True Colors

by Karen Traviss

  Mereel smiled to himself. “Until the lawsuits come rolling in.”

  “Just operating costs,” Skirata said. “Overheads.”

  The three men climbed onto Aay’han and sat on a flat section of her casing, backs resting against the curve of the port cargo bay, looking out to sea. Mird sat with its nose pointing into the wind, sniffing happily. Skirata didn’t know a lot about sport angling, although he could manage to catch fish if he ever had to, and he hoped there wasn’t some giveaway sign of a real angler that was conspicuously missing. If push came to shove, he could always play the stim baron on his first fishing trip.

  “The aiwha-bait has to have a resupply route,” he said. “She can’t just go to ground here and have no contact with anyone. How does she get her food? She’s not the kind that lives off the land. She’s used to having minions.”

  “Sea,” said Mereel.

  “What?”

  “Live off the sea, not the land.”

  “Well, Kaminoan discipline or not, she has to eat something.”

  “Let’s do a little exploring,” said Vau. “We have the chart. Oya, Mird!”

  Mird stood up, paws slipping on the smooth hull, and looked around frantically at the command to hunt. The strill couldn’t sense any prey. Vau leaned over and ruffled its loose folds of gold fur, pointing at the water. Strills could fly and glide, but swimming wasn’t their forte. Mird rumbled with disappointed frustration.

  “’S’okay, Mird, I’ll let you hunt kaminiise soon,” Skirata said. He wondered if he was getting soft: he’d always disliked the animal, even if he couldn’t blame it for its savagery given a master like Vau. Now he saw its talents, if not its charm. “Soon. Okay?”

  Mird’s eyes had that focus and intensity that suggested it understood Skirata perfectly, and it settled down again with its huge head in Vau’s lap. Mereel slid his sun visor into place and leaned back against the curve of the hull, fingers meshed behind his head.

  “Let’s narrow down the search range first,” he said, pointing. “Look. Check out the speed.”

  Moving across the harbor, well within the safe turquoise shallows, was a powered barge with aquata divers getting ready to explore the underwater world, wearing a bizarre array of brightly colored swimwear that said they didn’t dive for a living. The hull looked like the barges tied up on nearby pontoons in Tropix resort livery: this was what the staff here used to get around the perfectly planned, ideally spaced island chain, and this was what the Twi’lek must have used to move Ko Sai’s equipment and droids out to sea.

  If they worked out the speed the barges could cruise, and factored in the weight of the cargo the Twi’lek had delivered, they’d get a radius within which to search.

  Skirata aimed his datapad, laying it flat on his knee and letting it track the barge. “I was never very good at this…” It was just a matter of timing it across a set distance, using the datapad like one of those gizmos that CSF sometimes used to track speeders. “Well, I make that fifteen klicks an hour.”

  Mereel slid along the hull and checked over his shoulder. “So that means if the barge went out to some RV point and returned in half an hour, we’re looking at a maximum range of maybe ten klicks, if it was moving faster, and that’s being optimistic.”

  “Let’s take the search out to the fifteen-klick radius, then, just to be sure.”

  Vau keyed in the data and projected the holochart onto the hull. “This is three-dimensional, remember.” A concave relief chart formed like a mesh basket in blue light that was hard to see in the sunlight. “That’s the underwater topography in a fifteen-klick radius from the coordinates the Twi’lek gave us.”

  Even in these lighting conditions, Skirata could see the indentations of cave mouths under the waterline. The charts only went down as far as fifty meters.

  It was as good a place as any to start looking.

  “Who did the hydrography for the developers?” Mereel asked. “They put that fifty-meter limit in for a reason, because they must have known what was below it. They didn’t just stop looking because it was time for a caf break.”

  “I don’t think there’s the equivalent of city hall here,” Skirata said. “We can’t just stroll in and ask the local planning chief if we can look through his database. That’s the problem with commercially owned planets.”

  Vau opened the top hatch and motioned Mird inside. “Where’s your spirit of adventure, Kal? Have overpriced DeepWater hybrid, will explore…”

  “I got this tub for a good price.” Insulting Skirata’s ability to drive a deal was marginally worse than questioning his courage, and he realized Vau had baited him yet again. “And I wonder what you’d do with yourself if you didn’t have me to torment.”

  Vau raised one eyebrow—now, that was annoying dumb insolence, it really was—but Skirata ignored the impulse, thought of the fortune Vau had handed over to him as if it were a cred chip he’d found on the street, and stood up. Mereel slipped the mooring line and prepared to get under way.

  The islands were constructed on the tops of natural peaks jutting from the sea, like porceplast crowns on the stumps of teeth. Once submerged, it was simply a matter of doing what he’d do on land if he was hunting an animal in a lair: looking for signs of activity, checking out cave mouths, and venturing inside.

  It was just a recce, just a discreet dive to scope out the topography that wasn’t shown on any of the charts, so they could come back later to stage a planned assault. But if an opportunity presented itself, they’d take it.

  Outside the transparisteel bubble that formed a clear dome over the cockpit, a tourist brochure of an underwater world drifted past them in vividly colored serenity. Mird seemed fascinated, pressing a snotty nose to the transparisteel and making excited grumbling noises, and Skirata risked reaching out to haul the strill back by its collar and wipe the viewport clean. Filthy thing, but it has its uses, just like us. Vau took the hint and beckoned to Mird to sit on his lap.

  Relations had definitely relaxed between Skirata and Vau. There was a time when they’d have brawled over less.

  Aay’han dropped below sixty meters, past the charted depth. The water was surprisingly clear; lacy weeds swayed gracefully in the currents. Brilliant pink and yellow fish like ribbons wove themselves between the fronds, flashing displays of lights like a Corsucant casino.

  “That’s more like it,” Mereel said, sounding pleased. The navigation displays stripped away the layer of marine life and showed a three-dimensional landscape of slopes marked with fissures and channels that penetrated deep into the face of the submerged mountain forming the one island within the fifteen-kilometer zone. Aay’han came alongside a deep shadow that appeared as a hole on the sensors.

  “Worth a ping,” said Mereel. “Let’s just line up the sensors and see how far into that feature we can map.”

  “You okay with this, son?”

  “Yes, Kal’buir.” He turned the vessel ninety degrees and pointed Aay’han’s nose at the opening for a deep scan. “Now, that’s a likely one. Goes back a hundred meters at least. Mark that on the chart, please, Sergeant Vau.” He turned to Skirata. “I’m several pages ahead of Ordo in the manual now…”

  There’d be a contest later, Skirata could tell. Ordo and Mereel, a double act right from the time he’d met them as two-year-old clone kids—no names, just numbers, and already handling blasters—sometimes indulged in a little rivalry and one-upmanship. It explained Mereel’s love of risk taking. He had to edge out of Ordo’s shadow somehow.

  They worked along the thirty kilometers of submerged coastline, checking and scanning cave after cave. Some were immediately obvious as dead ends when the sonar scan was mapped onto the three-dimensional view, just depressions in the rock that went nowhere. Some were so deep and twisted that the sonar didn’t find an end, and those were marked. As Mereel eased Aay’han through the extraordinary forest of weed and marine creatures—some of which slapped suckerlike mouthparts onto the cockpit bubble as if testi
ng the ship for flavor—Skirata kept an eye out for signs of disturbance to the environment that might indicate recent construction work. If Ko Sai was here, she’d only been in residence for a few months. Signs of activity might still be around—fresh-cut rock face, debris from cave mouths, any number of telltale signs that she’d had a hideaway built down here.

  Vau stared out of the dome, too, with Mird mirroring his posture as exactly as a six-legged animal ever could, blinking from time to time and pausing once or twice to turn and gaze at its master before giving him an enthusiastic and slobbery lick across the face with a dripping gray tongue.

  Skirata shuddered. But at least there was one being in the galaxy that loved Vau unconditionally. Fierfek, if he’d started feeling sorry for the chakaar after so many years, it was a bad sign. The fortune was just creds Vau had no use for, Skirata told himself, something he wanted to deny his own privileged class and that simply happened to be useful in the plan to rescue clones—an afterthought.

  It’s not true, though, is it? He’s a Mando too. The same thing that drew him to Mandalore is the same thing that kept me there. We chose it. Maybe I hate him because of the parts of him that are too much like me.

  “All stop,” Vau said suddenly.

  Mird stiffened, always sensitive to Vau’s reactions. The strill was hunting, even if it couldn’t get out there and taste the scents and currents. Mereel brought the ship to a halt and she drifted, silent except for the hum of the shields and environment controls.

  Vau pointed ahead, slightly to port.

  “In that weed forest. Look.”

  Aay’han’s exterior holocams trained in the direction of Vau’s finger and Mird’s snout. The weed was thick and populated by shoals of glowing orange discs that could have been fish, worms, or swimming crustaceans. The impression was one of a tapcaf courtyard strung with decorative lights.

  Not all the weed was pale green. Some looked white in the aquamarine light. Skirata strained to focus, and then a current moved the weed a little more and he realized he wasn’t looking at weed at all, but bones.

  It was a skeleton.

  “Shab,” Mereel muttered. “I think we’re too late for resuscitation, Kal’buir.”

  “I hope he bought travel insurance.” Skirata couldn’t see any marks on the bones at this distance. “Or she.”

  Who’d died down here? And why?

  The skeleton was swaying in the current as if dancing with the weed. It was definitely a humanoid of some kind, picked clean and as white as an anatomical specimen, although a closer inspection—as close as they could get without leaving the vessel—showed a few colonies of pale yellow growths that looked like closed shadow barnacles. It was hard to see what was holding it down. If the flesh was gone, the connective tissue that held the bones together should have been gone, too. Skirata couldn’t think of a species that fitted the bill, but it didn’t matter. He—or she—wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Diver who ignored the hazard warnings?” Vau asked.

  Skirata’s instinct for bad signs was more reliable than any sonar. “What kind of marine life eats a diving suit and apparatus as well as the meat?”

  Mereel, engrossed in the controls for the external security holocam, let out a long breath.

  “And when did you last see a fish with fingers?” he said quietly, switching the holocam image to one of the large monitors. “Look.”

  The close-up view of the weed bed that swayed around the skeleton’s ankles like a deep-pile carpet showed a splash of bright orange. As Mereel magnified the image and went in for a close-up, Skirata realized what it was.

  Mereel was right. There weren’t too many marine species that could take a length of fibercord and secure a body to a rock.

  The close view on the monitor showed a knot: a competent, nonslipping, textbook Keldabe anchoring bend. In a galaxy of loop rings, gription panels, and a hundred hightech ways of attaching things, few people bothered to learn to tie knots properly, let alone one as distinctive and complex as that.

  Very few people indeed: only clone soldiers—and Mandalorians.

  Chapter Ten

  Naasad’guur mhi,

  Naasad’guur mhi,

  Naasad’guur mhi,

  Mhi n’ulu.

  Mhi Mando’ade,

  Kandosii’ade,

  Teh Manda’yaim,

  Mando’ade.

  No one likes us,

  No one likes us,

  No one likes us,

  We don’t care.

  We are Mandos,

  The elite boys,

  Mando boys,

  From Mandalore.

  —Mandalorian drinking song, loosely translated; said to date from a ban on Mandalorian mercenaries drinking in local tapcafs, when employed by the government of Geris VI

  Republic Treasury building,

  Coruscant,

  478 days after Geonosis

  Besany closed the doors to her office and obscured the transparisteel walls with a touch of the button on her desk. She didn’t want to be disturbed.

  Centax II. Do I concentrate on that?

  She fondled the blaster that Mereel had given her and wondered what it would take to make her use it; she’d never fired one in anger. She hadn’t even been trained to shoot, but now seemed a pretty good time to learn. Then she began trying to work out how she might take a closer look at Centax II—in person, or at a distance—and work out what was going on. It was a military area, and no member of the public could stroll in there unannounced. There weren’t that many excuses to pay a visit even for a Treasury agent.

  The public accounts showed a number of contractors providing services to the Grand Army that could be cross-referenced to Centax, and one of them—Dhannut Logistics—also showed up on the health budget. It was worth a look as long as she was thinking medcenter.

  I could be totally off beam, of course.

  And I got Mereel his answer anyway. I should walk away from this.

  But she couldn’t, because Ordo couldn’t walk away, and neither could Corr, or any of the others. She realized how empty her life must have been to have filled up so fast and so easily with people who—possibly—didn’t give her a second thought except as a useful contact.

  I’m not stupid, Kal.

  But they had something she wanted, too, and it wasn’t just Ordo. She wanted a share of their closeness, that belonging and camaraderie, and an end to feeling she was on the outside of life.

  She thought suddenly of Fi, and how—so Ordo said—he knew there was a complete element missing from his existence, and he resented it. She at least knew what hers was, and where she might get it.

  But there was also the lure of a wrong to be righted, and she knew she wasn’t alone in that. Senator Skeenah from Chandrila was getting very vocal about the Grand Army’s conditions and clone rights. He might prove to be a handy excuse for investigating further.

  Her private comlink stared back at her from the palm of her hand, daring her to choose between calling Ordo and contacting the Senator. Still scared that she might call while Ordo was gambling whether to cut a red wire or a blue one as a detonator counted down, she sent him a delayed message instead. He could choose when and if he wanted to read it.

  I hope you enjoyed the cake. What else could she say? She had no idea who else might see it, secure link or not. You have to try my home cooking when you get back. She could imagine Ordo reading it with a frown, taking it at face value, while Mereel—who seemed to be leading a totally different life, and relishing it—would have given her a knowing grin.

  Besany sent the message with a click of her thumbnail on the keys, then tapped in the code for the Senate switchboard.

  No point leaving an audit trail on the office link, just in case. He’s a known antiwar activist. They’ll be watching him—whoever they might be.

  Senator Skeenah’s administrative droid made an appointment for her to meet him later that day, which indicated just how few lobbyists were courting a man
who opposed the war, and asked if she preferred “off site.”

  “I’m at the Treasury building,” she said. Visiting the Senate was routine for a government employee; it would draw less attention than a meeting in a tapcaf or restaurant. She’d be picked up on any of a dozen security holocams as she moved around Galactic City, and even by the surveillance satellites that kept watch over Coruscant. “I’ll come to his office.”

  On the way to the meeting, sitting in the back of an air taxi, she felt that the small blaster in her pocket was visible to the whole planet. She didn’t even know what type it was. It was a smart dark blue with a stubby green-gray barrel and a little red light that showed it was charged, quite a pretty object. When she peered at the engraved plate on the butt—she was sure the end of the grip was called that—she could see the words MERR-SONN.

  “Lady, you’re making me nervous,” said the taxi driver. “You going to assassinate someone?”

  Besany hadn’t realized he could see that far over the back of the seat, but there was a lot she didn’t know about the visual field of a Rodian’s faceted eyes. She slid the blaster off her lap and back into her pocket.

  “I mix with unsavory characters,” she said.

  Taxi drivers had an opinion on everything. “Senate’s full of them… they’re called politicians.”

  She thought that way, too, but then realized she’d never actually met one socially. Where did she get that idea? From the holonews? From the courts? The power of stereotypes was astonishing. She wondered how she could ever gain any headway in making Coruscanti see the anonymous troopers fighting the war for them as living, breathing men.

  She couldn’t even say they were all someone’s son or husband or father or brother. They were utterly outside of society. The size of the task almost crushed her.