“Is he talking through his shebs?”
“Well, if he is, then at least we’ll know what his methodology is so we can rule it out,” said Gilamar. “Knowing what doesn’t work is as useful a clue as any in genetics.”
“Promise me you won’t kill him until you get something useful out of him.”
“It’ll be a challenge,” Gilamar said. “I could have fun testing a large-gauge rusty syringe on that guy. Now, you want me to look in on Kad’ika before I pay my respects to Zey and tell him where to shove his offer?”
“See Zey first. And no insertion instructions…”
“Wad’e and I… well, we’re not exactly persuaded that training more covert ops troopers is a productive use of a Mando’ad’s time.”
Here we go again. Covert ops clones had been tasked to assassinate renegade ARC troopers. Gilamar and Tay’haai had taken that news very badly, although maybe not as badly as Darman, who’d ended up killing two of them. The Republic was rotten at its core; more maggots tumbled out every time Skirata shook it. Clones forced to kill clones—yes, Skirata could see it was one insult too far.
“Mij,” Skirata said, “the more of us back on the inside, the better.”
“You can get any information you want. Jaing and Mereel can slice into any system in the Republic—including the Treasury. Why don’t you just fleece Palpatine of his reserves and we can all thin out?”
Skirata concentrated on not blinking. Gilamar had no idea how accurate that comment was. Skirata hated deceiving him, but what he didn’t know couldn’t get him into more trouble. He knew what he needed to know, and no more.
“Yeah, but you can steer events…,” Skirata said. “You want to see Priest or Reau back in?”
“You wouldn’t. Not them.” Gilamar boiled. He loathed both of them to the point of violence. “They had the makings of the Death Watch in them, those two. Him and that perverted secret fight club, her and that let’s-conquer-the-galaxy-again osik… that’s not what either of us want Mandalore to be, is it?”
“I know how to get you going, don’t I?”
Gilamar scratched the bridge of his nose thoughtfully. The conspicuous break in it from a particularly fierce game of get’shuk made him look more like a man who handed out injuries than one who healed them. That was also true, of course.
“Just keep me away from them. Him especially. Jango must have been mad to recruit him.”
“Joking, Mij…”
“Okay, tell me what you’re really looking for.”
“Any clue about the timing of a shift in strategy,” Skirata said. “Like I said before, there’s a big sea change coming and I want plenty of notice so I can get our boys out.”
Gilamar stood with hands on hips, staring down at Skirata’s boots. “Okay, just for you. And get that leg fixed, will you? It’s a simple op. What are you, a martyr or something?”
Maybe I am.
Skirata had lived with the aftermath of that ankle injury for nearly forty years. He rationalized it as a reminder of stupid risks, but perhaps it was a penance. He couldn’t sleep in a bed now, either; on the night he’d rescued Ordo and his brothers from the Kaminoans, he’d slept in the chair to keep an eye on them, and from that point on he felt that rest in a comfortable bed was off limits to him until he fully secured their futures. Ritual—ritual to keep the fates appeased, to focus him, whatever—had eaten a big chunk of his life.
“You’re right,” Skirata said. “I’ll get it fixed.”
Gilamar went on his way. Mereel, unusually quiet, strolled in the other direction toward the speeder parking area.
“Well, our professor’s bold moral stance on not exploiting poor downtrodden clones like me didn’t last long, did it?” he said. “He’s got the breaking strain of a warm butter-loaf.”
“Son,” said Skirata, “if all scientists had nice shiny consciences, we’d still be fighting with stone axes. Who do you think developed all those handy blasters, lasers, and ion cannons?”
“A lot of academics don’t support the war, though.”
“Yeah, but if you went back in there, told our overeducated friend what you were, and asked him to liberate you and your clone brothers, he’d be out the doors so fast you wouldn’t see his shebs for dust. It’s a theoretical principle for him. It’s not personal. Worse than that—he’s not even motivated by creds. I hate a man who’s driven by a vision. You can’t trust him.”
“And you’re busting a gut to free us just for the cred chips and the plunder, of course…”
“That’s different. You’re my boys.”
“Anyway, it’s not as if we’re stuck with him. He’s just one scientist working on a fragment of the data. And he’s not going to be chatting about the approach over a caf in the university common room, is he? None of them will. They’ll all potter away on their own section of the genome, thinking they’re privileged with some secret, and never have the full picture.”
“Sooner or later, we’re going to have to try it out. The cure, I mean.”
“Try it on me.”
It had to be tested on a clone. Skirata didn’t see any of them as expendable, even rank-and-file troopers he’d never met, but the thought of trying some unproven therapy on any of his own boys scared him. He couldn’t try it out on himself. It was the one sacrifice he could never make for them, however much he wanted to.
“We’ll make sure we know how to undo the effects of it before we get to that stage,” Skirata said, ruffling Mereel’s hair. “I won’t take risks with your health.”
Mereel laughed. “Lots of nice healthy firefights instead.”
“You could go home to Mandalore now and never fight again.” Skirata felt instantly guilty. It didn’t take much where his kids were concerned. “Nobody’s forcing you to fight now, son.”
“I’m not sitting on my shebs while my brothers fight, either.” Mereel seemed more interested in an illuminated sign a little farther ahead than avoiding premature old age. He quickened his pace. “Sooner or later, though, we might have to use Kad’ika’s tissue samples.”
Skirata shook his head. Etain hadn’t objected to letting Ko Sai take a look at her son’s genome, but Ko Sai had been their prisoner, held in isolation. There was nothing the Kaminoan could have done with the knowledge. Once some other gene cruncher got wind of the fact that Darman and Etain had a son, though, the baby would be a valuable commodity. Half Jedi, half perfect soldier: that was a genome a lot of companies—and governments—would kill to get their hands on.
“It’s too dangerous, Mer’ika,” Skirata said. “They can detect the midi-chlorians. They’d know.”
“Maybe only the Jedi Council has the kit to do that.”
“Wouldn’t they see there was material in the cells that didn’t add up?”
“Kad’ika’s the only child of a clone that we have, and some of the aging genes aren’t present—or at least what we think are those genes.” Mereel didn’t sound desperate, just patient, as if Skirata didn’t realize things and needed a biology lesson repeated with helpful diagrams of squalls and jakrabs. “I thought the maturation genes the Kaminoans added to the basic Jango model were recessive, for their own business reasons, but it’s never quite that simple in genetics. Add, take away, or change one gene—even move its position—and it can have a massive impact on the expression of all the others. They’re all connected somehow. It’s not a simple case of chopping bits out of gene sequences or adding them. If it was, cloning wouldn’t be such a profitable or secretive business. It’s very hard to get right.”
Skirata didn’t want to argue. The whole quest was his idea; he could hardly turn around now and say there was a limit to how far he would go to save his clone sons from an unfairly early death. Skirata wasn’t sure now if his own reluctance was based on fear of exposing Kad’ika to discovery, or just a general unease about using the kid for genetic research in any way. That was all too… Kaminoan.
Kid? My grandson. He really is my grandson now.
>
“We can approach it from the embryology end, too,” Mereel said. “Dr. Elliam Baniora. Everything I’ve read suggests he’s the top man when it comes to development. Let’s tell him we want to see if we can clone humans with extended active life spans for manual labor.”
Cover stories needed to have just enough truth in them to look like the real thing. Skirata wondered whether to just tell them the truth: that he’d been one of life’s losers until his unhappy life had been transformed by a bunch of clone kids who needed him simply to survive, and so now he would do anything, absolutely anything, to give them a normal life and the life span that went with it.
If the scientists wanted the biotechnology as the price of saving his boys, he’d pay it. He didn’t care. He just wanted them to have lives like other men.
“You know what I find funny?” Skirata unlocked his speeder, the spoils of war commandeered from a Jabiimi terrorist who was too dead to need it now, and realized the sign that had caught Mereel’s attention was outside a confectionery store. Clones, always peckish, tended to have a very sweet tooth. Maybe it was linked to their maturation, the metabolic need to fuel all that fast aging. “That the guy could look you in the eye and still not know what you are. Even now, most aruetiise here don’t know what a clone trooper looks like.”
Nor did they care, by and large. But some did, like Besany Wennen, and when they cared they could move mountains.
Mereel paused. “Can you wait a few minutes while I get something, Kal’buir?”
“Candied nuts… nut slice…?”
“I hear that store does very good nut slice.”
Skirata fished in his pockets automatically and crammed a stack of credit chips into Mereel’s hand.
“Time we got some bank accounts sorted out for you all,” he said.
Mereel shrugged. “We’re not short of creds, any of us.”
“I mean real bank accounts, not skimming off the Republic’s budget. In case anything happens to me.”
“Buir, we can slice into any banking system in the galaxy, like Mij said. We’re big boys now. And nothing’s going to happen to you.”
Skirata walked a precarious line between wanting to protect his adopted sons from an unforgiving galaxy and giving them the space the Republic denied them to be independent. It was a parent’s dilemma, magnified many times and complicated by their accelerated, compressed life spans. He didn’t want to dole out pocket money to them like kids; these were fighting men, and they deserved the wherewithal to lead their own lives, all the simple routine choices that citizens had.
“I don’t mean money laundering,” Skirata said. “I’ll get Jaing to set up personal accounts for you all. Private, to spend as you like. None of my business.”
Mereel laughed and strode off toward the brightly lit sign. “I’ll only blow it all on fast speeders, slow women, and overpriced candy…”
Skirata sat in the driver’s seat and waited for Mereel to return with his booty, checking the messages on his comlink to pass the time. No, he didn’t have to worry about Mereel. The lad was sociable, confident, and guaranteed to find a way of fitting in wherever he went. Of the six Nulls, he was the one best able to deal with the demons the Kaminoans had forced on him. But the others—A’den, Kom’rk, Jaing, and Prudii—kept Skirata awake at night to varying degrees. And Ordo…
I’m too protective. Ordo can cope. He’s a grown man. And he’s got Besany.
Skirata stared at the comlink’s miniature screen without really seeing it. He tried not to have favorites, but from the moment two-year-old Ordo had aimed a blaster at a Kaminoan to try to save his brother Nulls from termination, the kid had been his heart and soul.
And now he’d sent Skirata the usual stack of sitrep text comms. There was a file of budget data, with a note that there appeared to be some big procurement projects due to deliver around the third anniversary of the war. That time slot appeared to be increasingly significant. Ordo had added a terse line: I DISPOSED OF A REP INTEL AGENT TONIGHT. HE WAS TRAILING BESANY. I SUGGEST WE PERSUADE HER TO LEAVE FOR MANDALORE BEFORE SOMETHING SERIOUS HAPPENS TO HER. I ALSO MARRIED HER.
Skirata read the last terse line a couple of times. He’d raised his boys as good Mandos, and the pressure to marry young must have seeped in deep without Skirata noticing he’d even put it in their heads. The Nulls were late starters by Mando standards. Marrying at sixteen was common.
My boy’s grown up and left home.
It was a private deal between a couple, nothing to do with anyone else, but Skirata felt a little excluded by the suddenness of it, and scolded himself for feeling that way.
Ordo was still playing the big brother to everyone just as he had in Tipoca City, but Skirata shared his worries; trouble was coming. They could even guess at a possible date for it. All that mattered now was getting out in one piece with as much capital as possible and a method for reversing accelerated clone aging. Skirata’s priority was his underground escape route for clone deserters—something that had started with his Nulls, then spread to include his commando company, and now extended to any white job—the ordinary clone trooper—who wanted something else out of life.
It was Skirata’s sacred mission. He was wedded to it.
But how many of the white jobs want to leave the army? How many of them can even conceive of the life they’ve been denied?
He couldn’t save one million men, let alone three. He’d save as many as he could. They had, after all, saved him in a way that went far beyond stopping him from getting killed in combat.
Come on, Mer’ika. You buying the whole store or something?
Skirata scrolled through the remaining messages. Most were business; fencing all the valuables that Vau had stolen from the Mygeeto bank vaults was taking time, as was laundering the bonds and credits. Then there were updates from Rav Bralor on Mandalore, letting him know how the construction of the bastion in Kyrimorut was going.
He almost missed the last message. It was very short.
DAD, RUUSAAN’S MISSING. WE HAVEN’T HEARD FROM HER IN MONTHS. WE NEED TO TALK. YOURS, IJAAT.
It was from one of his sons.
Not his clone sons, the kids he put everything on the line for; it was his biological son, Ijaat, whom he hadn’t spoken to in many years and—with his other son, Tor—had declared him dar’buir, no longer a father.
Aruetiise didn’t understand Mando family law, but to be divorced by your own kids was one of the worst disgraces for any Mandalorian.
Ruusaan… Skirata hadn’t seen his daughter in years, either. But she hadn’t signed the dar’buir declaration, and that had always given him some hope that she didn’t hate him for the divorce.
My little girl. She’s missing.
The hatch opened and Mereel slid into the passenger’s seat, pockets bulging, but the grin died on his face.
“Buir?” He stared into Skirata’s eyes. “Buir, what’s wrong?”
Skirata hadn’t realized his shock and fear were visible. He hadn’t realized tears were running down his face, either.
“My daughter,” he said. “My girl’s missing.”
Skirata had two families, both in need, and no Mandalorian could ever turn his back on his kids forever, even if they’d disowned him.
“We’ll find her, then, Buir,” Mereel said, matter-of-factly. “After all—she’s family.”
Skirata hoped she was. Family took a lot more than genes to hold it together.
Chapter Four
Kragget restaurant,
lower levels, Coruscant,
938 days ABG
No, I’m not going to play Mand’alor. Okay, you can tell everyone I’m Fett’s son if that makes them happy, but you can keep the politics. And I want payment. It’ll crimp my mercenary earnings.
—Spar, formerly ARC-02, to Fenn Shysa, unconvinced that Mandalorians need him to masquerade as Fett’s legal heir
“Hi, sweetie.” The Twi’lek waitress greeted Etain with a big smile. “The usual?”
> “That’d be great,” said Etain. “Thanks.”
Nobody wandered into the Kragget by chance. It was a place for regulars, a greasy-looking diner right on the edge of the lower levels, and so it was popular with those who spent a lot of time in the lawless neighborhoods nearby—the Coruscant Security Force. Jedi general Etain Tur-Mukan was now a regular here, too, but it wasn’t the Kragget’s lavishly greasy all-day breakfast that lured her. It was brief and secret visits to see her son.
She’d named him Venku, but now he was known as Kad—Kad’ika, Little Saber.
Kad was now nearly a year old and Etain’s heart broke anew each morning at the prospect of being separated from him for another day. The fact that he had a small army of doting babysitters did nothing to dull the pain of having to keep her motherhood secret from everyone, including Kad’s father.
The longer this went on, the harder it would be to tell Darman that he had a son.
Etain settled at a corner table and got a nod from CSF officers she knew by sight but not by name. Her brown Jedi robes gave her a kind of anonymity, much like the clones’ armor; nobody asked why she was slumming it down here, because Jedi often did marginal jobs, and anyway—she was Kal Skirata’s buddy. CSF, and Captain Jaller Obrim in particular, were very chummy with Skirata and his boys.
One of the officers paused in midchew as Etain sat down at a nearby table. “General, have you heard from Fi lately?”
“He’s doing okay,” she said. The CSF officers knew Fi wasn’t dead. They’d helped Besany rescue him. Etain was comforted to know she wasn’t the only sane woman who did crazy, dangerous things for the welfare of clone troopers. “He’s even got a girlfriend now.”
There was a ripple of approving comments from surrounding tables. The cops liked Fi. Everyone did, because he was a funny, friendly guy, but he had legendary status within CSF; he’d once thrown himself on a grenade to shield CSF officers, and that bought a man serious respect. Katarn armor had saved him that time. It hadn’t saved him from brain trauma on Gaftikar. Even Fi ran out of luck sooner or later.
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