501st: An Imperial Commando Novel

  Fine. Working just fine.

  He commed Control to check his mike, and got confirmation from a droid that it could hear him perfectly.

  What do I do now?

  Imperial Command wasn’t as free and easy as the Grand Army’s special forces setup. There was no way of vanishing for a few days on a whim if a target looked promising. There was no Kal’buir to cover for them while they did as they pleased, or an indulgent General Jusik to task them as he saw fit.

  Or Etain. Poor Etain.

  How the shab could he get a chance to go to Mandalore? How much more could he ask of Jaller Obrim? The man would be watched as closely as anyone. One thing was clear to Niner, even if he didn’t care about politics: in the new galactic order, Palpatine was checking who was with him and who was not.

  “Ner vod …”

  Niner turned, expecting to see Darman, but he was still alone in the room. He adjusted his audio, cycling through comm frequencies and picking up channels he didn’t know he could access. They were all Imperial military channels. He was entitled to use some of them, being special forces, but he hadn’t been able to get this many before. The droid had screwed up.

  And now he kept hearing a voice.

  Niner couldn’t make out the words, but it was definitely a man’s voice, very faint, very broken up, buried in radio interference when he switched comm channels. He wondered if he’d picked up a holonet transmission or even a taxi frequency. Then the voice came in loud and clear.

  “Niner, ner vod,” it said. “You didn’t think some osik’la Imperial encryption could keep us out forever, did you?”

  The voice almost made him lose control of all sphincters. It wasn’t Darman who was going crazy. It was him. He didn’t dare reply. He activated the signal locator in his HUD, but it told him the transmission was coming from inside the barracks, and he didn’t believe that for one minute. He knew that voice. He was just too scared to say the name, in case it was a setup, and he was wrong—fatally, finally wrong.

  “Niner, cut the osik and respond,” the voice said sharply. “Can you hear me?”

  “Identify yourself,” Niner whispered.

  “The galaxy’s gift to women. The best data slicer this side of … well, anywhere. Financial genius and all-around modest ori’beskaryc vod. Jaing Skirata. Who’d you think it was—Mereel?”

  “You wish … ,” said Mereel’s voice.

  “Shab,” Niner whispered. Was he hallucinating? He answered anyway “They’ll pick you up and trace you. Shut up.”

  “You always were a worry-guts, Niner. Trust Teekay-O. He’s done a lovely job on your comms. I await his invoice with interest.”

  “The droid.”

  “Inorganic colleague, please.” Jaing sounded chipper. Niner was relieved that he wasn’t hallucinating, but now he had an extra risk to worry about. “Niner—you’re coming home. And I hear you have something for me …”

  Kyrimorut, Mandalore

  “Who’s for more eggs?” Corr yelled over the hubbub. He’d volunteered for kitchen detail with Ny this week, probably to impress Jilka, and Ordo decided it was working. She watched Corr when she thought he wasn’t looking. “Make the most of these. The nuna can’t keep up with you greedy shab’ikase. It’ll be boiled mealgrain until they start laying again.”

  “But we’re trillionaires,” Fi said. “How come we’ve got an egg crisis? We should be brushing our teeth with Daruvvian champagne.”

  “It’s all Levet’s fault. He’s not farming fast enough.”

  Levet looked up from his plate. “I’m only halfway through the livestock manual. I’m still on chapter ten—nerf husbandry.”

  “You know there’s a law against that, don’t you?” Fi said. “Hurry up start on the chapter about roba. I like smoked roba.”

  “Let’s admit temporary defeat and ship in extra eggs for the time being,” Levet said. “We can glory in our gritty self-sufficiency later.”

  Ordo watched Uthan and Ny with interest. Neither woman was aware—as far as he knew—that Fi wasn’t joking about being worth trillions. Ordo wasn’t sure that Ruu knew or understood the details, either. Uthan definitely seemed to be taking it as a joke. He wondered how they’d react if they knew just how much wealth the clan was sitting on.

  But creds didn’t solve every problem.

  Skirata tapped the end of his fork on the table. “Okay, ad’ike, what’s the drill today?”

  “We’re tracking Niner via his helmet systems,” Jaing said. “So we rendezvous with Gaib and Teekay-O off Coruscant, they supply us with ordinary stormtrooper armor, we swap out the electronics, land in Imperial City or whatever it’s called this week, pick up Niner and Darman, and bang out.”

  “Just like that,” Fi said. “Can I come?”

  “Nulls only,” Mereel said. “And before anyone else asks—no. It’s going to be just us and Ny, because her ship’s been passed and inspected at Imperial checkpoints.”

  “We never needed to worry about that before,” Atin muttered. “Bogus transponder signal. Don’t leave the barracks without one.”

  “But it’s a one-shot trick. We might want to drop in again. First rule—don’t make things any more complicated than you need to.”

  Ny watched the discussion with her arms folded, lips pursed in apparent disapproval. Ordo thought she was the perfect cover. She was used to contraband runs—and, Kal’buir said, after a certain age women were invisible, just like clones. She was the wrong gender and the wrong age to look like a gang courier. Females who did that kind of work were expected to be young and dangerous looking, because most beings watched too many holovids with glamorous actresses playing blaster-toting heroines, and so they believed that was how things were in the real world. Men like Jaller Obrim weren’t fooled that easily. But the galaxy wasn’t full of men like him. It was full of fools.

  Ordo thought of mentioning that by way of explanation, but he knew Ny wouldn’t appreciate the candor.

  “Okay, I’m up for it,” Ny said. “Shall we pick up some eggs at the store on the way back?”

  It was hard to tell if she was joking, deadly serious, or scathing. Her expression seldom changed. She rarely looked happy, but sometimes she smiled—at Kal’buir, at Fi, at Kad—and became a different person. Ordo held out hope that she would stop sleeping in her ship as if she was on a cargo stopover, and accept that this could be her home, too.

  “Okay, let’s do it,” Skirata said. He bounced Kad on his knee. “This boy needs his buir.”

  “And I really will stock up on supplies,” Ny said. “Get your grocery list together, folks. No point wasting fuel. Might as well make the best use of it.”

  Skirata fumbled in his belt. Kad tried to help him find what he was looking for. “How many creds, Kad’ika?” Skirata asked, laying cash chips on the table. “Tell me, then give them to Ny.”

  Kad studied the chips. “Lots. Five.” That was as high as he could count. “Six?”

  “Clever boy, close enough,” Skirata said. It was a lot more than that. “Now, what’s special about them?”

  Kad looked up into Skirata’s face for a prompt, then shook his head.

  “If you spend these, nobody knows who you are,” Skirata said, holding one up. “You can spend them in secret. Nobody knows where you live or what you’ve bought.” Skirata turned the chip over to show Kad the holoimage on the back. “That’s important, Kad’ika, because there are bad people out there who want to find us and hurt us. That’s why we use these, so they can’t.”

  Kad looked as if he understood, but then he always did. He nodded gravely.

  “Now give them to Ny.”

  Kad slid off Skirata’s lap and delivered the chips. Ny took them with a show of mock formality, suddenly the other Ny again, and gave Kad a cuddle while she counted the credits.

  She lowered her voice. “Kal, that’s a little excessive for groceries.”

  “It’s for fuel and parts, too.” Skirata shrugged. “You can’t keep thrashing that
old crate around the galaxy on your own budget. And you brought supplies this time.”

  “It’s not necessary. I eat your food, so I pay my way.”

  “Ny,” Skirata said, “let’s you and me go for a walk, shall we? There’s something you need to know.”

  He gave Ordo a meaningful look as he ushered her out of the room. So he was going to tell her what she’d walked into, then, as if volunteering for Palpatine’s hit list wasn’t crazy enough. She was another passerby sucked into the vortex of Kal’buir’s grand plan who had to leave her life behind. Nobody escaped unscathed. Even Parja’s engineering business was now a sideline. She spent most of her time servicing the vessels and equipment at Kyrimorut.

  Uthan turned to Ordo. “Kad’s just a baby. Is it right to teach him that the galaxy’s full of beings out to get him? He’ll grow up paranoid.”

  “He’s the son of a Jedi and a commercially valuable clone, his family are deserters and enemies of the Empire, and there’s an occupation force on his homeworld,” Ordo said. “How would you describe the world to him?”

  “Do you see the Keldabe garrison as an occupying army?”

  “You would, if this was Gibad.”

  “But your leader let them come here and rent land.”

  “We’re in no shape to fight that big an army. If Shysa had told them to get lost, you know what would have happened next. Better to watch and wait. Build our strength.”

  “And steal their kit,” Gilamar said. “Just a little. Here and there.”

  Uthan should have known better than anyone what it meant to cross Palpatine. There was no holoreceiver in the karyai, because Skirata felt it stifled conversation—and carousing—but Ordo knew that as soon as breakfast was over, Uthan would retreat to her laboratory and switch on the news to see what was happening to her homeworld. Gibad didn’t have a history like the Mandalorians’. They hadn’t learned to live with war and fight a hundred different ways.

  Gibad was going to be brought into line as an example to anyone else thinking of arguing with the new management. It was only a matter of time, and that time depended on what worked best for Palpatine. The assault wasn’t being delayed to allow negotiations to take place.

  “You always play the long game, you Mandos,” Uthan said.

  Gilamar smiled. “It’s cheaper in the long run. Your hair looks great, by the way. Very lower-levels street gang.”

  “Flattery is effective, Mij.” She put a self-conscious hand to her head. “But you’ll have to work harder on your analogies.”

  Now that Skirata had left the table, everyone else took it as a cue to go as well—except Ruu. Ordo wondered why he couldn’t immediately accept her as a sister, another vod like his brothers. She was Kal’buir’s flesh and blood, wasn’t she? How could he not find some kinship with her, then, some common bond?

  Besany leaned over him as she cleared the table. “Sweetheart,” she whispered, although the clattering plates made it hard to hear her anyway. “I nearly acquired a stepsister once. Hated her guts on sight. It takes effort and time.”

  Ordo couldn’t imagine Besany hating anyone, not until he recalled how fast she bonded with this clan. For an apparently rational woman, her emotional reactions were powerful and instant. “Nearly?”

  “Dad didn’t marry her mother. Thankfully.”

  “So you didn’t stop hating her guts.”

  “No, but I only mildly resented them in the end.”

  “Uplifting thought, cyar’ika.”

  “Keep on thinking it.”

  Ordo wondered why nobody wanted to extend that same tolerance to Skirata’s sons, the ones who had formally disowned him, but Ruu—Ruu had constructed an entirely different image of her absent father in those years. Ordo could see it on her face. She seemed to be permanently awed by Kal’buir, as if he fully measured up to the hero she’d expected him to be.

  Boils were there to be lanced, Mereel always said. Ordo prepared to trade a few painful seconds for long-term comfort.

  “So, Ruu, is Kal’buir as you remembered him?”

  “Pretty well. I thought he was taller, I admit.” She gave Ordo a careful smile, as if she were being interviewed for a job and wanted to make a good impression. “But everything else—yes, I remember the gold armor and how he was always going off to war, or coming back from one with all these weird and exciting gifts. A real warrior, like in the holovids. I always thought he wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody, and how dashing he was.”

  Prudii laughed. He was like Mereel and Jaing in many ways, comfortable with everybody and happy to joke and gossip. “Actually, that’s a pretty accurate description,” he said. “Short people can be dashing, too. So no disappointments?”

  “I always told myself he’d come back for me,” she said. “And he did. How can I be disappointed?”

  Ruu was in her midthirties. Ordo wondered why she hadn’t got on with her life and had a family of her own, but he understood that powerful sense of salvation that Skirata could instill in anyone just by showing up. He saved people. He’d certainly saved Ordo and his brothers, and yes—he had been both dashing and unafraid, holostar-style, when he did it. But Ordo wondered if Ruu realized he un-saved people, too, for bounties, payments in kind, and even revenge. He didn’t want to see that adulation in her eyes tarnished by reality. Kal’buir would see it, too, and it would break his heart.

  Ordo wasn’t ashamed of his father’s past. Skirata did whatever he had to do to survive without handouts in a hostile galaxy that had never given him a break or a head start.

  “Buir’s had to take some tough jobs over the years,” Ordo said. “You’ll hear some say harsh things about him, but he’s a good man. The best. That’s why we’re very protective of him.”

  “I noticed. But there’s nothing anyone can say about my dad that I hadn’t heard from my mother.”

  Mereel looked at Ordo with a smirk that said he doubted that Skirata’s late wife knew half of what her old man did for a living, even if she’d accepted his credit transfers over the years.

  “Look, it’s nothing personal,” Ordo said. Yes, it was. It definitely was. Like all his Null brothers, he found it hard to be neutral about anybody. Everyone had to be assessed—a potential threat to be neutralized if necessary, or someone you would lay down your life for. There was no middle path, much as he struggled to find one. “We just don’t know how to deal with you.”

  “It’s okay, Ordo. I don’t want Dad’s credits, I’m not here to take your place, and I understand why you don’t find it easy to trust newcomers. I’m just grateful to have my father back and get to know him again. Does that make you happier?”

  The part of Ordo that was common sense and reason told the wary animal within him that it was okay. When he let his intellect run the show, and it stopped his instincts from getting the better of him, he always felt guilty for what he’d said or felt. But instincts were there for a reason.

  “Yes,” he said. “Much happier.”

  “That’s good. Now, is there any use I can be on this mission?”

  “Not unless you can look like a clone.”

  “I think I fail on all points there.”

  A’den, the nearest the Nulls had to a diplomat, held up a finger.

  Ordo cut him off at the pass. “And you’re not coming, ner vod, because if you have to take your helmet off, they’ll see you’re a little weather-beaten. I doubt that the ordinary meat-cans are going to look like that.”

  “I prefer bronzed,” A’den said. “And maybe you should do something about your gray hairs, then. Anyway, I was going to say that Ruu might be able to help Arla. She knows what it’s like to have your past crash-land on you. Poor Arl’ika doesn’t know what happened to her brother yet.”

  “Does anyone?” Ruu asked.

  “Vau knows more than Kal’buir, I think.”

  Ruu had a wary look so like her father’s—slightly narrowed rabid-schutta eyes, head turned away just a fraction—that nobody was ever going t
o ask for a paternity test, even if Mandos cared about that sort of thing, which they didn’t. “I’ll do what I can.”

  Ruu left, taking her plate with her, and Kom’rk raised an eyebrow at Ordo.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, ner vod, but you lack sensitivity. Poor woman didn’t go looking for Kal’buir. We abducted her.”

  “She knows the score.”

  “So you’re happy now.”

  “Less tense, let’s say.”

  Jaing laid his datapad on the table. “Oh good,” he said. “I thought we were going to have a spat about Number One Son losing his place in the pecking order. Okay, what floor plans do we need?”

  It had always been a joke, but Ordo wasn’t sure it was so funny now. He’d been the informal alpha male of the brothers since infancy, and Skirata treated him as such. Mereel had always fallen into the sidekick role. In a family of six sons, it was inevitable that there’d be alliances and harmless rivalries. Now Ordo was starting to worry that they really did see him differently. The last thing he wanted was advantages that his brothers didn’t have.

  “Do you think I’m jealous?” he asked.

  “More scared,” Jaing said. “She’s got to prove she’s loyal and not a chakaar like her brothers.” As he scrolled through schematics on the small screen, Ordo could see the flickering light on his hands. “Now remember that second virus I fed into the Republic mainframe?”

  Mereel got up and stood behind him, hands on his shoulders. “You mean the incredibly risky and cocky demonstration of your programming skills that you performed under the nose of Republic Audit?”

  “Yep. That’ll be the one.”

  “I do recall. Has it been busy?”

  “Well, now your pet tinnie and his minder have set up a comm portal, I can retrieve the data it’s mined. What do you want—building plans, budgets, procurement contracts, Imperial canteen menus?”