501st: An Imperial Commando Novel (7 page)

Skirata felt like a fool. He was a fool because Ny Vollen left him feeling vulnerable. He was a fool because a teenager who was a little too much like Etain could reduce him to tears. He was a fool because he let all this
osik
get to him. His war wasn’t over. He had to stay sharp and keep thinking like a soldier; there was a lot of unfinished business.

“I know,
Mer’ika.”
He had to stop reliving the past and focus on the future. “I’m just old and tired. You’ll be like that one day. But no sooner than you need to be.”

Mereel chuckled and wandered off in the direction of a hangar hidden by netting and half buried in the soil. He never seemed upset by his accelerated aging. But then Skirata had never been conscious of being a short-lived creature compared with the Hutts he’d done business with, so maybe the reality hadn’t sunk in for Mereel yet.

It would sink in when he started overtaking Jusik on the road to mortality, though. Skirata, painfully aware of an implacably ticking chrono, braced himself to have dinner with a ghost.

“Is it compulsory to like
gihaal?”
Ruu Skirata asked.

She opened the metal container, letting the pungent aroma of dried smoked fish escape into the kitchen.
Gihaal
kept for years without refrigeration, one of the staples of Mandalorian ration packs. Ny filed it under Acquired Tastes. She was grateful she’d never had to prepare it from raw fish. It must have smelled a whole lot worse while it was drying.

“I doubt it,” Ny said, trying to hold her breath. “I think a lot of Mandos hate it, too.”

Ruu wrinkled her nose as she inhaled. She was so much like her father. “Good. I’d hate to let the side down.”

With more than twenty mouths to feed, meals at Kyrimorut had now acquired an industrial scale. The complex was more than a house. It was
yaim
—part barracks, part hotel, part married quarters, part farmhouse, the archetypal Mandalorian clan home. They were lucky that Laseema, Atin’s Twi’lek wife, had worked in a restaurant and so could manage a kitchen. She knew all the complicated stuff about portion sizes and making sure everything was ready at the same time. Ny was happy to take orders from her.

“I vote we get a droid,” Jilka said, dicing amber-root. “Why is Mandalore the only place where everyone does everything by hand?”

“The dignity of labor.” Besany tasted the bubbling vat of stew to check if it needed more salt. “Hard work’s good for the soul. Very grounding.”

“My soul’s fine,” Jilka said stiffly. The angrier she got, the faster she diced. “My body is another matter.”

Jilka looked at her hands, red and sore from kitchen chores, and Ny could almost read her thoughts:
How did this ever happen to me
? Like Besany, Jilka had worked for the Treasury as an investigator. But unlike her, she hadn’t followed a clone husband to Kyrimorut. She was an innocent bystander, set up by a Gurlanin spy to draw attention away from Besany while she leaked government information to Skirata, arrested by the secret police—and sprung from prison by Ordo and Vau. Jilka’s life had been wrecked before she even knew why. She hadn’t actually punched out Besany yet, but the atmosphere between them was pure ice. It was only a matter of time.

“You don’t have to do this.” Besany held out her hand for the knife, which was probably a bad idea. Jilka ignored it. “You’ve got no obligation to us at all.”

“If I’m stuck here, then I
pull my weight,”
Jilka said, and went on chopping.

What else could Besany say? That it was better being stuck at the
shabla shebs
end of the galaxy—Ny was picking up all the profanities—than being held by Palpatine’s thugs? None of it should have happened. Jilka had just been friends with the wrong woman at the wrong time.

Well, they weren’t friends now.

Corr poked his head around the kitchen door. Ny wondered if Jilka could tell all the clones apart yet.

“Can I hide in here, please, ladies?” He gave them his best cheeky-boy smile and swaggered in. “The atmosphere’s a bit intense out there. Aiwha-bait alert.”

“Since when does the kitchen have a
FEMALES ONLY
sign outside?” Jilka asked. “Make yourself useful, soldier.”

Corr winked, took the knife from her hand, and began chopping with surprising speed and skill. The more surprising thing was that she let him.

“If it
did,”
he said, “you’d give me special exemption, right?”

Jilka fixed him with her tax investigator’s stare. “Maybe.”

He smiled and chopped faster. He was being a bit too cocky, paying more attention to Jilka than the knife, and the inevitable happened. He nicked his finger. He swore and paused for a second before carrying on.

Jilka stared. “You’re not bleeding.”

“Oh, these aren’t real, neither of them.” Corr flexed both hands. “But the sensors work. I’m in pain. You can kiss it better if you like.”

“Not real?”

Nobody had told Jilka much about Corr, then. The fact that he’d lost both hands and forearms in a blast when he was a bomb disposal trooper just hadn’t come up. It had now. Prosthetic limbs were commonplace, but losing both hands somehow shifted the injury from routine to distressing.

Corr’s smile didn’t waver. He stripped the synthflesh covering off one hand and waggled metal rods and servos for inspection.

“Bomb disposal specials,” he said. “I was in EOD, but I got a wire wrong. Now,
these
babies—special bomb disposal standard. Also issued to surgeons.
Very
fine motor control.
Very
sensitive, too, when I put the synthflesh back on.”

He gave her a sly smile. Jilka looked like he’d defused her as efficiently as any explosive device.

“I’m impressed,” she said.

“Understandable,” said Corr. “The rest of me is all my own, of course.”

Jilka seemed to thaw a little. She was either embarrassed by his injury or very taken with him, and Ny bet her creds on the latter. Corr carried on chopping until Skirata called him from the passage. It sounded like Ordo and Jusik were back from Keldabe.

“Keep the blade warm, gorgeous,” Corr said, pressing the knife’s handle back into Juka’s palm. “I’ll be back.”

He vanished. Jilka turned her head slowly to Besany. “So, your idea? Peace offering? A clone of my own?”

“Not at all.” Besany looked put out. “He was very shy when I first met him, but Mereel decided to … broaden his outlook on life.”

“I see it worked.”

“You could do a lot worse, Jilka. Clones value the things we take for granted. They never expected to have any of them.”

Ny was surprised by the rebuke, but Jilka didn’t snap back. She went on chopping, eyes fixed on the table. Atin came in carrying a plastoid bowl full of gleaming freshly caught fish.

“Kaminoans eat fish, don’t they?” he said, as if he was having second thoughts. “I never asked back in Tipoca. We didn’t eat with them.”

Laseema picked up a fish by its tail. “Did you gut them properly?”

“Of course I did. And it’s going to take me ages to get the smell off my hands.”

“You’re a darling. Now all I need is some
gihaal
stock to poach them in.”

“You know that’s what Dad and the boys call the Kaminoans, don’t you?” Ruu spooned the dried pieces into a jug.
“Gihaal
. Fish-meal. When they’re not calling them aiwha-bait, that is.”

Jilka seemed unmoved by the odor, but then her tax enforcement duties brought her into contact with a lot of Hutts. “Well, we can make some ironic broth, then.
Gihaal
for
gihaal.
”

“Twenty-five
gihaal
broths, coming up. Or however many it is.”

“None for Fi.” Laseema tasted it, frowing. “He can’t stomach it after what happened to Ko Sai.”

Jilka gave Ny a look that said
tell me what happened
, but she decided that could wait a few months. The woman was unhappy enough as it was.

“Okay, so how many
have
we got tonight?” Laseema checked quantities on her datapad. “Are Cov’s squad in or out at Rav Bralor’s place? How about Levet? Uthan—is she staying in her room, or what? Arla won’t come out, I know.”

“I know we couldn’t leave her in the asylum,” Ruu said, “but did anyone think how the poor woman would feel about being surrounded by strange men in Mando armor?”

“But we’re not the Death Watch,” Besany said. She’d fallen into the role of alpha female by virtue of being Ordo’s wife. “We’re not the ones who killed her family.”

“And she’s not Mando.” Ruu seemed to have embraced her father’s culture despite the long separation. “She’s from Concord Dawn. Not the same thing. Jango joined us, but she never got the chance.
Everyone
probably looks like Death Watch to her.”

Laseema arranged the fish in a pan and set them on the stove. “Do you think she knows Jango survived?”

“I don’t think she even knows what day it is.
Bard’ika’
s the only one who can talk to her. And you, Laseema.”

“Maybe that’s because Bardan doesn’t look like her brother, and Laseema’s a Twi’lek,” Jilka said. “Arla’s
got
to notice the family resemblance in the clones, even if she never saw Jango as an adult.”

“That must be upsetting her even more.” Laseema arranged tidbits on a tray with a few flowers. Arla certainly never got touches like that in the Valorum Center. “And I don’t so much talk
to
her as
at
her—just odd words. Maybe she doesn’t understand much Basic.”

Ny had to remind herself that Arla Fett had been banged up in a secure mental unit because she murdered a few men, and a court decided she might kill more. But everyone here seemed to assume she had her reasons until proven otherwise. It was a bafflingly Mando attitude. Skirata never seemed to worry that the men of Kyrimorut were at risk.

“Gosh, it’s going to be a fun evening,” Jilka muttered. “My family had dinners like this on Republic Day. No serial killers, of course, although we were never entirely sure about Uncle Tobiaz.”

Ny thought that summed it up pretty well. The atmosphere around that huge veshok table was
sliceable
, although not for the reasons she expected. Skirata looked lost and upset. She’d expected to find him being dragged off Kina Ha, knife in hand. But it was Ordo and Mereel—those two always paired up when they smelled trouble—who looked grim and disapproving. Kina Ha sat next to Atin. Ny decided to sit on the other side of her and offer moral support.

“I’ll make the introductions.” Skirata’s voice was husky, as if he’d been swallowing unshed tears. “Kina Ha, Scout—this is my family, and my guests.” He pointed out who was who, who was married to who, who
should
have been married if only they’d get on with it, and who the guests were. Dr. Uthan was introduced as
a friend
concerned for the clones’ health. Skirata had a talent for sly euphemism.

But something had knocked the stuffing out of him, and Ny guessed that it was Scout rather than Kina Ha.

Little Kad,
Kad’ika
, sat on Jusik’s lap for a change, staring at the two Jedi. He was around eighteen months old now, walking and talking, but with an unsettling tendency to just pause and study things in a way that looked too adult. He held his toy nerf in one hand, its fur charred from his mother’s funeral pyre. Ny found it heartbreaking that this tiny kid had put it on there. She tried to work out if he felt cheated that Skirata had rescued it from the flames, that he’d been denied the chance to give his mother a farewell offering, but he refused to be parted from the toy now. Skirata had planned to keep it for when Kad was older and could understand its significance. That plan had lasted a few hours.

The baby already knew. Ny could see it.

Kad never asked where Etain was, or when Mama was coming home. As soon as Skirata showed him her body, he seemed to understand perfectly that she was never coming back, so now he kept asking where
Dada
was. Sometimes he said
Boo
, asking for his
buir
, the
Mando’a
word that could mean mother or father. But Ny doubted he was asking about Etain. He was just picking up the language he now heard most often. He wanted Darman.

Kad stared at Scout as if he knew her, then shook his head.

“He’s very cute,” Scout said. “I feel that the Force is stronger in him than in me, but that’s not saying much. I have to do most things the hard way. I’m not much of a Jedi.”

“Kad’s mother wasn’t strong in the Force, either,” Skirata said, “and she was a
terrific
Jedi.”

Ny caught Ordo’s eye and saw that slight raise of the eyebrow. He was fiercely protective of his father, always ready to intervene. But it was Jusik who stepped in.

“Kina Ha, I’ve never heard of another Force-sensitive Kaminoan,” he said. “May I ask a very personal question? Did they try to engineer your bloodline to maximize midi-chlorians?”

Ko Sai had been excited to get her hands on blood and tissue samples from Etain and Kad. It was an obvious question to ask when it was clear that Kamino had its own Jedi test subject all the time.

“Oh no, not at all,” Kina Ha said. She sounded like a Kuati dowager duchess, imposing and matriarchal, even with that misleadingly gentle Kaminoan voice. “My Force abilities seemed most unexpected and most unwanted. I was bred for
longevity
, for deep-space missions. We never carried out those missions, of course, so there I was, something of an
embarrassment
, and the only one of my kind—I didn’t fit the standard at all. So I felt it best to leave. As a species, we learned to fear too much diversity because controlling our genome was the way we survived the flooding of our world. A
one-off
, as you might call it, looks very much like a threat.”

Kad’s gaze was now fixed on Kina Ha. He didn’t even blink. Jusik carried on.

“If Ko Sai was so interested in midi-chlorians, then, why did she seem to have no record of you?”

“Bardan.” Kina Ha sounded as if she’d known him all her life. “This was all a
very
long time ago,
centuries
ago, and I suspect that my particular genetic records were erased before Kamino became such an
industrial
clonemaster. I’m not the kind of relative you’d want the neighbors to know about.” She almost laughed, a strange bird-like trill. “I do enjoy human holovids, as you can tell. I’ve had a great deal of time on my hands to watch them.”