501st: An Imperial Commando Novel (2 page)

“They’re looking for Jedi,” Ny said.
And my friends, like A’den … and Ordo … and Kal
. She wondered if the Rodian actually paid any taxes at all. “We don’t know how many escaped the Purge. Enough to worry Palps, obviously.”

But Etain Tur-Mukan was one of the many Jedi who didn’t get away, although she hadn’t been executed in the Purge. She’d died
stupidly
. She got herself killed. Ny was used to the angry phase in bereavement, and the guilt that followed blaming the dead for being dead and leaving you so lonely that it wasn’t worth taking the next breath, but she hadn’t even known Etain before she took her body home to Mandalore.

Crazy kid. If she’d just walked by instead of getting in the way, defending that clone trooper, then she’d be alive now. And Darman would have a wife to come home to, and their baby would have a mother. What a waste. What a terrible, terrible waste. A war for absolutely nothing except a corrupt old barve’s ambition. Or a whole bunch of corrupt barves, if Kal’s right
.

My Terin should still be alive, too. Stang, I miss you, baby
.

The pain was at a manageable level these days, although she wished she hadn’t found out the details of how her husband died. But if she hadn’t, she would have imagined worse. Her old man was dead, gone in a matter of minutes, and that was all there was to it. He wasn’t the only man in the merchant navy to die in the war; she wasn’t the only war widow in the galaxy. Her grief was nothing special.

“I hope they find all of them,
fast
, and then we can get back to normal business,” the Rodian muttered.

“Who?” Ny was miles away, walking with the dead and trying to resist asking them why they’d done such uselessly brave things that hadn’t made the slightest difference to the course of the war. “What?”

“Jedi
. I never trusted them anyway. My buddy—he lost his ship once, no compensation,
nothing
, when one of their fancy Masters commandeered it for some getaway. No
please, thank you
, or
here’s some creds to tide you over, friend
. Just
took
it. Higher authority. Mystic and righteous work. Piracy, more like—government-backed thieves. Well, they got theirs. Good riddance.”

Ny thought of Jusik and Etain, and bit back a defense. “Would you turn them in if you found any?” she asked.

“Even without a reward.” The Rodian snapped his fingers. “Like
that.
”

Ny wondered what he would have thought if he knew that it was another Force-user still running the show anyway. But she wasn’t even sure she could blame it all on this … Siff? Shith?
Sith
, that was it. Whatever kind of saber-jockey Palpatine was—if he’d engineered the
whole war, like Skirata said—then he hadn’t needed to encourage some worlds to fight each other. Old enemies were just waiting for an excuse to start.

Ny hadn’t even heard of Sith before she met the renegade clone clan. Bardan Jusik had explained the ancient feud between Sith and Jedi, as pointless as the sectarian war on Sarrassia, where two factions of a religious cult had been fighting for thousands of years over the proper ritual for handling some holy relic—a goblet, a statue, a set of bones, Ny forgot which. They just seemed to define themselves by
not
being the other faction. She didn’t understand any of it.

Osik
. That was the word. Mandalorians knew how to cuss, all sibilants and explosive consonants. It was all a load of
osik
.

There were plenty of other things Ny didn’t know or understand that were much closer to home. She hadn’t known Etain, so she couldn’t fathom the depth of Skirata’s guilt about the girl. She hardly knew Darman, come to that. She didn’t understand why Mandalore had allowed an Imperial garrison on its home turf. And she didn’t know how she fitted into the gathering of misfits that was Clan Skirata, only that she now thought of Kyrimorut as her home base and that it had happened almost overnight.

But that didn’t matter now. She was doing this for two reasons, two
good
reasons, but the second one was starting to trouble her more the closer she got to Mandalore.

I gave my word. And … stang, why do I trust Kal Skirata so much
?

“At
last,”
said the Rodian. The akk handler was heading his way. The Rodian turned to her and nodded in a way that seemed to transcend species, the gesture of an exasperated pilot on a tight schedule whose timetable had been messed up by idiots. “I’m going to lose my on-time bonus thanks to this.”

Ny stood with
Cornucopia
’s manifest in one hand. That was the drill; to have your admin data ready on
your ’pad for inspection, stand clear of your vessel, and wait for the security guy to talk to you.

Speak when you’re spoken to. Some things never change
.

“Don’t point that out to them, will you?” she said. “Or else they’ll keep you here until Mustafar freezes over.”

She realized her pulse was racing. If the akk got a whiff of her two passengers, she’d be finished. It was a huge gamble. But then her passengers had everything to lose, too, and she knew they could make themselves a lot harder to find than the average stowaway.

Ny waited. She concentrated on feeling impatient, imagining the time and creds she would have been losing if this had been a real delivery, and hoped it was enough to disguise her fear from both akks and humans.

She wouldn’t have been the first freight pilot to find illegal stowaways in her vessel, or the first to deny all knowledge. And sometimes that was true; illegals knew all the tricks when it came to slipping past security checks. But what had once been routine and occasional searches by assorted authorities for a variety of reasons—like Boriin not wanting skilled metalsmiths leaving its territories, or Mil Velay not allowing anyone with a criminal record to enter its space—was now a matter of life and death.

The akk strained on its leash as it came toward her. Both of its front legs lifted clear off the ground as the handler leaned back against the animal’s weight to restrain it. He slackened the leash, and the akk raced up
Cornucopia
’s open ramp and vanished inside.

Ny handed her datapad to the stormtrooper. She couldn’t see his eyes behind that visor, but she was used to guessing where folks who wore helmets might actually be looking, and he seemed to be reading the ’pad.

“Name, ma’am.”

“Nyreen Vollen.”

“Cargo?”

“Food and basic supplies, bound for LodeCorp Mining asteroid Nine-Alpha-Four, Roche system.”

“Any passengers?”

“None.”

“Have you left your vessel unattended or unsecured at any time?”

“No.”

“Have you checked the vessel for beings, life-forms, or objects not loaded by you?”

“Yes.”

Well, that was true. She’d checked. The
beings
—she’d done the loading personally. The stormtrooper took some time going through the list on her ’pad, probably to give the akk enough time to do its search. There wasn’t much that anyone could extract from her manifest. It really was just supplies—flour, grassgrain, pickles, powdered milk, sacks of denta beans, soap, dried fruit, all the staples that would come in handy for a siege. Kyrimorut was that kind of place. It gave its residents a siege mentality, if they hadn’t already arrived with one. And she had.

The stormtrooper handed back her datapad. The others began walking slowly around the freighter, looking it over.

That hold stinks of tar-fuel, too. The akk can’t smell anything through that … can it
?

But akks could do a lot of things. They weren’t anywhere near as smart as strills—ah, yes, Mird, she had a treat for Mird in her cargo, too—but they were employed as search animals for a reason. They were
good
at it. They smelled all, heard all, saw all.

No noise. No barking. No reaction. Please, please … 

Ny had never known time pass so slowly in her life. How could the akk possibly miss what was hidden in the empty water tanks? It would start whining and scrabbling at the inspection plate. She must have been crazy to think she could get away with this,
her
, a lowly freight-jockey. Running errands and doing a little low-level spying for A’den had been nowhere near as outrageously dangerous as this. Even helping that ARC trooper Sull desert had been a relatively safe trip. Ny knew she was out of her depth now.

It’s all my fault. Kal didn’t even want this. My bright idea … my problem
.

The Rodian’s shuttle, now cleared for exit, taxied to the landing strip and lifted off. Ny watched, hoping she just looked anxious to complete her deliveries and get paid. Searches took less than ten standard minutes, from what she’d seen, and the akk had been nosing around in
Cornucopia
for about that long.

It’s nearly over. Nearly out of here. Nearly … home
.

Where was home now, anyway?

Then it started. The hacking bark of the akk hound, that distinctive
ack-ack-ack
noise that gave the animal its name, echoed from the open hatch. Ny knew she wasn’t going home now, ever, and she struggled not to panic. Three stormtroopers rushed to the ramp, blaster rifles ready. The fourth held his sidearm on her.

“Wait here, ma’am,” he said. He craned his neck to see what was happening. “Officer, what’s going on in there?”

The akk stopped barking. Ny heard one set of scuffed footsteps accompanied by scrabbling claws, and she simply couldn’t draw another breath. This was it. The animal must have sniffed out her stowaways.

“Sorry, boys.” The guard’s voice emerged from the hatch. “He’s still a pup, despite his size. Needs a bit more discipline.”

The akk came trotting down the ramp dragging a bantha’s thigh bone, the huge pelvis end clamped between his jaws. It was Mird’s treat; bantha meat wasn’t easy to get hold of on Mandalore. Ny’s knees nearly buckled. The guard tried to take the bone from his animal, but the novice akk wasn’t having any of it. His lip curled and he growled deep in his throat, teeth still locked hard on the femur.

“Look, I can get another bone,” Ny said, feigning exasperation rather than flinging her arms around the akk and telling it what a good boy it was for sabotaging the search. “Keep it. I need to get moving.”

One of the stormtroopers tilted his head at her. “What do you need a bantha bone for, ma’am?”

Ny’s answer was out of her mouth before she even thought about it. The ease and speed with which she conjured up a complete fabric of lies shocked her.

“One of the miners has a pet nek,” she said. “You don’t find many banthas on your average asteroid.”

It really
was
getting that easy to lie. She was disappointed in herself, her old self before widowhood had made her into a more marginal creature, but she also felt a thrill of excitement—and shame—at her newly discovered capacity for defiance.
Yes, I’m wrong, I’m breaking the law, but I did it—I pulled it off
. The guard was still trying to get the akk’s mind back on search duties as she closed the hatch.

Stang, she hoped those two could still breathe in that tank. She couldn’t check until
Cornucopia
jumped to hyperspace and she’d set the autopilot on course. Getting out of Mezeg orbit seemed to take hours rather than minutes, and the moment the stars in the viewport stretched from points of light to frozen streaks of infinity, she checked the course and handed the controls over to
Cornucopia
’s nav computer.

The aft cargo section was silent except for the throb of the drives and the rattle of loose fittings. Ny took a deep breath and began unbolting the water tank inspection plate on the deck, wondering if she’d find bodies rather than live Jedi.

“That was too close.” Ny lifted the metal panel and reached down. It was a tight fit in the space between those tanks even for a short, skinny kid like Scout, so the Kaminoan must have been very uncomfortable indeed. “How did you get away with that?”

Scout scrambled out of the hole in the deck, her ginger hair disheveled. She looked like she hadn’t eaten in a week. It took a little longer to extract Kina Ha, not only because the Kaminoan was much taller, but also because she was a lot older—exactly how old, Ny wasn’t sure, but the Kaminoan was a venerable lady by anyone’s standards. Ny usually couldn’t tell the age of a nonhuman, but Kina Ha would have looked obviously old
to anyone, with deeply lined gray skin and drooping eyes. She moved slowly. It made Ny feel positively teenaged.

“I influenced the akk to find that bone when it got too excited,” Scout said. “But we’re fine. Aren’t we, Kina?”

“We are
alive,”
said the Kaminoan. “And that is a bonus. Thank you for risking so much for us.”

Ny would have taken that thanks in her stride a matter of days ago, but now it triggered a pang of guilt. Neither of the Jedi knew where they were going, and they hadn’t pressed her too hard for an answer. But she hadn’t told them exactly who their hosts would be, either.

And that was going to be … interesting.

No matter: like Kina Ha said—they were alive, and that was a bonus.

Cornucopia
was a typical old CEC
Monarch
-class cargo ship, boxy and basic, with a long bench along the bulkhead behind the pilot’s and copilot’s seats. Kina Ha settled on the bench like a crotchety duchess and fastened her safety restraints. Scout slid into the copilot’s seat next to Ny.

Ny broke out some ration packs and passed them around. She had no idea what Kaminoans ate—fish and other seafood, she guessed—but Kina Ha wasn’t going to get any yobshrimp here. Skirata had said that Kaminoans hated bright sunlight and were happiest when it was cloudy and bucketing down rain. That was going to be a challenge to achieve on Mandalore, too. But that was going to be the least of Kina Ha’s problems.

“We’re going to Mandalore,” Ny said at last. Somehow she expected at least a gasp, or even a cry of protest. But the two Jedi were silent. “You heard me, didn’t you? Mandalore?
Manda’yaim
?”

“Yes, we did hear, thank you,” Kina Ha said. “Suitably remote and forbidding. I commend your ingenuity.”