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  Maybe they’d arrived to mark the anniversary. Nobody outside the Grand Army seemed to bother about it.

  “What are they doing here?” Sev muttered. “Why now?”

  Wad’e Tay’haai and Mij Gilamar were two of the Cuy’val Dar, the training sergeants recruited personally by Jango Fett to train clone commandos in Kamino. Most were Mandalorians, and most had disappeared again once their contract was over, living up to their title: “those who no longer exist.” But now they were reappearing in ones and twos. It just made Scorch feel that his general suspicions were justified.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe Kal’s decided he likes the company of intellectuals.” He paused. Tay’haai still had that ancient bronzium spear slung across his back and a beskar flute hanging from his belt. They were both lethal weapons. “You think he ever uses those things?”

  “Sure of it,” Sev said. “I heard Zey was trying to recruit Cuy’val Dar again to cross-train ordinary troopers.”

  “Smacks of desperation.”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, we are desperate.”

  The four Mandalorians exchanged a few words and disappeared. Without his helmet systems, Scorch couldn’t overhear anything at that distance. “Why did Fett recruit any non-Mando sergeants at all?”

  Sev shrugged. “He said it was for the skills mix, but I reckon he just couldn’t find a hundred Mandos to front up for him.”

  Scorch followed Sev back into the accommodation block. He often wondered how the commandos trained by aruetiise—non-Mandalorians, a word that could mean anything from foreigner to traitor—felt about being surrounded by others who were so steeped in Mandalorian culture. There weren’t that many left, though. Out of twenty-five hundred or so who completed training by aruetiise, fewer than a thousand remained. It said a lot for Mandalorian training.

  “We could train the white jobs better ourselves,” Scorch said. “We’ve got experience to pass on to them.”

  Sev picked up his helmet from the table and inverted it to begin calibration. “You fed up with fighting, then? Want a nice desk job?”

  “No, just saying…”

  Scorch tried to avoid thinking too much because life was now full of questions that were beyond his power to answer or even influence. They crept up on him at unguarded moments: in the ’freshers, or while he sat in the gunship en route to an insertion, and just before he fell asleep. Where was the Grand Army going to get more troops? If they started cross-training more meat-cans as commandos, who backfilled their positions? Things looked more stretched every day.

  And where were all those zillions of shabla droids the Separatists were supposed to have? They had plenty, but if they had as many as Intel claimed, they must have been having a party somewhere and sitting out the war. One of the Null ARCs swore blind that there was only a fraction of that number deployed.

  The Nulls knew a lot that they didn’t share with the commando squads. When they didn’t know something, Scorch got worried. He kept forgetting how many zeros there were in a quadrillion, but whatever it was, it was a lot more droids than he’d encountered.

  “Maybe Palpatine will have to start recruiting citizens,” he said hopefully.

  Sev laughed. He didn’t do that often. “I’d rather work shorthanded than have to serve with mongrels. You’ve seen what they’re like as fleet officers. You want them as infantry?”

  “At least the war would be over quicker. We’d win or lose horribly.”

  “True. Brutal, but true.”

  But what happens to us when it ends?

  It was the kind of question that whiny bunch Omega kept asking. Scorch couldn’t plan that far ahead. All he knew was that the Grand Army would run out of troops in a year or so, if casualty rates held constant, and he wasn’t seeing anywhere near enough replacements coming in.

  “Someone said that Palpatine’s started producing clones on Coruscant because he doesn’t trust the Kaminoans not to get their facilities trashed by the Seps again,” Scorch said.

  Sev huffed and got on with calibrating. “Yeah, like the rumor that we were getting some super-duper new ion cannon…”

  He was right. It was another dumb rumor like so many they’d heard before. If the Chancellor was breeding more clone troops, he’d have told everyone, just to boost morale and scare the Seps. And if he had them, he’d deploy them.

  Scorch had seen evidence of neither.

  But if he was breeding them… they wouldn’t be ready for a long time. Kamino clones took ten standard years to mature.

  No, it was all buzz, the stream of tall tales, general halfheard gossip, and occasional nuggets of truth that circulated among the ranks. There were no extra reinforcements on the horizon.

  Galactic City, Coruscant,

  737 days ABG

  Surveillance was an art, and so was evading it.

  Republic Treasury agent Besany Wennen had tailed a good number of frauders and embezzlers in the last six years, but she’d never been the subject of a investigation herself. As she headed home from the office after a late finish—some work was best done while colleagues were absent, especially the kind of work that would get her arrested—she slid her hand into her pocket out of habit to check two things. One was the Merr-Sonn blaster that Mereel, Null ARC trooper N-7, had given her; the other was her datapad, full of heavily encrypted data that should never have left the Treasury mainframe.

  I’m a spy. I’m working against my own government. I was always such a good girl, wasn’t I, Dad? And now look what’s become of me.

  Her father would have understood, though, she was sure. He’d taught her to stand up for what she believed. The blaster was simply the kind of precaution you had to take when you were meddling in the Chancellor’s secrets. At night, even under the garish lighting of a quarter thronged with beings from every part of the galaxy, Besany felt utterly alone and hunted.

  Every day—sometimes in the morning, sometimes on her way home—she was convinced someone a few paces behind was watching her. She’d turn, seeing nothing but commuters with woes other than hers on their minds, but the uneasy feeling wouldn’t go away. Sometimes it even happened in the office. She wondered if one of the shapeshifting Gurlanin spies was still shadowing her; but they’d left Coruscant now, and if they put their minds to it, not even a Jedi could detect them.

  This time, though, the sensation of being stalked wasn’t just her guilt talking.

  Just as the Gurlanin had warned, someone was following her. A man had caught her attention at the speeder bus platform near the Treasury building. She was used to attracting stares—she was very tall, very blond—but this scrutiny was different, a kind of fixed, slightly-past-her glance that meant the man was keeping her carefully in his peripheral vision, trying to look as if he were taking no notice of her. Some might have said Besany was just paranoid, but she was a professional investigator, and she just knew. Her gut was rarely wrong.

  The man was graying, middle-aged, and portly, an anonymous-looking human male in a well-worn, high-necked business suit just like millions of others. He seemed to change his mind about waiting for the speeder bus to the university and walked ten meters behind Besany.

  She caught sight of him reflected in the transparisteel walls of Galos Mall. He was tailing her, no doubt about it.

  And if you’ve not arrested me yet, chances are you can’t… or you don’t know what I’m up to.

  It was hard to imagine what can’t meant for a government that seemed to use emergency powers with such careless and unopposed ease. Besany had been waiting in silent dread for a knock on the door in the middle of the night ever since she’d first started bending the rules, and then twisting them out of all recognition on behalf of Sergeant Kal Skirata—Kal’buir, Papa Kal—whose extraordinary paternal charisma made her throw aside the caution of a lifetime.

  It was for a moral cause. She never had any doubt about that. It was just a healthy fear of getting caught.

  She glimpsed her stalker in the
transparisteel shopfront again, and her stomach churned.

  The more she dug into the accounts of the Grand Army, the more anomalies she found—bogus companies, credits being channeled into cloning facilities far from Kamino—and yet there were no extra troops appearing to bolster the beleaguered Grand Army, now stretched dangerously thin across the galaxy. Numbers were her life; but the numbers in Chancellor Palpatine’s defense budget didn’t even come close to adding up.

  You’re building another secret army, aren’t you, Chancellor? And that’s why the Kaminoans are worried. They know something’s up.

  Besany didn’t break her pace. She kept on walking, still relatively safe among the crowds, and tried to decide whether to carry on to the air taxi platform, grab a cab, and escape her apparent pursuer, or to divert down the next walkway to nowhere in particular and flush him out.

  And then what? Run away? Shoot him?

  The man was still behind her as she stepped onto the moving slidewalk that linked the lower level of Galos Mall to the fashion floors. She leaned one-handed on the safety rail as the moving belt carried her past the holodisplays of garments, letting her gaze sweep over him before turning to look at the other side. When she reached the ready-to-wear section, she stepped off at the last moment and thought she’d lost him, but after a few minutes she caught sight of him again riffling through impossibly frilly underclothes on a rail as if shopping for his wife. His air of bemusement looked authentic.

  Of course, I might just be paranoid after all…

  Besany spun around and headed back to the slidewalk down to the walkway level again. If he followed her this time, she decided, she’d grab an air taxi, or maybe even confront him. Yes, she could do that: she’d walk right up to him, look him in the eye, smile charmingly, and ask him if he knew her.

  Do I just want to shake him off, or find out who he is?

  If Palpatine’s agents wanted to kill her, they’d had plenty of opportunities. This man was probably just finding out who she associated with and where she went. The slidewalk dipped at a gentle gradient down to the walkway, and she stepped off at a race-walking pace to the air taxi rank. His only option then would be to follow her home, and then—then she would have an excuse to shoot him.

  But even if you do… there’ll be another one to take his place.

  How much did they know? Treasury security was her business. She was certain they didn’t realize she was downloading data from the budget system.

  Ahead of her, a tower of black transparisteel hung like a waterfall, a different-themed restaurant on every floor. She could see the diners and the sporadic burst of flame as chefs prepared cojayav wings at the tables; and she could still see the man in the suit reflected in the ambling crowd behind her. They were well inside the entertainment district now. The walkways were packed with well-heeled Coruscanti and off-world tourists out to sample the best cuisine in the galactic capital. Crowds were useful insurance, but they were also places where the worst could happen.

  Besany slid her datapad into the inside pocket of her coat, pretending to fumble for her transit identichip, and gripped the blaster in her pocket.

  It was purely for comfort. There was no way she could use a weapon here in this crowded, very public place. Her newfound friends in the Coruscant Security Force could make the problem go away if she opened fire, but they couldn’t make thousands of people turn a blind eye. Attention was the last thing she needed right now.

  The plaza was growing more packed as she neared the taxi platform. A line of diners waiting for tables at the Vesari fry-house had formed a dam in the sea of visitors, slowing the flow of foot traffic so much that the crowd began to form eddies. Besany was losing ground to the man in the suit; she could see him as she turned to avoid the queue, so she darted sideways into the colonnade of small tapcafs to bypass the crowd.

  She was banking on him not trying anything stupid—as in fatally stupid—in public. The colonnade led to a parking area for private speeders, so if she cut through there she could rejoin the main walkway by the taxi platform. But the permacrete square was a deserted maze of vessels crisscrossed with long black shadows, and she realized she’d made a dangerous mistake. She should have stuck with the crowds.

  Hand on her blaster, she turned. There was no point running. She was almost face-to-face with the man now, a matter of paces away, and she met his eyes.

  He seemed surprised when she drew the blaster from her pocket. But his wide-eyed expression wasn’t directed at her. It was because someone else was suddenly right behind him, an arm clamped around his neck, and his sharp gasp was cut short. Besany heard a faint gurgling. The man’s right leg flailed a couple of times, and then he seemed to be standing frozen on tiptoe, motionless.

  “Just because you’re following someone,” said a familiar, much-missed voice, “doesn’t mean you’re not being followed.” Clothing rustled. “Let’s just check what you’re carrying… oh, a nice DH-seventeen. That’s not quite your style, is it?”

  A battered gray delivery speeder dropped out of nowhere and Besany didn’t have time to move past complete confusion into fear. Its side hatch opened: a huge hairy Wookiee arm shot out and hauled the man inboard. Captain Ordo—Null ARC-11 Ordo, her Ordo, her lover—shoved the taper-nosed DH-17 blaster inside his jacket and beckoned impatiently to her. He was supposed to be on deployment light-years away, not here. She hadn’t even spotted him following them.

  Neither had the man in the suit, it seemed.

  “Ordo, you said you were in the Outer Rim,” she whispered, looking around to see if there were witnesses, heart hammering. “How long have you been following me?”

  The speeder dropped a little lower, and he put one boot on the hatch rail. Ordo looked very different out of his pristine white ARC trooper armor: in nondescript dark street clothes, he could have been anyone from a bodyguard to a thug from one of the local gangs that preyed on unwary tourists.

  “I like to keep an eye on you,” he said. “Get in.”

  “What are you going to do with him? If his control knows he was following me, then they’ll know I’m involved.”

  Ordo seemed disturbingly relaxed. It was as if he’d never been taught that kidnapping people was wrong. But Skirata’s special forces squads abducted, assassinated, and spied for the Republic, and there was an inevitability if you bred hyper-smart, ultra-hard fighting men: sooner or later, they understood their power, and used it for their own ends if those ends weren’t met by the Republic.

  “Can’t stand around chatting,” Ordo said. “Get in, cyar’ika.”

  Ordo always exuded unshakable confidence in a crisis, and Besany now understood why troops would follow some officers anywhere. Before she could even think about it, she found herself scrambling into the speeder’s open hatch, following orders without argument. A stench of cooking oil and stale mealbread—the speeder’s previous cargo, probably—hit her. In the gloom, a Wookiee sat crammed awkwardly into one of the human-sized seats with a firm grip on the man in the suit. It was Enacca, one of Skirata’s fixers. Kal’buir’s associates were an eclectic mix of species and professional backgrounds, from the respectable to the outright criminal, but mostly the marginal beings who needed to duck and dive to get by. Skirata was very good at getting a motley crew to work together for mutual advantage. He’d missed his vocation, Besany thought. Politics needed a man like that.

  Enacca made a quiet rumbling trill deep in her throat. Ordo shrugged in response.

  “No, I haven’t a clue who this chakaar is,” he said. “Get this crate airborne and we’ll find out.”

  “What do you want?” the man asked. “My wallet? My speeder?”

  He was trying to play ordinary, and failing. He wasn’t scared enough—or even angry enough—at being plucked off the street. Any normal being would have been reduced to a quivering heap if they were kidnapped by a Wookiee and a man who looked the way Ordo did right then.

  Ordo held out one hand, palm open. His other hand drew a
short-barreled custom Verpine pistol. “Not that I think you’ll be carrying your real identichip, but let’s have a look.”

  Besany shrank back against the bulkhead. She was now perfectly safe but even with a Wookiee and a Null ARC trooper taking care of her problem, she felt uneasy sitting so close to someone who’d been tailing her. Her adrenaline was starting to ebb. This wasn’t how she saw her sober career in the Republic’s civil service panning out. Ordo had literally crashed into her life a year ago, and her galaxy had been changed out of all recognition. Today was just the new normality.

  Enacca lifted the speeder clear of the parking area, banking over the artificial cliffs and canyons of Coruscant. Besany could see the nightscape through the small viewport at the rear. She wondered where they might be going; Enacca’s specialty was procuring vessels and safe houses—safe for the clones and Skirata’s associates, anyway. Wherever they were taking this man wouldn’t be safe for him at all.

  “My name’s Chadus,” the man said, eyes following Ordo’s hands as he rifled through the contents of the wallet. “I work the late shift at the transit authority.”

  “Sounds like a load of osik to me. Why were you following this woman?”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “You always hang around attractive females in the lingerie section, do you? There’s a word for men like you.”

  “I wasn’t following her. I was looking for something for my wife—”

  “I’m the jealous kind. I don’t like perverts stalking my girlfriend.”

  “I told you—”

  “Why were you carrying a serious piece like a DH-seventeen?”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, Coruscant is getting pretty rough.”