Omega Squad: Targets rc-4 Read online

  Omega Squad: Targets

  ( Republic Commando - 4 )

  Karen Traviss

  The story “Omega Squad: Odds” by Karen Traviss first appeared in Star Wars Insider Issue #81, in 2005.

  ODDS

  Note: This story takes place 65 to 67 days after the events of the novel Star Wars Republic Commando: Triple Zero.

  Everyone knows that Intel's about as reliable as a Weequay quay ball. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have its uses. Sometimes it's the lies and myths that tell you everything you need to know.

  place and time: separatist droid factory. olanet. siskeen system – 460 standard days after the battle of geonosis.

  Atin liked a big, satisfying explosion as much as the next man. But there were better ways of putting droids out of action than turning them into shrapnel. He just didn't agree with the technical details this time.

  “Ordo told me you were argumentative,” said Prudii.

  Atin bristled. But coming from Ordo, it might have been a compliment. “I just want to get it right.”

  Atin edged along the gantry above the foundry floor, feeling along the rust-crusted metal railing for a sound section that would take the weight of a rappelling line with a fully-kitted Republic commando on the end. The only illumination was the red-hot glow from the durasteel sheets feeding into the rollers; droids didn't need light to see. The night-vision filter in his visor had kicked in the moment he and Prudii entered the factory.

  It was a high-value target. The factory was said to be one of the largest outside Geonosis. Again, intel seemed to have lost something in the translation.

  Atin found what felt like a solid section of railing and checked the metal's integrity with his gauntlet sensor. Flakes of corroded metal fell to the gantry floor, and he brushed them carefully into a gap to hide signs of entry.

  “Five per cent extra carvanium does the job.” Prudii – Null ARC trooper N-5 – pulled out his belt toolkit. “Trust me. I've done a lot of these.”

  “I know.”

  “And? Did it work? It worked.”

  “Okay, I'm not a metallurgist.”

  Prudii peered over the rail as he checked his rappelling line. “Neither am i, but I knew a man who was.”

  Atin didn't ask about his use of the past tense. He was both an assassin and a saboteur, and at the top of his game in both fields. Until Atin got to know him as well he knew his Null brothers, Ordo and Mereel, he would err on the side of caution. Nulls were as mad as a box of Hapan chags. There were only six of them in the army, but it felt like a lot more.

  Omega Squad was back at barracks again for a few days. Atin missed the rest of his team, but he'd volunteered for this mission to learn a technique. And learn he would.

  I can do this. Argumentative? I just like things to be right.

  Prudii dropped down the line, his kama spreading in the air as he descended in complete silence – no mean feat for an 85-kilo man in full armour. Atin took a breath and paused before dropping down after him. If a droid detected them, the mission was over. They'd have to blow the factory – again. And then the Seps would switch production elsewhere – again. If they just churned out millions of substandard tinnies, crippled at the molecular level by a little tweak in the automation, it would save a lot of hunting.

  “Nothing personal,” Atin muttered, wondering what went on in their self-aware metal heads. “It's you or me, vode.”

  “What?” Prudii's voice filled Atin's helmet.

  “Just trying not to be… organicist.”

  “Don't give me all that droids-have-rights osik.”

  “Wouldn't dream of it,” said Atin.

  He landed next to the Null lieutenant, and they skirted the assembly line. On the factory floor, 20 metres below ground level, the rhythm of fully automated production continued uninterrupted. Only worker-droids were around during the night shift. Durasteel sheets rumbled between the rollers, were caught by giant claws, and moved to the next assembly line for cutting. At the end of the conveyor belt, a clamshell press shaped the torso cases of

  battle droids around a form before dragging them through cooling vats with a hiss of steam. The whole place smelled of soot and burning.

  A maintenance droid –just a box on wheels with a dozen multifunctional arms – trundled past Atin and Prudii, as blind to the electromagnetic profile of their armour as all his kind were. Atin still held his breath as it passed. But no sound escaped from his sealed helmet. He could yell his head off at Prudii and nobody else would hear a thing. The deafening noise of the assembly line would have drowned out all sound anyway.

  “There it is.” Prudii pointed to what looked like a run of oversize lockers on a far wall. Their hinges were as corroded as the gantry. “I hate rust. Don't they do any housework around here?”

  Atin eased the cover open carefully. No, the Seps didn't inspect the automated settings very often, as long as the stateboard reported that everything was running okay. Inside, racks of data wafers fed template information to the different production lines, dictating wire gauges, alloy proportions, component ratings and the thousands of other parameters that went go into making a battle droid. Atin and Prudii had just opened up the brain of the entire factory. It was time for a little surgery.

  “How many times have you done this?” asked Atin.

  Prudii sucked his teeth audibly and rocked his head, counting. “Lots,” he said at last.

  “And they haven't noticed yet?”

  “No. I'd say not.” Prudii clipped bypass wires to the bays above and below the slot to isolate it. “Just so I don't trigger the safety cut-out.” He inspected a substitute data wafer – apparently identical in every way to the Separatist ones – and inserted it into the slot. “This'll make sure the foundry adds too much carvanium to the durasteel, and that the quality control sampling reads it as normal levels. See?” He pointed to the readout on the panel. A cluster of figures read 0003. “Machines believe what you tell 'em. Just like people.”

  “You sure that's enough?”

  “Any higher and it'll be too brittle to pass through the rollers. Then they'll spot the problem too soon.”

  “Okay…”

  Prudii took a breath. He was remarkably patient for a Null. “Look, when these chakaare reach the battlefield, the overpressure from a basic ion shell will crack their cases like Naboo crystal.” He removed the bypass clips and attached them to bays flanking a vertical slot further up the panel. More spiked wafers replaced genuine chips. “And just in case they get lucky and spot that little quality-control problem, this one will reduce the wire gauge just enough so that when it takes a heavy current, it'll short. I like to introduce a different batch of problems for each factory, in case they spot a pattern. How much more of this do I have to debate with you?”

  “Just checking, sir.”

  “Drop the 'sir.' I hate it.”

  It was a precise calculation: just enough to render entire production runs of droids so vulnerable on the battlefield that they were almost useless, but not enough to flag the problem when the units were checked before being shipped from the factory – checked by service droids using the same falsified data.

  Prudii had to be doing something right. The kill ratio had climbed from 20-to-one to 50-to-one in a matter of a few months. The tinnies still hadn't overrun the Republic, despite the claims that they could. While Prudii worked, factory droids skimmed past him, oblivious. He stepped out of 'щ their way and let them pass.

  “Is it true you've tracked down General Grievous?” asked Atin. '"Cos I know that two of you were tasked to hunt him…”

  “Not me. Ask Jaing. Or Kom'rk. Their job, not mine.”

  Atin hadn't met them yet. “If they've f
ound him, the war's as good as over.”

  “You reckon? Well, it doesn't look like it's over yet.”

  Atin took the hint and didn't ask about Grievous again. He kept watch, DC-17 rifle ready, anxious not to use it for once. It was odd to be invisible. He wondered why the Grand Army didn't use stealth coating on all trooper armour, seeing as most of their land engagements were against droids.

  There was a lot that didn't add up in this war.

  “There,” said Prudii, closing the panel gently. He stood back to inspect it. “We were never here.”

  They climbed back up to the gantry on their lines and slipped out the way they'd come. It was pitch black outside. They had an hour to get to the extraction point and transmit their coordinates to the heavily , disguised freighter waiting for them. On Olanet, that meant crossing '. kilometres of marshaling yards serving the nerf-meat industry. Atin ;' % could hear the animals lowing, but he'd still never seen a live nerf.

  “This place stinks.” Prudii settled behind a repulsor truck in a yard full of hundreds of others and squatted in its shadow. The harmless but nauseating stench of manure and animals penetrated his helmet's filters. “Five-seven, are you receiving?”

  “With you in 10, sir. Stand by.”

  Prudii made no comment about the 'sir.' He took the data wafers out of his belt and attached a probe to them, one at a time. He struck Atin as a kindred spirit, a man who wouldn't let any inanimate objects get the better of him, but he was still hard work.

  “Shab,” Prudii muttered. He held but a wafer. “What do you make of this?”

  Atin slotted it into his own wafer reader and relayed the extracted data to his HUD. The readout was just strings of numbers, the kind of data he'd need to analyze carefully. “What am I looking at? I normally blow this stuff up. I've never stopped to read it.”

  “Look for the code that starts zero-zero-five-alpha, 10 from the top row.”

  “Got it.”

  “That's the running total of units off the line since the wafer was inserted to start the production run. And the date.”

  Atin scanned from left to right, counting the line of numbers and inserting imaginary commas. “996,125. In a year.”

  “Correct.”

  “Not exactly smoking.” Atin checked that he wasn't missing a row of numbers. “No, just six figures.”

  “Every factory we hit is producing numbers like that. Judging by the raw material freight we monitor, there're still a lot more factories out there, but I think we're talking about a few hundred million droids.”

  “That's reassuring. Thanks. I'll sleep well tonight.”

  “And so you should, ner vod.” Prudii popped the seal on his collar, lifted off his helmet and wiped the palm of his gauntlet across his forehead; it came away shiny with sweat in the faint light leaking from the HUD. Somehow he looked older than Mereel and Ordo. “They say they're making quadrillions of droids.” He paused. “A quadrillion has 15 zeroes. A thousand million millions, not a few hundred. Are we missing something here?”

  Atin took no offence at the explanation. Anything more than three million was bad news in his book; that was how many clone troops were deployed or being raised on Kamino. “'They' say? Who're 'they'?”

  “Now that's a good question.”

  “Anyway, it only takes one to kill you.”

  “But where are they all? I've bimbled around 47 planets this last year.” Prudii made it sound like sightseeing. Atin had a sudden vision of him admiring the visitor attractions of Sep planets and then fragmenting them. The grip of the Verpine rifle slung across his back was well-worn. Atin had no real idea who Prudii hunted, and he was happier that way. “Seen a lot, counted a lot. But not quadrillions. They just don't seem to be able to produce anywhere near those numbers.”

  “But that's why we're fighting, isn't it?” Atin tried not to worry about the HoloNet news and took the political debate as something that didn't matter, because one droid or a septillion, he and his brothers were the ones who would still be in the front line. “Because the Seps are going to overrun us with droid armies if we don't stop them. So why not just reassure the public that the threat isn't that big?”

  Prudii looked at him for a moment. Atin got the feeling that he felt sorry for him in some way, and he wasn't sure why. “Because it's only the likes of us that are finding this out every time we crack a Sep facility.”

  “You report it?”

  “Of course I report it. Every time. To General Zey. Mace Windu knows. They all know.”

  “So why is the holonews news saying quadrillions? Where did the figure come from?”

  “I heard it first from Republic Intelligence.”

  “Well, then…” Intel was notoriously variable in quality. “They make it up as they go along.”

  “Even they're not that stupid.”

  Prudii replaced his helmet and held his hand out to Atin for the wafer. He didn't say much after that.

  Millions or quadrillions. So what? Atin, a man who enjoyed numbers, looked at the 1.2 million clone troopers deployed at that moment, added the two million men still being raised and trained, and didn't even need to place a decimal point to work out that he didn't like the odds.

  But he never did. And it never stopped him from defying them.

  “Want me to relay this data to HQ?” he asked.

  “No,” said Prudii. “Not until Kal'buir sees it. Never until he sees it.”

  A good Mandalorian son always obeyed his father. The Null ARCs were no different: they looked to Sergeant Kal Skirata – Kal'buir, Papa Kal – for their orders, not to the Republic. A Mando father put his sons first, after all, and they trusted him.

  Skirata would always outrank everyone – captain, general-and even Supreme Chancellor.

  place and time: tipoca city. kamino – 461 days after the battle of geonosis.

  Ko Sai was a devious piece of work.

  Mereel – ARC trooper N-7 – had always thought of Kaminoans as cold, arrogant, xenophobic, and even suitable for barbecuing, but he'd never seen them as scheming – not until he began hunting their missing chief scientist, anyway. She hadn't died in the Battle of Kamino, as everyone thought. She'd defected.

  Why? What motivates her? Wealth? Not politics, that's for sure.

  He knew she was still alive, because she was on the run from her Separatist paymasters, now. In the cantinas of Tatooine, he'd heard rumours of a bounty. And when you had only your rare skill in cloning to trade, in a galaxy where non-military cloning was now banned, your attempts to raise credits were hard to hide from those who knew where to look.

  The world of Khomm and Arkania had really suffered from that ban. Mereel knew exactly where to look.

  He stood to attention in the ranks of troopers in theTipoca training facility, a good, obedient clone as far as the Kaminoans were concerned. A perfect product. But their identification systems weren't quite as foolproof as they'd told the Republic. They certainly hadn't spotted his fake ID transponder code. The little chip cycled through randomly generated IDs and, without his distinctive kama and blue-trimmed armour, he could disappear right in front of the kaminiise. Not even the patrolling KE-8 pilots looking for defective clones could spot him.

  You think you're infallible, don't you, aiwha-bait?

  One of the Kaminoan technicians walked along the row of troopers and paused in front of him, blinking, gray-skinned, its long fragile neck tempting to a man trained to kill. Mereel, frozen at attention, fantasized: blaster, vibroblade or garrote? These vile things had wanted to exterminate him as a kid, and he would never forget that. He and his five brothers had been a cloning experiment the Kaminoans considered a failure: but Kal Skirata had saved them.

  There was time for revenge later. Kal'buir had taught him patience.

  Patience is a luxury. I'm ageing twice as fast as an ordinary man.

  He needed to pass through Tipoca City and grab some data without being noticed. The Kaminoan moved on. Mereel savoured the knowledge
that he knew more about chief scientist Ko Sai's whereabouts than the Kaminoans did, and they'd searched for her very, very hard.

  You're going to give us back our lives, gihaal, me and all my brothers. Mereel included the Republic commandos, the poor cannon fodder meat-cans around him, and even the Alpha ARCs, who'd been ready to kill clone kids to stop the Seps from using them. An vode. They're all my brothers. Even the Alphas.

  As the troopers fell out, he slipped in at the rear of a line of men to cover his progress toward the administration core of the building. One glanced at him, the slightest head movement betraying what was happening under his helmet. The man was probably well aware Mereel was a stranger from the minute telltale differences in gait or bearing, but he said nothing. No clone could possibly be a security risk.

  I'm just borrowing some information, ner vod. I'm not even going to sabotage this cesspit of a city. Take no notice of me.

  As the line passed a corridor leading off at 90 degrees, Mereel wheeled left and walked calmly down to the end of the passage. The heads-up display in his helmet scrolled floor plans and data before his eyes. He looked both at it and through it to focus on the systems terminal set in the wall. Since the Separatist attack on Tipoca just over a standard year ago, security had been tightened, but that was just for Seps and their droids. Amateurs and tinnies. Nobody could keep out a determined Null ARC.

  “Mer'ika,” said the voice in his helmet. It was quiet and concerned: Skirata rarely raised his voice to them. “Don't push your luck. I want you back in one piece.”

  “I hear you, Kal'buir.” Mereel slipped the docking pin of his forearm plate into one of the terminal's ports. A couple of troopers looked his way from the end of the passage, but he remained unhurried. I'm just calibrating my suit. “We might not get another chance to come back here. I'm grabbing everything I can.”

  Along with the legitimate outgoing code that requested data from the Tipoca mainframe, a second hidden layer hitched a ride to access the root of the entire system undetected. Mereel now had Republic Treasury encryption and de-erasure keys, courtesy of an obliging Treasury agent called Besany Wennen, and they were the most advanced available. Now he could read not only Treasury data, but also find encrypted files between Tipoca and the Republic that had been hidden from his previous probes. He might also be able to recover the data that Ko Sai had stolen and deleted.