“GAR regulation five-six-one-one, subsection A—an officer may invite guests into the wardroom,” Ordo said. “And you’ll apologize to Sergeant Skirata right now.”
“I will do no such thing. I’ll have you court-martialed.”
Ordo answered to nobody but Skirata. This little gutworm had to apologize. It was a matter of honor, and not just his. “Really? Court-martial this.” He brought his head down sharply in a well-practiced head-butt and the crack of bone—not his—split the wardroom air. The ensign fell backward with a shocked oof sound, hands cupped to his nose. There was plenty of blood.
“I’m sticking you on a charge,” Ordo said calmly, picking up a pristine white napkin to wipe his forehead. Without a helmet, it always hurt more than he expected. “Insubordination. What’s your name?”
The ensign was stunned, in more ways than one. “Lu… Luszgoti.”
“And now, Ensign Luszgoti, you’ll say the magic words.” He grabbed the kid’s collar, hauled him upright, and stood him in front of Kal’buir. “Apologize to Sergeant Skirata.”
The ensign glanced around, maybe calculating his chances of dropping Ordo, maybe looking to more senior officers to back him up. Nobody else moved. Ordo tightened his grip.
“I apologize,” the ensign said at last. “Sergeant.”
Skirata raised his glass. “Apology accepted, son. Now usen’ye before my boys really lose their tempers.”
Ensign Luszgoti left to a polite ripple of applause from one corner of the wardroom. He obviously wasn’t popular. A steward droid trundled up to the table with a jug of ale that Skirata hadn’t ordered.
“Most entertaining, Captain.” A commander sitting at a nearby table nodded, indicating the drinks were on him. “How I’ve longed to do that.”
The ensign would think twice about treating another clone like dirt. But so would the more polite officers here. Violence had its place in education.
“K’oyacyi,” said Skirata. “Cheers.”
It was a telling phrase, k’oyacyi; it was a command that meant “stay alive.” And so it was a toast, or an exhortation to hang in there, or even to come home safely. Staying alive and making the most of each day’s living underpinned much of the Mandalorian language.
“K’oyacyi,” A’den said. “Oya manda.”
Ordo, never fond of alcohol, stared into his glass and wondered what the Republic’s armed forces would be like if they had to recruit wholly from nonclones. Whoever had ordered the clone army had excellent foresight.
But, as Fi had once said, they might have set up the whole war anyway, not that a carefully planned war looking for an excuse to start was anything remotely new in the galaxy.
It was still important to find out exactly who could plan so far ahead, and so well.
Hangar deck, Redeemer,
two hours later
Skirata found a quiet corner of the hangar deck as he waited for the transport, staring at the comlink in his hand for a long time before keying in Tor’s code.
It had taken him three days to work out what to say. He thought he’d comm his estranged son straight back and demand to know what had happened to his daughter, buoyed up on a wave of anxiety, but there was too much water under the bridge, and the boy was a stranger.
Boy.
Tor was thirty-nine now. Maybe he even had grandchildren. That was possible, if he’d been Mandalorian and married very young as Mando’ade did; but his mother wouldn’t have allowed that. Ilippi thought the beskar’gam was dashing when she married Skirata, but his long absences on deployment started to wear on her with three small kids to care for, and then she hit the big cultural wall—Tor was coming up on eight years old, and Skirata wanted to do as all Mando fathers did, to take his son to train and fight alongside him for five years.
Skirata could picture Ilippi now, five-year-old Ruusaan and six-year-old Ijaat clinging to her legs, crying, while she yelled that no baby boy of hers was going to war. From that argument—and she shouldn’t have yelled like that, not in front of the kids—their marriage went rapidly downhill. The next time he came home on leave, the kids were with her parents on Corellia, and she told him she wanted a divorce.
It took thirty seconds, Mando-style—a short oath to wed, and a shorter one to part. Skirata handed her all his earnings and left for another war.
Every credit. Every credit I didn’t absolutely need to survive, until the day I left for Kamino. Then I was dead and gone.
He waited for Tor to answer with comlink set on audio-only. He had no idea what to call him. Son? He called most younger men “son” by default. This time it wasn’t a reflex.
“Skirata here,” said a voice. For some reason he expected Tor to have rejected his name, and it shocked him into brief silence to hear it. “Hello?”
“It’s me… Kal Skirata.”
“I… I didn’t think you’d call back.”
Skirata plunged in as he would with Zey, and bit back the urge to ask every detail of their lives. They’d decided not to be his sons, and begging for crumbs would only make things worse. Cool distance was the only way to deal with it. “You used the word missing. Is Ijaat okay?”
“He’s fine.”
“Tell me about Ruusaan.”
“We lost contact with her some months ago.”
“And now you start looking?”
“We… drifted apart.”
The adult Tor was a stranger; the Tor that Skirata was reaching out to had grown up and changed years ago. There was nothing familiar even about his voice. Skirata’s finger hovered over the hologram key, wanting to activate it to see what his boy had grown into, and finally he gave in to thirty-two years of wondering.
The hologram shimmered into life, blue and unreal. Tor was dark-haired, thickset, smartly dressed, and that was all Skirata could tell. Low-res holograms were lousy on detail.
And Tor could see him and what was immediately behind him.
“Where are you?” he asked. “Who’s—oh, wow, that’s the Republic army.”
“They’re clone troops,” Skirata said. My boys, too. “I’m on the front line.”
“You always were.”
Tor was on neutral Corellia if his comm signal was real—it would be, of course—and his only contact with the war was probably via HNE bulletins. How could he ever understand his father? “Tor, tell me what happened to Ruusaan. I need all the data you can give me.”
“Yes, we thought you’d be best placed to find her.”
“When, where, how?” How can I talk to a kid I raised as if he’s a client? “I need detail.”
“She was living on Drall, last we knew. We didn’t see her more than once a year, but when her comm code didn’t function, we got worried. Her apartment was cleared out and there was no sign of her.”
“Did you check her bank account?”
“Why?”
“Activity. Withdrawals, or a complete lack of them.”
“No. I don’t have any access. We weren’t that close.”
I would have raised you smarter, son. And we’d have been close. “What does she do for a living?”
“She drifts. Security… bartending… a bit of courier work now, she says.”
Please don’t let her be a mercenary. I wasn’t there to teach her how to stay alive. “Did you report her missing to the Corellian cops?”
“They said she was an adult free to go where she liked, and we’d have to come back with evidence of a crime before they could get involved.”
“Okay. I need her state ID number and a recent holo-image.” I’ve got her date of birth. She’s my girl. She’s still my daughter. “I’ll do the rest.”
“I know it’ll cost you, but we can pay.”
“No. Thanks.”
“You look… like you’ve had a tough time… Dad.” So now Skirata was Dad again.
That hurt. In his peripheral vision, he could see Mereel and Ordo chatting, thinking they were keeping a discreet eye on him when he knew perfectly well t
hat they were standing by to pick up the pieces. Would he take Tor and Ijaat back? Would he swap any of his clone sons for those he had some genetic investment in?
Never. Is that bad? Understandable? Noble? I still don’t know. It just… is.
“I’m doing fine,” Skirata said, struggling with the mix of remembered heartbreak and resentment that he couldn’t link to the person he was looking at now. I didn’t want to leave. I wouldn’t have left. I sent you every cred I earned. “Comm me the data and I’ll find her. It’s what I do.”
Tor seemed to be hovering on the brink of saying something. His fidgeting was visible. “I just want you to know we’re sorry. It was about Mama, that’s all. We just wanted you to be there when she was dying.”
Skirata gave up trying to handle the welter of emotions. He could see a red-and-white blur striding toward him, but he didn’t look up. “There’s no point going over it now. We did what we did, son, and for reasons that made sense to both of us at the time.”
Son. It slipped out. Ordo, helmet under one arm, moved purposefully into the range of the holovideo pickup and put his hand on Skirata’s arm. It was a real hands-off-my-father gesture.
“Buir, General Tur-Mukan needs to speak to you.” Ordo’s tone was pointed, and maybe Skirata was imagining it, but there was some emphasis on the buir. “She’s about to leave.”
It broke the spell. “Got to go, Tor,” Skirata said. “Get that data to me as soon as you can.”
“Buir?” Tor asked. “He called you father.”
So how did you introduce your estranged biological son to his adopted stepbrother? Skirata decided he wouldn’t even try. “Tor, this is one of my sons. Captain Ordo Skirata. Look, tell Ijaat—tell him not to worry and that it’s all going to be okay.”
Skirata closed the link abruptly and looked up at Ordo. The Null managed to look both faintly disapproving and guilty at the same time.
“Sorry, Kal’buir.”
“I wouldn’t have known how to end the conversation anyway, son,” Skirata said. “It’s bothering you, isn’t it?”
“Not exactly a joyous reunion.”
“I’m not even sure Ruu’s missing. They just don’t know where she is.” Skirata decided to keep an open mind until he could hack into Ruusaan’s bank account and see if it was still active. “She sounds like a restless spirit.”
“I meant,” Ordo said grimly, “that you’re distressed by your sons.”
“Are you?”
“If you want to be reconciled with them, we’ll do whatever you want to ensure it’s… trouble-free.”
Ordo had never shown the slightest sign of jealousy as a kid. Each of the Nulls was—in that curious clone way—anxious not to have more privileges than his brothers; it was a way of avoiding conflict in a closed, stifling, wholly artificial clone society in Tipoca City. But the Nulls had also been genetically altered to maximize the potential for fierce loyalty in Fett’s typical Concord Dawn genome. Their brutal infancy before Skirata rescued them had made that potential manifest itself fully, and if a Null liked you, he’d die for you. If he didn’t, it was a good idea to run for it. They had no middle path.
“They’re never going to take your place, son.” Skirata gripped his arm. “And I wanted to tell him to usen’ye, but I have to be bigger than that, because a father’s responsibility doesn’t have an expiry date. I could have tried to stay in touch better than just transferring creds.”
Ordo—very upright, thumbs hooked in his belt—tilted his head slightly. “They bled you dry and finally rejected you, and you still love them. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know, Ord’ika.” Skirata saw Etain making full speed on a collision course with them, two lightsabers swinging on her belt, and dwarfed by the huge concussion rifle slung across her back. “But if they hadn’t, I’d never have had to take Jango’s offer to train clones, and then I’d never have met you.”
Ordo’s head dropped a little. “And we’d have been euthanized, because nobody else would have thought our lives worth saving. If the tidy nature of fate is the point, I accept the argument, but that doesn’t change what happened to you.”
“Well… if you want something to shine bright, it has to be polished hard.” Skirata wondered exactly what Jango would have done if he hadn’t been there to stop Orun Wa from having the Null kids put down. Jango talked tough—was tough—but his callous attitude didn’t extend to children, however brutal it looked from the outside. “Jango might have been a self-centered chakaar, but don’t believe all that bluster about Boba being nothing more than his apprentice. He wanted a son, no doubt about it. He knew what it was to be a kid waiting to die, so I reckon he’d have given the aiwha-bait a good hard kov’nyn and sent him on his way.”
Shame you didn’t do a bit more for the other boys cloned from you, Jang’ika, but I suppose you didn’t have much pity left after all that happened to you.
Etain strode up and looked into Skirata’s face. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “And what’s a kov’nyn?”
“A head-butt,” said Ordo. “A Keldabe kiss.”
Etain wore a little frown of concentration. Skirata suspected she was memorizing every Mando’a phrase she could, the better to be a good Mando wife in due course. “Kal, the two of you are radiating trouble like a beacon. Can I help?”
“Family strife,” he said. “Your Jedi radar is pretty impressive.”
“So is the strife,” Ordo said cryptically, then squeezed Skirata’s bicep in parting. “Ret’, Kal’buir.”
Supply droids and repulsor trolleys began filling the deck, transferring pallets of food, spare parts, and fuel cells from stores to a replenishment shuttle. Redeemer was a heavily armed warehouse. Etain and Skirata were about to go their separate ways again.
“Any message for Veshok Squad?” she asked. “I’m paying a field visit.”
Skirata pulled out a packet of candied bofa fruit and handed it to her. “Tell them to remember to brush their teeth afterward.”
“You miss them.”
“Yeah.” Skirata wondered what Etain was going through being separated from her son so often. “In case you’re still wondering, I just spoke to one of my biological sons for the first time since he disowned me. It’s never easy.”
“It’s your daughter, yes?”
“She’s probably gone off on some adventure, but I’ll find her anyway, just in case.”
“I can’t work out if Ordo’s jealous or scared, but he’s very upset.”
“He’s got nothing to worry about. That boy’s my heart, and he knows it.”
“Just let me get this straight, Kal. I did the sums. You were still supporting your kids financially when they were pushing thirty. None of my business, but I think you more than did your duty by them.” Etain had an earnest little face dusted with freckles. Skirata sometimes found it hard to reconcile her durasteel will with that apparently fragile exterior. “The way you first described how they disowned you made me think they were still children, not grown men. And you didn’t walk out. You were dumped.”
“It was my rough Mando charm. Irresistible.”
“I’m saying that you’ve got nothing to feel guilty about. I’m with Ordo on this. It’s not healthy to be at their beck and call.”
There was a small place in Skirata’s mind where he knew that was true, but the rest of him felt he’d failed. Etain meant well. Like Ordo, she seemed only to want to protect him. “Now how about you?”
“I’m going to tell Darman about Kad when he comes back from Haurgab.”
“Okay.”
“And I’m going to leave the Jedi Order.”
Skirata kept his reaction to himself. She’d sense it anyway.
“Now?”
“No, but I’ll know the right time. My work’s not finished yet.”
Someone called to her. A young lieutenant—not a clone, but a random human being—stood with one boot on the rail of a small armored shuttle. “General? Flight checks complete, ma’am. Ready
when you are.”
Etain gave Skirata a wink. “I’ll make sure Veshok brush their teeth. Force be with you, Kal’buir.”
She walked away, still looking like an attachment to the conc rifle. He knew very few Jedi with a taste for the weapons of the ordinary soldier. So far, they’d all ended up in his motley gang.
Kal’buir. She calls me Kal’buir.
Skirata checked his comlink data display for files from Tor, and wondered what Ruusaan would call him when he found her.
Chapter Six
Hadde forward operating base, Haurgab,
one and a half months later
As a Jedi, I was taught to preserve life. I led these clones—no, these men—to their deaths. These were living, sentient beings. What I have been asked to do is the opposite of everything I was trained to do as a Jedi.
—Master K’Kruhk, in self-imposed exile on Ruul, explaining to Mace Windu why he chose not to continue as a general, shortly before returning to the Order to fight again
“What happened, General—did we finally find something worth pillaging from this planet?”
Etain just sighed to herself, but it wasn’t directed at Scorch. He knew that Etain was the most relaxed of generals and didn’t mind her commandos mouthing off. He shook his head at the size of the Haurgab base, which had grown to something approaching a small city itself, and wondered why the GAR presence here was getting bigger rather than smaller. This ball of rock wasn’t worth the effort. If the locals wanted to kill each other, Scorch could see no reason to get in their way. The whole planet could turn Separatist and nobody would ever notice the difference.
“Ours is not to reason why, ner vod,” Sev said. “Bred to be happy with our fate, and all that sewage.”
“Shabla osik,” Scorch said. “Remind me to punch the next dumb civvy that says that.”
Scorch doubted he would ever get within punching distance of a civilian who knew enough about them to even say it, but it was a nice fantasy for a few seconds. Boss and Sev went off in the direction of the mess, and Fixer hung around like a little black cloud of disapproval. He examined the new ordnance.