“Come on,” Skirata said wearily. “More caves to ping.” He settled down in the copilot’s seat.
Whatever differences Vau had with him, the man had an extraordinary tenacity; the size of the task ahead was so huge, the chances so flimsy, that any sane individual would never have bothered to start. It wasn’t just a matter of finding one Kaminoan who didn’t want to be found. Vau wondered if she was even capable of doing what Skirata wanted.
If this is all a wasted effort… how’s the little chakaar going to take it?
The quest—oh yes, it was a quest, a sacred calling for Skirata now—seemed to sustain him. It was as powerful as religion. He was so fixed on his boys’ welfare that he seemed to have no plans for himself, and his definition of who qualified as his boys was now so all-encompassing that it seemed in danger of sucking him dry. It was more than the Nulls, who had been his sons in fact if not in name from the day he met them. His obsession had then spread to the commandos, and now to any stray trooper who came into his orbit, like Corr. It was as if Skirata was desperate to avoid any thought of himself, to erase himself in every waking moment.
Maybe his memories were unhappier than Vau knew; he seemed to be reinventing himself a day at a time, and he rarely talked about his past now, not even his father.
He never talks about his mother. And apart from the knife—does he recall anything of his birth parents?
Toxic things though they were, Vau still found families interesting. The best thing he’d ever done was to run away from his own. As if on cue, Mird appeared at his side and clambered onto his lap, the only family he had, and maybe the best kind.
“Did you ever think of asking Arkanian Micro to take a look at some clone tissue?” Vau asked. “Just in case.”
“I did.” Skirata was staring straight ahead at the shifting three-dimensional display of the sonar mapping scanner, reflected onto the transparisteel viewport. “But it’ll be my very last resort. Once they have a genome to play with… well, I don’t want to see any more lads bred to die.”
“What if they hadn’t been Jango’s clones?”
“What?”
“Mando’ade don’t care about bloodlines. What if they’d been from a Corellian donor, or a Kuati? Would it still tear you up to see them used?”
Mereel seemed to be making a point of staying out of the conversation. Skirata sucked his teeth thoughtfully.
“If I’d met them as little kids about to be exterminated, I think I’d have done the same.” He looked distracted by the idea, as if he hadn’t ever considered it. “Being Jango’s blood just made it more relevant. But Jango or not, they’d still have needed a sense of belonging, wouldn’t they? And it would still have been my duty to give it to them. And that would have made them Mando’ade.”
“Interesting formations ahead,” Mereel said. Vau thought he might be trying to change the subject, but maybe not. “Going in for a closer look.”
Vau looked at Mereel in profile and tried to see Jango in him, but it was surprisingly hard. Odd as that might have sounded to an outsider, it was true: the clones usually didn’t remind him of Jango Fett at all. Part of that was living among them for years, and becoming blind to the superficiality of appearance, but there were many ways in which they didn’t even look like their progenitor. Jango—born of parents who lived hand-to-mouth, undernourished as a youngster—hadn’t been much taller than Skirata, but the Kaminoans had managed the clones’ nutrition carefully from the day the egg was fertilized, and they’d turned out tall and muscular. In a hundred and more ways, they weren’t exact replicas of Fett.
Nor was his son, Boba. Poor kid: it was a terrible age to lose a father, and the boy had nobody else in his life. He was worse off than any trooper. If he managed to survive, Vau predicted he’d turn into the hardest, most bitter, most messed-up shabuir this side of Keldabe.
Even I had a second father to adopt me… too late, maybe, but better than never…
“What’s that?” Skirata said suddenly. He pointed forward. “Lots of debris.”
They were on the northwest quadrant of the island’s shelf, and the slope on their starboard side was pocked with dark depressions that could have been caves. Strewn across the smooth seabed was a sharply delineated area of small fragments. They were visible even in the filtered sunlight, but when Mereel directed the external lamp ahead of the vessel they stood out in sharp relief.
“That’s not a rockfall,” he said. “If it was scree, it’d cover the whole area from the foot of the slope, because it slides. But there’s a gap, about ten meters. Rock doesn’t jump, does it?”
Mereel brought Aay’han up twenty meters and maneuvered to a dead stop right above the debris. From the exterior holocams, the aerial view projected onto the cockpit monitor reminded Vau of a bag of flour dropped on a clean floor.
“Relatively recent, too,” Skirata said. “Or the silt would have covered it.”
“Looks like someone dropped a load of spoil from an excavation a long time after the island was terraformed.”
Vau actually felt excited. It was an odd hunt, but every bit as exhilarating as a chase. Mird picked up on his excitement and slid off his lap, rumbling in anticipation. “It’s very tempting,” Vau said, “to work out a direction of travel from the shape of that spoil…”
The three men looked at one another.
“Let’s go for it,” Mereel said, with a big grin.
They were above the fifty-meter limit now, and as Aay’han circled slowly above the island shelf, the sensors picked up the throb of drives and the churning sounds of propulsion units from submersibles and surface vessels exploring the turquoise shallows. The scan showed them as points of light, most of them well within the ten-kilometer safety zone. They wouldn’t be disturbed down here.
“I never completed the diving course,” Skirata said suddenly. “I just thought you ought to know that.”
“Might not even need to get our feet wet, Kal’buir.” Mereel took Aay’han deeper, facing the submerged cliff. “Look at the three-D scan.”
Head-on, the sonar showed a complex pattern of holes, although none of them seemed to extend far into the rock. But there was an overhang that was more or less in line with the patch of debris. Mereel skimmed the seabed, stirring silt into the clear water, and came in close to the jutting shelf of weed-coated rock.
And there it was. From this angle, the scan picked up a deep tunnel, mostly hidden from casual inspection by the overhang, but now visible as a rectangular shaft with rounded corners and an aperture about eight meters by five. Aay’han had a twenty-meter beam.
“Well.” Skirata shrugged. “We can’t just drive in, can we?”
“You’re so nautical,” Vau said.
Mereel still had that grin on his face. “There’s always the chance we’ll find that it’s only a waste outlet, and that there’s a hungry thing twice the size of a dianoga living in there.”
“Let’s find out.”
“If Ko Sai’s in there, then she’ll be using transport to get in and out. Let’s head back to the resort and see what they’ve got for rental.”
“This means diving, doesn’t it?”
“Not necessarily, Kal’buir.”
Whatever Mereel had in mind, it amused him. Dangerous things usually did. Vau raised an eyebrow. “I’ll put Mird ashore, if that’s okay with you.”
“Trust me,” said Mereel.
Aay’han surfaced well clear of the harbor and skimmed through the gap in the breakwaters toward her berth. As they drew nearer to the pontoons and slowed almost to a stop to come alongside, Mereel pointed across the water.
“That’s what we need,” he said. “I knew they’d have them here. Perfect.”
Vau and Skirata followed his finger, but Vau could see nothing except choppy waves. Then something broke from the surface, like a Whaladon breaching, and arced three meters into the air before crashing back into the sea again. At first, Vau thought it was an enormous silver fish, but by the time
it had progressed across the harbor in extravagant, corkscrewing leaps, he’d managed to focus on the thing long enough to see that it was an extraordinary ship shaped like a firaxa shark, minus the head fin. It was five sleek meters long with a brilliant scarlet flash on one flank and the words WAVE-CHASER picked out in gold.
Fierfek, it looked like fun. Vau could barely recall fun. The craft would also fit neatly through the entrance to what he hoped was Ko Sai’s laboratory, as well as Aay’han’s cargo hatch.
“Let’s go rent one,” Mereel said. “They’re two-seaters and they’ve got a top speed of twenty-five kilometers an hour. Not that I researched them earlier, of course.”
Skirata just looked blank. It was the expression he wore when he wanted to say nu draar—the most vividly emphatic of Mando’a refusals—but felt he had to keep up appearances. “One.”
“Someone has to pilot Aay’han, because those things won’t have much range,” Vau said. “And I’m volunteering. I had my midlife crisis about ten years ago, so you can go play boy racer this time, Kal…”
“Shabuir,” Skirata muttered, but he looked nervous.
The Wavechasers turned out to be for sale or rent. Price had long since ceased to be an issue for any of them now that time was the rarest and most precious thing imaginable, so Skirata bought one.
“Handy runabout for Aay’han,” he said, staring at his boots. “And if we dent the thing, we won’t have any explaining to do to the rental office.” Then he looked up at Mereel, a head taller than him, and slapped the passcard in the Null’s palm. “All yours, son. High time you owned something nice.”
Vau was usually immune to Skirata’s polar extremes of emotion, but for a few seconds the old chakaar and his surrogate son simply looked at each other as if there was nothing else that mattered in the galaxy, and Vau felt genuine envy.
It wasn’t Skirata he envied. It was Mereel, for having a father who doted on him so much that he could do no wrong. Like time, it was something his wealth had never bought him.
Chapter Eleven
There’s one thing that bothers me, sir. They say Master Yoda referred to the war as the Clone War right after the Battle of Geonosis. It was the very first battle of the war. Why did he identify the war that way, by the clones who are fighting it? Have we ever said the Fifth Fleet War or the Corellian Baji Brigade War? What does he know that we don’t?
—General Bardan Jusik, confiding in General Arligan Zey
Shuttle,
en route for Dorumaa from Qiilura,
478 days after Geonosis
“What does cyar’ika mean?” Etain asked, gazing at something in the palm of her hand.
Ordo could guess where this was heading, and as they were stuck in the cockpit of a small shuttle he had no option but to have a conversation. He was afraid things would stray into areas where he felt woefully ignorant, and not having the answers always troubled him. He expected to be perfect.
“It means ‘darling,’” he said. “Sweetheart. Beloved. Dearest.”
Etain swallowed audibly and didn’t look up. “And it’s okay for a woman to use that word to a man?”
“You can use it to anyone,” Ordo said. Ah, she was groping her way through the minefield of a relationship in a foreign language. “Anyone or anything you love. Child, spouse, pet, parent.”
“Oh.” There was a slight drop in her tone as if she hadn’t expected to hear that. “Okay.”
“If Darman uses it, it’s not because he regards you as his strill, General…”
She made a little sound as if she was trying to laugh but had forgotten how. “So does everyone else know about the baby except Dar?”
“Just Kal’buir, Sergeant Vau, and my brothers. And Bard’ika, obviously.” Ordo respected Jusik’s ability to sit on the news for as long as he had, but it made him wonder what else the Jedi didn’t tell him. He longed for a day when none of this subterfuge was necessary. “Because we have a duty to look after you.”
“I—I appreciate your concern.”
“No pain?”
“No.”
“Any more bleeding?”
“No… Bardan knew before I told Kal, actually. He sensed it.” She let out a long sigh and clasped her hands on her belly as if it were much larger than it actually was. “Is he still angry with me?”
“You’d know if he was. Kal’buir just tries too hard to put the galaxy right for us, but it can’t be done, and it isn’t his job to do it now that we’re grown men.”
“Have you ever told him that?”
“Not in those words, exactly.”
“So you’re scared of him, too.”
“No. I’m scared of not being worthy of him.”
“No pressure, then…”
It was hard when someone devoted their entire life to your welfare, a mounting debt that never got paid. Ordo wanted to see Kal’buir get a decent night’s sleep in a proper bed, and have his ankle fixed. He wanted him to find a nice woman to take care of him; in fact, he wanted all the things for his buir that the man wanted for his sons, more or less. “I’d better warn him we’re coming when we drop out of hyperspace.”
“Why didn’t you call him earlier?”
“Because he would have told me to take you back to Coruscant, and I would never disobey him.”
“Even if he’s wrong?”
Ordo didn’t always agree with Skirata, but that was a long way from his being wrong. “He needs me there.”
“And am I going to be any use like this?”
“You don’t have to be useful.”
“What’s the big deal with Dorumaa anyway? Because I know Kal would never take a leave, let alone in the middle of a war.”
There was no point keeping it from her. She’d find out as soon as they touched down. “Ko Sai.”
“What about her?”
“I think they’ve found her, and that means her research, too.”
Etain was suddenly very quiet. He could hear her breathing but kept his eyes on the streaked starscape in front of him.
“Kal wasn’t just ranting, then.”
“No.” She didn’t understand him at all. “Mereel has been tracking her for months. Unfortunately…” Ordo wondered whether it was wise to tell her that Jusik had tipped off Skirata. It wasn’t. If they wanted to confide in each other as Jedi, that was up to Bard’ika. “Unfortunately, Delta caught up with one of his informants and so they’re heading for Dorumaa, too, on the Chancellor’s personal orders to capture her.”
This time he did glance at Etain, and she looked like a scared child. Her mouth was slightly open and she was an awful color, almost gray; he should never have mentioned it. The last thing she needed in her state was another thing to fret about, but if she didn’t worry about it now, she’d have to worry about it when they landed, and he couldn’t possibly have left her on Qiilura any longer to do more worrying with only the shapeshifters for company.
“You really are crazy, aren’t you?” Etain said.
“Me personally?”
“Kal and the Nulls going up against Delta… and defying Palpatine?”
He struggled to reassure her. “We’re not fighting Delta. We’re just getting there first. No harm done.”
“Ordo, this private-army thing has to stop. You can’t do this. You’ll end up being shot for treason.”
That rang all the wrong bells with Ordo. She might have said it as a general warning, but it was a little too close to the hidden reality of Sull and the other ARC troopers who wanted out of the GAR.
“So you know they put us down like animals, do you?”
“I was just—”
He wanted to put it to her straight: did the Jedi know about executions? Did they ever discuss what went on once the battles were over? But he knew Kal’buir would be angry if he raised Etain’s blood pressure and harmed the child, so he bit his lip—literally—and let his anger and mistrust pass.
She’s just a kid. She’s just like Bard’ika, only not as confi
dent and as good at the job. You have to back off.
It was a physical effort to shut up. Ordo could taste salt and metal, blood wet on his lip. “I’m sorry.” He focused on what Skirata would want and fought down the impulse to take out his resentment and frustration on Etain, not because it was unfair but because it might lead to events that would upset Kal’buir and Darman. He wanted to ask her why only a handful of Jedi objected to a slave army, and why they could claim to believe in the sanctity of all life and yet treat some life as being exempt from that respect. It was a question he should have put to Zey, too. Instead he parted his lips and heard himself say, “Let’s change the subject. If Besany’s offered to cook dinner for me, does she mean dinner, or…”
He trailed off. Etain was staring at him with the look of someone who’d seen a terrible accident, and he had no idea how to phrase the question anyway, but he did want to know the answer. The width of the cockpit was just over two meters. Etain reached across and grabbed his arm so hard that he flinched.
“Can we roll this back a bit, Ordo? Please? Who’s putting down clones? Does Zey know about this?” He didn’t have to be Force-sensitive to know she was disturbed by what he’d said. “Seeing as it’s ARC troopers being hunted down by covert ops troopers, maybe Zey authorizes it, even if they’re not all in his chain of command. He wasn’t slow to give the nod to Kal’buir to carry out illegal assassinations that can’t be traced back to him, was he?” Ordo wiped his lip on the back of his hand. “I just don’t know. And I shouldn’t have told you.”
“But you did, and now I’m mad about it.”
“Nobody leaves the Grand Army except in a body bag, Etain.” He decided to soften the impact by dropping her rank, which would have sounded like an accusation right then. “Once that story gets around, what do you think that’ll do to loyalty, let alone morale?”
Etain seemed to be framing difficult words. “Ordo, I can’t help being a Jedi. I never had any more choice than you did, and I can’t turn off my Force abilities any more than you can switch off your brain. So you scare me, because I can sense the dark side in you, all the violence and anger, but it’s all pushed down, and I just wonder when you’re finally going to erupt and lose control.”