You’re coming home, lads. One day, soon.
The new speeder had been worth the creds, as if he had to worry about that now with a massive fortune getting fatter by the end of each banking day. It was fast, and cut the transit time to Kyrimorut by an hour. As he brought the speeder low through the treetops to avoid detection—he was starting as he meant to go on—he was reassured by how hard it was to spot Kyrimorut from the air, and how the clearing caught him by surprise.
Someone was waiting for him when he landed. Arms folded, Ny stood like a loadmaster waiting for cargo, glancing at something in her hand.
“Ny,” he said, jumping out. Her transport was still ticking over, as if she’d just landed. “You okay? I thought you were working out of Fondor now.”
She held out her hand to offer him something. It was a tiny piece of glittering plastoid.
“Found it,” she said. “It was stuck between the layers of soundproofing in the crew bay. Ordo said Etain’s datachip was missing from her ’pad, so I checked where I’d laid her body.”
It was a datachip, all right, and Skirata found himself promising the Force some grudging respect if only it was Etain’s. He looked at it for a few long minutes. It took a little while longer before he could speak.
“Thanks, Ny. I’ll add it to the list of a million things I owe you.”
“Debt paid.”
“Sorry it wasn’t better news about your husband.” Skirata still didn’t know the details, and didn’t want to pry. “I’ll shut up about it if you want.”
“Nobody’s getting much good news at the moment, Kal. I’ll settle for closure. Some widows don’t even get that.”
She turned to leave, but he caught her arm. “Have they fed you, that bunch of mine?” He turned the datachip over and over in his hand. What was on it? It might have been nothing. If he didn’t look, he’d never know.
And he had to know.
Ny hovered, almost telepathic. “I can look at it for you if it’s going to be too upsetting.”
“No, I have to do this. Thanks anyway.”
“It’s no trouble.”
He took a breath and slid the chip into his datapad. Ny had the right stuff. She was mandokarla. “This isn’t going to be easy either way.”
Skirata expected the chip to be full of heartbreaking images of Etain with Kad, and he wasn’t disappointed. Mothers did that; they kept pictures of their kids, especially if they knew their time with them would be limited.
You told her you’d take her son from her.
But it wasn’t just her and the baby; it was Darman, too, all three of them in some of the holos. The pain in Skirata’s throat was sudden and intense, enough to make him open his mouth. His own sobbing caught him by surprise. Ny put her hand on his shoulder.
“I could have done something…,” he said.
“No, Kal.”
“I could have let them be together. I broke every rule in the book, so why not that one? Why didn’t I do it from the start?”
“Regret gets you nowhere.” It was hard to square her forbidding exterior with the obviously kind woman within. “By the way, I took a chance. Got room for some more?” She popped the hatch on her shuttle. “Can’t resist strays, me.”
A clone in a pair of gray pilot’s coveralls, the sort any freight jockey wore, walked down the path toward them. For a terrible moment, Skirata’s heart leapt and something in his mind said Darman, but it wasn’t Dar. A fleeting thought like that could crush Skirata for days.
The clone looked embarrassed. Skirata had expected anything from relief to fear, but not embarrassment. And this wasn’t any of his boys. He was a stranger. Any clone was welcome here, though, and the man was instantly family. That was his right. They were all brothers, vode an.
“Levet,” said the clone. “I served under General Tur-Mukan.”
Ah, this was the commander who’d known Etain was pregnant and kept his mouth shut. Levet held out his hand to Skirata for shaking.
“So, you’re the one Ordo calls Commander Tactful.”
Levet raised an eyebrow. “I try to be. Thank you for the refuge, Sergeant. I’m not proud of myself, but something snapped.”
“Nothing to be ashamed of, either, ad’ika.” Skirata beckoned toward the house. “You more than did your duty. Now it’s your time to do what you want.”
“A farm,” said Levet. He looked around him, taking in the farmhouse with an expression like a lost child checking the darkness for monsters. “I don’t know the first thing about farming, but I can learn to do just about anything. And General Tur-Mukan… I’m very sorry indeed.”
“Her son’s doing fine.” Skirata patted him on the back. This lad had nothing, just the clothes he stood up in. “Go inside, and Ordo will get you settled in. Get some food down you.” Skirata looked at Ny. “You staying for a meal? Least we can do for you.”
Ny considered the invitation slowly. “That would be nice. Can I raise a delicate topic?”
Skirata felt a little hope, but he knew he’d feel guilty if he thought of his own needs before all his boys’ needs were met—and that included finding a method for stopping their headlong rush to old age.
“I’m all ears,” he said.
She waited for Levet to go. “Jedi.”
“Where are we going with this?”
“You didn’t hate them all. You loved Etain and you love Jusik. They’re not all bad, are they? Whatever the Jedi Order turned into, they can’t all be guilty.”
“No.” It was common sense. The fact that they’d killed Etain and used his clones like droids didn’t change the fact that he knew there had to be good ones for the likes of Jusik to exist at all. “They’re not. And Jusik isn’t a Jedi.”
“What if I came across some nice folk who’s only fault was that the Force dumped midi-chlorians in their system? How would you feel about them?”
“What do you mean, came across?”
“It’s an occupational hazard if you haul freight. You find stowaways and illegals in your hold, and you hear their stories, and sometimes you don’t feel right dumping them out the air lock, and pretty soon you start trying to do the decent thing in a nasty galaxy.”
Skirata fixed her with his best don’t-even-think-about-it look. “Hypothetically…”
“Mandos don’t care about your roots. Only what you do. Right? Pretty tolerant for a bunch like you.”
“Yeah.”
“I might have two Jedi who escaped.”
“If one’s Quinlan Vos, bring him on. I’ve got a knife that’s lonely.”
“Kal… come on…”
“Okay, who are they?”
“One’s a kid.” Ny’s face was still pitiless detachment personified, but there was a silky note in her voice that was almost like being stroked. “I mean a kid—maybe only fourteen. Name’s Esterhazy or something. She helps grow things, and says they thought she was a useless Jedi, more mundane talent than Force skills, and that sounds like poor Etain to a T. No decapitating. The other’s… a Kaminoan.”
Skirata actually gasped. It wasn’t loud, more a slow inhalation, but he had no idea that Kaminoans ever produced Force-users. Aiwha-bait and saber jockeys. His two favorite objects of hate right then; and here was one who scored on both counts. His knife whispered to him.
So why did Ko Sai get so excited about Kad? If the gray freaks had their own Force-users, why didn’t they tinker with their own midi-chlorians to create Force-using clones?
Because they were the master race, and everyone else was just meat. He could see that now. They’d never use their precious, perfect genome to create a product. Ko Sai had told Mereel that after he said hello to her with an electroshocker. She was really offended when he asked if she was the clone “mother”—whether their somatic cloning method had used Kaminoan ova for the Fett DNA.
“I’ll confess I’m not crazy about the idea,” Skirata said, having the weirdest feeling that this was very important. “I can just imagine what a lovely, cari
ng, modest being a Kaminoan Jedi is…”
“She’s called Kina Ha. She didn’t strike me as a monster—”
Skirata remembered his first day on Kamino. Such gentle voices. “They never do, at first.”
“—but she’s from a special line of very long-lived Kaminoans. They genetically engineered her bloodline for long space missions.”
Skirata almost collapsed.
He had to repeat those words in his head a few times before he believed what he’d heard, and his hammering pulse slowed enough for him to get a grip.
So… they can extend life, too, as well as shorten it. No wonder Palps went crazy trying to get hold of Ko Sai before I did. No wonder he thought she could make him immortal. She could probably do something pretty close.
And that means… Dr. Uthan will be very interested in her genome. And so, my dear sweet aiwha-bait, am I. I am so very, very interested in that… for my boys.
“Kal, I know this is hard,” Ny said, frowning. “And maybe the wrong thing to ask after what happened to Etain.”
“You’re right.” He struggled with his conscience—not about the plans that sprang fully formed into his mind, because a Kaminoan deserved no consideration, but because he didn’t like the fact that he was taking advantage of Ny’s good nature.
But this is for my boys. They come first. Before me and my needs. Before Ny Vollen’s opinion of me, too.
“No, it’s fine.”
“I can bring them back here?”
I must be insane. But what an opportunity. “When were you thinking of doing it?”
“I’ll be passing their location in a week or two.”
“Okay. But be careful. Full security. First sign of trouble—I’ll personally make them one with the shabla Force.”
Ny smiled. She could smile, and it was a nice one. “You’re a good man, Kal.”
“No,” he said. He’d level with her sooner or later. She’d probably hate him for it, and that was a pity, because he liked her more every time he saw her. But he had a duty. “I’m not good at all. But I do love my boys.”
Imperial Army Training Center,
Centax 2, Coruscant
Darman had been trained to survive against all odds behind enemy lines, and that was what he was doing now.
Strength of will: that determined who lived, and who didn’t.
“Dar?”
He knew when he was plunging into the abyss. Kal Skirata had taught him to spot the signs of despair and weakness, so he would know when he needed to get a grip. It wasn’t lack of water, or food, or even being shot that really killed you in these circumstances; it was letting despair eat you alive. It was giving up.
“Dar, can you hear me?”
If you take control of pain, fear, and loss, then you take control of your situation. Make it work for you.
He could hear Kal Skirata’s words as clearly now as he ever could. He chose to hear the man as he first knew him when he loomed over Darman as a training sergeant, and not as the father he’d come to love as the years wore on, because that dredged up too much raw pain. He needed to be a different Darman for as long as it took to escape; the Darman who’d come to think he had a right to a life beyond the army, who’d loved a girl and married her, seen her die, and held a son for far too short a time before it was all snatched away from him—that Darman was too fragile to survive an indefinite period in this alien environment. That man would have to wait in suspension until the time was right for him to come alive again, if that time ever came at all.
“Darman!”
Someone shoved him hard in the chest. He shook himself out of his near-meditative state and found he was looking at Niner, walking awkwardly on cybernetic braces to demonstrate that he was up and about again.
“You seem very chipper, Sarge,” he said.
“I’ll be back on duty in a couple of weeks.”
“That’s great.”
“Dar, you want to go somewhere quiet and talk?”
“Why?”
Niner was looking hard at him. “Take your helmet off, Dar. Please? Talk to me.”
Darman lifted off his bucket and set it on the table. He preferred his old Katarn rig, but if he was going to change one thing, it didn’t matter if everything familiar went down the sewer. It made it easier to be a different Darman. Niner lowered himself into the seat next to him, supporting his body weight on muscular arms, and took a firm grip of Darman’s hand.
“Dar, it’s okay to go a bit nuts after what’s happened,” he whispered. “But I’m your brother. Do what you like in front of these di’kute, but you can be yourself with me. Okay?”
The 501st troops were pretty sharp, but some of the other new boys weren’t up to scratch for commando training. It wasn’t so much the mediocre performance on initial testing that got to him—what else did they expect from clones grown in a year or two?—but that they seemed to think Centax 2 was Kamino. Some di’kut had told them this before the war ended, and they would not believe Darman’s stories about endless oceans and cloud-locked skies until he made them study the Kamino system database.
They had to, anyway. There was a contingency plan to deal with Kamino, which wasn’t exactly best buddies with the Empire now. Darman was keen to refresh his relationship with the aiwha-bait. If they were looking for volunteers to bring Kamino into line, he’d be first in the queue.
“I’m fine, Niner,” Darman said. This was the worst he could imagine, the lowest ebb. But he was surviving, and if he could hold himself together at rock bottom, then he would eventually live his life again, because no pain he would ever encounter again could be worse than this. “I’m coping.”
“Dar, I know you well enough to see what’s happening now.”
“What, then? What is happening now?”
“Okay, ner vod. It’s okay. I’m not pushing you.”
Darman wanted to tell Niner that if he tried to get the old Darman to come out, the pain would destroy him. And the things that other Darman knew had to remain under wraps. The best way to do that was to forget that he knew them, and lock them down for another day. What he consciously shut out of his mind could become habit—he had a technique for that—and then he wouldn’t let anything slip, or incriminate those he loved.
So it was for the best. He put the old Darman away, and with it the unbearable pain of being so very close to an idyllic happiness and having it snatched from him. That Darman couldn’t survive here, not even with his brother Niner supporting him.
But he could hide, and come out when it was over.
“You could have left me,” Niner said. “But you didn’t, and I’ll owe you for the rest of my life.”
“We never leave a brother behind,” Darman said. “How could I?”
And he wouldn’t be left behind, either. He knew that. Someone would come for him. While he waited for that day to come, though—he’d do whatever he had to, the way that Kal Skirata had taught him.
Barracks block, Imperial Army Training Center,
one standard hour after lights-out
Scorch had finally forced himself to stop replaying the events of the Kashyyyk operation in his mind to work out what he could have done to save Sev. There was plenty.
But that was in the past, a moment gone forever, and now he could do nothing except drive himself crazy with self-recrimination. And he had a new job to get on with that wasn’t going to wait around while he grieved. There were no Skiratas or Vaus in the Imperial Army to let the remnant of Delta Squad do as they pleased, or to care how they felt. This was a new world, much more like the restricted one of Kamino than the independence they’d grown used to. Even the new barracks had that white antiseptic feel of Tipoca City.
“Have you seen him, then?” Boss asked, voice barely audible. He leaned over the edge of the upper bunk and prodded Scorch. “He’s here. Him and Niner.”
Scorch was grateful for the momentary distraction. He broke off from his perpetual guilt about Sev’s fate to wonder if Etain
had survived the purge. Jusik had: Scorch knew because he’d seen the death warrant on the list of missing Jedi that was being circulated. Palpatine had put a bounty on Skirata’s head, too.
But if Darman was still here—it didn’t look like Etain had made it. Scorch was certain he’d have got her away to safety if he could.
“No sign of Corr or Atin,” he whispered.
“I heard they’re on the deserters’ list, with the Nulls and a few others…”
Scorch didn’t reply. He could hear Fixer snoring mechanically in the next bunk, and the noise now seemed reassuring rather than something that exasperated him enough to pour a jug of water over his brother while he slept. The rest of the commandos in the dormitory area were men he didn’t know. A little familiarity was precious right then.
“Would you shoot them if ordered?” Boss asked.
Sev had once asked Scorch a similar question. “I don’t know.” But Scorch wanted to say no, he wouldn’t; and good luck to them. “Would you have shot Etain if she’d still been with us when Order Sixty-six went down?”
“Academic,” said Boss, evading the issue. “She wasn’t.”
“Did you get a chance to ask Dar why he’s still here?”
Boss paused. “Yeah.”
“And?” Scorch expected news of Etain. His stomach clenched. “What, then?”
Boss swallowed. Scorch heard it. “All he said,” Boss whispered, “was that he couldn’t leave Niner behind.”
Scorch knew Boss well enough not to ask him how that made him feel.
He felt the same way.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Keldabe, Mandalore,
next day, 1,097 days ABG
I didn’t accept that he was gone until I saw his name on the war memorial. Then it had a finality to it. He wasn’t mine any longer. He was absorbed into the ranks of the dead, untouchable, separate, frozen in stone.
—Widow of Lieutenant Commander Ussin Fajinak, first officer of Republic warship Aurodia
Kad was restless today. He’d whimpered through most of the night and everyone had stood their watch with him, trying to soothe him to sleep. Fi bounced him on his lap.
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