501st: An Imperial Commando Novel (33 page)

“You said a Sith did. The Jedi were the enforcers—even before Palps.”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Are you okay?”

“No, I’m scared stiff. This galaxy’s falling apart.” Dar dropped his voice as they turned into the mess lobby. “My kid. What’s going to happen to my kid? You heard what Holy Roly said. He can’t even trust Intel now. We’ve swapped one rotten regime for another.”

“Welcome to the real world,” Niner said. “But there’s always a door marked
EXIT.
”

They didn’t need to take anything with them. They didn’t have anything of value, anyway. Niner had to keep his helmet on to maintain comms to the ship.

Rede was busy cleaning his boots when they walked into the squad room. He looked up, wide-eyed. No, science couldn’t possibly cram enough into these Spaarti clones in a year. Poor kid—they were walking out on him when he needed them most. Ennen wasn’t around.

“Are you going to show me some vibroblade techniques, Sarge?” Rede asked. “I’m a fast learner.”

“Tomorrow,” Niner said. He felt awful. Now he had to lie completely. “We’re just going for a recce around town. Old buddies to check up on. We’ll be back before lights-out.”

Rede frowned slightly, but went on cleaning. The truly weird thing was that he seemed to be changing before Niner’s eyes. He really was learning by the minute. In the space of a day, he’d picked up habits and gestures. Whatever medical science tried to do to human beings to speed up their development, they still had to go through that process of learning from adults around them and then fitting in with the tribe. Rede was just doing it faster than a Kamino clone.

And we did it faster than mongrels
.

“See you later,” Darman said. He was pretty convincing.

Niner put his helmet back on as they walked through the main doors and headed for the perimeter gate. Beyond that lay what had been Galactic City, now Imperial City, and Niner could probably have counted the number of times he’d walked out into that civilian world on one hand.

He opened the secure comlink. “Ordo? You receiving? We’re on our way.”

“Nice excuse, by the way.” Ordo sounded relaxed. “We picked up most of that cozy chat. What an
affable
fellow Holy Roly is.”

“He’s crazy,” Niner said. “He’s going to be running his own private army.”

Jaing interrupted. “I’m shocked, I tell you. Who’d abuse their command privileges so shamelessly? And guess what—his family’s from Dromund Kaas. You won’t find
that
in your database,
ner vod
, because it wasn’t even on Republic charts. The place is run by dark side weirdos called the Prophets. They make sure their prophecies of doom and dark destruction come true. Now, I’m no psychologist, but between the saber-jockeys and the mad monks, I think I can guess what shaped your boss’s bad attitude to our paranormally gifted friends.”

“Pity he’s on the wrong side,” Ordo said.
“Kal’buir
would like him.”

“
Kal’buir
’s never going to get the chance.” Niner picked up speed as they passed through the security gates. “We’re coming home,
vode.
”

“Oya manda,”
Mereel said approvingly. “I hope you two don’t mind hiding in a water tank while we exfil.”

They were going to Mandalore. Niner could rarely recall being excited, but this was like nothing else he’d ever known. It was a leap into a new life, one he couldn’t begin to imagine, and just not knowing was a thrill in itself. He thought that was odd for a man whose nickname was Worry-Guts.

He’d try farming. Fishing. Bounty hunting, if he got bored with the rural life. And he’d find a nice girl, just like Fi had.

Fi
. He hadn’t seen his brother in nearly two years.

And Darman—Niner didn’t ask, because he didn’t need to. Dar was going to be reunited with his son.

“What did Ordo have to say?” Darman asked. He was shut out of the secure link, but he could guess Niner was talking to the Nulls. “Everything okay?”

“It’s all going fine,” Niner said, regretting that he’d never get to ask Holy Roly what had happened back home to make him bitter enough to defy Force-using Intel agents. “Soon be home.”

“H
ave you been here all night?” Gilamar asked.

Uthan looked up from her notes, elbows on the lab bench, head propped on her hands. In front of her, she had the rough sketch of the level-10 containment unit she’d need to safely re-create the virus that had been unleashed on Gibad.

“More or less,” she said.

“How’s it going?” He pulled up a stool and sat down next to her, laying his hand on hers with the kind of firm grip he probably reserved for his drinking buddies rather than women. It was still comforting to have someone hold your hand when your world—in every sense—was in tatters. She hadn’t pegged him as the hand-holding type. “I wasn’t expecting you to be working on this. But … yes, it helps. After Tani was killed, I think I read every paper on pituitary tumors in the Republic Institute.”

“I’m working on justice,” Uthan said. “And I don’t mean the clones’ problem. Palpatine wants to play dirty? Fine.”

Gilamar glanced at the diagram. “You going to explain?”

He was a Mandalorian. He’d understand. He wouldn’t spout some high-minded piety and tell her that brutal vengeance just brought her down to her enemy’s level. He’d want to eliminate future threats.

She liked him a lot.

“I’m working out the fastest way to re-create and manufacture the phase-one FG thirty-six virus,” she said. “And then I’m going to let it loose on Coruscant.”

“Understood,” he said, nodding.

“Of course, once I’ve got a few canisters, I’ll need transport to the Core. It’s a very economical virus. You can accelerate its spread by airborne distribution, or just seed a few carriers and let it progress at its own pace. Incubation period six days or so in humans, infectious for six weeks, designed to work through an entire population and defeat normal quarantine measures. Go on, tell me how clever I am for building such a stealthy pathogen.”

She waited for him to explain why she should just stay home and bide her time, all comforting and sensible. But he just nodded again.

“I’d do the same, I think, except with something that made a lot more noise and flame.” He picked up the datapad and looked as if he was calculating what materials were needed. “It’s a really simple process, then. What did you base the virus on?”

“It’s a modified version of nebellia.”

“That just causes minor respiratory tract problems and diarrhea. It’s not fatal.”

“It is after I’ve done a little nip and tuck on its DNA …”

“Clever girl.”

“All I need is a sample of nebellia and the cell culture to host the virus—preferably
Gespelides ectilis
—and I can grow industrial quantities of the strain within weeks.
Great value, bioweapons—expensive on the R and D side, of course, but dirt cheap on production.”

“You could just propagate monnen spores, of course,” Gilamar said. “Naturally occurring, and patent-free.”

“You know, Mij, I’m not sure if you’re encouraging me, mocking me, or humoring me.”

“I’m just seeing the downside of this, but also wanting you to avenge your world and kick Palps so hard up his
shebs
that his eyeballs rattle.” Gilamar shut his eyes for a moment. “There’s only so many times I can say how sorry I am. You don’t need to be told how bad it is. I think you’re the kind of woman who needs to get even.”

Uthan liked that honesty. She felt she could say whatever was on her mind in return, and he’d never take offense. “It’d be a great deterrent for Mandalore to hold.”

“You know what? I think we’d rather have an antiviral first. Because Palps knows his toy really works now. He might want to play with it again.”

Uthan had worked out that Mandos regarded biological and chemical weapons as beneath contempt, a coward’s tactic deployed from the safety of an armchair. But they were too pragmatic a people to have any warrior-ethic objection to doing things the easy way.

“Would Mandalore
use
a biological weapon?” she asked.

“We prefer sharp things. Pointed things. And noisy things that we can see from about twenty klicks away, preferably resulting in a big ball of flame.” Gilamar looked utterly dejected despite his chirpy tone. She found it odd to have a relative stranger mourning with her. “Trouble with the invisible stuff is that you don’t actually know where it is, or what it’s doing. Or what happens after you let it loose.”

“If I’d had any sense, I’d have made the immunogen at the same time as I developed the virus. But even if I had—I had no way of getting it to Gibad. Fi and his friends captured me long before then.”

Gilamar ignored the irony. “I think that antiviral is pretty urgent now.”

“Agreed.”

“What do you need to produce it?” He was a kind man, but he wasn’t letting her off the hook. He was right, of course. “Ironically, developing a vaccine is the most dangerous and rebellious thing you can do to the Empire now.”

“I just manipulated two genes in a naturally occurring nanoscale virus.” Uthan turned her datapad back the right way up and calculated a few more dimensions. “We still need to hold a live virus, so we’d need some extra safety precautions. But FG thirty-six latches on to a single protein in human DNA, and the protein can be made resistant by one gene mutation. I can induce that gene mutation in a population with an engineered virus.”

“Based on  … ?”

“Something easily transmissible and low-grade, like rhinacyrian fever. Very few humanoids have resistance to it. A day or two of a runny nose and itchy eyes, which is far preferable to dying of internal hemorrhaging and involuntary muscle paralysis.”

“How fast?”

“Weeks.”

“How easy to treat the population?”

“Vaccination’s best, if you can herd four million Mandos. It would probably be simpler to let it loose and rely on human carriers to spread it. Or do what Palpatine did—disperse it in the air. But that requires a lot of equipment and someone will notice.”

“Okay, give me your shopping list,” he said. “I’ll get the stuff as soon as I can.”

“And then how about wiping out Coruscant?”

“First things first.”

There was a timid knock on the door. Uthan looked up to see Scout in the doorway, and hoped the girl hadn’t heard the conversation. It felt indecent to discuss plans for mass murder in front of a Jedi. Uthan wasn’t sure why she reacted that way, seeing as she had little respect for the Jedi Order playing enforcer for the Republic,
but Scout was a scared child, and that defused Uthan at an instinctive level.

“I wondered if you wanted breakfast,” Scout said. “I’ll bring it here, if you like. Peace and quiet. You, too, Mij?”

“Thanks,
ad’ika,”
Gilamar said. “You’ve got a good heart.”

Uthan listened until the sound of Scout’s boots faded. Then she looked at Gilamar. “What a strange little group we are, clinging together. All loss and loneliness.”

“Everyone’s lonely until they find kindred spirits. I think this is a community of folks who’ve had enough and can’t run anymore.”

“I’m truly grateful for your kindness, Mij. It’s as if everyone’s conveniently forgotten what I actually do for a living.”

Gilamar shrugged. “Most folks here have taken another being’s life. I think that includes the Force-users, too.”

“How’s Arla doing?”

“Not good. Her past seems to be coming back to her, and it sure ain’t happy memories.”

Scout came back a lot sooner than Uthan expected. She caught herself feeling indignant, and then plunged into burning guilt for getting too engrossed in Gilamar when there were so many dead. But there was a void in her misery, a gap in the connection to the loss of her world that translated into aching, inconsolable grief for loved ones. She was upset, shocked, horrified, enraged—but she felt her sorrow was a fraud, because her personal loss was minimal.

I have no right to sympathy
.

Sessaly was a distant cousin she saw once a year out of duty, the nearest she had to a family. Somewhere, her ex-husband and in-laws lay dead, too, but she hadn’t spoken to them in ten years. There were colleagues from the university. But there were no close friends. Uthan felt like a holovid fan sobbing over a dead actor, mourning someone she didn’t even know, appropriating grief. Her
life had been lived out in a laboratory and fixated on achievement, and now it was barren in every sense of the word.

“Eggs,” Scout said, putting the plates down in a clear space on the workbench. “Last of the nuna ones until Ny gets back.”

“Thank you.” Uthan noted that even Ny had found a niche here. “We won’t starve yet.”

Some tragedies were so huge that mention of them was superfluous. Uthan could sense Scout’s awkwardness, not knowing what was appropriate at a time like this, so Uthan broke the silence that followed.

“I have to manufacture an antiviral,” she said. “In case the Empire decides to use the virus here. Would you be interested in helping me?”

Scout gave her a wary look. “Does it involve cutting up animals?”

“No. Not at all. I just tinker with a virus, and then put it in a plant cell culture. The more the cells multiply, the more of the beneficial virus we get.”

“Back to the AgriCorps,” Scout said. “I’m great with plants.”

“That’s what we need most,” Gilamar said. “Actually, this would be a yeast. But I’m splitting hairs. Are you interested in medicine?”

Scout seemed genuinely curious. “Did Bardan really repair Fi’s brain damage with the Force?”

“Watched it happen,” Gilamair said. “Measured it. Truly amazing.”