Triple Zero

by Karen Traviss

  Mereel tapped his ear. “Comlink on.”

  Ordo took a few slows breaths. He had removed the folding stock from the Verpine rifle; it was now short enough to conceal under a document holder. He looked like any other anonymous, helmeted, convalescing clone trooper playing office boy and carting archived flimsi around.

  “Go,” Ordo said, and stood up.

  He walked toward the refreshers, which took him on a path past the Madiry woman.

  “Mereel, kill the cam.”

  He had a few moments now before a security console spotted the outtage and tried to fix it. He took five fast strides and bent over Madiry as if to ask her a question.

  She looked up as if an old friend had startled her. “Hello, trooper.”

  “Hello, aruetii,” Ordo said. He drew the Verp and put two rounds point-blank through her forehead and a third down at an angle through her upper chest. One round thudded through into the planter of soil behind her. Ordo had no idea where the other two went, but the informant was now dead and she simply slumped, head down as if still reading, a pool of her bright blood on the holozine’s screen.

  Ordo slipped the Verp back under the document folder and walked away. It had taken less than ten seconds from cuing Mereel to walking away.

  Nobody even looked at him as he strode calmly toward the GAR complex, passed it, and met Mereel on the other side of the speeder parking bays. They disappeared into the sea of vehicles and mounted the Aratech speeder bike to head back to base.

  Kal’buir had always told the Nulls they were instant death on legs. Ordo liked to live up to that assessment. His thoughts were on Besany Wennen as he rode off, and how it was good that he hadn’t had to kill her, too.

  Operational house, Qibbu’s Hut,

  1330 hours, 385 days after Geonosis

  The more the tagged targets moved around Coruscant, the clearer the strike team’s task became.

  “That,” Fi said admiringly, “gets better every time I look at it, Bard’ika.”

  Jusik stared at the Coruscant holochart with a big grin and basked in the approval. The telltale red traces of the marked terrorists as they moved around the city were forming a pattern that firsthand surveillance would have struggled to build up.

  “It was obvious, really,” he said. “You’d have come up with it yourselves sooner or later.”

  Vau put down a bowl of milk in front of the strill. It lapped noisily, showering droplets across the carpet. “I vote that Dust-tagging becomes standard surveillance procedure. It’s a matter for your sergeant, of course.”

  The police interloper’s trace had been removed. Jaller Obrim had given her a painless and unnoticeable EMP sweep to kill transmissions from the marker powder she had inhaled. Now just five marked targets moved around the grids of blue light, building an accurate picture of where they went and where they stayed. The division between the two was now very much easier to see. Four locations—the house in banking sector 9, the landing strip used by the fresh farm produce importers, and two apartments in the retail sector—were clearly the most visited.

  “But we probably only tagged Perrive’s hired help,” Fi said. “We want the bigger guys.”

  “The bigger guys,” Vau said, “need the hired help by their side. All this activity is connected to the fact that they’re about to receive explosives they badly need. Now, we know they used dead letter drops, for want of a better phrase, to avoid direct contact between the various terror cells in the network. It’s how they ensure there’s no way of tracing them back. So what does this tell you?”

  Fi studied the hypnotic blue and red light in front of him. “They’re moving back and forth between locations over and over.”

  “And therefore?”

  “Therefore… they’re either one cell… or they’re several cells who have abandoned security precautions and are making direct contact with each other.”

  “Well done, Fi.”

  Fi didn’t care for Vau but he enjoyed praise. He savored the moment. “So what do you think we’ve got here?”

  “Given that this centered on the explosives, I think we’re looking at the manufacturing cell—the people who make the bombs. Possibly also the ones who place them. Setting a complex device in a location or on a vessel can be a fiddly business, and I reckon this lot would do it themselves. They need to be mobile to get to different target locations, too, hence the need for a busy landing strip—nobody notices more traffic movement there. Now, Fi, that’s a group of people worth taking out. Those are hard skills to replace in a hurry.”

  Jusik gave Fi a playful punch on the shoulder, elated. “Result!” He seemed to see it as a big puzzle to be taken apart. If Fi hadn’t seen Jusik use a lightsaber, he would have taken him for a boy who just liked playing with complicated kit. “Time to make their eyes water, eh, Fi?”

  “You got it.”

  “Delta has recce’d the landing strip. You’ve recce’d the house in the banking sector. That just leaves the two apartments, and Ordo and Mereel have stopped off to recce those now.”

  The strill had finished its milk, most of which had ended up on the carpet. Vau—a sergeant who believed in thrashing courage into his men, a sergeant who had scarred Atin badly—grabbed a cloth from the kitchen area and mopped up the damp patches. Then he took a clean rag, soaked it, and wiped the strill’s mouth and jowls as if it were a baby. The animal accepted the indignity and rumbled with happiness.

  Fi wasn’t sure he would ever know what went on in the heads of nonclones.

  Delta and Omega assembled in the main room, finding seats where they could, and spent the next hour planning three house assaults and a raid on an airstrip. They were basic maneuvers they had drilled for time and again on Kamino; they’d done it for real more than once, too. They had fairly recent plans of the buildings—not to be relied upon absolutely, of course—and covert holocam surveillance. Apart from the fact that the squads were used to operating alone, it was as near a done deal as an operation could be.

  Planning. It was all about planning.

  But there was always a surprise, always one more factor you hadn’t allowed for or didn’t see.

  Fi planned for that, too. They all did, deep down.

  Operational house, Qibbu’s Hut,

  1530 hours, 385 days after Geonosis

  Etain knew.

  She had known it would happen in time, but it had happened now, in two brief, wonderful weeks. The Force landscape that surrounded her had changed subtly and she felt strangeness and purpose within her, purpose that was someone else’s.

  It was said that Force-sensitive females could often detect the moment that they conceived. And it was true.

  Etain stood on the landing platform for a while, searching for the fear she always imagined might come with taking that irrevocable step and not knowing its full consequences. But there was no fear. There was simply a pleasant sensation of certainty, almost like hands pressing on her shoulders.

  And a clear vision, in the part of her brain that saw the universe without images, showed a new path through trails of webbed, colored light. In her prosaic way, it reminded her of a holochart, but it was less solid, its threads and lines shifting.

  The new path that was marked through the tangle of colored threads was pale, silver, and thick, and from it sprouted silver tendrils that snaked into the tangles of the rest of the image. This new life she carried would be significant, and it would touch many others. The Force was clear if you listened carefully to it: and this time it said This is not wrong.

  On Qiilura, I envied Jinart her certainty. I envied Master Fulier that quality, too. And now I have it at last.

  It was almost blissful. She savored the warm sun on her face, eyes closed for a few moments, and then walked back into the main room. It seemed oddly empty: Delta and Omega were catching up on sleep, doors shut. Ordo had disappeared with Mereel, and Corr had left a datapad running to log movements of suspects on the holochart while he went for a meal.

&n
bsp; Vau stretched out in one chair with the strill on his lap while Skirata sat opposite him, boots up on the low table, eyes closed, hands clasped on his chest. Etain watched him, knowing that she might need to tell him even before she told Darman: she would need Skirata’s help, his list of contacts and places to disappear.

  Darman would be overwhelmed by it all when he needed to keep his mind on fighting. But Skirata was a man of the world, never fazed by anything; he would understand what she was giving Darman, and want to help.

  Not yet, though.

  While she watched Skirata, Niner wandered out of his room in his red fatigues, scratching his head with both hands. He poured a glass of water and walked across the room in slow silence to stand contemplating the sleeping Skirata with a slight frown. Then he went back to his room. He emerged a few moments later with a blanket and eased it over his sergeant, tucking it around him carefully. For once the man didn’t stir.

  Niner stood over him for a while, simply looking down at his face, lost in thought.

  “He’s okay,” Etain whispered.

  “Just checking,” Niner said quietly, and returned to his room.

  Etain defocused for a few moments and sought Darman in the Force: as ever, he was a well of calm and certainty, even while sleeping. When she focused on the room again, she realized Skirata had opened his eyes.

  “You okay, ad’ika?” he said. “Was that Niner just now?”

  “I’m fine.” He was in a better mood now. Perhaps he regarded the matter between her and Ordo as closed. “Yes. He was checking on you.”

  “He’s a good lad. But he ought to be getting some sleep.” He raked his hair with his fingers, yawning. “Fatigue affects your judgment.”

  “But not yours,” Vau said quietly.

  Skirata was alert in a heartbeat and swung his legs off the table onto the floor. Vau could wind him up as surely as a mechanical toy. “If I don’t move fast enough when the shooting starts, that’s my problem. I’m used to it.”

  “Yes, we all know.” Vau turned to Etain. “This is normally where he starts lecturing me on his ghastly childhood as a starving war orphan living feral on some bomb site, and how I just ran away to become a mercenary because I was bored with my idle, rich family.”

  “Well, that saved me some time,” Skirata said irritably. “What he said.”

  “You have a family, Vau?” Etain was suddenly mesmerized by people who had lives and parents. “Are you in contact with them?”

  “No. They cut me off when I declined to choose the career they wanted for me.”

  “Wife? Children?”

  “Dear girl, we’re Cuy’val Dar. People who have to disappear for eight years or more aren’t the family kind. Except Kal, of course. But your family didn’t wait for you, did they? That’s all right, though. You’ve got a lot more sons now.”

  If Etain had known nothing of Skirata, or even Vau, it was the kind of jibe guaranteed to start a fight. Skirata was absolutely and instantly white with anger. One thing she knew about Mandalorians was that clan was a matter of honor. Skirata walked up to Vau very slowly and the strill woke, whining.

  Etain checked that Skirata’s jacket with its lethal array of blades was still hanging over the back of the chair.

  Skirata shook his head, slow and deliberate. Vau was much taller and a few kilos heavier but Skirata never seemed to worry about that kind of detail.

  “But that’s the good thing about being Mando. If you don’t get the family you want, you can go and choose one yourself.” He looked suddenly older and very sad, small, crushed by time. “You going to tell her? Okay, Etain, my sons disowned me. In Mandalorian law, children can legally disown a parent who’s shamed them, but it’s rare. My sons left with their mother when we split up, and when I disappeared to Kamino and they couldn’t locate me, they declared me dar’buir. No longer a father.”

  “Oh my. Oh, I’m sorry.” Etain knew how serious that would be for a Mando’ad. “You found that out when you left Kamino?”

  “No. Jango brought the news back that they were looking for me about… oh, four years in? Three maybe? I forget. Two sons and a daughter. Tor, Ijaat, and Ruusaan.”

  “Why were they looking for you?”

  “My ex-wife died. They wanted me to know.”

  “Oh…”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you could have told them where you were at the time. Jango could have talked to them.”

  “And?”

  “You could have made your peace with them.”

  “And?”

  “Kal, you could have explained to them somehow and stopped it.”

  “And reveal we had an army in training? And compromise my lads’ safety? Never. And not a word to any of the boys, you hear? It’s the only thing I ever kept from them.”

  He’d sacrificed his good name and the last possibility of his family’s love and forgiveness for the men he was training. It hit Etain hard in the chest like a blow.

  She turned to Vau. “Do you see your men as your sons?”

  “Of course I do. I have no others. It’s why I made them into survivors. Don’t think I don’t love them just because I don’t spoil them like kids.”

  “Here we go,” Skirata said, all contempt. “He’s going to tell you that his father beat the osik out of him and it made a man of him. Never did him any harm, no sir.”

  “I’ve lost just three men out of my batch, Kal. That tells me a lot about my methods.”

  “So I lost fourteen. You making a point?”

  “You made yours soft. They don’t have that killer edge.”

  “No, I didn’t brutalize mine like you did yours, you hut’uun.”

  Etain stepped between them, arms held out, pieces of old conversations falling into place with awful clarity. The strill began rumbling in its throat and dropped to the floor to pace protectively in front of Vau.

  It was just as well the bedroom doors were shut.

  “Please, stop this. We don’t want the men to hear you fighting right now, do we? Like Niner says—save it for the enemy.”

  Skirata turned his head with that sudden total focus that left Etain tasting a ripple in the Force. But it wasn’t the angry reaction of a man who had been stung by painful observation. It was genuine anguish. He glanced down at Mird as if considering giving it a good kick, then limped off to the landing platform.

  “Don’t do this to him,” she said to Vau. “Please. Don’t.”

  Vau simply shrugged and picked up the huge strill in his arms as if it were a pup. It licked his face adoringly. “You can fight ice-cold or you can fight red-hot. Kal fights hot. It’s his weakness.”

  “You sound just like an old Master of mine,” Etain said, and went out to the platform after Skirata.

  Coruscant’s skylanes stretched above and below them, giving an illusion of infinity. Etain leaned on the safety rail with her head level with Skirata’s as they gazed down. She searched his face.

  “Kal, if you’d like me to do something about Vau—”

  He shook his head quickly, eyes still downcast. “Thanks, ad’ika, but I can handle that heap of osik.”

  “Never let a bully manipulate you.”

  Skirata’s jaw worked silently. “I’m to blame.”

  “For what?”

  “Sending boys to their deaths.”

  “Kal, don’t do this to yourself.”

  “I took the credits, didn’t I? Jango whistled and I came running. I trained them from boys. Little boys. Eight, nine years of nothing but training and fighting. No past, no childhood, no future.”

  “Kal…”

  “They don’t go out. They don’t get drunk. They don’t chase women. We drill them and medicate them and shunt them from battle to battle without a day off, no rest, no fun, and then we scrape them off the battlefield and send what’s left standing back to the front.”

  “And you alongside them. You gave them a heritage, and a family.”

  “I’m as bad as Vau.” />
  “If you hadn’t been there, your place would have been taken by another like him. You gave your men respect and affection.”

  Skirata let out a long breath and folded his hands, elbows still braced on the rail of the balcony. A speeder horn blared far below them. “You know something? Live-fire exercises. They started five years into their development. That means I sent ten-year-old boys to die. And eleven, and twelve, and right on up to the time they were men. I lost four of my batch in training accidents, and—some of those were even down to me, my rifle, my realism. Think about that.”

  “I hear that happens in any army.”

  “So ask me the question, then. Why didn’t I ever say, Whoa, enough? I’ve had some unkind thoughts about you, ad’ika, why your kind never refused to lead an army of slaves. And then I thought, Kal, you hut’uun, you’re just the same as her. You never stood up against it.”

  “Your soldiers worship you.”

  Skirata closed his eyes then screwed them tight shut for a moment. “You think that makes me feel better? That stinking strill loves Vau. Monsters get loved irrationally all the time.”

  Etain wondered whether to soothe him by judiciously influencing his mind that he would not feel guilty. But Skirata was his own man, tough-minded enough to spot her mind influence and shrug her manipulation aside. If she asked him for his cooperation… no, Skirata would never take the easy path. She had no comfort to offer him that wouldn’t make matters worse.

  That was part of his unique and appealing courage. Her first impression was that he would be a man whose bluff exterior was simply embarrassed machismo. But Skirata wasn’t embarrassed about his emotions at all. He had the guts to wear his heart on his sleeve. It was probably what made him even more effective at killing: he could love as hard as he could punch.

  Force, stop reminding me. Duality. I know. I know you can’t have light without dark.

  Her spiritual struggles were irrelevant now. She was carrying Darman’s child. She longed to tell him and knew she had to wait.

  “You love them, Kal, and love is never wrong.”