, sir?”
“Bring her back in one piece.”
“Bummer,” Fixer muttered. “Sir.”
Zey managed a smile. “I know you have little to love the Kaminoans for, gentlemen, but I don’t make the rules. Lama Su is adamant that Ko Sai defected and that she didn’t die. He won’t give his reasons, but that probably doesn’t matter because the Chancellor wants a tame Kaminoan scientist for our own use so we aren’t beholden to Tipoca, should they ever change their minds about our favored-customer status.” The general shook his head as if he was arguing with himself. “So haul her back here. Top priority. He ordered me to put the best team on it.”
Sev accepted that it was true. They were better than Omega because they didn’t go soft and get diverted by personal issues. They had Vau to thank for that.
“She’s been gone a year, sir. Why make the move so late in the day?” Boss asked.
“I’m not privy to that information, Sergeant,” Zey said carefully. “But the intel we do have, via the Kaminoans, suggests that she’s passed through Vaynai within the last six months.”
Sev didn’t know the Kaminoans had any kind of intelligence, seeing as they almost never left their homeworld, but they could clearly buy it in from outside. He chalked Ko Sai up to the long list of objectives that Delta had been set and tried to come to terms with his fears about Vau.
Boss broke position and wandered over to the holochart to locate Vaynai. “Who’s tracking her, sir?”
“You.”
“Understood.”
“The report came from Ryn who do occasional work for the Republic. She’s probably long gone, but this is the first positive lead we’ve had.”
Sev sneaked a look at Jusik. Something had definitely distracted him, and it wasn’t what was happening on the parade ground. The Jedi looked at him and gave him a discreet thumbs-up.
What does that mean? Cheer up? His grav-ball team won? Vau’s okay?
Boss, Scorch, and Fixer were engrossed in the discussion on the significance of Vaynai—plenty of ocean, and she wasn’t likely to be hiding out on Tatooine—and Sev just stood there, eyes pointing in the appropriate direction to look like he was following the debate.
Fear. Yes, it was fear. Everyone got scared, but this was different: a gnawing, hollow void in his stomach. He’d let Vau down when it mattered. If Vau survived, he’d beat Sev within a breath of his life. If he didn’t—he’d haunt him. Try harder, Sev. You let your brothers down, you let me down, you let the whole shabla army down. Try harder, you lazy little chakaar, or next time it really will hurt.
Sev had tried so hard that he’d collapsed on his bunk most nights without even getting his fatigues off, and then had to catch up on his laundry in the early hours when reveille made his heart nearly leap out of his chest and he got up with his head still buzzing with lack of sleep.
He was five years old. He hadn’t forgotten.
Sev was now the best sniper in the Grand Army because he didn’t want to let anyone down.
“… and this stays within this room, gentlemen, because this is the Chancellor’s pet peeve.” Zey’s tone jerked Sev back to the present. “Nobody else in Special Operations knows about this, and I really don’t want Skirata to know, because… fine man though he might be, he does have an issue with Kaminoans. Any man who refers to them as tatsushi and actually boasts of recipes is probably best kept out of the loop. Dismissed.”
Scorch chuckled approvingly as they clunked their way down the corridor toward the mess with Maze at their heels. “You think Skirata would really eat a Kaminoan?”
Fixer managed a sentence, which was good going for him. “Only if he had hot sauce.”
“What do you think they serve us? That isn’t rollerfish on the menu.” Scorch half turned as he walked, trying to drag Sev into the conversation. “You okay, Sev?”
“Terrific.” They couldn’t mention Vau in front of Maze. As far as Zey was concerned, Vau had done the Mygeeto recce and banged out. He certainly hadn’t robbed a bank and plunged down some ice hole to freeze to death, if he hadn’t already broken his neck. “Never better.”
The sound of boots walking briskly down the corridor behind them broke into a clatter. Jusik caught up, looking flushed and almost pleased with himself. “I’ll keep this lot in line, Captain,” he said to Maze. “I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than make them finish their greens.”
Maze turned on his heel immediately and began walking back to the command center. “Whatever it is you’re doing,” he said, “thank you for not involving me in it—sir.”
Maze wasn’t stupid. He didn’t want to stand between two Jedi generals playing a game. Nobody in their right mind would. Boss stood back to let Jusik enter the mess first.
“Well, General?”
“I feel that Vau is alive.”
“And we left him behind,” Sev said. “We don’t do that.”
Jusik took Sev’s arm discreetly and applied a little pressure. “And you were out of options, Private. If he’d wanted extracting, he’d have asked.”
Scorch grabbed a plate of seedbreads and slapped them on a table to mark his territory. Few of the other commandos sat near Delta at mealtimes because they were one of the last complete squads who’d been decanted together in Tipoca City and stayed together this far. Heavy casualties in the early days of the war—Sev hated himself for believing all that guff about Jedi being invincible military geniuses—meant that most commando squads had been re-formed at least once and just didn’t have that extra cohesion that Delta did, Sev was sure. All but one of Vau’s squads had stayed in one piece; he might have been a savage instructor, but it was all for their own good. He said so. It was true.
“So what now, sir?” Boss asked. “How do we make this disappear? The voice traffic with Skirata?”
“Don’t kid yourself that Zey doesn’t know something went on.” Jusik could switch from being a goofy kid to a hard man in an instant. He seemed to be learning a lot from Skirata. “He has to at least pretend to stick to the rules. Leave it to me. Those comlink records will vanish before anyone knows they exist.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You made the right call to pass the problem to me instead of Zey,” Jusik said. “You might feel disloyal, but what he doesn’t officially know can’t get him in trouble.”
“Will you let us know when they find him?”
“’Course I will. If anyone can extract him, Kal’buir and Ord’ika can.” Jusik grabbed a seedbread from Scorch’s plate and got up to leave. “The Force tells me things will work out.”
Sev watched him go. If the Force was that chatty, it should have been telling the Jedi about useful strategic stuff, not vague fortune-telling.
“Kal’buir,” Fixer mocked.
Boss didn’t seem too upset about Vau to eat. “Wow, he’s got it bad, little Jusik, hasn’t he?”
“Regular little Mando’ad—”
“Hey, our sarge is missing.” Sev clenched his teeth to keep his voice as low as he could. “Vau could be dead, and you can eat and joke? We abandoned him. We left him to die. We never leave a man behind, guys.”
The other three stared at him like he was telling them something they didn’t know. “Take it easy, Sev. We’re all worried.”
“Best thing we can do,” Scorch said, “is do our job and let everyone else do theirs.”
“You get that g
em of wisdom off a ration pack label?” Sev snapped.
“Shut up and eat. You’ll think straighter on a full stomach and a few hours’ sleep.” Scorch grabbed a passing server droid. “Full Corrie breakfast for the young psychopath here, tinnie.”
Sev ate too fast to taste the food, but at least it filled a hole, as Fi would have said if the annoying little jerk had been here. Sev wasn’t sure if he missed Omega or not. On balance, he did.
And it was all for a few credits. There weren’t enough credits in the galaxy to make it worth leaving a comrade behind. Sev could imagine nothing worse.
If he ever saw Vau alive again, he wondered if he’d have the guts to apologize to him.
Mygeeto,
DeepWater submersible Aay’han,
depth fifty-eight meters,
471 days after Geonosis
Skirata wasn’t sure if the fluid dripping off his nose and chin was spray from the melting ice or his own sweat.
They’d been hacking at the ice face for an hour now, and the space was too confined for both of them to work at the same time. They took turns. Skirata found he needed it: it was hot, damp, and numbing labor. Melting was useless. It seemed to be freezing again as fast as it thawed. He put his full weight against an inadequate hydrocutter and took another chunk of ice out of what he saw as a six-meter tunnel. His hands were numb and tingling from the vibration.
I’m getting too old for this.
Vau, why the shab are we even bothering? I put my boy at risk for this?
Ordo tapped him on the shoulder. “Break, Kal’buir.”
Skirata put the cutter on standby and found he could hardly move his legs. Ordo, with that perfect silent understanding, grabbed him by his boots and hauled him out of the air lock tube. Skirata leaned against the bulkhead and then slid down it in exhaustion. His hands felt lifeless. He shook them hard to stop the tingling.
It wasn’t the time to say that they could have left Vau. They were both at the stage where they couldn’t think of much beyond the next minute and the next chunk of ice pulled free and pushed out onto the deck. The cargo bay deck was scattered with wet gravel freed by the melt: the pristine white landscape disguised how much debris there was in the compressed snow.
There was another thunk from the air lock like a brick falling off a wall. Skirata struggled to his feet and stepped in to clear the ice out of Ordo’s way. Even the noise of the cutting disc couldn’t drown out Mird’s whining and yelping, and he wondered if the strill would claw clean through the hatch to get out of the locked storage compartment. Even if nobody else loved Vau, that animal certainly did.
The good thing about repetitive and desperate physical labor was that it stopped you from speculating too much on things like the ice that had refrozen across the lake, the possibility that the lake wall would collapse under the weight of the water anyway, and that, working now without their sealed armor, they’d drown if the boarding tube gave way.
Clunk.
Ordo was young, strong, and fit. He was removing the ice a lot faster than Skirata could.
“Rewarming,” Ordo yelled. Skirata was partially deaf from too much time spent around loud explosions without a helmet, but he could hear him. “When we get Vau out, he’s bound to have hypothermia, however good his armor is. Got to get him thawed.”
“What?”
“Rescue breathing. Warm air in the lungs. Mouth-to-mouth.”
Skirata wasn’t thinking fast enough. “Osik.”
“Maybe Mird can do it…”
The one thing they had plenty of now was hot water. The tanks were full. Vau could at least have warm compresses.
“Warm sugar water.” Ordo grunted with effort, and there was another clunk. He was going well. “It’s all about raising core temperature.”
Skirata broke out his ration pack. He never imagined he’d give Walon Vau his last energy blocks. Here he was, worrying about a chakaar who’d beat his men badly enough to put them in a medcenter, when he had his boys, Jusik, a pregnant Etain, and now Besany Wennen to fret over, and they all deserved his efforts a lot more than Vau.
“Chakaar,” he said to himself.
“A cryodroid might be a good investment.”
“What?”
“I said, I think a cryodroid might be a good investment. Icebreaking.” The drill drowned Ordo’s voice for a while. “Should be able to melt ice faster than this.”
It was a long half hour. The brief spells at the ice face were getting harder each time, and they needed to save their energy blocks for Vau. Skirata felt his strength ebbing faster. The gravel released from the ice dug into the palms of his hands when he crawled into the tube, but they were so numb now he could hardly feel it. Eventually he resorted to his blaster, and the steam made the compartment feel like a sanisteamer.
Ordo checked the thickness of the ice. “Nearly there. At least it’s warm in here.”
“I’m sorry, son. Getting you into this.”
“Good training. Never done this before.”
“You should be out on the town with your girl at your age, not—”
“I don’t feel right about using Besany to spy for us.”
It was right out of the blue. Ordo did that from time to time, revealing what was on his mind and making Skirata realize he didn’t know everything about him, not even now. He must have been chewing it over while he slogged away at the ice.
“Mereel didn’t force her, son. She knows the score.”
“I meant that I wasn’t expecting to feel bad about it.”
So again, Skirata knew even less about Ordo than he thought. He decided not to comment and just let the lad ramble on, but Ordo went quiet again and more lumps of dirty, gritty ice fell out onto the deck as the cutter whined. He’d had his say.
The Republic uses you, son, but now we’re using the Republic. Can’t let an asset like Besany Wennen go to waste.
A breath of burning cold air on his face and a shout from Ordo snapped Skirata out of an exhausted trance, and somehow his adrenaline got him back on his feet.
“We’re through. I see him.” There wasn’t enough room for both of them in the tube. Ordo hacked frantically at the rapidly enlarging hole. When he leaned back to reach for a fibercord line, Skirata could see a black shape that didn’t look like a man for a moment, but then he could make out part of the T-shaped visor of Vau’s helmet. “I’m cutting his packs free.”
The operation was now more like delivering a nerf calf. After much swearing and panting, Ordo backed out of the boarding tube, hauling Vau by a line around one shoulder. It sounded like he was dragging a coffin. Vau plopped onto the cargo bay deck in a heap, his armor so cold that it burned Skirata’s fingers as he eased off the man’s helmet.
Vau’s hard, gaunt face was almost blue. Skirata pushed his eyelids back to check his pupils: they reacted to the light. Humans survived low temperatures even when they looked dead, and Vau was definitely alive. Skirata mentally listed all the procedures he had to follow, like looking for a pulse, counting breaths, not rubbing extremities, and diverting warmer blood from the core. “Osik, Walon, you shabuir, don’t you dare go and die on me now—”
Vau’s head rolled and he mumbled back at Skirata.
“Mird,” he said. “Mird…”
Skirata had gone after Vau at least twice in his life fully intending to kill him. His instinct, funny thing that it was, now focused him totally on saving the man. Ordo slithered backward out of the tube again, dragging Vau’s birgaan and a large bundle of plastoid sheeting that chinked and clacked.
“Rescue breathing, Kal’buir,” he panted. The effort had even taken its toll on Ordo. He grabbed Vau and half dragged, half carried him into the medbay, heaving him onto the bunk. Skirata trailed behind with the bags. “I know your cussing can generate a few kilowatts of heat, but it’s not reaching his lungs.”
“He’s conscious and breathing. No CPR.”
“Okay. Dry. He’s dry.” Wet clothing leached the heat fast. “The
suit held up.”
Skirata pulled off Vau’s armor and grabbed whatever he could find from the locker to wrap him up. His fingers showed no signs of frostbite: corpse-cold, but still soft. That was something. “Let Mird out.”
Mird shot out of the store compartment and nearly knocked Skirata over. The animal was good and warm. If anyone was going to snuggle up to Vau and transfer heat, Mird was the best choice. Ordo watched the strill flop onto its master with delighted little squeals and rumbles, slobbering over his face. Ordo seemed to find it suddenly funny.
“Thanks, Mird,” he said. “You saved us both from a fate worse than death. Carry on, that strill.” He turned to Skirata. “It’s time to seal up and get out of here.”
“How are you going to break the surface ice?”
Ordo shrugged. “Torpedo.”
“Well, the laser didn’t attract any unwelcome attention, so go for it, son. I’ll get some hot liquid into Vau.”
“Secure him in the bunk, because we’re going to be banging out of here at quite an angle. You might want to hold off the hot liquid until we’re stable again.”
Ordo never exaggerated. When he said quite an angle, he probably meant vertical. A few moments after the shock of an exploding torpedo bounced back at them, everything they hadn’t had time to stow securely went sliding to the bulkheads and Mird howled, claws nailed deep into the bunk housing. Aay’han leveled out. The loose objects thudded back down on the deck.
“Drink this,” Skirata said, lifting Vau’s head with one hand and holding a beaker of the cube-sweetened hot water to his lips. Mird gave Skirata some grudging space but spread itself down the length of Vau’s frame. “Get it in your gut, Walon, or I’ll have to heat your innards by shoving a blaster down your throat.”
Vau coughed, splashing a fine spray of spit in Skirata’s face. “I’m going… to tell everyone… what a soft chakaar you are, Kal.”
Well, his cognitive functions were just fine. No confused rambling there; Skirata ticked one more symptom off the first-aid list. “Can you feel any injuries?”
“Not yet… you look worse than me…”
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