Hard Contact

by Karen Traviss

  “Orun Wa said we couldn’t be measured,” Mereel said, totally without pride, and perched on the edge of the couch, swinging his legs almost like a normal four-year-old. They might have all looked identical, but their individual characters seemed distinct and … obvious. Skirata wasn’t sure how he managed it, but he could now look at them and see that they were different, distinguished by small variations in facial expressions, gestures, frowns, and even tone of voice. Appearance wasn’t everything.

  “You mean you scored too high for him to count?”

  Mereel nodded gravely. Thunder slapped the platform city: Skirata felt it without hearing it. Mereel drew up his legs again and huddled tight up against his brothers in an instant.

  No, Skirata didn’t need a hut’uunla Kaminoan to tell him that these were extraordinary children. They could already handle a blaster, learn everything he threw at them, and understand the Kaminoans’ intentions all too well: no wonder the aiwha-bait was scared of them.

  And they would be truly phenomenal soldiers—if only they could follow a few orders. He’d work on that.

  “Want some more uj?” he said.

  They all nodded enthusiastically in unison. It was a relief. At least that gave him a few minutes’ respite from their unrelenting, silent attention. They ate, still miniature adults. There was no chattering or high spirits.

  And they flinched at every bolt of lightning.

  “Are you scared?” asked Skirata.

  “Yes, Kal,” said Ordo. “Is that wrong?”

  “No, son. Not at all.” It was as good a time to teach them as any. No lesson would ever be wasted on them. “Being afraid is okay. It’s your body’s way of getting you ready to defend yourself, and all you have to do is use it and not let it use you. Do you understand that?”

  “No,” Ordo said.

  “Okay, think about being scared. What’s it like?”

  Ordo defocused slightly as if he were looking at something on a HUD he didn’t have. “Cold.”

  “Cold?”

  A’den and Kom’rk chimed in. “And spiky.”

  “Okay … okay.” Skirata tried to imagine what they meant. Ah. They were describing the feeling of adrenaline flooding their bodies. “That’s fine. You just have to remember that it’s your alarm system, and you need to take notice of it.” They were the same age as city kids on Coruscant who struggled to scrawl crude letters on flimsi. And here he was, teaching them battle psychology. His mouth felt oddly dry. “So you tell yourself, okay, I can handle this. My body’s now ready to run faster and fight harder, and I’ll be seeing and hearing only the most important things I need to know to stay alive.”

  Ordo went from his wide-eyed dark stare to slight defocus again for a moment and nodded. Skirata glanced at the others. They had that same disturbing concentration. They had also stacked their plates neatly on the low side table. He hadn’t even noticed them doing it.

  “Try thinking about your fear next time there’s lightning,” Kal said. “Use it.”

  He went back to the kitchen area and rummaged through the cupboards for some other snack to keep them going, because they seemed ravenous. As he stepped back into the main room with a white tray of sliced food-board that looked even less appetizing than the tray itself, someone buzzed at the door.

  The Nulls immediately went into a defensive pattern. Ordo and Jaing flanked the door, backs hard against the wall, and the other four took cover behind the sparse furniture. Skirata wondered for a second what flash-learning program had taught them that—or at least he hoped it was flash-taught. He waved them away from the door. They hesitated for a moment until he took out his Verpine shatter gun; then they appeared satisfied that he had the situation under some sort of control.

  “You scare me,” Skirata said softly. “Now stand back. If anyone’s after you, they’ve got to come through me first, and I’m not about to let that happen.”

  Even so, their reaction prompted him to stand to one side as he hit the panel to open the doors. Jango Fett was standing in the corridor outside, a small sleepy child in his arms. The boy’s curly head rested on his shoulder. He looked younger than the Nulls, but it was the same face, the same hair, the same little hand clutching the fabric of Jango’s tunic.

  “Another one?” Skirata said.

  Jango glanced at the Verp. “You’re getting edgy, aren’t you?”

  “Kaminoans don’t improve my mood. Want me to take him?”

  He shoved the shatter gun in his belt and held out his arms to take the boy. Jango frowned slightly.

  “This is my son, Boba,” he said. He pulled his head back to gaze fondly at the dozing child’s face. This wasn’t the Jango that Skirata knew of old; he was pure paternal indulgence now. “Just trying to settle him down. Are you sorted now? I’ve told Orun Wa to stay away from you.”

  “We’re fine,” Skirata said. He wondered how he was going to ask the question, and decided blurting it out was probably as good a way as any. “Boba looks just like them.”

  “He would. He’s been cloned from me, too.”

  “Oh. Oh.”

  “He was my price. Worth more to me than the credits.” Boba stirred, and Jango carefully adjusted his hold on the kid. “I’ll be back in a month. Orun Wa says he’ll have some commando candidates ready for us to take a look at as well as the rest of the Alpha batch. But he says he’s made them a bit more … reliable.”

  Skirata had more questions than seemed prudent under the circumstances. It was natural for a Mando’ad to want an heir above all else, and adoption was common, so cloning was … not that much different. But he had to ask one thing.

  “Why do these kids look older?”

  Jango compressed his lips into a thin line of disapproval. “They accelerate the aging process.”

  “Oh, fierfek …”

  “You’ll have a company of a hundred and four commandos eventually, and they should be less trouble than the Nulls.”

  “Fine.” Did he get help? Were there Kaminoan minders to tackle the routine jobs, like feeding them? And how would the non-Mandalorian training sergeants deal with them? His stomach churned. He put on a brave face. “I can handle that.”

  “Yeah, and I’ll be doing my bit, too. I have to train a hundred.” Jango glanced at the Nulls, now watching warily from the couch, and began walking away. “I just hope they aren’t like I was at that age.”

  Skirata pushed the controls, and the door sighed shut. “Okay, lads, bedtime,” he said. He dragged the cushions off the couch and laid them out on the floor, covering them with an assortment of blankets. The boys gave him a hand, with a grim sense of adult purpose that he knew would haunt him for the rest of his days. “We’ll get you sorted out with decent quarters tomorrow, okay? Real beds.”

  He had the feeling they would have slept outside on the rain-lashed landing pad if he’d asked them to. They didn’t seem at all unmanageable. He sat down in the chair and put his feet up on a stool. The Kaminoans had done their best to provide human-suitable furniture, something that struck him as a rare concession given their general xenophobic arrogance. He left the lights on, dimmed, to soothe the Nulls’ fears.

  They settled down, pulling the blankets over their heads completely. Skirata watched until they appeared to be asleep, laid his Verpine on the shelf beside the chair, and then closed his eyes to let the dreams overwhelm him. He woke with an explosive jerk of muscles a couple of times, a sure sign that he was past the point of tiredness and into exhaustion, and then he fell into an unending black well.

  He slept, or so he thought.

  A warm weight pressed against him. His eyes jerked open and he remembered he was stranded on a perpetually overcast planet that didn’t even seem to be on the star charts, where the local species thought killing human kids was merely quality control.

  Ordo’s stricken little face looked up into his.

  “Kal …”

  “You scared, son?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come
on, then.” Skirata shifted position and Ordo scrambled up onto his lap, burying his face in his tunic as if he had never been held or comforted before. He hadn’t, of course.

  The storm was getting worse. “The lightning can’t hurt you here.”

  “I know, Kal.” Ordo’s voice was muffled. He wouldn’t look up. “But it’s just like the bombs going off.”

  Skirata was going to ask him what he meant, but he knew in an instant that it would make him angry enough to do something stupid if he heard the answer. He hugged Ordo to him and felt the boy’s heart pounding in terror.

  Ordo was doing pretty well for a four-year-old soldier.

  They could learn to be heroes tomorrow. Tonight they needed to be children, reassured that the storm was not a battlefield, and so was nothing to fear.

  The lightning illuminated the room in brief, fierce white light: Ordo flinched again. Skirata laid his hand on the boy’s head and ruffled his hair.

  “It’s okay, Ord’ika,” he said softly. “I’m here, son. I’m here.”

  Eight years later: Special Forces SO Brigade HQ Barracks, Coruscant, five days after the Battle of Geonosis

  Skirata had been detained by Coruscant Security Force officers and for once in his life he hadn’t put up a fight.

  Technically, he’d been arrested. And now he was the most relieved man in the galaxy, as well as the happiest. He jumped out of the police patrol speeder and winced at the sharp pain in his ankle as he hit the ground. He’d get that sorted out sooner or later, but now wasn’t the time.

  “Wow, take a look at that,” the pilot said. “They’re holding off special ops squads there. You sure there’s only six of ’em?”

  “Yeah, six is overkill,” Skirata said, discreetly patting his pockets and sleeves to make sure the assorted tools of his trade were in place and ready for use. It was just habit. “But they’re probably scared.”

  “They’re scared?” The pilot snorted. “Hey, you know Fett’s dead? Windu topped him.”

  “I know,” Skirata said, fighting the urge to ask if he also knew what had happened to little Boba. If the kid was still alive, he needed a dad. “Let’s hope the Jedi don’t have a problem with all of us Mando’ade.”

  The pilot closed the hatch, and Skirata limped across the barracks landing pad. Jedi general Iri Camas, hands on hips with his brown robes flapping in the breeze, watched in a way that Skirata could only describe as suspicious. Two clone troopers waited with him. Skirata thought the Jedi should get his long white hair cut: it wasn’t practical or becoming for a soldier to wear his hair to his shoulders.

  “Thank you for responding, Sergeant,” Camas said. “And I apologize for the manner of your return. I realize your contract is completed now, so you owe us nothing.”

  “Anytime,” Skirata said.

  He noted the blasterproof assault shields erected across the main entrance: four squads of Republic Commandos stood behind them, DC-17 rifles ready. He glanced up at the roof, and there were two commando sniper teams spread out along the parapet as well. Yes, if a bunch of Null-class Advance Recon Commandos didn’t want to cooperate, then it would take a lot of equally hard men to persuade them otherwise. And he knew that none of the commandos would be happy about being ordered in to do the persuading. They were brothers, even if the ARCs were rather different men at heart.

  Skirata shoved his hands in his jacket pockets and focused on the doors. “So what started all this, then?”

  Camas shook his head. “They’re scheduled to be chilled down now that they’re back from Geonosis, because nobody can command them.”

  “I can.”

  “I know. Please, get them to stand down.”

  “They’re even more of a handful than the regular Alpha-batch ARCs, aren’t they?”

  “I know that, Sergeant.”

  “So you wanted the hardest troops you could buy to take on the enemy, and then you got cold feet when they turned out to be too hard.”

  “Sergeant—”

  “I’m a civilian at the moment, actually.”

  Camas took a silent breath. “Can you get them to surrender? They’ve shut down the whole barracks.”

  “I can.” Skirata wondered if the clone troopers were looking sideways at him, or in the direction they appeared to be facing. You could never tell with their helmets on. “But I won’t.”

  “I really don’t want any casualties. Are you holding out for an increased fee?”

  Skirata was a mercenary, but the suggestion insulted him. Camas couldn’t be expected to know how he felt about his men, though. He made an effort not to be annoyed. “Enlist me in the Grand Army of the Republic and give me back my lads. Then we’ll see.”

  “What?”

  “They’re terrified of chill-down, that’s all. You have to understand what happened to them as kids.” Camas gave him an odd look. “And don’t even think about mind influence, General.”

  Skirata didn’t give a mott’s backside about pay. Eight years spent on Kamino training special forces for the Republic’s clone army had made him wealthy, and if they wanted to press more credits on him, that was fine; he’d have a good use for them. But what he wanted most right then, and what had made him happy to return with the CSF officers instead of showing them just how handy he was with a fighting knife, was not being safe in a soft civilian life when his men were fighting a desperate, bloody war.

  And he needed to be back with them. He hadn’t even had the chance to say good-bye when they suddenly shipped out to Geonosis. He’d lasted five miserable days without them, days without purpose, days without family.

  “Very well,” Camas said. “Special adviser status. I can authorize that, I suppose.”

  Skirata couldn’t see the commandos’ faces behind their visors, but he knew they’d be watching him carefully. He recognized some of the paint schemes on their Katarn armor: Jez from Aiwha-3 Squad, and Stoker from Gamma, and Ram from Bravo up on the roof. Incomplete squads: high casualties on Geonosis, then. His heart sank.

  He began walking forward. He got to the blaster shields, and Jez touched his glove to his helmet. “Nice to see you back so soon, Sarge.”

  “Couldn’t stay away,” Skirata said. “You okay?”

  “It’s a laugh a minute, this job.”

  Camas called out, “Sergeant? Sergeant! What if they open fire—”

  “Then they open fire.” Skirata reached the doors and turned his back on them for a few moments, unafraid. “Do we have a deal? Or do you want me holed up in there with them? Because I won’t be coming out unless you guarantee them no disciplinary action.”

  It struck Skirata that Camas might be the one to fire on him right then. He wondered if his commandos would obey that order if it were given. He wouldn’t have minded if they had. He’d taught them to do their job, regardless of their own feelings.

  “You have my word,” Camas said. “Consider yourself in the Grand Army. We’ll discuss how we’re going to deploy you and your men later. But first let’s get everyone back to normal, shall we, please?”

  “I’ll hold you to every last word, General.”

  He waited at the doors for a few moments. The two sheets of reinforced durasteel parted slowly. He walked in, relieved, and home again at last.

  No, Camas really needed to understand what had happened to these men as young boys. He had to, if he was going to cope with the war that had now been unleashed.

  It wouldn’t just be fought on someone else’s planet. It would be fought in every corner of the galaxy, in every city, in every home. It was a war not just of territories, but of ideologies.

  And it was wholly outside Skirata’s Mandalorian philosophy: but it was his war regardless, because his men were its instrument whether they liked it or not.

  One day, he would give them back something the Kaminoans and the Republic had stolen from them. He swore it.

  “Ord’ika!” he called. “Ordo? You’ve been a naughty boy again, haven’t you? Come here …”

>   THE OLD REPUBLIC

  (5,000–33 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE)

  Long—long—ago in a galaxy far, far away … some twenty-five thousand years before Luke Skywalker destroyed the first Death Star at the Battle of Yavin in Star Wars: A New Hope … a large number of star systems and species in the center of the galaxy came together to form the Galactic Republic, governed by a Chancellor and a Senate from the capital city-world of Coruscant. As the Republic expanded via the hyperspace lanes, it absorbed new member worlds from newly discovered star systems; it also expanded its military to deal with the hostile civilizations, slavers, pirates, and gangster-species such as the slug-like Hutts that were encountered in the outward exploration. But the most vital defenders of the Republic were the Jedi Knights. Originally a reclusive order dedicated to studying the mysteries of the life energy known as the Force, the Jedi became the Republic’s guardians, charged by the Senate with keeping the peace—with wise words if possible; with lightsabers if not.

  But the Jedi weren’t the only Force-users in the galaxy. An ancient civil war had pitted those Jedi who used the Force selflessly against those who allowed themselves to be ruled by their ambitions—which the Jedi warned led to the dark side of the Force. Defeated in that long-ago war, the dark siders fled beyond the galactic frontier, where they built a civilization of their own: the Sith Empire.

  The first great conflict between the Republic and the Sith Empire occurred when two hyperspace explorers stumbled on the Sith worlds, giving the Sith Lord Naga Sadow and his dark side warriors a direct invasion route into the Republic’s central worlds. This war resulted in the first destruction of the Sith Empire—but it was hardly the last. For the next four thousand years, skirmishes between the Republic and Sith grew into wars, with the scales always tilting toward one or the other, and peace never lasting. The galaxy was a place of almost constant strife: Sith armies against Republic armies; Force-using Sith Lords against Jedi Masters and Jedi Knights; and the dreaded nomadic mercenaries called Mandalorians bringing muscle and firepower wherever they stood to gain.