501st: An Imperial Commando Novel

by Karen Traviss

  “Buckle up, Ruu,” Jusik said. “It’s going to be a fast exit.”

  “Hundred meters,” Maze said.

  Jusik felt sweat prickle on his top lip. He had to sense where Maze was in relation to the ship, and his speed, and build an instant three-dimensional moving picture in his mind. Every other bad feeling in the Force that was clamoring for attention had to wait. Jusik shut his eyes.

  “Remember you’ve got brakes, Maze …”

  “Fifty meters.”

  “Start braking, ner vod.”

  “Whoa …”

  “I said brake!”

  Jusik felt the speeder as a disturbance in the Force that was about to crash through the back of his skull. The airframe shook. Ruu swore. Maze’s voice said “Clear!” and Jusik hit the hatch control, shutting the cargo doors. He didn’t think about anything else until the freighter was hurtling into a sky getting darker by the second. He headed for the jump point as soon as they were past the upper layer of Fradian’s atmosphere.

  “So what if that isn’t Maze?” Ruu said at last.

  Jusik breathed again. “Maze?”

  He could feel something very wrong now. He took out his Verpine. He was sure that it was Maze he could feel in the Force, but there was someone with him. Jusik sensed a Force-user, and a presence he thought he knew but that shifted and wavered like a bad comm signal.

  Maze was an ARC trooper, and he followed his orders like a pro. He had one of Palpatine’s Sith agents with him. Jusik knew it.

  “Ruu, when the nav computer indicates, hit the jump button,” Jusik said.

  “We can’t dump things out the air lock in hyperspace …”

  “Just do it.”

  Jusik scrambled down the ladder and made his way cautiously down the shoulder-wide passage that connected the forward cargo hold to the cargo bay itself. He reached for his weapons—Verpine in his right hand, lightsaber in his left. The blade sprang to life, green and humming. Ambidexterity was a useful ability.

  In the dim deckhead lighting, he could see a dusty speeder vibrating slightly in tune with the ship. One hatch opened, very slowly. He aimed the Verp.

  “Maze, get out. Hands on your head. Stand clear where I can see you.”

  The hatch opened far enough for Maze to step out. Yes, it was Maze. He was wearing a grubby brown tunic and a couple of days’ growth of stubble, but it was him all right.

  Maze put both hands on his head, fingers locked. “It’s not how it looks.”

  “And your buddy.” Jusik looked to the left-hand hatch. If Maze tried anything, he could drop him with the Verp, but the Force-user would need the little extra persuasion of a lightsaber. “Get out on deck. Hands on your head. Just freeze, or you won’t have a head.”

  Jusik felt that wavering presence in the Force change from something vague and shifting to something he knew very well indeed. He wondered if it was a trick. There was no telling who or what Palpatine had signed up to work for Intel these days. And even if the shabby form that squeezed out of the speeder hatch was hard to recognize, the suddenly clear presence in the Force wasn’t.

  “General?” Jusik said, aghast. “Master Zey?”

  The man who stood before him obeying his instructions was a lot thinner than the Zey he’d known, and looked as if he’d been through each one of Corellia’s Nine Hells.

  “I’m not armed,” Zey said. “Maze took my lightsaber.”

  Jusik looked to Maze, still keeping Zey in his view and ready to take his own lightsaber to him if he moved. He was shocked by his own reaction. “You shot him. Ordo said you shot him. The night of Order Sixty-six.”

  “Ordo’s not half as smart as he thinks he is,” Maze said. “Well, he is, but he got this one wrong.”

  “You lied to me, Maze. You set us up.”

  “I just left out a detail.”

  “You want us to save him, too? Is that it? Or is he a peace offering for Kal to play with?”

  “Yes,” Maze said. “I’m asking you to help both of us.”

  Ruu must have been listening on the ship’s system. “Sixty seconds to jump,” she said calmly. “Last chance to dump them out the air lock.”

  Jusik looked at Maze. The man deserved better. But he had no idea what to do about Zey, or even how he’d concealed his presence. This wasn’t a Jedi rescue operation. This was for the men they used and discarded.

  He only had seconds to decide.

  He did the compassionate thing, but he didn’t lower his weapons. He made himself a promise that he’d use them later if this all went wrong. And he’d have some explaining to do to Skirata.

  “Thirty seconds, Bard’ika,” Ruu said. “I say flush Maze for being a lying barve and flush the Jedi just because.”

  Fifteen seconds. Ten.

  “Jump,” said Jusik.

  12

  Everyone’s got some serious dirt in their history, ma’am. In the days of the Old Republic, we Mandalorians wiped out at least one sentient species just to prove that we could—the Cathar. Are we ashamed of that? I hope so. But if anyone tries to wipe us out again, I feel better knowing we once did something to deserve our fate. It’s easier to take than just being spotless victims.

  —Wad’e Tay’haai, historian and mercenary, in conversation with Kina Ha

  Kyrimorut, Mandalore

  “But I was never part of this,” Ny said. “I never joined anything, signed anything, or agreed to anything.”

  There was a helplessness about being innocent that left Ny floundering. What could she say? Some Jedi had added her name to a list of pilots who could be contacted to move fugitives. They hadn’t asked; she didn’t know.

  All she knew now was that people she loved and trusted were looking at her as if she was a traitor, a traitor who could have brought the Empire to their front doors. A’den, ever the loyal friend, leaned on the back of her chair with his hand resting on her shoulder.

  “It’s okay, we know,” he said. “We just want to backtrack a bit so we can work out how, because how might tell us what else the shabla jetiise have lumbered us with.”

  It felt like an interrogation even if she was surrounded by friends—Skirata, Ordo, Mereel, and A’den. Ny felt guilty of being gullible. She’d never thought of herself that way. What scared her more than anything wasn’t the Empire, she realized, but being despised by the only friends she now had.

  “Kal, you believe me, don’t you?”

  Skirata sat in a chair by the door, occasionally rubbing one hand over his face as if he was tired and trying to focus. His gaze wandered back to her and he fixed her with that implacable blue stare that could have been hatred or just distraction. No, he was thinking about something else. He blinked, and suddenly he was really looking at her.

  “Resources.” He snapped his fingers. “Everyone and everything is a resource for them. Take a ship, take a pilot, take an army. All in their holy cause, all justifiable, and they don’t even think about what they leave in their wake, because they mean well.”

  Ny thought that sounded a lot like Skirata’s approach, but she was in no position to lecture him at the moment.

  “Well, we got to it before the Empire did,” Ordo said. “Thanks to Niner and Obrim.”

  “That man’s saved my shebs way too often.” Skirata went to get up, but Ordo motioned him to sit down again and refilled his cup. There seemed to be a kind of telepathy at work between them. “The question now is who else has this information. Because the chances of them keeping it on one chip are zero.”

  Mereel sucked his teeth contemptuously. “Along with their chances of learning that the safest place to hide something is in your shabla head.”

  “It’s not chaff, then,” A’den said. “Not planted as a decoy.”

  “Not with Ny’s data on it,” Ordo said. “They couldn’t have known it would end up here.”

  “You sure?”

  “If they’d been able to plan that far ahead,” Ordo said, “Palps wouldn’t have been able to pull off the Pu
rge, would he?”

  “Well, we can sit waiting for the other shoe to drop, or we can get out and manage this,” Skirata said. “Let’s see what else Jaing shakes out of it. Then we can work out who might have what.”

  “I’m sorry, Kal,” Ny said. She felt like a naughty kid, with the grown-ups talking over her head about what should be done about her. “I’m really sorry.”

  She expected Skirata to tell her that it wasn’t her fault. She needed to hear that. All the sweat, all the pain, all the lives that had gone into creating this safe haven, and now she might be the cause of its downfall because she was gullible. She could hardly bear to think beyond the next terrible second.

  “It’s my fault,” Skirata said. “I never stopped to ask the obvious. You told me there were Jedi looking for somewhere to hide. Once you mentioned Kina Ha, I never stopped to ask why you, why out of all the pilots they could have picked, they ended up with you.”

  Ny tried to reconstruct the sequence of events. Freight pilots and illegals went hand in hand. Some pilots did it for credits, some did it out of pity, and some didn’t know they were doing it at all, because they didn’t secure their ships or check their holds well enough. She did it out of pity. And she even did it for A’den to get whatever information she could about her husband’s ship, transporting the ARC trooper Sull off Gaftikar to save him from being shot as a deserter.

  “I knew Ny would help refugees,” A’den said. “The other freighter pilots used to say she was soft. That’s how I got to know her, and why I asked her to run errands for us. The Jedi worked that out, too. Like it or not, Buir, we have way too much in common with the Jedi when it comes to exploitation.”

  Ny had no idea she was seen as such a soft touch. She wasn’t sure if she felt insulted or not.

  “Well, I never dumped a stowaway out of the air lock or called the port cops,” she said. “Some I just kicked out when I found them on pre-launch checks. Some I felt sorry for. Scout approached me and I couldn’t say no to a starving Jedi kid so soon after Etain died. So I said maybe.”

  Skirata slurped his caf and got up to wander around the kitchen. “We’re already vulnerable. Palpatine’s got saber-jockeys of his own, all kinds of foot soldiers who can sniff out other Force-sensitives. They could detect Kad and Bard’ika if they got within range. I’m making a dangerous assumption that having Kina Ha and Scout here doesn’t add to the problem, and it’s a trade-off against the benefit we can get from Kina Ha’s genetic material. But as soon as Uthan’s done with her—”

  Skirata stopped dead, but Ny continued his train of thought. “You want them gone,” she said. “But they know about this place. And even if they won’t give that information away, they can have it extracted from them the hard way. Which leaves you with one option. Tell me you’re not going to take it.”

  He looked brokenhearted. He often did these days, but she knew what was going through his mind this time: You’re not one of us, you’re not the woman I thought you were.

  “Ny, I swear that not one more clone will die to save a Jedi’s hide,” he said. “Not one. Do you understand? If you ask me to choose between a Jedi’s life and a clone’s, I’ll choose the clone’s. The Jedi had it easy for centuries, and now they’re not special or privileged anymore, they’re expendable just like my boys were. We owe them nothing.”

  He tipped the dregs of his caf down the drain and left the room.

  “It’s okay,” Ordo said. “Buir knew it was a risk from the start. He’s just angry with himself. If he’d told you to get lost and refused to hide Kina Ha, he’d be beating himself up now for passing on a chance to get her DNA.”

  A’den squeezed Ny’s shoulder. “Even if Palps had that datachip, how’s he going to identify you, or the ship, or even know where you are? Anyone looking for Mandalorians knows where to start anyway. Even a Weequay.”

  They were nice boys, kind boys. She couldn’t bear to see anything happen to them. “Tell me what I need to do to put this right, and I’ll do it. Whatever it is.”

  “Nothing you can do,” Mereel said. “Nothing anyone can do. I think we learned a long time ago that there was never going to be a point where we could shut the door, put our feet up, and say, ‘Well, it’s all going to be plain sailing from now on.’ We don’t live in that kind of world. We’re always going to be fighting.”

  Skirata came back a few minutes later with a few sheets of flimsi in his hand, reading as he walked. “Jaing thinks he’s got about ninety percent of the data, or he will have in a couple of hours. Then it just needs someone to sift through it and evaluate it.”

  “Me,” Mereel said. “Seeing as I don’t have a date tonight.”

  “Yeah, you need the rest,” Ordo muttered.

  “Altis crops up a lot.” Skirata seemed to have forgotten his near argument with Ny. “He’s a busy boy. Looks like he’s running at least a couple of escape routes. Somebody find me some intel on Plett’s Well.”

  “Never heard of it, but that’s a challenge I can’t resist,” Mereel said. “Any clues?”

  “Jedi safehouse, by the sound of it. Maybe that’s where all the survivors headed.” Skirata looked up and caught Ny’s eye. She hoped he wasn’t thinking the worst. He said he wasn’t getting involved in anyone else’s wars now, just looking after his own. “That’d be dumb, huddling in one place. You think they’d have learned from us. Bas’lan shev’la. Scatter. Don’t present a single target.”

  “Coordinates?”

  “If Jaing can find them, that’ll come in handy.”

  Ny didn’t dare say a word. This wasn’t the time to provoke Skirata. She knew him well enough by now to realize that he switched into a savagely protective mode when he thought his family was under threat, and in that state of mind he’d think nothing of destroying whole planets, let alone individual beings. She wasn’t even sure he’d regret it afterward.

  He’s not like the men you knew back home. He grew up without rules. He’s always been on the edge of survival. He’s not Papa Kal all the time.

  “Hasn’t Bard’ika called in yet?” Skirata asked.

  “Not yet. Give him a couple of hours.”

  Skirata seemed placated. He walked over to Ny’s chair, eyes still fixed on the flimsi sheets, and patted her on the head just like he did the clones.

  “They used you up, Ny,” he said, still not looking at her. “Now it’s our turn.”

  He settled down in the chair again and went on reading. Occasionally, he snorted to himself, or said “Shab …” and shook his head. Eventually Jaing came into the kitchen with a thick sheaf of printed flimsi and dumped it on the table.

  “There you go, and that’s just a third of it,” he said. “Poor old Camas. It would really tick him off to know we were pawing through all his data. Can I have a caf break now?”

  “Son, you’re a genius.”

  “And modest with it. No Bard’ika yet? Maybe Ruu got him back for that Force punch at the POW camp. She’s a chip off the old block, Kal’buir—never forgets a grudge.”

  “Munit tome’tayl, skotah iisa.” Skirata winked. “That’s long memory, short fuse, Ny. The Mandalorian character.”

  She didn’t know what to make of that. “I’ll leave you lads to it,” she said, getting up and passing his chair. “Time for my rounds.”

  “Ny, it’s no big deal.” Skirata caught her arm, as if he did that all the time. “We’re pretty sure you were just a name on a list. Nothing else.”

  “I know,” she said. But she also knew he’d corner Scout and ask her why she’d approached Cornucopia, just to double-check, and that in his position she’d have done exactly the same.

  Ny wandered around the house, checking who was where, as if the place was her ship and she was securing hatches for launch. Habit was comforting. Scout was with Uthan in the lab, deep in a conversation that looked as if it was doing both of them good, two lost souls whose societies had been wiped out in an instant. Kina Ha was dozing in her room—or maybe she was meditating.
Besany was trying to get Kad to stand still to measure him for clothing. He was growing fast.

  Parja stood outside Arla’s room. The door was slightly open, and Ny could hear Laseema talking. Parja tapped her blaster in its holster.

  “Not taking any chances,” she whispered. “The sooner Mij’ika gets back with something stronger for her, the better.”

  Outside, Ny could see Jilka and Corr ambling arm in arm along the edge of the stream. That was definitely a romance in progress. In the distance, she could hear the sound of vibrosaws and occasional shouts as Levet and the Yayax boys built a fence. Or maybe it was a barn. She really didn’t know what they got up to most of the time, but they seemed happy enough doing it.

  Whatever was happening in the rest of the galaxy, life here was making a ferocious effort to get back to normal.

  Her rounds took her the full distance of the perimeter, enough of a walk to clear her head and put things in perspective. As she completed the circle and walked back through the yard, dodging the nuna as they squabbled over mudworms, she spotted Fi sitting on the wall, staring across to the woods.

  He didn’t notice her for a moment. He looked utterly dejected, shoulders sagging, and he hung his head for a moment as if he was crying. When her boots crunched on some gravel, he looked up and instantly transformed into cheerful, wisecracking Fi again.

  “So, are you going to call the cops and report your freighter stolen?” he said. “Bard’ika’s probably wrapped it around a tree by now. He’s as mad as a box of Hapan chags when he gets into a pilot’s seat.”

  Ny sat down next to him, wincing at the sharp edge of the brick under her backside, and put her arm around his shoulders.

  “Cut the act, ad’ika,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I’m not stupid.”