“You’re going to have to spell out why this is good news,” Skirata said.
“Well, we’re minus some criminal scum, and we’ve found more we didn’t even know about. Plus we now have some good forensics. The SOCO team has been all over his apartment like a rash.”
“And?”
“Solid gold for the Organized Crime Unit.”
“Whoopee for them, but was he or was he not handling explosives?” Skirata was getting agitated, chewing that ruik root again. “I’m not interested in gangsters stealing Republic weapons for their own purposes. Is his gang supplying explosives to anyone?”
“Yes, we found traces everywhere. Your Jedi colleagues seem to be finding the disturbance in the Force useful—whatever that means.”
“Does this mean that your Organized Crime Unit is going to be getting in our way now?”
“Share operational details with me and they won’t.”
“You know the rules of this game.”
“Kal, your boys are coming awfully close to being targeted by CSF themselves. It could easily have been you and them in a shooting match. I don’t want any friendly-fire incidents if we can avoid them.”
Fi watched Kal’s jaw muscles working as he chewed. This wasn’t warfare. It had crossed over into armed politics. Skirata and Obrim seemed to be conducting a private war by their own rules, and Fi didn’t envy them.
“You know that we’re not taking prisoners,” Skirata said. “And I can’t see your people turning a blind eye to that once they know what we’re up to.”
“But I’ve got something you need,” Obrim said.
Skirata switched instantly from lovable rogue to a creature of pure ice. “Don’t ever, ever try to bargain with me about this.”
“Are we on the same side or not?”
Skirata was ashen. “We’ll go it alone then.” Fi had rarely seen him truly angry, but when he had been pushed too far he went white and quiet and dangerous. “Come on, son. We’ve got work to do.”
He took Fi’s elbow and steered him to the doors. It didn’t bode well. Fi looked back over his shoulder at Obrim—a man equally white, equally tense—and the captain shook his head.
“Okay, Kal, I’ll give it to you anyway, but may the Force save your sorry backside if this goes wrong.”
Skirata turned. He seemed genuinely surprised: he hadn’t been bluffing. He really had been storming off and cutting Obrim out of the loop. “What happens if it does go wrong, Jaller? You get into trouble with your bosses. But my boys die.”
“Yeah, and so might mine if they get in the way by accident.”
“Then don’t get in the way.”
“Okay, what time did your people grab the woman?” Obrim asked.
“Midafternoon.”
“Well, there was someone trying to get hold of our irresistible friend here via a government comlink shortly before CSF went to his home an hour ago.”
“You mean there’s someone else in the GAR working with him?”
“Yes, and if we could pin down the transmission source, I’d have given it to you.”
Skirata’s shoulders sagged. “Thank you, my friend.”
“Don’t mention it. Just try to give me a warning before you start another war here, okay?”
“That was a nice smokescreen line to the media, by the way. Gang war indeed.”
“It’s very nearly true. But thank your oily friend Mar Rugeyan for that. You’ll owe him one, I’m sure.”
Skirata rolled his eyes. Fi continued to be surprised by the machinations of political life in Coruscant. He was grateful—and not for the first time—that all he had to do was shoot or be shot. There was no time to worry or plan: either you did a better, faster job than the enemy at that particular moment or you died.
“Rugeyan wants good news,” Skirata said. “Let’s see if we can find some for him.”
Obrim smiled ruefully at Fi and made a gesture of tipping back a glass of ale. “Don’t forget that drink, will you?”
They left Obrim in the morgue and took the service turbolift to disappear into the late-night crowds around the CSF complex and emerge at a taxi platform to wait for Jusik to collect them. Skirata simply glanced at three innocent Coruscanti citizens waiting there, too, and they decided they had urgent business elsewhere. Kal’buir could look anything but paternal when he felt like it.
Fi pulled his collar up, still feeling horribly exposed without his armor. Skirata rummaged in his pocket, took out a bar of candied fruit, and broke it in two. He handed Fi the bigger piece.
“What now?” Fi said.
“It’s the only solid lead we’ve got,” Skirata said. “And it’s a mess, but I’m reluctant to let it go and start over.”
“I bet the Seps are looking for another source of supply for their explosives now. If this were Qiilura or any other mining planet, they could do it easily. On an urban world like this… well, scoring a few blasters is easy, but shopping for explosives is going to attract attention. Maybe this is where we use Ordo’s little cache of stuff that goes bang.”
Skirata stopped chewing. “I’m never sure if we have the same ideas because they’re common sense, or because I trained you and now you’re as crazy as I am, son.”
“Well, they know their original consignment didn’t arrive, so now you might as well use the stuff as bait.”
“And there’s Qibbu.”
“Now, that’s dangerous.”
“No, that’s when Hutts come in useful. They’re like one big scum want-ad service. Seeing as he thinks we’re doing a bit of private business without the GAR’s consent anyway, why disappoint him? He can put the word out that Kal has something to sell.”
“But then we’ve pinpointed our operational base for them.”
“You think Qibbu will want to advertise that we’re in his precious hotel, with the possibility of unpleasantness and lots of damage following him home, too? He won’t discuss locations. He likes being alive.”
“But you’re going to tell Obrim, right?”
“Only the location when we have a delivery set up with our new customers,” Skirata said. “And then only to warn off CSF.”
He lapsed into silence. Around them—keeping a sensible distance, because Skirata looked remarkably gangsterish himself right then—ordinary citizens and tourists from dozens of species were making their way in and out of brightly lit clubs, restaurants, and shops. They were dressed in exotic, colorful clothes, chattering and enjoying themselves: they were arm in arm with friends, or holding hands with lovers, or accompanied by gaping children who had never seen a city-planet like this at night.
Fi knew how those kids felt. It was still as much a spectacle of miraculous delight to him as it had been when he first saw it from the crew bay of a police cruiser. But it was also now something alien to him, something he had no stake in and could never fully understand.
The civilians around him could have no idea of what was happening right in the middle of their safe daily lives. A few meters from them, a mercenary and a soldier who had no official orders were planning to unload enough explosives on the black market to destroy whole quadrants.
But it was a fair trade. Because Fi had no idea of what their lives were about, either.
We live in parallel worlds. We can see each other, but we never meet.
At least Darman seemed to have found a bridge to a normal life, if you could call a Jedi normal. Fi wondered if his brother realized that everyone knew what was going on with him and the general.
If he were Darman, he wouldn’t care.
Operational house, Qibbu’s Hut,
0056 hours, 381 days after Geonosis
Ordo placed the tight-wrapped packs of five-hundred-grade thermal plastoid explosive on the table and stacked them in piles of ten. Darman picked one up and fondled it with the fascinated expression of a connoisseur of explosives.
It was interesting, Etain thought, to note what made Darman feel relaxed and confident, because sitting on
fifty kilos of ultrahigh explosives didn’t reassure her at all.
“Dar, cut it out,” Niner said. “We’d like the hotel to still be here when Vau arrives. Reckon you can avoid blowing the place up for the next hour?”
“This stuff is perfectly safe unless you stick something metallic in it and trigger an electrolytic reaction,” Darman said. He smiled at Etain before lobbing a hand-sized pack at Niner. “Udesii, ner vod.”
Niner caught it and swore. Then he threw it back.
Etain could hear the shower running in the ’fresher. She could also see Atin wandering around, eyes fixed in defocus on the grubby carpet as if he was rehearsing a speech in his head, and he was trailing a disturbance in the Force that felt like the aftermath of a battle. She’d felt Atin’s raw grief on Qiilura, the pain at losing his original brothers at Geonosis, and she could taste the dark depths in him all too easily.
Fi, even without the ability to use the Force, seemed to be able to do the same. From time to time he got up and gripped his brother by his upper arm, talking very quietly and earnestly to him.
Much of the conversation was in Mandalorian, which she didn’t understand well enough, but she certainly picked up one word that needed no translation: Vau.
Boss, Jusik, and Scorch had gone back down to the bar. Sev and Fixer were out on the landing platform—now looking like a normal hotel roof covered with assorted transport from speeder bikes and airspeeders to a couple of taxis—providing a discreet perimeter defense in case someone had tracked the strike team back to Qibbu’s. The whole place simmered with tension and—yes, it was there, very subtly, but it was there—fear.
“If Vau’s bringing the rest of the thermal, who’s minding the prisoners?” Darman said.
“I don’t imagine they’ll take much minding now,” Ordo said. “But Enacca’s around.”
“So who’s going to help him haul fifty kilos of deadweight?”
Ordo looked faintly irritated. He still felt to Etain like a disjointed turmoil of emotions held in place by a ferociously intelligent logic. She had classified him as dangerous without really knowing why.
“Vau,” he said carefully, “is still a fit man. A soldier since childhood, just like you and like Kal’buir. He can carry fifty kilos on his own almost as well as you can.” Ordo adjusted the pile of sealed packs so they lined up perfectly, as if that mattered very much to him. “And if Enacca doesn’t need to guard prisoners, she’ll help him carry the ordnance. Either way, stop worrying.”
“Yeah, that’s my job,” Niner said.
Etain had a very good idea what doesn’t need to guard prisoners meant. If they had ceased to be useful, then they were a liability here, just as they were on Qiilura. And they would be shot.
Darman killed Separatists when he couldn’t take them prisoner. She’d watched him do it: clean, quick, passionless. And—was this the dark side finally pulling her over the edge?—even if she would hesitate to do it herself, she was no longer appalled that he or his comrades did.
He looked up from the packets and gave her a broad smile. There was never even a hint of darkness in him.
“It’s perfectly safe,” he said. She realized she was frowning at him and that he had taken it to be a comment on the pile of instant destruction on the table. “Don’t you trust me?”
She smiled back instinctively. “Of course I trust you.” Yes, I do: you’re my friend, my lover.
Skirata emerged from the ’fresher toweling his hair and wearing a change of clothes with his Verpine in its light gray holster. He leaned over Niner to look at the holozine he was reading.
“Don’t you ever watch the holonews?” he asked, pointing at the darkened screen on the wall.
“Too much to take in.” Niner resumed reading. “Other people’s complicated lives.”
Atin had settled in the corner with his DC-17 on his lap. They all kept the rifle close to them when they weren’t in public. It was too obviously a commando weapon in the street, and had to be replaced by a discreet blaster. But back here, they lavished affection on the Deece again. It was the weapon they had been raised with and now lived by.
Fi had his slung over his shoulder, and he was looking out the window onto the catwalk opposite, the one that linked another level of seedy bars with the concourse below. He was invisible to the Coruscant beyond the transparisteel, but clearly it was painfully visible to him. Etain could feel his longing.
Fi had changed since Qiilura. Etain had first sensed him in the Force as good-natured and calm. A year later his façade was as unfailingly cheerful, but the undertow was darker, more desperate. He’d seen too much of the war. And he had glimpsed something even more painful and guaranteed to trouble him: ordinary people on Coruscant, leading normal lives of the kind he would never have.
She didn’t need the Force to help her taste that. She could see the constant question on his face when he glanced at couples and families, of all species. Why not me? Why is this life not for me?
It was what Darman had asked.
Family and clan—family and fatherhood—seemed of overwhelming importance to Mandalorian men. They certainly drove Skirata.
Then Etain knew exactly what the Force had in mind for her, and it was not the path of a Jedi any longer. It was to ensure that at least one cloned man was given back the future that had been taken away from him at birth, or whatever cold distant process served for birth in those Kaminoan laboratories.
Etain would make him a father one day. She would give Darman a son.
But neither of them had the luxury of a normal life in this war. Her dream would be a secret—even from him for the time being.
Then Etain put the thought from her mind and closed her eyes to meditate, unself-conscious because she was among true friends.
She drifted in formless calm, hearing only the slowed pace of her own heartbeat, until the door buzzed.
She snapped alert again. So did Omega and Skirata.
Etain saw the squad individually as clearly as she did any other beings, and not just because the Force tinted them with their unique shades of character. She had ceased to see their identical faces or their armor, and experienced instead only their distinct personalities and habits.
And yet when they moved—when they switched to their soldier state of being—they were like a single perfect predator.
The buzz made them all look up together, not like ordinary men responding by staggered milliseconds one after the other, but in one movement, absolutely synchronized, and their expressions and the angle of their heads and their frozen alertness were one. Then, with another perfect single movement, they split like a fist opening into fingers and snapped to positions around the room, rifles trained on the door.
Not a word: not one hand signal from Niner. They hadn’t even had time to put on their helmets and activate the shared comlink. Whatever told them to move there, do this, watch that, was so thoroughly ingrained in them from drilling that they seemed almost to be operating on instinct.
Their dark, high-cheekboned, exotic faces were expressionless. Except for the rapid blinking, they were completely and utterly still. Etain suddenly saw them as that single exquisite predator again, and it scared her.
Their DC-17 rifles all blipped once in unison as each weapon charged up to fire.
“Vau’s not due yet. And Delta’s on perimeter.” Skirata had his Verpine shatter gun trained this time, not his small blaster—an indication of how much higher he felt the stakes were. “Etain, you feel anything?”
“Nothing.” She was certain she would have perceived a threat by now. She was suddenly aware that she had drawn her lightsaber. She hadn’t even felt herself move. “Nothing at all.”
“Okay… on three… one… two… th—”
And the door opened. Etain flinched involuntarily, grasping her lightsaber two-handed. A scent hit her, a foul damp musk.
“Fierfek,” Skirata said. “You di’kut. We could have blown your head off.”
Niner, Ordo,
Darman, and Fi made annoyed clicks and sighs and lowered their Deeces. Atin didn’t.
Vau walked in with two straining carryalls and a six-legged, loose-skinned shambles of pale gold short fur ambling behind him. So that was the strill. And the absence of malice and tension had been… ice-cold, calm, utterly detached Walon Vau.
“At’ika, lower your Deece,” Skirata said softly.
“If you say so, Sarge.” And although Atin obeyed, his steady stare at Vau was an eloquent loaded weapon.
“Come on in,” said Fi. “Ain’t nobody here but us clones.”
“You could have called ahead,” Skirata said.
Vau lowered the carryalls to the floor, and Ordo pounced on them. “Just challenging your security, like I ought to.”
“Well, either Delta and Jusik got instantly stupid or they let pass someone they knew, so don’t get too cocky. Anything you want to tell us?”
“I’ve shut down the safe house and Enacca has cleaned up.”
Etain listened intently to the language, spoken in the code of euphemism out of long habit. Cleaning up certainly meant removing bloodstains, because she’d seen them, but she had the feeling it was more than that.
“No further business with our two friends?” Skirata said.
“That’s the trouble with Coruscant,” Vau said. “High balconies are safety risks. At least that confirms our two guests weren’t Jedi, eh?” Vau found a seat, and the strill scrambled onto his lap: it took Etain a moment to work out what he meant, and the realization shocked her. “The other fortunate thing is that I was able to talk to Vinna Jiss’s supervisor at GAR logistics as her… landlord and complain that she had skipped owing me rent. The supervisor was sympathetic and said she was an unreliable employee.”
“So?” said Skirata. Omega had disappeared back to the rooms that led off the main one. Except Atin: Atin waited, a block of black hatred, and Ordo stacked the explosives.