Skirata finally allowed himself a little satisfied grin, which put Etain more in mind of a gdan than ever. He gave both Boss and Niner ferocious pats on the back; Boss flinched while Niner turned and smiled, pleased with life. “Nice job. You two go and get something to eat.”
Etain fought an urge to walk across to Skirata and hug him. She had finally worked out what was happening. Omega—and Ordo—were clearly used to genuine affection from him: they touched all the time, from roughhousing and crushing hugs to hair ruffling. Delta didn’t. They were uncomfortable with it. Whatever relationship they had with Vau was much more distant, more competitive, more a desperate quest for his approval. Skirata played the good father even now, dispensing treats, unashamedly pleased and proud of everything his boys achieved. Vau looked as if he played the master, and being judged good enough was rare.
It made her wonder more than ever about Atin. She would have seized the moment and taken him aside to ask, because it troubled her, but she was interrupted by the return of Fi and Sev. Fi strode up to Atin and grabbed the datapad from his hand.
“A strange blue woman with no taste in men wants to see you,” he said. “Go on. Laseema’s complaining you haven’t said hello to her today.”
Fi had a knack for teetering on the edge of offense. He also did a very good job of pretending that Atin’s good fortune with Laseema didn’t bother him one bit. The aching little void at the core of him, so plainly detectable in the Force, said otherwise.
Jusik caught Etain’s eye: he spotted it, too. Then he looked past her toward the doors, and she felt something as well—anxiety and distress, very clearly emanating from a presence that could only be Ordo.
He strode into the room and began unfastening his armor, jaw clenched. Skirata just waited.
“So, did you have a good day at the office, dear?” said Fi.
“She’s not dead,” Ordo said. “Vinna Jiss is not dead.”
“Start again, son,” Skirata said.
“A woman my supervisor identified as Vinna Jiss walked back into the logistics center at sixteen-fifteen today.” He stacked the plates and sat down on the edge of a chair, completely calm except for the telltale gesture of one fist clenched on his knee. He looked up at Vau. “And it was her, or at least she looked the image of the woman Jusik picked up. In one piece. Are you sure you killed her?”
Vau raised an eyebrow. “Oddly enough, yes. Humans don’t bounce. I would have spotted that, I think.”
“Then who was that at work today?”
“You couldn’t be mistaken?”
Ordo didn’t even blink. “I remember everything I see in complete detail. I have eidetic memory. What I saw was the identical image of the woman we detained and who you took for interrogation. Of that much I am absolutely certain.”
“Fierfek,” Skirata said. “Options?”
“One, she’s a twin or a clone.” Ordo counted off on his fingers. “Two, she’s some kind of droid designed to mimic her. Three? A Clawdite. Shapeshifting is a useful skill for a terror group to recruit. But why would they want to mimic a dead colleague?”
“How about that supervisor?”
“I’ve logged her going into the ’freshers and searching lockers, but now I have no idea if she’s working alone or with this Jiss woman. She was genuinely angry when she saw her, though.”
“Because the other Jiss fouled up, maybe.”
“We need to do some surveillance on this resurrected Jiss. She’s supposed to be on the evening shift, so I’m going back to the center just before midnight and I’ll follow her when she leaves.”
Jusik’s lips parted but Etain was faster off the mark. “I’ll come with you,” she said. “I’ll be able to tell you whether she’s a droid, at least.”
“I can do that with sensors,” said Ordo.
“I’ll come with you anyway.”
Ordo turned to Skirata. “I don’t like mysteries.” He was clearly embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Kal’buir. I’m not resolving this as fast as I should.”
“Son, this is never a fast game. We’re making good progress. Take it easy.”
But Ordo wasn’t the type to take it easy. He joined the contemplation of the holochart and picked up Niner’s datapad.
“I’ll take a clip of those Dust rounds, please, Bard’ika,” he said. “Just in case.”
Skirata drew his stubby Verpine handgun from his holster. “Better use this, then. More compact than the rifle.”
“Thank you.”
Etain stood with Vau, watching the erratic progress of the markers around the chart. A hard decision lay within it: at what stage would Skirata feel it was safe to bring CSF in on the surveillance? When would he share information with them? Etain understood his anxiety, but the simple mathematics of the situation was that CSF would be needed sooner or later.
Ordo began logging more locations into the datapad. His jaw muscles were working visibly. It must have been hard for a man used to being smarter than anyone else except his five brothers to handle the ordinary mortals’ world of being dumbfounded a lot of the time.
“Oh,” Vau said suddenly.
“What?”
“Tell me what this building is.”
Jusik interrogated the database in the holochart emitter. “CSF Divisional Headquarters.”
“Well, well,” said Vau. “How illuminating. Why is one of our tagged bad guys going in there?”
Chapter Sixteen
Mhi solus tome
Mhi solus dar’tome
Mhi me’dinui an
Mhi ba’juri verde
We are one when together.
We are one when parted.
We will share all.
We will raise warriors.
—Traditional Mandalorian marriage contract and ceremony, in its entirety
Logistics center,
Grand Army of the Republic, Coruscant Command HQ,
2340 hours, 384 days after Geonosis
There was a lot to be said for having a matte-black army-issue bodysuit.
It provided a reasonable amount of protection against blaster and projectile weapons, and it was low visibility at night, unlike ARC trooper armor. Ordo felt in the pockets of the knee-length dark gray jacket that Vau had lent him and felt compelled to inhale the unfamiliar scent of its wearer: antiseptic soap, weapon-lubricating oil, and a maleness that was not his. But it disguised the skintight suit. That was all it had to do.
It also disguised the Verpine shatter gun in his holster.
“What makes you think she’s going to stick to her shift hours?” Etain said, looking slightly past him, head almost touching his. They sat in the closed cockpit of a speeder parked a hundred meters from the logistics center, where they could watch the doors. To anyone watching, they were just a young couple in a parked speeder late at night, like a thousand others at that moment.
“The fact she bothered to return to work at all. That means she wants her pattern to appear normal again.”
Etain just nodded. She seemed to be finding it hard to keep up a conversation. Ordo could smell Darman on her, which fascinated him: Darman seemed able to step beyond the community of brothers and not feel adrift, just as his Null brothers could. But Ordo found it distressing, and Fi seemed to as well.
Ordo wasn’t sure if he would ever trust a female, not after Chief Scientist Ko Sai first towered above him, gray and cold and unfeeling. He wondered if having a human mother would have made it easier.
Etain shut her eyes again. She shuddered.
“It’s not cold,” Ordo said.
“Are there Jedi working here?”
“Of course. Jedi make great clerks.”
“I’ll take that as a no.”
“It’s a definite no. Why do you ask?”
“I felt someone in the Force, very faintly.”
Fierfek. Zey? Jusik being helpful? “Close?”
“Gone now.”
She went back to silent contemplation of something beyond him.
r /> “Is your PEP laser fully charged?”
“Yes, Ordo.”
“Very noisy and visible. Last resort.”
“As is a Verpine round.”
“I have the chamber loaded two and one,” Ordo said.
“What?”
“Two marker projectiles between each live round, and one live round already up the spout, as Kal’buir so aptly puts it.”
“And you can—”
“Count? I do believe so.”
“I seem to offend you without meaning to. I realize you have an astonishing intellect.”
It wasn’t that his mind was so remarkable that seemed worth comment, but that hers and others’ were not. He felt the need to explain.
“In an emergency, it’s better that I’m able to fire a killing shot without needing to discharge two nonlethal rounds first.” He stared into her eyes: they were light green, flecked with amber. Except for Skirata’s, the only eyes so unlike his own that he had ever studied at that range were alien, and shortly before he killed their owner. “Anyway, I can execute a triple tap with a Verpine. So it’s academic.”
“Triple tap? I’ve heard Dar talk about double—”
“Three rounds in quick succession. Some species need a little more stopping power.”
“Oh.”
“The PEP laser will stun most humanoids.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
Ordo simply tapped the Verpine under his jacket.
They waited. Maybe they really did look like a couple having a private moment. Randomly created people did strange things.
Staff in groups, ones, and twos began entering the building for the night shift.
Soon…
Movement behind the transparisteel doors made him focus and check his chrono: 1155. Staff sloping off early. “Stand by,” he said quietly.
Etain turned very slowly away from him in her seat, ready to open the speeder’s hatch and slide out.
Ten or eleven workers emerged. Ordo and Etain slipped from the speeder and feigned ambling around in conversation. There was still frequent pedestrian traffic around the center.
By 0005 the trickle of staff in and out had slowed, and there was still no sign of Vinna Jiss.
“She has to come out that entrance.”
“You’re sure—oh, okay, Ordo.”
They waited. He wondered how long the two of them would look inconspicuous.
And then he spotted the ginger wavy hair and the beige tunic he’d seen earlier. Jiss. He watched her turn along the path and walk down the ramp toward the walkways that connected the complex to the business district around it; then he made his move.
Etain walked briskly at his side and grabbed his hand. “For goodness’ sake, Ordo, try to look like a couple.”
Ordo didn’t much like that, but the mission came first.
They kept twenty meters behind Jiss, hampered by the lack of crowds of office workers to hide among at this time of night. Maybe they should have waited until daylight. But nobody knew how much time they might have to act. It was a case of now.
Etain did that side-to-side head movement as if she was straining to hear something. “Okay… people behind us, but they seem to have their minds on matters other than us…”
“How do you know that?”
“No feeling of focus on me, or you.”
“Handy,” Ordo said, but he hitched back his jacket and hooked his thumb in his belt to be ready to grab the Verp.
They had followed Jiss for about half a klick along the shrub-lined office walkways when the few pedestrians became none and they had no cover between her and them. Jiss turned right into a side alley and Ordo picked up speed, drawing his weapon and holding it as discreetly as he could against his chest.
“Where’s she gone?”
“The alley,” Ordo hissed. “Are you blind?”
“No, I mean she’s gone. Gone. I can’t feel anybody there.”
Ordo cocked the Verp and checked the status indicator. He might need that live round after all. He slowed at the corner and froze for a second before stepping into the opening with the gun raised, two-handed.
He was looking at a man’s back about fifty meters ahead. No sign of Jiss. Maybe that really is a Clawdite.
“Oh my…,” Etain said.
Ordo was about to discharge the lethal round into the containers of shrubbery and try for a tag pellet but the man appeared to crouch into a low run. There was a reflection, a split-second gleam that said metal, alloy—weapon.
He fired instinctively.
The silent shot hit something with a wet sssputt and whoever or whatever he had hit rolled, stumbled, and raced off to the left down another passage. Ordo broke into a sprint, Etain pounding after him. He reached the point of impact and saw fluid—dark, oily—before discharging both tag pellets into the shrubs and lining up the next lethal round. This had gone wrong. He had got it wrong. But he couldn’t turn back now: this had to be resolved. He swung left and there was someone lying on the paving, writhing, and he aimed the Verpine.
“Check!” Etain yelled. “Check!”
And in the fraction of a second that he froze on the safety command she had heard Skirata use, a shock wave of air and heat flared past him and hit the figure on the ground in a blinding, deafening flash. Without his visor he was stunned for a second, too. But he dropped on the body, holding the Verp clear, and grabbed an arm.
Its limb melted away in his grip.
That second became endless, a layered image.
I’m going to throttle that Jedi.
What the fierfek have I grabbed?
It’s a Clawdite.
He looked up at Etain but she raised her blaster again and spun around. There was a second deafening, blinding crack of a PEP laser discharging.
Ordo had a tight grip of something very heavy and black and sleekly furred that had stopped moving. And that was an odd thing for a wounded Clawdite—a humanoid when not shapeshifting—to become.
A few meters from Etain, a human female lay crumpled on the paving, gasping for breath. It was Supervisor Wennen, not Jiss. Ordo defaulted to training and opened his comlink.
“Bard’ika? We need extraction urgently. Two prisoners, both injured. Now!”
His instinct told him to find some cover fast. The PEP laser would bring someone running before long. He dragged whatever creature he had shot into an alcove and motioned furiously at Etain to do the same with Wennen. It was amazing how heavy a weight a little Jedi could haul.
But he wanted to hit her, and hard.
“You di’kut,” he hissed. “I could have been killed. Never use that command. Do you hear me? Never! If you try that again, I’ll shoot you.”
Etain’s wide-eyed stare was either fury or shock. He didn’t care.
“I thought you were going to finish it off!” She knelt over the black creature at his side and put her hands on it. “It’s alive. I have to keep it alive. You shouldn’t have fired.”
“That’s my call to make.”
“You shot a Gurlanin—”
There aren’t any Gurlanins currently on Coruscant, so Zey says. “Spare me your hindsight lecture.” Gurlanin. Shape-shifter. Qiiluran. Spy. Never seen one before. “Jusik, can you hear me? Can Vau handle shapeshifter first aid?”
Jusik’s voice was breathless. “With you in ten minutes, Ordo, hang on. Where’s your speeder?”
“Not here. Just move it, please.”
Etain had her fingers spread on the creature’s black coat, her eyes shut tight. “I can use the Force to control the bleeding.”
“Okay, you do that, Jedi.” He squatted over Wennen and checked her breathing with the Verp held to her head. “So, Supervisor, why were you following us?”
Wennen looked in bad shape. Her eyes were streaming and she curled up into a ball, clutching her chest. Etain had fired the PEP laser at close range. “Republic… Audit… you shoot me, chum… and you’re in big trouble…”
“What?”<
br />
“Treasury officer.”
“Show me, or you’re the one in trouble, ma’am.”
She let out an anguished gasp and fumbled for her pocket. Ordo decided to play safe and extract the contents for her. Yes, it was an identichip: Republic Treasury Audit Division.
“You’ve nearly fouled up a GAR operation,” he said.
“I was following Jiss.”
“Why?”
“Supplies going missing. So did she. Who are you?” She pulled back her head a little to focus on his bare hand gripping the Verp. “Well, that tells me you’re not Trooper Corr.”
“Obviously.”
“Are you the captain who came in the other day? Because you certainly recognize me…”
So much for deniability: this would be all over the Treasury in hours if he let her get up and walk away—not that she seemed able to. “We need to have a little chat.”
“And what’s that?” Wennen tilted her head to look at the Gurlanin, lying inert while Etain struggled to stabilize its wound.
Etain opened her eyes a little.
“This,” she said, “used to be one of our allies.”
Operational house, Qibbu’s Hut,
0045 hours, 385 days after Geonosis
Skirata assembled a makeshift deployment tote board from three large sheets of flimsi and stuck them to the wall.
It was old technology, real words on real flimsi, not shifting lights and code. He needed its solid reassurance right now. Things were turning osik’la.
Corr—assigned to the team on Skirata’s whim—stood beside him, dutifully listing target locations by numbers of visits and tagged suspects on one sheet while Skirata kept a tally of which commando was deployed, and where they all were for the next twelve standard hours. Without his armor and bodysuit, Corr was just a very young man with durasteel mechanisms where he should have had real hands, and it broke Skirata’s heart.
Droid. They’re making you into what they always thought you were, son.
Skirata shook himself out of it and concentrated on the flimsi. He hated holocharts. He liked solid things that he could grab hold of, even if they had their limitations. It also kept his hands occupied when he was reaching the limits of his confidence. He had to stand firm. His men needed to see him in control, reassuring, believing in them.