501st: An Imperial Commando Novel

  And me. Pain has found me, too. None of us is normal. But then, normal people never do anything of note, nothing magnificent or world changing or on the knife-edge of risk. I belong here.

  “Okay, let’s leave this batch and come back later,” she said. She placed the flasks in the cabinet and set the heat cycle to run. “Three hours. Check your chrono. Now let’s go and be sociable.”

  After years in solitary confinement, Uthan found it hard to get used to a house full of the activity of thirty-odd Mandalorians, Jedi, clones, and assorted beings who’d thrown their lot in with them. Even back on Gibad, she’d never lived alongside more than three or four people. She wondered how Skirata kept track of them all. But then this was a small family by his standards. Somehow, he’d looked after and trained not only the Nulls but an entire company of more than a hundred commandos as well. So had Gilamar, and Vau. She found that astonishing.

  Gilamar was standing in the corridor near Arla’s room with Jusik and Jaing, all three of them muttering as if things weren’t going well. Gilamar held a hypospray in one hand, filling its reservoir from a plastoid vial.

  “Anything I can do?” Uthan asked.

  Gilamar held up the hypo. “Just debating whether to use this or not. Stop-a-bantha juice. I’m really not happy topping her up with sebenodone, but she’s doing herself damage now.”

  Uthan could hear the sound of thudding coming from inside the room. The doors were slightly open. It sounded as if someone was hammering plaster with a soft mallet.

  “Is that her?”

  “Yeah.” Gilamar took a breath and lowered his chin like a nerf ram about to charge, steeling himself for the fray. “I like a shoot-out. Or a good old-fashioned fist-fight. But overpowering ladies just doesn’t sit right with me.”

  “Why don’t I do it?” Uthan said. She was very conscious of Scout standing to one side, eyes closed. Jusik was doing the same. This Force business unnerved her. “She’s much calmer around women. I don’t look threatening. And I do know how to use a hypo without rupturing soft tissues.”

  “No,” Jusik held out his hand, eyes still closed. “You’re going to think I’m a callous shabuir, but I say leave her for a while. Withdrawal’s pretty unpleasant, I know, but there’s something surfacing in her. It feels … rational. Sharp-edged. Real. Scout, can you sense that?”

  Uthan fought an embarrassed urge to laugh. Scout, eyes screwed tightly shut, tilted her head back to concentrate. She was a skinny little thing, and Jusik was a small man alongside Jaing and Gilamar; they looked like two starving waifs sniffing the aromas of someone else’s dinner. But this was serious. The scientist in Uthan rebelled at the idea of diagnosis by communing with the invisible. She wanted lab results, numbers, reagents that changed color.

  “Yes,” Scout said at last. “It’s like another presence, almost, but it’s her. It’s more solid. It feels to me like … oh … this is going to sound dumb, I know, but I’m feeling … a big block of dark granite tearing through thick drapes.”

  “Mine’s all sharp edges, black-and-white contrast,” Jusik said. Uthan wondered if Jedi were all synesthetic. “Like something’s forcing itself back into her conscious mind, her old self, and it’s not what she wants to see.” He opened his eyes. “Suppressed trauma, obviously. I hate doing this to her, but I feel it’s better if we find out what it is.”

  “I think we know that, don’t we?” Uthan said. “The Death Watch slaughtered her family and kidnapped her.”

  “We need to be more specific than that to help her.”

  Gilamar looked riveted. He was still clutching the hypospray in the filling position. “Has anyone ever done a brain scan on you?” he asked. “I’d give anything to see your brain activity while you’re sensing this stuff.”

  “Agreed?” Jusik said, lips set in a grim line. “We let all this stuff come out?”

  “Might as well.” Gilamar put the cover back on the hypo. “Because it’s that or just keep her drugged to her eyeballs until the day she dies. If you’re going to try psychotherapy, this is the only way.”

  “She’s not scared,” Scout said, eyes still shut.

  “What?”

  “Usually, she’s scared. I could feel it. Not so much now. She’s … full of hate and guilt.”

  “Well, that fits her memory resurfacing.” Gilamar shrugged. “Hate for the Death Watch, guilt that she survived and her folks didn’t.”

  “No, that’s not it. It’s about her. She hates being herself.”

  Uthan watched, fascinated and horrified. Psychologists were all the same, even amateur ones like Jedi. It was all so nebulous. “Well, I’m still going in to talk to her. Isn’t Laseema around?”

  “She’s taken Kad to visit Rav,” Jusik said. “With Besany and Ordo. Until Kal’buir relaxes a bit about having the kid in the same space as Zey.”

  “Okay.” Uthan took off her lab tunic. She didn’t want to look like a medical orderly. “How hard can this be? At least I know what survivor’s guilt feels like.”

  Uthan opened the doors wider and stepped into Arla’s room. It was big and airy enough not to feel like a cell at the Valorum, with a pretty view of open countryside, so at least the poor woman wouldn’t feel she’d swapped one prison for another. Arla had pushed her bed into one corner, and was kneeling on it facing the wall. She was banging her fist on the wall, pounding her hand against the plaster. Uthan edged around until she was at the head of the bed and could see better.

  “Arla? It’s me, Qail.” She risked getting a little closer. She was a meter away, just out of range of a punch if Arla snapped. For a moment, she took a panicky glance at what might be in reach that Arla could use as a bludgeon. But she was sure that a male wouldn’t have been able to get this close. “Arla, my dear, you must feel wretched. Would you like me to get you some caf, or sit with you?”

  Uthan thought Arla was using the heel of her fist. But she wasn’t. Uthan could see now that she was using the knuckles, the bones covered by paper-thin skin, and there was a wet patch of blood on the honey-colored wall. Two thin trails of blood ran down and vanished behind the bed.

  “Arla,” she said. “Can you stop that for a minute so we can talk?”

  Uthan put her hand out—slowly, nervously—and just got a fingertip to Arla’s shoulder when the woman wrenched away and scrambled to the other end of the bed.

  “Don’t touch me!”

  “Okay, I’m sorry. But your hand’s a mess. That’s got to be painful. I’m a doctor.” Well, not a physician, but it’s worth a try. “Let me take a look.”

  “Don’t!” Arla stared at her hand for a second and then dug her nails hard into the inside of her opposite forearm. She drew blood. Uthan could only stare in horror. “I’m filth. I’m filth. Stay away from me.”

  “Nobody thinks you’re filth, Arla.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “I know that’s got to hurt, and that you need a doctor to see to those wounds.”

  “You don’t know what I am. You don’t know what I’ve done.” Arla started rocking, arms tight around her knees, head buried. The blood was now everywhere. “I’ll be okay in a minute. Leave me alone. You don’t want to be near me. Get away.”

  Uthan had never been so scared in her life. She could handle privation, danger, any extreme that came her way, but watching someone else so devoured by despair and self-loathing was terrifying. She had no control over the situation. And she didn’t know how to begin to make Arla Fett feel better.

  I know everything about the fabric of life. How cells work. What makes us what we are. What drives the living machine. But I have no idea how to reach out to another being in purgatory.

  But she was going to try.

  “Nobody’s judging you, Arla,” Uthan said kindly. How could she? She had no idea what had driven Arla to kill, only that she’d lost her family in the most horrific circumstances. Uthan knew plenty of killers who never so much as lost their appetite for their next snack. And here was this unlucky wo
man, institutionalized for years, harming herself in the agony of guilt. Uthan decided to say whatever might soothe her. “I’m sure you had reason to kill … to defend yourself …”

  “Not that,” Arla spat. “Not them. They were nothing. I mean bad stuff. Disgusting stuff.”

  Arla rocked herself a little longer and then her breathing slowed, and she seemed to be calming down, or at least she’d exhausted herself. She shuffled into a cross-legged position, braced her elbows on her knees, and rested her head in her hands.

  It seemed as good a time as any to slip out. Uthan backed away to the door, and Gilamar peered in.

  “Oh, shab.”

  Jusik craned his neck. Uthan ushered them back a little way along the corridor and closed the doors. Jaing was engrossed in something on his datapad.

  “Well, I’m getting a better picture of why the Valorum docs kept her so heavily sedated,” Gilamar said. “She doesn’t even need anything sharp to self-harm.”

  “Mij, I don’t know what she was talking about, but she blames herself for something.”

  “You said you wanted me to hack into the criminal justice database,” Jaing said, brandishing his ’pad. “Well, here you go. Arla Vhett, spelled right, three counts of murder, and at least six more thought to be down to her but the court ruled there was insufficient evidence. Convicted, but transferred to a secure mental unit after serving a year or two in a normal prison. That’s our girl.”

  “So is any of that of use to us?” Jusik said.

  “Ah, but it’s who she whacked that makes it interesting. Assuming that the six they couldn’t convict on are hers, then they don’t look random, but they don’t look logical, either. At least not serial-killer logical, if you know what I mean.”

  Gilamar took the datapad from him and read, brow puckered in concentration. “All male, all business owners—one tapcaf, one haulage firm, one catering supplies, and … hey, that name rings a bell. Vargaliu. He was a bounty hunter, way back.”

  The three men looked at one another. Uthan had the feeling that they would have felt better if Arla had been the kind who only killed males with red hair, a consistent lunatic. Scout tugged at her sleeve.

  “I just get the feeling of the most awful guilt,” she said. “The poor woman’s tearing herself apart with guilt.”

  “And not over her victims, judging by what she said,” Jusik muttered.

  “So what can we do for her?” Uthan asked.

  Jusik looked guilty himself. “We could hire a proper psychiatrist, except that we don’t want any more visitors than we already have. It’s getting like Galactic City spaceport here. I say we let her surface some more, and see what we’re dealing with.”

  “And then?”

  Jusik shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  “Me neither,” said Gilamar. “But if it’s insoluble, we’ve always got the meds.”

  Jaing didn’t say anything. Jusik had insisted on rescuing Arla, but nobody had imagined the form that her psychosis would take. It was naïve and well meaning, a spur-of-the-moment reaction that any compassionate being would have had about someone in torment. But now it looked as if Arla could never lead a normal life or return to Concord Dawn.

  “It was my idea,” Jusik said, “and so she’s my responsibility. One way or another—I’ll get her out of this.”

  Compassion was a burden. Uthan realized she’d avoided it for most of her life, and Jusik had made a vocation of it.

  She wondered which of them was the happier.

  14

  A betrothal token should be portable, capable of easy conversion into credits in case of emergency, and, if worn, should not impede the wearer in combat. Earrings are out. So are long chains. Gems in rings should be in a rub-over setting and shallow enough to be worn under gauntlets. You really don’t want to see what happens if you catch a ring in a moving cable or machine part.

  —Purchasing advice for Mandalorian suitors from Tsabin Dril, jeweler and artillery specialist

  Coth Fuuras space station, Expansion Region

  Darman knew better than to trust anyone as much as he’d trusted Skirata, but Roly Melusar was an all-right kind of officer. He asked how they wanted to play things now that Ennen was gone.

  Yes, he said that. His very words. How do you want to play it, men? Can you handle a replacement for Ennen yet, or would you rather operate as a three-man squad for a while? Nobody had ever done something that simple, that thoughtful for them before—except Kal’buir, of course.

  Darman didn’t want to replace Ennen yet. It was hard enough bonding with Rede. If the squad had been ordered to, he’d have done it, of course, but at the moment it felt less painful to stick to the tight circle he knew, brothers who had lost a buddy in a particularly awful way.

  Niner said it would be easier to operate as a smaller squad while they had a wild card like Rede to train. Dar didn’t think there was very much wild about Rede at all. He just absorbed everything at a frightening rate, and he knew more about them than they knew about him.

  Rede was just over a year old and he’d spent nearly all that time in a gestation tank. What was there to know about him?

  “You know what makes this business with Ennen worse?” Niner said, chin resting on folded arms as he watched the station’s security monitors. “Not just that he killed himself. It’s that we didn’t get on with him. He didn’t like us, and I’m not sure we liked him. And I never thought I’d say this, but—well, it feels even worse in some ways than losing a brother you loved.”

  Darman tried to look as if he was more interested in the assorted views of the space station’s main thoroughfares. He sat watching the bank of screens, running his thumbnail down his chin. It probably didn’t fool Niner.

  “Guilt,” Darman said. “Guilt eats you alive.”

  Niner couldn’t say it in front of Rede, but they both knew what Darman blamed himself for not doing. “I don’t think that would have stopped him, Dar.”

  Oh, yes, it would. If he’d known there was somewhere he could escape to and start his life over again—he wouldn’t have stuck a blaster in his mouth and pulled the trigger. It wasn’t just Bry dying that tipped him. It was not having anything else to make surviving worthwhile.

  “What would have stopped him?” Rede asked.

  Niner filled the gap without a blink. “Us trying to understand his Corellian thing.”

  “I liked him,” Rede said. “He was pretty good to me. Is it that much of a problem, you guys all having different cultures?”

  “We weren’t all different,” Darman said. “Most of us had Mandalorian sergeants, and that’s what we grew up as. Only a quarter of commandos had aruetyc sergeants.”

  “Yeah, I know what that means.”

  It wasn’t Rede’s fault that he wasn’t Fi, or Corr, or Atin. Darman made a conscious effort to remember that. He tried to imagine what it was like to reach adulthood without any real contact with other beings, having everything you knew piped into your brain while you floated in some nutrient soup. That was Darman’s definition of a nightmare. He couldn’t believe that Rede could behave so normally under the circumstances.

  “Tell us if you feel we’re shutting you out,” Niner said. “We don’t mean to.”

  “You were Omega Squad, weren’t you?”

  “Yeah.” Niner sat up a little. Something had caught his eye. “The Boys in Boring Black. That’s what Delta called us.”

  “How do you feel about your buddies deserting and leaving you behind?”

  Niner put his hand on Darman’s arm in less time than it took Darman to inhale in preparation to give Rede an earful. Darman took the hint.

  “We miss them,” Darman said. But I’m going to talk to them soon, and to my son. He willed Rede not to say something insulting about them just in case he lost it with him. “You always miss your brothers. All of them.”

  “Dar, I think that’s our boy.” Niner tapped his finger on the monitor screen, then jumped up and went into the adjoining co
ntrol room. A crew of droids and three Sullustan security officers were keeping an eye on the public areas of the station. “See this guy? Follow him. Keep a cam on him at all times and we’ll take the feed in our HUDs. Now lock down the departure gates and seal off sections A-nine through A-fifteen. Emergency escape routes, too. I want that part of the station watertight.”

  “Airtight,” said one of the guards. He ran a practiced eye over the crowds milling around on his screens. “With that number of bodies moving about—safest thing is to run a routine fire evacuation. Bring down the internal bulkheads. It’s triggered a dozen times a week by vessel emissions anyway. Way too sensitive. Thinks everything is a fire or a fuel leak.”

  “Whatever it takes.”

  “Who is this guy, anyway?”

  “Borik Yelgo. A Jedi Knight.”

  “Stang—are we going to have any station left when you lot are done fighting?”

  “We promise not to breach the hull,” Niner said. “But it’s going to mean getting the civvies out of the way first without alerting him.”

  Those weren’t their orders—not the ones from Palpatine’s command, anyway. Once you let Jedi know they could hide behind civilians, that you wouldn’t risk collateral damage, they’d exploit it. Darman knew that Palps was right for once. But Niner had always been uneasy about that kind of thing.

  All the civvies had to do was turn in Jedi and stand clear of them when ordered to do so.

  And when this job’s done, I’m going to find a quiet corner before we head back to base, and call Kyrimorut.

  Somehow, being light-years from Imperial City made that call feel safer. Darman veered between nerves and excitement as he planned what he was going to say and who he’d talk to. It pushed the capture of the Jedi into an insignificant second place.

  “Okay, if we cut through the service passages, we’ll end up the other side of alpha-fifteen,” Niner said. “Then we can move back through the sections as they shut the bulkhead behind us.”