501st: An Imperial Commando Novel

by Karen Traviss

  I love this. I feel alive. Is this like the world where I was born? I don’t remember it. But this feels like home.

  Kad seemed to be aware of it, too. Jusik held him on one hip as he stared wide-eyed through the transparisteel at the dripping plants in the courtyard, pointing occasionally and saying, “Reesh! Reesh!” It took Jusik a while to work out that he’d learned a new word—piryc, wet—and the best he could manage was the last syllable.

  “It’s wet because it’s melting, Kad’ika,” Jusik said. “It’s getting warmer. You’ll be able to play outside soon. That’ll be fun, won’t it?”

  Nobody called the child Venku anymore. Darman had preferred Kad, but he hadn’t known the baby even existed until more than a year after the birth, so the name had been dropped. This was Dar’s boy; Jusik reminded himself of that every day. Jusik was just one of an army of willing foster parents taking care of Kad until his father came home, and the fact that he had a special bond in the Force with him didn’t accord any extra privilege.

  He’s not my son. I mustn’t mean more to him than his dad just because I’m around and Darman isn’t.

  It wasn’t the Mando way, this fixation with biological parentage. Every Mando’ad had a duty to look after the children of the clan, and adoption erased a kid’s past—or even an adult’s. But Jusik felt like a usurper every time he connected with Kad and felt him in the Force.

  “Hey, Kad’ika, look what I’ve got.” Jusik took his holoprojector from his belt-pouch one-handed and switched it on. He couldn’t bear to show Kad the images of his mother yet, and left that task to Laseema, but he could cope with reminding Kad about Darman. “Look. That’s your dad. Dada. Buir. He’s coming back one day soon. We know where he is. We’re going to bring him home.”

  Kad chuckled and pointed at the holoimage. “Boo! Dada!”

  “That’s right. Buir’s coming home.”

  Jusik felt Gilamar approaching. He could usually pick out everyone’s impression in the Force as clearly as seeing them. Vau was a strange pool of calm; Kal’buir, whirlpools of passion, from violent hatred to selflessly devoted love. Ordo was another contradictory mix—a ferociously agile mind and complete physical confidence coupled with the wild emotional swings of a teenager. And Gilamar … Gilamar was mostly acceptance, a little loneliness, and pain so deep that it seemed an essential part of him. Jusik had no idea when Gilamar’s wife had been killed, but he got the feeling that it would always be yesterday for the man.

  “What’s it like?” Jusik asked, not turning around. Kad put his palm flat on the window and banged it a few times to get Mird’s attention. The strill was in the courtyard, nose pointing into the wind, inhaling intriguing scents on the air. “How does it feel to have a Force-user around all the time? Does it ever bother you?”

  “What, that you might be doing mind tricks on me or something?” Gilamar made faces at Kad. “Or that I can’t hide emotions from you? Not really. It’s no different from the strill. It can sense things I can’t. I don’t resent it for that.”

  “I hope I smell better …”

  Gilamar studied him. “If you were Force-sensitive and didn’t train, would you develop powers anyway? Would you even know you had powers?”

  “Probably not.” Jusik could feel the next question developing. “The Jedi Council wouldn’t have needed to test for midi-chlorians otherwise. You’d just find you understood people better than most, or had better hunches than your buddies, or terrific visuospatial awareness. You’d end up as a psychologist. A successful gambler. A pilot. A sports star.”

  “So …”

  “Okay, you’re thinking it might be a good idea not to develop Kad’s skills. Am I right?”

  “I thought the idea was to teach him how to control them so that he didn’t attract the wrong sort of attention. If he can just let them lie fallow and be none the wiser, that’s an interesting dilemma.”

  “You’re full of those.”

  Gilamar looked at him with distinctly paternal tolerance. “And so are you.”

  “I don’t think it’s different from encouraging any talent in a kid and then letting them choose how they use it.”

  “Except with the way Palpatine’s going, it’s a talent that’s going to mean a death warrant. So carry on teaching him to keep it under wraps.”

  Kad would know the truth about his mother in due course, but Jusik didn’t feel any need to teach him Jedi lore. Kad could have his own personal link to the Force with no Masters or lords to intercede or dictate the form it took. Didn’t every living creature connect to it in some way? It was simply a matter of degree.

  “I’m going to see what I can do for Arla today,” Jusik said. “You know I’m guessing my way through this, don’t you?”

  “Welcome to the adventure of practicing medicine.” Gilamar patted his shoulder as they walked away down the passage. “You guessed your way through repairing Fi’s brain damage pretty well, so I shall watch and learn, Bard’ika.”

  Jusik didn’t need to see Arla Fett to work out how she was feeling on any given day. He could feel her in the Force. He sensed her much as he had at the Valorum Center for violent psychiatric patients: a deeply troubled soul that manifested itself as jagged lines and harsh primary colors in his inner eye, confused and in pain, defying him to walk by and leave it to its misery.

  I rescued her. She’s my responsibility. What’s the point of swapping one locked ward for another?

  He paused in the corridor outside her room, still holding Kad on one hip. Gilamar stood well back.

  “I’m scared to see what happens if we stop her meds,” Jusik said. “But I can’t help wondering if they were more about keeping her docile for the center’s benefit than to help her.”

  “Well, if I were dealing with homicidal patients, I admit I’d probably use the zaloxipine cosh, too.” Gilamar shrugged. “We could try tapering off the dose. But I’m not a shrink. Your Force senses can tell better than any doctor how she really feels.”

  Jusik had tried to use the Force as little as possible when he left Coruscant, as if he could shrug off every trace of his Jedi past. It seemed an unfair advantage to have gifts that his clan brothers didn’t. But he couldn’t do it. It was like shutting his eyes to pretend he couldn’t see to fit in with a community of the blind, temporary and artificial, always with the knowledge that he could open his eyes at any time—not so much equalizing the situation as trying to imagine what it might be like to lose that sense. He couldn’t shut it off. The best he could do was be conscious of the ways he used his Force senses, and never exploit them.

  “Some days she’s calmer than others, whatever the dose,” Jusik said.

  “Well, it’ll be a case of trial and error, then.” Kad reached out for Gilamar’s hand and shook it with the grave politeness of a diplomat. “You think Kad’ika’s going to help things?”

  “If I go in there with a small kid, it’s clear I’m not going to hurt her.”

  “What if he reminds her too much of Jango?”

  “Is that going to upset her any more than seeing his clones?”

  “She wouldn’t remember Jango as an adult. But he was a kid when she last saw him, so she might recall looking after him at Kad’s age.”

  “Well, let’s see.”

  Jusik knocked on the door. Nobody had locked it since Arla had arrived. The alarm system would kick in if she left the building, and—apart from Vau—nobody seemed concerned that she might harm anyone. She never wanted to come out anyway. Sometimes she tried to barricade the door from the inside with a chair or table. Whatever had made her kill didn’t seem to make her go out looking for victims.

  “Arla? It’s Bardan.” He waited. Kad slapped his palm on the door a few times. “Would you like to come out for a walk with us? Get some fresh air?”

  Silence. Jusik felt her wariness and confusion. The latter might have been put down to the mind-numbing dose of zaloxipine, of course.

  “Okay, can I come in and see how you are? I
’ve got Dr. Gilamar with me.”

  Jusik opened the door. The internal doors at Kyrimorut were wooden and hinged, an ancient design that needed no power to operate them. In the most isolated parts of a largely rural planet with unreliable power supplies, that mattered. Arla Fett—forty-something, faded blond, thin, so unlike her brother as to make her unrecognizable as a Fett—sat on the edge of the bed with a pillow clutched tightly to her chest. The bed was so neatly made, the sheets and cover so tightly tucked in, that it looked as if a soldier had done it. Jusik didn’t even try to guess what had happened to her in the thirty or so years since her parents were murdered by the Death Watch for aiding Jaster Mereel.

  Does she know about Jango? How do I even broach the subject? Good news, Arla, your brother survived the massacre. Bad news, he saw everyone he cared about slaughtered, he spent years in slavery, and he got killed by a Jedi in the end. Sorry about all that, Arla.

  No, he couldn’t do that yet. The medcenter records he’d sliced on Coruscant said she’d been committed to the Valorum Center ten years ago, no next of kin, no personal details beyond no fixed abode. And that was all long before the Clone Wars started. He doubted that the staff even knew she had a brother, let alone that he was Jango Fett.

  Gilamar waited by the door. Even out of armor, he looked like a bruiser, and armor definitely upset Arla. How could she tell the difference between one Mando and another, anyway? To her, they probably all spelled grief and trouble.

  “Hi, Arla.” Jusik stood back a couple of meters and made a fuss of Kad, taking the boy’s hand and waving it at her. “Say hi to Arla, Kad. Arla, you’ve seen Kad before, haven’t you? He’s a … distant relative of yours.”

  “Careful, ad’ika … ,” Gilamar murmured.

  Arla studied Kad’s face with a slight frown. Kad gazed back at her, mesmerized, and for a moment Jusik couldn’t work out if the kid was sensing something in the Force, or if he was just a curious kid like any other.

  “What are you?” she said at last, looking straight at Jusik. “You’re not a doctor.”

  Jusik was surprised to hear her speak coherently, and in Basic, too. She had a slight accent. And she made eye contact for a few moments, as normal as anyone.

  “No, I’m a … well, I don’t know what I am, actually. A soldier, maybe.” Jusik took a breath. “I’d like to say I was a friend of your brother, but I never knew him. I’m just doing what I think he would have wanted, which is to get you well and help you make some kind of life for yourself.”

  Arla stared at Kad, then glanced up at Jusik again. “Where are you from?”

  “I don’t know.” She’s asking every question I can’t answer. “I was taken from my folks when I was a baby.”

  “Are they dead?”

  Oh boy. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t even know where to start looking.”

  Actually, that wasn’t true; the Jedi Council records were now reduced to ashes, but his family name was probably real, and so Mereel or Jaing could run a few searches in moments and track down worlds where the Jusik name was common.

  Jusik suspected he didn’t want to know. He didn’t need another conflicting identity. Clan Skirata was his family now, and he could shut out everything else. He had to. He could only handle one allegiance at a time, all or nothing.

  But he wondered if some spark would be struck if he ran into his own flesh and blood by chance. Biologists said closely related humans really could recognize one another by scent even if they didn’t realize it, just like Siolans and Kemlans. Maybe Arla knew deep down that the clones and Kad were her kin.

  Arla looked right through him. “Well, my folks are dead.”

  “Tell you what,” Jusik said. “Put a coat on, and come out for a stroll with us. If you want to tell me about yourself, and your family, that would be good.”

  She still stared. All things considered, this was an improvement. “When are you going to make me drink that stuff?”

  “What stuff?”

  “The medicine. Not the capsules. The liquid that makes me have nightmares.”

  Gilamar kept his voice very calm, very quiet. “They gave you something else at the Valorum Center, then? Not just zaloxipine. Do you know what it was called?”

  “No.”

  “Are you still having nightmares?” he asked.

  “Not the same ones. More like bad dreams I can’t understand. Most of the time I don’t remember them, but I know I dreamed them.”

  Gilamar moved forward two slow steps. Jusik couldn’t believe Arla was talking this lucidly. When she first arrived she’d either been totally silent, or made no sense at all.

  “If you were prepared to give me blood and hair samples,” Gilamar said, “I could test it to see if any other drugs were still left in your system.”

  “You can’t make me drink that stuff.”

  “Ner vod, we don’t even have any to give you, whatever it is. All we’ve got is the zaloxipine the center gave us.”

  Ner vod. Arla might have been familiar with the words. In Concordian, the Concord Dawn dialect of Mando’a, the phrase—brother, sister—sounded very similar. She frowned at Gilamar as if she was trying to focus on him rather than disapproving of what he’d asked.

  She’s medicated out of her skull. We’re going to have to be careful how we reduce that dose.

  “Okay,” she murmured. She rolled up her sleeve and held out her arm with the fold of her elbow uppermost, as if she’d had blood samples taken a hundred times. “Get it over with.”

  Jusik began to hope. Arla was already improving simply for being out of that asylum. When he first met her, she cowered from all men; now she was letting Gilamar draw blood from her arm.

  “Now, you want to take that walk?” Gilamar asked.

  Arla shrugged. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  They didn’t even have to send the samples away for analysis. With the small lab that Mereel had set up for Ko Sai, and the assortment of medical equipment that Gilamar had stolen from Republic medcenters, Kyrimorut could do most of its own lab work.

  The lab was situated opposite the roba pen, where a huge sow stood guard at the entrance to her shelter. It was a very Mando juxtaposition of high tech and manure-scented agrarian life that hadn’t changed since Canderous Ordo’s day.

  Gilamar shook the vial of black-red blood as he walked down the passage, pausing to hold it up to the sunlight slanting through one of the windows.

  “Funny stuff, blood,” he said.

  “Chemically, or spiritually?”

  “Both. And it’s not thicker than water, whatever they say.”

  “She seems better this week. The other medication must be wearing off.”

  Gilamar opened the lab door. Uthan’s perfume wafted out, a subtle herbal scent that might have been shampoo. “I’m wondering why they had her on two antipsychotics like that. Just saying that there might be a good reason.”

  “We’ll find out, won’t we?” Jusik said, and left with Kad to ponder how little blood meant to him.

  Derelict hunting lodge, Olankur; the southwest coast of Mandalore’s north continent

  “You’re a suspicious man, so you are, Kal.”

  Fenn Shysa brushed a layer of dust from the rough table and set a bottle of tihaar and two glasses in front of Skirata. The layer of dead insects on the windowsill suggested the hunting lodge hadn’t been used for some time. Olankur was an awfully long way to come for a drink.

  It was a long way from the Imperial garrison, too, and that was the whole point.

  “Keeps me alive,” Skirata said.

  “We could have had done this in Keldabe. Don’t you trust your Mand’alor?”

  “We could have done this by comm, too, but you’re the one who wanted to talk face-to-face.”

  Skirata trusted Shysa as much as he trusted anyone outside his family, but he didn’t want to be seen with him too often. The Mand’alor was known to the garrison commander. Skirata had to assume that one of the stormies—or the mongrel officers
, or even that inbred chinless di’kut of a commander—would get lucky and find out something sooner or later.

  Mandalorians were tight-lipped around outsiders. But nothing stayed a secret forever.

  Shysa pulled the stopper from the bottle and poured two small glasses of tihaar. Skirata could smell the colorless liquor from the other side of the table, a wonderful velvety aroma of the ripe varos fruits it had been distilled from. Every tihaar was different, made from whatever local fruit was available. Varos grew in the tropics, so this bottle was a rare treat.

  “Your boy doesn’t have to wait outside, Kal.”

  “Ordo just likes to keep an eye on things.”

  “Sensible lad.” Shysa sipped, frowning in concentration. “But you could always change your shabla armor. Imperials can’t tell one Mando from another as long as you keep your buy’ce on.”

  Skirata raised his glass and gulped the liquor down in one. “K’oyacyi.”

  “K’oyacyi.” Shysa went to pour top-ups but Skirata placed his palm over the top of his glass. “Ah, you think I’m buttering you up for something, Kal. Don’t we know each other better than that?”

  “I don’t think fast with a few drinks inside me.”

  “You don’t need to think fast. You need to listen.”

  “You still want me and the Cuy’val Dar to train your resistance, is that it?”

  “Resistance sounds a bit too romantic and hasty for my tastes. I’m thinking of it more as … an intention to respond in kind if the Empire doesn’t turn out to be the reliable and reasonable tenant any self-respecting Mand’alor would want. But that’s not why we’re talking.”

  Shysa was a reluctant Mandalore, which was a healthy attitude as far as Skirata was concerned. He’d stepped up because he had to. After three years without Jango Fett, without a chieftain of chieftains, the clans were getting too used to the idea of having no compass, and there was a fine line between freethinking independence and chaos. But Shysa wasn’t there to run the place like some aruetyc bureaucrat. He was there to provide focus, and he had plenty of that. He was a determined man when he found something worth pursuing. Skirata was still waiting to find out what it was.