“Yeah.”
“Fi, look at me.” She clamped her hands on either side of his face and made him meet her eyes. “You’ve got years ahead of you, either way. So live them. And I’m not putting you back together so that you can run off with some aruetyc hussy with a fancy Coruscant manicure when you’re fit, so you better marry me. Okay? Mandos marry young. We’re both past the age. It’s not right.”
Fi’s first thought was that he needed permission from someone, probably Kal’buir. But he didn’t; and that was scary. He could do whatever he wanted. All his life he’d had army rules and regs and procedures to follow, a structured existence, and now he was adrift on a sea of choices he never thought he’d have but without the capacity to make the most of them.
“I’m no use for anything,” he said. “Why do you want to marry me?”
Parja’s eyes narrowed. They were very blue. “I’ll be the judge of what you’re good for. You’re Fi, for a start, and that’s a good enough reason. Now get your shebs into that cantina and show me you remember how to order ne’tra gal and a meal.”
Fi was sure it was all bluster. He was amazed by her patience: she never cared how many times he dropped things or couldn’t recall the right word. Her aunt Rav Bralor, one of the Cuy’val Dar who’d trained them on Kamino, said the engineer in Parja hated leaving any broken machine unfixed. Fi was the kind of restoration project that she relished.
“Will you still want me when I’m better?” As he walked through the cantina doors, the bar seemed a more intimidating target than any beachhead. “I might be too…” The word eluded his lips, although his brain had selected gorgeous. “…good to look at.”
“Then I’ll just have to wear a welding visor to shield my delicate sensibilities,” Parja said. Several people in the cantina paused to look up. It was a small town on a small planet where everyone knew their neighbor’s business, so they recognized Fi as a stranger. “Or you can keep your helmet on at all times.”
“Okay, I’ll marry you, then.”
“Don’t let me twist your arm…”
“Maybe I can learn a trade.”
“When your coordination improves, you can pull your weight in the workshop.”
It was always when with Parja, never if. Failure never occurred to her. As Fi stepped up to the bar, heart pounding because he wasn’t sure he’d be able to find the right words to order ale, he was aware of two men to his right taking extra interest in him. He could hear them muttering over their drinks. Their helmets were stacked on the floor beside their table. Whatever else was wrong with his brain, Fi could still filter a conversation out of a hubbub of noise if it was about him.
“That’s not the guy, I tell you.”
“You can’t tell.”
“But he looks like him, I give you that.”
“Too much like him.”
“Who’s to say where Fett sowed his bas neral, eh?”
They looked up as if they were suddenly aware that Fi was staring at them—he was, and with irritation—and changed the subject. Mandalorians had the tact of a drunken Weequay, so they must have thought he would have been pretty offended by their comparison. Fi tried to keep his mind on the task at hand and fumbled for a credit chip.
“Two ales,” he said. And all Mandalorian cantinas could rustle up a couple of bowls of soup. “And two soups.”
The barkeep, an older woman with the kind of thin, gaunt face that made her look as if she got her kicks by sucking the juice from sourcane, gave him a long and cautious stare.
“You’re not from around here,” she said in Basic. Everyone from Enceri spoke Mando’a, but Fi had enough trouble with Basic these days. She tilted her head slightly to one side to look at the helmet under his arm, and her expression softened. “Ah. Okay, verd’ika, is it gi dumpling soup, or red gourd?”
Verd’ika. It was an affectionate term for a soldier. That warning sigil worked just fine. “Gourd, please.”
Gi soup was too much for him. Fi couldn’t face fish now, not after what happened to Ko Sai. The Kaminoan scientist was always referred to as gihaal—fish-meal—and now that she was dead and dismembered, fish made Fi feel oddly queasy. He handed over his credits. Parja claimed a table in a dim corner and settled him in a seat.
“You’re doing fine, cyar’ika.”
“Who do I look like?” Fi knew he looked like every single one of his clone brothers, and—as far as he knew—like Jango Fett had at the same age. He indicated the two men still huddled over their ale with as discreet a nod of his head as he could manage. “Fett’s dead, and he was a lot older than me.”
“Not Fett,” Parja whispered, taking a vise-like grip on his hand as if to shut him up. “One of your brothers. Spar.”
Spar—ARC trooper Alpha-02—had deserted even before the Grand Army was first unleashed at Geonosis. As Skirata always said, the man might have been an Alpha plank but he wasn’t a fool. “He’s not my brother.”
“Well, they say Fenn Shysa wants him to pretend he’s Fett’s heir, just to keep up appearances. In case you hadn’t noticed, we don’t have a Mand’alor at the moment.”
“Did you notice when you had one?”
Parja paused and looked as if she was going to smile. “The point is that not having one gives the aruetiise the idea that we’re in decline. Let’s face it, we never really recovered from losing our best fighters at Galidraan. We haven’t had to—yet.”
Fi hadn’t noticed the place falling apart. Mando’ade didn’t need much leading, although they did like to have a figurehead, if only to gripe about. A vivid memory sprang into his head, and the language to express it. “Fett’s already got a son. Boba. He must be about twelve now. Cocky little jerk. Ordo shoved his head down the ’fresher for bragging that his dad could wipe the floor with Kal’buir.”
“We need more than a kid right now, Fi, even if anyone could find him. He’s vanished.”
“Takes after his father.”
“Careful, or Shysa might ask you to play the fruit of Fett’s loins…”
“Test tube, more like.” Fi recalled seeing Fett in Tipoca City from time to time, a solitary, distracted figure who seldom mixed socially with the Cuy’val Dar he’d recruited. Fi wondered if the Mand’alor got a kick out of seeing millions of copies of himself all over the place, or if it disturbed him. “Why doesn’t Shysa take over? Or one of the chieftains?”
“The Fett name still makes the aruetiise tremble.”
Aliit ori’shya taldin. Mandalorians always hit the nail on the head with their sayings; family definitely was a lot more than blood. Technically, Fi was as much Jango Fett’s flesh and blood as Boba was. Fi thought it was interesting how he didn’t feel the man was anything like a father.
“I’m Mando A-list, then,” he said. “Pure Fett. But with better luck with women.”
Parja submitted to the grin she’d been trying in vain to suppress. She rubbed his forearm with vigorous enthusiasm. “Kandosii! Jaing said you had a way with words. I do believe it’s coming back.”
Fi felt a little brighter. Yes, maybe he’d be as good as new one day, or near enough. He ate his soup with the unsteady hand of a child learning to feed himself, facing the wall so that nobody would see if he spilled it down his chin. He did. Parja reached out a discreet hand and wiped it for him before he could fumble for a cloth.
“Six months ago,” she said, “you couldn’t even walk upright without help. You’re doing good, cyar’ika.”
She knew exactly when he needed reassurance. I’m lucky. My friends saved me. They put me back together again. He’d once thought the bond with his original squad, the brothers he was born and raised with, was the strongest he would ever experience, and their deaths had devastated him; he couldn’t imagine being that close to another living being again. Then he found an equally deep bond with Omega Squad. Now his bonds extended to a wider family, a ragbag of clones and nonclones, and even something that had once seemed unattainable—a woman who loved him.
“Okay,” Fi said. “When I don’t look so broken, we’ll get married.”
He wanted to be his old self for her. She looked at him with a slight frown, and it occurred to him that she might have thought he was fobbing her off. Maybe she just didn’t understand what he was trying to say. Words often didn’t come out as he planned these days.
“Better get fit fast, then,” she said.
Kal’buir had trained his boys to set goals, no matter how small. The next ridge, the next morning, even the next footstep if things were going badly—you had to keep your eyes fixed on that, and use it for strength and focus.
By this time next year, Fi decided, he would be the man he was before the explosion. He picked up his mug of ne’tra gal and tilted it slightly in Parja’s direction, managing not to spill any, and forced a grin.
“I’ll paint my armor specially,” he said. Maybe it was time he stopped looking like the ghost of Ghez Hokan, whose red-and-gray armor he’d scavenged. “Any color you like.”
But Parja was looking past him toward the doors of the cantina, and her expression had taken on that tight-lipped, narrow-eyed, I’m-going-to-punch-your-head-in look that he found oddly endearing. He turned carefully to see what she was scowling at.
A man in green armor swaggered up to them and looked down at Fi. Then he lifted off his helmet, releasing wavy blond hair in need of a good trim, and extended a gauntleted hand.
“Well, look at you,” he said. “Chip off the old block, or at least what the old block might have been if he’d had your start in life. You doin’ all right, ner vod?”
Fi didn’t have a clue who he was. He seemed to be the only one who didn’t, though. The cantina was silent, one communal held breath.
Parja stared the man in the face. “You weren’t just passing,” she said sourly, and put her hand on Fi’s forearm in a grip that said keep off. “So before you even ask—my old man’s not available. Can’t you see he’s injured?”
The blond man didn’t seem remotely offended by the rebuff. He just smiled, all charm—not that it worked on Parja—and clasped Fi’s other arm Mando-style.
“You look baffled, soldier,” he said. “The name’s Fenn Shysa. How’d you like to do your bit for Mandalore?”
Omega Squad observation point above the Hadde-Rishun road,
Haurgab, Mid Rim
Darman had never been a gambling man. Now he knew why; he watched his creds disappearing as Atin’s racing beetle powered to victory, unchallenged and unstoppable.
The bug wasn’t exactly greased lightning. But at least it knew where it was going, a skill that seemed in short supply among the local insect life. As the rest of the squad’s beetles scuttled around chaotically, Atin’s trotted on a straight, determined course toward the finish line—a strip of detonite tape stretched across the upturned ammo crate that formed the makeshift racetrack.
The others rushed back and forth, buffeting the walls and bouncing off them time after time as if they might eventually batter an escape route through the side of the crate. They just didn’t have that single-minded focus that made a winner. Darman gave them five points for sheer persistence.
“Kandosii!” Atin cheered. Sound carried for kilometers on the still air here, but inside a soundproofed helmet, a commando could yell to his heart’s content. It had taken Omega Squad days to find the path up to this vantage point, and they wanted to lie low. “Go on, ner vod, show ’em what you’re made of… that’s my boy…”
Omega had time on their hands while they waited for Separatist rebel convoys passing through Haurgab’s Maujas desert, and beetle racing was literally the only game in town. It was a blistering noon, one of those days when climate-conditioned Katarn armor was a cool haven from the killer heat outside. Maybe it was too hot today even for the local insect life.
Darman reached out to put his beetle back on course with a careful forefinger. Its iridescent scarlet wing cases reminded him of the daywings that he’d seen on Qiilura, flies that lived for one frantic, gloriously colored day and then died. Darman had once thought that going out at the top of your game was a noble exit for a commando, but after a couple of years exploring the wide world beyond Kamino, he’d worked out that it wasn’t glorious at all. It was unfair.
Life was short—especially for a clone—and increasingly depressing.
Daywings just showed you in fast-forward what was going to happen to you all too soon. Darman sometimes felt just like the racing beetles, too: trapped, shunted from location to location without really knowing what the greater plan might be, and banging his head against the wall of a war that seemed neither winnable nor losable.
He was fed up finding things in common with insects. He was a man, and he missed his girl. He wanted to go home—and he had no idea where home was.
Fi said it was Kyrimorut. Darman decided it would be wherever Etain wanted it to be.
Sometimes she touched him in the Force to let him know she was thinking of him, a distant and almost disturbing sensation as if someone was creeping up behind him. Dating your Jedi general was a very bad idea, and he knew it, but the war had to end sometime; and then he would have what Sergeant Kal called a normal life. What normality might turn out to be for a fast-aging clone and a prematurely retired Jedi he had no idea, but he was willing to give it a go.
He prodded his racing beetle back on course again. “Get a move on, di’kut. It’s that way.”
“Hey, no cheating.” Corr turned to Niner for adjudication as course steward. “Disqualify the unsporting bounder, Sarge. His beetle’s doped.”
“Okay, I know I’ve lost already.” Darman tossed a credit chip at Atin to pay the bet, then picked up his beetle and turned it toward the finish line. Comic relief had been Fi’s job, but he was gone; Corr, his replacement, did his best to fill the role of squad wise guy and general cheering-up operative. “I just hate to see the poor thing bumbling around like that, all confused and pathetic.”
“You’ll never be a successful trainer if you get sentimental about the bloodstock, Dar…”
Niner edged across the ground on his belly and peered into the box, his shadow falling across one of the beetles. It paused to wave its antennae and tested the suddenly cool air before trotting over to Corr’s chosen creature—brilliant turquoise, very shiny—and making amorous advances to it.
“I don’t think its mind’s on the race, somehow, ner vod,” said Niner, getting back on all fours. Atin’s beetle pottered on, as steady and single-minded as its temporary owner, and crossed the finish line. “Yeah, Atin’s done it again. Drinks in the winner’s enclosure…”
They were on self-recycled water now. Darman fantasized about fresh cold water from a faucet, and however much the procurement techies insisted that the filter system guaranteed that the recovered water—“personal” water, they called it—was as pure as a Naboo spring, he still didn’t like the idea that he’d drunk it and excreted it several times before. It was unsettlingly warm in his mouth as he sucked the tube from the reservoir inside his armor.
Still, it beat drinking someone else’s.
A big jug of iced water, a shower, and a nice soft bunk…
Atin made a discreet fist, victorious. “Oya! Pay up, losers.” He held out his palm. “That’s eight straight wins.”
“We’ll make you a little trophy, At’ika.” Darman picked up a cup-like desiccated husk from some long-dead plant. “You can put the winner out to stud now. Breed thoroughbreds.”
“Will I get striped ones or mauve ones if I mate it with Corr’s?”
“It’s not like mixing paint. You don’t know much about genetics, do you?”
Niner scooped up the beetles in his hands and tossed them into the air. They scattered in a dazzling display of gem-like wings, vanishing into the heat haze.
They could fly just fine. Why did they never try to escape from the racetrack? Why did they keep buffeting their stupid little heads against the sides of the ammo crate when they could just look up and fly away?
/>
Niner repositioned the blaster cannon on its tripod with its muzzle nestled discreetly in a cleft in the rock and fidgeted with the optics. He seemed increasingly restless and withdrawn these days, as if he had doubts about everything and couldn’t discuss them with the squad. Maybe it was Fi; not just his absence, which was hard enough to take, but what had happened to him. If Fi had died, they might have handled that better than knowing he was brain-damaged. They hadn’t seen him since Sergeant Kal whisked him away to Mandalore. Sometimes he sent comm messages, but apart from mentioning some Mandalorian woman called Parja, who seemed to be a permanent fixture in his new life, he told them little.
Jusik said he was improving, though. Darman recalled just how much Fi had wanted a girlfriend, and now that he had one, Darman had no need to feel guilty about Etain. Most human beings seemed happier when they had something that someone else didn’t, but Darman—like most clones, he realized—was uncomfortable when he had some advantage over his brothers.
As far as General Zey was concerned—not that Zey believed a word of the cover story, of course—Fi was dead. He was so far away now in every sense that he might as well have been.
Jusik was gone, too. The whole team was drifting apart.
Darman settled down in prone position and sighted up on the dirt road below, the only open terrain for kilometers, to wait for their target. Atin made a faint slurping noise as he sipped from his water supply. A shadow cast from the remains of an ancient fortress, three crumbling walls of baked mud bricks, provided some cool spots in their laying-up position. A lot of battles had been fought at this pass.
“Speaking of genetics,” Atin said, “what really did happen with Ko Sai?”
Darman shrugged. “When Kal’buir wants us to know, he’ll tell us.”
“I heard some weird stuff.”
“How weird?”
“That Kal took her research and killed her.”
“Who told you that?”
“Sev.”
Atin had been one of Vau’s trainees, like Delta Squad, and Darman knew they still gossiped despite old feuds. “Sev’s talking through his shebs as usual,” he said. “Ko Sai got what was coming to her, either way.”