True Colors

by Karen Traviss

One step at a time, girl. Do what you can.

  Senator Skeenah met her in one of the cell-like private interview rooms kept for Senators to meet members of the public. He was much more ordinary than she’d imagined, not terribly well dressed, but he had an earnest passion that hit her like a tidal wave. Another stereotype crashed and burned.

  “Of course I’m concerned about what happens to these men,” he said. “Whatever other member planets might do, Coruscant hasn’t tolerated slavery in millennia. It’s intolerable that we adopt it now simply because it’s expedient. But I’m a lone voice.”

  Besany took it carefully. “I’m having some difficulty identifying medical provision for the Grand Army, Senator. I can identify expenditure on what I think are medcenter facilities, but it’s not… let’s say the audit trail isn’t transparent.”

  That careful comment meant a great deal in political code if the listener wanted to interpret it. Skeenah seemed to. “Yes, I’ve asked repeatedly about casualties—the medical field units are woefully inadequate, and I can’t find out what happens to those killed in action. To the best of my knowledge, the bodies aren’t recovered. There’s no heroes’ return for these poor men. So if you see large sums allocated to clone welfare, I can assure you there’s no sign of it being used to that end.”

  Besany had a sensation of dread like cold water spilling in her lap. It was something she could have found out easily enough from Ordo; he’d know what they did with bodies, but it was one of a long list of things she’d never thought to ask. The inference was that troopers were simply discarded like waste, and that stoked her anger. She hovered on the edge of asking Skeenah if he knew anything about facilities on Centax II, and decided that it was too dangerous to have that kind of discussion with a man she didn’t know.

  “I audit some of the Grand Army accounts,” she said. That much was true, and hardly a secret if news of her meeting got back to her bosses. She slipped a plastoid contact card from her pocket and pressed it into his hand. “If there’s ever anything you think I should look at—discreetly, of course, because I’d be investigating other public servants—do let me know.”

  “Ah, you’re the internal police…”

  “I look after the taxpayers’ credits.”

  “And here was I thinking you might be concerned about the welfare of our army.”

  Besany bit her tongue out of habit but it was too painful a comment to let pass. “Oh, but I am,” she said. “They’re not just theoretical charity cases to me. I’m dating a trooper.”

  Skeenah looked taken aback for a moment, and she wasn’t sure if he was reacting to her cutting comment or the unsolicited personal detail.

  “Well,” he said, “there’s no point my haranguing you about the fact that they’re all human men like any other, is there?”

  It was time for a little humility. “I know a lot of clones, by most people’s standards, and yes, I care what happens to them.”

  “You might know, then, what happens to them.”

  “In what sense?”

  “When they’re wounded but can’t return to active duty. You see, I can find out what happens on the Rimsoo medical stations—or at least I get some limited answers from the Defense staff—but I’m getting no answers about the men who can’t be patched up and sent back.”

  Besany thought of Corr, temporarily assigned desk duties after a device he was defusing blew up and took his hands with it. He was awaiting the arrival of specialist prosthetics, and if Skirata hadn’t grabbed him for commando training, he’d have gone back to ordnance disposal.

  “I would imagine they die,” Besany said. “The army seems to go to a lot of trouble to send them back.”

  “Ah, but life isn’t that tidy,” Skeenah said. He lowered his voice, even though the doors were shut. “There’ll be injuries that a man can survive, but that means he’ll never be fit for service again. I can’t seriously believe something like that hasn’t happened in more than a year of this war. And yet there are no homes for these men, who must surely exist, and we know they don’t end up being cared for by family—because they have none. So where do they go?”

  Besany didn’t even want to think about it, but she had to. The only answer she could think of right then was that the most badly injured who might otherwise have been saved were left to die.

  But some mobile surgical units had Jedi advisers. No Jedi would let such a thing happen… would they?

  She had to talk to Jusik. He’d tell her.

  “I’m going to see if I can find out,” Besany said.

  “And I’m going to carry on pressing for proper long-term care facilities.” Skeenah looked troubled. “Meanwhile, I’m also going to help raise funds for charitable care. There are some citizens out there who want to help, you know.”

  “I’ll keep you posted,” Besany promised.

  She took the long walk back to the Treasury building, pausing for a caf on the way, and found that the Senator’s question was now eating away at her. Yes, it could only mean that clone troopers lived, or died, and there was no middle way or disability provision. The war hadn’t reached the eighteen-month mark yet. Governments were always poor at thinking things through, especially when wars caught them on the hop.

  Maybe this was what Dhannut Logistics was doing, then: care facilities out of the public eye to hide the signs that the war might not be going as well or as cleanly as the civilian citizens imagined, just as she’d first thought. She decided to check out their other projects when she got back to her desk, but while she sipped her caf, she checked them out via her datapad simply to get a street address from the directory.

  And that was where things started to get interesting.

  There was no entry in the public database for Dhannut. It could have been a subsidiary of another company, of course, or even one that wasn’t based on Coruscant; but either way, it would have to be registered to tender for government contracts, and it would have had to register for corporate taxation even if it was offworld, and so it would require a tax exemption number.

  Jilka could come in useful now. She was the tax officer; she was an expert in finding companies that earned revenue and didn’t pay their taxes in full.

  Besany Wennen, who’d played things by the book all her life until she fell in with a crowd of misfits and men who didn’t exist, put on her best liar’s face and prepared to spin a plausible story to Jilka, crossing the line from merely accessing records for unauthorized reasons to entering a world of deception—with consequences she knew she could never imagine.

  Rebel camp,

  near Eyat, Gaftikar,

  478 days after Geonosis

  The Marits were scuttling everywhere in a state of excitement, and there were a lot more of them today than Darman had seen before.

  He leaned against the doorway of the hut, brushing his teeth, collapsible plastoid bowl in one hand as he contemplated what was going to be a busy few days.

  “Shift it, Dar.” Niner was in full armor. He’d had word, then: they were going in. “Thirty-fifth’s moving. They’re finishing up on Qiilura. Let’s make sure they’ve got an open door.”

  Qiilura. Darman spat foam into the bowl. “Have I got time to call Etain?”

  “Do you have to?”

  “Well, I might get killed, and…”

  Niner’s expression was hidden behind his visor, but Darman knew every nuance of his breathing by now, every faint sound that indicated swallowing or licked lips, every click of the jaw when words didn’t emerge.

  “You’ll be fine,” Niner said at last, and slapped him on the shoulder. He was playing the reassuring ruus’alor, the sergeant; the word was derived from ruus, a rock, and it summed up his solidly pivotal role pretty well. “But call her anyway. Say hi from me.”

  Niner walked away toward the Marits. He never talked much about what he wanted from life. He never confided in his brothers about fears and loneliness, or talked about girls, or showed any sign that he didn’t think the war was a
good idea. It was the last bit that worried Darman most. Niner probably kept his yearnings to himself for the sake of maintaining morale—did he think they didn’t know that?—but everyone griped about the war and every aspect of it out of habit and custom. It was the only leeway clone troopers had—to express opinions that the command was clueless, that the food was garbage, that the kit was osik, and that it was all a waste of time, but it was better than being a civilian. And it was a veneer, a kind of bonding ritual to show how much you didn’t care, when in reality you were scared witless, always hungry, and usually disoriented. Being the best army in the galaxy didn’t stop any of those feelings. At first, Darman—like all of them—had thought their role in life was noble and inevitable; now the indoctrination had been worn thin by seeing the galaxy beyond Kamino, and even some ARCs were deserting. The rank and file were grumbling—in private. If they’d had somewhere to go and the bonds had been weaker, Darman suspected a lot more would have vanished from the ranks.

  But they stayed for their brothers. They stayed because their only source of self-esteem was being the best at what they did.

  And they had nowhere else to go.

  Once more of them worked out what happened to those who couldn’t—or wouldn’t—fight any longer, what would happen?

  Yes, the GAR might have been better off with tinnies. They never worked things out.

  “How many teeth have you got, Dar?” Niner yelled. He’d stopped to look back. Darman paused with the brush still in his mouth. “Because you’re taking an awful long time cleaning them.”

  Darman mumbled through a mouthful of foam. “Sorry, Sarge.”

  He went back to the refreshers to rinse his mouth and clean up, then changed from his fatigues into his bodysuit before washing the clothing in the refresher’s basin with a rock-hard lump of the local soap and shaking it out so that it dried in minutes. Habit—ritual—was a soothing thing. By the time he’d attached his armor plates to the bodysuit, the fatigues were dry and he could fold them tightly into a small roll that he slipped into his backpack.

  He couldn’t even recall putting on his plates. His mind was on Etain. He shut the door and commed her.

  She took some time to answer. He was on the point of just recording a message when he heard her voice, and he felt instantly foolish, tearful and excited. It was audio only, no holoprojection, but he never questioned that because she was on deployment and she had her reasons for not showing him where she was.

  He worried anyway. He wanted to see her again, quite literally. He was worried he’d forget her face.

  “Can you talk?” he asked.

  There was a brief pause. “Are you okay, Dar?”

  “I’m fine. I got bitten by an ARC trooper.”

  “That’s gross. Are they poisonous?”

  She seemed to think he was joking. Darman wondered whether to blurt out that Sull had been under a death sentence, but decided that kind of thing needed saying in person. “It’s okay, I just sucked out the venom and shot him. Anyway, Fi wanted his armor. Hey, I miss you. What’s happening on Qiilura?”

  Another pause. “It’s not good. Most of them went quietly but some dug in, and… well, you know.”

  “Casualties?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ah.”

  “Not me, obviously.”

  “I’m glad.” He caught a note in her voice that said she was holding back; maybe there was someone with her. The holovids showed clandestine love affairs as exciting, but Darman just found the secrecy miserable. “What’s Levet like?”

  “Solid guy.”

  “We’ll be working with his battalion pretty soon. Does that mean you’ll be coming back to Triple Zero? Sorry—I shouldn’t ask. Just thought you’d be finished there, and…”

  “It’ll be a few more months. Three, maybe.”

  “Oh.” Where? Why? “Okay.”

  “I miss you too, Dar. Think of something you’d like to do when we meet up. I’m not good at planning things like that.”

  Darman wasn’t, either. He suspected she didn’t mean a drink from a grimy glass at Qibbu’s sleazy cantina for old times’ sake. “Mereel might have some ideas. He seems to know every tapcaf between Galactic City and the Outer Rim.”

  “Okay. I don’t mind as long as you’re there.”

  “Me, too.” Darman worried that he didn’t have any smart talk or witty lines. He sounded like a total di’kut, he knew it.

  There was a loud rapping on the door. “Dar?” It was Fi. “Dar, are you in there?”

  Darman rolled his eyes and addressed the ether. “What, Fi?”

  “Are you going to be in there all day? I’m not going to dig a latrine because you’re still doing your hair…”

  “Okay, okay. Give me a moment.” He lowered his voice. “I’m sorry, cyar’ika, I have to go.”

  “I’ll call you in a while. Stay safe. I love you.”

  “Look after yourself.” Darman was working up to saying that he loved her, too, when the link closed from her end of the channel, and the moment was gone. He took a deep breath before yanking the door open, brokenhearted that he might never get the chance to tell her. He had a bad feeling about the coming assault on Eyat. It was vague and nagging, probably just his growing awareness and resentment of the way things were, but possibly—just possibly—an omen. Mixing with Jedi made you almost believe in that kind of stuff. “Fi, I’m going to break your shabla neck…”

  Fi stepped back with his hands held up in mock submission. “Steady on, ner vod.”

  “You really pick your moments.”

  “I want to use the ’freshers.”

  “Yeah, and I was—” Darman stopped himself. There was no point ranting at Fi for interrupting a call to Etain. It would be particularly tactless. “Okay.” He patted his brother’s cheek with exaggerated care, and realized he was doing a very Skirata-like thing. “I’m going to check the ordnance again.”

  “Atin’s been through it twice.”

  “Then I’ll do it a third time.”

  “Dar…”

  “What?”

  “You can talk about Etain, you know. I’m not going to burst into tears or anything.”

  Fi closed the door behind him, and Darman heard the sound of running water. Fi wasn’t stupid and he’d probably heard every word anyway, but Darman still felt guilty at having a part of his limited life that put any kind of barrier between them.

  Outside the hut, Niner and Atin were laying out equipment, checking it, and taking no notice of A’den’s spirited argument with one of the Marits. It was another dominant one with a red frill at its throat, but it wasn’t Cebz. The lizards were gathering: where there had been fewer than a hundred in the camp, there were now a few thousand in the area, coming to the rendezvous point from villages scattered throughout the countryside.

  Darman stared at the pile of ordnance. There were enough thermal detonators to remove a large chunk of planet.

  “Overkill,” he said.

  Atin looked up. “Whatever happened to P for plenty?”

  “You’ve seen Eyat. They’ve got triple-A and traffic cops, not Acclamators. So we hammer them with the Thirty-fifth and then the lizards overrun them. Don’t you think that’s a waste of resources?”

  “Dar, it’s still a capital city,” Niner said. “And we’re not just fighting the Gaftikari. We’re denying the place to the Seps.”

  “And we’re not footing the bill for it, either,” Atin said.

  Darman pondered what possible use this planet would be to anyone except the mining companies. Did they even use kelerium and norax to build droids? Maybe it was the Republic doing a favor for Shenio Mining in exchange for services rendered elsewhere. The galaxy seemed to work that way. Help us out in the war, buddy, and we’ll see you right when it comes to building your profits.

  And it didn’t matter to him at all. He had no stake in it, no interest, and no consequence to him except his life and his brothers’ lives on the line, which was simp
ly the job he did.

  He bent down to pick up a small thermal det and rolled it in his hands, seeing the little restaurant opposite the Eyat government building. The minced roba pastry rolls washed down with sweet caf had been delicious; a charge of this size, detonated within twenty meters, would shatter the restaurant’s transparisteel frontage into a thousand blades and send them flying at three thousand meters a second into anything and anybody within a thousand-meter range. Sometimes it paid not to think about it too much.

  “Can I do the power station?” he asked.

  Niner didn’t turn his head. “You recce’d the government buildings area.”

  “Doesn’t mean I can’t take out the station.”

  “I don’t like changing plans this close to time.”

  “What plans? We didn’t even complete the first recce. We’ve scrubbed the assassinations. We’re going to run the same risks.”

  Niner didn’t answer. They’d become so used to doing things on the fly with little or no planning that Darman began to wonder if they were getting sloppy. Special Operations was as much—no, more—about detailed surveillance, observation, and rehearsal than going in with Deeces blazing and blowing stuff up.

  “A’den’s going to brief us in around an hour,” Niner said at last.

  “Great.” Darman tossed and caught the unprimed det like a toy a few times and then laid it back on the fabric sheet with the rest of the ordnance. “I’m going for a walk.”

  Niner could always recall him. He slipped his helmet over his head, sealed it, and strode off into the camp, seeing the world through the filter of his visor’s HUD again, targets in an environment rather than beings in a landscape. Skirata said they were at the stage of life where they were making emotional connections that regular folk made much earlier in childhood, able to imagine themselves in the situations they created. But, he said, it was hard to picture yourself as the guy strolling past the restaurant at the moment the charge detonated when you’d never done ordinary things like that and had been given only a detached academic grasp of blast radii, overpressures, and fragment velocities.