501st: An Imperial Commando Novel (55 page)

“Lorka Gedyc has big plans for us. Forget your petty personal squabbles with the
aruetyc
Empire and start thinking about our rightful heritage. We weren’t always the
aruetiise
’s latrine-cleaners. We’ve got the
beskar—
and we can use it.”

“Say it.”

“Say what?”

“Are you still calling yourself the Death Watch, or have you hired an image consultant to give you a racy new name?”

Gilamar looked Priest straight in the eye with just enough hostility to be convincing. Ordo had guessed right. He just hoped
Mij’ika
knew how far to go with this stunt.

“We’re not ashamed. Death Watch it is.”

“So how are you going to build your new Mando empire?” he asked. “There can’t be more than a few thousand
of you vermin, tops. And you won’t be fighting little girls this time.”

“I can’t reveal troop strengths to you.” Priest shook his head. Gilamar didn’t voice his usual objection to the Death Watch using the word
troops
instead of
thugs
. “Still as sanctimonious as ever, Mij.”

Gilamar paused and pushed himself away from the wall one-handed to stand upright. Ordo braced for trouble, keeping an eye on Priest’s holstered blaster. His hand wandered just a fraction too close to it for comfort.

“Yeah,” Gilamar said. “I have trouble forgetting all the lads on Kamino I had to patch up from your fight club. And the ones who didn’t make it.”

“The strong survive, the weak die. That’s the way the galaxy works. The day we forgot that, we became everyone’s lackey.”

Gilamar looked down for a moment. The river was so noisy that they had to stand as close as friends to hear each other. Then Gilamar’s shoulders sagged as if he was sighing.

“It’s not vengeance,” he said. “It just has to be done.”

Ordo was fast. But he wasn’t fast enough. Gilamar dropped to a crouch and drew the blade on his belt, bringing it up into Priest’s belly in the time it took Ordo to inhale. Priest staggered back, eyes wide with shock, and fell against the slippery wall. For a heartbeat Ordo couldn’t work out how Gilamar had put the knife through Priest’s armor; but then he saw the blood, spurting blood,
arterial
blood, and knew that Gilamar had aimed with a surgeon’s precision for the gap between the plates at the top of the thigh. He’d sliced through the femoral artery.

Priest had minutes to live. He’d bleed out in minutes.

“Oh … oh … you
scum … 
” Priest’s voice had suddenly taken on a high-pitched shakiness, all surprise. He slumped at the foot of the wall, trying to stem the blood with his hands, but he was already too weak to apply much pressure. “You … you … why?”

“It’ll take too long to list.” Gilamar just watched him. Ordo had never seen that side of the doctor before. “But I can’t let you live, for so many, many reasons.”

“Isabet? Issy? Help me … 
help me … 
”

Reau wasn’t going to hear him. Nobody would, with the racket the water was making. They were going to have a dead body on their hands very soon. Ordo had to think what to do next.

“Shab
, Mij, did you have to?” he said.

“Yes.” Gilamar squatted down and looked Priest in the eye. “I can’t let your kind come back to Mandalore. You know that, don’t you? And it’s the least I owe Jango. And all those boys who got broken for your entertainment.”

Priest was panting now, semiconscious, and all he managed was an animal noise that faded into nothing. There was an awful lot of blood pooling on the cobbles. Ordo looked down from the archway to see if there was any runoff staining the water, but the churning foam was as white as ever.

How can I tell Besany that my first thought was how to cover this up
?

It was a war. It didn’t matter which war. And Besany had seen him do far worse.

Ordo watched Gilamar check the pulse in Priest’s neck as if he was doing a house call.
“Kal’buir
’s going to be furious.”

“You got a better idea, son? This
chakaar
would turn us in if it suited him, too.”

“We’d better dump the body in the river.”

“Yeah.” Gilamar took something from his belt and held it under Priest’s nose. It looked like polished durasteel. The man’s eyes were half open. Gilamar nodded. “He’s gone. Kinder exit than he deserved. Help me tip him over the side. Mind you don’t get blood all over your plates.”

Gilamar searched Priest and took his datapad, comlink, and ID chip, then unclipped one of the shoulder plates with the hated Death Watch emblem and slipped
it into his belt pouch. The opening in the granite wall wasn’t overlooked. Unlike Imperial City, there were no snoop cams to monitor the place, either. Ordo took a grip of Priest’s belt and backplate, Gilamar grabbed the other side, and together they heaved the body into the torrent. They didn’t even hear a splash.

“He’ll wash up somewhere downstream,” Gilamar said. “The buffeting and the rocks will mash the body a bit, but we don’t have Jaller Obrim or the CSF Forensics Service here to worry about. Come on. I’ll make my peace with Kal.”

“Who’s going to make the most noise when they realize Priest’s missing?” Ordo asked. He checked himself for blood before climbing the steps again. “Other than Reau?”

“Does it matter?” Gilamar cleaned his knife in the spray from the river and shook off the water. “We’re all borked anyway. Might as well hang for a bantha as a jackrab.”

It was time to bang out of Keldabe. They’d infected enough people by now anyway. And Reau—Ordo knew they’d have to deal with her sooner or later.

It would take her a long time to work out who’d killed Priest.

“A
rla? It’s me. Can I come in?”

Jusik rapped on her door and waited for a response. It was locked from the outside, but he had to give her some control over the only sanctuary she had. Laseema listened, head tilted in concentration.

“She’s been awful while you were down in Keldabe.” Laseema adjusted the balance of dishes on the tray. “Hallucinations, muscle spasms, vomiting, the lot. I had to get Fi to give her medical aid while Scout kept her calm. He’s really good.”

“He trained as a squad battlefield medic,” Jusik said. “I always think of him as just the sniper. I tend to forget the medic side.”

“This is the first time she’s been too far out of it to wash and dress herself. That’s why I’m worried.”

“What were the hallucinations about?”

“The only thing I could understand was that she thought she was burning. There were flames coming toward her.”

Jusik didn’t know enough to even guess if that was a clue to an underlying problem. And he’d never seen anyone suffer withdrawal symptoms before. It was distressing. When he opened the door, Arla was thrashing around on the bed, clearly in pain, panting for breath. Her eyes were half open.

“Let me die,” she mumbled, apparently lucid. “If you understood, you’d end this for me.”

Jusik turned to Laseema. “Better get
Mij’ika.”
This was medically beyond him. “Arla, this is going to pass. I know it doesn’t feel like it, but it
will
be over soon.”

He put his hand under her head, feeling the matted, sweaty hair, and wondered how medics ever coped daily with the smell of illness. She struggled to focus on him.

“It
won’t
pass,” she whispered. “It’s not the drugs. It’s
me.
”

“When that stuff is out of your system, then we can fix you. We can.”

“No. It’s still there. It always will be.”

Gilamar arrived with an assortment of hyposprays. For a man who’d just killed a former comrade, he looked oddly calm. “What’s wrong, Arla? Stomach cramps? Throwing up? Head hurt?” He placed a blood pressure sensor in the crook of her elbow. “That’s a bit low. Let’s fix that first.”

“Twitching muscles … stang, my legs …”

“Two for two, so far.” Gilamar gave her two shots and stood back. “Should be kicking in anytime, Arla. Hang in there. Now, where are you, and what can you see?”

“Bedroom … window … you … Bardan … and Laseema was here.”

“You’re not hallucinating, then. You’re going to feel like a speeder wreck for a couple of days yet. What’s your biggest problem right now?”

Arla rolled over on one side and flung off one of the blankets. “I want to stop thinking. I want it all to stop.”

Gilamar bent down to whisper in Jusik’s ear. “She’s lucid and feeling ropey. Apart from monitoring her blood pressure that’s all I can do until something else mechanical or chemical goes wrong.”

Jusik sat with Arla for half an hour, trying to feel her mental state, and all he could get was a sensation in his mind of her constantly trying not to look at something hanging in front of her eyes. He tended to see solid images superimposed at a point that felt somewhere behind his eyes and level with the roof of his mouth. Then he felt Zey and Kina Ha approaching. Kina Ha was distinctive in the Force, such a weight of time and experience stored in her being that the Force felt as if it curved around her. Zey was an odd mix now: the old Master, impatient and frustrated like an escaping sigh, but almost completely engulfed in a terrible regret that peaked and fell on a cycle like a heartbeat.

“If we can help,” Zey said. “Just say.”

Kina Ha settled down with majestic slowness and dipped her long neck to gaze into Arla’s face.

“I’m
old,”
she said. “And there’s nothing you have done that can shock me. I’ve seen
so many
. Whatever it is, you’re not the most terrible being who ever lived. It won’t let you go, so you can’t run from it, but you can grab it and hold it where you can see it for what it is.”

Jusik had no idea what the Kaminoan was going on about, although she seemed to sense that thing that Arla was trying not to see. It was obvious: a terrible memory. It would be agony to relive what the Death Watch did to her family and then to her, but it seemed to be the only option left.

Zey just watched. Jusik moved back a little. Kina Ha took Arla’s arm and examined the cuts and deep wounds.

“What are you trying to cut out of yourself?” she asked.

Jusik tried not to jump too far ahead, but he could guess guilt, taste guilt,
calculate
guilt. Arla didn’t know her brother Jango had survived. But there wasn’t a happy ending to that, either, so Jusik decided to save it until she was a lot stronger.

“What I am,” Arla said at last.

“And what are you?”

“One of them.”

“Who?”

Jusik looked at Zey, who seemed just as lost as he was. Kina Ha’s thousand years of life—what had she seen and experienced? More than any human, ten times over, even more than any Hutt, even if she spent it all in secluded contemplation. She’d had time to listen to whole
worlds
.

“Look,” Arla said. “I can’t say it.”

She scrambled into a sitting position, and struggled to lift the back of her shirt. Jusik didn’t know what to expect; he just knew that she’d been hurt, physically and emotionally. Jango had told Vau just the barest detail about the Death Watch punishing his father for harboring Jaster Mereel, and his mother shooting one of them dead so Jango—eight, maybe—could get away. That was the last he saw of all of them, his mother shielding fourteen-year-old Arla, his father on his knees yelling at him to run.

Jango thought they’d all died. Arla seemed to think she was the lone survivor, too. Between those two views lay a mystery.

Arla still fumbled with her shirt. Jusik didn’t dare touch her to help her. He left it to Kina Ha.

“Look,” Arla said. Kina Ha lifted the fabric higher. “I can’t reach it. If I could, I’d cut it out. But
I’d
still be in here. It’s me who needs to go.”

Jusik steeled himself to look. He was expecting worse. He wasn’t sure if the dark brown mark was a tattoo, or a scar, or a branding mark, but he knew exactly what it was because he’d seen one only hours ago, or a version of it: the Death Watch emblem, the ragged winged W shape. It didn’t surprise him. She’d been spoils of war as
far as they were concerned, an animal to be used, and marked as their property.

“A surgeon can remove that,” Kina Ha said. “Would that help?”

Arla pulled down her shirt again. “You don’t get it. You can’t guess because it’s so bad.”

“Whatever it was, you were a child of fourteen, Walon tells me. When we’re adult, we look back and judge our childhood actions by unfairly adult rules.”

Arla didn’t turn around. “It’s not a wound or a humiliation. It’s a badge.”

“Explain.”

“After I was kidnapped, after it stopped being a nightmare, I stayed with them. I became one of them. I
stayed
. I could have run away. But I
stayed
.” She looked over her shoulder at Jusik. “Could you stand being me?”

“Oh,
shab,”
Jusik said.

“Stop me remembering it all,” she begged. “Let me die, or kill me, but I can’t live in this head anymore. I kept trying to die. But the doctors wouldn’t let me.”

Arla was frighteningly lucid now. Jusik wasn’t sure if Kina Ha had induced some state of clarity, but whatever it was, he’d rescued a woman who didn’t want to stay rescued. There was no point telling her that kidnap victims, hostages, and abused, helpless kids often found themselves depending on the very people hurting them, and even growing to like them, because their own lives were held in those hands. Humans generally weren’t the magnificent heroes of holovids who fought back, but simply normal beings doing instinctive things just to stay alive.