Ordo wasn’t used to being told he wasn’t smart enough to understand. He wasn’t so much offended as shocked. “So what troop strengths are we talking about? What targets?”
“Enough to occupy thousands of worlds.”
“Separatist worlds?” Ordo was thinking hard. If Palpatine wasn’t planning a massive assault on the Seps, which worlds would he be targeting? Ordo decided to look for some economic angle when the Gurlanin left. “I know this war has been engineered carefully for some other ends, and many wars are, but what does he want out of it? Which worlds?”
“Lots of worlds. That’s all you need to know. I think I know what your plans are, more or less, and so I advise you to put them into effect sooner rather than later. Agent Wennen will be the next Treasury employee who vanishes into RDS cells, and then it’s only a matter of time before Palpatine hunts you all down. Go now.”
“You know about Jilka, then,” Besany said.
“Of course I do,” said Valaqil. “That’s how we bought you time.”
Ordo got there a moment before Besany did. “You set her up, then?” He put his arm out instinctively to block Besany’s line of fire before she did something rash, but he also registered the word we. “That wasn’t very helpful, actually. She’s a little too close to us for comfort.”
The meaning had now sunk in with Besany. She was white-faced with anger. “You—you—” She didn’t seem to have a term of abuse for a predator. “I trusted you! You’ve been prowling around my office? How could you do that? Why Jilka?”
“Why anybody?” said Valaqil. “Why us? She ran record searches on that bogus company you were looking for, and that was recorded on the system, and so it was a short step for us to print flimsi copies of information that pointed to an interest in Centax Two.”
“She’s innocent. Do you know what they’re probably doing to her now?”
“Would you rather they were doing it to you?” Valaqil turned in an elegant circle as if he was going to settle down, but he was simply heading for the ventilation grille. He sat down on his haunches, gazing at the plate as if some prey might emerge from it. “You should have been more discreet about your affair with the gallant captain here. It’s a very short step to connect you with excessive curiosity about Centax.”
Besany turned to Ordo. “You said there was nothing on file about me.”
“He was right, there isn’t,” said Valaqil, “but there are too many beings now who have come into contact with Skirata’s gang, and there comes a time when you can no longer operate covertly because too many know you, and you have crossed too many. That time is very close. You’d better hope that your enemies spend more time with Jilka before they realize she’s useless to them and start looking again.”
The Gurlanin blinked a couple of times as if waiting for thanks or at least a reaction. He hadn’t been wrong the last time; Ordo, cautious as he was, believed Valaqil now. The creature became a slick of black liquid before flowing back through the ventilation plate, and then vanished forever.
Laseema’s apartment,
Coruscant,
Cuy’val Dar emergency planning session
“You can’t slot her,” Skirata said, putting his comlink back in his pocket. “That was Ordo. The Gurlanin framed the woman to throw RDS off the scent.”
“Then that’s her very bad luck.” Vau was getting annoyed. Mird whined at his feet, gazing up at him, always sensitive to its master’s moods. “This isn’t like rescuing one of our own. Get Jilka out alive, and we have to find somewhere to stash her. She won’t just say, ‘Thanks for saving me, I’ll just forget all that happened, and vanish of my own accord.’ She’ll be a liability for as long as she lives.”
“Then we hide her,” Tay’haai said. “I’ll find some way of getting her off the planet if you can’t.”
“If she’s been framed and has nothing to reveal,” Vau said, “then the urgency to shut her up recedes somewhat, except for the fact that she knows Besany’s boyfriend is called Ordo. Do I have to draw you a picture, Kal?”
“And we’ve already got two retrievals to do.” Gilamar sounded resigned, and that worried Skirata. He didn’t usually agree with Vau even about the time of day. “All the intel says we don’t have much time left, and we just can’t wander around collecting waifs and strays forever.”
“Is this to spare Besany’s conscience?” Vau asked. “Because if it is, let me remind you that it’s one more problem caused by sentimental attachment, all because your lads don’t think before they drop their plates for the first girl who smiles at them.”
“You chakaar.” Skirata tolerated no slight against his boys or their womenfolk. “Besany’s earned the right to be one of us. And there’s the small matter of this being the right thing to do.”
Vau raised an eyebrow. “I hate it when you get moral.”
“This whole operation is about being moral. We’re in it to save those who’ve been screwed over by the Republic.” And we were getting on so well. But Vau was right. If they thought Jilka was going to bring down the weight of the Chancellor’s personal police on Besany—and that would mean on them all—then she had to be silenced, kindly or unkindly. He’d been ready to do it himself until he faced up to the effect it would have on Besany, and so on Ordo. It was also hard to forget the look on Niner’s face when he worked out what Skirata was considering. “We get her out. We get Uthan out. And we get my daughter out.”
“Jilka may already have given up Ordo and Besany without even knowing she’s done any damage. Let’s just grab Uthan and bang out now.”
Vau always had a point. Omega and Etain were still on Coruscant, Besany was on her way to the safe house—Laseema’s apartment—and Jusik was due to land at any time with the two ARCs, even if he might get tied up keeping an eye on Fi. They had their trillion-credit haul, and more cloning data than even Arkanian Micro could dream of. Now was a good time to go. Jilka could tell RDS everything, but it would be too late to stop them getting away.
Somehow, though, Skirata had to try for Jilka. He hated himself for not automatically putting Ruu at the top of the list.
“We spring Jilka,” Skirata said. “And we get her to Mandalore.”
“Oh, and you think she’ll be grateful to be stuck at the shebs end of the Rim for the rest of her life?” Vau said. “Now I know why Omega make a habit of abducting prisoners and not slotting them like they should.”
“Walon, let’s at least try. We’re not savages.”
“Exactly, we’re soldiers, Kal. And we’ve forgotten this is a war.”
The four Cuy’val Dar stood pondering the holoschematic of the Republic security building and the service delivery schedules. They had a portfolio of bogus ID chips and could walk in with the catering, the sanitation crew, or even the droid that maintained the office machinery. It was just a case of finding the fastest route, and locating Jilka. It wasn’t a huge prison. There were just twenty cells.
The doors opened; Ordo ushered Besany inside. She was clutching a large holdall, and her face was grim. The conversation about Jilka’s fate stopped abruptly.
“Bes’ika can’t go back to her apartment,” Ordo said. “No telling who’ll show up next.”
Skirata’s choices had narrowed to one. “We’re just discussing how to extract Jilka.”
Vau raised one eyebrow. The others said nothing.
“We can’t extract her from the RDS facility by force, because it’ll get all kinds of unfortunate attention too early in the game.” Ordo took out his datapad. “We get them to take her out of the cell, and snatch her in transit.”
“You’ve got a plan,” Gilamar said.
“Of course. I’ve got access to Republic Intel codes. If we time this right, then I simply generate a bogus request for a rendition to the Rep Intel detention facilities. Then we hit the transport en route.”
Skirata gestured at Vau. “Yes, but Brain of Galactic City here has already told Zey we’re going to extract her.”
??
?Double-bluff,” Vau said. “When he hears it happened, he won’t wonder if we’re involved for some dubious reason and start digging. He thinks I’m spying on you anyway. He’ll nod and say, ‘Oh, that’s Vau doing the decent thing for me, and thwarting those Intel and RDS jokers.’ Won’t he?”
Skirata just raked his fingers through his hair. “Well, what’s done’s done, and now we just have to clean up as best we can.”
“Okay, let’s triple-bluff,” Ordo said. “Sergeant Vau, you and I will intercept the transport.”
“If they buy the request.”
“Get changed. We’ll do it within the hour. Try to look Separatist.”
Vau’s face didn’t move a muscle. “I’ll put on my best Jabiimi accent.”
Besany looked numb now. She seemed to be acclimatizing to a permanent high level of insane risk. Given another month, Skirata thought, she’d be as bad as the rest of them.
“Come on, daughter,” he said, taking the bag from her hands with as reassuring a smile as he could manage. “Let’s get you settled in. Is this everything?”
She nodded. “Yes. I can’t think what to do with the apartment at the moment—”
“Leave things as they are,” he said. “If you vanish completely, then it just draws attention. Might be a good idea if you resigned from your job, though.”
That seemed to hurt. A little frown creased the corners of her eyes for a fleeting moment. “I’ll cite personal problems with my partner,” she said, taking it like a trouper. “They don’t tend to want to pry into domestic stuff, and it’s been noticed that I’m not exactly the woman I was.”
Skirata wasn’t sure how to take that. When Besany opened her bag and laid the contents on the cabinet in the room kept for Ordo, it told Skirata what really mattered to her. Her subconscious had told her what she couldn’t live without, and it wasn’t trinkets and comforts she’d crammed into the holdall with a few changes of clothes, but images, information, and her blaster.
She set the holoimage projector on the side table.
“It pays to travel light,” Skirata said.
“Well, I understand Mandalorians a great deal better after today.” She opened the projector and activated it. “If you can’t carry it, it’s a burden, and if it can be easily replaced, it’s not worth regret.”
“You married a Mandalorian. What do you think that makes you?”
At least it made her laugh, and that lit up her face. “I’ve got to wear armor, haven’t I?”
“Nothing but top-grade beskar, too. Only the very best for my girls.”
Some cultures preserved images on sheets of flimsi, static and silent. Skirata once thought that was a poor substitute for the walking, talking, three-dimensional holoimages, but he found them easier to deal with on the bad days. A static picture was firmly anchored in the past, making the subject untouchable, announcing clearly that those days, those moments, were long gone. But a holoimage brought a special kind of pain; it was the presence of people as they really had been, as if they would answer if spoken to or respond to a touch. It was a cruel illusion. Static two-dimensional images reminded you clearly that it was all over. Holoimages just dragged the untouchable past into the present and tormented you with it.
“Want to see my father?” she asked. “My first one?”
“I’m honored to be the second,” Skirata said. “Yes, I’d love to see your dad.”
Her father, Norlin Wennen, lived again in the moving holoimage for a few moments. “Are you coming, Bes?” The figure smiled and beckoned, as if he had something wonderful he wanted to show her. “You’ve never seen anything like this, I’ll bet…”
Besany smiled, distracted. “It was the jewel-caves of Birsingrial, and we were on vacation,” she said to Skirata. “I was ten, I think.”
And she could answer her father a hundred times, but he’d never hear, never reply. She watched her ten-year-old self run after him, giggling with excitement as she vanished into the shafts of ruby and emerald light.
“I do that, too,” Skirata said softly.
“That was our last trip together before my mother left.”
“Did she have a reason?”
“Yes, but I can’t recall his name.”
Skirata didn’t comment. “Want to see mine?” He handed her the small projector he kept in his belt at all times and flicked the controls. A grid of small images hovered in the air for her to select and enlarge. He pointed out detail. “The guy in green armor—Jusik’s armor—is my adopted father, Munin. And here’s all my vode from previous missions. My kids—all of them, clone and nonclone—and Kamino. Walon recorded a lot of this. He reckoned I’d need evidence for the defense if I ever filleted another Kaminoan.” He gestured at the images of himself surrounded by a group of six grim-faced identical little boys while he stripped down a large blaster rifle on a table in front of them. “I only ever had to show them once. And here’s some of my commandos in training… yeah, that’s Theta, Dar’s first squad. Poor little shabuire—all dead now, bar him.”
“Why does Ordo always sleep with the covers over his head?” Besany asked.
Skirata stared in slight defocus at the holoimages, then put the projector on the cabinet. “Live ordnance tests. To see how little kids coped with the noise and shock. He couldn’t stand the night storms on Kamino after that, and he always buried his head under the covers. Funny, none of his brothers did.”
She gave him a long look that he couldn’t quite read, and for a moment he wondered if she thought he was reminding her that her own woes were nothing compared with those that Ordo and his brothers endured. Then again, she might just have been trying to imagine the closed world of Kamino, a small group of marginal Mandalorians cooped up together for years whether they liked one another or not, re-creating a small but distorted outpost of their society a long way from home, just to stay sane.
Who saved who? Who needed the teaching of the Mandalorian ethic more—our boys, or us?
Besany’s fine-boned face broke into a sad smile again. “Don’t let him get himself killed.”
“He’s Ordo,” Skirata said. “He decided he was never going to let that happen to him when he was two years old.”
Yes, the Nulls—and all his clones—had come a long way. And they had a lot farther still to go.
Sector L-32,
Galactic City,
an hour later
Ordo had to hand it to Vau: he looked utterly convincing.
With a ferociously short haircut, as near to shaven as he could get without a shine on his scalp, and a lightly tinted mini HUD visor of the kind favored by the security community, he looked like the real deal. The severe black business tunic set it all off. It said do not mess with me. He looked like a Republic enforcer of the most dreaded kind, quiet and implacable.
“Fortunately, my hair grows back fast.” Vau sat in the passenger seat of the unmarked black official speeder and passed his palm discreetly across the top of his scalp as if feeling naked. “This is not my style.”
The speeder wasn’t actually one they’d liberated from the GAR command pool, but Enacca’s contacts seemed to be able to summon up a facsimile of anything on a drive and repulsors.
Ordo contented himself with the ubiquitous helmet and visor common to most enforcement and rescue agencies across the planet. Mereel might have enjoyed disguising himself by altering his hair and eye color, but Ordo wanted to keep it simple.
He checked his chrono. Five minutes until the shift changeover at both the Rep Intel facility and the RDS; it would then be another eight hours until anyone checked the custody sheets again at either end. But Ordo and Vau wouldn’t be waiting that long.
“I hope Mird is okay,” Vau said, staring out of the tinted viewscreen at the flicker of passing vessels zipping by in the skylane at the end of the alley.
“Is a strill safe around a small child?”
“Being hermaphroditic, all strills have a maternal streak, Ordo. Hence the endless nest building whe
n it sees the baby.”
“If it takes my clothing to make nests one more time, I shall be very displeased.”
Vau snorted. “Come on. It’s charming.”
Ordo could recall the time he was terrified of Mird and pulled a blaster on it; the animal seemed bigger than him at that age, a savage thing. Now it had become a comrade in this war. It even played with babies. All things were possible.
The chrono showed 1400.
“Okay, let’s do it,” he said, opening his comlink. “Wad’e, are you ready for nerf herding?”
Tay’haai grunted. “I hurt my neck last time I did this. Let’s try to avoid collisions.”
Vau opened his comlink, transmitting a false origin code to appear on the RDS system as Republic Intel. Ordo readied the bogus authority codes, slicing into the Intel system to generate a handover request from a genuine Intel officer who happened to be on a lunch break. It was just a matter of looking down a list of terminals grouped by the appropriate department, and finding those machines that were on standby. It would take hours to show up as an anomaly.
“RDS Custody Desk, please…” Vau had a rich, resonant, upper-class voice that he could polish or roughen at will. It oozed authority. He was hard to disbelieve. “Hello… yes, this is Republic Intelligence… We’re requesting a prisoner transfer. We require a female human, Zan Zentis, initial J… Would you like me to spell that? No? Very well. Apologies for the short notice, but it’s to minimize the risk of a rescue attempt. We have reason to believe that her associates might attempt to extract her. Now, we can collect her, or you can transfer her to our secure unit, but we’d like this done immediately for the reasons I’ve given.”
Vau stared ahead as if in a trance, listening. Ordo both dreaded these gambles and relished the adrenaline rush of taking them. If the RDS bought the story and opted to ship her over, then it would be a physical intervention. If they were lazy, and said to come and get her, it would be a tidy taxi job.
“Yes, I do have authorization… stand by… transmitting now.”