don't approve of our mission."
"That wasn't what I was thinking."
"But you don't. Why do you help us?"
"Not voluntarily."
"Then why? What leverage does someone have?"
Her answering laugh was a bit tighter than she had intended.
"Somewhere on Coruscant is a computer file listing every indiscretion
ever committed in the galaxy. There was a need, my name came
up, and doing a favor is better than spending a decade on a work
planet."
"And your name is on this list?"
She nodded. "You're a quick study."
"I believe that's called sarcasm."
"Ooh," she squealed. "More human by the minute. Next we try
irony."
He scowled ferociously, and she laughed. "So . . . what did you
do?"
"My younger sister joined a religious sect on Devon Four. When
they refused to pay taxes Coruscant slapped an embargo on them.
When a plague struck the colony, they were going to die, every
woman, man, and child. No one would do a thing. So . . . "
He nodded understanding. "So you got them their medicine. And
your sister?"
She brightened. "Raising a squalling brood of brats somewhere in
the Outer Rim. I'd do it all over again."
"Even though it brought you here."
Strangely enough, she was feeling more than just comfortable, and
a thought drifted through her mind that here meant both the planet
and his arms. Hmmm. "Even though."
"I notice you spend more time talking to me than my brothers," he
said, his lips close to her ear. "Why is that?"
"You hold my interest."
"Why?"
"I don't know," she said honestly. "Perhaps because you are the only
one trained for command. That makes you more like Jango."
His attention sharpened. "They say he was a loner."
"Yes," she said. "But a natural leader, too. At other times he could
be invisible, as I understand quite a few people learned to their brief
and painful regret."
Nate gave a hard, flat chuckle. Yes, indeed.
"But if he wanted, when he entered a room every head would
turn." She paused a beat. "Especially mine." Her voice grew softer.
"But that was all so long ago. I was eighteen years old, and Jango was
twenty-five."
"Was he a bounty hunter then?"
She closed her eyes, dredging up old memories. "I think he was in
transition. He'd only been free maybe two years, since the Mandalorians
were wiped out. I met him in the Meridian sector. He'd lost his
armor somehow, and was searching for it." A ruminative smile. "We
had just about a year together. Then things got dangerous. We were
raided by space pirates. Our ship got blown from the sky, and in the
middle of a really nasty space battle we were forced to take separate
evacuation pods. I never saw him again." She paused. "I heard he survived,
and got his armor back. I don't know if he looked for me."
Sheeka shrugged. "Life is like that, sometimes." Her voice had grown
wistful.
Then she chuckled, and he drew back slightly and looked at her in
puzzlement. "Why do you laugh?"
"You do remind me of Jango. He always locked his emotions away.
But I can remember times when he let them out of their cage."
"Such as?"
Her sweeter, saucier side was bubbling to the fore, and she was
happy to feel it. She'd feared she'd never feel that evanescence again.
"If you're lucky, I might tell you sometime."
She knew he was curious now, and pardoned herself for the slight
exaggeration. In truth, Jango was a man of few words who kept his
feelings in check. In his life, and his chosen lifestyle, that reserve had
been vital for survival.
Just from their few conversations, she knew that for all his practical
and lethal knowledge, Nate hadn't the foggiest notion about
ordinary human lives. Until this, until the moment that he had
taken her in his arms, she could feel that he had treated her with a
certain respect and distance, more like a sister than anything else.
He probably knew only two types of women: civilians to be protected
or perhaps obeyed, treated with courtesy at the least. On the other
hand were the sorts of women who offered themselves to soldiers
in exchange for credits or protection, to be used and discarded. It
could be emotionally risky to break down such a simplistic worldview.
But she had to admit that she was interested in breaking through
his reserve, wondering what she might find beneath it.
What would happen, how might he respond if she allowed the
bond between them to deepen? And if she took it in a new direction?
She drew him away from the dancing and laughter into the shadows.
"What now?" she asked.
"We're off-duty until dawn, why?"
She took his hand. "Come," she said. "I'd like to show you something."
Confusion darkened his face.
"I have to be available—"
"You said you were off-duty. Are you confined to base?"
"No—" He stopped. "If I'm called, I would need to be back within
twenty minutes. Can you guarantee that?"
She calculated distances and velocities in her head. "Yes."
Five minutes of scrambling over broken rock took them to Spindragon.
As he strapped in, Sheeka swiftly completed her predeparture
checklist and lifted off. With a practiced touch she rocketed
almost a hundred kilometers to the southeast in about twelve minutes.
At first she skirted the ground to elude scanning. Then, when
they were a sufficient distance away, she rose up into a standard
transport lane, filled with commuter pods and double-length cargo
ships transporting goods among clients reluctant to pay the orbital
tax.
Nate watched the ground whirl beneath them, enjoying the ease
and command with which Sheeka piloted the craft. Competence
was something he could always appreciate. This woman was different
from others he had known, and that difference disoriented
him slightly. Curiously enough, he enjoyed the sensation. So Nate
relaxed as she took him into a saw-toothed stretch of hills, and then
set them down again gently, not eighteen minutes after they left the
camp.
The camp was built into the hillsides, several different mine openings
suggesting both natural and artificial breaches in the surface. As
she landed, a dozen offworlders and two X'Ting emerged to meet
them. All grinned, nodded, or waved at them in greeting.
"What is this place?"
"They are my extended family," she said. "Not by birth. By
choice."
"Is this where you live?"
She smiled. "No. We don't know each other that well yet. But. ..
my home is a lot like this."
Now he was able to make out more dwellings. They appeared to be
camouflaged, the coloration perhaps designed to make them more
difficult to see from the air. From the ground, though, they still
tended to melt into the shadows and rock formations.
"Why do they hide?"
She laughed. "They don't. We just love the mountains, and enjoy
blending w
ith them as much as possible."
Again, the danger of seeing everything through a soldier's eyes.
High, sweet voices rang down from the slope. Nate turned to see
several young human boys and girls up there playing some game of
laughter and discovery. They dashed about calling names, squealing,
enjoying the long shadows.
Down around the rock-colored dwellings swarmed older children.
Some of them were graceful X'Ting, slender and huge-eyed, reminding
him a bit of Kaminoans. Adolescents, he supposed, working
with adults. Building, repairing tools perhaps.
He watched them, thinking, feeling. He found the environment a
bit confusing. Or could it be Sheeka herself who troubled him?
Whichever, he found himself remembering his own accelerated
childhood, the learning games he had played .. .
Once again, Sheeka Tull seemed to have read his mind. "What
were you like as a child?" Clever. Had she brought him here to see
children, hoping that it would spark his own memories?
He shrugged. "Learning, growing, striving. Like all the others."
"I've visited a lot of planets. Most children's games help kids discover
their individual strengths. How can you do this? Aren't you all
supposed to be the same?"
Teasing him again? He realized, to his pleasure, that he hoped so.
"Not really. There was a core curriculum that we all mastered, but
after that we specialized, learned different things, prepared for different
functions, went on different training exercises, fought in different
wars. No two of us have ever had the same environment, and
because of that we are stronger. In the aggregate, we have lived a million
lives. All of that experience grows within us. We are the GAR,
and it is alive."
"Loosen up, will you?" she clucked, and stretched out her hand to
him. He hesitated, and then after checking his comlink to make
certain that he could be reached in case of any emergency, he followed
her.
41
Asouthern wind nipping at their backs, Sheeka led Nate up a
worn, dusty hillside trail into the mouth of one of the tunnels. The
mouth was about four by six meters, and once inside, the trooper saw
that the shielded buildings outside were not the living spaces he had
supposed them to be. Toolsheds, perhaps. Within was a large communal
area lit by glowing fungi arrayed along the walls, nurtured
with liquid nutrients trickling from a pipe rigging. The fungi rippled
in a luminescent rainbow. When he brought his hand close to a bank
of it, his skin tingled.
"Most places on Cestus, the offworlders pretty much dominate the
X'Ting. Consider them primitive even though they give lip service
to respect. But there are a few little enclaves like this one, where we
actually try to learn from them. They have a lot to offer, really, if we'd
just give them a chance."
A variety of human and other offworlder children ran hither and
thither with their little X'Ting friends, burning energy like exploding
stars, flooding the entire cave with their exuberance. The day's
major work had ended, but some of the adults were still fixing tools,
laughing and joking in easy camaraderie.
They greeted Sheeka warmly as she approached, glancing at Nate
with tentative acceptance. After all, their attitude seemed to say, he's
with Sheeka. The air churned with luscious smells. In several nooks
meals were being concocted from a variety of tangy and exotic ingredients.
He found the jovial messiness oddly appealing.
But as soon as that thought sank in, conditioning rushed forward
to yank it back out.
"What do you think?" Sheeka asked.
He strove to compose a answer both accurate and in alignment
with his values and feelings. "This seems . . . a good life. An easy life.
Not a soldier's life. It is not for me."
Nate had assumed that she would accept such an answer at face
value, but instead Sheeka bristled. "You think this is easier? Raising
children, loving, hoping. You?" A sharp, hard bark of laughter. "You're
surrounded by the replaceable. Ships, equipment, people. A modular
world. A piece breaks? Replace it." Her small strong hands had
folded into fists. "You never leave home without expecting to die.
What do you think it's like to actually care if your children survive?
To care} What do you think the universe looks like to someone who
cares? How strong would someone have to be just to preserve hope?"
Her outburst knocked him back on his emotional heels. "Perhaps
. . . I see what you are saying."
She continued on as if she had prepared this speech for days. "And
how much strength do you think it requires to keep your spirits high
when everything you've spent a lifetime building . . . that your parents
and grandparents spent a lifetime building . .. can be destroyed
by the decision of someone too far away to touch?" She paused a moment.
"And men like you."
It was his turn to bristle. "Men like me protect you."
"From other men like you."
He might have taken offense at that, but instead he felt a bit sad,
realizing that Sheeka was not as different as he had thought. She was
just another outsider after all. "No. Men like me don't start the wars.
We just die in them. We've always died in them, and we always will.
We don't expect any praise for it, no parades. No one knows our
names. In fact, by your standards we have no names at all."
Something in his face, his voice, or his carriage reached through
her anger, because suddenly she softened. "Nate . . . "
Sheeka reached out as if to take his hand, but he drew it away. "No.
Is that what you wanted to hear? Well it's true. We don't have names.
And no one will ever know who we are. But we do. We always do."
He felt his shoulders square as he said that simple truth. The troopers
knew who they were, always. And always would. "We're the
Grand Army of the Republic."
Sheeka shook her head. "Nate, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to judge
you."
His stance did not soften. She had dropped her guard. It was unfair
to attack now, but he could not stop the training that was, in the
final analysis, all he knew. "I haven't had your choices. Every step of
my life I've been told what to do."
"Yes," she said, her voice small now.
He took a step closer, looking down on her dark, lovely face. "And
what do you know? We both ended up in the same place."
He paused. She had nothing to say.
"So what difference did all those decisions make?"
Sheeka looked up at him, their eyes meeting for a moment that
was too intense. Then a child running between them broke the moment.
She managed a rueful smile, said, "Come on," and led him
back out of the cave.
The two of them sat on a hillside, watching the moons and listening
to the happy sounds. Sheeka had spoken a bit of her life here on
Cestus, of small pleasures and trials.
"So," she concluded, "sometimes all we could do was wait, and
hope. Don't you think that requires endurance?"
"Is that what it was like?"
She gave no answer, just twisted a stalk of grass up and knotted it
into a ball, throwing it downslope.
"I am sorry," Nate said. "I live only to defend the Republic. I regret
if that defense brings misery to some, but I won't apologize for who
and what I am."
Without saying a word, Sheeka slid closer to him. When she
started speaking again, his own thoughts ended, and he found himself
losing interest in anything save the sound and cadence of her voice.
"All you have to lose is your life, and you hold that cheaply enough.
Are you so strong, Nate? Are you really as strong as the least fungus
farmer?"
Their eyes locked again, and he felt the beginnings of an emotion
he had never before experienced: despair. She would never understand
him.
Then Sheeka, swollen with anger, seemed to deflate a bit. "No,"
she said. "That's wrong of me. I know one of the problems—it's the
whole name thing. I'm sorry. I'm used to calling droids by numbers
and letters. People have names. You guys just have shorthand for your
numbers."
"I'm sorry—" he began, but she held up her hand.
"Do troopers ever have real names?" she asked.
"Rarely."
"Would you mind if I gave you one?"
She was staring at him with such sincere intensity that he almost
laughed. But couldn't. The whole thing was amusing, really.
"What name did you have in mind?"
"I was thinking Jangotat," she said quietly. "Mandalorian for 'Jango's
brother.'"
He laughed, but found his voice catching a bit in midchuckle. Jangotat.
"Sure," he said. "If that makes it easier. Fine."
Her answering smile burst with relief. "Thanks. Thanks, Jangotat.
That's a good name, you know," she said, thumping him with her
elbow. They both chuckled about that, until the mirth died away to a
companionable silence.
Jangotat, he thought.
Jango's brother.
A smile.
That I am.
42
I. he armored cargo transport lay broken, flames gushing from its
shattered innards, its treads curled back from their axles like shreds of
skin from peeled fruit. The cargo itself was scavenged or burned, its
load of credit chits looted: the cash would be useful for purchasing
goods, buying silence, and providing for the widows and orphans of
any Desert Wind fatalities.
Black oily smoke curled from the transport's ruptured belly and
The Cestus Deception Page 23