Ah. Skeenah was a decent, moral human being who cared about the treatment of clone troopers. He was a few months behind Besany on this one; she wished he was less diligent. She didn’t want attention drawn to the very area she was investigating. Maybe giving him the proceeds from selling the sapphires was too risky.
Start. Start?
“What do you mean, start?” Besany asked.
“Well, if he gets the Senate to back his call for a full audit, some unlucky person’s going to have to do it.”
Besany had always been good at covering her tracks.
For the past fifteen months or so, she’d mined the Republic’s financial network for apparently routine data on exports and defense procurement, patiently piecing together a complex picture of ships being ordered from KDY and laboratory supplies heading for Centax 2.
“It’ll be me,” she said, wishing Skeenah had either shut up or started his finance crusade a lot earlier, when it would have given her better cover for her own activity. “And I could do without an extra project right now.” Besany looked at the chrono on the archive wall and edged toward the doors with her box of datachips. “Got a lot to catch up with. See you later.”
“Did you ever find that medical supplies company you were trying to track down?”
“No, I had to admit defeat on that one,” Besany said, far too quickly.
Jilka would know that wasn’t like Besany at all. Besany hoped she’d put it down to worrying about Ordo. When she was safely in her own office, she went through her daily routine of running a search for all new transactions on the Treasury ledger—sometimes as many as a million line items a day—and set it to look for defense and medical product codes. Anyone hiding those items probably wouldn’t use them, but she had to start somewhere each day. She could refine them farther by delivery target dates; any expenditure was sorted by the quarter in which it was due to be drawn down from the budget.
What was she really looking for now, anyway? Timetables. She knew what was happening. She just needed as many clues as she could get for Skirata to decide when the time would be right to pull his boys out.
And me.
She’d never been to Mandalore, and she hadn’t the first clue what a frontier existence on a backward rural planet might be like. As she glanced at her office-worker hands, soft and manicured, she decided it was too late to worry about that now, and concentrated on the scrolling lines of data in slight defocus, letting her eyes scan rather than trying to read.
The medical items weren’t showing any pattern, but the defense procurement codes were clustering around the same period, about a month or two away. On its own, that was nothing; added to what she already knew, it just reinforced the time period that was becoming more apparent as the likely time for the big push. She made a copy of the defense budget data—perfectly legitimate in her current role—but transferred it onto her private datapad rather than her Treasury one for transmission to Skirata.
How much does he tell Etain?
Besany hardly saw her. It was just as well, because she wasn’t sure what she could safely discuss with her. The two women could hardly sit down over a cup of caf and chat about the various scams she’d pulled. It was one deception layered on top of another, even within their own circle.
Besany stuck to her routine, going out at lunchtime to stretch her legs and transmit the data clear of the building. As soon as her encrypted system indicated that the data had been received, she deleted the files; the less time she had them on her ’pad, the better. A brisk walk around the plaza and a little window-shopping created the illusion that life went on as it always had for her, instead of the minutes ticking down toward the time when she would have to leave everything she knew.
As she walked, she felt the hairs on her nape prickle, as if someone was behind her again. She really had to shake this off. If she didn’t, she’d be completely nuts soon. A casual glance over her shoulder confirmed, as it did almost every time, that there was nobody around but office workers on their meal break and shoppers, just like her.
These days, she saw clone patrols on the streets. It had started with a few outside main government buildings, and now she was seeing them daily, the same white armor she was used to, but some with blue sigils and plate detail, some with red. She made a note to ask Ordo who they were, and carried on shopping.
What matters more? An easy life, or doing what’s right? You can make a difference. So it’s your moral duty to do it. That’s what Dad would have done.
She’d cope, because Etain would, and so would Laseema. They were all in this together. Back in the office, she leaned back in her chair and unlocked her terminal to begin today’s task—real work, the stuff she was paid to do—checking a tip-off that catering contracts were being awarded to nonexistent companies, the credits pocketed by someone in the procurement service. It was a common scam in a big, complex budget.
“Just can’t get the staff these days,” she muttered to herself. “Okay… let’s see…”
She accessed the Treasury database of registered companies, which was simple enough, but when she tried to crosscheck an entry with a CHA food hygiene inspection she hit a problem. Instead of lines of names, addresses, and registration numbers, she got only a portal screen; access was denied.
The system was usually more reliable than that.
“Jay-Nine,” she called. “Jay?”
The support droid was usually wandering up and down the corridor on this floor of the building, ready to be summoned to fix computer problems. He rarely had to be called. Normally, the sound of distant swearing was enough to summon him. She heard the faint hum of his repulsors as he glided down the corridor, the top of his dome just visible above the rail in the transparisteel wall.
“Agent Wennen,” said the droid, hovering in front of her desk. “Problem?”
“I can’t get into the CHA network, Jay. It’s locked me out.”
As soon as she said it, her gut knotted. They’ve caught me. In the weeks after Ordo had killed the Republic spy trailing her, she’d waited for that knock at the door or a hand on the shoulder to tell her the game was up, but nothing had happened.
“Central Tech took down the network during the meal break,” the droid said. “They found what appears to be a virus in the system, so they activated the departmental firewalls. Nothing to worry about. All requests for data will have to be via comlink for a few days, that’s all. Did you not receive notice of the shutdown?”
“Obviously not,” she said. Relief of a kind flooded her, but it didn’t stop that churning sensation that spread from her stomach and became a feeling of cold tension in her thigh muscles. “And why does neutralizing a virus take days?”
“We’ve never seen this before. It’s very sophisticated. We’re not even certain what it’s doing, because it causes no disruption, but there’s definitely something running across the network that wasn’t installed by the Treasury and shouldn’t be there.”
I’ll bet. Jaing and Mereel were gifted slicers. And she’d watched Ordo hack into the Republic Intel system with the ease of someone checking his stock prices. There was no magic or mystery in it, just the right inside information; almost every breach of security she’d ever investigated came down not to brilliant computer skills—although the Nulls were brilliant—but to someone being careless with passwords and verifications.
I opened the door.
I let the Nulls into the system within hours of meeting them.
She didn’t regret it, but it didn’t stop her from being scared.
And now she had a problem. Her access was severely limited, and the Treasury computer team had spotted that something was wrong. There’d be an investigation. Things would get too close for comfort. She was qualified in computer auditing, but the stuff Jaing could do—that was well outside her league, and she had no idea what he might have introduced into the system.
“Well, I’ll just have to work around it, Jay,” Besany said. “Have other department
s been infected?”
“Still looking, Agent Wennen,” said the droid.
It was all Besany could do to stop herself from making an excuse to leave the building to warn Skirata. She waited an hour so that if she was being watched, she didn’t look as if she’d rushed to call someone as soon as she found her network access was down. Walking across the plaza in front of the Treasury building, she bought a mealbread stick from a vendor; then, casually as she could, she munched on it while she commed Skirata.
“Kal?” she said. “I’ve got another one of my problems…”
Hadde, capital of Haurgab,
half an hour after the missile attack
Hadde was now enemy territory.
After months of regarding the capital as a safe haven, the GAR could no longer be relaxed about watching its back here. Darman provided top cover on Omega’s patrol vehicle as it sped down the main road behind Delta’s, both of them flanked by new Nek Pup armored gun platforms of the 85th Infantry as fire support.
“More of those guys from the Fourteenth,” Corr said quietly. On either side of them, life seemed to be carrying on as normal, with shop awnings pulled down against the blistering afternoon sun and few citizens on the streets. The launch coordinates for the missile were in this neighborhood. “Look. Manning the right-hand gun.”
The man looked like any other clone trooper, except for the discreet brigade markings. Darman tried to get a closer look. But his attention was needed on the street, to keep an eye out for trouble at ground level while the others scanned rooftops. The remote that Atin had sent out in front of them checked the route ahead for ambushes, trip wires, and disturbed ground, relaying images to their HUDs. The Hadde militia and civilian police had swept through a few minutes ahead of them.
“Are they some kind of special unit?” Niner asked. “Because I’ve only seen them in ones and twos. And that’s odd. And we didn’t know about them. That’s even odder.”
Etain, crammed into the seat behind Atin on the open-bay speeder, made a noncommittal grunt. “The Nulls weren’t told about them, either.”
“Is that a problem?” Corr asked.
“Well, it bothers me,” Darman said. “Seeing as they seem to know every time the Chancellor changes channels on HNE…”
“That’s just talk to scare you, ner vod.”
“It’s true.”
“If the Nulls were Force-sensitive, too,” Etain said carefully, “they’d be terrifying.”
“Like they’re not already?” Darman turned as far as he dared to look at her. Fierfek, that’s my girl. I’ve got a girl. I matter to someone in the outside world. The heady sweetness of it distracted him for a moment. “I mean, they’re our brothers, and we love ’em now that we know them better, but when they get that red mist—well, they scare me.”
Corr sighted up fast on an apartment building, making Darman think he’d spotted something through the cloud of dust kicked up by the speeders. “They’re only a danger to aruetiise.”
“Yeah, I’m more scared of Scorch at the moment,” Atin said, but he didn’t sound as if he was joking. Delta’s speeder was fifty meters ahead in a wake of dust. “I think he’s feeling it.”
The road narrowed and they were in another neighborhood, all side streets and winding alleyways. They passed local Hadde patrols that waved them through intersections. Feeling it had become a shorthand throughout the Grand Army for the increasing agitation and hair-trigger anger that troopers experienced as the war progressed. Darman had his moments. Some nights—not many, but enough—he had nightmares; being engulfed in flames in the warehouse raid on Coruscant had come back to haunt him for reasons he couldn’t fathom. It wasn’t the shattered bodies on the battlefield or the faces of his first squad that disturbed him. It was the fire.
Poor old Scorch. Darman understood.
“I’ll talk to him later,” Etain said, adjusting her comlink earpiece. Her tone indicated that talk was going to be something a little more intensive. “Here we go. Cordon ahead.”
Niner brought the speeder to a halt beside Delta’s. Dozens of local militia milled around, heavily armed and watching every angle, but Darman still kept the repeating blaster on full charge. One of their officers jogged from the inner cordon toward Delta’s vehicle. Boss redirected him to Etain with a jerk of his thumb.
“We sealed off the area within ten minutes, General,” said the officer. “We might have lost them by now, but we’ve pinpointed one house as a launch site.” He turned to indicate the road at his back and gestured left. “The street is shut off at both ends, as you requested. The houses are still occupied as far as we know.”
“Haven’t you checked?”
“No, ma’am. We left it for you. We didn’t encounter any fire.”
Etain didn’t say anything, but her tight-lipped expression said she was underwhelmed by their commitment. Darman wondered why they didn’t just arrest their own problem citizens and be done with it, but they were clear that they wanted the GAR to go in and kick down doors. And it couldn’t have been because they felt Scorch needed the therapy. Darman bet that the show of GAR strength was a bracing reminder for any citizens thinking of going over to the rebels.
“Maybe the locals don’t want to be seen dragging other locals away for questioning,” Atin said, almost a whisper on the helmet comm circuit. The two squads could hear each other. “But it’s okay for us to play the bad guys.”
“He might just want to reassure people that we’re here and we’re cracking down,” said Niner.
Corr had fallen into a new and totally un-Fi-like role: squad cynic. “Of course, it might also be that they’re militia one day and rebels the next…”
“Can’t trust ’em.” It was Scorch. “Any of ’em. They’d all put a round in us given the chance.”
Scorch wasn’t joking. Darman could hear it in his voice. He could never predict what was going to be the final straw for anyone, and he wasn’t sure why the attack on the base was any more traumatic for Scorch than previous missions. But it obviously was. Perhaps it was because Scorch associated the mess with sanctuary, and now even that haven was a battleground.
He’d ask him later.
“Okay, prepare to dismount,” Etain said.
The eight commandos walked into the deserted streets under the cover of the two Nek Pups, split into two rifle teams. Darman checked the remote aerial view; there was nothing on the roofs, and nothing in the walled courtyards. Outside a door, a small dark brown animal of a species that Darman didn’t recognize sat cleaning itself. He checked again and magnified the image.
In the rear courtyard of the largest house, a big patch of charred vegetation was clearly visible. It was easily big enough to be the downdraft burn from an Arakyd Huntmaster missile. You could haul those things anywhere and move them in minutes, and that was what had hit Hadde Base.
“Of course, the guy could have just had a barbecue,” Darman said.
Sev cut in. “Well, let’s go and check out his sausages, then…”
“I don’t like this.” Etain was still carrying the conc rifle, but this time she drew both lightsabers from her belt. One was hers, and the other was her dead Master’s. Shab, had she changed a lot since Darman had first met her. But even then, back on Qiilura when she had been under cover for so long that she didn’t even know there was a clone army, she knew that she didn’t know it all, and she trusted her troops to put her straight. She activated one lightsaber and stared at the target building as if she was willing the doors to open.
“I can sense a lot of beings in these buildings… plenty of armaments… hostility. Let’s hope they’ve got the sense to stay inside.” She simply walked up to the doors—a bold move even for a Jedi—and hammered on them, lightsaber still clenched in her fist. “Grand Army—open up!”
“Wow,” said Sev. “Bold. And dumb.”
“Open up, or stand away from the door,” Etain yelled. She had no concept of cover, but she was a Jedi, and she had her own early
-warning system. Darman was watching her back anyway. He’d smack Sev later for the wisecracks. “Your call. Lay down your weapons and come out.”
There was still no answer. Rapid entry with a Jedi wasn’t quite the same as with a regular team, because she could sense things nobody else could, and when Etain cocked her head and then backed away from the door, Darman knew she’d detected something specific.
“Six or seven individuals in there, cannoned up,” she said. “I’d hoped for a surrender. Never mind. Open the box, Dar. Let’s see what we shake out.”
“Ma’am,” said Scorch, “permission to join the assault team?”
Scorch needed to do it, and Etain seemed to understand that. “Granted.”
Darman was struck by how much more soldier she was than Jedi now. He liked that. She understood. It made him feel safe, certain that they were all going home in one piece. One Nek Pup moved up, its forward repeating blaster elevating to line up for a possible wall breach.
“Omega, go,” Etain said. “Dar, stand by.”
Darman had never used the Merr-Sonn breaching grenade before. The stand-off rod made his Deece feel oddly unwieldy, but at twenty meters he didn’t think he’d miss the entrance. Atin, Corr, Scorch, and Niner stacked either side of the front doors, but much farther back than usual. Delta stood by as security, ready to deal with fire from other locations.
As Darman sighted up he held his breath for a moment, it was suddenly so quiet even with the steady burble of the Nek Pups’ drives that he could hear a baby crying somewhere. Etain jerked her head around.
“The kid’s streets away,” Darman whispered. He could see it had distracted her. “We’re fine. On your mark.”
Etain gave him a grim, close-lipped smile as if she was going to burst into tears. It was just a second, no more. Then she was her old self again.
“Take it out,” she said. “Fire.”
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