Fine. It can’t come too soon.
She felt guilt for all the men she could never help—men like Corr, who had blossomed at the first opportunity to explore a wider life—but she had to save those she could. The underground escape route beckoned; she would be good at making that work, using her Force skills for something tangible. And maybe she’d influenced Zey into pursuing a more humane approach to the army.
Stop bargaining with yourself.
The chrono ate away at the remaining hours. Kad was in a giving mood today and kept handing her one of his toys, a small fluffy four-legged thing that was supposed to be a nerf. She got ready to leave, dreading the moment Laseema returned because it meant that her time was up. But it wasn’t Laseema who walked through the doors next. It was Enacca, the Wookiee.
Kad was transfixed. He’d never seen a Wookiee before. Etain lifted him up so Enacca could hold him, and to his credit he didn’t burst into tears. He tugged at her fur as if he couldn’t believe she was real.
Enacca made a purring noise, and Kad squealed with delight.
“What brings you here, Enacca?” Etain asked. “Has Kal trashed more vehicles and left you to round up the wrecks?”
Enacca yowled that she was going back to Kashyyyk to help drive out the Separatists who were despoiling her homeworld.
“I’m headed there, too,” Etain said. She didn’t believe in coincidences. “What made up your mind?”
Enacca jerked her head in silence, a Wookiee shrug. Etain could guess. Eventually Skirata arrived with Laseema, wearing his it’s-nothing-to-do-with-me expression. Etain just raised an eyebrow.
“You need all the Wookiees you can get,” he said.
Etain couldn’t bring herself to berate him for leaning on Enacca to play minder to her. The Wookiee probably did want to do her bit for her homeworld. It was good to know he was looking out for them all. It felt a lot better than being the object of his anger.
“You look after yourself, at’ika,” he said. “And that’s an order.”
“I will, Kal’buir.”
He left her to take her leave of Darman and Kad, and she walked away from the apartment clutching her son’s nerf, feeling that it didn’t look out of place at all with a concussion rifle and two lightsabers.
Kragget restaurant,
lower levels, Coruscant,
later that day
“Forgiveness is a wonderful thing, Kal.” Gilamar ignored every health warning that his former profession had issued, and tucked into a plate of assorted fried meats and werris eggs, moistened with extra melted roba fat that soaked into a breadroot patty. He’d been away for a few weeks and seemed to want to make up for lost time. “All that aggravation about the baby’s been forgotten. If only the rest of the galaxy could agree to shake hands and move on.”
Skirata was treading water now, waiting for a window for the next stage of the withdrawal. At least Jilka had shut up pretty fast. He hadn’t told Besany how close he’d come to slotting her, and Besany hadn’t yet told her how she’d come to be in the frame for something she hadn’t done. He just hoped Besany wouldn’t give in too soon to her honest urges and confess all. It wouldn’t be pretty.
Jilka was a fugitive now, anyway, whether she liked it or not. It had a remarkably sobering effect on anyone.
“Guess who’s joining us for refreshments upstairs,” Skirata said.
“Palps?”
“No, he had another engagement. Someone we haven’t seen for a few years.”
Gilamar contemplated the translucent yellow glaze of egg yolk on the white patty. “If it’s Dred Priest, let me get my special rusty scalpel first.”
“Nothing like that. Come on, eat up. Jaing’s dropping in with a handy contact, too. Plans to make, work to do, Mij’ika.”
Skirata had never quite worked out how Alpha-02 had managed to escape from Tipoca before the war, but he was content that he had. Gilamar bolted down his meal and followed Skirata back to Laseema’s apartment. It was going to be a big shock for him.
“Surprise!” said Skirata, opening the doors.
Three clones sat around the table with Besany and Laseema, playing sabacc: Fi, Sull, and Spar.
“Look at Fi, good as new.” Skirata wondered if Fi was ready to return to even easy duties yet, but morale and feeling part of a squad again would do him more good than half the fancy medics in Coruscant. “Mij, remember that lad? It’s—”
Gilamar walked up to Spar and slapped him on the back. Spar—not usually the most cheerful of men—stared at him for a moment, and then his face split into a knowing grin.
“How you doing, Spar?” Gilamar started laughing. “How’s the headaches?”
“Ooh, it’s me back, Doc, I can’t move… and the voices… the voices!”
Both men burst into peals of laughter and embraced each other. “You chakaar. You made my day, you know that?” said Gilamar. “So you’ve done all right for yourself. Busy?”
“Oh, bit of this, bit of that. I even turned down a job. Mand’alor or something.”
“You don’t want to do all that Mandaloring stuff, ad’ika. Look what happened to the last two. Terrible promotion prospects.”
Skirata heard every cough and spit in Tipoca City, every scam and scandal in the claustrophobic Cuy’val Dar community, but Gilamar had a few cards he kept close to his chest. It was only now that Skirata saw Spar and the medic laughing that he put two and two together, and wondered why he hadn’t ever managed to make it add up to four.
“So you’re the one who got Spar off Kamino,” he said. Gilamar bowed theatrically, armor creaking. “You saved your favorite sons, I saved mine.”
“You never told me.”
“You never told me what Jaing was doing to the banking system…”
“Good for you, Mij’ika.” Skirata meant it. “But you can tell me now, can’t you?”
“Jango came and went as he pleased, even if we were stranded. You got your supplies of tihaar and uj cake, didn’t you? There were outbound parcels, too, if you know what I mean. Jango knew when to turn a blind eye to the cargo in Slave’s hold. He owed me one.”
Skirata wanted to ask what reciprocal deal had taken place, but it could wait until they were both well away from Coruscant and a bottle or two of tihaar had been consumed.
“So you’re going to join the team, Spar?” Gilamar asked.
Spar reverted to his usual unsmiling self. “I don’t want pay. I want a chance at that cure when you lot find it. I want to live as long as the next man.”
Skirata cut in. “Son, no clone ever has to ask for what’s his by right. I keep telling you that. You don’t have to bargain for it. You sure you want in on this mission? You’re not obliged.”
Spar seemed taken aback. “No, I am obliged. And Sull. Him, too.”
Sull nodded. “I’m in.”
“I’ll take all the aberrants I can get,” Skirata said. “Good lads.”
The Kaminoans were proud of their low rate of aberrance. They had a behavioral norm for clones, and any clone who didn’t fit it—any clone who didn’t have the sense or self-control to keep his opinions to himself—was classed as deviant, and reconditioned. They were full of euphemisms, the Kaminoans; it was the language of purity and cleansing. But it was destruction—of will, of hope, and even of life. Clones who survived reconditioning were a psychological mess, Skirata knew, but they met the Kaminoans’ standards of not talking back, and that was all they wanted.
Skirata had never worked out if the aiwha-bait genuinely believed that clones who didn’t toe the line were defective, or if they were just cynically callous, the handful of prison camp guards holding down millions simply by terror, wielding the fear of who would disappear next and never return, making terrible examples of a few to deter the rest.
The prison camp analogy bothered him more now in his quiet moments.
We had enough clone troops and arms on Kamino to revolt and wipe out every Kaminoan. Hard men. Best troops the galaxy’s ever seen. And yet we stuc
k to the rules, pretty much. If I’d been half a man, I’d have organized them, led them, overthrown the regime. Force knows I had the years to do it, but I didn’t.
Nobody did. Seventy-five out of the hundred Cuy’val Dar were Mandalorians, experienced special forces troops, more than enough to take down Kamino and turn it into a wasteland. From the inside? A stroll. Why didn’t they rise up? Kamino swallowed them, and Skirata now hated himself for being swallowed. They got used to the prison rules a slice at a time, still Mando, still freethinking, but as prey to institutionalization as anyone. They slid into making a difference on the margins, looking after their boys, and never saw the bigger picture or the doors they could simply kick open.
Never again. Never.
“Okay,” Skirata said. “I need a hand springing a couple of people. One’s a scientist called Uthan. She might be your passport to a ripe old age. The other’s my daughter, who’s banged up in a POW camp for getting caught in Sep colors.”
“Your real daughter?” Fi asked.
“What does that make you, my unreal son? My biological daughter, yes.”
Fi didn’t ask awkward questions, but Skirata could see them forming in his eyes already. “I go where sent, Kal’buir.”
They sat down to resume the sabacc game in hushed tones so that they didn’t wake Kad. Skirata had never been much of a player, more a drinking observer at the table, and Fi seemed much more interested in talking to Besany. He hadn’t seen her—or at least he couldn’t recall seeing her—since he’d been in various stages of coma, and now that he was back on Coruscant, he kept patting her hand, as if he really wanted to give her a big hug but was afraid to. Skirata found it unbearably touching. He hadn’t stopped thanking her since the day he landed.
“You saved my life,” Fi told her. “You saved me.”
Besany helped him play his hand. Skirata hadn’t realized that she was pretty sharp at cards. “Fi, you were just too good to throw away,” she said at last, eliciting a big grin. “I believe in never wasting a good man.”
The holoplans of the detention center on Pols Anaxes were projected onto the wall while they chatted and speculated on the quickest way in and out. The best options were always those that required no shooting and heroics, just a cool head. And Enacca wasn’t around to sweep up the transport situation—it now fell to Tay’haai. They were still debating the merits of bogus ID—slipping into predictable methods of entry made them vulnerable—versus infiltration via the drainage system when Jaing arrived with a guest.
Sull looked up. “Well, I never. You again.”
The woman was short, graying, and swamped by her pilot’s overalls. She looked like Skirata felt: wrung out and despairing of the galaxy, but still ready to give it a kick where it hurt most. She met his gaze. He saw a kindred spirit in her eyes that he could do business with.
“Sull, you bad boy,” she said, grabbing the ARC in a playful headlock. “I bust my butt getting you out of the Republic’s clutches, and you come straight back. Did they get you from the dumb box of clones, or what?”
Sull actually laughed, submitting to the mock attack. That told Skirata a lot.
“This is Ny Vollen,” Jaing said. “One of A’den’s buddies. And when she’s not helping us with removals, she flies freight. Ny, this is Kal Skirata. My father. Sergeant Skirata.”
“Us short folk got to stick together.” She studied Skirata unself-consciously and held out her hand for shaking. “Want to look at my schedule? I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
“Is it worth seeing?” Skirata asked, feeling unaccountably bashful.
“It’ll hold your interest, Mando boy. Kuat’s nice this time of year.” Ny held out her datapad. “Can’t seem to stay away from the place.”
“I was born on Kuat.” Skirata was no longer in control of this conversation, and not even of his own mouth. Why did I ever volunteer that information? Ny Vollen unsettled him. “My, you do visit the old place a lot.”
Skirata didn’t have Ordo’s ability to do a quick visual scan of a document and analyze it immediately, but he knew a lot of components in transit when he saw them. It was enough for thousands of vessels.
“Shipyards are extra-busy, then,” he said.
“Working-up busy.” Ny seemed to be testing him. She probably had a good idea that he wasn’t exactly the Chancellor’s trusted adviser on procurement issues. “This is all replacement parts for battleships, not small stuff, so they’re either delivering a lot of combat-ready hulls or anticipating a big need for replacement parts all at once.”
“You ever worked in shipbuilding?”
“No, but I know how to hang around in cantinas waiting for my cargo, listening to folks who do.”
“And?”
“Lots of new vessels and transports rolling out now—hundreds a week—and some big panic to be ready in a few weeks’ time.”
Skirata looked at Jaing for confirmation. The Null had access to the KDY system. He nodded.
“I’m grateful,” Skirata said. He pulled a ten-thousand-credit chip from his belt and put it on the table beside her. Placing it in her hand seemed an act of charity, like giving a child spending money. Ny looked at the chip, then tossed it back in his lap.
“I’ve been getting treble pay and on-time bonuses, thanks. I’m just trading information. It’s tax-free.”
“So what do you want from us, Ny?”
“A’den’s got that sorted. My old man’s ship was lost a couple of years ago, and I know he isn’t going to be alive, but I want to know the how and the where. That’s all.”
That shut Skirata up. “Sorry to hear that.”
“I’ll let you know when I find out more, okay?”
“We’re grateful, Ny, we really are.”
“And you better hang on to those creds, Mando boy. You look in need of it.”
“I’m a trillionaire,” Skirata said, deadpan.
“If you’re worth that much, you can afford some better armor. Look at the state of you. All scrapes.”
“We Mando boys like to show we’ve been in action. Anyway, this is top-grade beskar—full density, two percent ciridium, no fancy lamination or carbon-alloy.”
“Does all that mean it’s heavy?”
“Yeah. Very heavy. Heavy is best.”
“Explains why you’re so short, then.”
He watched her go, dumbfounded.
Jaing gave him a prod in the shoulder. “I think she likes you.”
“I think she’s just trying to joke her way out of being in limbo about her husband,” Skirata said, and found himself hoping Jaing was right, then scolding himself because he didn’t have time for that foolishness. “Okay, date set. We bang out on…” He calculated. “One thousand and ninety days ABG.”
“Copy that,” Sull said, mimicking the regular troopers. He had a sense of humor after all. He was going to need it.
Sep-controlled area near Kachirho,
Kashyyyk,
one month later, 1,070 days after Geonosis
“You sure you saw Grievous leave?”
Scorch aimed an anti-armor round at the wall of battle droids, ducking as dagger-like chunks of tree and fizzing metal shrapnel hammered on his armor. “You saw, Fixer, so what else do you think that was?”
“Why, though? Is it a retreat?”
Blasterfire poured down on them from the Trandoshan positions.
Every time Scorch raised his head, he was looking at another wave of Trandos and battle droids. “Does this look like a retreat to you?”
Scorch couldn’t have given a mott’s hairy backside about the bigger picture at that moment. It was the first time he thought they might have been in real danger of getting overrun and slaughtered. The Sep presence was putting up a bigger fight than he’d expected.
“Incoming!” Boss smacked his head down again, and his field of vision was full of the crawling debris on the floor. Scorch could hear the drives of a ship. When he knelt up to look again, a supply vessel was
dropping down onto the landing pad in the clearing. Trandos rushed to unload it; Sev popped up from the cover of a pile of SB droids and began hosing the pad with blasterfire.
“Can you put an anti-armor round or two in there, Boss?”
“Just getting the range now…”
Boss fired once, twice, three times. It was hard to see how accurate his shot was, just a split-second wake of vapor and turbulent hot air, and then everything was one vast sheet of burning gold with a white-hot heart. The explosion shook the ground under Scorch’s knees. The blinding light gave way instantly to roiling black smoke, and as the wind parted it Scorch saw nothing left on the pad except burning, twisted wreckage.
“I think he was hauling detonite,” Sev said. “I wish they all blew like that.”
“We’ve got to stop them moving around this kriffing forest so easily.” Boss looked around, waiting for the next wave of droids, then crouched down in the lee of the barricade, getting his breath. “Okay, the Wookiees can keep picking ’em off, but we need a bigger hydrospanner to sling in their works or this is going to be a running battle for the next five years.” He clicked his helmet comlink. “General, can we shortcut this?”
Etain took a few seconds to respond. Scorch could hear the blasterfire in the background, and the roars and barks of furious Wookiees. “How hard do you want that shortcut to be?”
“We’ll take a ten, ma’am. We’re feeling lucky.”
“Enacca says if you can take the bridge at Kachirho, or sever it, you’ll cut off their supply line completely.” Etain paused as if listening to a running commentary. “It’ll cut ours off, too, but Wookiees can rebuild smaller bridges around it in days. Seps can’t.”
“I like the odds,” Boss said. “Let’s go, Delta.”
Etain’s voice was breaking up on the link. “And we’ve got Geonosians swarming everywhere here—you’ll need to be way up in the trees to take Kachirho.”
“Bugs!” Sev said cheerfully. “Save a few for me, ma’am. I love their pretty wings, especially when I shoot them off.”
Boss reoriented their HUD positioning, and the squad worked its way through the forest, too pumped on adrenaline to worry about what predators might be waiting. Then a hairy arm waved from overhanging branches: Wookiees. They were showing them a route higher up into the trees, a fast track to Kachirho. Scorch shot a rappel line into the branches and winched himself up, then ran up a section of tree trunk that made him feel Jawa-sized to emerge in a tree-house village on a huge mat of branches and vines. It took him a second to spot the Wookiees; he saw the Trandos first. The Wookiees were emptying bowcasters at them with apparently slow, leisurely, but lethal accuracy, seeming oblivious to the incoming Trando fire.