“That’s a fine helmet,” she said. It had detailed crimson and gold sigils, and the alloy section that formed the eyepiece T of the visor was jet black. There were telltale scrapes and gouges as if some huge creature had clawed at it. “Does Fi still have Hokan’s armor?”
Skirata nodded. “Certainly has. Niner said he could have it, and he keeps it stashed in his locker.”
Etain thought of Ghez Hokan, and how she had first mistaken Darman for Qiilura’s brutal enforcer simply because of that sinister helmet with its T-shaped slit. Fi had the helmet now. And that was because Etain had taken Hokan’s head off with her lightsaber, nearly a year and a lifetime ago when she was still not used to killing.
It was red armor with a distinctive gray trim. She recalled that vividly.
Mandalorian helmets didn’t look half so fearsome now. The shape was familiar: it was even welcome. But she had somehow forgotten that Skirata, and most of the training sergeants who had been recruited to forge boys like Darman into elite commandos, had been Mandalorian mercenaries handpicked by Jango Fett.
She wondered if she would have seen Skirata the same way nine months earlier, had he been her enemy on Qiilura. “Packing or unpacking?”
“Packing.” He lifted the fabric bags carefully and they made a metallic clunk: weapons. “We can’t operate out of here. Officially we’re off duty and on indefinite leave.” He laid the armor plates in the bag and layered the clothing between them, then slid in the fabric-cased weapons. It occurred to her that this was probably all he owned, the nomadic mercenary ready to move on to the next war. “Are you squeamish, General? I mean ethically squeamish.”
“I’m a Jedi, Sergeant.”
“Well, that answers a lot of questions I didn’t ask.”
“Ask me a specific question.”
“Do you know what black ops means?”
“Oh yes…”
“I thought you might. I had no idea you would be coming back with Omega right now, but you spent four months with Zey on Qiilura turning the locals into guerrillas to fight the Seps, right? And before that you survived when Master Fulier didn’t. So I reckon you’re pretty handy in a scrap.”
“I know my weaknesses.”
Skirata paused and looked up from his packing. “Best knowledge of all.”
“Just tell me what’s at stake,” Etain said.
“Now, there’s an interesting request from a Jedi.” He put his hand carefully in the side of the carryall and withdrew a small cloth-wrapped package. When he unwrapped it and held it out in his palm, she could see it held small scan bars mounted on fragments of white plastoid alloy. “For me, stopping more of these. For the Republic, stopping activity that limits the ability of the Grand Army to deploy. For the Senate, showing the Seps that they can’t strike here at will. Take your pick.”
She knew what the objects were now: she’d seen them on hundreds of chest plates. They were armor tallies, the identification devices all clone soldiers wore.
“I’ll take the first option.” She thought of the other Fi, the one who was no longer alive to be boyishly excited like his namesake at the prospect of seeing the Coruscant that lay beyond the barracks. “You believe I’ll be of some use?”
“In urban operations, a woman is always useful, Jedi or not. Another aid to invisibility—old di’kute like me and females like you.”
Skirata smiled and rewrapped the armor tallies. Etain reached into her bag and realized that she had even fewer possessions than this nomad. “And General Jusik is part of this operation? What about Master Zey?”
“General Zey is not officially aware of this.”
“If we’re not operating out of here, then where?”
“Oh, somewhere interesting. Give me a couple of days and then we can relocate. Besides, the boys need some rest.”
So he wasn’t going to tell her. Fine. “Delta seem a little… different from Omega. I take it you have confidence in them?”
“Oh, they’re good lads.” He fumbled in his jacket pockets and pulled out credit chips, scraps of flimsi, and a nasty-looking metal device crested with a row of short, savage spikes and that appeared to have holes for four fingers. She stared. He placed it on the table. “The hormone that makes them hard fighters is the same one that makes them a bit of a handful, too.” The contents of Skirata’s jacket continued to pile up on the table. A coil of thin wire, a fifteen-centimeter knife with a tapering three-sided blade, a stubby custom blaster, and a length of heavy, sharp-edged chain joined the cache. “Not that the poor ad’ike are ever off duty, of course. But when you say the word, they’re on the case like that.” He snapped his fingers to make the point of immediacy. Yes, she’d seen that.
Skirata took off his jacket, revealing surprisingly broad shoulders and an underarm holster holding what looked like a modified Verpine shatter gun. He hung the garment over the back of a chair. Etain estimated he was still exceptionally fit in the wiry way of small men and continued to revise her view of him as a man who could only train others to fight.
And she had never seen so many instruments devoted to injury and destruction in one man’s possession—not even a Republic commando. She indicated the weapons with a cocked head and waited for a hint of why he was carrying them.
Skirata paused, one hand raking his short gray hair.
“What?” he said, looking bemused.
“The… kit.” He was a walking armory. “The weapons.”
“Oh, don’t worry.” He clearly didn’t understand. “I don’t carry many tools when I’m in civilian areas. Don’t want to be too conspicuous. Ordo looks after the rest of it. We’ll be properly cannoned up when we deploy. Guess what? Got six Verpine sniper rifles. Custom-made and EMP-hardened. Exquisite. Not really rifles, ’cos they don’t have rifled barrels, but…” He grinned suddenly, apparently distracted by a thought, and she had a brief and vivid vision of another man entirely. “You haven’t met Ordo yet, have you? He’s a fine lad. Pride of my heart, really he is. Him and his brothers.”
Etain was totally disarmed by his candor, which seemed both incongruous and yet in keeping with a man who had gone to such extraordinary lengths to equip his young charges to survive.
She knew he was a killer. She knew his people had a long history of killing Jedi, even fighting for the Sith. She knew exactly what he was, but she couldn’t help liking him and knowing that he would be very, very important to her for the rest of her life.
Her certainty was in the Force. And she knew what was coming in the days and months ahead would take her beyond her limits, and would bring her no sense of peace or understanding as a Jedi. But the Force would show her what it intended her destiny to be.
Chapter Seven
I think it’s significant that the casualty rate among commando squads trained by Mandalorians is lower than those trained by other races. Somehow, Mandalorians imbue their charges with a sense of purpose, self-confidence, and almost obsessive sense of clan—of family—that gives them a genuine survival advantage.
Let us be thankful they’re on our side this time.
—General Master Arligan Zey, Director of Special Forces, officer commanding SO BDE, addressing the Jedi Council
SO Brigade HQ Coruscant,
briefing room 8,
1500 hours, 370 days after Geonosis
“I thought we’d have a chat,” said Skirata. He turned a chair around and swung his legs astride it, folding his arms on the chair back and resting his chin on them. “Just us Mando boys. No aruetiise present.”
Delta Squad had settled in seats on one side of the briefing room and Omega on the other, with the table between them. Skirata could have sliced through the atmosphere between Atin and Sev with a vibroblade: how could they think he hadn’t noticed? He knew how to read every nuance of cloned men like a book, even if they weren’t the ones he knew intimately. In fact, he could read most species now. So they either thought he was stupid, or they were so at ease in his company that they felt no need to disg
uise their feelings.
And the Delta boys—like Omega—were painfully loyal to their sergeants. They sat around in dark red fatigues, looking disturbingly young without their armor and weapons.
“You don’t see Tur-Mukan or Jusik as traitors, do you?” Darman said.
“I was using aruetiise in the general sense of non-Mandalorian.” Oh, Darman was fond of Etain, wasn’t he? He’d have to keep an eye on that. “What I’ve got to say is just squad business, not the officers’.” Skirata dropped his knife from his sleeve and fidgeted with the blade, running his fingertip carefully along the honed edge. “I hope you’re listening to this, Delta.”
“Yes, Sarge.” Boss was watching him intently.
“And you, Sev.”
Sev glanced at Atin for the merest fraction of a second, but enough to confirm Skirata’s hunch. “Yes, Sergeant.”
“Okay, number one—any bad blood between me and Vau is our business, not yours. If any of you want to fight about it, I’ll personally make you regret it. Save it for the bad guys.”
The silence was almost solid. Atin stared ahead of him, unblinking; Sev compressed his lips as if choking back protest and flicked a glance at Niner. Darman and Fi simply looked baffled.
“No, Sev,” Skirata said. “Niner didn’t say a word to me, but I’ve got eyes in my backside and a very good memory. You do not have a grudge against Atin, do you understand me? If you want to argue the toss about my little altercation with Vau, then you have it out with me.”
“Understood, Sergeant.”
“Good. Prove it.”
“Sorry?”
“You two.” Skirata motioned to Atin and Sev with the point of his blade. “Get up and shake hands.”
Neither Atin nor Sev moved for a moment.
“I said get up and shake hands. Now.”
Skirata wondered if he’d lost them, but then Atin stood just a heartbeat before Sev did. They leaned across the table that separated them and shook hands as ordered.
“Now do it again and mean it,” Skirata said quietly. “You have to be one team now, one big squad, and when I tell you what we’re up against you’ll understand why. Boss, I expect you to keep your boys in line.”
Boss leaned forward and shoved Sev in the back. “You heard the sergeant.”
Atin held his hand out again. Sev took it and shrugged.
“Good,” Skirata said. “Because we’re off the charts now. What we’re about to do has no official authorization from the Senate or the generals, so if we screw up, we’re on our own.”
“Ah,” said Scorch. “So Jusik and Tur-Mukan don’t know about this.”
“Oh yes, they do.”
“Then who’s we?”
“You, our young generals, Ordo, Vau, and me.”
Scorch raised his eyebrows. “You’re operational again?”
It was time for a little theater. “Yes.” Skirata hurled his knife with the exquisite accuracy born of decades of surviving by it. It embedded itself in the wooden paneling behind Sev, half a meter to his right. “Bet you can’t do that with a vibroblade, son.”
“He can if I pick him up and throw him,” said Fi.
They all laughed. Skirata wondered if they’d still be laughing in a few minutes. Ordo was due back soon. With any luck, he and Vau would have beaten some information out of Orjul; the Nikto were probably too tough even for Vau to crack in that time.
In the end it might not matter. He had his team ready to deploy on Coruscant now—his team, not the Republic’s—and they could do things that CSF either wouldn’t or couldn’t. Obrim had his hands tied by laws and procedures, and maybe he even had a mole among his own comrades.
But this strike team had no laws at all: it didn’t even exist. On Triple Zero, it was… zero.
Skirata hadn’t asked Zey what would happen to them if they got it wrong. They could end up dead, all of them. It was an academic detail.
Scorch got up, pulled the knife from the wall, and handed it back to Skirata with a grin. Fixer applauded.
“Remember all that dirty black ops stuff that me and Vau taught you way back?” Skirata slid the blade back up his sleeve again. My dad’s knife. All I have of him. I took it off his body. “Or did you file it with the boring stuff on contingency orders and emergency procedures?”
“I think we recall it, Sarge.”
Skirata remembered it, and didn’t want to. It was training that had to be done. It broke his heart, but it was going to be all that stood between those boys and death sooner or later. They had to be able to face the unimaginable, and—yes, there were even worse things than charging a line of droids with your comrades.
There were the things you might have to face alone, in a locked room, with no hope of rescue.
Maybe Vau was right. Perhaps trainees needed to be brutalized beyond the point where they were just brave, pushed into a state of existence where they became animals intent only on survival. That was how Vau had nearly killed Atin. It was why Skirata had then gone after Vau and nearly killed him.
“I’m not proud of what I did to you,” Skirata said.
“You crawled through the nerf guts first, Sarge. It looked like so much fun that we followed you in.” Fi roared with laughter and leaned back in his seat. “And then you threw up.”
The Sickener, they called it. One more endurance test to make sure they could face conditions that would break and kill lesser men, crawling through a ditch filled with rotting nerf guts.
But there were more tests to come. A night out in Fest-like temperatures; no sleep for three days, maybe more; scant water, a full sixty-kilo pack, and blistering heat; and a lot of pain. Pain, pitiless verbal abuse, and humiliation. A captured commando could expect brutal interrogation. They had to be able to cope without breaking, and it took some imagination to test that to the limit.
How far is too far, Kal?
Vau was much more detached about handing out all that punishment than Skirata could ever be. It was very hard to hurt your sons, even if it helped them survive the unsurvivable.
“Well,” Skirata said, mortified that Fi could take it in such good spirits. “The nerf guts were the fun part. It all goes downhill after that.”
Sev seemed quite animated. “Do we get to do assassinations?”
“If we do, they never happened. You imagined them.”
“Whoops. My trigger finger just slipped, Sarge. Honest.”
“You catch on fast about the fascinating world of politics in which we now find ourselves, young man.”
“Is it okay if I say politicians are gutless chakaare?” Scorch asked.
“Call ’em what you like, son. You still haven’t got a vote.” Skirata felt the thud of boots striding down the passage outside. The vibration carried; their voices didn’t. “Wars are legal violence. Everything else is just crime. Fortunately we’re Mandalorian, so we’re a lot less prissy about that fine distinction.”
“Just point us at the bad guys and say go.”
“That’s the awkward bit.”
“What is?” Scorch asked.
“You’ve got to find them first.”
“Well, we found quite a few so far…”
Delta laughed like one man, even Sev, and Omega joined in. The coded entry system blipped and the doors slid open. Ordo strode through them, probably aware of the kind of entrance he could make.
Delta had never worked with a Null ARC before. Maybe they thought it would be no different from working with Alpha or any of the other Jango-trained ARC troopers. Skirata watched with interest. Ordo would certainly break some more ice.
“Sir!” Delta said sharply, all at once. Niner and the rest of Omega just touched their brows casually.
“Sorry I’m late, Sergeant.” Ordo took off his helmet, tucked it under one arm, and handed Skirata a datapad and a rather heavy flimsi-wrapped package about the size of a small blaster case. “Not much information, but Vau is still working on the problem. And General Jusik sends his compliments.”
“Thanks, Captain.” Skirata glanced at it and then unwrapped the parcel. But it wasn’t a weapon; it was a box of candied vweliu nuts. Jusik was a very thoughtful officer indeed. Skirata broke the seal and got up to place it on the table within the reach of both squads. “Fill yer boots, lads.”
Fi had his usual silly grin on his face, the faintest hint that he might be planning to do something at Ordo’s expense.
“Ooh, nice new skirt!” said Fi. “You went to all that trouble just for us? What happened to the old kama? Did it shrink in the wash?”
He got up and stood a pace or two in front of Ordo, still grinning and clearly expecting some backslapping or some other show of delight at reunion after several months.
“’Scuse me, Sergeant,” Ordo said calmly, and smacked Fi down on the floor with a none-too-playful body press. Fi yelped. Being hit by someone in armor when you weren’t wearing your own hurt.
Boss’s expression was a study in shock. The Delta boys jerked upright in their seats and stared as if they were debating whether to step in and break it up. Ordo looked like cold death; even Skirata had times when he wasn’t quite sure which way Ordo would jump.
“Your big mouth is going to get you into a lot of trouble one day,” the ARC hissed. Fi, eyes locked on Ordo’s, neck tensed, looked ready to fight back. “So you better hope I’m there when that happens.” Then Ordo burst out laughing and got to his feet in one move. He hauled Fi upright by his arm, slapping his back enthusiastically. “The old firm back together again, eh? Good stuff!”
Boss glanced at Skirata, who smiled enigmatically, or so he hoped. Nulls were either your best friend or your worst imaginable enemy. Fi, luckily, had a devoted friend. He still looked shaken by the nature of the reunion, though.
“Okay, you can thin out now and we’ll resume tomorrow morning with our little generals for a full intel briefing at oheight-hundred,” Skirata said. “Now that we all understand each other.”