“Yes, we should have put the civilian government back in the pilot’s seat and withdrawn troops from here by now,” Etain said. “But it doesn’t seem to work like that. Grab yourself something to eat while things are quiet.”
She strode off in the direction of the base commander’s office. Inside a minute, there was a distant but deafening whumppp and the whole building shook. Scorch ducked instinctively as dust rained gently from the joists overhead.
“Incoming…,” a clone’s voice called, feigning boredom, and everyone around laughed.
“Yeah, quiet.” Fixer pried open an ammo crate with his gauntlet vibroblade and rummaged through the contents. “Regular spa retreat.” He tutted loudly. “De-skilling, that’s what this is.”
“What is?” Scorch asked, thinking about his next meal. In this game, you grabbed whatever you could whenever you could, and as much of it as possible—food, sleep, water, laughs. There were a lot of clone troopers milling around, and he didn’t recognize the unit flashes on a couple of them. Scorch didn’t like not knowing things. He filed it mentally as something to catch up on later. “Going to lodge a complaint with the Galactic Union of Amalgamated Building Wreckers?”
Fixer examined the new Merr-Sonn entry grenade with sighing disdain. “Even a Weequay could use this.”
“That’s the whole idea, genius. You ought to suggest that to Merr-Sonn as an advertising slogan.” Scorch took the grenade from him and attached the stand-off rod, then slid the grenade’s housing over the muzzle of his Deece. A couple of troopers watched warily. It wasn’t a smart thing to do inside a building. The device was designed to blow out doors from a safe distance—safe for the operator, anyway—to effect a rapid entry. “Personally, I don’t mind trading professional exclusivity for an absence of pain.”
Fixer held out his hand for the grenade. Scorch returned it, and the troopers appeared to relax again. “I thought you were a craftsman.”
“I am. I just don’t like being met with a hail of blaster bolts when I knock on doors, that’s all.”
Fixer slipped a couple of the grenades into his belt pouch. The two of them wandered off toward the scent of frying oil and hot sauce, removing their helmets to get a good deep lungful of the seductive aromas without air filters getting in the way. In the mess hall, white armor in various states of cleanliness, from snow-field to rolling-in-the-dirt, formed an unbroken sea except for a little craggy island of matte-black, burly Katarn Mark III rig. Etain was huddled at a table in conversation with Omega Squad.
“Thought she was heading to see the CO,” Fixer said.
Scorch looked around for a splash of red and orange to spot Sev and Niner. They were in line, getting their plates loaded by a droid that seemed a little too obsessive about portion control for Sev’s taste. Sev’s voice carried across the burble and hum of mess-hall chat: “I need extra protein. Otherwise my aim wanders, and then I shoot tinnies. By accident, on account of being starved.”
“She must have diverted.” Scorch wanted to stay on the subject. “Well, she could hardly walk past Darman, could she?”
“It’ll end in tears,” Fixer said.
“Spoilsport.”
“Seriously. It’s not right. Clones shouldn’t mix with officers. Let alone Jedi officers.”
“What, in case we get ideas above our station? Don’t know our place, to die nice and quietly so we don’t upset the civvies?”
“You spend too long talking to Fi and those Null dingbats, Scorch.”
“You’ve seen the average galactic citizen now. We didn’t know any better on Kamino. If anyone’s superior, it’s us, not them.”
Fixer just stared at him. It was the most dangerous thought Scorch had ever expressed. But he wasn’t going to be made to feel he was less than fully human because he’d been hatched rather than born, because he’d seen plenty of natural humans now, and they weren’t much to write home about.
He was the best of the best. He deserved the same respect as the next man, and maybe a little more.
“You’re jealous of Darman,” Fixer said at last.
“She’s not my type.” Scorch felt unaccountably angry. “But if you’re saying I envy him for having the guts to live his life, not the life he’s been told to get on with, then yes. I am.”
“Di’kut,” Fixer muttered.
Sometimes—too often, in fact—Scorch had nothing to do but wait, and thinking filled the time even when it was the last thing he wanted to do. He often thought about Skirata’s new grandson. Clones, like all beings in the galaxy, speculated and gossiped.
“You reckon that baby is a clone’s?” Scorch said at last.
“What baby?” Fixer targeted the menu suspended above the servery; they actually had a choice. Troopers parted to let him pass. “What’s up with you today?”
“The baby Skirata brought into the barracks when Zey was away. His grandson.”
“Snack-sized. Yeah. Why do you think that?”
“It’s just weird to hand your kid over to a Mando who’s fighting in a war. I mean, how bad must things be at home if the kid’s safer with Skirata?”
“So why does it have to be a clone’s baby? And maybe Skirata’s family lives in the shebs end of the galaxy, so it’s an improvement to have the old shabuir hauling Junior around minefields.”
“Coruscant. Not exactly minefields.”
Scorch thought of the baby’s curly black hair and dark eyes. There was something… something very familiar about him. The kid could easily have been one of the younger clones back on Kamino, those baffled and serious youngsters who once stared at older clones like Scorch in the refectory. That was me, not so long ago. Scorch saw himself in their eyes: desperate to succeed, aware of yearning for something but not able to articulate it, feeling safe only among his immediate brothers.
Scared. Scared of everything.
“I think I’ll have the minced nerf stew,” Fixer said, like he was some kind of restaurant critic. Scorch couldn’t recall if Fixer had ever had that wide-eyed look when they were kids. “You, Scorch?”
“Uh… whatever’s the biggest portion. Chaka noodles.”
Looking after a clone’s kid was just the kind of thing Skirata would do. He’d been an assassin, a debt enforcer, any number of brutal and unpitying things, but he loved his boys to blind distraction. If any of them had found time to get a girl pregnant, he would take in that kid as his own kin.
“What if it’s one of Omega’s kids?” Scorch said.
Fixer turned his head slowly. He had to twist from the waist because his backpack frame was too high to glance over his shoulder.
“What are you yammering on about? Drop it.”
“I said, what if the baby was fathered by one of Omega Squad?” Scorch tried to keep his voice down. “They’re his favorites.”
“Have you been drinking contaminated drive coolant again?”
“Okay, forget it.”
Fixer was far more interested in his meal. Scorch turned very slowly to watch Etain and Omega chatting. It had been no secret when the two squads did joint ops on Coruscant that the general and Darman were lovers. Scorch had found that such a difficult concept to handle that he simply shut it out and reminded himself he didn’t have time for anything but staying alive. He worried that he was getting like Fi. The smart-mouthed little di’kut had become a watchword within Delta Squad for doing everything a clone commando was supposed to avoid—he craved the outside world too much, he voiced his dissatisfaction, and he encouraged the same kind of dissent among his brothers. He was subversive. He should have known the only way out was in a body bag. What was it they were all told back in training? They had certainty, they had a purpose, and that was more than most beings ever got in their miserable lives.
Okay, so why isn’t it enough?
“Might be Darman’s love child with the General,” Fixer said, seeming to tune back in to the topic. The droid slopped a brown liquid mass onto a mound of mashed vegetables. It would have neede
d a forensic test to confirm it was minced nerf in gravy, but this was still a long way from the bland nutrition cubes they’d been fed as kids and still carried as part of their dry rations. Hot, savory food was a luxury that Scorch never took for granted. “She disappeared to Qiilura for ages. Or maybe it’s Captain Maze’s, because he’s such a smooth-talking rogue that no female could resist him.”
Maze was an iceberg on legs, and a grumpy one at that. “Now you’re the one drinking coolant…”
“I can have crazy theories, too. Can’t get any crazier than that. I win. Now eat.”
They grabbed their trays and made their way to the table occupied—in the full military sense of the word—by Boss and Sev. Omega might have mixed with other brigades and ranks, but Delta still liked their own company, and whatever mood they conveyed to other clones usually made them want to sit somewhere else. Scorch wanted to wander over to the white jobs with the unit badge he didn’t recognize and ask a few questions. But it could wait. He wedged his Deece and helmet between his feet and tucked into a mountain of noodles.
“So what’s the General here for, then?” Boss worked his way through a pile of oozing red-fruited pie. “Other than visiting her favorite squad?”
“She hands out candy,” Sev said. “Every time she visits a squad in the field, she takes treats for them. Just like Skirata.”
“Maybe he’ll teach her to garrote folks as well as he does, too.”
“She’s been bleating about the number of men they’ve committed to this dump,” Sev said. “I overheard General Mlaske say she’s nagging Zey and Camas to withdraw the garrison and leave the locals to sort themselves out, because they’ll be as much trouble for the Separatists as they are for us. Might tie them up here for free.”
Fixer chewed. The table was silent except for the faint wet sounds of eating for a few moments.
“There’s a sort of logic to—”
That was as far as Boss got. One moment the mess hall was lit by sunlight slanting through blast shutters set high in the walls, and the next Scorch was blown backward by an instant whirlwind of shattered duraplast into darkness and sheets of flame. Something smashed him full in the chest and winded him. It was the table. He groped for his rifle, but his helmet had gone flying, and he lay on his back trying to suck in breaths, succeeding only in swallowing dust that choked him. He couldn’t breathe—
But he could hear. That was something.
The yelling began right away; no screams, just shouts to do this, check that, get medics. Scorch made a few attempts to sit up before he realized the table was still on top of him. Then the weight suddenly lifted. He was looking up at Sev through a haze of settling permacrete dust, so unsure of how long he’d been on his back that he checked the chrono display on his forearm plate and then realized he couldn’t work it out from that anyway.
“Direct hit on the front entrance.” Sev wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. His face was peppered with tiny beads of blood as if he’d had a bad time shaving. “You okay?”
“What happened to the perimeter defense systems? We’re supposed to be secure here.”
Sev hauled him to his feet but there was nowhere clear to stand. The mess hall was a mass of upended tables and chairs. It hadn’t taken the full force of the missile, but the shock wave and debris had punched out the hall doors and flung anything that wasn’t secured across the room.
It had flung metal trays like Kaski throwing-blades, turning them into lethal weapons. Scorch had that moment of trying to make sense of what he was looking at but not wanting to, because his brain was saying Horrible, look away—no look, you have to, even if it makes you sick. The trays had hit two men standing near the racks where they’d been stored, and one of them was in just his fatigues; a tray had taken off his leg at the knee. His buddies were kneeling beside him, giving him first aid. The other—they’d given up on him. The impact had sliced off the top of his head.
Some things in battle you shut out, and some you couldn’t and would never stop seeing. Scorch felt this scene slot into his memory as if it would never fade. It was the incongruity of it, a scene of carnage with food and cups spread among the blood.
Then rage took him. He felt himself go from stunned slow motion to off the scale in a blink. Nobody expected to have to die while they were off duty trying to grab a meal. Out of all the death he’d seen so far, this was different, he was different, and he felt he’d tipped over an edge that he would never be able to draw back from again. He started sorting through the debris, flinging aside the plastoid tables, oblivious to everything around him except finding his Deece, locating the scum who did this, and blowing their brains out.
He was nearly at the shattered doors when he felt someone grab his right shoulder plate from behind.
“Scorch!” It was Boss, with Sev right behind him. Scorch was aware of frantic activity all around him and an alarm klaxon screaming close by, but he couldn’t pay attention to it. It felt like it was all happening behind a transparisteel barrier. “Whoa there. You don’t know where you’re heading yet.” Boss spun Scorch around and handed him his helmet. “And you’ll probably need this.”
Just being stopped in his tracks was enough to jerk him out of the blind rush to exact revenge. He found himself panting. The hall came back into focus; the sound was making sense now. The rest of his squad looked a mess, covered in fine dust, and then Omega came scrambling over to them, kicking chairs aside. Etain appeared from the other side, hair in a tangle but very alert.
“Everyone okay?” she asked. “Scorch, did you get hit by anything? Did you lose consciousness?”
“I’m not concussed,” he said firmly. His voice sounded odd to him. Maybe he looked crazy to her. “I just want to kill the shabuir who did this. How did they get past the missile defenses?”
“I just raised the base security team,” she said. “The security scanners show the trajectory of the missile, and it came from inside the city. Not from the rebel positions.”
“Have they calculated a location yet?”
“To within one block,” Niner said.
“Good.” Scorch felt that they were staring at him, but even though he was back in control again, he still knew that only one thing would let him sleep tonight. “Time for house calls.”
Treasury offices, Coruscant
“Ooh,” said Jilka. She took Besany’s wrist as if arresting her and yanked her hand up to inspect it. “That’s nice.”
Besany should have known she could get nothing past Jilka Zan Zentis. The woman was a tax investigator. She could assess a defaulting taxpayer’s net worth to the last cred just by sniffing him—blindfolded. She zeroed in on the ring that Besany had thought was discreet and understated.
“It’s nothing.”
“Doesn’t look like nothing to me,” Jilka said. Besany made an effort to herd her into a quieter corner of the archive area. “Looks like top-grade sapphire. Looks like you ditched soldier boy for a more upmarket model.”
“Soldier boy,” Besany said, feeling her throat tighten with temper, “has not been ditched. And I’m going to get Ordo out of the army.” She swallowed hard, knowing it was unwise to say it, but she would not cover him up like some guilty secret simply because he was a clone. “We got married.”
Jilka looked as if Besany had told her she was joining a Jabiimi terrorist group for a lark. “Can you even do that?”
“No law against it.” At least it had distracted Jilka from a full assay of the stone. Besany willed her not to say that she couldn’t marry a clone, because then she wouldn’t be able to bite back a retort. “And I know what I’m getting into, before you ask.”
Record droids whirred past in the corridor. “I haven’t a clue what you’re getting into, so I wouldn’t ask,” Jilka said. “And you don’t talk about him much, so there’s not much for me to warn you about anyway. Boy, are you edgy lately.” She shrugged. “Well, congratulations. No nuptial cake to share?”
Besany was edgy all righ
t. It wasn’t just the small matter of slicing data from the Republic computer network on a regular basis. She’d almost grown used to the constant anxiety about that. It was the kriffing shoroni sapphires that were uppermost in her mind, possibly because they were so visible, and her data theft wasn’t. She thought she’d put the problem to rest when Vau had the three gems recut into smaller stones for her by one of his dodgy Hutt contacts. That had shaved a lot off the value. But they were still worth millions, and they were almost impossible to trace. She’d weakened and had one made into a ring, to stop Ordo from feeling he’d been rejected. Once he was reassured that she’d have been as happy with a plastoid band, she’d sell it to raise hard credits.
It’s wrong. I shouldn’t benefit from this.
She kept the rest of the stones in her jacket, wrapped tightly in a small flimsiplast bag, because she wasn’t sure what to do with them. One idea nagged at her like a begging child.
It’s crazy. But someone I know has a very good use for those creds, for clones even Skirata won’t be able to help.
“It’s the war,” Besany said, which was true.
“At least it’ll be over.” Jilka’s eyes still strayed to the sapphire, but it was the cold appraisal of a professional calculating unpaid tax, not a woman admiring a bauble. “And it won’t reach Coruscant.”
“What makes you say that?”
“It just won’t.”
“I meant why you think it’ll be over.”
Jilka shrugged. She seemed to be picking her words, but Besany knew her well enough to know she was trying to avoid saying the obvious: that the Republic might have to give in to Separatist demands, because the war was stretching it thin. She would stop short of saying that clone casualties would be too high to carry on. That was too crass an observation, true or not.
At least she kept up to speed with the progress of the war. That was more than most.
“Costs too much,” Jilka said at last. “Senator Skeenah’s raised a question in the Senate about the large numbers of gunships being ordered that are taking too long to get to the front line. I think they’ve got a budget crunch, but the accounts are such a mess it’s hard to know where to start.”
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