501st: An Imperial Commando Novel Read online

  “Sorry,” Jusik said. “I’m not making light of what happened to you.”

  Ordo shrugged. “Mereel took it the worst. But we’re all messed up.” His frank assessment of his own mental health was almost touching. “Imprecise term, but it sums up the effect Kamino had on us.”

  “Have you discussed it with Kal’buir?”

  “Yes, and I agree with him. Kina Ha’s genetic material is too valuable to pass up just because we have nightmares about the kaminiise.”

  Jusik chewed over the implications of that again as he parked the speeder as close as he could to the Oyu’baat cantina. Kina Ha was another long shot in the bid to find a way to reverse the clones’ accelerated aging, and all of those so far had unraveled into dangerous missions and betrayals. If the Kaminoans had engineered some of their own kind to live exceptionally long lives, then there was something—some set of genes, some technique—that Dr. Uthan might exploit to reset the clones’ aging process to normal. Yes, Jusik could see how important it was; Skirata lived for his clone sons, and giving them a normal life span had become a sacred quest. But this … it had to be traded off against the risk of Kyrimorut’s location leaking, and whatever would happen to Ny Vollen’s regard for Skirata when she worked out that he would turn Kina Ha into soup if he thought it would save his boys.

  That’s going to hurt Ny. Maybe him, too.

  “Let me ask you a question, Bard’ika,” Ordo said. “Does it trouble you that Kina Ha is a Jedi?”

  “Why should it?”

  “Old memories.”

  “Not bothered at all.”

  Ordo looked dubious. “But Kaminoans aren’t a compassionate species, so what kind of Jedi will she be?”

  Jusik thought about it. He’d never heard of a Force-sensitive Kaminoan. And one who lived for centuries, maybe even millennia—that made her a one-off in every sense. “A lonely one, I think.”

  Ordo raised one eyebrow. “Inside, I’m crying. Really. So is Kal’buir, I’m sure.” Then he dropped the subject. Jusik decided that Ordo thought it was perfectly normal to try to erase your past because he’d done it, too, or as best he could. He seemed to be worrying that the arrival of real Jedi might shake Jusik’s resolve.

  No. No, it won’t. Now now.

  Keldabe was a few hours’ flight time south of Kyrimorut and the climate was much milder. The snow hadn’t reached this far. Jusik ambled through the narrow streets and down alleys overhung by rickety buildings, relishing the sheer impossibility of the city. One moment he was in a street that hadn’t changed in the best part of a thousand years, all time-twisted wooden frames and ancient plaster, and the next he was in the shadow of a stark industrial warehouse or a polished granite tower. Keldabe was an anarchic fortress of a city on a granite outcrop on the bend in the Kelita River, almost completely surrounded by the Kelita River, a natural moat that changed from picturesque calm to a torrent within a kilometer. Jusik loved the place. It captured everything about Mandalore for him, and he was happy that intelligence gathering would bring him down here more often.

  The clones had to keep their helmets on, of course. No Mandalorian cared if his neighbor was a deserter from the Grand Army, but the Imperials were around, and the last thing anyone needed was a clone stormtrooper coming face-to-face with a man who looked exactly like himself.

  The stormies, as everyone now called them, hadn’t come into town yet. They probably wouldn’t venture into the Oyu’baat anyway. It was the oldest cantina on the planet, open for business when the Mandalorians fought against the Old Republic, which was also the last time anyone seemed to have changed the menu.

  The place was clean but somehow enticingly seedy. The smells that wafted out when Jusik opened the doors were an adventure in themselves. He felt the thrill of ages, because everything happened here; as a Force-sensitive, the echoes called to him as vividly as if he’d been present when the events took place. If Mandalore had a government of any kind, then its business was done in the Oyu’baat’s booths and at its long counter as chieftains of the clans debated, reached agreements, and struck deals.

  So the Oyu’baat was the obvious place to hear gossip about the Imperial garrison. Mandos tended not to keep secrets among themselves, and it saved a lot of high-risk observation time just to sit and listen—and enjoy an ale.

  Jusik took off his helmet and bought a mug of ne’tra gal. He didn’t look much like his wanted poster behind the counter—all bounties were posted there, for the benefit of patrons who were in the hunting business—but nobody would have turned him in anyway. Jusik was a Mandalorian now, just another adult taken into the fold like so many others, whose past no longer mattered and wasn’t discussed. But maybe they left him alone because anyone who knew his past also knew that he was under the protection of Kal Skirata. Jusik remained wary.

  Ordo kept his helmet on and settled in a booth. Jusik ordered a bottle of ale for Ordo to take away. The barkeep gave Jusik a sympathetic look.

  “Clone on the run, eh, ner vod?” Locals knew why some men kept their helmets on. He held the glass mug of ne’tra gal at arm’s length until the foam settled. “Don’t worry. Imperials don’t come in here. Made sure of it.”

  The barkeep didn’t say how he’d achieved that, and Jusik didn’t ask. He could hear a group of men convulsing with laughter. The word kyrbes—mythosaur skull, the Mand’alor’s traditional crown—jumped out at him.

  Well, they thought the thing was funny, too. Jusik decided to gather a little intel.

  “Vode, what’s going on with that skull?” he asked. “Why are the Imperials moving in?”

  One of the group, a thickset man in his fifties with deep brown armor and knuckles tattooed with Mando’a runes, was laughing so hard that he started coughing. He tried to answer. But every time he almost got a word out, the guffaws overtook him and he bent over with his hands braced on his knees. His friends were in the same state. One of them could only manage a wheezing hurr-hurr-hurr sound. The whole cantina was watching now.

  “You don’t know what that is?” the man said eventually. He wiped tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand. “Really?”

  “Really. We don’t usually go south of the river, so we’ve never seen it before today.”

  “Go on, Jarkyc, tell him.” One of the group shoved the man in the back. Mando humor could range from sly to unashamedly lavatorial, so Jusik couldn’t guess what was coming. He just sensed in the Force that Jarkyc found something both hilarious and confusing. “It’s the best thing I’ve heard all year.”

  Jarkyc got his breath back and cleared his throat. “It was the dumbest idea.” He jerked a thumb at one of his companions. “Hayar’s idiot brother thought Mandalore could attract adventure tourists. He built the skull as a theme park years ago. A place where folks could be entertained with mindless aruetyc osik. Needless to say, it never opened.”

  The men started laughing again. Jusik couldn’t piece it together. “So why are the Imperials interested in it?”

  “We’ve been bad boys. We told them it was an ancient Mandalorian temple that held great magical power for us simple folk, and so …” He took more wheezing gulps of air. “Well, they wanted to build the garrison in there, on account of it having so much significance to us. So we sold it to them.”

  The whole cantina erupted in raucous laughter. Beskar gauntlets hammered on tables. Yes, a combination of aruetyc gullibility, playing dumb, and getting paid a good price for it was a fine Mando prank.

  “Mythosaurs weren’t that big, were they?” Jusik said.

  “Maybe not, but they don’t know that, do they?”

  “Aruetiise,” Hayar said. “They’ll believe any old osik you tell them. They think we’re superstitious savages.”

  “Hey, retract the superstitious bit!” someone shouted over the laughter. “Think we should leave some offerings at the temple, just to show how pious we are?”

  Other drinkers joined in. “What, the ones with five-minute detonation timers, or the
incendiary sort?”

  “Proves that someone on Kamino forgot to use Jango’s brain cells.”

  “Nah, it’s not the clones. It was that garrison commander—some aristo from Kemla. Kaysh mirsh solus.”

  It was a lovely Mandalorian insult: his brain cell’s lonely. Mandalorians had more words for stupid and stabbing than any other language, and Jusik couldn’t help thinking the two were somehow inextricably linked.

  “So what does that tell you?” Jusik asked Ordo, sliding into the booth.

  “I’d take a guess that the Empire wants to inspire awe and wonder among the natives,” Ordo said. “Or they think it’s going to curry favor with us. Either way, it tells me that whoever’s making the decisions doesn’t know Mandalorians very well. And that means it’s not Palpatine, because I think he does understand us, in an exploitative sort of way.”

  “Like Kal’buir says, it’ll be about beroyase bal beskar—Palps wants our mercenaries and our iron ore.” Jusik drained his ale in eight gulps. He’d never enjoyed ale on Coruscant, but it all felt very different here. He was filling out, putting on weight and muscle, and he felt happier being Bard’ika than he ever had in his life. “I wouldn’t mind taking a closer look at the skull.”

  “It’s like watching a speeder wreck, isn’t it?”

  “I’m having one of my feelings from a previous existence.”

  Ordo shrugged and pocketed the unopened bottle of ale. “Come on, a quick walk around town to see who’s about, and then you can go admire the kyrbes.”

  A walkabout normally resulted in buying odds and ends they couldn’t get in Enceri; engine parts for Parja’s workshop, toiletries for Dr. Uthan, and candies for everyone. Jusik hoped Mij Gilamar included dentistry in his prodigious range of medical skills, because clones and sugary food went hand in hand. Their accelerated aging seemed to demand a lot of calories.

  By the time they found a safe observation point for the grotesque mythosaur theme park, Ordo had already chomped his way happily through a half-kilo bag of candied nuts and was starting on the second.

  “You’ll regret that when your beskar’gam doesn’t fit anymore,” Jusik said, watching the skull from the speeder’s side screen.

  “I’ll burn this off easily.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I used to say.”

  Jusik was beginning to wonder if his Force senses were getting slack. He had an uneasy feeling about the garrison, which he filed under O for Obvious, but there was something else bothering him. He watched the procession of stormies, construction droids, and Imperial officers—who certainly got their new uniforms faster than Jusik ever received kit requests in the Grand Army—and looked for anything out of the run of normal-for-despots.

  “I see they’ve got Mando help,” he said, focusing on a figure in red beskar’gam. It was always hard to tell a male Mando from a tall female because the armor often obliterated the curves and gave women the same gait as the men. But he was sure it was a male. “Well, as long as Shysa hasn’t gone public with his resistance, what can they do?”

  Ordo shoved his bag of nuts in the speeder’s dashboard compartment and held his hand out for the electrobinoculars. “Let me look.”

  “There. The guy in red, black undersuit, talking to the Imperial.”

  Ordo froze. “Ah.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “In a way.”

  “What?”

  “Gilamar won’t be happy. You don’t know who that is, do you?”

  “If I did, Ord’ika, I wouldn’t have handed you the electros.”

  Ordo watched in silence for a little longer until the man took off his helmet for a moment to scratch his scalp.

  “Yes, that’s definitely him,” Ordo said. “Former Cuy’val Dar. One of Jango Fett’s less inspired choices for training sergeant—good soldier, but a complete nutter. Mij Gilamar had to be dragged off him more than once. Had a lady friend called Isabet Reau—also a sergeant, also mad as a box of Hapan chags.”

  “I need a name.” Jusik recalled all the gossip and filed names mentally. He needed to know who could upset the good-natured Gilamar that much. “Come on, who is it?”

  “The man who wants the old Mandalorian empire restored,” Ordo said, seeming to have lost interest in his nuts. “To the bad old days, that is. His name’s Dred Priest. And he’s a dead man already.”

  2

  If we’ve defrauded the galactic banking system out of a trillion credits, stolen the industrial secrets of the top dozen clonemasters, assassinated government intelligence agents, and spied upon, thieved from, sabotaged, and generally ticked off Palpatine at every level—well, harboring escaped Jedi really isn’t going to make things any worse for us, is it?

  —Deserter, Null ARC trooper N-10—now Jaing Skirata, Mandalorian mercenary

  Kyrimorut, Mandalore

  “So you know what you’re doing, Kal, yeah?”

  Mij Gilamar rarely gave advice outside of his two fields of professional expertise—killing or curing—but sometimes he used a certain tone that made Skirata’s shoulders hunch.

  It was a rebuke, a clip around the ear, however kindly put, and all the more cutting for it. No, Skirata was not sure what he was doing. He would have been the first to admit it. In fact, he was going to admit it right now. He stared up into the clear dusk in the general direction from which the freighter Cornucopia was due to make a low-level approach, and wondered if this was the moment when his talent for pulling off impulsive gambles had finally reached its limit.

  But it’s not just my neck, is it? It’s my boys. And it’s all the other unlucky shabuire who put their faith in me.

  “Okay, I’ve risked everyone’s life by letting the Jedi come here,” he said. “The more folks I gather in, the greater the odds that we’ll be found. But be honest, Mij’ika—if you’d had the chance of getting your hands on someone the aiwha-bait engineered to live longer, could you pass it up?”

  Gilamar kept his eyes on the sky. “No, probably not.”

  “I hear the but coming.”

  “It’s too late to change plans. I’d just be sniping.”

  Skirata heard something rustle in the undergrowth. His first thought was that it was Mird, but the strill was with Vau, light-years away in the Kashyyyk sector looking for leads on Sev. After long years of hating Mird, Skirata now missed the animal, and much as it surprised him, he missed Walon Vau, too. He thought of all the times he’d drawn his knife on both of them, and bitterly regretted years spent on infighting when there were so many real enemies around.

  The rustling turned out to be Mereel and Jaing strolling through the bushes. Jaing was either keeping an eye on Mereel, knowing his temper when it came to Kaminoans, or else planning to show off his distinctive gray leather gloves to Kina Ha to remind her what could happen to Kaminoans who didn’t behave.

  Am I sure this isn’t a setup? How could a Kaminoan Jedi with those genes land in my lap? She’s probably the only one of her kind. And I’m not that lucky.

  Gilamar sighed. “Maybe Ny’s had the sense to blindfold them. But they’re Jedi. They’ve got that radar ability, that direction thing.”

  “Yes, thanks, I do realize that once they get here, they know our location.” Skirata took out a strip of ruik root and chewed to calm his nerves. “They can have this location dragged out of them if they’re ever caught. So once they’re here …” He hadn’t thought that through yet. What the shab have I done? “But my priority is keeping the boys safe. So I won’t hesitate to put a round through both saber-jockeys if I think that needs doing. Is that the question you really wanted to ask, Mij?”

  Gilamar turned his head slowly to look at Skirata. “Kal, did you tell Ny why you were willing to hide the Jedi here?”

  No, he hadn’t. At least, he hadn’t spelled it out; he’d just reminded Ny that he wasn’t the good man she thought he was, but that he loved his boys. She knew what the stakes were, what was happening to Ordo and all the other clones. She should have put two and t
wo together. He didn’t plan to apologize for doing his duty as a father.

  “I never told her I wanted Kina Ha for spare parts, no,” he said.

  “She’s only seen the nice paternal Kal.” Gilamar held out his hand for a piece of ruik. “You might want to think how to break it to her. Maybe I should do it. Doctor’s bedside manner and all that osik.”

  “Tough. She’s a fine woman, but this isn’t about her.”

  Skirata liked Ny, so much that it scared him. He should have grown out of all that nonsense by now. And he owed her. But if A’den tried any harder to throw the two of them together, they’d break something.

  A’den would have to wait to get his own way for a change. Skirata had a mission, and he would not be diverted from it. His reason for living was his adopted sons, and without them … sometimes he wondered how long he would have lasted if he hadn’t taken a chance on Jango’s summons to Kamino. He was pretty sure that within a year, he’d have been dead in a gutter with a blaster hole through his head for pursuing one bigger, faster, younger bounty too many. He might even have ended up putting the hole there himself. He hadn’t enjoyed being the old Kal Skirata.

  And then he met the Nulls, breathtakingly courageous little kids barely big enough to grip a hold-out blaster, and his life began again as if he’d been resurrected. He’d been given a second chance to make a better job of it.

  I owe them everything.

  “Okay,” Gilamar said. “You trusted her with the location, and you trusted ARC troopers you didn’t even know, like Spar and Sull. So maybe you can find a way to trust these Jedi.”

  Jaing walked up behind Skirata and draped one arm on his father’s shoulder. Mereel appeared on the other side. They moved in like a close protection team.

  “I’ll make sure they know the house rules, Buir,” Mereel said. “Regardless of how much I want a nice pair of gloves like Jaing’s.”

  “Get your own Kaminoan, ner vod.” Jaing gave Skirata a rough hug and back-slap. “I need a matching belt to go with these.”