Darman had an utterly disarming smile. It made Etain feel worse, because the trust just shone out of him. She would be contrite. She would beg forgiveness. And he had to be told, but she worked up to it gently.
“I really like Corr,” she said. “I’m astonished how political he is, how much he thinks. He’s really rather subversive.”
Dar began detaching his pack and armor, stacking the plates beside his helmet. There was no such thing as a quick change for a commando kitted out the way the RCs were. “Yes, us simple clones can even count, and we is happy to be dumb, yes sir, just churn us out and line us up in the shooting gallery, because we don’t feel a thing…”
Etain was mortified. She hadn’t meant it like that. It was simply admiration of Corr’s ability to shake off the indoctrination that told him the only purpose of his life was to lay it down for the Republic. “Dar, you know I’d never even think anything so disgusting.” She grabbed his hand. “You believe me, don’t you? I’m not a bigot. I meant that—”
“I know. It’s okay. Sorry. Just a bit fed up.”
Darman was the most laid-back of men, so some mongrel must have said something out place to the squad. If she found out—well, if she found out it was a Jedi officer, she’d go and give them a very un-Jedi bawling-out they’d never forget.
And now she had to tell him.
“Dar, I love you. You know that, too, don’t you?”
“Are you working up to telling me something bad?”
“Not exactly bad.”
“Because that’s how Sergeant Kal used to start when he had to scold us as kids. You know I love you, son, but you mustn’t do that again. But he does love us, so it’s okay.”
Etain knew now why Jedi—her brand of Jedi, anyway—feared attachment. She was now totally out of control of the situation, unable to be serene. Love messed you up something rotten. But she still wouldn’t trade it for anything, including her next breath. It was the peak of her existence.
“Dar, I need you to listen to me.” Etain took his arm. She wanted to grab him by both shoulders to keep him facing her, but he was too tall. “Dar, I’m going to tell you something I should have told you a long time ago. Please don’t be angry with me, even though I deserve it.”
That got his attention. “Is it Mereel?”
“What?”
“When I’m away.”
Etain was shocked silent for a moment. “Fierfek, Dar, never! No, nothing of the kind. I’d never betray you like that.” She’d been at this point so many, many times, and she hovered on the brink again. It was agony. Do it. Tell him. Do it. Stang, did he really think she’d cheat on him? “Dar, the reason I was away on Qiilura for five months was… I was pregnant. I had a baby.”
As soon as the words escaped her lips, she could almost see them hanging in the air. They had a life of their own, form and meaning, reality and potency. However many times she’d picked up Kad and held him, he had never been more real than at this moment, even light-years away in someone else’s care.
Darman just looked at her. She felt him: he was suddenly as blank as his expression. It was a bombshell. It had stripped all thought from him.
“What?”
“I had a baby.”
They were the wrong words, but that was how they came out. Darman was struggling, blinking as if he was trying to process an alien language, looking her straight in the eye but not connecting with her. A vast chasm had opened up between them.
“It died?” The words escaped in a breath. “Oh, Et’ika…”
She wasn’t expecting that. He’d totally misunderstood. She’d used the past tense, and it had thrown him. He didn’t even ask if it was his. It was as if he didn’t connect their relationship with the possibility of a child.
What did I expect him to say, after what I’ve done?
“No, Dar, he’s fine. He’s beautiful. He’s yours. He’s ours.”
Darman’s eyes never left hers. He stopped blinking and drew in a breath with his lips parted, like someone about to sneeze or cough. Etain couldn’t even feel which way he was going to jump. She was now terrified. She knew it would shock him, but it had completely winded him.
“You never told me?” he said at last. “You never thought to tell me?”
It was far worse than that, of course. Did he even need to know she had planned it? Yes, he did, because she couldn’t live with any more lies. He and Kad were her whole life now. There could be no secrets.
“I realized that if I told you I was pregnant, you’d fret, and you don’t need any more worries when you’re at the front.” There was no purpose to be served by telling him Skirata had stopped her. She’d deceived Darman from the start, planning to conceive, making him think there was no risk of pregnancy. It was her fault: she would face the consequences alone. “And then I didn’t know when to tell you. And I was scared of the Jedi Council finding out, for all kinds of reasons—they’d kick me out, they might take Kad away from me—”
“Is… is that his name?”
“Yes. Kad. I named him Venku when he was born, but then you said you liked Kad as a name for a son, remember? When…” Etain trailed off. She remembered when that conversation had taken place, and wished she hadn’t reminded him. The eruption was coming. “We were talking about names.”
Darman had superb recall. Not perfectly eidetic, like the Nulls’ enhanced memories, but he could remember just fine. When. When Skirata had introduced Kad to the squad as his grandson. Now Kal’buir was in it up to his neck, too.
“That was my son,” he said. Etain could hardly hear him. He was almost saying it to himself. “My son.”
“It’s okay, Dar.” She reached out again and tried to take his hand, but he didn’t grip hers in return. She was too scared to try to hug him now, although she wasn’t sure what she was scared of. He now looked like a spring about to uncoil. “We’ll make it work now, Dar. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have done any of this, I know it, but I so wanted you to have a son, to have some kind of future. That’s what Mandalorian men want, isn’t it? Heirs.”
Darman didn’t seem to pick up that it was deliberate and Force-shaped on her part, but that was like failing to notice the snowstorm when the avalanche had brought down half the mountainside. He simply took a step back from her, and cupped both hands slowly over his mouth and nose, as if he was trying to avoid inhaling something.
“Dar?”
He straightened up with his arms at his side. “Am I the last to know that was my son?” He looked as if he was replaying all the conversations from that day when they stood around in Besany’s apartment admiring the new addition to Skirata’s family. Skirata had even formally adopted Darman, in that on-the-spot, one-line, instant Mandalorian way. And Darman had told her he wasn’t ready to be a father. If he was recalling all that, he must have been in turmoil now. But she could sense almost nothing from him. “Etain, did everyone know except me?”
“No. Just those who needed to know for Kad’s safety.”
Darman paused, staring at the bunk in defocus, and then began reattaching his armor plates. “Everyone except me and the squad, then.”
Etain had no reason to think he would ever hurt her, but in that way of all very strong, very muscular men, he had a presence that could either be reassuring or menacing, and right now he scared her inexplicably. It was the silence—both kinds, the lack of sound and the lack of emotion in the Force. He fumbled with his helmet, and then seemed to give up on sealing it, tucking it under one arm.
“Dar, when you’re ready to talk about this…,” she said.
He turned to the doors. “I just need to walk for a while,” he said, voice hoarse. “Clear my brain a bit.”
She listened, holding her breath until she couldn’t hear his boots in the corridor any longer. Then she opened her comlink, and called Skirata to let him know what she had done.
Chapter Eight
Transit mess deck N,
GAR Station Nerrif,
1910 hours GST, 996 days ABG
Of course clones suffer. What makes you think they don’t? They’ve been at war continuously for more than two years without a break, and it’s been a hard war. Battle stress isn’t an if, it’s a when; if the GAR were made up of average humans, you would simply not have a functioning army now. Clone troopers are optimized humans, and only two percent of the population could ever be as tough, resilient, and aggressive as these men are. But grind them daily like this, give them no respite, deprive them of sleep, give them no outlet or support—and even they will break down eventually.
—Dr. Mij Gilamar, Cuy’val Dar and medical adviser to Special Operations Brigade, assessing the Republic Department of Defense claim that clone troops would not suffer battle stress like other humans because they knew no other kind of life, and were bred for it
The benefits of a fully enclosed helmet had never been more apparent to Darman than now. He could sit and rage in full sight of any passing trooper, and as long as he didn’t move, nobody would be the wiser.
There was little privacy in these temporary barracks. Omega Squad huddled in an open four-berth cabin area, icons of relaxed calm to anyone watching, but inside their buy’cese was a private arena for a painful conversation. The only drawback was that body language had to be suppressed; but that was a skill all clones learned the moment they realized they could retreat inside their armor and create a private space that the Kaminoans couldn’t enter. Darman wondered how many Jedi generals knew that the familiar Copy that… was nothing like the comments shared between brothers on private circuits out of officers’ earshot.
“Shab, Dar, what are you going to do?” Atin asked.
“I don’t know.” Darman hadn’t managed much more than that in the past hour. He didn’t even know yet if he was angry. The closest comparison he had to this feeling was when Jay, Vin, and Taler got killed, once the immediate blind struggle to survive had passed—disbelief, numbness, a physical ache in his chest, and a complete inability to think straight. “I just don’t know.”
“He doesn’t have to do anything.” Niner fell into sergeant mode, trying to be the voice of reassurance in a crisis. “There’s nothing he can do. The baby’s a fact. It’s being looked after. There are no regs that say he can’t father a child. And Etain isn’t going to sue him for child support credits, is she? So all he has to do is come to terms with the fact that she kriffing well had his kid and didn’t bother to tell him.”
“Nothing major, then,” Atin said, arms folded tight across his chest. It was a good way to avoid making gestures that would give outsiders any clue to what was going on. “He can just feel betrayed. He can manage that.”
Corr had kept his mouth shut throughout the argument. He might have been annoyingly gabby on less personal topics, but he knew when to butt out. Dar felt he glimpsed the real man at those moments. He liked him all the more for it.
Darman ventured into territory he was reluctant to even think about. “Kal’buir knew.”
“Yeah, but you said Etain would be in serious osik if the Jedi Thought Police caught her.” Niner seemed to be going for mitigating circumstances. “And don’t they take Jedi babies? She had her reasons.”
But she had told him, and Kad wasn’t any less at risk. The assumption was that the baby was Force-sensitive, or whatever they called it. That didn’t make him a Jedi. Darman longed for a few sensible words from Jusik. He’d have the answers, and if he didn’t, he’d still have some wise words on the situation that might make Darman see the positive side and a way of picking up again from here. It struck him that his first thought wasn’t to pour his heart out to Skirata.
“Dar,” Corr said carefully, “don’t you want the kid?”
“Yes, I do.” It just slipped out. “I didn’t think I’d be interested, but he’s mine. It means there’s more to me than just what’s sitting here. I can’t explain it very well. All I know is that it matters. It makes me someone different.”
Regular humans grew up knowing what families were, what parents did, even if they didn’t have one. In Darman’s wholly artificial world on Kamino, during the years that mostly shaped him, Darman had worked out something vital; that there was such a thing as a father, and Kal Skirata filled that gap in his life. He’d seen Jango Fett from time to time—and his son—and known that he was grown from the man’s cells, but he never felt the connection with him that he felt with Skirata. Humans were just like any other creature in the galaxy. Their instinct was to breed and look after their young, and cloning humans and growing them in vats didn’t change that one bit.
“I bet Ko Sai would have been shocked that her predictable clone units had such messy lives,” Corr said. “She wouldn’t have liked that at all.”
“Shame she’s dead, then. Would have been great to see her reaction.”
Niner clicked his teeth in annoyance. “Well, you can forget the practical problems, and we can get you through the bad feelings. We always have. Vode An, right?”
Actually, Niner was wrong. He was very wrong. Darman was in a place he’d never been before, and it was about more than suddenly finding he had a child out there somewhere. It was about trust. The galaxy was all lies, and even his job was built partly on deception, but as long as there was one area that he knew was real and that wouldn’t crumble under him, he felt safe.
That part wasn’t Etain. It was Kal’buir.
“He knew,” Darman said, “and he never told me.”
“Kal?” Corr asked.
“Why wouldn’t he tell me?”
“Because he knew you’d go off the deep end like this.”
“Don’t I have a right to know? I mean, he always told me I was a man with the right to control my own life, but now he decides what’s good for me and what isn’t.”
Niner cut in. “Give him a break. Kal’buir wasn’t the one who got pregnant and kept quiet about it.”
“Well, if he had a reason for not telling me, it’s either because he thought I was too stupid to handle it, or that Etain’s problems were more important. I mean, it’s not like I’d tell anyone else, is it?”
“Or,” said Niner, “maybe he decided that because you and Etain are two adults, he was staying out of your private business.”
It made sense. Niner always did. But it didn’t placate Darman one bit. He was starting to find definite thoughts solidifying in the fog of painful emotions, and three of them loomed like rocks: that he wasn’t trusted by people he loved and trusted, that he wasn’t sure now if he could trust them, and that he had a nameless, formless, desperate animal need to see his kid, even if he wasn’t sure what a father in his position was supposed to do.
Well, he could hang on to that. And he knew what a father’s job was. He’d had what he thought was the best role model in Skirata, although doubts about that now gnawed at him.
He checked the incoming transmissions on his HUD. If he chose not to answer on the voice channel—or couldn’t—the data could be stored as text to be read later. Skirata had been trying to raise him on the secure link. Etain had just left a reminder that they were embarking for Triple Zero—Coruscant, Corrie, Trip Zip, whatever she wanted to call it, because he didn’t care right now—at 0600 GST.
He wasn’t snubbing either of them. He just hadn’t worked out what he wanted to say, let alone how he was going to react to the answers.
“It’ll be all right, Dar,” Atin said quietly. “Ups and downs of being with females. We’d have learned all this by stages if we’d been born the regular way on Corrie.”
Darman was inclined to listen to Atin. Niner was just Master Theory about women, and Corr’s romances lasted as long as he was in town, thanks to Mereel’s influence. Atin had Laseema, and he knew the score even if he never had to worry that there was a kid out there he didn’t know existed.
“Things used to be simple,” Niner said, but it sounded as if he was talking to himself.
Things did. But life wasn’t simple now, and Darman understo
od the occasional bliss of being ignorant.
Growing up at twice the speed that nature intended hurt in more ways than he first thought. It hadn’t given him time to toughen up his heart.
Arca Barracks gymnasium,
Coruscant,
0630 hours, 997 days ABG
Vau seemed to be in his element again. Scorch hesitated to use a word like radiant for a hard old chakaar like his sergeant, but the man looked like he had some blood in his cheeks for the first time in ages.
“You think that hurts?” Vau grunted. He had an unlucky trooper in an eye-wateringly painful grip on the floor. The di’kut should have known better than to volunteer for the demonstration, but he obviously didn’t know Vau, and thought he was dealing with an old guy. He was. But Vau was an old guy who kept fit and knew plenty about pain. “No, this hurts.”
The trooper squealed. It took a lot to get a reaction out of a man like that. They might have been meat-cans, but they were as hard as any ARC or commando. Scorch couldn’t watch any longer. He called to Vau, more for his own peace of mind than the urgency of Zey’s summons or to end the trooper’s agony. Vau’s technique was known as a Keldabe handshake, but hands didn’t have a lot to do with it.
“Sarge!” he yelled. “Sarge, General Zey sends his compliments and wants to see you right now.”
Vau let go of a delicate part of the trooper’s anatomy and the guy rolled over onto his side, out of action for a few moments. Well, at least he knew how to stop a human adversary with one grip now. Mird watched from the sidelines, yawning occasionally, with the air of having seen it all before.
“Get yourself off to medbay and have that looked at, ad’ika,” Vau said, tidying his rumpled fatigues. He didn’t look half as scary out of armor. His looks lied. “Mird, watch them and make sure they don’t slack off. You lot—by the time I come back, I want you to be able to make each other’s eyes water. Got it?”