501st: An Imperial Commando Novel Read online

  It’s nearly over. Nearly out of here. Nearly … home.

  Where was home now, anyway?

  Then it started. The hacking bark of the akk hound, that distinctive ack-ack-ack noise that gave the animal its name, echoed from the open hatch. Ny knew she wasn’t going home now, ever, and she struggled not to panic. Three stormtroopers rushed to the ramp, blaster rifles ready. The fourth held his sidearm on her.

  “Wait here, ma’am,” he said. He craned his neck to see what was happening. “Officer, what’s going on in there?”

  The akk stopped barking. Ny heard one set of scuffed footsteps accompanied by scrabbling claws, and she simply couldn’t draw another breath. This was it. The animal must have sniffed out her stowaways.

  “Sorry, boys.” The guard’s voice emerged from the hatch. “He’s still a pup, despite his size. Needs a bit more discipline.”

  The akk came trotting down the ramp dragging a bantha’s thigh bone, the huge pelvis end clamped between his jaws. It was Mird’s treat; bantha meat wasn’t easy to get hold of on Mandalore. Ny’s knees nearly buckled. The guard tried to take the bone from his animal, but the novice akk wasn’t having any of it. His lip curled and he growled deep in his throat, teeth still locked hard on the femur.

  “Look, I can get another bone,” Ny said, feigning exasperation rather than flinging her arms around the akk and telling it what a good boy it was for sabotaging the search. “Keep it. I need to get moving.”

  One of the stormtroopers tilted his head at her. “What do you need a bantha bone for, ma’am?”

  Ny’s answer was out of her mouth before she even thought about it. The ease and speed with which she conjured up a complete fabric of lies shocked her.

  “One of the miners has a pet nek,” she said. “You don’t find many banthas on your average asteroid.”

  It really was getting that easy to lie. She was disappointed in herself, her old self before widowhood had made her into a more marginal creature, but she also felt a thrill of excitement—and shame—at her newly discovered capacity for defiance. Yes, I’m wrong, I’m breaking the law, but I did it—I pulled it off. The guard was still trying to get the akk’s mind back on search duties as she closed the hatch.

  Stang, she hoped those two could still breathe in that tank. She couldn’t check until Cornucopia jumped to hyperspace and she’d set the autopilot on course. Getting out of Mezeg orbit seemed to take hours rather than minutes, and the moment the stars in the viewport stretched from points of light to frozen streaks of infinity, she checked the course and handed the controls over to Cornucopia’s nav computer.

  The aft cargo section was silent except for the throb of the drives and the rattle of loose fittings. Ny took a deep breath and began unbolting the water tank inspection plate on the deck, wondering if she’d find bodies rather than live Jedi.

  “That was too close.” Ny lifted the metal panel and reached down. It was a tight fit in the space between those tanks even for a short, skinny kid like Scout, so the Kaminoan must have been very uncomfortable indeed. “How did you get away with that?”

  Scout scrambled out of the hole in the deck, her ginger hair disheveled. She looked like she hadn’t eaten in a week. It took a little longer to extract Kina Ha, not only because the Kaminoan was much taller, but also because she was a lot older—exactly how old, Ny wasn’t sure, but the Kaminoan was a venerable lady by anyone’s standards. Ny usually couldn’t tell the age of a nonhuman, but Kina Ha would have looked obviously old to anyone, with deeply lined gray skin and drooping eyes. She moved slowly. It made Ny feel positively teenaged.

  “I influenced the akk to find that bone when it got too excited,” Scout said. “But we’re fine. Aren’t we, Kina?”

  “We are alive,” said the Kaminoan. “And that is a bonus. Thank you for risking so much for us.”

  Ny would have taken that thanks in her stride a matter of days ago, but now it triggered a pang of guilt. Neither of the Jedi knew where they were going, and they hadn’t pressed her too hard for an answer. But she hadn’t told them exactly who their hosts would be, either.

  And that was going to be … interesting.

  No matter: like Kina Ha said—they were alive, and that was a bonus.

  Cornucopia was a typical old CEC Monarch-class cargo ship, boxy and basic, with a long bench along the bulkhead behind the pilot’s and copilot’s seats. Kina Ha settled on the bench like a crotchety duchess and fastened her safety restraints. Scout slid into the copilot’s seat next to Ny.

  Ny broke out some ration packs and passed them around. She had no idea what Kaminoans ate—fish and other seafood, she guessed—but Kina Ha wasn’t going to get any yobshrimp here. Skirata had said that Kaminoans hated bright sunlight and were happiest when it was cloudy and bucketing down rain. That was going to be a challenge to achieve on Mandalore, too. But that was going to be the least of Kina Ha’s problems.

  “We’re going to Mandalore,” Ny said at last. Somehow she expected at least a gasp, or even a cry of protest. But the two Jedi were silent. “You heard me, didn’t you? Mandalore? Manda’yaim?”

  “Yes, we did hear, thank you,” Kina Ha said. “Suitably remote and forbidding. I commend your ingenuity.”

  “You don’t have a problem with Mandalorians?”

  “Should we?”

  “Well, a lot of them have a problem with you. Jedi, that is.”

  Kina Ha peered into the open pouch of the ration pack as if she was divining the future from its contents. “I have a vague recollection of Mandalorians fighting for the Sith,” she said. “But I’ve kept myself far from the political detail of the galaxy for a long time.”

  Ny wasn’t sure what a long time meant, but she imagined centuries. Kina Ha wasn’t just any old Jedi. She was genetically engineered; all Kaminoans were, of course, and Skirata said that was how they survived their global flood and turned into what he described as loathsome eugenicist scum. But no Kaminoan had been engineered quite like Kina Ha. She was unique. Her genes had been modified for a very long life span, and that meant she would be useful to Skirata in ways she probably couldn’t begin to imagine.

  That genome was the only thing that was going to save her from Skirata’s wrath. He was banking on finding something in her genes that would stop his clone sons from aging at twice the normal human rate.

  “Is that where you’re from?” Scout tidied her hair with her fingers. It didn’t look much different afterward. “Mandalore?”

  “No,” Ny said. “I’m not Mandalorian. I just help them out when they’re busy.”

  How do I explain Kal to them?

  “I’m not being ungrateful,” Scout said. Kina Ha selected something from the ration pack and chewed it thoughtfully. “I’m just scared.”

  Oh boy. “I’m taking you to a safe place,” Ny said. “Quite a few other folks are hiding from the Emperor.”

  “Other Jedi?” Kina Ha asked.

  Ny wasn’t sure how to describe Bardan Jusik. Lapsed Jedi? Very lapsed Jedi? Apostate? Born-again Mando? It could wait. Scout would be able to decide for herself soon enough.

  “In a way.” She couldn’t sit on this any longer. “Look, you’re going to stay with a Mandalorian clan of clone troopers who’ve deserted. Some of them don’t have very happy memories of Kamino, Kina Ha. It’s only fair that I warn you. And the place belongs to Kal Skirata. He’s an old mercenary who trained clones in Tipoca City, and … well, he hates Jedi and Kaminoans for using the clones. So relations might be frosty for a while.”

  Ny felt a little better for getting that out in the open, but not much. Kina Ha tilted her head gracefully.

  “Well, it could be worse,” she said.

  Scout lowered her chin. “And that place is safe?”

  “Kal’s a good man.” Ny was instantly defensive again, was already far too fond of Skirata for common sense. “He’s dedicated his life to rescuing clones. But Kamino left a big mark on everyone. One of the clones had a baby with a Jedi girl who got
killed in the Purge. So it’s one big painful mess at the moment. But you’ll be safe there. Kal’s given me his word.”

  Mess didn’t quite cover it. Ny decided not to plunge the two Jedi into anxiety overload by mentioning the rest of the problems. They’d find out about Dr. Uthan soon enough, and Jusik the definitely-not-Jedi, and the bounties on everyone’s head, and Jango Fett’s serial-killer sister back from the dead, and the Imperial garrison, and Fenn Shysa’s resistance plans … yes, it really did sound like less fun than falling into a sarlacc’s corrosive gut when she looked at it all in the cold light of day.

  But Ny still couldn’t help feeling better when she thought of Kyrimorut. The place was isolated, desolate, and spartan, full of the grieving and the dispossessed, but the warmth of the tight-knit community there transformed it.

  It held no memories of Terin, either. When she was there, she felt able to imagine a future. The days ahead were no longer an empty void to be endured or escaped.

  “What happened to the Jedi’s baby?” Scout asked.

  “Kad? He’s fine.” Was that telling Scout too much? Ny had grown a major caution gland when she started dealing with the Grand Army, but the girl would see for herself anyway. “Growing like a weed.”

  “And the bone? What was the bone for? Is it some primitive Mandalorian ritual? I heard they crown their leader with a real skull.”

  “I think the skull’s symbolic, Scout.” Was it? Ny liked Mandos, but they did have a penchant for anatomical trophies. “The bone was for Mird. If you’ve never seen a strill before, they’re quite something. Very rare native animal.”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “Then you’re in for an education.”

  Ny settled back in her seat and realized that she hadn’t escaped from the Empire. She’d simply skipped one crisis and was hurtling at multi-light-speed toward the next.

  “I recall strills, I think,” Kina Ha said absently. “But that was just before the Sith went into hiding.”

  Ny was only half listening now, checking Cornucopia’s instrument panel. “Sorry, when did the Sith disappear?” She glanced over the back of the seat. Very few ordinary folk had even heard of Sith, so it was odd to hear Kina Ha drop the name. “I’m not good at history.”

  The Jedi frowned in concentration, furrowing her wrinkled brow all the way back to where her ears should have been if Kaminoans had them.

  “Oh … perhaps a thousand years ago?” She swayed her impossibly long neck like a snake. “It’s been so very long … and so many wars. I forget.”

  Ny wasn’t sure she’d heard right. And then she realized she had, and the galaxy changed out of all recognition for her—again.

  Special Operations barracks, 501st Legion headquarters, Imperial Center (formerly Coruscant)

  Medical technology could do just about anything, Niner decided, except mend Darman.

  He watched his brother put on his newly issued Imperial armor, dark charcoal gray and black. The color was much like their old matte-black Katarn pattern plates, but there the similarity ended; everything about the shape, from helmet to chest plate to greaves, was just that bit different. It made Darman look like a stranger. And he felt like one, too.

  Darman had changed overnight. Niner couldn’t really expect anything else. How would any husband react to having to stand by and watch his wife killed? But this was more than grieving. Both he and Darman had lost brothers in the war, and they’d had no choice but to get on with life and carry on fighting in the very next moment.

  Grieving was dealt with slowly and privately. Eventually, you came to terms with it. But Niner had never been in love with a woman or fathered her child, and so he realized that Darman’s grief was probably something new and indescribable, bound up with shattered hopes for a future that no clone had thought he’d ever have.

  But we can have those lives. The little ordinary things. Fi’s got a wife. So has Atin. And Ordo. They’re living as Mandalorians, free men. I know what I can be.

  Niner had never seen Kyrimorut, and now he had to forget that he even knew its name. At least he didn’t know where the homestead was. Nobody could beat that information out of him. He was scared to talk about anything in their new quarters, even in the locker room, in case the Emperor had installed surveillance to check on who was loyal and who had ties to the past regime.

  It might have been the same boss with a new title, but the new Empire already felt like a different world from the Republic.

  Darman attached his armor plates to his undersuit, and clung to his DC-17 rifle like a comfort blanket. The 501st had let the commandos keep those for the time being. There was probably a brutally pragmatic reason for it; they were used to the Deece, and that saved training time on new weapons, but it still felt like a kindness, a concession to ease them into the new and unsettling world of the Imperial Army. Niner kept trying to work out why it felt so different. It wasn’t the vast influx of new clones produced on Centax 2 by fast Spaarti processes. He’d met very few of those men. No, what bothered him most was simply the absence of things that had been the core of his life for thirteen years.

  People.

  He couldn’t call Skirata. There was no General Jusik, either, or Fi, Corr, or Atin, or any of the people he knew he could count on if he needed them. There was just Darman.

  And Darman needed him, whether he knew it or not.

  Dar could have escaped with the rest of them and been with his baby son now, but he didn’t; he’d stayed with Niner. Nobody in the galaxy could buy that kind of loyalty and brotherhood, and now Niner had a debt not only of honor but of family.

  Darman flexed his fingers, making his new gauntlets creak. “You going to stand there scratching your shebs all day? Buckets on. Mustn’t keep Lord Vader waiting.”

  “I know you’re not okay,” Niner said, “so I’m not even going to ask.”

  “I’m fine. Are you up to this?”

  Niner had broken his spine on that awful night when Order 66 was called. Darman had refused to leave him, afraid he’d end up like Fi, on life support waiting to have the plug pulled because nobody had a use or a place for crippled clones. Niner didn’t need reminding that it was his fault Darman was stuck here and not raising Kad.

  “I’m good as new,” Niner said. He did a few twists from the hips and bent over straight-legged to put his palms flat on the floor. “See? Actually, that’s better than I used to be. I couldn’t quite do that before.”

  “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

  “Dar, whatever Vader’s got in mind for us, it’ll be business as usual.”

  “How can it be? We haven’t got a war to fight now.”

  “Oh, you think it’s all over, do you? You been watching the holonews?” News was all that Niner had to occupy him for days after his spinal cord was repaired and he was confined to a brace. “There’s still trouble. Still places where the locals are fighting. Places that won’t accept the Empire.”

  Darman flipped his helmet over between his hands a few times. “Little border wars. They don’t need special forces for that.”

  “Okay—what do you want to see happen? No, don’t answer that.”

  Niner grabbed Darman’s arm, steering him down the corridor to the parade ground. This wasn’t Arca Barracks. He couldn’t trust anyone or anything. When they got outside, he walked into the center of the parade ground, took off his helmet, and gestured to Darman to do the same.

  This had to be done in silence. Normally, they could have switched to a secure comm circuit and safely discussed anything within the privacy of their helmets, but Niner had no idea if the new kit had comm overrides that he didn’t know about. It was the kind of thing he could have handed to Jaing or Mereel to pull apart, but the Null ARCs were half a galaxy away. He’d improvise.

  “What are you doing?” Darman asked.

  Niner held up his forefinger for silence. “Testing the proximity sensors. Put your helmet down.”

  As far as onlookers were co
ncerned, they were just two clones testing new and still unfamiliar armor systems. Niner laid his helmet on the ground and walked away from it, beckoning Darman to follow suit. When they were far enough from the helmets to be out of audio range—and then some, just in case—Niner stopped.

  “Okay, Dar, we walk back toward those buckets in a few moments, like nothing happened. Got it?”

  “You’re paranoid.”

  “I’m sensible. Look, Dar, what do you want most right now?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes. It does. Do you want to leave? Do you want to go to …” Niner hardly dared say it, but at some point it had to be said. “You want to go find Kad? Look after him?”

  Darman’s expression was unreadable. If only Bard’ika—Bardan Jusik—had been here now; he could have Force-sensed Darman’s real mood. But he wasn’t, and Niner could only guess, because the Darman he knew didn’t react the way this Darman did. Niner had spent two days reading medical texts while he was recovering. He didn’t understand a lot of it, but he now knew there were states of mind called dissociative amnesia, where the mind shut out the memory of terrible events just to be able to cope with everyday life. He was sure Darman was doing that.

  “I don’t know that name,” Darman said at last.

  Niner had no idea how to handle this. All he could do was keep an eye on his brother and hope that time really did heal. “Okay,” he said. “You want to stay here.”

  “What else would I want to do? I’m a commando.”

  “It’s all right, Dar. You’re going to be fine.”

  There was nothing else Niner could say. Darman hadn’t mentioned Etain since the night she was killed. Niner decided it was still too risky to raise the subject. But he made up his mind that he’d get Darman out of the Imperial Army by brute force if necessary. How—that was another matter. But he was a commando. He’d think of something.