501st: An Imperial Commando Novel (47 page)

But she was going to try.

“Nobody’s judging you, Arla,” Uthan said kindly. How could she? She had no idea what had driven Arla to kill, only that she’d lost her family in the most horrific circumstances. Uthan knew plenty of killers who never so much as lost their appetite for their next snack. And here was this unlucky woman, institutionalized for years, harming herself in the agony of guilt. Uthan decided to say whatever might soothe her. “I’m sure you had reason to kill … to defend yourself …”

“Not
that,”
Arla spat. “Not
them
. They were
nothing
. I mean
bad
stuff.
Disgusting
stuff.”

Arla rocked herself a little longer and then her breathing slowed, and she seemed to be calming down, or at least she’d exhausted herself. She shuffled into a cross-legged position, braced her elbows on her knees, and rested her head in her hands.

It seemed as good a time as any to slip out. Uthan backed away to the door, and Gilamar peered in.

“Oh,
shab
.”

Jusik craned his neck. Uthan ushered them back a little way along the corridor and closed the doors. Jaing was engrossed in something on his datapad.

“Well, I’m getting a better picture of why the Valorum docs kept her so heavily sedated,” Gilamar said. “She doesn’t even need anything sharp to self-harm.”

“Mij, I don’t know what she was talking about, but she blames herself for something.”

“You said you wanted me to hack into the criminal justice database,” Jaing said, brandishing his ’pad. “Well, here you go. Arla Vhett, spelled right, three counts of murder, and at least six more thought to be down to her but the court ruled there was insufficient evidence. Convicted, but transferred to a secure mental unit after serving a year or two in a normal prison. That’s our girl.”

“So is any of that of use to us?” Jusik said.

“Ah, but it’s who she whacked that makes it interesting. Assuming that the six they couldn’t convict on are hers, then they don’t look random, but they don’t look
logical, either. At least not serial-killer logical, if you know what I mean.”

Gilamar took the datapad from him and read, brow puckered in concentration. “All male, all business owners—one tapcaf, one haulage firm, one catering supplies, and … hey, that name rings a bell.
Vargaliu
. He was a bounty hunter, way back.”

The three men looked at one another. Uthan had the feeling that they would have felt better if Arla had been the kind who only killed males with red hair, a consistent lunatic. Scout tugged at her sleeve.

“I just get the feeling of the most awful guilt,” she said. “The poor woman’s tearing herself apart with
guilt.
”

“And not over her victims, judging by what she said,” Jusik muttered.

“So what can we do for her?” Uthan asked.

Jusik looked guilty himself. “We could hire a proper psychiatrist, except that we don’t want any more visitors than we already have. It’s getting like Galactic City spaceport here. I say we let her surface some more, and see what we’re dealing with.”

“And then?”

Jusik shrugged. “I have no idea.”

“Me neither,” said Gilamar. “But if it’s insoluble, we’ve always got the meds.”

Jaing didn’t say anything. Jusik had insisted on rescuing Arla, but nobody had imagined the form that her psychosis would take. It was naïve and well meaning, a spur-of-the-moment reaction that any compassionate being would have had about someone in torment. But now it looked as if Arla could never lead a normal life or return to Concord Dawn.

“It was my idea,” Jusik said, “and so she’s my responsibility. One way or another—I’ll get her out of this.”

Compassion was a burden. Uthan realized she’d avoided it for most of her life, and Jusik had made a vocation of it.

She wondered which of them was the happier.

D
arman knew better than to trust anyone as much as he’d trusted Skirata, but Roly Melusar was an all-right kind of officer. He asked how they wanted to play things now that Ennen was gone.

Yes, he said that. His very words.
How do you want to play it, men? Can you handle a replacement for Ennen yet, or would you rather operate as a three-man squad for a while
? Nobody had ever done something that
simple
, that thoughtful for them before—except
Kal’buir
, of course.

Darman didn’t want to replace Ennen yet. It was hard enough bonding with Rede. If the squad had been ordered to, he’d have done it, of course, but at the moment it felt less painful to stick to the tight circle he knew,
brothers who had lost a buddy in a particularly awful way.

Niner said it would be easier to operate as a smaller squad while they had a wild card like Rede to train. Dar didn’t think there was very much wild about Rede at all. He just absorbed everything at a frightening rate, and he knew more about them than they knew about him.

Rede was just over a year old and he’d spent nearly all that time in a gestation tank. What was there to know about him?

“You know what makes this business with Ennen worse?” Niner said, chin resting on folded arms as he watched the station’s security monitors. “Not just that he killed himself. It’s that we didn’t get on with him. He didn’t like us, and I’m not sure we liked him. And I never thought I’d say this, but—well, it feels even worse in some ways than losing a brother you loved.”

Darman tried to look as if he was more interested in the assorted views of the space station’s main thoroughfares. He sat watching the bank of screens, running his thumbnail down his chin. It probably didn’t fool Niner.

“Guilt,” Darman said. “Guilt eats you alive.”

Niner couldn’t say it in front of Rede, but they both knew what Darman blamed himself for
not
doing. “I don’t think
that
would have stopped him, Dar.”

Oh, yes, it would. If he’d known there was somewhere he could escape to and start his life over again—he wouldn’t have stuck a blaster in his mouth and pulled the trigger. It wasn’t just Bry dying that tipped him. It was not having anything else to make surviving worthwhile.

“What would have stopped him?” Rede asked.

Niner filled the gap without a blink. “Us trying to understand his Corellian thing.”

“I liked him,” Rede said. “He was pretty good to me. Is it that much of a problem, you guys all having different cultures?”

“We weren’t
all different,”
Darman said. “Most of us had Mandalorian sergeants, and that’s what we grew up as. Only a quarter of commandos had
aruetyc
sergeants.”

“Yeah, I know what that means.”

It wasn’t Rede’s fault that he wasn’t Fi, or Corr, or Atin. Darman made a conscious effort to remember that. He tried to imagine what it was like to reach adulthood without any real contact with other beings, having everything you knew piped into your brain while you floated in some nutrient soup. That was Darman’s definition of a nightmare. He couldn’t believe that Rede could behave so normally under the circumstances.

“Tell us if you feel we’re shutting you out,” Niner said. “We don’t mean to.”

“You were Omega Squad, weren’t you?”

“Yeah.” Niner sat up a little. Something had caught his eye. “The Boys in Boring Black. That’s what Delta called us.”

“How do you feel about your buddies deserting and leaving you behind?”

Niner put his hand on Darman’s arm in less time than it took Darman to inhale in preparation to give Rede an earful. Darman took the hint.

“We miss them,” Darman said.
But I’m going to talk to them soon, and to my son
. He willed Rede not to say something insulting about them just in case he lost it with him. “You always miss your brothers. All of them.”

“Dar, I think that’s our boy.” Niner tapped his finger on the monitor screen, then jumped up and went into the adjoining control room. A crew of droids and three Sullustan security officers were keeping an eye on the public areas of the station. “See this guy? Follow him. Keep a cam on him at all times and we’ll take the feed in our HUDs. Now lock down the departure gates and seal off sections A-nine through A-fifteen. Emergency escape routes, too. I want that part of the station watertight.”

“Airtight,” said one of the guards. He ran a practiced eye over the crowds milling around on his screens. “With that number of bodies moving about—safest thing is to run a routine fire evacuation. Bring down the internal bulkheads. It’s triggered a dozen times a week
by vessel emissions anyway. Way too sensitive. Thinks everything is a fire or a fuel leak.”

“Whatever it takes.”

“Who
is
this guy, anyway?”

“Borik Yelgo. A Jedi Knight.”

“Stang—are we going to have any station left when you lot are done fighting?”

“We promise not to breach the hull,” Niner said. “But it’s going to mean getting the civvies out of the way first without alerting him.”

Those weren’t their orders—not the ones from Palpatine’s command, anyway. Once you let Jedi know they could hide behind civilians, that you wouldn’t risk collateral damage, they’d exploit it. Darman knew that Palps was right for once. But Niner had always been uneasy about that kind of thing.

All the civvies had to do was turn in Jedi and stand clear of them when ordered to do so.

And when this job’s done, I’m going to find a quiet corner before we head back to base, and call Kyrimorut
.

Somehow, being light-years from Imperial City made that call feel safer. Darman veered between nerves and excitement as he planned what he was going to say and who he’d talk to. It pushed the capture of the Jedi into an insignificant second place.

“Okay, if we cut through the service passages, we’ll end up the other side of alpha-fifteen,” Niner said. “Then we can move back through the sections as they shut the bulkhead behind us.”

Darman shoved Rede ahead of him as they followed Niner down the service area corridor, a dimly lit canyon of polished durasteel walls strung with cables, ducting, and pipes. Indicator lights and the glow of control panels provided the only illumination. As Darman jogged along, he could see the alarm system repeater panels flashing: the sensitive atmosphere monitors had detected particulates and ion emissions above a certain level—thanks to intervention by the station security team—and the automated system had shut down all traffic movements.
It was routine, like setting off a domestic fire alarm by toasting breadmeal sticks a bit too long.

“Aren’t the civvies going to rush into another sector and take Yelgo along with them?” Rede asked.

“All we need do is corner him so he doesn’t end up in the service ducts,” Niner said. “Don’t worry. Keep an eye on him in your HUD feed. You can run and watch that at the same time, can’t you?”

“I’m working on it,” Rede said.

It took them minutes to run through the service area of the station and emerge into section A-15. The schematics said it was a
passage
, but Darman found himself in a wide, brightly lit plaza flanked by stores, tax-exempt boutiques, and eateries. Coth Fuuras was a popular stopover for passenger vessels as well as freighters. He could tell which beings were regular visitors and which weren’t by the level of anxiety as the public-address system told them to evacuate the section in an orderly manner. The pilots and stevedores in scruffy coveralls ambled along, munching snacks and slurping caf, and the tourists—regardless of species—all seemed to be trotting, not wanting to look panicked.

A fire on a space station was as bad as things got. He couldn’t blame them for being worried. Nobody seemed to take any notice of three black-armored commandos. Maybe the civvies just saw them as more folks in uniform, part of the fire-control team. It was hard to tell.

“Okay, find him,” Niner said. “Fan out.”

Darman kept one eye on the HUD feed from the security cam, trying to work out where he was in relation to the shop fronts that Yelgo was passing. The Jedi—maybe twenty, human, with a distinctive break in his nose and a scattering of freckles—was walking at a brisk pace like everyone else, not looking over his shoulder. He didn’t need to, after all. He could sense his surroundings.

“Isn’t his sense of danger going to kick in?” Rede said, keeping up with Darman.

“Sometimes they can’t pick out one source of danger from another—like on a battlefield.”

“But there’s no real danger here.”

“Yeah, but the civvies don’t know that, and I bet they’re generating enough fear or whatever it is he picks up on to put him off his game.”

Darman could see individuals pausing to try emergency doors and finding them locked. He was coming up to a crossroads in the station, where one passage crossed another like a street. The curved shape of the space station—a ring rotating around a central gravity core, like a giant fiber reel—created a weird horizon. It made Darman feel as if he were constantly running down a hill, and he could see farther than he would have been able to on the flat. In his HUD image, he saw Yelgo pause at one of the departure areas but turn away when he found it shuttered.

He was a hundred meters from him, maybe less. Niner picked it up before Darman could.

“Tapcaf,” he said. “Turn right at the intersection, follow the overhead sign for Departures Green Six, and look for the Cheery Traveler franchise. That’s where he is.”

The crowd was walking briskly toward the A-5 bulkhead, which would seal behind them while the fire was contained—or so they thought. It wasn’t going to open. Shops were pulling down their shutters, staff filing out with irritated expressions that said they did this way too often and would have to work late to make up for lost time. Darman slowed to a fast walk so that he didn’t catch Yelgo’s eye.