True Colors

by Karen Traviss

  —Chancellor Palpatine, to Jedi general Arligan Zey, Director of Special Forces, Grand Army of the Republic

  DeepWater-class ship Aay’han,

  Mygeeto space,

  471 days after Geonosis

  “Fierfek.” Skirata sighed, watching the transponders mapped on the cockpit holochart. The picket of ships around Mygeeto made it look as if it were ringed by its own constellation. “I know Bacara’s keeping them busy down there, but that’s still quite a gauntlet to run.”

  “And we’re a forty-five-meter cargo ship,” Ordo said. “Just a laser cannon by way of armament. Mandalorian crew in full beskar’gam. Definitely not a Republic vessel.”

  “What d’you think, just walk in?”

  “Could do. Nothing links us to the Republic. And I always carry a range of current transponder codes, so that’s an easy fix.”

  “Well, we won’t win a battle with a warship, so that’s our choice made for us.”

  “Of course, a submersible’s sensors are perfect for getting an accurate three-dimensional scan of the site.”

  “In we go, then, Ord’ika.”

  Ordo studied the long-range orbital scan of the landing site. It was a vast glacier in a landscape of sheet ice and crystal rock. The penetrating scan showed few crevasses, but the sheet was honeycombed with irregular tunnels that meandered around one another like tangled yarn and occasionally crossed. The straight, uniform outlines of the ventilation shafts were easy to identify by contrast. Around the warm shafts, underground lakes of melted water had formed, capped by thinner ice sheets. Ordo copied the section of holochart to his datapad and didn’t even have to do the calculations to realize that searching each tunnel in the site that Delta had pinpointed would take days.

  Too long.

  An idea formed immediately in his mind, as well as a theory on what had happened to Vau. He might have fallen into the warren of tunnels—or through the ice into the liquid water beneath.

  It wasn’t good either way.

  “Crystal-worm tunnels,” Ordo said. “It’s fascinating how life-forms survive even in the most extreme places.”

  “If Vau’s out in those temperatures,” said Skirata, “he won’t be one of them. It’s been hours. Even in his beskar’gam, the seals won’t keep out that kind of cold indefinitely.”

  Ordo slid his electronic tool case out of his sleeve and took out an overwrite probe. He selected a randomly generated transponder code with a Mandalore prefix, and Aay’han ceased to register as licensed on Mon Calamari.

  “Okay, Kal’buir, now or never.”

  He maneuvered Aay’han into a landing trajectory and wondered whether to brazen it out by pinging Mygeeto Traffic Control and requesting permission to land. No water on board, a civilian vessel that anyone could scan to confirm its configuration—he’d sort that the moment they got out of here—and a couple of wandering mercs at the helm: even with a battle going on, he might get away with it.

  He opened the traffic frequency. “Mygeeto TC, this is Mandalorian cargo vessel Aay’han. Request permission to set down for replenishment.”

  The pause was longer than he expected. “Aay’han, this is Mygeeto TC. For Mandalorians, you’re remarkably slow to notice we have hostilities ongoing.”

  “Mygeeto, scan our tanks for water.”

  The next pause was even longer. “Aay’han, we note your tanks are zeroed. Unfortunately, our city facilities are closed. Remember the hostilities?”

  If he was turned away now, he’d blown it. They’d drawn Mygeeto’s attention to them. “Mygeeto, there appears to be water just under the surface west of the hostilities, and Mandalore does give assistance to the CIS. We’ll refill at our own risk.”

  “Aay’han, okay, go ahead, and don’t try to sue us if you sustain damage or injury. Make sure you’re off the planet in two standard hours.”

  Ordo felt his shoulder muscles relax. He hadn’t realized he’d tensed them. “Mygeeto, understood.”

  He closed the link. Skirata winked at him and grinned. Kal’buir was proud of him, and it made him feel as safe and confident now as it had when he was a small child.

  “It’s amazing how rarely you need to use force,” he said, relieved.

  Without the coordinates from Delta, Ordo knew he wouldn’t have known where to start the search for Vau. Mygeeto’s surface was a windswept icescape, dazzlingly pretty for a few minutes and then fatally disorienting. Ordo set Aay’han down between cliffs on the edge of the underground lake and sealed his armor, and as he opened the hatch the wind shrieked and howled. He slid off the hull, and Skirata dropped down beside him.

  “He’s been out here for four hours, Kal’buir.” Ordo activated his helmet’s infrared filter, adjusted it to its most sensitive setting, and cast around on a square search of a twenty-meter grid. “If he’s dead, I might still pick up a temperature differential, but it’s unlikely.”

  Skirata paced the imaginary grid with slow, silent deliberation, sweeping a handheld scanner across the surface to locate holes and fissures, and then scanning for temperature changes. Ordo suddenly wondered if he’d been tactless, and that Kal’buir might be upset at the thought of Vau being dead. The two men had been at each other’s throats ever since he could remember, but they also went back a long time, including all those years training clones on Kamino, erased from the galaxy and dead to all who knew them.

  “I’m sorry, Buir,” he said.

  “Don’t be.” Skirata checked a readout on his forearm plate. “I’m scanning for metals. This detects twenty meters down.”

  Skirata might have been genuinely unmoved, interested only in the proceeds of the robbery. For once Ordo couldn’t tell, but he doubted it. Skirata felt everything on raw nerves. They paced slowly, leaning against the wind, and Skirata seemed to be cycling through his comlink frequencies because Ordo was picking up spikes on his system. Vau might have left a link open. It was worth trying.

  “No paw prints,” Skirata said. “Wind’s probably swept them away.”

  Ordo switched from infrared to the penetrating sensor. It was like checking in mail slots, a tedious progression from one hole to the next. A recent fall of snow was drifting, filling in the depressions. “He could be anywhere. He might even have got out and found shelter.”

  Skirata tilted his head down as if listening. Ordo caught a burst of audio on the shared comlink. “If he is, his helmet systems are down.”

  “I’m getting static.”

  “He might be down too deep.”

  Ordo was starting to feel the cold seeping through his armor joints. If this had been his GAR-issue suit, he’d have had temperature control, but his Mandalorian beskar’gam was more basic. He’d fix that as soon as he got the chance, just like he’d upgraded his helmet. It wasn’t as if he spent a lot of time working in it. He’d never thought to check how Vau’s suit was configured: it was just matte black, an image he dreaded as a kid, and now unsettlingly like Omega’s Katarn rig. Black was the color of justice. Kal’buir’s armor was sand gold, the color of vengeance. Ordo had opted for deep red plates simply because he liked the color.

  But black or gold, if Vau didn’t have coldproofing or some other protection, he’d be dead now.

  “Don’t laugh, son,” Skirata said, “but I’m going to try something old-fashioned. Just like you talked your way past the picket.”

  He stood with his arms at his sides and yelled.

  “Mird! Mird, you dribbling heap, can you hear me?” The wind was drowning out his voice. He clenched his fists and tried again. “Mird!”

  Ordo joined in calling the strill’s name. He almost expected to see a patrol closing in on them, but his helmet sensors showed nothing.

  “Strills can stand cold,” Skirata said, pausing to get his breath. “And they’ve got better hearing than humans. It was worth a try.” He tapped his forearm controls, adjusting his helmet’s voice projector to maximum. “Mird!”

  How would they even hear the animal if it responded to
their calls? Ordo was about to go back and start using the ship’s sensor systems to probe deeper into the ice, but he heard Skirata say “Osi’kyr!” in surprise and when he turned, the snow was shaking. The thin crust broke. A gold-furred head pushed through like a hideously ugly seedling, a thick layer of white frost on its muzzle.

  “Mird, I’ll never curse you again,” Skirata said, and knelt down to scoop away the chunks of ice. The animal whined pitifully. “Is he down there, Mird? Is Vau down there?” He hesitated and then rubbed the folds of loose skin on its muzzle. “Map the tunnel for me, Ord’ika.”

  The holochart hung in the air, a 3-D model of the ice beneath them. The tunnel that Mird had struggled out of ran down at a thirty-degree angle and curved close to the margin of the lake before snaking away again and disappearing off the chart in the direction of Jygat.

  “It’s about sixty meters down to the bend, and the diameter there is only a meter,” Ordo said. “If he fell, chances are he came to rest at the bend.”

  “Long way down.” Skirata had his arms around Mird, and Ordo wasn’t sure if he was hugging the animal or trying to shelter it. It was a marked change of attitude, given that he’d thrown his knife at it more than once in the past. “Mird, find Vau. Good Mird. Here.” He took out a length of fibercord from his belt and knotted it around Mird’s neck. “Go find him. You couldn’t drag him out, could you? Is he stuck? Find him.”

  Mird struggled back down the tunnel, making rasping noises with its claws like a skater, and then there was silence again.

  “Mird’s clever, but a strill can’t tie knots,” said Ordo. “So if Vau’s dead or unconscious, what are you doing?”

  “Measuring,” said Skirata. He had a tight grip on the line, watching it intently. Eventually it went taut. “Fierfek, there’s never a Jedi around when you need one, is there? Bard’ika could have done his Force stuff and located Vau right away.” He tugged on the line. “Back, Mird. Come back.” The line went slack again. “Given how much line I’m holding, minus the loop, Vau’s at fifty-eight meters.”

  “If Mird reached him.”

  “It’d stay with Vau. Trust me, it stopped where Vau is when the line went taut. Now all we have to do is get to him.”

  The solution was obvious to Ordo. “We breach the tunnel at the thinnest point of the ice, which is where it runs next to the lake, and that’s less than eight meters thick.”

  “And flood the tunnel…”

  “No.”

  “Or flush him into the lake and lose him. Either way, he’s dead.”

  “Either way,” Ordo said, utterly relieved that he recalled every line of the DeepWater manual, “I line the ship up, starboard-side-to, and work through the ice with the boarding tube from the air lock. Dry entry.”

  Skirata looked up at him for a moment. Ordo didn’t need to see his face to know what he was thinking.

  “You still manage to amaze me, son. You really do.”

  “Just hope we don’t hit rock.”

  Mird crawled out of the tunnel and flopped at Skirata’s feet, panting. It was a struggle to get the strill into Aay’han, probably because it thought they were leaving Vau behind, but it was weak and frozen, and that meant Skirata and Ordo could subdue it between them.

  Ordo set the ship down on the frozen surface of the lake. If the ice cracked and they fell through, that was fine, because it would save him the trouble of smashing through. But it didn’t.

  Shields. What did it say about shields when diving? Reconfigure. He tapped in the commands and waited. Amber indicators changed one by one to green. Okay, now avoid any serious impacts…

  Ordo lifted Aay’han clear of the surface, climbed steeply, and fired a laser round at the lake at what he hoped was a safe distance from the ice wall. Steam plumed up beneath him like a geyser. A chunk of ice lifted vertically and bobbed for a second before sliding back again.

  The lake would freeze over fast. “Brace for dive,” he said, and took her in a slow nosedive.

  “Osik.”

  “Oh yes—”

  Do other people live their lives like this? Do they take these kinds of risks?

  It wasn’t the time to worry about that. Ordo hadn’t yet met a problem he couldn’t solve or a situation he couldn’t survive. Aay’han pushed through the shattered surface, and even at low speed it seemed like crashing into solid rock. For a moment Ordo thought he’d got it badly wrong, but the slow ice impact wasn’t anywhere near as violent as weapons fire, and the shield held. Chunks scraped and screeched as she passed through the slush layer, and then everything went quiet in clear twilight water. They were in the lake itself. Now he had to align the air lock with Vau’s position.

  “You knew the hull would take that, right, Ord’ika?” Skirata jumped out of the copilot’s seat and pulled off his helmet. He looked shaken.

  “Of course I did. Well, ninety percent sure.”

  “Okay, close enough. Let’s do some scanning.”

  The air lock was nearly two meters in diameter. Ordo aligned it at Vau’s rough position and used the penetrating sensors to look for a dense mass. Skirata went into the starboard cargo bay with his metal scanner and opened the inner air lock hatch. The warning light lit up on the console, and Skirata’s voice crackled over the ship’s intercom.

  “Big immobile lump of durasteel and beskar about six meters in,” he said. “Good old Mandalorian iron. You can’t beat the stuff. That’s Vau all right.”

  Six meters: that was a pretty thin wall between the tunnel and the water. At least there was no worm activity, but there was no way of knowing if the shock wave from the laser round would attract them. “Let me reposition. I’m a meter off.”

  “I can’t tell if he’s alive.”

  “Okay, we’ve got to cut through that ice now.”

  “Heat it,” Skirata said.

  “We can vent the meltwater through the tanks.”

  “About eighty cubic meters. Maybe less.”

  “Okay.” Ordo hiked the thermostat on the environmental controls: they needed to raise the temperature of the exposed ice on the other side of the air lock any way they could. “Maybe a combination of heat and cutting.”

  “And Mygeeto TC wants us out of here in… about an hour and a half.”

  Ordo extended the outer docking ring until he felt it embed in the lake wall. “Come out of the air lock, Kal’buir. I need to test for leaks. Clear?”

  “Clear. I’m going to see what we’ve got in the tool locker.”

  “Okay, closing inner air lock.” The status light changed to green again. He put Aay’han on autohelm to hold her steady against the ice wall. “Opening outer hatch.”

  The sensors showed no leaks. When Ordo maneuvered the safety cam inside the air lock chamber, he saw a smooth glassy disc of dirty ice. A few meters on the other side of that lay Walon Vau. If they got it wrong while they tried to cut through the wall, the water would flood in and sink Aay’han. It was a lot of trouble to go to for a few credits and a man both of them disliked.

  On too many occasions, Ordo had wished Vau dead. Now he found himself willing the chakaar to stay alive.

  Special Operations Brigade HQ,

  Coruscant,

  General Arligan Zey’s office,

  471 days after Geonosis

  Sev thought it was just as well he had a reputation for being uncommunicative. General Zey walked up and down the short line of four commandos as if he was doing an inspection, pausing occasionally to stare at a detail of their armor or look into their eyes.

  If the Jedi thought that would psych out Delta Squad, he’d have a long, long walk ahead of him.

  Sev stared straight ahead, hands clasped behind his back, boots planted firmly at shoulder width. In his peripheral vision, General Jusik sat on a table swinging his legs. His disheveled Padawan image didn’t fool anyone. Sev had been on enough operations with him to know that he could make Scorch look overcautious. Zey’s ARC trooper aide, Captain Maze, prowled the room as if he was
n’t listening to the debriefing. On balance, Sev preferred the Null ARCs. They understood in a way that the men trained by Fett simply didn’t.

  Zey came to a halt in front of Boss and stood with his nose almost touching his. “I’m not stupid,” he said quietly. “Am I, Sergeant?”

  “Sir, no sir!” Boss barked.

  “Want to tell me what went wrong with your exfiltration?”

  “Sir, we encountered some resistance and were forced to exit the complex via an unreconnoitered passage, sir.”

  Sev felt for Boss. They’d all made the decision to stick with Vau, but Boss was… the boss. So he got it in the neck. Sev found the occasional trips back to HQ unsettling. He wanted to be back out in the field with just his brothers for company, because Coruscant wasn’t their world, and he’d already had enough of it.

  Zey was still in Boss’s face. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with Skirata, would it, Three-Eight?”

  “Sir, no sir!”

  Well, that much was true. Nobody had actually lied to Zey yet, because Jedi had a way of telling if someone was lying. Zey took a pace back, seemed to be suppressing a smile, and then shook his head.

  “Well,” he said at last, sitting down behind his fancy lapizinlaid desk. “Good result on Mygeeto. General Ki-Adi-Mundi has sent his commendation.”

  Don’t care. What’s happened to Sergeant Vau?

  “Can we eat it, sir?” Scorch asked, straight-faced.

  “I realize you returned with indecent haste, Delta.” Zey turned to Maze. “Captain, once I’m through with this briefing, take Delta straight to the mess and stand over them while they eat the recommended daily intake.”

  Maze, looking less than thrilled by his nursemaid duties, grunted, “Sir.” Jusik, who’d been staring out the window, suddenly flinched as if someone unseen had walked up behind him. Jedi were weird.