Order 66

by Karen Traviss

  Order 66

  By Karen Traviss

  Republic Commando - Book 4

  Republic Commando

  01 - Hard Contact

  Omega Squad: Targets

  02 - Triple Zero

  Odds

  03 - True Colors

  04 - Order 66

  Imperial Commando

  01 - 501st

  Dedication

  For the British squaddie—with pride and gratitude

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks go to editors Keith Clayton (Del Rey) and Frank Parisi (Lucasfilm); my agent Russ Galen; Bryan Boult and Jim Gilmer, for insight and unstinting support, even when I get really, really tedious; Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade, for being Mike and Jerry; Ray Ramirez, HHC 27th Brigade Combat Team, for technical advice and generous friendship; Haden Blackman, for relighting the fire; Sean, for great one-liners; Wade Scrogham, for disturbingly efficient hand weapons; and Lance, Joanne, Kevin, and everyone in the 501st Dune Sea Garrison, for practical and inspirational armor expertise, as well as being or’aliit.

  Dramatis Personae

  Republic Commandos:

  Omega Squad:

  RC-1309 Niner

  RC-1136 Darman

  RC-5108/8843 Corr

  RC-3222 Atin

  Delta Squad:

  RC-1138 Boss

  RC-1262 SCORCH

  RC-1140 FIXER

  RC-1207 SEV

  Fi Skirata, former Republic commando

  Bardan Jusik, former Jedi Knight, now Mandalorian (male human)

  Sergeant Kal Skirata, Mandalorian mercenary (male human)

  Sergeant Walon Vau, Mandalorian mercenary (male human)

  Captain Jaller Obrim, Coruscant Security Force (male human)

  General Etain Tur-Mukan, Jedi Knight (female human)

  General Arligan Zey, Jedi Master (male human)

  Null ARC troopers:

  N-7 Mereel

  N-10 Jaing

  N-11 Ordo

  N-12 A’den

  N-5 Prudii

  N-6 Kom’rk

  ARC trooper Captain A-26, Maze

  ARC trooper A-30, Sull

  ARC trooper A-02, Spar

  Agent Beasny Wennen, Republic Treasury investigator (female human)

  Jilka Zan Zentis, Treasury tax enforcement officer

  Laseema, waitress (female Twi’lek)

  Dr. Ovolot Qail Uthan, Separatist genetics expert (female human)

  Nyreen “Ny” Vollen, commercial pilot (female human)

  Prologue

  Curbaq Plaza,

  Galactic City, Coruscant,

  600 days after the Battle of Geonosis

  So that’s me.

  So that’s how I once looked. We should all see ourselves from a stranger’s perspective at least once in our lives.

  There’s a Jedi walking toward me, all brown robes and earnest piety; no braid, so despite his youth he’s not a Padawan any longer. He’ll be commanding troops. At the very least, he’ll be on active service on his own. The war makes us veterans before our time.

  I want to grab him by the shoulders and ask if he thinks this is a just war, a war fought honorably, but he’ll panic if a Mandalorian in full armor accosts him—especially one he’ll sense is a Force-user like himself. Nobody else is taking much notice of me. Mandalorians on Coruscant are just foreigners, bounty hunters, one more bunch of economic migrants out of the many thousands of species who flock to the galaxy’s capital.

  Ah, the Jedi’s looking around the crowd. He can sense me.

  I’m lost in the crowd of shoppers and sightseers. It’s very strange—obscene, even—to see everyone going about their business on Coruscant as if we’re not in the second year of an ugly war. And for them, of course, they’re not. It’s someone else’s war in every sense—fought on other worlds, fought by other beings, fought by men who aren’t Coruscant citizens. Clone troopers aren’t anyone’s citizens. They have no legal rights. They’re objects. Chattel. Military assets.

  Nobody should stand back and let that happen, least of all a Jedi.

  I’m just a few meters from the Jedi now. He’s so serious, so committed. Yes, that was me, just months ago.

  A passerby glances his way and I sense her unease. When I walked around the city in my robes, I thought that others saw me as someone there to help them. Now I know different; they probably saw someone they didn’t trust, with powers they didn’t understand, someone they didn’t elect but who shaped their lives behind the scenes anyway.

  If they’d known how much I could shape their thoughts, too, they’d have fled from me.

  The Jedi passes close by, but I still don’t recognize him. He stares into the T-slit of my helmet as if I’ve grabbed him. I can feel his confusion as I walk on by—no, not just confusion: fear. A Force-using Mandalorian has to be on his list of worst nightmares.

  There was a time when it was on mine, too. Funny, that.

  Then I sense him turn. I feel him working his way back through the crowd toward me, burning with questions. Before he reaches out to tap my shoulder—and I have to give him credit for even trying—I turn to face him.

  He flinches. What he sees doesn’t match what he can feel. “What are you?”

  “A man who drew the line,” I say. “How about you?”

  “You’re General Jusik…”

  Is it that obvious? To a Jedi, yes, it is. I used to be Bardan Jusik. Everyone in the Jedi Order knows I finally went native. It’s the only response I know; complete surrender to a way of life—first Jedi, now Mandalorian—with every fiber of my being. My Jedi Masters didn’t raise me to live my life by halves.

  “Not any longer,” I say at last.

  “You walked out on us in the middle of a war—a war we have to fight.” He’s puzzled, resentful—scared. “How could you betray us like that?”

  I wonder who he means by we: Jedi, or clones?

  “I left because it’s wrong.” I shouldn’t have to tell him that. “Because you’re using a slave army to do it. Because there’s no point fighting one kind of evil if you replace it with your own brand.” Get specific. Get personal. Don’t give him a chance to look away from his conscience. “You, personally. You make that choice each morning. A belief you suspend when it suits you isn’t a belief. It’s a lie.”

  Oh, that stung. I feel his soul squirm.

  “I don’t like it any more than you do.” He seems oblivious of the stares of passersby. “But if I walk out, it won’t change the Council’s policy, or the course of the war.”

  “It’ll change your war,” I say. “But I suppose you’re only following orders. Right?”

  Everything that has happened in the galaxy—everything that ever will happen—is framework made up of countless connections of individual choices: yes or no, kill or spare, survive or die. They shape every moment for all eternity. One man’s decision matters. One being’s choices, moment by moment, connected to a network of billions of other choices, is all that existence is.

  “We need every general we can muster,” he says. Maybe the Jedi thinks he can appeal to my sense of guilt. “There’s a terrible darkness coming. I can feel it.”

  So can I.

  It’s vague and unfathomable, but it’s there, looming, like someone stalking me. “Then do something about your own darkness.”

  “Like joining a gang of mercenaries?” He looks over my armor with evident disgust. “Thugs. Savages.”

  “Before you choke on your own piety, Jedi, ask yourself who you’re fighting for.”

  Fierfek, I called him Jedi. My disconnection’s complete. His expression is one of quiet horror, and I walk away knowing I’ll never see him again, I know that. And this war will end in grief; I know that, too.

  I’ve made
my choice. Unlike the clone troopers, I have one. And I choose to let the galaxy look after itself, and save those men that the rest of the civilized world relegates to the status of beasts. It’s the right thing to do. It’s what a Jedi should do.

  The day of reckoning is coming. Yes, I can feel that, as well. I can’t stop it, whatever it is; but I can defend those dearest to me.

  Choices. I had one. I made it.

  Chapter One

  Mes Cavoli, Mid Rim,

  approximately fifty years before the Battle of Geonosis

  So, who’s to know whether Jango had more than one son or not, or even how old he is? Come on now, Spar, it’s time to be doing your bit for Manda’yaim. You don’t have to lift a finger. Just act like Fett’s heir while we sort ourselves out, so everyone knows we’re still in business.

  —Fenn Shysa, appealing to deserter Spar—former ARC trooper A-02—to pass himself off as Jango Fett’s son and heir in the interregnum following Fett’s death

  “Get up! Get up and run, you little chakaar, or I’ll drag you up.”

  Falin Mattran could see the curling smoke of the mercenaries’ camp a couple of hundred meters away, but it might as well have been a hundred kilometers. He couldn’t get up: he couldn’t go on. He knelt on all fours, struggling for breath, every muscle burning, but he refused to cry.

  He was seven years old. Nearly. He thought it was six years and ten months, but he’d lost count in the war.

  “Can’t,” he said.

  “Can.” Munin Skirata was a big man with pockmarked green armor and a blaster that fired metal pellets. He loomed above, voice deafening, face invisible behind a helmet with a T-shaped visor that scared Falin the first time he saw it. “I know you can. You survived Surcaris on your own. And you’re not strolling in your fancy Kuati park now, so shift your shebs, you lazy little nibral.”

  It wasn’t fair; life generally wasn’t. Falin’s parents were dead, and he hated the world. He wasn’t sure if he hated Munin Skirata, but if he could have killed the man right then, he would have. Only exhaustion stopped him. He almost reached for the knife he’d taken from his father’s body when he realized Papa was dead and was never going to wake up however hard he tried to rouse him, but he couldn’t take his weight off both arms without collapsing into the dirt.

  “You can do it if you want to,” Munin yelled. “But you don’t want to, and that makes you a nibral. You know what a nibral is? A loser. A waste of space. Deadwood. Get up!”

  Falin wanted one thing, and that was to show that he wasn’t lazy or stupid. His dad had never called him stupid. Neither had his mother; they loved him and made him feel safe, and now they were gone forever. He struggled into a kneeling position, then stood up, swaying and tottering, before breaking into a run again.

  “That’s more like it.” Munin jogged alongside him. “Come on. Shift it.”

  Falin’s legs didn’t feel like part of his body anymore. He’d run so far that they wouldn’t do what he wanted; he was trying to run, but stumbling along in small steps, unable to find a steady rhythm. His lungs screamed for a rest. But he wasn’t going to stop and be a nibral. He didn’t want to be one of those.

  Ahead was as near to home as he was ever going see again, a camp that moved from place to place each day, where he sobbed himself to sleep every night with his fist crammed into his mouth so the Mandalorians wouldn’t hear him and think he was a baby for crying so much.

  He could see the Mando soldiers standing around in the camp, watching. They all wore armor. Even their women were tough soldiers, and it wasn’t always easy to tell who was under that armor, male or female—or even if they were human.

  Falin willed his body on, but it wasn’t listening. He pitched forward flat on his face.

  Every time he tried to get up, gravel and dirt cutting into his palms, his arms gave way again. He sobbed in frustration. The finish line was still a long way off. But he had to get up. He had to finish.

  I’m not lazy. I’m not a nibral. I won’t let him call me that—

  “Okay, ad’ika,” Munin said, scooping him up in his arms. He sat Falin on one hip as if he was used to carrying kids and strode into the camp. The sudden switch from yelling to kindness was confusing. “You did okay, lad. It’s all right.”

  Falin hit Munin as hard as he could, but his balled fist bounced off the metal breastplate. It hurt. He wasn’t going to let Munin know that, though. “I hate you,” he said, now certain at last. “When I’m bigger, I’m going to kill you.”

  “I bet you would,” Munin said, smiling. “You already tried once.”

  The other Mandalorians watched, some with helmets on, some not. They’d finished fighting their war here. They were waiting for a ship to take them home.

  “You trying to kill that boy?” One of the men stopped to ruffle Falin’s hair. His name was Jun Hokan, and he was eating shavings of that horrible dried fish stuff, gihaal, carving them from a big chunk with his vibroblade and popping them into this mouth the way some folks ate fruit. “Poor shab’ika. Hasn’t he been through enough?”

  “I’m just training him.”

  “There’s such a thing as too much.”

  “Come on, he’s mandokarla. He’s already managed to survive on his own. He’s all guts, this one.”

  “Guts or not, I didn’t have my boy do proper training runs until he was eight.”

  Falin didn’t like being talked about as if he couldn’t understand what was going on. In the center of the camp—tents made of plastoid sheets strung over pits, then covered with grass and branches—a pot of stew was cooking over a crackling fire. Munin set him down and scrubbed his face and hands clean with a cold wet rag before ladling stew into a bowl and handing it to him.

  “We’ll have to get you some armor when we get home,” Munin said. “You need to learn to live and fight in it. Beskar’gam. The Mandalorian’s second skin.”

  Falin slurped from the bowl. He was always hungry. The stew was more like a broth—no lovely fat dumplings like his mother made—and he didn’t like the fishy smell, but this was a banquet compared with what he’d scavenged in the ruined city for a year.

  “Don’t want any armor,” he said.

  “You can do all kinds of things when you’re wearing armor that ordinary folks can’t do, Kal.”

  Munin called him Kal. In the man’s own language, it had something to do with knives and stabbing. Munin had nicknamed him Kal because Falin had tried to stab him with the three-sided knife when they first met; the Mandalorian seemed to think it was funny, and hadn’t been angry at all. But Munin fed him, and didn’t hurt him, and in the weeks since Falin had been part of the mercenary camp, he’d felt better even if he wasn’t happy.

  Sometimes Munin called him Kal’ika. The mercenaries told him it meant “little blade,” and showed that Munin was fond of him.

  “I’m Falin,” he said at last. “My name’s Falin.” But he was already forgetting who Falin was. His home in Kuat City seemed like a dream mostly forgotten when he woke up, more a feeling than a memory. His family had moved to Surcaris while his father did engineering stuff on the new KDY warships there. “I don’t want another name.”

  Munin ate with him. When he wasn’t shouting, he was actually a kind man, but he could never take Papa’s place. “Starting over can be a good thing, Kal’ika. You can’t change the past or other folks, but you can always change yourself, and that changes your future.”

  The thought grabbed Falin and wouldn’t let go. When you felt powerless, the idea of being able to make the bad stuff stop was the best thing in the world, and he didn’t want to feel this bad ever again. He wanted things to change.

  “But why do you make me run and carry things?” he asked. “It hurts.”

  “So that you can handle anything life throws at you, son. So that you never have to be afraid of anyone again. I’m going to make a soldier of you.”

  Falin liked the idea of being a soldier. He had a vague but long list of beings he
wanted to kill for hurting his parents, and you could do things like that if you were a soldier. “Why?”

  “It’s a noble profession. You’re tough and smart, and you’ll be a great soldier. It’s what Mandalorians do.”

  “Why didn’t you kill me? You kill everyone else.”

  Munin chewed thoughtfully for a while. “Because you don’t have parents, and me and my missus don’t have a son, so it sort of makes sense that we do what Mandalorians always do—that we take you in, train you, set you up to be a soldier and a father yourself. Don’t you want that?”

  Falin thought about it for a long time. He didn’t have an answer, other than that he was lonelier now among other beings than when he’d lived on his own in the rubble on Surcaris, because all the Mandalorians seemed to belong. They were close-knit, like a family. And they hadn’t killed his parents; they’d just rolled into town a year later while the war was still raging. He still felt angry, though, and they’d do as a focus for his anger until the real thing came along.

  “You think I’m lazy and stupid,” Falin said.

  “No, I just say that and shout at you to get you mad enough to push yourself to the limit.” Munin watched him empty the bowl and then refilled it. “Because strength is up here.” He tapped his head. “You can make your body do anything if you want to badly enough. It’s called endurance. When you find out just how much you can do, how much you can face, you’ll feel fantastic—like nobody can ever hurt you again. You’ll be strong in every sense of the word.”

  Falin wanted to feel fantastic. On a full stomach, life seemed vaguely promising as long as he didn’t think about his mother and father, lying there among the shattered beams of the house they’d rented on Surcaris.

  It was an image he couldn’t get out of his mind. He got up to wash the bowl in a pail of water and then sat down again next to the fire to look at his father’s knife, as he did every day. It had three flat sides, like a pyramid stretched out to a point. He’d never been allowed to touch it while his father was alive, but he’d taught himself to use it because he had nowhere to run and nobody to look after him. He could throw it pretty well now. He practiced a lot. He could hit any target, moving or otherwise.