Skirata met Ko Sai’s eyes. She looked back and forth from him to Mereel and Ordo a few times as if calculating something—don’t even think about it, aiwha-bait—and then settled on Mereel again.
“And you’ll starve me into submission, you think.”
“Oh, you’ll get well fed,” Mereel said. “I want you healthy for a long time, so I can watch you suffer. I might not get a long life, but seeing you go crazy is cleaning some osik out of my heart that’s been there for far too long.”
“Cathartic,” said Ordo. “It really is.” He turned to the cockpit. “I need to check up on Fi’s condition, and then we have to make a move, Kal’buir. Any preferences?”
The one place Skirata could guarantee to find some Sepproof, Republic-proof, Jedi-proof accommodation was Mandalore. He had business to take care of there as well. He turned to Etain.
“Want to see the home turf, ad’ika? Visit Manda’yaim?”
She still looked in shock. There were no fancy Galactic City doctors on Mandalore, but plenty of women who knew how to handle a pregnancy.
“What do I tell Zey?” she asked. “He was sold on your story that I was staying on after Qiilura was cleared to help the Gurlanins for a few months.”
“I’ll think of something. I always do.”
She shrugged. “Okay. I’ve never seen Mandalore. What’s it like?”
“I’d like to say it’s paradise,” Skirata said. “But it’s as rough as a bantha’s backside, and half as pretty.”
“I never liked beach vacations anyway.”
Vau held his hand out to Ordo. “Better give me the code key for your shuttle. I’ll take it back to Coruscant and meet you all there, as and when.”
Maybe Vau had business to sort out. He had his inheritance, after all, and there were probably items he wanted to fence, because he had his expenses like everyone else. The shuttle needed to go home, too; they couldn’t keep abandoning small vessels and charging new ones to the GAR budget. Enacca the Wookiee couldn’t retrieve everything they were forced to dump.
“Thanks, Walon,” Skirata said.
“I might take a detour to Aargau, actually…”
His bank was on Aargau. Business, then. That was fine.
Skirata strapped himself into the third cockpit seat so Ordo could take the copilot’s position with Mereel at the helm. Ordo was now talking directly to Leveler, whose comm officer seemed to think he was calling from Arca Barracks on Coruscant. A code scrambler was a wonderful thing.
Vau released the mooring lines and gave Skirata a mock salute from the pontoon, and Mereel took Aay’han out past the breakwater, accelerating her gradually toward the speed at which she’d rise on floats and then lift clear of the water. Skirata opened his comlink and keyed in Jusik’s code.
“We’re out of here, Bard’ika. Thanks.”
“Thank you for keeping me informed,” Jusik said stiffly. So he had an audience: Delta must have been with him. “Is everything all right?”
“No. But it will be.”
“Niner informed me about Fi.”
“Ordo’s on the case. Don’t worry. And you don’t have to worry about Ko Sai any longer, either.”
“Okay…”
“Call me when you can talk freely. We’re off to Mandalore.”
Jusik was a good lad, Skirata reflected. He’d been good right from the start. They were lucky to find a few aruetiise with that kind of loyalty.
Aay’han took off in a storm of spray, lifting into the night sky. As she passed above the island that had once housed Ko Sai’s base in its bowels, Skirata checked the sensors and couldn’t help but notice that there was now an area of subsidence on the sports field, a shallow bowl about a hundred meters across. He could even see it; the shadow created by the illumigrids made it look like a big black lake.
“P for plenty,” Skirata said. “I think we brought the ceiling down.”
Mereel checked for himself. “Oops.”
“You’re taking this pretty well.” Skirata now worried what was happening behind Mereel’s cocky veneer, because he’d badly underestimated what was going on inside Ordo.
“There’s always a bright side,” said Mereel. “One day, we’ll look back on all this and laugh.”
Skirata doubted it. But one thing, at least, was settled: he didn’t have to hunt for Ko Sai any longer.
He just had to work out what he was going to do with her.
Tropix island, Dorumaa,
479 days after Geonosis
“So this is how the other half live,” Sev said.
Delta Squad, clad in the dull but all-encompassing coveralls of a utilities maintenance crew, tried to look routine as they made their way along the shoreline collecting garbage. There wasn’t a lot, but the management liked the white sand to look pristine before the hotel guests emerged after breakfast. Some poor di’kut was even combing it with a big rake.
“I’m glad I’m in this half, then,” Boss said. “The novelty of cleaning up after civvies would wear off fast.”
“I meant the lounging-around-in-the-sun bit.”
“Overrated.” Fixer speared a scrap of flimsi wrapping with a special sharpened pole designed for doing just that, although Sev could think of much better uses for it. It was the first enemy contact Fixer had had for a while. Sev considered requesting a transfer to the infantry, where they seemed to be getting more droid action. “Ruins your skin. Gives you blisters. You have to coat yourself in slimy sun filter to stop it from killing you in the end.”
Scorch stood back and let him kill another scrap of litter. “So how long have you been promoting the benefits of a vacation on Tropix?”
“Look, any job would be better than mine, because right now I feel I’m wasting my time.” Fixer shoved his finger hard in his ear, adjusting the hidden comlink bead. “This is boring. Even the police comlink channel is tedious. Drunks, lost valuables, and collisions between rental speeders.”
Jusik had finally let them loose on the island itself. Fixer and Boss weren’t happy about the delay, but the Jedi had a point: it was hard to blend in here in a suit of Katarn armor, and they didn’t have what he called Omega Squad’s social skills. Scorch had helped him liberate a few maintenance crew uniforms overnight, a task so easy it was almost an insult to their skills at getting into places they shouldn’t have been. As for the locks—he could have busted them open just by scowling at them. It was pathetic.
It was a bummer about Fi, though.
Sev didn’t like the thought of being in a coma, just in case it was one of those conscious ones where you knew what was going on around you but you couldn’t respond. Whatever happened to him, he decided, would be fast and final; no hanging around. At one point he thought of talking it through with the rest of the squad, but they’d noted Fi’s state and then shut it out of conversation, so Sev knew they were as scared as he was.
“I know that Jedi sense stuff,” Boss said carefully, “and that generals are privy to intel we don’t get, but I get the feeling Bard’ika isn’t leveling with us.”
“Maybe he’s too embarrassed to tell us he brought us all this way to buy us a Neuvian ice sundae,” said Scorch. “Part of this new management drive to make us feel valued.”
“Does Zey know he’s having an identity crisis?” Boss asked.
“Who says he is?”
“Aw, c’mon… the durasteel-underwear syndrome?”
“So he likes Mandalorian stuff,” Scorch said. “Maybe it’s comforting for guys who aren’t allowed to have violent feelings. He can act out a bit.”
“He’s got a lightsaber. He acts out violence just fine with that.”
Sev didn’t have a Jedi’s Force radar but he certainly had a trooper’s sixth sense for an officer approaching. Just as he looked up from the blinding white sand, feeling uneasy, he saw Jusik striding down the boardwalk in what Sev thought of as his “half Jedi,” the anonymous white tunic and pants that they all wore under the layers of robes.
�
�Why don’t you put your theory to him, then, Dr. Scorch?” said Sev. “Go on, ask him.”
“Yeah, I always wondered where he keeps his lightsaber when he dresses like that.”
“Result,” Fixer muttered.
Sev prodded him with the litter pole. “What?”
“Police channel chat.” This was as near as Fixer ever got to excited. “Folk were calling in saying they’d heard a mystery explosion, but no location. Now they’ve had a report of a sports field subsiding on the next island.”
“As in underground explosion?”
“Maybe. Rescue Service is going over to check it out.”
Jusik caught up with them. “I’ve rented a fishing vessel so we can move our ops away from prying eyes. How’s the maintenance business?”
“Explosive,” said Scorch. “Fixer says the locals reported a big bang followed by a hole in the ground not far from here. And as this isn’t a big-bang kind of planet, we might as well check out the lead.”
“Good idea,” said Jusik.
“Sir, are you okay?”
“My apologies, Scorch. My mind’s not wholly on the job. If anyone would like an update on Fi’s condition, let me know.” He looked around him, almost as if he’d heard something and was trying to work out where it was coming from, but it was just one of his mannerisms. “No? Okay, let’s take a look at this hole in the ground.”
Fixer was still eavesdropping on the police comlink frequencies. “What cover are we going to use?”
“No need. Overfly it in the TIV, get a few coordinates out of it, then work out a way of assessing the point of the explosion.”
“Might not be anything to do with Ko Sai, of course.”
“Want to skip it?”
“No sir. But maybe the Twi’lek was decoying us.”
Jusik picked up a scrap of litter, examined it, and dropped it in the collecting sack that Fixer was carrying. “What makes you say that? He ran for his life pretty convincingly.”
Boss cut in. “Because we’ve turned up nothing, sir, except the traffic manager here who remembers someone hiring a utility barge for a delivery offshore, and then it was found drifting minus the employee.”
“And nobody went looking for him.”
“When they say don’t go beyond the safety limits, they mean it. They have no idea what’s lurking under the surface, and they’re not too keen to find out.”
Jusik shrugged. “Just as well we’re made of sterner stuff. What a shabby attitude toward employee welfare.”
Sev had seen Jusik hunting targets before, and he behaved like a man with a mission: single-minded, resourceful, and tenacious. On Coruscant, he’d even worried Sev with his wildly risky tactics. Now he was behaving differently. The fire had gone out of him. It was as if he didn’t care if he found Ko Sai or not.
It could have been that he didn’t want to find her, and that worried Sev for all kinds of different reasons. But maybe it was, as he said, because he was preoccupied by Fi. That was worrying in its own way, because an officer who was distracted when one man out of his commando group of five hundred was wounded really didn’t have what it took.
“Yes sir,” Sev said.
The aerial view of the island sports resort to the south of Tropix—ActionWorld, a name Sev found hilarious given its extensive array of visitor safety measures—was educational. Yes, it was an instant lake all right, minus the water. From the TIV, he could see how the ground had collapsed beneath the grass without breaking up much of the surface. Something underneath had caved in.
“Not too low, Boss,” Jusik said. “What’s our transponder telling their flight control?”
“Delivering ice desserts, sir,” Scorch said, checking the charge on his Deece. “Yeah, put some syrup and crushed nuts on this.”
Folks didn’t use their eyes any longer. They believed everything their gadgets told them. Sev studied the chart on his database, mapped in the position of the subsidence, and compared it with the divers’ hydrographic chart.
“The hole might not be directly above whatever blew up,” he said, “but it’s a fair assumption. That gives us a search area underwater.”
“You’re gagging to wear that scuba trooper’s rig, aren’t you?” said Scorch.
Sev didn’t answer. He was starting to wonder what he’d say to Ko Sai when he found her. She was still a figure of dread, a name that even the Kaminoans used to mention in hushed tones, and not just because of her expertise; she had the power of life and death, the authority to say who came up to scratch and who didn’t. Now that Tipoca City was far behind him, he was starting to realize why that wasn’t such a great idea.
It was turning into a long, slow day. Transferring the kit from the TIV to the diving vessel without being spotted ate a couple of hours, and then they had to work out a search pattern without even knowing what they were looking for—except maybe a lot of rock.
And those scuba suits just processed oxygen from the surrounding water. There was no excuse for coming back to the surface because they were running out of air.
Fixer and Boss took the first shift, transmitting optical and sensor images back to the vessel. Sev, Scorch, and Jusik sat on the bridge, watching the output screens.
“Come on, Sev, cheer up.” Scorch nudged him. He was suited up, slapping his flippers on the deck in a rhythm that annoyed Sev more with each thwack. “This is better than most of the stuff they show on HNE. It’s really interesting rock. Great weeds, too.”
If they didn’t find Ko Sai, Vau would have something to say about it. Okay, he didn’t know they were on the case, but he’d find out sooner or later if they failed.
Somehow that mattered to him more than coming up empty for Chancellor Palpatine.
Boss and Fixer surfaced after an hour and Sev and Scorch flopped over the gunwale into the crystal-clear water. Sev had done the compulsory diving course as part of his basic training—and why call it compulsory, he wondered, when everything was compulsory for a clone?—but just because he could do it didn’t mean he liked it.
He didn’t. Scorch did.
“Wow, this is amazing. Look at that!”
“It’s a fish, Scorch. You’ll get over it. So will the fish.”
“Come on, how many folks get to do this? Savor the privilege, man.”
“I will, next time I’m getting my shebs shot off.”
Sev wanted to say a lot more right then: a terrible unguarded moment ambushed him, and he wanted to blurt out that he was fed up with hearing that voice within telling him he wasn’t good enough when he was almost bleeding from the effort, and that he wanted… fierfek, he didn’t know what he wanted, but he knew he didn’t have it.
That was when he realized why Fi wound him up so much, because Fi asked the questions that he couldn’t face. And Fi had a sergeant who was a father, who thought he was terrific whatever he did or however much he screwed up.
So the jewel-like fish and luminous coral around him had a long way to go to make up for that gnawing void in his chest. He ignored them, and swam without jet assistance to avoid churning up silt, scrutinizing the seabed of the island shelf and the rock formations around him for signs of recent activity.
Up ahead, there was a sloping pile of rocks extending from the cliff that wasn’t on the chart. As Sev swam over it, he couldn’t see anything growing there; no plants, encrustations, or any of the life that was quick to colonize every surface. How do I know that? I’ve never dived anywhere like this. It’s all from databases in my helmet systems. Flash-learned stuff. Things I’ve been trained to trust, unseen. The rock face opposite was equally scoured, as if this pile had been the large chunk that had shattered and fallen away from it.
“General Jusik, sir,” Scorch said, “is any of this showing up on your disturbance-in-the-Force meter?”
“I see it.”
Sev picked up some of the smaller fragments and moved them, checking for any debris that wasn’t part of what nature intended. This would take forever: he let the roc
k drop and swam away from the cliff to get an overall perspective, maybe even see some channel open to the sea. It was just as he was backing away that he brushed against something and turned, thinking he’d snagged weed fronds, and found himself looking at something white and vaguely familiar.
It didn’t have a head, but the rest of it was a humanoid skeleton.
“Fierfek—”
“Sev?”
“It’s okay, Scorch.” But they could all detect that his pulse rate had shot up, because armor always had a sneaky little system for monitoring life signs. “Looks like the speeder buses run really late here, judging by how long this guy’s been waiting…”
Scorch swam across to him, rocks and big bangs forgotten for the moment.
“What is it?” Jusik asked. “I can’t see.”
Scorch adjusted the unfamiliar helmet cam controls that linked his POV to the comm system. “See it?”
“Ah.” Jusik sighed. “Any sign of what killed him, Scorch?”
“Let’s ask Sev. He’s a dead-body-ologist.”
Sev, feeling embarrassed by his reaction, examined the bones. The left arm came off in his hand.
“Yep, he’s dead all right.”
Scorch sucked his teeth noisily. It was extra-amplified in the scuba trooper helmets. “Sure you don’t want a second opinion, Doc?”
“Nah, I’m prepared to go out on a limb.” Sev dipped down and retrieved the arm from the weed around it. He followed the length of orange fibercord to its origin, which turned out to be a nonslipping Keldabe anchoring bend tied on a mooring ring of some kind. “But I can tell you who made sure he didn’t float, more or less. Can you see this, sir?”
“It’s a knot,” Jusik said.
“A special one. Mandalorian. Used only by Mandos and folks trained by Mandos.”
Sev’s first thought was the Twi’lek pilot, Leb, saying that he’d told some Mandalorians about his delivery route. There was a connection here, and it would have been a lot easier to make it if Jusik hadn’t scrubbed the pilot’s memory a little too soon for Sev’s liking.
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