501st: An Imperial Commando Novel (14 page)

They left Lieutenant Nelis and the emergency crews to their task. Ennen and Darman carried Bry’s body back to the shuttle and Ennen took the controls. Darman and Niner sat in the crew space behind him, salvaging what they could from the computer, and tried not to think about Bry and how they hadn’t bonded with him. Darman could see it all on Niner’s face when he took off his helmet.

“So what was going on there?” Darman said. “Crates. No Kester. Camas sending out coded transmissions.”

“Escape route.”

“Yeah, I know that, but …”

“Let’s see if we can get any clues from this.”

Niner chipped away at the plastoid for ages and finally managed to pull out a few circuit boards. The datachip was still inserted in one of them.

“Might as well try,” he said. He pried out the chip and slid it into his datapad. “Atin would have had this all sorted by now.”

When Niner turned the chip reader to show Darman the display, there was nothing on it. Camas must have wiped it before he made his last stand, which was still the dumbest death that Darman could imagine.

But we wouldn’t let ourselves be taken alive. Would we
?

Camas could have tried harder to escape. Okay, he wasn’t Jusik or Kenobi, and he’d spent too long sitting on his backside before the war, but he seemed determined to stay put.

“I think he was a decoy,” Darman said at last. “I think he was keeping us busy for as long as he could while something else was going on.”

“Shame this thing won’t tell us what.” Niner took out the chip and stared at it as if a frown could reboot it and restore the data. “But who knows? Jaing always said it was really hard to wipe data completely. Maybe someone can recover something off this.”

If there was anything recoverable on the original chip, then the commandos would probably never be told. Darman knew that. Even when Skirata was involved, they hadn’t been told everything.

But he couldn’t bear the thought of Bry dying just to take out one Jedi, not even a Master and general like Camas. He wanted the chip to be the key to a dissident network. He wanted it to be
pivotal
.

Darman knew it was guilt for giving Bry a hard time until it was too late to befriend him.

The ice-glazed trees at Kyrimorut shed a slow, steady rain on the ground, the first sign that the thaw had started.

Jusik stood at the window and listened to the faint trickling of water in the gutters and down-pipes. The world outside still looked frozen solid, but spring was coming. He could smell it; he could sense the life underground waiting to wake. There was a marvelous feeling of hope and anticipation that he’d never detected on Coruscant. The global city was choked with permacrete and its weather controlled artificially, leaving almost nothing wild to stay in touch with the natural cycle of the seasons.

I love this. I feel alive. Is this like the world where I was born? I don’t remember it. But this feels like home
.

Kad seemed to be aware of it, too. Jusik held him on one hip as he stared wide-eyed through the transparisteel at the dripping plants in the courtyard, pointing occasionally and saying, “Reesh!
Reesh!”
It took Jusik a while to work out that he’d learned a new word
—piryc
, wet—and the best he could manage was the last syllable.

“It’s wet because it’s melting,
Kad’ika,”
Jusik said. “It’s getting warmer. You’ll be able to play outside soon. That’ll be fun, won’t it?”

Nobody called the child Venku anymore. Darman had preferred Kad, but he hadn’t known the baby even existed until more than a year after the birth, so the name had been dropped. This was Dar’s boy; Jusik reminded himself of that every day. Jusik was just one of an army of willing foster parents taking care of Kad until his father came home, and the fact that he had a special bond in the Force with him didn’t accord any extra privilege.

He’s not my son. I mustn’t mean more to him than his dad just because I’m around and Darman isn’t
.

It wasn’t the Mando way, this fixation with biological parentage. Every
Mando’ad
had a duty to look after the children of the clan, and adoption erased a kid’s past—or even an adult’s. But Jusik felt like a usurper every time he connected with Kad and felt him in the Force.

“Hey,
Kad’ika
, look what I’ve got.” Jusik took his holoprojector from his belt-pouch one-handed and switched it on. He couldn’t bear to show Kad the images of his mother yet, and left that task to Laseema, but he could cope with reminding Kad about Darman. “Look. That’s your dad. Dada.
Buir
. He’s coming back one day soon. We know where he is. We’re going to bring him home.”

Kad chuckled and pointed at the holoimage. “Boo! Dada!”

“That’s right.
Buir’
s coming home.”

Jusik felt Gilamar approaching. He could usually pick out everyone’s impression in the Force as clearly as seeing them. Vau was a strange pool of calm;
Kal’buir
,
whirlpools of passion, from violent hatred to selflessly devoted love. Ordo was another contradictory mix—a ferociously agile mind and complete physical confidence coupled with the wild emotional swings of a teenager. And Gilamar … Gilamar was mostly acceptance, a little loneliness, and pain so deep that it seemed an essential part of him. Jusik had no idea when Gilamar’s wife had been killed, but he got the feeling that it would always be yesterday for the man.

“What’s it like?” Jusik asked, not turning around. Kad put his palm flat on the window and banged it a few times to get Mird’s attention. The strill was in the courtyard, nose pointing into the wind, inhaling intriguing scents on the air. “How does it feel to have a Force-user around all the time? Does it ever bother you?”

“What, that you might be doing mind tricks on me or something?” Gilamar made faces at Kad. “Or that I can’t hide emotions from you? Not really. It’s no different from the strill. It can sense things I can’t. I don’t resent it for that.”

“I hope I smell better …”

Gilamar studied him. “If you were Force-sensitive and didn’t train, would you develop powers anyway? Would you even
know
you had powers?”

“Probably not.” Jusik could feel the next question developing. “The Jedi Council wouldn’t have needed to test for midi-chlorians otherwise. You’d just find you understood people better than most, or had better hunches than your buddies, or terrific visuospatial awareness. You’d end up as a psychologist. A successful gambler. A pilot. A sports star.”

“So …”

“Okay, you’re thinking it might be a good idea not to develop Kad’s skills. Am I right?”

“I thought the idea was to teach him how to control them so that he didn’t attract the wrong sort of attention. If he can just let them lie fallow and be none the wiser, that’s an interesting dilemma.”

“You’re full of those.”

Gilamar looked at him with distinctly paternal tolerance. “And so are you.”

“I don’t think it’s different from encouraging any talent in a kid and then letting them choose how they use it.”

“Except with the way Palpatine’s going, it’s a talent that’s going to mean a death warrant. So carry on teaching him to keep it under wraps.”

Kad would know the truth about his mother in due course, but Jusik didn’t feel any need to teach him Jedi lore. Kad could have his own personal link to the Force with no Masters or lords to intercede or dictate the form it took. Didn’t every living creature connect to it in some way? It was simply a matter of degree.

“I’m going to see what I can do for Arla today,” Jusik said. “You know I’m guessing my way through this, don’t you?”

“Welcome to the adventure of practicing medicine.” Gilamar patted his shoulder as they walked away down the passage. “You guessed your way through repairing Fi’s brain damage pretty well, so I shall watch and learn,
Bard’ika.
”

Jusik didn’t need to see Arla Fett to work out how she was feeling on any given day. He could feel her in the Force. He sensed her much as he had at the Valorum Center for violent psychiatric patients: a deeply troubled soul that manifested itself as jagged lines and harsh primary colors in his inner eye, confused and in pain, defying him to walk by and leave it to its misery.

I rescued her. She’s my responsibility. What’s the point of swapping one locked ward for another
?

He paused in the corridor outside her room, still holding Kad on one hip. Gilamar stood well back.

“I’m scared to see what happens if we stop her meds,” Jusik said. “But I can’t help wondering if they were more about keeping her docile for the center’s benefit than to help her.”

“Well, if I were dealing with homicidal patients, I admit I’d probably use the zaloxipine cosh, too.” Gilamar
shrugged. “We could try tapering off the dose. But I’m not a shrink. Your Force senses can tell better than any doctor how she really feels.”

Jusik had tried to use the Force as little as possible when he left Coruscant, as if he could shrug off every trace of his Jedi past. It seemed an unfair advantage to have gifts that his clan brothers didn’t. But he couldn’t do it. It was like shutting his eyes to pretend he couldn’t see to fit in with a community of the blind, temporary and artificial, always with the knowledge that he could open his eyes at any time—not so much equalizing the situation as trying to imagine what it might be like to lose that sense. He couldn’t shut it off. The best he could do was be conscious of the ways he used his Force senses, and never exploit them.

“Some days she’s calmer than others, whatever the dose,” Jusik said.

“Well, it’ll be a case of trial and error, then.” Kad reached out for Gilamar’s hand and shook it with the grave politeness of a diplomat. “You think
Kad’ika
’s going to help things?”

“If I go in there with a small kid, it’s clear I’m not going to hurt her.”

“What if he reminds her too much of Jango?”

“Is that going to upset her any more than seeing his clones?”

“She wouldn’t remember Jango as an adult. But he was a kid when she last saw him, so she might recall looking after him at Kad’s age.”

“Well, let’s see.”

Jusik knocked on the door. Nobody had locked it since Arla had arrived. The alarm system would kick in if she left the building, and—apart from Vau—nobody seemed concerned that she might harm anyone. She never wanted to come out anyway. Sometimes she tried to barricade the door from the inside with a chair or table. Whatever had made her kill didn’t seem to make her go out looking for victims.

“Arla? It’s Bardan.” He waited. Kad slapped his palm
on the door a few times. “Would you like to come out for a walk with us? Get some fresh air?”

Silence. Jusik felt her wariness and confusion. The latter might have been put down to the mind-numbing dose of zaloxipine, of course.

“Okay, can I come in and see how you are? I’ve got Dr. Gilamar with me.”

Jusik opened the door. The internal doors at Kyrimorut were wooden and hinged, an ancient design that needed no power to operate them. In the most isolated parts of a largely rural planet with unreliable power supplies, that mattered. Arla Fett—forty-something, faded blond, thin, so unlike her brother as to make her unrecognizable as a Fett—sat on the edge of the bed with a pillow clutched tightly to her chest. The bed was so neatly made, the sheets and cover so tightly tucked in, that it looked as if a soldier had done it. Jusik didn’t even try to guess what had happened to her in the thirty or so years since her parents were murdered by the Death Watch for aiding Jaster Mereel.

Does she know about Jango? How do I even broach the subject? Good news, Arla, your brother survived the massacre. Bad news, he saw everyone he cared about slaughtered, he spent years in slavery, and he got killed by a Jedi in the end. Sorry about all that, Arla
.

No, he couldn’t do that yet. The medcenter records he’d sliced on Coruscant said she’d been committed to the Valorum Center ten years ago, no next of kin, no personal details beyond
no fixed abode
. And that was all long before the Clone Wars started. He doubted that the staff even knew she had a brother, let alone that he was Jango Fett.

Gilamar waited by the door. Even out of armor, he looked like a bruiser, and armor definitely upset Arla. How could she tell the difference between one Mando and another, anyway? To her, they probably all spelled grief and trouble.

“Hi, Arla.” Jusik stood back a couple of meters and made a fuss of Kad, taking the boy’s hand and waving it
at her. “Say hi to Arla, Kad. Arla, you’ve seen Kad before, haven’t you? He’s a … distant relative of yours.”

“Careful,
ad’ika … 
,” Gilamar murmured.

Arla studied Kad’s face with a slight frown. Kad gazed back at her, mesmerized, and for a moment Jusik couldn’t work out if the kid was sensing something in the Force, or if he was just a curious kid like any other.

“What
are
you?” she said at last, looking straight at Jusik. “You’re not a doctor.”

Jusik was surprised to hear her speak coherently, and in Basic, too. She had a slight accent. And she made eye contact for a few moments, as normal as anyone.

“No, I’m a … well, I don’t know what I am, actually. A soldier, maybe.” Jusik took a breath. “I’d like to say I was a friend of your brother, but I never knew him. I’m just doing what I think he would have wanted, which is to get you well and help you make some kind of life for yourself.”

Arla stared at Kad, then glanced up at Jusik again. “Where are you from?”

“I don’t know.”
She’s asking every question I can’t answer
. “I was taken from my folks when I was a baby.”

“Are they dead?”

Oh boy
. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t even know where to start looking.”

Actually, that wasn’t true; the Jedi Council records were now reduced to ashes, but his family name was probably real, and so Mereel or Jaing could run a few searches in moments and track down worlds where the Jusik name was common.

Jusik suspected he didn’t
want
to know. He didn’t need another conflicting identity. Clan Skirata was his family now, and he could shut out everything else. He
had
to. He could only handle one allegiance at a time, all or nothing.