True Colors

by Karen Traviss

  After that, it was easy. Relatively.

  Etain took a deep breath and was vaguely aware of the sound of the LAAT/i in the distance as she counted to three, tightened her grip on the margins of his armor plates, and then pushed upward, locking out her knees. For a moment the tendons felt as if they would never stretch out. She tottered a little. Then she found her balance and turned very carefully to walk, bent over at forty-five degrees, between the shimmering patches in the snow that only she could see.

  The weight lifted off her shoulders and she gripped more tightly, thinking she was dropping him, but she found she was clear of the minefield and a couple of his comrades had simply hauled him off her back.

  Levet caught her by the shoulder. “Enough, ma’am. Even if I have to slug you, you’re not doing that again. Understand? Leave it to the winchman.”

  She didn’t feel so clever now. She weighed forty-five kilos and she’d admit even to herself that she was skinny.

  “Okay.” She looked around at separate little scenes of despair, troopers receiving first aid from comrades while the med droid from the AT-TE hovered among them. She hadn’t even noticed the huge six-legged walker move in. Now she could see the trooper hit earlier, Ven, and his buddy kneeling over him, face pinched and yellow with the cold. Once troopers took their helmets off to attempt mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, they were as vulnerable to the freezing conditions as anyone. She walked across to him, feeling unsteady, and squatted down.

  “Can’t get a pulse, ma’am,” he said quietly.

  “He’s not dead.” She put her hand on Ven’s forehead and felt the life in him—weak, but holding on. She couldn’t see where he’d been hit. The vulnerable points were the gaps between armor sections. “Extreme cold improves survival chances with some injuries. The med droid will be with him in a few minutes.” Ven’s skin felt like a corpse’s. She knew exactly what a cadaver felt like. “Okay?”

  “Okay, ma’am. Thanks.”

  She’d been at this stage before: numb, not fully aware of her surroundings, and unsure how much time had elapsed. The firing had stopped, so the surviving farmers—if there were any after the AT-TE’s cannon bombardment—must have moved on. Most of the Gurlanins had vanished except for the few helping the gunship’s winchman get a harness on the remaining dead and wounded.

  It was odd to watch them. They could take any form they pleased, anything at all, yet instead of shapeshifting into something with hands, they remained in what she thought of as their animal form. It was as if they felt they didn’t have to change any longer. They had their planet back, very nearly. It seemed like a kind of physical nationalism where they could be themselves again.

  “You okay now, ma’am?” said Levet.

  Etain watched the walker squat in the low position to open its hatches and take in the wounded on repulsor gurneys. Ven’s skin was like pale wax; other men were suffering from blast trauma, shaken around inside their armor by mines or artillery rounds. Even a helmet didn’t prevent brain injury, and their armor wasn’t the expensive ultratoughened Katarn type that enabled Fi to throw himself on a grenade and come out of the encounter just badly shaken. The med droid was injecting medication to stop intracranial swelling; one man was having a temporary shunt inserted through his skull to drain off fluid.

  “I’m not injured, if that’s what you mean.” She turned to look at Levet, unable to judge his degree of annoyance in the Force. He was a calm sea of self-control with undercurrents hidden so deep that she couldn’t tell if they were violence, sorrow, or passion. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to cause you anxiety.”

  See, all these horrible medical details I know about now? I didn’t want to learn this the hard way. Maybe when I get out, I can use this, be a medic… not a Jedi, not after this war. Not if, but when.

  It was more than worrying about Darman. It was all of them: the clone soldier she loved, the ones she knew as friends, the ones she didn’t know and never would. It overtook her now. She worried that her anxiety would damage the baby, and slid her arms inside her cloak to put a surreptitious hand on her belly and send a sense of comfort to him. He was agitated. Her state of mind was affecting him. He seemed almost… angry.

  It’ll be all right…

  But she had no name for him. She didn’t dare. And if he was angry, it was something he’d inherited from her.

  “We’re done,” Levet said. He stood listening, one finger held up for silence, and Etain heard a single shriek—a man, a woman, she couldn’t tell—in the distance. The Gurlanins were picking off the rebel farmers who’d escaped the bombardment.

  I ordered this. I started it. I did it. I made the mistake about the minefield.

  Etain was simply dismayed to take stock of the person she’d become, and how far her Jedi training—contemplation, reason, nonviolence—had receded into the distance.

  “Ma’am? Time to move on and track down the others. This is going to be a long, fiddly job.”

  “Okay.” Etain needed a moment. She stared down at the compressed pink snow where Ven had lain while his buddies worked on keeping him alive. There was more blood than she’d expected, but it was hard to tell when it had stained the snow and spread. Blood in water or slush always looked worse than it was. “I’ll be with you shortly.”

  She stood thinking of Darman, picturing him so that the baby might possibly see what she saw in the Force, and then made her way to the LAAT/i gunship. The speeder buses had already left empty, with no farmers to evacuate. Levet walked behind.

  “Ma’am,” he said. “Hang on.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve been hit, ma’am. Look—”

  Etain turned around to face the commander and saw what he’d spotted: she’d left a trail of blood droplets in her wake. Instinctively, she looked for injuries, knowing how easy it was to be numbed to them until the adrenaline wore off.

  Then it dawned on her. The blood wasn’t coming from an injury, but running down her leg. She could feel its brief warmth now as it cooled on her skin and froze where it soaked into her clothes. A searing cramp seized her and doubled her up.

  She was hemorrhaging. She was losing the baby.

  Nar Hej Shipping Company,

  Napdu, fourth moon of Da Soocha, Hutt space,

  476 days after Geonosis

  Sev stood to one side of the entrance, staring at Fixer on the other side as he had so many times before.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d walked through an unknown door without blowing it up, kicking it open, or melting its locks with a blaster bolt. One day he’d use the controls like everyone else. Scorch knelt between the two of them, edging the thin blades of the hydraulic spreader into the crack between the two halves of the door.

  “I need an explosive fix,” Scorch said. “I’m fed up with opening things quietly.”

  “We don’t want an audience arriving to admire your work.”

  “Sev, I’m a surgeon among rapid entry artists.” Scorch grunted with the effort as he braced the spreader against his chest and leaned on it. The blades finally slipped into the gap. “You’re a nerf butcher.”

  “Want to be on the menu, too?”

  “Patience. Or we’ll lock you in a room with Fi and let him talk you to death.”

  Fixer let out a long sigh, one of his eloquently wide repertoire of nonverbal responses, and held up his hand to do a mute countdown: four, three, two…

  One.

  Scorch pumped the hydraulics and the blades separated, sliding apart along the length of the bar. The doors were now open far enough for him to wedge the hydraulic ram between them and part them wide. Sev stepped over him, focused on not letting Ko Sai’s trail go cold.

  So… they couldn’t let Skirata know about this.

  Or Omega, come to that.

  It bothered Sev a lot. He understood the need to know and not know, but something that had to be kept from specific people he knew and trusted—and who wouldn’t trust a brother commando?—troubled him.
<
br />   We’re not like ordinary men. We’re professionals. We don’t play games.

  But what puzzled him most was the order not to tell Vau, either. Maybe Zey thought Skirata would wheedle it out of him. The Jedi certainly didn’t trust Mandalorians, but maybe that was inevitable given the free-range nature of Vau’s and Skirata’s black ops activities. They might have been old but they were still thoroughly bad boys.

  The office was in darkness. Sev’s helmet spot-lamp picked out desks, grubby mats on the floor, and doors that led to what his sensors told him was a long hollow space—a corridor. It probably led to living quarters. It wasn’t unusual for traders to live in the same building as their offices on Napdu, because it was just a staging post for the sector’s freight—no nice residential neighborhoods. Sev knew that because his HUD-linked database said so, under a red glowing header that read LOCAL CONDITIONS. He saw too little of the galaxy’s day-to-day life to judge for himself, so he still relied on intel. He could see Scorch and Fixer’s view of the dark office in their point-of-view HUD icons, and Fixer was already slicing into the computer records.

  And Ko Sai’s trail led here, after it was shaken and beaten out of reluctant informants. Vaynai, waterworld and smugglers’ haven, stopping off at Aquaris, another waterworld rife with piracy and other scum, to… Napdu.

  Fixer took a probe from his belt and slid it into the computer’s port, then stood in a pose of frozen concentration as he watched the screen. “Business is booming,” he said. “They really ought to shut the system down at night and password-protect the start-up.”

  Scorch prowled, taking flimsi out of files. Anyone who still used flimsi either had data they didn’t want to commit to a sliceable medium or was neurotic about keeping backups for the tax office. “And that would slow you down how long, exactly? Thirty seconds?”

  Fixer grunted meaningfully. Sev, half his attention on points of entry and exit, and the other half on Fixer’s HUD view of the scrolling spreadsheets, could hear Boss clearing his throat. Their sergeant was a hundred meters away, waiting in a TIV—a special ops traffic interdiction vessel—that masqueraded as a packet courier, and the disembodied sound of someone coughing and swallowing irritated Sev a great deal.

  “Boss…”

  “Problem, Sev?”

  “You, Boss…”

  “When I can take my bucket off, I’ll gargle with bacta. Got a cold. Okay?”

  Fixer came to life again. “That’s the contents of his data storage copied across. Scorch?”

  Scorch was still sifting through a pile of flimsi, moving it from one stack to another and pausing to stare at each sheet. He was scanning the contents on his HUD holorecorder. “This is just old stuff. Might as well grab what I can, though.”

  Boss’s voice rasped on the comlink. “This cesspit is orbiting another waterworld, Delta… Da Soocha. See a trend?”

  Sev heard a faint creak and padded up to the interior doors. He listened carefully, then pressed a sound sensor to the panels. “Prepare to bang out. I detect signs of unintelligent life, and it’s not Scorch…”

  Fixer shut down the computer, grabbed a trashy ornament—a souvenir faux crystal vase from Galactic City with long-dead insects piled up in the bottom—and broke open a cash credit box to pocket the contents. Vau had taught them to make infiltrations look like robberies if they could, and Sev remained impressed by his old training sergeant’s unerring eye for the choicest deposit boxes on Mygeeto. Whatever Vau did, he did it exceptionally well.

  He’s the best. Why should he expect any less from us? He made me what I am. He cares, whatever Skirata thinks.

  “Okay, we’re gone,” said Fixer, and vanished through the doors with Scorch. Sev backed out after them, DC-17 aimed, in case the owner walked in and became another unfortunate statistic in a lawless sector. Burglars didn’t usually wear Katarn armor; it would have been hard to leave a live witness.

  The three commandos sprinted down the road—no street lighting, all properties shuttered, no prying eyes—and down a dark alley to catch up with Boss. The TIV sat like a crouching animal in a gap between two repulsor trucks. The hatch opened, and they piled inside.

  “Okay, let’s thin out and run through the data.” Boss punched in the coordinates to take the TIV into a freight lane out to Nar Shaddaa and held his hand out for the datachip.

  “C’mon, Fixer. Got to transmit it back to base for General Jusik to sift through.”

  Fixer dropped it into Boss’s palm. “Bet I find it before he does.”

  “You can have a techies’ race between you,” Scorch said, taking off his helmet and rolling his head to ease his neck muscles. “He’s okay, ol’ Jusik.”

  Fixer pounced on the chip as soon as Boss had transmitted the contents and slotted it into his datapad. Sev, sliding across the bench seat in the crew bay to lean on his shoulder, noted that there were an awful lot of freight and passenger transactions.

  Fixer shrugged him away. “Gerroff. Go pester Scorch.” Sev heard his comlink click off and Fixer was in a world of his own, searching for all traffic that came from or connected with Vaynai in the last six months.

  Sev eased off his helmet and gazed at the starscape. It was pretty. There were things out there he wanted to see and do, and probably never would, but he was determined not to think about it or else he’d end up a whiner like Fi, always regretting what he couldn’t have. His life was too short to waste it like that. It took an effort to steer away from speculation and longing, but Sev prided himself on his single-mindedness even when it hurt—especially when it hurt.

  “So what’s Zey’s problem with Skirata?” Scorch asked, kicking the back of Sev’s seat. The benches were arranged one behind the other. “Doesn’t he trust him?”

  “Doesn’t trust him not to make tatsushi out of Ko Sai,” Boss murmured. “Papa Kal got off to a bad start with the Kaminoans…”

  Scorch carried on swinging his boot against the metal frame. “Is it true he killed one?”

  “Who knows? He’s crazy enough.”

  “So what’s Vau going to do with his stash?”

  Sev turned around, grabbed Scorch’s ankle, and twisted to make the point. “Maybe he’ll pay for a nice beskar saber for me so I can remove the source of this irritation.”

  “Come on, you’d miss me if I got killed…”

  “Nobody’s going to get killed. Except by me.”

  “Shut up, you two.” Boss took a sudden intense interest in the TIV’s rectenna display. “Busy lane. Don’t distract the pilot.”

  Fixer, gaze glued to his datapad, suddenly stirred and pulled off his helmet. “Paydirt.”

  “What?” Sev asked.

  “Fifteen flights booked in that originated on Aquaris or Vaynai. Five of those passed through both. Two of that five went on to Da Soocha. One paid for in cash credits.”

  Boss muttered to himself. “Very busy lane…”

  “Vessels?” Scorch asked.

  “One hydrographic survey vessel, one private charter. The droggy ship was the cash credit transaction.”

  “So she’s doing the waterworld grand tour.” Sev pictured the rough layout of the galaxy, mentally plotting a course from Kamino, then to Vaynai, then Aquaris, then Da Soocha. It looked as if Ko Sai had headed out along the margin of the Outer Rim toward the Tingel Arm and then looped back, maybe to cover her tracks, maybe to avoid something. Whatever she was doing, she was hopping from one ocean world to another. “Looking for a new house with a pool?”

  “Better find the pilot and shake him down about the trip.”

  “What if it’s not Ko Sai?” Sev was distracted by the fact that Boss wasn’t joining in. “I suppose we start over from Aquaris, if the informant was telling us the truth.”

  “We’ll pay him a visit if his memory needs help.” Scorch rolled his eyes. “How many Kaminoans do you think go wandering around the Outer Rim, Sev?”

  Boss interrupted. “I hate to ruin your travel plans, gentlemen, but this is a busier freight
lane than anyone has a reason to expect. Check out the joker who’s tailgating us.”

  All four commandos squeezed forward to stare at the rectenna screen. There was a small, fast vessel right up their tail, so close that if they’d vented their waste tank it would have spattered the viewscreen. It wasn’t the kind of thing that bad pilots did. It was what someone in pursuit did.

  “It’s a big galaxy,” said Sev, pulling on his helmet and sealing the collar for vacuum. He felt his stomach tighten and his pulse pounding in his throat. “He could overtake…”

  Scorch helmeted up, too. “Maybe he wants your autograph.”

  Boss commed back to base. The sensors showed that the vessel’s weapons were charging, and the transponder trace read UNKNOWN.

  The cannon round that shaved past their port side was definitely known, though. It had trouble written all over it.

  Chapter Seven

  Master Windu, I respect clone troopers as much as any Jedi, and perhaps even more in some cases. But a certain distance is required from our troops, clone or not. General Secura is becoming a little too close to Commander Bly, and while I applaud her dedication to the men under her command, this can only end in tears.

  —Jedi General Arligan Zey, director of special forces, stepping outside his area of responsibility in conversation with Master Mace Windu

  Aay’han, laid up on Bogg V,

  476 days after Geonosis

  Ordo watched a strange tableau unfolding in the crew lounge of Aay’han as he worked on fitting the enhanced weapons in the ship.

  While he passed hydrospanners and connectors to Mereel in the engineering section, he kept an eye on Skirata and Vau through the open hatch. He was ready to step in and break up an argument, because Kal’buir’s embarrassed and partial thaw toward his old comrade couldn’t last. The Nulls had grown up with the Skirata-and-Vau act—arguing, bickering, even fighting; the only thing the two had in common most of the time was their armor and their military skill. Skirata thought Vau was a sadistic snob, and Vau saw Skirata as an overemotional, uncultured thug.