501st: An Imperial Commando Novel

  “Oh, thank you!” Uthan bent over an open crate to examine the contents, then straightened up looking as if she’d been given a birthday present. “Mij, you remembered.”

  Ordo expected to see something exotic and wonderful in the crate. Instead, there were just packs of woodpulp sheets, the kind of absorbent material used in medcenters.

  “That’s because I wrote it down,” he said, smiling. “And if you look in the cool-pack … I always say the way to a woman’s heart is with a lovely box of noxious pathogens. Nebellia and rhinacyria virus samples. Knock yourself out, Doc.”

  Uthan positively glowed. “I’ll find a home for them right away,” she said, making the viruses sound like a bouquet in need of a vase. “As soon as I’ve modified them, we can make a start on the cell cultures.”

  Gilamar turned to Ordo. “Where did Vau go? Is he still arguing with Kal?”

  “I’m hanging around in case they come to blows,” Ordo said.

  “Well, it’s a bit of a shock—fancy old Maze pulling a stunt like that. Can’t wait to hear how he got Zey off the planet.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be riveting,” Ordo said. “Although I’m not sure why he felt the need to dupe me into thinking he’d shot Zey. If I’d wanted the man dead, I’d have done it myself.”

  Ordo didn’t have to look hard for Vau and Kal’buir. He just followed the angry voices drifting on the air. Skirata seemed to have decided to lance the boil early and tell Vau the whole plan. Everyone else had found something pressing to occupy them, except Jusik, who looked ready to part the two of them if it came to blows.

  “I’m going to do the deal,” Skirata said. “It’s not like Altis is the kind of Jedi who’s interested in political power and building big temples. Is he, Bard’ika?”

  Ordo ambled around the karyai as casually as he could. Jusik caught his eye and gave him an almost-imperceptible shake of the head. Vau still looked livid, jaw muscles twitching. Mird, always a reliable indicator of its master’s mood, was lying flat on the floor in absolute silence, gaze darting from Vau to Skirata and back again.

  “They say half of his followers aren’t even Force-sensitives,” Jusik said. “And apparently thousands of Padawans trained at his academy—based on board a ship. If he was really into power, we’d know all about it by now.”

  “No wonder he got away,” Skirata said. “Keep moving. Smart shabuir.”

  “Are you taking any of this in?” Vau snapped. “Have you completely forgotten the last three years? The whole point of the war? Not Palpatine’s war. Jango’s war.” Vau turned and stabbed a finger in Ordo’s direction. “Why do you think he was created? To fill some emotional void in your sorry life? No. Jango did it to put an end to the Jedi because we can’t trust them. We’ve never been able to trust them. He banked everything on letting Dooku use his DNA to build the only army that had a chance of taking these hut’uune down. And now you’re talking about making concessions to them. You make me sick.”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed,” Skirata said, suddenly unnaturally calm, “the winning side doesn’t like us much, either. We’re still under the heel of Force-users. Just one with a red lightsaber.”

  “So why put us at risk? Why not just shoot Zey and have done with it? Kina Ha—that I can understand. She’s a lab specimen. Scout—part of the package. But Zey? Let him go, and he’ll search out his pals and try to rebuild the old Order. You don’t need to do a deal with Altis to take them off your hands. You need a Verpine rifle and some guts.”

  “Okay, mir’sheb, you go and finish them off. An old woman and a child. Ori’jagyc. Big man.”

  “You think I wouldn’t?”

  “If you don’t—then what are we going to do with them?”

  “We get this far.” Vau spread his arms. “We get this far. We finally get rid of the Jedi and its groveling lackeys. And what do you do? You help them survive and regroup. You, of all people. One minute you hate their guts and see them as the enemy, the next you go soft on them. Oldest trick in the book—put children and old folks and pitiful wrecks in the line of fire to shield a cowardly army. You know how we despise an enemy that tries to exploit that.”

  “It’s … not about that, Walon.”

  Vau made a sweeping gesture of disgust. “If Fett were alive today, he’d spit on you, you know that? What did all those clones die for, Kal? So we could give the Jedi a second chance? Sheb’urcyin … aruetii.”

  Butt-kisser. Traitor.

  Ordo waited for Skirata to swing a punch. He didn’t. He just took it in silence. Vau turned and stalked off, snapping his fingers at Mird to follow him. Jusik shuffled his boots and looked embarrassed.

  “I think everyone revises history under stress,” Jusik said. “He’s forgotten that nobody knew Jango had set this up until the Purge happened. None of us had any idea what the clone army was really for, beyond something the Jedi Council didn’t ask enough questions about.”

  “He’s right, though, isn’t he?” Skirata still stood staring down at the floor. “I go out of my way to do the decent thing for Jedi. But I won’t help my own Mand’alor.”

  “You make it sound as if you had a plan that took account of all this, Buir,” Ordo said. “Your only plan was to save as many of us as you could. You never set out to smash the Jedi Order, Fett did. It’s a separate issue.”

  “Sure it is,” Skirata said. “I better see what Zey’s up to, just in case he’s rebuilding the shab’la Jedi Temple here and Maze is helping him.” He got halfway to the doors and turned. “It’s not them being Force-sensitive that gets to me. It’s the organization. The way they trample us all in the process of keeping power.”

  Jusik waited until Skirata was out of earshot and shrugged. “I hate it when they’re both right. Come on. Better stand by to stop him throttling Zey.”

  Vau had been far closer to Jango Fett than Skirata ever had. He understood—perhaps too late, but eventually—the depth of Fett’s loathing of the Jedi. They’d cost Fett everything he held dear; the Death Watch had robbed him of more—a family and a surrogate father—but Fett still bided his time for years and saved his supreme act of revenge for the Jedi. That told Ordo everything.

  And you won, Jango. Shame you didn’t live to see it.

  “Bard’ika, you know Zey at … a different level from me,” Ordo said. “What’s he likely to do if we let him go?”

  Jusik took a long time to reply. “Zey’s a pragmatist,” he said at last. “He thinks in terms of living beings with faces and names, not spiritual concepts. That’s why Maze gets on with him.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question. I know he wouldn’t rush to turn us in to Imperial Intelligence, but would he try to rebuild the Jedi Order along the old lines?”

  “I don’t think he would, even if he could.”

  “This might upset you, but I’m prepared to execute him.”

  “Yes, it upsets me because I know him too well to turn my back on him, and yes, I understand completely.”

  Ordo expected that from Jusik—honest, compassionate, but ultimately pragmatic, as pragmatic as Ordo himself, as pragmatic as the Jedi Order spending the lives of the clone army for an imagined greater good.

  We’re all the same. Except Jusik and I say it out loud. We all decide that one life is worth less than another.

  “If it really needs doing,” Jusik said, “I’ll be the one to do it. Okay?”

  That was typical Bard’ika. Always taking responsibility, almost to the point of martyrdom.

  “The last thing we want Kyrimorut to become is the Jedi remnant’s worst-kept secret,” Ordo said. “That’s a security measure. But you see Vau’s point. Ever cleared groundthorn weed? If you leave so much as a centimeter of root, it sprouts again. I think the lives of our clone brothers should buy more than a temporary reprieve.”

  They wandered out into the lobby, one of the circular hubs of the complex from which passages sprouted like spokes of an eccentric wheel. The house was a chain of redoubts connected
by surface corridors and underground tunnels, but the quaint charm was coincidental to its purpose. This was a bastion built to withstand a siege. Ordo never forgot that.

  “I can’t shut off my Force senses any more than you can think stupid,” Jusik said. “And I get these … premonitions. Jedi call them certainties in the Force. I don’t accept fixed futures, but I’ve got the feeling that the Jedi will rebuild one day, just like the Sith have. The best we can do is to stay away from both factions for as long as we possibly can—and definitely never fight their wars for them again.”

  That was the most sensible idea Ordo had heard all day. They found Zey and Skirata watching the construction work for Uthan’s virus kitchen, no visible trace of any animosity between them, just two tired men of a certain age wishing things had turned out differently.

  Zey didn’t turn his head. He seemed focused on Cov and Jind, who were sawing lengths of wood and cutting interlocking joints into them. These were men he’d commanded.

  “Where did you learn carpentry?” he asked.

  “From a manual.” Jind almost said sir but stopped himself. “Same way that Levet is learning to farm.”

  “So what are you building?”

  Cov glanced at Skirata for his cue. “Storage,” he said at last.

  Skirata took over the conversation. “Dr. Uthan is reversing the clones’ accelerated aging. She needs more lab space.”

  There was no point telling Zey that Kyrimorut was about to handle live pathogens. But once he settled down and started talking to Kina Ha and Scout, even if that was when they were all long gone from Mandalore, he’d hear it all; the FG36 virus, every detail that would be of interest to the Empire, and not in a healthy way.

  “So the Imperial garrison confines itself to the Keldabe area?” Zey asked.

  “Far as I know,” said Skirata.

  “Doesn’t that worry you?”

  “Not half as much as you do.”

  “Kal, I swear that—”

  Zey stopped dead. He looked over his shoulder, then turned and stared toward the door behind him. Ordo wondered what had stopped him in his tracks until he saw Kad trot out and stand on the doorstep.

  There was no hiding him now. There was certainly no way of hiding him from a Jedi Master.

  “Oh my,” Zey said. “I can feel who that is. I had no idea … oh, poor child …”

  Jusik spared Skirata the burden of answering. Maybe he could sense things in Zey now that nobody else could.

  “Yes,” Jusik said. “That’s Etain’s son. Darman’s son. Now do you understand the stakes a little better?”

  Zey’s eyes filled with tears and he squatted down to toddler height. Kad edged up to him, wary and grim-faced, then looked to Skirata for reassurance.

  “Yes,” Zey said. “I do.”

  Uthan’s laboratory, Kyrimorut

  “So how are you going to test this?” Scout asked. She looked very different in a laboratory coverall, gloved and booted like a technician with a cap over her hair. “How do you know if it works or not?”

  Uthan opened the conservator door and took out the sealed virus samples. Gilamar’s resourcefulness amazed her. She wondered where he got his medical and lab supplies, and how the vendor reacted to a Mandalorian in full armor showing up and presenting him with a shopping list like that. But a man who could steal an operating table from a medcenter wasn’t easily daunted.

  “Well, I’d need to infect a test subject with the modified rhinacyria virus and then expose them later to FG thirty-six.” Uthan placed the samples in the biohaz safety cabinet and sealed it. “But we’d need a human. So I’m planning to test it on myself. If I live, it works. It’s too important to trust computer modeling or isolated cells.”

  “But then how would you know that both the FG thirty-six virus and the other thing are actually working?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  “And that means you’re going to have a deadly virus sitting in a bottle here …”

  “Not quite a bottle, but you got the deadly bit spot-on.”

  “Kal and Mij must trust you a lot.”

  Uthan lined up the containers of enzymes and chemicals ready to modify the rhynacyria’s DNA, and thought that over. Yes, they obviously did. She hadn’t actually thought of it in those terms, because … well, that was how she did the job. She handled dangerous pathogens. It was the first time that she’d stopped to think how much faith these people had placed in her not to kill them or wipe out their entire world. Given how she’d first met the clones, she felt uncomfortably guilty for a moment.

  My world’s gone. They might think I’ve got nothing to lose. That I’m still determined to wipe out the clone army.

  The more she thought about it, the harder it got.

  Scout was a smart girl, learning fast, and remarkably dexterous. She followed her instructions to the letter—preparing the electrophoresis gel, sterilizing vials and containers, and lining up the various enzymes, reagents, and nutrient solutions in exactly the right place. She didn’t fumble or drop things like so many technicians Uthan had trained at the university. Uthan hadn’t noticed until now how precise and sure Jedi were in their movements, that extraordinary visuospatial ability. But Scout’s expression told her that she was less interested in the techniques of gene splicing and switching than in Uthan herself.

  “Would you use it?” Scout glanced sideways at her. “Knowing what it does, what it really means—would you use the FG virus yourself?”

  If you’d asked me a few days ago … a few weeks ago …

  “I never thought of myself as a monster,” Uthan said. “I’m not. Am I? I’m no different from most beings, I think. But there’s part of me that wonders if I have a blind spot about this. And then I think—does the weapon matter? Does the number of dead matter? If I shoot one enemy with a blaster, or you cut down an enemy with your lightsaber, nobody would think we were monsters. How many more do we have to kill, and how, and why, before we cross that line into becoming … monsters?”

  Scout chewed her lip thoughtfully. “That’s one for a Jedi Master.”

  “We don’t need Jedi Masters to define morality for us.”

  “I suppose I’m saying I don’t know.”

  “Have you ever killed anyone?”

  “No.”

  “But you’re armed. You’d use your lightsaber if threatened.”

  Scout seemed to be scanning Uthan’s face for proof of lack of monsterhood, and Uthan found herself regretting that she’d not seen Scout grow up even though the girl was a stranger. It was the oddest feeling, like having a daughter who’d only reappeared in your life after too long an absence.

  Like Kal and Ruu. That must hurt him sometimes. And her. All that lost time that can never be recovered.

  “I’d probably think I didn’t have any other choice,” Scout said at last. “But it wouldn’t be much different from what you did—thinking you had to kill in self-defense. It’s just a feeling that it’s different. Not a reason.”

  Uthan smiled at her. “I enjoy our conversations. After nearly three years of having no company except soka flies and third-rate doctors who thought I was a lunatic, you have no idea how good it feels to have a challenging conversation.”

  “So the soka flies thought you were crazy, too?”

  Uthan had moments when the sheer weight of Gibad’s destruction left her unable to think straight. She wasn’t sure whether to hate herself for the other moments, the ones when she got on with life and even took pleasure in it.

  She let herself laugh anyway. “I gave them names. Flies. What do they know?”

  From the window, she could see the herd of roba rooting on the edge of the woods while Mird watched them at a cautious distance. Rural life went on around her, an existence that hadn’t changed much in perhaps five thousand years.

  “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” she said to herself.

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Doctor,
do you think it’s right to infect everyone on the planet with this?” Scout asked. “It’s just a bug that spreads like any disease. Nobody can avoid it. They don’t get a choice once it’s set loose.”

  “Let’s put it this way,” Uthan said. “It’s a lot more ethical than watching Palpatine use FG thirty-six on the population and knowing I could have saved them.”

  Mama knows best. Isn’t that always the way? But once everyone knows there’s a countermeasure for the virus, Palpatine will simply use something else.

  It kept Mandalore a few steps ahead of the worst the Empire could do to it. If she couldn’t bring down Palpatine, the next best thing was to look after a planet that could be a severe pain in his Imperial backside.

  “It’s a bit like baking cakes.” Scout looked up from the curved transparisteel cover of the small biohazard cabinet where the DNA samples would be replicated and broken up into their component genes. “Wow. Can you hear that?”

  Uthan stopped shaking the transparisteel flask in her hand. The homestead’s acoustics and the quiet of this remote place meant that sound carried, but all she could hear was the faint up-and-down buzzing of voices. It didn’t sound like an argument. She’d heard plenty of those in the last few days. A female voice. Not Besany or Jilka … not Ny … Arla, maybe. Definitely not Laseema or Kina Ha.

  “Let’s go and see once this batch is set to run,” she said. “Whatever it is, the antigen comes first. What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Arla. She’s getting worse.”

  Arla was living with horrific memories. Maybe the medication shut them out, or maybe it simply trapped her with them but left her unable to scream or flee. Trauma did different things to different minds. Skirata had been galvanized to survive, Ordo had learned to shut it away most of the time, and Arla simply couldn’t handle it. There were no rules in psychology that Uthan could follow, not like the more predictable and orderly world of microbiology. It bordered on shamanism.

  Gilamar seemed to be getting more frustrated each day, almost blaming himself for not being able to fix the problem. He was a man with pain in his past, too. Had anyone in this place escaped some kind of tragedy or suffering? Uthan didn’t think so. It was a colony of the damaged and dispossessed.