Hard Contact Read online

  She eased herself up on her elbows, then her knees, and looked around.

  Why did they have to manure barq so late in the season anyway? She fumbled in the pockets of her cloak for a cloth. Now if only she could find a stream, she could clean herself up. She pulled a handful of stalks, crushed them into a ball, and tried to scrape off the worst of the dung and debris stuck to her.

  “That’s a pretty expensive crop to be using for that,” a voice said.

  Etain gulped in a breath and spun around to find a local in a grubby smock scowling at her. He looked thin, worn out, and annoyed; he was holding a threshing tool. “Do you know how much that stuff’s worth?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. Sliding her hand carefully inside her cloak, she felt for the familiar cylinder. She hadn’t wanted the Weequay to know that she was a Jedi, but if this farmer was considering turning her in for a few loaves or a bottle of urrqal, she’d need her lightsaber handy. “It was your barq or my life, I’m afraid.”

  The farmer stared at the crushed stalks and the scattered bead-like grains, tight-lipped. Yes, barq fetched a huge price in the restaurants of Coruscant: it was a luxury, and the people who grew it for export couldn’t afford it. That didn’t seem to bother the Neimoidians who controlled the trade. It never did.

  “I’ll pay for the damage,” Etain said, her hand still inside the cloak.

  “What were they after you for?” the farmer asked, ignoring her offer.

  “The usual,” she said.

  “Oh-ah, you’re not that good looking.”

  “Charming.”

  “I know who you are.”

  Oh no. Her grip closed. “You do?”

  “I reckon.”

  A little more food for his family. A few hours’ drunken oblivion, courtesy of urrqal. That was all she was to him. He made as if to step closer and she drew her arm clear of her cloak, because she was fed up with running and she didn’t like the look of that threshing tool.

  Vzzzzzmmmm.

  “Oh, great,” the farmer sighed, eyeing the shaft of pure blue light. “Not one of you lot. That’s all we need.”

  “Yes,” she said, and held the lightsaber steady in front of her face. Her stomach had knotted, but she kept her voice under control. “I am Padawan Etain Tur-Mukan. You can try to turn me in, if you want to test my skill, but I’d prefer that you help me instead. Your call, sir.”

  The farmer stared at the lightsaber as if he was trying to work out a price for it. “Didn’t help your Master much, that thing, did it?”

  “Master Fulier was unfortunate. And betrayed.” She lowered the lightsaber but didn’t cut the beam. “Are you going to help me?”

  “We’re going to have Ghez Hokan’s thugs all over us if I—”

  “I think they’re busy,” Etain said.

  “What do you want from us?”

  “Shelter, for the moment.”

  The farmer sucked his teeth thoughtfully. “Okay. Come on, Padawan—”

  “Get used to calling me Etain, please.” She thumbed off the lightsaber: the light died with a ffumm sound, and she slipped the hilt back inside her cloak. “Just to be on the safe side.”

  Etain trailed after him, trying not to smell herself, but it was hard, nauseatingly hard. Even a scent-hunting gdan wouldn’t recognize her as a human. It was getting dark now, and the farmer kept glancing over his shoulder at her.

  “Oh-ah.” He shook his head, engaged in some internal conversation. “I’m Birhan, and this is my land. And I thought you lot were supposed to be able to use some sort of mind control tricks.”

  “How do you know I haven’t?” Etain lied.

  “Oh-ah,” he said, and nothing more.

  She wasn’t going to volunteer the obvious if he hadn’t spotted it for himself. A disappointment to her Master, she was clearly not the best of the bunch. She struggled with the Force and she grappled with self-discipline, and she was here because she and Master Fulier happened to be nearby when a job needed doing. Fulier never could resist a challenge and long odds, and it looked as if he’d paid the price. They hadn’t found his body yet, but there had been no word from him, either.

  Yes, Etain was a Padawan, technically speaking.

  She just happened to be one who was a breath away from building permadomes in refugee camps. She reasoned that part of a Jedi’s skill was the simple use of psychology. And if Birhan wanted to think the Force was strong in her, and that there was a lot more behind the external shell of a gawky, plain girl covered in stinking dung, then that was fine by her.

  It would keep her alive a little longer while she worked out what to do next.

  Fleet Support, Ord Mantell, barrack block 5 Epsilon

  It was a waste, a rotten waste.

  RC-1309 busied himself maintaining his boots. He cleaned out the clamps, blowing the red dust clear with a squirt of air from the pressure gun. He rinsed the liners and shook them dry. There was no point being idle while he was waiting to be chilled down.

  “Sergeant?”

  He looked up. The commando who had walked in placed his survival pack, armor, and black bodysuit on the bunk opposite and stared back. His readout panel identified him as RC-8015.

  “I’m Fi,” he said, and held out his hand for shaking. “So you lost your squad, too.”

  “Niner,” RC-1309 said without taking the proffered hand. “So, ner vod—my brother—you’re the sole survivor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you hold back while your brothers pressed on? Or were you just lucky?”

  Fi stood there with his hands on his hips, identical to Niner in every way except that he was … different. He spoke a little differently. He smelled subtly different. He moved his hands … not like Niner’s squad did, not at all.

  “I did my job,” Fi said carefully. “And I’d rather be with them than here … ner vod.”

  Niner considered him for a while, and went back to cleaning his boots. Fi put his kit in the locker beside the bunks, then swung himself up into the top rack in one smooth motion. He folded his arms under his head very precisely and lay staring up at the bulkhead as if he were meditating.

  If he had been Sev, Niner would have known exactly what he was doing, even without looking. But Sev was gone.

  Clone troopers lost brothers in training. So did commandos. But troopers were socialized with whole sections, platoons, companies, even regiments, and that meant that even after the inevitable deaths and removals during live exercises, there were still plenty of people around you whom you knew well. Commandos worked solely with each other.

  Niner had lost everyone he had grown up with, and so had Fi.

  He’d lost a brother before—Two-Eight—on exercise. The three survivors had welcomed the replacement, although they had always felt he was slightly different—a little distant—as if he had never quite believed he’d been accepted.

  But they performed to expected levels of excellence together—and as long as they did, their Kaminoan technicians and motley band of alien instructors didn’t seem to care how they felt about it.

  But the commandos cared. They just kept it to themselves.

  “It was a waste,” Niner said.

  “What was?” Fi said.

  “Deploying us in an operation like Geonosis. It was an infantry job. Not special ops.”

  “That sounds like criticism of—”

  “I’m just making the point that we couldn’t perform to maximum effectiveness.”

  “Understood. Maybe when we’re revived we’ll be able to do what we’re really trained for.”

  Niner wanted to say that he missed his squad, but that wasn’t something to confide in a stranger. He inspected his boots and was satisfied. Then he stood up and spread his bodysuit flat on the mattress and checked it for vacuum integrity with the sweep-sensor in his glove. It was a ritual so ingrained in him that he hardly thought about it: maintain boots, suit, and armor plates, recalibrate helmet systems, check heads-up display, strip down and rea
ssemble DC-17, empty and repack survival pack. Done. It took him twenty-six minutes and twenty seconds, give or take two seconds. Well-maintained gear was often the difference between life and death. So was two seconds.

  He closed the top of his pack with a clack and secured the seal. Then he checked the catches that held the separate ordnance pack to see that they were moving freely. That mattered when he needed to jettison explosive materials fast. When he glanced up, Fi was propped on one elbow, looking down at him from the bunk.

  “Dry rations go on the fifth layer,” he said.

  Niner always packed them farther down, between his spare rappelling line and his hygiene kit. “In your squad, maybe,” he said, and carried on.

  Fi took the hint and rolled over on his back again, no doubt to meditate on how differently things might be done in the future.

  After a while he started singing very quietly, almost under his breath: Kom’rk tsad droten troch nyn ures adenn, Dha Werda Verda a’den tratu. They were the wrath of the warrior’s shadow and the gauntlet of the Republic; Niner knew the song. It was a traditional Mandalorian war chant, designed to boost the morale of normal men who needed a bit of psyching up before a fight. The words had been altered a little to have meaning for the armies of clone warriors.

  We don’t need all that, Niner thought. We were born to fight, nothing else.

  But he found himself joining in anyway. It was a comfort. He placed his gear in the locker, rolled onto his bunk, and matched note and beat perfectly with Fi, two identical voices in the deserted barrack room.

  Niner would have traded every remaining moment of his life for a chance to rerun the previous day’s engagement. He would have held Sev and DD back; he would have sent O-Four west with the E-Web cannon.

  But he hadn’t.

  Gra’tua cuun hett su dralshy’a. Our vengeance burns brighter still.

  Fi’s voice trailed off into silence the merest fraction of a section before Niner’s. He heard him swallow hard.

  “I was up there with them, Sarge,” he said quietly. “I didn’t hang back. Not at all.”

  Niner closed his eyes. He regretted hinting that Fi might have done anything less.

  “I know, brother,” he said. “I know.”

  2

  Clone personnel have free will, even if they do follow orders. If they couldn’t think for themselves, we’d be better off with droids—and they’re a lot cheaper, too. They have to be able to respond to situations we can’t imagine. Will that change them in ways we can’t predict? Perhaps. But they have to be mentally equipped to win wars. Now thaw those men out. They have a job to do.

  —Jedi Master Arligan Zey, intelligence officer

  Secure briefing room, Fleet Support, Ord Mantell, three standard months after Geonosis

  Fleet Support Base hadn’t been built to accommodate tens of thousands of troops, and it showed. The briefing room was a cold store, and it still smelled of food and spices. Darman could see the loading rails that spanned the ceiling, but he kept his focus on the holoscreen in front of him.

  It didn’t feel so bad to be revived after stasis. He was still a commando. They hadn’t reconditioned him. That meant—that meant he’d performed to expected standards at Geonosis. He’d done well. He felt positive.

  But his helmet felt different. There was a lot more data on the HUD, the heads-up display. He flicked between modes for a while, controlling each command with rapid blinks, noting the extra systems and hardware that had been installed since Geonosis.

  Sitting to his left was his new sergeant, who preferred to be called Niner when superior officers weren’t around, and RC-8015, nicknamed Fi. They, too, were the sole survivors of their squads. At least they knew what he was going through.

  There was a fourth makeshift seat in the row—a blue alloy packing crate—and it was unoccupied. Jedi Master Arligan Zey, hands clasped behind his back, paced up and down in front of the screen, cloak flapping, breaking the holoprojection each time. Another Jedi, who had not been identified, was splitting his attention between Zey and the three helmeted commandos sitting absolutely still on the row of crates.

  The reflective surfaces of the spray-clean alloy walls enabled Darman to discreetly observe an unusual alien—one he had never seen before. He had been trained to take in every detail of his surroundings, although it was very difficult not to notice the creature.

  The alien was about a meter and a half long, and it was slinking around the walls, sniffing. Black-furred and glossy, it prowled on long delicate legs, thrusting a narrow muzzle into crevices and exhaling sharply each time it did. Earlier, Darman had heard Zey address it as Valaqil: he also said it was a Gurlanin, a shapeshifter.

  Darman had heard about shapeshifters in training, but this wasn’t a Clawdite. He was watching its reflection in his right-field peripheral vision when the door swung open and another commando entered, helmet tucked rigidly under his right arm, and saluted smartly.

  “RC-three-two-two-two, sir,” he said. “Apologies for keeping you, sir. The medics didn’t want to discharge me.”

  No wonder: there was a stripe of raw flesh across his face that started just under his right eye, ran clean across his mouth, and finally ended at the left side of his jaw. He certainly didn’t look like any of the other clones now. Darman wondered what level of persuasion it had taken to get the medical staff to skip a course of bacta.

  “Are you fit, soldier?” Zey said.

  “Fit to fight, sir.” He sat down next to Darman and assumed the same ramrod posture, glancing at him briefly in acknowledgment. So this was their fourth man. They were a squad again—numerically, anyway. Omega Squad.

  The other Jedi was staring at the newcomer with an expression of barely concealed astonishment. Zey seemed to notice and nudged his colleague. “Padawan Jusik is new to clone armies, as are we all.” That was understandable: Darman had never seen Jedi before the Battle of Geonosis, and he was equally fascinated. “You’ll excuse his curiosity.”

  Zey gestured at the holoscreen.

  “This is your objective, gentlemen—Qiilura.” He glanced at his datapad, reading intently. “This data has been obtained from high-altitude reconnaissance, so it has its limitations.”

  Zey went on, “Qiilura is technically neutral. Unfortunately, its neutral status is likely due to end very soon.”

  He had referred to them as gentlemen. Maybe Zey didn’t know what to call commandos. It was still early days for all of them.

  The image on the screen began as a blue-and-white disc, zooming in to views of chains of islands, deep river inlets, and rolling plains peppered with patches of woodland and gameboard fields. It looked pleasant and peaceful, and hence utterly alien to Darman, whose entire life beyond Tipoca City had been spent on battlefields, real or virtual.

  “You’re looking at farming communities, almost all of them located here in this region because it’s the most fertile land,” Zey said. “They produce barq, kushayan, and fifty percent of the luxury foodstuffs and beverages in the galaxy. There’s also gem mining. The population is nevertheless living at subsistence level, and there is no government other than the law of commerce and profit—Neimoidian traders effectively own the planet, or at least the productive areas that are of use to them. They enforce their stewardship through a militia controlled by Ghez Hokan—a Mandalorian so unpleasantly violent that he was actually asked to leave the Death Squad for enjoying his work too much.”

  Jusik looked up from his datapad. He appeared to be following the presentation. “Scum,” he said. “One of our sources calls them scum, indicating … a very disagreeable group of people.”

  Zey paused for breath as if to ensure that the last snippet of information had made its point. “Given how thinly stretched our resources are, we are unfortunately unable to justify intervening to deal with any injustice on Qiilura at this time. But we have excellent intelligence that indicates a significant military asset located there.”

  Darman was listening, and sti
ll watching the Gurlanin peripherally. It had moved around the room to sit upright beside Jusik, with its front paws neatly clasped before its chest. He was also observing Jusik. The Padawan still appeared riveted by the commandos. Darman was careful not to stare—even though any eye movement was disguised by his helmet—because Jedi knew things without having to see. His instructors had told him so. Jedi were omniscient, omnipotent, and to be obeyed at all times.

  Darman hung on Zey’s every word.

  “Qiilura isn’t on the main lane, so to speak,” Zey said. “Ideal for hiding, if that’s your intention. And there are things hidden there. We need you to apprehend one, and destroy the other—a Separatist scientist, Ovolot Qail Uthan, and her most recent project, a nanovirus. We have reason to believe both are at a research facility on Qiilura.”

  Zey paused, and Jusik filled the space. “We have a Jedi there, Master Kast Fulier, but we haven’t heard from him or his Padawan in some weeks.”

  Zey picked up again. “And let me assure you that we’ve been searching diligently for them. We have a location for our targets, but no plans of the buildings. The lack of plans will make your retrieval and sabotage task more challenging, as will the communications situation. Questions?”

  Niner raised a gloved hand from his lap. “Sir, what is the comm situation, exactly?”

  “Neimoidians.”

  “Not quite with you, sir.”

  Zey looked blank for a moment, and then his face lit up with revelation. “The Neimoidians own and control all the infrastructure—the native population scarcely have pits for refreshers, but their overlords enjoy the finest comlink net and air traffic control that credits can buy. They like to ensure that nobody does business without their knowledge. So they monitor everything, and very little intelligence comes out—you’ll have to avoid using the long-range comlink. Do you understand me, soldier?”

  “Sir, yes sir, General Zey.”