501st: An Imperial Commando Novel Page 5

  Gilamar just smiled. Like Skirata, he’d never been one for trophies. Come to think of it, neither had Vau. The three of them always looked pretty harmless for Mandalorians, with no scalps, hides, strings of teeth, or unidentifiable remains of their kills dangling from their shoulder plates. Maybe they needed to roughen up their image a bit and sport a few shriveled body parts that weren’t their own. Skirata tried to imagine what he’d be able to stomach hanging from his shoulder plate. He couldn’t think of anything. His own squeamishness surprised him sometimes.

  Mereel cocked his head. “Listen …”

  “Is everyone inside?” Skirata asked.

  “I don’t think a teenage girl and a senile Kaminoan are going to be a security problem, Buir.”

  “What if it’s not just them?”

  Jaing chambered a round in his Verpine rifle. “Then I’ll just have to empty the whole magazine, won’t I?”

  Skirata’s hearing had been wrecked by too many years of using noisy weapons, but his eyesight was okay. He watched Ny’s freighter skim just above the trees, no navigation lights visible, bringing with it a heady blend of hope for prolonging his boys’ lives and the real risk of losing everything he lived for.

  Every waif and stray that ended up here was potentially another mouth to betray the existence of the bastion, whether they intended to or not.

  And that included Ny Vollen.

  Skirata trusted her because A’den did. And she’d put herself on the line; she’d brought Etain’s body home, spied for the clan, and refused all payment. All she wanted was to find out how her husband’s ship had been lost, but now she had that information—she was still around, still doing favors.

  “So you have a woman at your beck and call now, Buir,” Mereel said, not quite managing to stop himself from grinning. “We’re irresistible, we Mando’ade.”

  “It’s not like that,” Skirata said. “She’s lost. She’s found us. That’s all.”

  He’d never thought of himself as a man who put the slightest faith in anyone beyond himself and his lads, but now he saw just how long the list of trusted strangers was becoming. This wasn’t what he’d planned.

  Cornucopia settled on its dampers, hissing vapor like a panting animal. Jaing and Mereel took up firing positions with their rifles trained on the main hatch and the emergency escape plate. Shab, it was just like Tipoca City again. The little Nulls reacted like that on the first night he’d met them, when an unexpected knock at the door sent them scurrying to take cover or stack either side of the doors.

  I mustn’t forget what Kaminoans did to my boys. No two-year-old child should know how to do that. It’s wrong. It’s just plain wrong.

  Skirata felt better now. The clone army might not have been Kina Ha’s doing, but he had no reason to apologize to her, either. The hatch opened. Light spilled on the snow and the ramp extended in jerks and scrapes. Cornucopia was in need of a major service.

  “Hey, Shortie.” Ny stepped onto the ramp and jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “They followed me home. Can I keep them?”

  “That’s Fi’s line,” Skirata said. He tried hard not to smile at her, but failed. He was instantly fourteen again, desperately worried what a girl thought of him, wishing he was taller, crushed or overjoyed depending on the look she might give him. He didn’t even notice that Ny wasn’t his usual type; she’d struck a spark in him, and he wished she hadn’t. “He’s made an uj cake for you. Parja taught him how.”

  “Mando men,” she said. “No end to your talents, is there?” She looked over her shoulder. “Scout? Kina? Come on, I need to get this ship under cover. We’re still on a war footing here.”

  Skirata braced himself. He didn’t dare look at Jaing or Mereel.

  Relax. It’ll be easy. All Uthan needs is samples, right? Nobody can object to that. No decent Jedi would want to deny another living being a chance of a proper life. And if she does—too bad.

  Skirata took Jusik and Etain as his benchmark of what decent Jedi should be. He was going to measure these two newcomers against that, and he felt he had the right to. But he’d been so fixated on the Kaminoan, so focused on what her genetic material might mean for the clones, that he’d almost forgotten about the kid Ny called Scout.

  She came out of the hatch first, and he simply wasn’t prepared for the punch in the gut that it gave him.

  Scout was all freckles and skinny determination, a Padawan Jedi in a grubby beige robe, shivering in the cold, hair in need of a good brushing. When she hitched up her belt and Skirata saw the lightsaber dangling from it, she reminded him so much of Etain that he simply couldn’t handle it. He put his hand to his mouth, more in shock than to stifle the sob.

  Gilamar let out a long breath. He’d seen it, too.

  “I’m Tallisibeth Enwandung-Esterhazy,” she said, giving Skirata a formal bow of the head. “You’ll probably want to call me Scout. Everyone else does. Thank you for taking us in, Master Skirata.”

  Skirata wasn’t even aware now of Jaing and Mereel behind him. Kina Ha was temporarily forgotten. He held his hand over his mouth, blinking away tears, and struggled to compose himself.

  “You must be freezing, ad’ika.” He could hardly keep his voice steady. Ad’ika just slipped out. It was what any Mando father called his kids, regardless of their age. “Get indoors and have some hot food.”

  Ny had told him that Scout was a lot like Etain, but she’d only said she was weak in the Force and almost didn’t make the grade as a Jedi. He took it more as a bid to convince him Scout was no danger to anyone. Ny had never warned him that the girl was so much like Etain in other ways, though.

  But Ny had never seen Etain alive, of course. She couldn’t know.

  Gilamar led Scout away, and Skirata was still so stunned and upset that Kina Ha was—mercifully—an anticlimax. The old aiwha-bait shuffled down the ramp, still with some of that grace that they all had, but she was obviously ancient. He’d never seen a Kaminoan who looked like that. Knowing how they treated him as defective because he’d limped, he wondered what they’d make of Kina Ha in Tipoca City.

  She bowed her head. “Nyreen has explained your difficulty with my people, Sergeant.” She used Ny’s full name, adding to the impression of ancient formality. “Which makes your generosity that much more commendable.”

  Skirata was too gutted by the shock of seeing Scout to say anything but the first thing that came into his head.

  “I’m not a saint, ma’am,” he said. “There’ll be a price.”

  Kina Ha nodded. “That’s the way of the galaxy.”

  Ny guided Kina Ha to the farmhouse as if she was reluctant to leave her to Jaing or Mereel. When she looked at Skirata, she seemed shocked, but it wasn’t as if she hadn’t seen him cry before. Maybe she couldn’t see what he saw when he looked at Scout.

  Fingers gripped his right arm, careful but firm. “Buir, you better get indoors, too.” Mereel marched him away while Jaing boarded Cornucopia to move the vessel into the camouflaged hangar. “Are you okay?”

  “Are you, Mer’ika?”

  “The old aiwha-bait’s irrelevant,” he said. “I’m not giving all of them the power to upset me. But remember something, Buir—the other one’s not Etain. Scout’s just a little Jedi who reminds us of her. Okay? Don’t let her get under your skin.”

  Skirata felt like a fool. He was a fool because Ny Vollen left him feeling vulnerable. He was a fool because a teenager who was a little too much like Etain could reduce him to tears. He was a fool because he let all this osik get to him. His war wasn’t over. He had to stay sharp and keep thinking like a soldier; there was a lot of unfinished business.

  “I know, Mer’ika.” He had to stop reliving the past and focus on the future. “I’m just old and tired. You’ll be like that one day. But no sooner than you need to be.”

  Mereel chuckled and wandered off in the direction of a hangar hidden by netting and half buried in the soil. He never seemed upset by his accelerated aging. But then Skirata had n
ever been conscious of being a short-lived creature compared with the Hutts he’d done business with, so maybe the reality hadn’t sunk in for Mereel yet.

  It would sink in when he started overtaking Jusik on the road to mortality, though. Skirata, painfully aware of an implacably ticking chrono, braced himself to have dinner with a ghost.

  Kyrimorut, Mandalore

  “Is it compulsory to like gihaal?” Ruu Skirata asked.

  She opened the metal container, letting the pungent aroma of dried smoked fish escape into the kitchen. Gihaal kept for years without refrigeration, one of the staples of Mandalorian ration packs. Ny filed it under Acquired Tastes. She was grateful she’d never had to prepare it from raw fish. It must have smelled a whole lot worse while it was drying.

  “I doubt it,” Ny said, trying to hold her breath. “I think a lot of Mandos hate it, too.”

  Ruu wrinkled her nose as she inhaled. She was so much like her father. “Good. I’d hate to let the side down.”

  With more than twenty mouths to feed, meals at Kyrimorut had now acquired an industrial scale. The complex was more than a house. It was yaim—part barracks, part hotel, part married quarters, part farmhouse, the archetypal Mandalorian clan home. They were lucky that Laseema, Atin’s Twi’lek wife, had worked in a restaurant and so could manage a kitchen. She knew all the complicated stuff about portion sizes and making sure everything was ready at the same time. Ny was happy to take orders from her.

  “I vote we get a droid,” Jilka said, dicing amber-root. “Why is Mandalore the only place where everyone does everything by hand?”

  “The dignity of labor.” Besany tasted the bubbling vat of stew to check if it needed more salt. “Hard work’s good for the soul. Very grounding.”

  “My soul’s fine,” Jilka said stiffly. The angrier she got, the faster she diced. “My body is another matter.”

  Jilka looked at her hands, red and sore from kitchen chores, and Ny could almost read her thoughts: How did this ever happen to me? Like Besany, Jilka had worked for the Treasury as an investigator. But unlike her, she hadn’t followed a clone husband to Kyrimorut. She was an innocent bystander, set up by a Gurlanin spy to draw attention away from Besany while she leaked government information to Skirata, arrested by the secret police—and sprung from prison by Ordo and Vau. Jilka’s life had been wrecked before she even knew why. She hadn’t actually punched out Besany yet, but the atmosphere between them was pure ice. It was only a matter of time.

  “You don’t have to do this.” Besany held out her hand for the knife, which was probably a bad idea. Jilka ignored it. “You’ve got no obligation to us at all.”

  “If I’m stuck here, then I pull my weight,” Jilka said, and went on chopping.

  What else could Besany say? That it was better being stuck at the shabla shebs end of the galaxy—Ny was picking up all the profanities—than being held by Palpatine’s thugs? None of it should have happened. Jilka had just been friends with the wrong woman at the wrong time.

  Well, they weren’t friends now.

  Corr poked his head around the kitchen door. Ny wondered if Jilka could tell all the clones apart yet.

  “Can I hide in here, please, ladies?” He gave them his best cheeky-boy smile and swaggered in. “The atmosphere’s a bit intense out there. Aiwha-bait alert.”

  “Since when does the kitchen have a FEMALES ONLY sign outside?” Jilka asked. “Make yourself useful, soldier.”

  Corr winked, took the knife from her hand, and began chopping with surprising speed and skill. The more surprising thing was that she let him.

  “If it did,” he said, “you’d give me special exemption, right?”

  Jilka fixed him with her tax investigator’s stare. “Maybe.”

  He smiled and chopped faster. He was being a bit too cocky, paying more attention to Jilka than the knife, and the inevitable happened. He nicked his finger. He swore and paused for a second before carrying on.

  Jilka stared. “You’re not bleeding.”

  “Oh, these aren’t real, neither of them.” Corr flexed both hands. “But the sensors work. I’m in pain. You can kiss it better if you like.”

  “Not real?”

  Nobody had told Jilka much about Corr, then. The fact that he’d lost both hands and forearms in a blast when he was a bomb disposal trooper just hadn’t come up. It had now. Prosthetic limbs were commonplace, but losing both hands somehow shifted the injury from routine to distressing.

  Corr’s smile didn’t waver. He stripped the synthflesh covering off one hand and waggled metal rods and servos for inspection.

  “Bomb disposal specials,” he said. “I was in EOD, but I got a wire wrong. Now, these babies—special bomb disposal standard. Also issued to surgeons. Very fine motor control. Very sensitive, too, when I put the synthflesh back on.”

  He gave her a sly smile. Jilka looked like he’d defused her as efficiently as any explosive device.

  “I’m impressed,” she said.

  “Understandable,” said Corr. “The rest of me is all my own, of course.”

  Jilka seemed to thaw a little. She was either embarrassed by his injury or very taken with him, and Ny bet her creds on the latter. Corr carried on chopping until Skirata called him from the passage. It sounded like Ordo and Jusik were back from Keldabe.

  “Keep the blade warm, gorgeous,” Corr said, pressing the knife’s handle back into Juka’s palm. “I’ll be back.”

  He vanished. Jilka turned her head slowly to Besany. “So, your idea? Peace offering? A clone of my own?”

  “Not at all.” Besany looked put out. “He was very shy when I first met him, but Mereel decided to … broaden his outlook on life.”

  “I see it worked.”

  “You could do a lot worse, Jilka. Clones value the things we take for granted. They never expected to have any of them.”

  Ny was surprised by the rebuke, but Jilka didn’t snap back. She went on chopping, eyes fixed on the table. Atin came in carrying a plastoid bowl full of gleaming freshly caught fish.

  “Kaminoans eat fish, don’t they?” he said, as if he was having second thoughts. “I never asked back in Tipoca. We didn’t eat with them.”

  Laseema picked up a fish by its tail. “Did you gut them properly?”

  “Of course I did. And it’s going to take me ages to get the smell off my hands.”

  “You’re a darling. Now all I need is some gihaal stock to poach them in.”

  “You know that’s what Dad and the boys call the Kaminoans, don’t you?” Ruu spooned the dried pieces into a jug. “Gihaal. Fish-meal. When they’re not calling them aiwha-bait, that is.”

  Jilka seemed unmoved by the odor, but then her tax enforcement duties brought her into contact with a lot of Hutts. “Well, we can make some ironic broth, then. Gihaal for gihaal.”

  “Twenty-five gihaal broths, coming up. Or however many it is.”

  “None for Fi.” Laseema tasted it, frowing. “He can’t stomach it after what happened to Ko Sai.”

  Jilka gave Ny a look that said tell me what happened, but she decided that could wait a few months. The woman was unhappy enough as it was.

  “Okay, so how many have we got tonight?” Laseema checked quantities on her datapad. “Are Cov’s squad in or out at Rav Bralor’s place? How about Levet? Uthan—is she staying in her room, or what? Arla won’t come out, I know.”

  “I know we couldn’t leave her in the asylum,” Ruu said, “but did anyone think how the poor woman would feel about being surrounded by strange men in Mando armor?”

  “But we’re not the Death Watch,” Besany said. She’d fallen into the role of alpha female by virtue of being Ordo’s wife. “We’re not the ones who killed her family.”

  “And she’s not Mando.” Ruu seemed to have embraced her father’s culture despite the long separation. “She’s from Concord Dawn. Not the same thing. Jango joined us, but she never got the chance. Everyone probably looks like Death Watch to her.”

  Las
eema arranged the fish in a pan and set them on the stove. “Do you think she knows Jango survived?”

  “I don’t think she even knows what day it is. Bard’ika’s the only one who can talk to her. And you, Laseema.”

  “Maybe that’s because Bardan doesn’t look like her brother, and Laseema’s a Twi’lek,” Jilka said. “Arla’s got to notice the family resemblance in the clones, even if she never saw Jango as an adult.”

  “That must be upsetting her even more.” Laseema arranged tidbits on a tray with a few flowers. Arla certainly never got touches like that in the Valorum Center. “And I don’t so much talk to her as at her—just odd words. Maybe she doesn’t understand much Basic.”

  Ny had to remind herself that Arla Fett had been banged up in a secure mental unit because she murdered a few men, and a court decided she might kill more. But everyone here seemed to assume she had her reasons until proven otherwise. It was a bafflingly Mando attitude. Skirata never seemed to worry that the men of Kyrimorut were at risk.

  “Gosh, it’s going to be a fun evening,” Jilka muttered. “My family had dinners like this on Republic Day. No serial killers, of course, although we were never entirely sure about Uncle Tobiaz.”

  Ny thought that summed it up pretty well. The atmosphere around that huge veshok table was sliceable, although not for the reasons she expected. Skirata looked lost and upset. She’d expected to find him being dragged off Kina Ha, knife in hand. But it was Ordo and Mereel—those two always paired up when they smelled trouble—who looked grim and disapproving. Kina Ha sat next to Atin. Ny decided to sit on the other side of her and offer moral support.

  “I’ll make the introductions.” Skirata’s voice was husky, as if he’d been swallowing unshed tears. “Kina Ha, Scout—this is my family, and my guests.” He pointed out who was who, who was married to who, who should have been married if only they’d get on with it, and who the guests were. Dr. Uthan was introduced as a friend concerned for the clones’ health. Skirata had a talent for sly euphemism.

  But something had knocked the stuffing out of him, and Ny guessed that it was Scout rather than Kina Ha.