“Thanks, son.” How did he ever grow up this normal? “Let’s enjoy ourselves for a change, shall we?”
For a few brief hours Skirata and Ordo did what normal civilians did and took an EasyRide to the city’s lower levels to have a dangerously unhealthy but comforting breakfast.
Skirata had never used public transport with Ordo in tow before, and the reactions of other passengers fascinated him. They sneaked sideways glances. Ordo’s custom holster with its twin blasters probably focused them somewhat. The ARC trooper armor was spectacular even in a city jaded by the everyday presence of a thousand exotic species.
Skirata regularly forgot how few of the capital’s civilians had ever seen a clone soldier face-to-face. Apart from the heavily publicized display of massed GAR battalions boarding assault ships at the military staging area a year ago, the vast majority of Coruscanti had no contact with them whatsoever.
And never without their helmets.
“Ord’ika,” he whispered. “Do me a favor. Take off your bucket, will you?”
Ordo paused for a moment and then popped the seal on his collar and lifted off his helmet. Skirata kept an eye on the other passengers’ reactions. It was a revelation. Some looked blankly surprised. Others went a little farther.
“Oh no, they’re human!” one man whispered. “And they’re so young!”
Did anyone know how young? He hated using Ordo like this, but it had to be done. Skirata, tired and permanently irritable, bit back his retort and became a diplomat for a few moments.
“No sir, the war isn’t droids fighting droids,” he said. “May I introduce Captain Ordo?”
Ordo nodded politely at the man in the seat across the aisle and extended his hand; Skirata had taught his little Nulls to act like nice boys when they needed to. The man hesitated and then reached across to shake Ordo’s hand, surrendering soft pale civilian fingers to a black gauntlet. The look on his face said clearly that he hadn’t expected to find flesh and blood inside the droid-like shell, or to retrieve his hand uncrushed afterward.
“My pleasure, sir,” Ordo said.
It was unusually quiet in the EasyRide after that. At least the reality had registered on them. Skirata nudged Ordo to get off when they reached the Kragget level, and the ARC replaced his helmet.
“You like to shock,” said Ordo.
“I like to educate,” said Skirata. “Sorry, son.”
Strolling around Coruscant with a fully armored ARC captain was hardly blending in, but it got him a good table in the Kragget, which meant one that the service droid actually wiped clean before they sat down. A couple of CFS officers acknowledged them. Police and security officers liked eating here because it was right on the edge of their “manor,” as some of them called the rough territory where they plied their trade, handy for a quick response to a call but far enough away to be a haven.
Ordo took his helmet off again to tuck into the plate of fried smoked nerf slices. The eggs were from something Skirata couldn’t identify and knew he didn’t want to. He concentrated on the seductively unctuous sensation of hot fat and salty yolk in his mouth and washed it down with several cups of caf.
“We can’t leave this to the boys in blue any longer,” Skirata said. They both knew what this was without being specific in a public place. “They’re hampered by having to do stuff by the book, and we don’t know if they’re all playing for our team anyway. This is one for us. I’m going to make Zey see sense about it. Once everyone’s back in town, it’ll be a lot harder for him to say no.”
“If the cryptography droid extracts some relevant data from Atin’s little haul, it might be even harder.”
“Which reminds me. I haven’t paid my respects to Vau.”
“Promise me you won’t pull your knife on him again.”
“I’ll behave.”
The server droid seemed to have been replaced by a female Twi’lek waitress, who looked past prime dancing age but who still distracted Skirata for a second or two. She put another plate of nerf strips in front of Ordo, who—like every clone soldier Skirata had ever known—would eat anything and everything put in front of him.
She smiled and lingered. Ordo froze and returned the smile in the nervous way of a small boy, then busied himself with his breakfast and the waitress moved away.
Skirata reflected on the careless power of youth and looks, and how incomplete a teacher he had been of social skills. “Somehow I don’t think she’s mistaken you for a droid.”
Ordo looked uncharacteristically flustered for a moment. “Er… I’ve been assessing our requirements.” He cleared his plate again, and Skirata slid his unwanted eggs onto the man’s plate and watched them disappear. “Kit is an issue. We need to discuss this before you see Zey. This is going to take some serious resources—vehicles, safe houses, special surveillance equipment, and ordnance.”
Skirata had been doing the calculations at the same time Ordo had.
They’d need two squads, at least, and a couple of Nulls. But two squads of Republic Commandos in their distinctively bulky, bad-boy Katarn Mark III kit and Ordo and Mereel in their spectacular red and blue would be noticeable as unusual activity.
They might need to wear that armor sooner or later, even if they could be deployed in civilian clothing the rest of the time.
Skirata chewed the last overdone piece of smoked nerf—he saved the delectable crunchy bits for last—and a solution blossomed as his jaw worked.
Hide in plain sight.
He was good at that. He could become so mundane—unkempt hair, scruffy clothing—that he was almost invisible. And so could his lads, by being the opposite.
All they had to do was be one of a number of clone personnel wandering around Coruscant in full armor. And if occasionally they took off that armor and went about in fatigues, then who would really recognize them as individuals?
They all looked the same to most people, other than a few Jedi who cared about them as men, and their own brothers.
Skirata considered it a very productive working breakfast.
He opened his comlink and keyed a meeting request to General Zey. Then he leaned across the table, seized Ordo two-handed by his shoulder pauldron, and gave him a noisy and exaggerated paternal kiss on the top of his head.
“Sorted!” he said. “Plain sight!”
The Twi’lek waitress watched, fascinated. “Hey, can I try that, too?”
“He’s just a boy,” Skirata said, and left her a very generous tip. Ordo got up to follow him, pocketing a couple of mealbread sticks for later. “My son.”
RAS Fearless hangar deck
“Good grief, here comes the armored division,” said Commander Gett. He strode toward the Neimoidian vessel. Its casing was streaked and pocked with scorch marks. “RCs look like tanks, don’t they?”
Republic Commandos did look fearsomely bulky alongside the clone troopers. The first four to clamber out of the seized Trade Federation craft were a riot of color, their battered armor daubed with green, yellow, red, and orange markings.
The second squad was armored in matte black, utterly featureless and grim. But Etain knew instantly who they were and which man was which. She needed no battle livery to distinguish them: their forms in the Force were almost like trails of phosphorescence in a tropical ocean, and they were instantly familiar, instantly old friends.
I was only with them for a few days and I haven’t seen or talked to them for months. But it’s as if we were never apart.
Fi—oh yes, she knew it was Fi even before he spoke—saluted, lifted his helmet, and winked.
“Ma’am, you look like the back end of a bantha,” he said sympathetically. “Are they looking after you properly here?”
“Fi!” She knew she was supposed to remain dignified and aloof, and she’d felt comradeship with many clone troopers in the intervening months, but her first reluctant command with Omega had utterly changed her. “Fi, I’ve really missed you. What happened to the gray armor?”
&nbs
p; “You know how much Dar griped about being too visible on Qiilura. Anyway, he’s brought you a present.” He gestured over his shoulder. Darman was helping a group of troopers haul the prisoners out of the Neimoidian landing craft while Gett examined it. “They’re all in one piece, too. We’ve been really good boys this time.”
Delta Squad had simply disappeared. When Etain looked around, she saw they had settled in a tight knot in a corner of the hangar deck, helmets on, obviously talking intently. She knew the body language now. They didn’t feel like Omega in the Force at all. They were a concentrated well, a bottomless pool of something unyielding, and totally enmeshed with each other. The general impression they made on the Force was one of triumphant high spirits.
Niner and Atin approached and clasped hands with her. It didn’t feel at all inappropriate. They looked tired and anxious, and she wanted very badly to make things right for them. They were her friends.
“I bet you’d like something to eat,” she said.
“Any chance of a hot shower and a few hours’ sleep first, please, General?” Niner looked apologetic and shoved Fi gently in the back. “Me first. I’m pulling rank.”
“He’s not really a sergeant, General,” said Fi. “He just helps them out when they’re busy.”
“Any news on our pilot?” Niner asked.
“Yes. I’m so sorry.”
It was never easy. She tapped her datapad to bring up the copy of the signal that Majestic had sent to Fleet and handed the ’pad to him. Niner glanced at it, blinked, and passed it to Fi. Fi parted his lips briefly as if to say something, and then his slight frown almost crumpled into grief. He composed himself and just looked down at the deck.
“He’s not the first,” Fi said, suddenly grim, and Etain had never seen that aspect of him surface visibly before. “And he won’t be the last.”
Etain watched them disappear through a hatch on the aft bulkhead, trailing after a trooper. Fearless shivered slightly under the soles of her boots, making top speed back to Coruscant, and she waited while Darman spent what seemed like an interminable time fussing about with the prisoner handover. She wondered if he was reluctant to talk after choosing not to remain on Qiilura with her. Perhaps he was just concerned that nothing else went wrong.
She gave up waiting and walked carefully between the troopers still trying to catch some sleep on the hangar deck, curled up wherever they could find a relatively comfortable space.
“Well done,” she said, hoping that some were awake to hear her.
Darman had changed.
He bent his head to ease off his helmet, popping the seal, and then shook his hair and smoothed it flat with one glove. And although he smiled, he wasn’t the Darman she had been through hell with.
He looked older.
Clones aged faster than normal men. He was eleven going on twenty-two going on—fifty. When she had first sensed him as a child in the Force, his square, high-cheekboned face had been both man and boy, at the stage of life when—had she been able to manipulate time—the slightest push backward would have revealed the child he had so recently been. But now he was a man, quite solidly, and with no hint of the boy about him.
It wasn’t simply that he had aged two years in one. The look in his eyes said he was much, much older, as old as the battlefield, maybe as old as war itself. She had seen it in the face of every clone trooper and commando and ARC she had commanded. She knew that she had that same look, too.
But Darman smiled anyway, and the smile broadened into a grin that made the rest of the ship—even the galaxy—utterly irrelevant to her.
“You always cut it fine, don’t you, ma’am?”
“It’s good to see you, Dar. Whatever happened to Etain?”
“She turned into a general and we’re on the hangar deck.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“Is it definitely confirmed that we’re going back to base?”
“Unless you want to argue with the officer of the watch, I believe so.”
“Good. We need a break. Just a day or two, maybe.”
He never did ask for much. None of them did: she wondered if they didn’t know what the world had to offer them or if they were just honed down to basic needs, too overwhelmed to think beyond recovering enough to do the job over again the next day.
She patted his armored shoulder and held her hand there for a few seconds. He looked as if he suddenly remembered something and was embarrassed by it in a way he quite enjoyed.
“It must be nice to be able to reach out to someone through the Force,” he said.
So he’d felt it. She was glad.
“Get yourself off to the ’freshers,” she said. “Come and find me afterward if you’re not too tired, and I’ll show you over the ship.”
“Have you met Sergeant Kal yet?”
“No.” Kal was always there for Darman, somewhere, even at times like this when she wanted to say so much to him. “When we dock, perhaps you could introduce me.”
Darman beamed, clearly delighted. “Oh, you’ll like him, General. You’ll really like him.”
Etain certainly hoped so. And if she didn’t, then she’d try, for Darman’s sake.
SO Brigade HQ, Coruscant, 369 days after Geonosis
The smell hit Ordo long before he reached the meeting room. It was a familiar blend of wet wool, mold, and a pungent oily musk.
Skirata reacted visibly. He straightened his right arm by his side out of old, old habit and let the blade slide into his hand, fall a fraction until the handle touched his palm, and then snatched it.
“Kal’buir, it would be better if I shot it,” Ordo said. He put a restraining hand on Skirata’s arm. “I won’t let it near you.”
“I’ve often wondered if you’re telepathic, son.”
“I can smell the strill, you have your knife ready, and we’re meeting Sergeant Vau. Telepathy isn’t required to work that one out.”
Ordo would have been quite content to shoot the strill without a second thought because it upset Kal’buir. But it wasn’t the strill’s fault that it stank, or that it had a master who cherished cruelty, or that it had become savage itself. It had been selected by nature and then trained by people to hunt for pleasure rather than for food, and nothing else had ever been allowed to cross its mind.
He felt some pity for it. But he would still kill it without a moment’s hesitation.
The doors slid back. Ordo placed his right hand discreetly on the grip of one of his repeating blasters. His attention went instinctively to Vau, then to the strill lying on his lap, and then to the fact that he had a clear shot at both. It took less than a second to process the information and then to subdue the impulse.
Behind Vau’s head, the walls of General Zey’s meeting room were a beautiful soothing shade of aquamarine, but they weren’t working. Skirata wasn’t soothed.
And Captain Maze was sitting at the table beside Zey, arms folded across his chest and looking none too impressed, either. There was an ugly purple bruise at the point of his chin, more discoloration around one eye, and a cut on the bridge of his nose.
I didn’t think I hit him that hard, Ordo thought. Unfortunate.
Zey motioned Skirata to enter just after the man strode in of his own accord, and indicated chairs at the lapiz-topped table. Bardan Jusik sat beside him, hands clasped on the tabletop in an attempt at serenity.
“Well,” Skirata said, and sat down. He ran his hand across the luxurious polished surface. “This is nice. I hope I never hear anyone complaining about the GAR’s expenditure on armor and weapons.”
“Kal,” Vau said politely. “It’s good to see you again.”
Vau was settled in one of the deeply upholstered hide chairs with the strill draped across his lap on its back, all six of its legs flopping in an undignified sprawl while he scratched its belly. Its huge fanged mouth was slack, tongue lolling, and a long skein of drool hung almost to the floor. Its body was a meter long, lengthened by a whip of a tail cov
ered in more loose skin.
The strill was still prettier than Vau, though. The man had a long square-jawed face that was all bone and frown lines, and graying dark hair cut brutally short. Faces rarely lied about the soul within.
“Walon,” Skirata said, nodding.
Zey gestured to Ordo to sit but he remained standing and simply removed his helmet. He transferred the bead-sized comlink connector to his ear, noting Zey’s expression without looking directly at him.
Skirata looked up. “Take a seat, Captain.”
Ordo obeyed only one man’s orders, and that man was Kal’buir.
Zey was visibly thrown—again. No doubt all other ARCs and commandos jumped when he said so, but he should have known Ordo by now. Maze certainly did. He was staring at his brother ARC as if one snap of Zey’s fingers would give him permission to jump up and return that punch.
“Maze, perhaps you’d like to go and have a break,” Zey said. “This is just going to be a tedious administrative matter.”
Maze paused for one beat, his eyes never leaving Ordo’s. “Yes sir.” He grabbed his helmet from the table and left.
Zey waited for the doors to close behind him. “Let’s hear your plan, Sergeant.”
“I want to deploy Delta and Omega on Coruscant to identify and neutralize the Sep network here, because it is here,” said Skirata. “It has to be in order to strike us so easily. And CSF doesn’t have the expertise or personnel to deal with this, and there might even be someone inside the CSF passing intel to the terrorists.”
Zey’s eyes were locked on him. “Commandos are a military asset. Not an intelligence one. Nor police. We have theaters of war across—”
“I wasn’t planning to arrest anybody. This is a shoot-to-kill policy.”
“I wasn’t aware we had one.”
“You haven’t, so you’d better get one fast.”
“I can’t ask the Senate to authorize use of special forces against Coruscant residents.”
“Don’t ask them.” Skirata became pure ice at times like this: Ordo watched him carefully, anxious to learn more nuances of the part of soldiering that required no weapons beyond nerve and psychology. “Is the Jedi Council squeamish about that sort of thing, too?”
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