“A hold-out blaster’s a wise precaution. So many riffraff about.” Ordo, still holding the Verp on Chadus, reached into his jacket and drew out the DH-17 blaster. He admired it for a few moments before flicking the safety catch off and handing it to Besany. She took it reluctantly. “But that’s an assassin’s weapon. Why else would you need a flash suppressor and low-light optics?”
“I got it from a buddy.”
“Your buddy must work in a rough business, then. Look, we can keep this game up as long as you like, but I missed dinner tonight, and that always makes me cranky.”
“You’re a kriffing clone, aren’t you?”
“And you’re Republic Intel.”
Chadus snorted. “I’m just an office clerk.”
“Okay.” Ordo took out a hand scanner. “Besany, if he moves, blow his gett’se off. Let’s see who he really is.”
Besany wasn’t sure how she’d aim at anything other than the man’s chest, but she tried to hold the DH-17 convincingly. There wasn’t much Chadus could do thousands of meters above the city anyway except submit to the scan. Ordo flashed it in front of his eyes to check his retinas, and then made him press his fingers onto the pad.
“What’s that going to tell you?” Chadus asked. He was definitely looking nervous now. “I haven’t got a criminal record.”
“I’ll bet.” Ordo read the display with a little frown. “Well, Agent Lemmeloth, Arbian J., you’ve got remarkably high security clearance for a clerk. Two more promotions and you’ll report directly to the Chancellor.”
“How the stang did you access that?”
“Because I’m much, much smarter than you, mongrel.”
Besany had never known Ordo to show the slightest embarrassment at being a clone. In fact, he seemed to take great pride in it: his genome having been selected and enhanced to create the raw material for the perfect soldier, and—however much the Kaminoan clonemasters believed the Null prototypes were a failed experiment—intensive training from infancy had produced a super-fit, hyper-intelligent, but unmanageably idiosyncratic black ops commando. As far as Ordo was concerned, he was the best, and therefore any randomly conceived being like Chadus was a poor second or worse. He had a point.
And now he also had the agent’s biometric access to the Republic’s most sensitive information. He could slice into some priceless files. But he had to do it now, before Republic Intel missed Chadus, or whatever his name was. The Nulls were very adept at data stripping—even better than Besany was, in fact. Yes, they really were the best, and that made them especially dangerous to cross.
Chadus—Lemmeloth—seemed to have reached the same conclusion.
“Try to use my access, and you’ll be caught right away.” He looked really agitated now, staring into Ordo’s face as if he was more shocked than scared. “What are you doing, anyway? You’re programmed to be obedient.”
“You should have paid more attention in genetics class,” Ordo said. “Genes only predispose. Environment’s what counts. Programming… no, human beings don’t work that way. Trainable. Not programmable.”
“You’re a soldier of the Republic. I order you to land this vessel and release me.”
Ordo made a little snorting noise of distracted contempt. “You can kiss my shebs. And you still haven’t told me why you were following Agent Wennen.”
“Who are you working for, clone?”
“I like to be my own boss. The hours are better. Now answer me before I have to start breaking things.”
Besany had questioned suspects in the course of her job, but accounts that didn’t balance or unauthorized expenditure didn’t usually involve abduction and persuasion with a blaster. Lemmeloth turned his head slowly to fix on Besany, as if he could get farther with her than with Ordo.
“It’s not too late to turn yourself in, Agent Wennen,” he said. “We understand. You talk to some malcontent like Senator Skeenah, he puts unhelpful ideas in your head about the direction of the war effort—”
“You’re bluffing,” Besany cut in, hoping he was. If Lemmeloth had opened the batting with that, then he probably didn’t have the worst dirt on her—that she was ripping data on the clone production program for Skirata. “I’m just a simple auditor. Numbers. Balance sheets. Budget estimates.”
“Are we done here?” Ordo asked quietly. “Last chance, Lemmeloth.”
Some things dawned slowly on Besany, for all her mental acuity. There was only going to be one way out of this for Lemmeloth. Ordo couldn’t just give him a black eye and tell him not to hang around her again. They’d snatched a spy; and spies didn’t forget. Even if Jusik had been here, he might not have been able to memory-rub Lemmeloth enough to guarantee the man would have no recollection of following her.
“If I don’t report in,” Lemmeloth said, “you’re the last contact I was tailing. None of this is going to go away for you, Agent Wennen.”
“No, but you are.” Ordo didn’t look up from his datapad. He seemed engrossed, tapping away at the screen. “I’m into your secure comm system now. I’ve just sent a message saying Wennen went straight home, didn’t make contact with anyone, and that you’ll call in later tonight.”
“So you’re working for the Separatists. That’s what we get for letting Mandalorian scum train our troops, I suppose.”
“Usually,” Ordo said, holding a gloved hand out to Besany for the DH-17, “folks beg me for leniency at this point.”
Lemmeloth was ashen. His gaze tracked discreetly around the speeder’s cramped cargo area, as if he thought he stood a chance at seven thousand meters if only he could get to the hatch. “It’s not going to happen, is it?”
“No.” Ordo adjusted the force settings on the blaster. Besany felt her gut tighten. “But I’m not a savage. Professional courtesy and all that.”
Then—no speeches, no insults, no warning—Ordo simply raised the DH-17, held it to the agent’s temple, and fired. It discharged with a loud bdapp. The man slumped off the seat and hit the deck with a thud. It was fast, dispassionate, and shocking. The smell of discharged blaster and seared skin overpowered the odors of food.
Besany found she couldn’t speak or cry out. She froze. Enacca looked over her shoulder from the pilot’s seat and made a low, rumbling growl.
“No, I don’t expect you to do all the housework,” Ordo said, still utterly matter-of-fact. “I’ll do the disposal myself.”
Enacca yowled.
“Okay, keep the blaster, but dump him in the lower levels, the derelict zone, so that a borrat can dispose of the body.” Ordo began stripping the corpse of everything vaguely incriminating or useful, as if he did it regularly. Besany realized he probably did. “The rats are pretty thorough. And recycling’s our civic duty.”
Ordo glanced up as if suddenly aware that Besany was staring at him in horror. For all the terrible jobs he had to do, he still had an incongruous innocence about him, a kind of wide-eyed embarrassment whenever he thought he might have made a social gaffe. Besany had never seen anyone killed before, let alone shot an arm’s length from her by her own lover. She knew Ordo’s work was dirty and difficult, but there was knowing, and there was seeing.
“Sorry,” he said, suddenly a guilty little boy caught throwing stones. “I should have told you to look away.”
“It’s—it’s okay.” Try as she might, though, Besany couldn’t make it okay. Something had stalled in her. She felt as if her heart was waiting for a safe moment to beat again. “I realize you couldn’t… just let him go.”
Ordo pulled off the man’s belt with some effort. The bantha-hide strap snapped like a whip. “If it had been the other way around, what do you think he’d have done to me? Or you, come to that? He’d have killed either of us without a second thought. It’s not like I tortured him or anything. Clean death. That’s the most any of us can hope for.”
Besany had hoped to die of extreme old age in her sleep. Most beings did, she suspected, even Mandalorian warriors. “Does… did he know what I wa
s really up to?”
“I skimmed your file details off the Intel mainframe.” Ordo shook his head. “According to that, it was just your meeting with the Senator that made them jumpy. Best thing you can do now, cyar’ika, is to tell your boss that a pervert’s stalking you and that you’re scared. That’ll cover your behavior and weapons, if anyone asks questions, and make you look like you’ve got nothing to hide.”
Ordo had been trained to kill efficiently, and given no other choice of career. Besany tried to remember that when Enacca dropped them off at her apartment and the speeder vanished into the night. He switched from assassin mode to harmless domesticity the moment the doors opened, trotting into the kitchen to make a pot of caf. Besany watched, unable to stop the trembling in her legs. It wasn’t that she felt sorry for Lemmeloth, but just a few hours ago he probably had no idea he was going to die. She wasn’t sure what had disturbed her most: being present at an execution, or realizing how very tenuous the link to life was for some in this war, and that the people she loved and cared for were as close to oblivion at any moment as that agent.
Outside this room, Coruscant went on shopping and dining and watching the holovids. The war was reality for someone else.
“I’m starving,” Ordo said, opening and closing cupboard doors. Clones were always hungry. Executions didn’t seem to dent his appetite. “Shall I make supper? I’ve learned to cook spicy grassgrain. You like that.”
“Just caf for me.” Besany was sure she’d throw up if she tried to eat anything now. She opened the conservator and pointed to neat rows of containers, prepared meals for two weeks, all labeled and dated because she was a label-and-date kind of person. “Help yourself.”
Ordo laid the table for two anyway. He had a very precise way of doing things, as if every eventuality in his life had a drill, and she knew that if she measured the spacing of the cutlery it would be exact. He pulled back a chair and gave her a nod to sit down.
“It’s my job,” he said quietly. So he understood what was troubling her, then, and maybe his snap-change to domestic trivia was displacement. “I don’t kill for fun.”
“I know.”
“It’s time you left Coruscant, Bes’ika. You’ll be safe on Mandalore. You can’t go on like this.”
“You need me inside the Treasury.”
“But I can slice into the system. Mereel can. We all can, since you turned over your codes to us.”
Yes, she’d done that pretty well the first night they’d met. Shot by a Jedi, abducted by a clone. And I trusted them? Yes, I did. They’re as good as family now.
“It’s still easier for me to do it.”
Ordo placed a cup of caf in front of her with the handle at precisely ninety degrees, as if it was a private ritual. “The nearest I’ve ever come to arguing with Kal’buir was over whether we were putting you at risk for our own ends.”
“I went into this knowing the score, Ordo.”
“But you think you have to face danger yourself to be able to look me in the eye, don’t you?”
He knew her a lot better than she realized. “I’m not going to sit on my backside in Kyrimorut while you’re on the front line,” she said. “I still have my uses.” Stang, she’d forgotten all about her datapad. She took it out of her pocket. “Here. I found another black hole in the procurement budget. New contracts for Rothana Heavy Engineering.”
Ordo took the datapad and looked as if he was calculating, lips moving slightly. “I make that an order for five hundred larties.”
“Exactly.” The LAAT/i gunship was the workhorse of the Grand Army, and replacements were always needed; five hundred was a drop in the ocean for RHE, whose yards could churn them out like cheap family speeders. “Now look at the delivery date.”
Ordo raised his eyebrows. “That’s nearly a year away. Are they knitting them by hand or something?”
“It gets better. I tied up that order authorization with the delivery date and the corresponding budget estimate for the next financial year, and not only do they not match, but the expenditure’s coded under domestic security. I thought the decimal point was an error, but no—it’s off by—well, see for yourself. That much can buy a few thousand Acclamators.”
Besany waited for Ordo to react. She’d brought him a prize at great risk: she realized that she was waiting for a pat on the head.
“Either Palpatine’s ordered some gold-plated custom larties to show us clone boys how much he cares, or he’s building a huge new fleet.” Ordo scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Lots of big ships. Shab, I need a shave.”
“He’s got to have somewhere to put his new clone army,” Besany said.
“But KDY and Rothana can lay a keel and launch a warship inside five months, and they can handle hundreds, thousands if they drop all other contracts. Where’s the other hardware they’re building in the meantime?”
“Unless they’re replacing ships a rivet at a time, I couldn’t find any other big orders due for completion before that time period.”
“So Palpatine’s stocking up with clones and ships, but not for deployment anytime soon. What’s so important about a year’s time? Why that timing?”
Besany knew enough about the fighting—the stuff that HNE rarely covered now—to realize that every day was an all-out, final effort for units of the Grand Army somewhere. But throwing much bigger resources at a war suggested finality. “You think the war might be coming to an end?”
“It’s only just started. Maybe he’s finally taking notice of our warnings that the Seps just don’t have anything like the number of battle droids they claim to have. But I still don’t understand the delay. Either way, Kal’buir will find this information useful.”
Ordo sent the data by comlink to Skirata there and then. The numbers in this war didn’t add up; it was a sore point with the Nulls, and especially with Skirata. They kept finding evidence that the Separatist droid armies weren’t the much-vaunted quadrillions but hundreds of millions, yet it didn’t seem to change the tactics dictated by Palpatine. Those were still bad enough odds for such a small clone army. But it explained why the Separatists hadn’t overrun Coruscant.
Besany preferred to think of this as the beginning of the end. She was a data-rational woman, her world built on demonstrable evidence and irrefutable numbers, but there was always room for optimism. She also preferred to think of Ordo as a victim of a regime that damaged him, not a stone-cold killer. He rummaged through the conservator and sat down with a plate of cold roast roba and thin slices of sheet-bread, chewing happily as if he hadn’t a care in the world. How could he possibly react like a normal man, anyway? He’d never had a childhood, and not even Skirata’s doting paternal presence could change the fact that everything about Ordo and his brothers—from their genome to the intensive training to maximize that genetic potential—had been designed to make him a lethal human weapon.
“You’re afraid of me,” he said suddenly, with the outspoken perception of a child again. There was still a lot of the boy left in Ordo. “Cyar’ika, I’d never hurt you, I swear.”
“I know, sweetheart.” That slightly desperate, wounded tone, so at odds with his powerful physical presence, always made Besany angry with the world. Ordo deserved better. “I’m just shaken, that’s all. It’s not every day I see someone shot like that.”
For Ordo, of course, it was routine. A clone’s life was cheap and disposable to both his Kaminoan creators and his political masters, and if men were indoctrinated to believe their sole purpose was to fight and die for the Republic, it was inevitable they would see others’ lives as equally expendable. The war was very distant for most Coruscanti, a conflict without personal consequences fought by men they never met. The two worlds—soldier and citizen—were utterly separate, and Besany thought that could only turn out badly for society.
“This is much better roba than we ever get in the mess,” Ordo said, distressingly innocent again. “It’s really tasty.”
“I like you to have the b
est,” said Besany. “You deserve it.”
Ordo looked blank for a moment and then fished in his belt pouch. What he placed on the table in front of her was nothing short of shocking. A gold pin with three enormous brilliant blue gems—one central stone flanked by two smaller ones—glittered in the harsh kitchen light, showing hints of deep forest-green fire.
“I meant to give this to you months ago,” he said. “But the time never seemed right.”
Besany was almost afraid to touch it. “Ordo, are those what I think they are?”
“Shoroni sapphires, yes.”
Shoroni stones were rare and ludicrously valuable. Clones didn’t even get paid, let alone have personal fortunes. Besany had to ask. “Where did you get them?”
“Sergeant Vau. He raided his family’s safe-deposit box on Mygeeto. He’s a disinherited Irmenu aristocrat. Anyway, he said you’d do the stones justice.” Ordo spooned pickled majroot relish onto his plate. “They’re worth ten million.”
“Ordo!” Besany’s stomach hit the floor and bounced hard. It felt like it, anyway; if she had one more shock tonight, she wasn’t sure she could handle it. “The police are going to be looking for these.”
“You don’t have to take them… and if the cops haven’t found them yet, chances are they never will.”
It’s stolen, a voice said in her head. It’s wrong.
So was stripping confidential data from the Treasury mainframe. So was handing over her passwords to Kal Skirata. So was extracting a badly injured clone from the hospital at gunpoint and making him disappear from the Grand Army’s system. So was sitting back in a seat and watching while a Republic agent doing his lawful job was dispatched with a single bolt to the head.
She’d done it all.
And I’m going to keep doing it.
Besany didn’t know how to handle a gift of that magnitude, stolen or not. She steeled herself to picking up the pin, and turning it to make the light dance off its facets.
“Shoroni gems appear green in daylight,” Ordo said, matter-of-factly. “It’s the crystalline structure. Bi-refringent and bi-axial. It’s—”