Triple Zero Read online

  It was very, very quiet once she blocked out the thrum of the gunship’s drive as it made 660 kph—off the dial—back to Fearless.

  And no, the IM-6 droid could not deal with forty men crammed into a modified bay better suited to thirty, not if a quarter of them were injured.

  Then, when Etain listened more carefully and her adrenaline had ebbed, she realized the bay wasn’t as quiet as she had thought. There was ragged breathing and stifled yelps of pain and—the worst, this—incoherent whimpering that peaked to a crescendo of a single stifled scream and trailed off again.

  She picked her way across the bay, stepping over men who were crouching or kneeling. Propped against the bulkhead, a clone trooper was being held in a sitting position by a brother. His helmet and chest plate were removed and Etain needed no med droid to provide a prognosis for a chest wound that was producing blood on his lips.

  “Medic?” She whipped around. “Medic! Get this man some help, now!”

  The med droid appeared as if from nowhere, jerking bolt upright from a knot of troopers where it was obviously working. Its twin photoreceptors trained on her.

  “General!”

  “Why is this man not being attended to?”

  “Triage X,” the droid said, dropping down into the unbroken carpet of troopers again to resume its first aid.

  Etain should have known. The red X symbol glowed on his shoulder. She hoped the man hadn’t heard, but he probably knew anyway, because that was the unsentimental way the Kaminoans had presented their training to the clones. Triage code X: too badly injured. Not expected to survive despite intervention. Concentrate resources on code 3, then code 5.

  She took a breath and reminded herself that she was a Jedi, and there was more to being a Jedi than wielding a lightsaber. She knelt down beside him and grabbed his hand. The grip he returned was surprisingly strong for a dying man.

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  She reached out in the Force to get some sense of the injury, to shape it in her mind, hoping to slow the hemorrhage and hold shattered tissue together until the larty docked. But she knew as soon as she formed the scale of the damage in her mind that it wouldn’t save him.

  She had vowed never again to use mind influence on clones without their consent: she had eased Atin’s grief, and given Niner confidence when he most needed it, both unasked for, but since then she had avoided it. Clones weren’t weak-minded anyway, whatever people thought. But this man was dying, and he needed help.

  “I’m Etain,” she said. She concentrated on his eyes, seeing behind them somehow into a swirl of no color at all, and visualized calm. She held out her hand to the trooper supporting his shoulders and mouthed medpacs at him. She knew they carried single-use syringes of powerful painkiller: Darman had used them in front of her more than once. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. What’s your nickname?”

  “Fi,” he said, and it shocked her briefly, but there were many men called Fi in an army with numbers for names. His brother said no silently and held up spent syringes: they’d already pumped him full of what little they had. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  If she could influence thought, she could influence endorphin systems. She put every scrap of her will into it. “The pain’s going. The drug’s working. Can you feel it?” If the Force had any validity, it had to come to her aid now. She studied his face, and his jaw muscles were relaxing a little. “How’s that?”

  “Better, thanks, ma’am.”

  “You hang on. You might feel a bit sleepy.”

  His grip was still tight. She squeezed back. She wondered if he knew she was lying and just chose to believe the lie for his own comfort. He didn’t say anything else, but he didn’t scream again, and his face looked peaceful.

  She rested his head on her shoulder, one hand between his head and the bulkhead, the other still clutching his, and held that position for ten minutes, concentrating on an image of a cool pale void. Then he started a choking cough. His brother took his other hand, and Fi—a painful reminder of a friend she hadn’t seen for months and might never see again—said, “I’m fine.” His grip went slack.

  “Oh, ma’am,” said his brother.

  Etain was aware in a detached way of spending the next twenty minutes talking to every single trooper in that bay, asking their names, asking who had been lost, and wondering why they stared first at her chest and then at her face, apparently bewildered.

  She put her hand to her cheek. It stung. She brushed it and a fragment of alloy came away on her hand with fresh, bright blood. She hadn’t felt the shrapnel until then. She aimed herself towards a familiar patch of green in the forest of grimy white armor.

  “Clanky,” she said, numb. “Clanky, I never asked. Where do we bury our men? Or do we cremate them, like Jedi?”

  “Neither, usually, General,” said Clanky. “Don’t you worry about that now.”

  She looked down at her beige robe and noticed that it was way beyond filthy: it was peppered with burns, as if she’d been welding carelessly, and there was a ragged oval patch of deep red blood from her right shoulder down to her belt, already drying into stiff blackness.

  “Master Camas is going to fry me,” she said.

  “He can fry us, too, then,” Clanky said.

  Etain knew she’d think about the deftly evaded answer to her question sometime, but right then her mind was elsewhere. She thought of Darman, suddenly conscious that something was wrong: but something was always wrong for commandos on missions, and the Force was clear that Darman was still alive.

  But the other Fi—the trooper—wasn’t. Etain felt ashamed of her personal fears and went in search of men she could still help.

  Bravo Eight Depot crime scene,

  Manarai, Coruscant,

  367 days after Geonosis

  Skirata took every clone casualty as a personal affront. His frustration wasn’t aimed at Obrim: the two men respected each other in the way of time-served professionals, and Ordo knew that. He just hoped Obrim knew that Kal’buir didn’t always mean the sharp things he said.

  “So when are your people going to get off their shebse and tell us how the device got in here?” Skirata said.

  “Soon,” Obrim said. “The security holocam was taken out in the blast. We’re waiting on a backup image from the satellite. Won’t be as clear, but at least we have it.”

  “Sorry, Jaller,” Skirata said, still chewing, eyes fixed on the rubble. “No offense.”

  “I know, comrade. None taken.”

  It was another reason why Ordo adored his sergeant: he was the archetypal Mando’ad. A Mandalorian man’s ideal was to be the firm but loving father, the respectful son learning from every hard experience, the warrior loyal to constant personal principles rather than ever-changing governments and flags.

  He also knew when to apologize.

  And he looked exhausted. Ordo wondered when he would understand that nobody expected him to keep up with young soldiers. “You could leave this to me.”

  “You’re a good lad, Ord’ika, but I have to do this.”

  Ordo put one hand square on Skirata’s back and one on Obrim’s to steer them both a little farther from the scene of destruction, anxious not to make it obvious in front of the aruetiise—the non-Mandalorians, the foreigners, sometimes even the traitors—that his sergeant needed comforting. Waiting was the worst thing for Kal’buir’s mood.

  Obrim’s comlink chirped. “Here we go,” he said. “They’re relaying the image. Let’s play it out to Ordo’s link.”

  The images emerged as a grainy blue aerial holo rising from the palm of Ordo’s gauntlet, and they replayed it a few times. A delivery transport came up to the barrier and was waved in to land on the strip. Then the scene erupted in a ball of light followed by billows of smoke and raining debris.

  The explosion blew out the transparisteel-and-granite walls of the Bravo Eight supply depot fifteen times before Ordo had seen enough.

  “Looks like the device came in on tha
t delivery transport,” Obrim said. Some of the recognizable debris scattered around the blast site confirmed that there had been a transport caught up in the explosion. “Nobody running away. So the pilot was inside, and…” He stopped to look down at data loading into his own ’pad. “I’m getting confirmation that it was a routine delivery and the pilot was a regular civilian driver. Nothing to suggest that it was a suicide mission, though. Just a routine run with some extra unwanted supplies.”

  “Can we go back over the recordings from previous days?” Ordo said. “Just to see if anyone was doing a recce of vessels and movements in the run-up to this?”

  “Archived for ten days. Won’t be any better in terms of angle and clarity than this.”

  “I’ll still take it.”

  Ordo looked to Skirata, who was silent and visibly angry, but clearly thinking hard. Ordo knew that calculating defocus all too well.

  “Okay, the best lead we have right now is to track back the other way down the line—from confirmed explosives supply chains,” Kal said.

  “Omega’s on a TIOPS run checking that right now,” Ordo said. “They might come back with some suspects for Vau to work on.”

  “I’m turning a blind eye to that, right?” said Obrim, a man who left the impression he would have given a lot to be back in the front line instead of supervising others. “Because suspects are my part of ship to deal with. But I do have this annoying eyesight problem lately.”

  “Long-term condition?” Skirata asked, moving Ordo out of his way with a gentle pat on the forearm.

  “As permanent as you want it to be, Kal.”

  “Make it incurable for the time being, then.”

  Skirata picked his way past the forensics team, who were still setting marker holotags at various points in the rubble: red holos for body parts, blue for inorganic evidence. Ordo wondered if the civilians who’d been gawking from behind the barrier would see anything about that on the HNE bulletin.

  Skirata paused and leaned over a Sullustan technician who was sensor-scanning the rubble on hands and knees. “Can I have the armor tallies when you find them?”

  “Tallies?” The Sullustan sat back on her heels and looked up at him with round black liquid eyes. “Explain.”

  “The little sensor tags that identify the soldier. On the chest plates.” Skirata held finger and thumb a little apart to indicate the size. “There’ll be fifteen around here somewhere.”

  “We can sort the admin for you, Kal,” Obrim said. “Don’t worry about all that.”

  “No, it’s not to account for them. I want a piece of their armor. To pay our respects, the Mando way.”

  Ordo noted Obrim’s puzzled expression. “Bodies are irrelevant to us. Which is just as well, really.”

  Obrim nodded gravely and ushered them behind another plastoid screen where the SOCO team was assembling and logging fragments of alloy and other barely identifiable materials on a trestle table. “You can take over all this if you want.”

  Skirata motioned Ordo across to the trestle. “It’s Ordo’s area, but I’m happy for your people to process it. I’ve got faith in Sullustan diligence.”

  Maybe it was just Skirata indulging in harmless hearts-and-minds work. But it seemed to do the job for the SOCO personnel.

  One of them looked up. “It’s good to know that military intelligence respects CSF.”

  “I’ve never been called military intelligence before,” Skirata said, as if he hadn’t realized that was what he had been doing every waking moment since five days after Geonosis.

  Ordo held out one hand to the nearest scenes-of-crime officer and crooked a finger to gesture for their datapad. “You’ll need this,” he said, and linked it to his own ’pad. “Here’s our latest IED data.”

  Yes, the CSF’s anti-terrorism unit and Skirata’s tight-knit team had become very close indeed in the last year. Going through official Republic security clearance channels just wasted time, and there was always the chance its civil servants would behave like petty fools across the galaxy and mark data as top secret for their own dreary little career reasons. Ordo didn’t have time for that.

  He was checking that the data had transferred cleanly when the hololink on the inner side of his forearm plate activated again and his hand was filled with a small scene of blue chaos.

  For a split second he thought it was an image in his HUD, but it was external, and it was Omega Squad.

  “Omega—Red Zero, Red Zero, Red Zero, over.”

  The holoimage showed the four commandos pressed against a bulkhead with an occasional fragment of debris floating into view. They were all alive, anyway.

  Skirata whipped around at the sound of Niner’s voice and the code they all dreaded: Red Zero, request for immediate extraction.

  Ordo switched instantly and without conscious thought into emergency procedure, capturing coordinates from the message and holding up his datapad so that Skirata could see the numbers and open a comlink to Fleet. Their language changed: their voices became monotone and quiet, and they slipped into minimal, direct speech. The SOCO team froze to watch.

  “Sitrep, Omega.”

  “Target’s boarded. Unplanned decompression, and our pilot and the TIV are missing. No power, but no squad casualties.”

  “Fleet, Skirata here, we have a Red Zero. Fast extraction please—on these coordinates. Pilot down, too, no firm location.”

  “Stand by, Omega. We’re scrambling Fleet assistance now. Time to critical?”

  “Ten minutes if we don’t get the hatch on this side of us open, maybe three hours if we do.”

  Skirata stopped, comlink still held to his mouth. Obrim was staring at the little blue hologrammic figures with the expression of a man realizing something terrible.

  We could be watching them as they die.

  “Go on,” Ordo said.

  “Three suspects the other side of that hatch, and they can’t open it now even if they wanted to. Dar’s got to blow it.”

  “In a confined space?”

  “We’ve got the armor.”

  Well, that was true: Fi had withstood a contact blast from a grenade in Mark II armor. “You don’t have any choice, do you?”

  “We’ve had worse days,” Fi said cheerfully.

  Ordo knew he meant it. He could feel the other part of him, the Ord’ika who wanted to cry for his brothers, but he was very distant, as if in another life: there was just absolute cold detachment in the physical shell where his mind was situated now.

  “Do it,” he said.

  “The Red Zero’s been transmitted to all GAR ships in striking distance,” Skirata said. Ordo didn’t want him to watch the hololink in case things didn’t go as planned, and turned his back to him. But Skirata turned him around by his arm and stepped into the holo pickup’s field of view so the squad could see him. “I’m here, lads. You’re coming home, okay? Sit tight.”

  There was a certainty about Skirata regardless of how impossible that assurance sounded in cold reality. But Ordo could feel his utter helplessness, and shared it: Omega was light-years from the Coruscant system, far beyond the sergeant’s ability to step into the firing line in person. The two soldiers turned together to shield the holoimage, and then Obrim moved in close, diplomatically blocking the view of his own team.

  “Your lad Fi,” he said, “—my boys still want to buy him that drink.”

  It was Obrim’s men Fi had saved from the grenade. And that was probably as openly sentimental as Jaller Obrim would ever be.

  “In five,” Darman said. “Four…”

  Like a HoloNet drama whose budget hadn’t run to a decent set, the image in Ordo’s cupped hand showed the squad curling themselves against the far bulkhead, grasping conduit to anchor themselves in zero-g, heads tucked to their chests and hunkering down.

  The image disappeared as Niner—whose gauntlet obviously carried the holofeed—buried his head, too.

  “Three, two, go!”

  The picture flared into a ball of b
lue light and the silent explosion looked even more like a poor-quality holovid whose audio track had failed.

  The holoimage dimmed for a moment and then the squad’s jet packs ignited and they surged forward in free fall, rifles raised, and the video feed broke up into wildly random movement with two more blinding flashes.

  “Okay, three bandits down, not slotted, not fragmented, but not very happy either,” said Fi’s voice, clearly relieved. “And oxygen.”

  “Nice one, Omega.” Skirata had his eyes shut for a moment. He pinched the bridge of his nose hard enough to leave a temporary white mark. “Now take it easy until we get to you, okay?”

  Obrim’s face was ashen. “I wish the public realized what those boys do,” he said. “I hate kriffing secrecy sometimes.”

  “Shabu’droten,” Skirata muttered, and walked away. No, he didn’t care much for the public at all.

  “What’s that mean?” Obrim asked.

  “You don’t want to know,” said Ordo, mulling over Jusik’s tenuous analysis of the Force around the blast scene.

  The enemy was never here.

  So… maybe there was nobody watching.

  There was nobody waiting for precisely the most damaging moment to detonate the device from nearby.

  Remote detonation of a moving device required one of two things: either a very good view of the target, or, if the target wasn’t visible, a precise timetable so the terrorist would know exactly where the device might be at any given time.

  And that meant either a very good knowledge of GAR logistics, or—if the terrorist wanted to see the whole area, not just the immediate base—access to security holo networks.

  Ordo felt a sudden cool clarity settle in his stomach, a satisfying sense of having learned something new and valuable.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. “I think we have a mole.”

  RAS Fearless: hangar deck

  Clanky kept a tight grip on Etain’s upper arm until she felt the drag of deceleration and the thud through the soles of her boots as the gunship docked in Fearless’s hangar.