501st: An Imperial Commando Novel

by Karen Traviss

  Shysa made a hmmmm noise. “Is it safe?”

  “Well, we’re not dead yet. You just get a mild fever and a runny nose. But I wanted your blessing to spread it. It’s not like we can ask everyone for their consent.”

  “Ah … Kal, I never thought I’d see the day when you got a bad case of medical ethics, you old shabuir.”

  “We’ve just got better scientists than Palps has.”

  “You won the Corellian lottery, then. Again.”

  “Yeah.” Skirata felt a sudden chill down his spine as he realized he hadn’t checked the clan accounts with Jilka for days. The numbers multiplied like bacteria. He could bankroll a small army for Shysa. “Natural born winner.”

  “I’ll mention to the clans that there’ll be a little bug doing the rounds but that we’ll be all the stronger for it.”

  “Then we can all laugh at Palps when he tries to wipe us out.”

  “I’m glad you’re on our side, Kal. You’re a strange and dangerous wee fella. Will this make the Imperials here immune, too?”

  “Yes, if they mix with us. Win some, lose some.”

  “Then it’s back to shootin’ ’em when they outstay their welcome. Drop by for a glass or two, Kal. Door’s always open.”

  Skirata closed the comlink and looked to Uthan for approval. She gave him a baffled frown.

  “You Mandos are thoroughly contradictory,” she said. “One minute you’ll kill the first person to try to impose rules on you. The next you think it’s okay to infect your entire population without their knowledge or consent.”

  “Forgive me if I say that’s rich coming from you.”

  “Face it. You’re all split personalities.” She looked at her chrono, lips moving as if she was calculating. “We’ll stay infectious for a few more days, so better get on with it. Pity we’re on the run. I would have loved to submit a paper on this.”

  It was a good excuse to take a few of the ad’ike into Keldabe. Everyone was getting a little restless, and Skirata wanted to check for himself exactly who was in town. He stuck his head around the kitchen door.

  “Walon, are you still sulking, or are you coming with us?”

  Vau wiped his nose. “Okay. Change of beskar’gam, though. No point asking for trouble.”

  Jusik, Gilamar, Vau, the Nulls, and Skirata swapped out armor plates from the stores and emerged in unrecognizable colors. It was enough to avoid the attention of any dumb Imperial who had a checklist of wanted Mandos wearing certain colors of beskar’gam. All the vode had to do now was take their helmets off in tapcafs when prying Imperial eyes weren’t watching, cough in confined spaces, and touch as many surfaces as they could. Keldabe was a hub for the whole planet. Eventually the infection would spread like the wirt-cough epidemic had forty years before, across the planet and throughout the Mandalore system by travel, and—eventually—around the galaxy.

  Slow. But covert.

  “Can they charge us with bioterrorism?” Jusik asked.

  Skirata thought of Jaller Obrim for a moment, and missed their long rambling discussions in the CSF staff club over an ale. “They can nick us for looking at them funny and being willfully Mandalorian with malice aforethought in a public place.”

  Vau opened the hatch of an old agricultural shuttle laid up in one of the barns and ushered the rest of them inside. A whiff of roba dung and straw rolled out. Mird trotted up expectantly, tail whipping, but Vau pointed back to the house. “Zey, Mird’ika. Guard the jetii.”

  Mird ambled back through the kitchen doors, grumbling to itself. Skirata knew that it was going to shadow Zey even into the ’freshers until Vau got back and told it to stand-down. It was a pity most sentient species weren’t that smart.

  “When we finish spreading the plague, we need to get on with off-loading our Jedi,” Skirata said.

  Gilamar coughed, and this time it wasn’t the virus. “I was meaning to talk to you about that, Kal. Scout wants to stay, poor kid.”

  “Plenty of room for strays.”

  “She wants to stay as a Jedi.”

  Skirata strapped himself into his seat and choked back his reflex rejection. “Okay. It’s not like she’s the first.”

  “No, Kal, she wants to stay a Jedi. Not become a Mando. But it’s okay. We’ve got Togorian Mandos. If they can fit in, Scout can, too. It’s only temporary—she seems to need Uthan at the moment.”

  “Interesting choice of mother figure.” Skirata could hardly blame Gilamar for wanting to be the archetypal Mando buir to any child in need. He decided to worry about Scout later. “So has anyone else got a surprise for me?”

  “Yes,” said Jusik. “Djinn Altis. Etain was invited to join them with Kad and Dar if she felt like it.”

  Jusik blurted it out as if he wanted to rid himself of the knowledge. Skirata felt his chest sink under the weight of loss.

  Etain could have survived Order 66, then.

  Skirata was learning to stop himself running through endless what-ifs, because a different fork in the road had been taken. He couldn’t change history, and he couldn’t live with the pain of being reminded that things could have been different. He had to walk away and accept that was how things had turned out.

  It was a massive effort. He usually failed.

  “Bard’ika,” he said, “if I ever make you feel you have to pick the right time to tell me things, I’m sorry. You should never have to tread on eggs with me, son”

  He didn’t mean it as a rebuke. He really did worry that his temper scared his family from telling him things.

  “I just don’t like opening wounds,” Jusik said. “Altis said he’d like to meet you sometime.”

  “I’d like to meet him, too. Especially as Dar and Niner are keeping tabs on him.”

  “Dar’s spitting blood about it.” Jaing didn’t sound as chipper as usual. “He still thinks we’re going soft on Jedi. Betraying our principles.”

  “I can see that, son. But I can’t win with Dar at the moment whatever I do, because he’s hurting too much.” No, I decided to behave all nice like an aruetuii, not a Mando, and he called me on it. “Let’s take one hurdle at a time.”

  The shuttle skimmed over familiar woods and fields and then followed the course of the Kelita River into Keldabe. Vau parked the shuttle near the animal market.

  “Seeing as your girlfriend failed to secure a proper bone for Mird, I’m going to see the butcher,” Vau said. “Never break a promise to a strill.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” Skirata said. “And Mird got the cookies.”

  Gilamar caught his arm by the biceps as they walked into the maze of alleys at the rear of the Oyu’baat cantina. “You’re a long time dead, Kal,” he said. “I know you put your needs a poor second to the lads’, but you’ve been a widower way too long.”

  “Is this a trend? You and Uthan, Jilka and Corr …”

  “Ruu and Cov.”

  “What?”

  “Your own daughter, and you don’t know where she spends her free time?”

  Skirata was stunned for a moment. He really needed to catch up with Ruu. He felt worse every day about neglecting her. Now she had a sweetheart, and he hadn’t even noticed.

  “You sure?” he said. “Cov? He’s just a kid.”

  “He’s roughly twenty-seven. Ruu’s thirty-six, thereabouts. In eight years or so, they’ll be the same age. Then he’ll start getting older than her.”

  Skirata never needed reminding that the clones were on borrowed time and that his personal priority was to put that right. But Gilamar’s stark analysis in relation to his own daughter really smacked him around the head. When he got back to Kyrimorut, he’d do whatever it took to get that gene therapy out of Uthan.

  The group split up, very casual, very random. Ordo went off with Gilamar. Now Skirata had to carry out his bizarre mission. He had to cough his guts out and give as many Mando’ade a mild dose of genetically modified rhinacyria as he could. Market day, held twice a week, meant the town was heaving with shoppers, dr
inkers, and scrappers, so Skirata slipped off his helmet one-handed to share his viral gift.

  Any Imperial who happened to venture into Keldabe wouldn’t even spot him. Skirata was out of practice, but he could still disappear simply by altering his body language and becoming a skinny old man nobody took any notice of until he wanted them to. It was an assassin’s skill. It was also a thief’s.

  It had been years since Skirata had gone anywhere with nothing to do except mooch around, and he wasn’t very good at doing nothing. He stopped at each tapcaf along the Chortav Meshurkaane and had a mug of hot shig, then ambled along the market stalls that lined the alley. One end was all leather items, from gloves and belts to kamas. The other was precious metals and gems, and somewhere in the middle the two trades met and mixed. Gilamar was right. He had to sort out where he stood with Ny. It affected the whole clan.

  Skirata looked over the gems and wondered what was an appropriate betrothal token for a man whose bank accounts had more zeros than he could count. It wasn’t his personal wealth. It was the clones’ fund. But he still had access to more creds than he would ever have a use for.

  Ah, shab. He didn’t even know what Ny liked. He’d buy something for Ruu, too, because he hadn’t bought his little girl a gift—a personal gift, not creds sent to her mother—for more than thirty years. He put his helmet back on, comforted by the instant access to comms and data, and took his virus further into town.

  The end of Meshurkaane opened onto the ancient paved square in front of the Oyu’baat, a space filled today with food stalls. A couple of stormtroopers strolled up and down the aisles. Skirata wasn’t sure if they were patrolling—why would they need to?—or if they were just exploring. Maybe the Imperial army had learned a lesson and worked out that men needed stand-easy time and a little breathing space.

  Empire or no Empire, his subconscious reaction to white plastoid armor was that these were his boys. Under their helmets, they would look like his boys. But they were not. If they were doing their jobs right, they’d check this scruffy little shabuir against their ID images in their HUDs, see the personal death warrant from Palpatine, and they’d pull him in. Thirteen years of constant, sleepless devotion to the liberation of their slave army wouldn’t count for naas.

  Instead of turning and retracing his steps down the Meshurkaane, Skirata carried on without deviating and walked slowly past them. He even stopped to buy a packet of spiced leathermeat. He didn’t see the stormies react. They were still facing dead ahead. But then he knew anything could have been happening under that helmet, and they could have been looking right at him.

  He carried on. They’d be looking for sand-gold armor with red sigils anyway, not this dark sea green. When he got to the far side of the square, he leaned on the rail to watch the Kelita River crashing over the granite rocks below while he unwrapped the leathermeat.

  Another great thing about his buy’ce, the distinctive Mandalorian helmet, was that the visor could not only give aging eyes a sharp view in infrared, low light, and UV, with a range of two kilometers, but also enlarge the infuriatingly small print on food packaging.

  But there was nothing wrong with his distance vision. When he turned around, something in the crowd drew his eye as familiar things did. It was out of time frame and context, something that rang a bell but took him a couple of slow seconds to pin down to a specific memory.

  It was a woman in yellow and gray armor, leather kama swinging as she walked, and a man in red and black. He’d seen that in some place or other every day of his life for the best part of eight years, and the place was Tipoca City.

  Ordo had warned him. It was Isabet Reau and Dred Priest.

  If Gilamar saw them, there’d be trouble. He loathed them with a passion. If anyone thought Jango Fett’s handpicked team of special forces experts had been one happy unit, then they really needed to understand what it was like to be marooned indefinitely on Kamino with folks you hated on sight and nowhere to escape them.

  Priest had run a fight club in one of the shadowy maintenance areas of the stilt city. He was a sick shabuir. He enjoyed seeing men really damage each other in fist-fights, and nobody needed that when they were training lads for armed combat. His girlfriend, Reau, was even worse, always harping on about restoring the glory of the Mandalorian empire through the iron will of the warrior.

  Skirata was all for Mando’ade kicking the osik out of anyone who got in their faces. That didn’t mean that aruetiise were inferior species; just enemies. But Reau and Priest really believed they were in need of the firm governing hand of a master state.

  “Kal?” Vau’s voice whispered over his helmet audio. “I can see you. Can you see what’s heading your way?”

  “Yeah. Where’s Mij?”

  “Ordo’s with him. It’s okay. But have you seen them?”

  “Yes. You going deaf as well, Walon? Right in front of me, almost on a collision course.”

  “Well, look harder.”

  Skirata doubted they’d recognize him. It had been more than three years since he’d last had to breathe the same air as those two, and he no longer had his distinctive limp. His only worry was that he wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to finally slide his three-sided blade into Priest where it would do the most damage. But he’d had plenty of chances on Kamino, where the Kaminoans were scared of the Cuy’val Dar and left them to run their affairs. It was lawless. And he still hadn’t done it.

  Gilamar had punched Priest senseless, though. He didn’t like young commandos showing up blinded in one eye or collapsing with brain hemorrhages. The fight club stopped for good after Jango gave Priest a good hiding.

  Skirata was five or six meters away from Priest and Reau now. If they’d been here during the war, he’d have known. It was a very small city in a world of only four million people. They’d come back with the Imperials.

  We’re mercenaries. Professionals. It’s no big deal. But those two …

  Skirata still couldn’t work out what Vau was so insistent he ought to see. It was only when Reau turned a little to her left that he saw the full surface of her shoulder plate, and the dark blue emblem on it.

  He thought it was a stylized jai’galaar at first, wings spread and half-folded back to swoop on its prey, talons outstretched, forming a vague W shape. But it wasn’t. And he had no idea how this woman had made it through Keldabe without getting a punch in the face at the very least.

  Shab, Priest had one of the emblems on his shoulder plate, too.

  Didn’t anyone else here know what that was?

  Skirata was now level with them, forced by the crowd to stop by the roba pie stall for a few seconds. He looked at Reau’s plate straight on.

  It wasn’t the same as the Death Watch emblem, but it was enough to almost trigger his reflex to swing a punch. It looked like a ragged, stylized silhouette of a shriek-hawk in dark blue paint. Dred and Reau moved past him and vanished into the crowds.

  Skirata just carried on walking, shaken. Vau caught up with him and they headed in silence for the Oyu’baat. They didn’t speak until they got inside, checked for Imperials, and took off their helmets.

  The barkeep gave them a weary look and set up two mugs of net’ra gal.

  “I told you—we asked the garrison to stay out of the place.” The thin head of pale amber foam settled on the black liquid like a mat of pond-barley as he contemplated it. “I’d lose half my custom if nobody could take off their buy’ce without being arrested.”

  Skirata noted his mug shot was still on the bounty poster behind the bar, along with everyone else’s. The sheet was splashed with some unidentifiable dark stain that might have been blood or even gravy. Some wag had inked in pointy schutta fangs on his image. Vau and Skirata grabbed their ales and found a quiet booth near a noisy hot-air unit, where they huddled over the mugs and tried to keep their voices down.

  “Well?” Vau said. “I know what I think that is.”

  “So do I. But nobody else seemed to be taking any notice.”<
br />
  “When did anyone last see the Death Watch here? Nearly thirty years ago. Update the badge, change from dark red to dark blue, and there you are. Nobody remembers. Some fancy diner used a symbol exactly like the winged circle of the Guuko Pure Light party and nobody under fifty thought there was anything wrong with it. Folks forget, and kids don’t get taught. And so these hut’uune get reinvented.”

  Skirata shut his eyes for a second to recall the symbol. It was a definite W shape. Older Mandos reacted to the Death Watch emblem just like the Guuko reacted to the Pure Light circle, which would always spell genocide to Guukosi who remembered the invasion.

  “Maybe we’re letting the personalities of the two hut’uune concerned shape our judgment,” said Skirata, realizing he was clutching at straws.

  “You know that’s osik. This isn’t the time of life to suddenly discover benefit of the doubt.” Vau leaned closer, almost nose-to-nose across the table with Skirata. “I don’t care if they’re cozying up to the Empire or the Holy Children of Asrat. It’s not the company they keep. It’s what they are. No true Mandalorian can live alongside the Death Watch.”

  Skirata wondered how many Mando’ade had given a mott’s backside about the power struggle between Jaster Mereel and the Death Watch. It hadn’t touched Mandalorians living off-world. It probably hadn’t even touched most of those living in the Mandalore sector. It was between two factions, relatively small factions. But it swallowed up the core of the full-time army and the leading clans, and it had been a battle for the heart of Manda’yaim—the very culture, how Mandalore would conduct itself for generations to come. The Death Watch represented the worst excess of an ancient imperial Mandalore.

  They’re rotten to the core. They’re dangerous.

  Skirata knew that no compromise could be reached with them. He could rationalize about the folly of trying to rebuild old empires, but in the end it was something he felt in his guts like a reflex revulsion at finding a decomposing body. He couldn’t help seeing the Death Watch as something disgusting.