“Doesn’t time fly?” Skirata said, and leaned around the open door. “Ad’ike? In you come.”
Atin and Fi walked in. Atin didn’t get her attention—he looked like any other Mando minder she expected to have guarding her—but Fi… Fi wore Ghez Hokan’s red and gray rig, and she’d known Hokan pretty well on Qiilura.
She stared at Fi. She’d probably forgotten how tall Hokan was—not very—and she just fixed on the armor.
“So you’re still alive, Ghez,” she said.
She would have no idea how funny that sounded to a Mandalorian; it was the direct translation of the universal greeting, Su cuy’gar. Fi chuckled, and then lifted off his helmet.
Skirata smiled. “An image is worth a thousand words, they say.”
“Surprise!” Fi said. “Miss me, ma’am?”
Uthan just put both palms slowly to her cheeks and stared. It was an oddly genteel reaction, not the gesture Skirata expected from her.
“You’ve not rescued me so I can continue with my unique research into neutralizing Fett clones, have you?” she said at last. “Just a woman’s intuition.”
Fi sat down opposite her. He really was coming on in leaps and bounds; he still had that unsteadiness and hesitation, but his confidence was sky-high. It was clear that he felt like a competent soldier again.
“We’ve got names,” Fi said. “And wives, and nice clothes, and bank accounts, and everything.”
Skirata still couldn’t tell when Fi was putting on an act and when he was being distressingly literal, but it sounded good either way.
“Is this revenge?” Uthan asked.
Skirata respected someone who didn’t go to pieces when they found they’d been totally scammed. “So, do you really want to kill clones, or were you just trying to solve a puzzle, Doctor?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I can’t imagine why any intelligent being would genuinely want to kill strangers for no reason. So either you’re a sad, sick shabuir, or you’re a typical scientist who just wants to make something work without thinking too hard about the consequences.”
“Or,” said Uthan, “I could be a patriot who doesn’t… didn’t want my planet to be run by a Coruscanticentric dictatorship, and so used her skills to target its army.”
“Big word, that. Mind if I write it down?”
“Would you be giving me this moral lecture if I was just making blasters to shoot your clones?”
“Maybe.” Skirata tried to visualize what this woman loved and cared about, but it was almost as hard as working out what made a Kaminoan tick. He opted for the basics. “Do you have children, Doctor?”
“No.”
He might have been imagining it, but he was sure she’d hesitated for a split second. She might have been lying; or it could have been a touchy subject. He concentrated on her eyes, searching for pupil dilation or any flickering movement that would betray emotion.
“Did you want kids?”
Again, the slightest pause. She blinked. “Once. But then life got in the way, and the next time I thought about it, it was too late.”
Gotcha.
“Well, these clones are my sons.” Skirata’s tone was soft and conspiratorial. He knew the buttons to press now. “Not figuratively—literally. I adopted them. They’re my kids and I love them, and they were my second chance at getting a family right. I want them out of the army and I don’t give a shab if Coruscant disappears up its own trash compactor as long as nothing happens to my boys.”
“Are we doing a deal here?”
“No.”
“Ah.”
“I just want you to understand my motive, Doctor. I didn’t care for the Republic, because I’m a Mandalorian, and Mandalorians don’t like being herded. The Republic wanted to force its brand of democracy on everyone, and the Jedi strong-armed for them because they always know what’s best for grunts like us. No, I’d rather have been fighting for the Separatists, but I had sons on the front line. I still have. And there’s something you can help me do.”
“Why would I want to?”
“You haven’t heard what I want yet.” Skirata ruffled Fi’s hair, and gestured to Atin to take off his helmet. “These charming lads age twice as fast as you or I do. I want that unfortunate state of affairs to stop.”
“You want them to have a normal life span.”
“Yes.”
Uthan stared at him for a few moments and then looked out of the slit-like window. Maybe it was the unbroken whiteness outside that unsettled her. Kyrimorut seemed as far from civilization as anyone could get, a wilderness that reminded folks how utterly alone and insignificant they were in the greater scheme of the galaxy. Uthan might have coped in her fancy secret laboratory on a backwater planet like Qiilura, but she was no longer on her own turf among allies with a guaranteed flight home.
“What’s in it for me?” she asked.
“Spoken like a Mando’ad.” Skirata smiled. “What do you think?”
“Knowing your kind, I get to live.”
“Doc, no good playing the ice queen with me. I’ve lived with Kaminoans. I know ice. Just cut the osik and tell me what you want. You’re already free of the Republic, the Seps, and even our new Emperor.”
“I want to go home. I lost nearly three years of my life in that cell.”
Skirata thought she would want credits, or at least to walk away with the research—she would want that, he was sure—but her reflex was to ask to go home.
Could he ever let her go?
No, not as long as there were clone troops vulnerable to her bioweapons. She hadn’t had the chance to perfect the nanovirus before Omega Squad had seized her on Qiilura, but it was now viable as far as he knew, and the army was still full of Fett clones.
“Put it another way,” Skirata said. “What do you want to do with your life? Be rich? Famous? Academically respected? Save the galaxy from disease and pain?”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say that smacked of desperation.”
“I’m trying to work out how much data I can safely give you without turning you into a threat.”
“If you had data, you wouldn’t need me.”
Skirata knew that tone. Uthan had the same need to solve puzzles—at best amoral, at worst malevolent—as Ko Sai, Nenilin, and all the others. She coveted knowledge, and that was her power. Well, he had knowledge, too. He switched on the data screen on the table.
“See for yourself,” he said.
Uthan hesitated for a moment and stared him straight in the eye, defiant, but then curiosity got the better of her and she turned her head slowly to look at the screen. Skirata took a few casual steps back, pulling out a few strips of ruik root to chew.
“Go on, Doc. Take a look.”
She did. And she wasn’t a sabacc player; her face betrayed her. It was like watching a hungry kid let loose at a banquet. She scrolled through the screens slowly at first, then at increasing speed until she stopped, drew back, and looked at him with an expression of breathless excitement.
“You’ve got everything here.”
Skirata did his I’m-just-a-simple-mercenary shrug. “Yeah, we have.”
“How did you acquire all this?”
“We mined the lot in the last couple of years. Kamino, Arkanian Micro, GeneSculpt, TheraGene, the Republic Livestock and Agriculture Administration, Khomm Central Population Planning, Columus Institute of Health, Lur, research still in progress at the Republic’s top universities—there’s not much cloning and genome data for sentients or nonsentients left in the galaxy that we haven’t ripped off.” Skirata paused for effect before mentioning Uthan’s former employer. “Even the Gibadan Academy of Life Sciences. We just aren’t completely sure how to put it together to achieve the result we want.”
Uthan looked torn between gorging herself on the research and looking for the catch. “Nobody’s ever assembled this much in one database.”
“My boys are obsessive. And thorough.”
“And all you want is for these clones to have normal life spans.”
“Yes.”
“Really…?”
“Really.”
“Skirata, this is worth billions. You could turn this over to any one of the companies and be a very, very rich man indeed. They’d kill to see their competitors’ data.”
Billions? He had a trillion creds, and the sum grew daily. “We only stole it for one reason. Now, are you in?”
Uthan stood staring at him.
“I said, are you in, Doctor? Do we have a deal?”
“What’s the catch?”
“If you try to stiff me, I’ll personally cut your throat—unless one of my boys gets to you first, of course. Either way, it won’t be quick. If you play nice and do the job, and don’t use any of this data or your own to harm Fett clones, then you can stroll off with it.”
Uthan appeared to do some calculation. “That could be many years away.”
“The faster you work, the sooner you leave,” Skirata said. “Trust me on that.”
Uthan didn’t really have any other options anyway. “I’ll do it,” she said.
“Good.” Skirata picked up his helmet. “Give Fi your shopping list and we’ll get any kit you need.”
“So what did happen to Ko Sai?”
“I’d like to say I killed her, to focus your enthusiasm,” Skirata said. “I certainly dreamed of it often enough. But she took her own life. I suppose it can get pretty grim here for a Kaminoan. Or maybe that’s how all supremacists like her prefer to go—anything rather than let an inferior species do it for them.”
Despite himself, Skirata almost liked Uthan. There was something in her, some spark of passion that Ko Sai and her vile kind didn’t have. It wasn’t as if they were even on opposite sides, politically speaking; it was just that her job had been to wipe out clones. If only they could have ironed out that difference, then they might have had a great business relationship.
Jaing and Mereel were waiting outside the doors a little way down the corridor. They straightened up when they saw Skirata coming and ambled toward him. Jaing was wearing those gray leather gloves with his gray beskar’gam. He was very attached to the gloves now. Skirata wondered how else Ko Sai had been immortalized after he sent her head to General Zey.
I never took trophies. Funny, that. Not my style, I suppose. “Well, Kal’buir?”
“She’s playing ball,” Skirata said. “I do believe the tide is turning.”
He walked through the Kyrimorut bastion and found himself singing under his breath. It was a shame Etain hadn’t lived to see this. Jusik had given him some hope, though; if Jedi had this deal with the Force, and Etain was somehow in a Jedi manda, then maybe she knew, and maybe she’d passed beyond missing those she’d had to leave.
And if that was the deal—no, Skirata didn’t resent Jedi privilege at all.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Kyrimorut,
1,095 days ABG
Rejorhaa’ruetiise meg’oyacyi jorcu mhi r’asham. Tell the aruetiise that they live because we died.
—Inscription on a Mandalorian memorial to fallen mercenaries, Kyrimorut
Mandalorians didn’t have memorials. Nomadic warriors never stayed anywhere long enough to tend cemeteries, let alone create public expressions of commemoration. But Mandalore was home now, and Skirata had other ideas.
He hadn’t planned it that well. It just happened when he stopped sobbing about Etain during the night, and found it was nearly sunrise, so he walked out into the frosted grass around the lake and waited for the dawn. As he stared at the horizon, seeing shapes and memories, he reached into his pocket and found a few pieces of hard plastoid.
They were armor tallies, the last remains of dead clone troops. He was absolutely determined they wouldn’t be forgotten. The little tags with their ID circuitry needed to be commemorated, like any piece of armor from a fallen comrade.
We’re your clan, your family. So we’ll keep your memory alive.
Most of the tallies he had were from men he didn’t even know. It didn’t matter. He had their names—just numbers, mainly—on his list, every one of them up to the moment Mereel last linked to the GAR network.
It was going to be a lot of work. But that was okay. He had time. He began pacing out a large rectangle in the grass, crunching his way in straight lines through the hard-frosted blades until he could see the outline. A memorial would stand here to make sure that these men were not invisible, not anonymous, not forgotten.
Even the aruetiise would know the size of the army’s sacrifice when—if—they ever saw it.
Skirata walked back to the outbuildings to get a shovel. Mird, snuffling around the yard, stopped and looked up at him with an expression that was painfully human.
“You want to keep me company, stinker?” It was unusual to see the animal without Vau, but it had established its territory around Kyrimorut now and seemed content to leave its master sleeping while it patrolled. Maybe it didn’t see Vau as a master; maybe it saw him as a father, and the strill was no more subservient and enslaved than Skirata’s clone sons. “Come on, Mird’ika. You’re a soldier, too.”
He could have sworn the strill nodded at him. It fell in behind him and sat watching like a sentry while he turned the first soil for the foundations. In his mind’s eye, he saw a broad-based obelisk, polished smooth, with the tallies inlaid or names and numbers inscribed. Perhaps that was both too ambitious and too at odds with the unspoiled beauty around it. It would also be a landmark in a place where he needed to stay hidden. One day, though; one day.
He’d think about that. He thought while he hacked into the rock-hard soil.
Mird jerked its head around, whining softly. Someone was coming, and Mird knew who it was. Skirata went on digging.
“Only Mandalores have graves,” said Vau.
“I’m being an iconoclast.” Skirata braced for a sarcastic comment on his expanding vocabulary but none came. “It’s not enough for us to remember them. It has to be something the whole galaxy can understand. However trumped-up the war was, they still did their duty and died.”
Vau squatted down as if he was checking Skirata’s construction lines for true. “Agreed. You reckon we can build something big enough to take that many names?”
“Die trying.”
Vau turned to Mird. “Shovel,” he said. “Fetch, Mird’ika. Shovel.”
Mird wheeled around and raced toward the homestead. Skirata was glad he hadn’t shot it. It was a remarkable creature, and there were few of them left. They were all in this together: clone deserters, ragtag civvies with nowhere else to run, disillusioned Jedi—and a strill.
“Do you think he knew, Kal?”
Skirata went on digging. Vau totally upended him when he showed his decent side, and made him ashamed of all the years they’d spent hating and fighting. “Who?”
“Sev. I never told him I was proud of him, and I was. Did he know I loved him every bit as much as you love your boys?”
Skirata knew that pain well. Did Etain know? Had he ever made up for the things he’d called her when she first told him she was pregnant?
“I know he did, Walon,” Skirata said. Vau had never had a father worthy of the name; all things considered, he’d done his best to be one himself. “I know he does. He’s missing. Missing men often get found. Our missing men will be found.”
Vau nodded, silent. He was the picture of regret, but whether that was for his relationship with his trainees or his life in general, Skirata had no idea, and thought it was a bad time to ask.
“So, Walon, materials? Shape? Dimensions?”
Vau looked distracted. “Something that can expand to three million in time. Something that looks like a natural formation from the air.”
Skirata almost asked about the many millions more that Palpatine had produced on Centax and Coruscant, but that task was beyond him whether they were clones of Fett or not. Do what you can. What he’d done seemed pitifully inadequate
, just a handful of men out of so many.
But it was still early days. Maybe more would follow.
The sun was climbing from the horizon, thawing the frost between the shadows. Skirata put his hand in his pocket again and took out the tallies. There were more in his quarters, in a box under the bed he still hadn’t used, and in which he wouldn’t sleep until he’d completed his mission to stop the clones’ accelerated aging. In his belt pouch, his fingers closed around something soft, small, and heartbreaking.
“What are you going to do with that?” Vau asked.
Skirata turned the toy over in his hands. “Give it back to Kad’ika when he’s older, of course. In the meantime, it’s comforting me. Crazy, isn’t it? The hard old Mando merc and his cuddly toy.”
He felt he’d done pretty well to get this far without breaking down again. He’d had enough of crying. It wore him out; it pounced on him when he least expected it. It was the kind of sobbing that was dry and painful, just convulsions in his chest and a terrible pain behind his eyes and in his throat.
Part of the ongoing pain was not being with Darman to comfort him. The poor kid didn’t have the experience to deal with that kind of bereavement, even if he was with Niner.
Who am I kidding? I still can’t deal with it, and I’ve been watching people I love die all my life.
Skirata struggled to get his breath. “I’ve got to go back for them. The longer we leave it, the harder it’ll be for everyone. I can’t even comm him now.”
“I know,” Vau said. “You’ll understand why I need to go visit some Wookiees for a while, then. Study trees.”
“Oh, I understand. Need any help?”
“If I know I can call on you, that’s enough.”
“I’ve got some creds I owe Enacca. Maybe you’d hand them over personally.”
“My pleasure.”
Skirata scraped the soil off his shovel and headed back to the house to sit down with his family, have a solid breakfast with them, and make plans.
Etain had always said the Force told her things about the future. Skirata wondered if it had told her that her name would be on a memorial to the fallen of the Clone Wars, the only nonclone he would ever allow to be honored there, apart from Bardan Jusik when his time came.