True Colors

by Karen Traviss

  “Come on.” Skirata slopped more liquid into his mouth. He felt wrecked now. “Get this down you.”

  “Tell Delta?”

  “Okay, yes.” Vau had a few saving graces: he knew his lads would be worried sick about him, and that they needed to know he’d been extracted. “Will do. Now what the shab was worth nearly freezing to death for?”

  “What the shab,” Vau said hoarsely, “was worth nearly… killing yourself… to save me?”

  “I wanted your armor. Better environment seals than mine, obviously. You could survive a sarlacc in that.”

  Vau actually smiled. He didn’t do that often. He had very even, white teeth that proved he’d had a healthy and well-fed early childhood. “Birgaan… take a look inside…”

  Ordo’s voice cut into the ship’s comlink system. “I’m heading for the RV point, Kal’buir. I’ve informed General Jusik that Vau’s inboard.”

  “Good lad,” said Skirata.

  “Good lad,” Vau chorused. “How much did this sub cost you?”

  “Shut up and drink.”

  Skirata waited until he’d forced three beakers of diluted energy cubes down Vau’s throat before giving in to an animal curiosity that overrode every weary ache and pulled muscle. He untied the bundle. As the contents spilled across the medbay deck, there was only one word he could spit out.

  “Wayii!”

  Vau made a coughing sound that might have been laughter. He didn’t get a lot of practice at that. Skirata was transfixed by the tide of valuables, so much so that his hands were shaking when he unfastened the backpack’s assortment of pouches. What spilled out stifled any further comment. He knelt down on the deck, knowing his old ankle injury was screaming for a painkiller but far too engrossed in sorting through the booty to give it any time.

  There was a lot here. A lot. Hundreds of thousands of credits’ worth. He stretched out his hand and rummaged cautiously. No—millions.

  Skirata started making a mental inventory almost without thinking about it. Old habits died hard.

  When he glanced over his shoulder, Vau was watching him, eyes half open as if he was nodding off. Mird kept guard, snuffling occasionally.

  “Except for the inside pocket,” he said, “you can keep the lot.”

  “What do you mean, keep the lot?”

  “I’m not a thief. I took what was rightfully mine. The rest is… a donation to your clone welfare fund.”

  “Walon,” Skirata said quietly, “this is something like forty million creds, at least.” Stunned or not, he could always compose himself enough to carry out a blisteringly accurate valuation. “You nearly died to get it. You sure about this? You’re still in shock. You—”

  “Sure.”

  “Sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “You liberated it for the lads? Walon, that’s—”

  “I liberated it to cover my shebs,” Vau said.

  Skirata nodded, suddenly unable to meet Vau’s eyes any longer. “Of course you did.”

  “If the only items missing… are from the Vau deposit box, then it narrows down the suspects.” Vau reached out for the beaker and managed to get it to his lips. He spilled a lot of it, but that was okay. He was recovering fast. “Just made it look like good old-fashioned random thieving.”

  “Your dad couldn’t touch you even if he did work out that you’d come back.”

  It was clearly one admission too far for Vau. He was definitely embarrassed, not angry. “Look, Kal, when you were surviving on dead borrats and gravel and playing the working-class martyr, did nobody teach you how to steal like a professional?”

  Vau usually didn’t have to do much to get Skirata fighting mad: breathing was normally enough. This time Skirata simply knelt there with his chin lowered, struggling to find the right words to tell Vau he was moved by his generosity.

  “Thanks,” he said, fidgeting with a spectacular aurodium ingot. “Thanks, ner vod.”

  Ner vod. He’d never called Vau brother without a good dose of sarcasm. Forty million creds went a long way with Skirata.

  “But remember my men, too, Kal. If they need help when the time comes… I expect it to be given.”

  “Walon, this is for every clone who needs help. Not just my lads. I’d buy out all three million of them if I could.”

  “As long as we understand each other.”

  “I’ll get Ordo to inventory this. He’s good at that.”

  They didn’t have a crumb of food on board Aay’han but they were… rich. Or at least Skirata’s rapidly expanding plans to secure the future for clones—his clones, Vau’s clones, any shabla clone he could get out of the GAR in the end—were well funded. Ordo sat at the treatment table in the medbay with Skirata and worked his way through the haul with a datapad and a distracted frown.

  “Is this some Mandalorian renaissance you’re planning, Kal?” Vau asked.

  It was starting to feel like it. He hadn’t really thought that far ahead. “If I set up a place for them all, then it might as well be Mandalore.”

  “Yeah,” Vau said. “It might as well.”

  Mird, draped over Vau like a badly made fur coat, watched Ordo with one red-rimmed eye. The other was shut tight. Ordo had never forgotten that Vau had set Mird on him as a kid, and it seemed that Mird hadn’t forgotten that Ordo had aimed a blaster between its eyes. It rumbled deep in its throat, apparently reassured that both Ordo’s hands were occupied with the proceeds of the robbery.

  Ordo took a spectral analyzer from his belt tool kit and ran the beam over the gems, diligently noting the composition and weight of each piece in his datapad with a little frown of concentration like some heavily armed accountant. Skirata held his breath.

  Some of the items in the bag were priceless antiques. “Beshavo ancestral icon,” Ordo said, and held up a time-stained square of gilded parchment. Collectors would happily shoot their mothers for it. They certainly shot each other. “I hope you know a reliable fence in the fine art world, Kal’buir, because we’re going to need one.”

  “The fine arts,” Skirata said, fighting a hysterical urge to giggle, “are my natural territory.”

  “You’re an uncultured savage,” said Vau. “But you did save my shebs. Here, Ordo, help me with my belt.”

  Ordo raised an eyebrow. “You ought to be taking it easy, Sergeant.”

  “Open this pouch. Come on.”

  Skirata did it for him. Vau fumbled and pulled out a piece of jewelry, a gold pin with three square-cut, vivid blue stones of extravagant size set along its length. He could have swapped it for a penthouse apartment in the Republica. Skirata had never seen anything like it.

  “My mother’s bauble,” Vau said. He tossed it to Ordo, who caught it one-handed. “Give it to that pretty girl of yours, Captain. She’ll do it justice.”

  Ordo, always an odd mix of naïveté and precocious experience, stared at it with visible dismay. He had no idea how to accept a gift like that: but then neither did Skirata. It was a showstopper. The only people who’d given him assets even remotely like it had done so at the point of his knife. Vau seemed utterly unmoved by wealth, but maybe if you started life that rich then it ceased to have meaning.

  Ordo scanned the stones—dimensions, clarity, refraction, density—and tapped the datapad.

  “Approximately one hundred and forty-three carats.” His gaze was still fixed on the sapphires as if they were going to explode. “Current market value of the unset gems is ten million. But it’s your inheritance.” He sounded like a little boy again, and the fact that it was stolen property didn’t enter into the objection. “It’s too valuable, I’m afraid.”

  “Take it, Ordo. It gives me great pleasure to know that Ma Vau no longer has it, and that a better woman does.”

  It might simply have been embarrassed bluster, but Skirata felt that depriving his loathed parents of something was exactly what Vau wanted. He was a volunteer orphan. It was in stark contrast with Skirata, an orphan who valued family more than anything
. He tried to be the best possible father to men who’d been created without the comfort of any mother at all, good or bad.

  Ordo, as ever, educated Skirata again. The lad was full of surprises.

  “It’s very gracious of you, Sergeant Vau,” he said, and put the pin carefully in his undershirt pocket. He could be quite the gentleman, just as Skirata had taught him. “Thank you. I assure you it’ll be treasured.”

  It took another hour to tally all the items, and some still defied valuation: even so, Skirata was now looking at fifty-three and a half million credits, if he didn’t count Ordo’s shoroni sapphires, half of it in unregistered secured bonds that could be converted to credits anywhere. While Vau slept and Ordo piloted the ship, Skirata admired the haul for a while, imagining all the safehouses, escape routes, and new beginnings it could buy for clones who decided they’d completed their service to the Republic.

  He wasn’t encouraging desertion. He was liberating slaves. Men who didn’t sign up had no oath or contract to honor as far as he was concerned.

  Eventually he left Vau to his sleep, curled in a fetal ball with Mird still keeping vigil over him, and wandered off to the cockpit to sit with Ordo.

  Ordo held out the jeweled pin. “Look. They turn green in this light.” He seemed more fascinated by the chemistry of them. “What am I going to do with them, Kal’buir?”

  Skirata shrugged. “Like Vau says, give them to Besany.”

  “They’re stolen. That compromises her.”

  “Let me think of something.”

  “They’d buy a lot of land and a secure base. Will Vau be offended?”

  “Not as long as Ma Vau doesn’t get to wear them again.”

  “How terrible to hate your parents so much. But then parents do appalling things to their children, don’t they? Like poor Etain. Given away to total strangers.” Ordo pitied Jedi. It was becoming a recurring theme in his conversation. “I’m lucky to find a father who wanted me. We all are.”

  Does he think I was a bad father to my own kids? He never says.

  “I’d kill for you, son,” Skirata said. “It’s that simple.”

  Ordo was a good lad. A wonderful lad. He could pilot a totally unfamiliar ship—even stage a staggering rescue—just on intuition and one skim of the manual, then sit down and balance the accounts. Skirata, choked silent by pride and overwhelming paternal love, leaned over the pilot’s seat and gave him a hug. Ordo winked, clearly pleased with himself, and gripped Skirata’s arm.

  Fatherhood was a blessing. It would be a blessing for Darman, when the time came for him to find out, and now Skirata had both wealth and the prospect of Ko Sai’s technology to guarantee a decent future for all of them.

  But the future was a fragile concept for Mandalorians. Tomorrow was never taken for granted by soldiers, and the Mando’a word for it—vencuyot—conveyed optimism rather than a timescale. Venku was a good, positive Mandalorian name for any son. It would fit Darman and Etain’s baby very well indeed.

  Yes, Venku. That’s it: Venku.

  “I never adopted you formally,” Skirata said. It had been bothering him in recent days, ever since he began to think of the war as having a definite timescale. “Any of you.”

  “Does that matter?”

  Skirata now felt that it did. No Mando’ad would nitpick over the bond between him and his boys, and as far as the Republic was concerned clones didn’t even qualify as people, but his plans to give them a decent future had now become very, very specific. That discovery of Lama Su’s terse message to Palpatine just over a week ago had fast-forwarded everything.

  “Yes,” he said. He reached to grasp Ordo’s hand and recited the short, no-frills gai bal manda—“name and soul,” all it took to unpick history and give a child a new parentage. Mandalorians were habitual adopters. Bloodlines were just medical detail. “Ni kyr’tayl gai sa’ad, Ordo.”

  Ordo stared at their clasped hands for a moment. He had a crushing grip. “I’ve been your son since the day you first saved my life, Buir.”

  “I think you boys did the saving,” Skirata said. “I don’t want to imagine where I’d be without you.”

  Skirata was now busy hating himself for not doing this before, not making the ultimate commitment, and he fretted about his five other Nulls scattered around the galaxy. Sometimes he saw them again as two-year-olds waiting to be culled—killed—because they didn’t meet the spec the Kaminoans wanted. Uncommandable. Disturbed. Defective.

  And aruetiise thought Mandalorians were savages, did they?

  The galaxy was full of hypocrites.

  Chapter Four

  Decree E49D139.41: All nonmilitary cloning of sentients is prohibited, and military cloning is to be confined to Republic-licensed facilities, such as those of the government of Kamino and any others designated by the Republic now or at any time during the duration of the hostilities. This prohibition encompasses the supply of cloning equipment; the hiring or contracting of cloning technologists and genetic engineers for the purpose of carrying out cloning techniques; and the procurement of sentient cloned organisms. Exemptions: Khomm, Lur, Columus, and Arkania may continue therapeutic medical cloning with appropriate license on a case-by-case basis.

  —Proceedings of the Senate, Republic Legal Review

  Gaftikar,

  the road to Eyat,

  473 days after Geonosis

  “So what’s your strategy?” Darman asked the lizard, trying to build relationships. “How are you going to take over?”

  Sergeant Kal said that you had to work with the locals and use their social structures to get the job done, not try to get them to work the Republic’s way. Atin ambled along beside Darman and the Marit, hands in his pockets, no telltale signs of his lightweight body armor under the workman’s clothes A’den had given him. It was raining and the path through the trees was muddy and puddled, but at least they had an excuse to cover their heads with hoods. Atin had a visor and two days’ growth of dark beard. On a cursory glance, few would spot that they were identical.

  “We crush Eyat,” the lizard said. Her name was Cebz and she had a frill of scarlet skin under her chin, apparently a sign that she was dominant and wouldn’t take any backtalk from lesser lizards. She smelled of crushed leaves and carried a formidable SoroSuub blaster slung across her chest. “We concentrate our efforts on the capital, and when that falls, the regional governments can’t hold out, and we take the next tier of cities, and then the next smaller ones, and so on. We have numbers on our side.”

  “I think our Chancellor could do with listening to you,” Atin said, more to himself than to her. “He likes to start everywhere at once, so nobody feels left out of the war.”

  “That’s how we build, by cascade process,” said Cebz. “We can also unbuild the same way.”

  Her tail swished from side to side to keep her balance as she walked. The whush-whush-whush and the current of air were noticeable. “Can you sneak up on people?” Darman asked.

  Cebz stopped swinging her tail and her gait became slightly more lateral, but she was now moving silently. “Yes.”

  “So you built the cities here.”

  “Yes. The hired help.”

  “But you don’t get a say in government.”

  “We didn’t get paid as much as humans. We can’t live in the nice homes we built. If having a say means changing that, then yes, we want a say in government. Your other comrade in the skirt was very vexed about that, before he disappeared.”

  “The first ARC? Yes, I can see how that would get Alpha-Thirty annoyed…”

  “You understand. You don’t have any rights, either. If you ask me, it’s crazy to train an army and not keep it happy. It’ll turn on you in the end.”

  Atin coughed discreetly. “You speak very good Basic.”

  “Always pays to speak the customer’s language.”

  She came to a sudden halt, motionless. Darman’s instinct was to crouch and draw his sidearm. Atin did the same. Cebz stared down at the
m, baffled.

  “What’s up?”

  “You stopped dead,” Darman whispered, missing his helmet’s sensors. “Enemy contact?”

  “No, but this is as far as I go. Too close to the city. Marits stand out. Heads we can cover, but the tails are a problem.” She swung around and began walking back toward the camp. “Good luck.”

  Reptilian species had that tendency to freeze and then burst into movement again, the GAR manual said. Knowing that didn’t stop Darman from reacting every time. Atin watched Cebz go and turned to Darman again with a shrug. “Just an initial recce and maybe vehicle acquisition, all right?” he said. “Just assess the place. Just look around.”

  “I swear,” Darman said. He had fake ID, credits, and the Marits’ excellent plans of the city on his datapad. “Make sure nothing’s changed since the last time the data was updated. See how far into the government complex we can get legitimately.”

  The first thing that struck him about the city was that it was clearly defined—no gradual thickening of suburbs, no ribbon development—and if he hadn’t been able to see the shapes of the perimeter buildings, he’d have thought it was a walled bastion. There was little traffic entering and leaving, and it was almost entirely made up of big vessels—repulsor trucks and shuttles. The citizens of Eyat didn’t venture far afield.

  “Siege in all but name,” Atin said. “They’re scared of the Marits.”

  “So how do we explain that we walked in?”

  Atin tapped his blaster. “We’re young, tough, and crazy.”

  “I’ll buy that.”

  “And from out of town.”

  “A’den could have mentioned it.”

  “We overflew the area. We should have thought of it.”

  “It’ll be easier next time, once we’ve got a vehicle.”

  “Hire or buy?”

  “I thought of liberating a crate, but it’s a small city, and they probably take speeder theft more seriously than on Triple Zero.”

  “Dar, you actually like thieving stuff, don’t you?”

  “It’s not stolen,” Darman said. “It’s differently procured.”