What new boys? We’re going to run out of reinforcements.
Blasterfire spat and flared; smoke roiled, and Darman made an effort not to react to the screaming and yelling. Niner reached out and put his hand on his shoulder, saying nothing.
“Got him,” said Corr. He paused and made a low rumbling noise in his throat for a split second, just like Sev. “By the lead vehicle. Look at that filthy hut’uun.”
For a moment Darman couldn’t work out why Corr had suddenly taken Haurgab’s civil war so personally, but when he magnified his HUD image he understood. Jolluc—yes, it was him—was sporting a few pieces of white plastoid armor, trooper armor. He swaggered through the smoke as if there wasn’t a firefight in progress.
There was only one way he could have acquired it, and that made this battle suddenly very personal indeed.
“I wonder what happened to the poor white job he took that from,” Corr whispered, taking aim. “Well, shab-face, here’s where you find out that trooper armor isn’t as hardened as Katarn kit…”
Niner swung back to the repeating blaster. They hadn’t bargained on this many rebels showing up, so they’d have to leave it behind. One good shot, and the Maujasi wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the location in all this confusion.
“Soon as we’re sure he’s down, bang out,” Niner said. “Got it?”
Corr squeezed the trigger without another word. Darman saw the plume of hot vapor like a puff of smoke rise from Jolluc’s head, and the rebel leader—nothing special, balding, maybe fifty—seemed to leap for a moment before falling backward against a burning truck.
“Still moving,” Darman said.
Atin squeezed off a shot. “Not anymore…”
Niner scrambled to grab his Deece. “Okay, job done—let’s go.”
They could be down the slope and out into the rocky hills before the Maujasi had worked out what had happened. They could have.
“Sniper! Sniper!”
The shout rang out across the wadi, and the firing paused for a moment. Then something whooshed a meter or so above the crumbling wall of the fort, sending Darman and the others diving for cover. A mortar exploded some distance behind them.
The next one would probably get the range right.
“We’re screwed,” Corr said wearily, and snapped off his Deece’s sniper attachment to replace it with the ion pulser. “They know we’re here.”
“By the time we get to the bottom they’ll be waiting for us.” Darman counted again; maybe twenty rebels still standing. “We can take twenty.”
Niner knelt down and aimed the repeater. “I’ll give them something to think about and you lot bang out.”
Darman ignored him and loaded a few grenades. Atin and Corr didn’t jump to obey orders, either.
“Don’t start that, Sarge,” Atin said. “You know we don’t do that. Let’s go.”
Some repulsortrucks had now managed to pull back and were making a run for it back toward Rishun. Another mortar round shaved a meter over the squad’s heads, way too close. The air was thick with pulverized rock and smoke from a burning vehicle. Darman switched filters on his visor with a couple of blinks and saw chaos in the haze, more debris than he expected and a lot of bodies.
“Okay, go. Go.”
Darman ran at a crouch for the exit point, thinking the others were following, but the faintest movement in Niner’s HUD point-of-view icon caught his eye. Through the haze that hung in the narrow pass, there was a growing tide of movement. Shapes—ones and twos at first, then dozens—were pouring out of openings in the sides of the wadi.
“I make that about a hundred…,” Niner said quietly, stacking what ammo he still had next to the repeater.
Corr swallowed audibly. “Tunnel network,” he said. “Told you so.”
The rebels had a lot more troops than Intel—or Omega—had thought, and they were all coming out to play. And they knew exactly where Omega were now.
It was one thing to fight past twenty rebels when you had armor and they didn’t. A hundred—that was a different matter.
“Oh… shab,” said Darman.
Private booth in the Haunch of Nerf cantina,
Coruscant university quarter
Mandalorians were lying savages, loyal to nobody and congenitally violent. They’d steal anything that wasn’t nailed down; they’d kill for a bet.
That was what a lot of folks thought of Mando’ade, and Kal Skirata was now relying on that thuggish stereotype to cover his tracks. The last thing he wanted any aruetii to know was that he needed information for purely emotional reasons. It always made negotiations harder.
“So, can you help me out or not, Professor?” He fixed the biologist with his best I’m-not-just-some-ignorant-grunt expression and leaned back so that the shoulder holster under his best bantha-hide jacket was partially visible. Nobody took much notice of armored Mandalorians on Coruscant, but he preferred to work in plainclothes here. It just provided one connection too many if anyone bothered to join up the dots. “I don’t know how much university biology professors make a year, but I’m betting it’s not millions.”
Gilamar was sitting in on the meeting to add a little medical expertise, and Mereel provided a credible impression of hired muscle. The professor was Dr. Reye Nenilin: he was a gerontologist, the best in his field, and that was the kind of expert Skirata badly needed.
“I have a comfortable lifestyle,” Nenilin said. “I’d have to have a very good reason for putting that at risk.”
“They say you know more about the aging process than any being alive.”
“Do you mind my asking what your interest is?”
Mereel—Null ARC Lieutenant N-7—stood behind Skirata. “My father’s not getting any younger.”
“He’s such a cute kid,” said Skirata. “Takes after his mother. Okay, let’s just say I have some parts of a puzzle, a puzzle that might make a lot of creds when complete, and I’m looking for someone who can help me work out what the missing parts are.”
“Is your interest professional?” Nenilin asked.
“I’m a Mandalorian,” said Skirata. It didn’t do any harm for the guy to realize what he was dealing with. “Do I look like I might be motivated by a Republic Accolade for Scientific Advancement?”
“Pecuniary, then… and if the topic is the process of aging, then which parts of the puzzle do you have?”
“I bet I know what you’re thinking,” said Skirata.
“I’d be very surprised if you did.”
The prof was remarkably lippy for an unarmed desk jockey alone in a room with three Mandalorians, even unarmored ones. Skirata thought it was a shame he couldn’t slap some respect into him. “You’re thinking this is about some rejuvenation scam.”
“Most entrepreneurs are on the brink of discovery, if only I can give them a little help… you’d be surprised how many pharmaceutical opportunities I get offered, Master Fal.”
Fal. It was an alias Skirata hadn’t used before; he wondered why he’d chosen to use the name after so many years. Skirata had been his only reality since childhood.
“Actually, it’s an industrial process,” he said, forgetting about Falin Mattran. The only thing he could remember about Kuat now was a green transparisteel wall in his parents’ apartment that made the whole room feel as if it was submerged in shallow tropical water. “If I can resolve one aspect of it, it’d be worth a great deal to the cloning industry.”
Mereel was usually the one who skated on thin ice when it came to shaking down a target. Now Skirata heard the Null inhale slowly, carefully, as if he was getting ready to interrupt.
Hide stuff in plain sight, son. I taught you that, didn’t I?
“I’m struggling here,” said Nenilin. “I don’t know much about commercial cloning.”
“Well, that’s an oversight for a clever boy like you.” Skirata smiled, all acid. “Commercial cloning’s banned now under wartime legislation. That’s bad news if your business is based on clones. It means
you can’t replace them. They age fast, you see. It’s partly the mechanism for maturing them fast, but it’s also common sense—if you make clones, you want repeat business, so you build in obsolescence. Great for clonemasters, but right now plenty of businesses can’t replace clone labor and they want to make the most of the workforce they still have. They’d like to stop them from aging so fast.”
Nenilin looked at Skirata long and hard. Skirata decided he didn’t like the man much. He wore an old-fashioned tunic, the kind that out-of-touch aristocrats still favored, which probably explained why he hung out at the Haunch of Nerf. The place was tricked out to look rough-hewn and ancient, its tables inaccurately imagined replicas of antique rural feasting trestles, and instead of porceplast plates it served its meals on pleek trenchers. The ale was specially brewed to make sure it remained authentically cloudy and full of unidentifiable lumps. Nenilin probably thought this was how the working classes once lived, in some bucolic idyll of coarse plenty that never actually existed, and that somehow this was a desirable state to revert to.
You’ve got no idea, chum. You should try the real thing.
“I’m not sure I want to be complicit in the exploitation of cloned sentient beings,” said Nenilin. Mereel sat down next to him and gave Skirata a weary look. “It’s tantamount to slavery.”
What a great time to find an aruetii with half a conscience. Skirata decided it was one he only wore in public, and looked to Gilamar to pick up on the technical stuff. It wasn’t his area of expertise, but he’d been a proper doctor once, and he knew how to phrase the science stuff.
“Do you know how Arkanian Micro grows human beings to adulthood in a year or so?” Gilamar asked. “How any cloners operate?”
“In theory, yes. Do you work for the Arkanians?”
Skirata didn’t have to say yes or no. Nenilin’s assumptions did the lying for him. “If we worked for Arkanian Micro, we’d be breaking the law by working on cloning projects with a ban in force, wouldn’t we?”
“I suspect that turning their production over to pedigree nerf bloodstock wasn’t an option.”
“I couldn’t say.”
But Nenilin couldn’t resist filling in the gaps. He enjoyed being clever. He probably thought all Mandalorians were semi-literate grunts. “If I were Arkanian Micro, I’d want a stopgap solution—a way of extending the life of my product during the ban, but one that I had the option to reverse.”
“An aging switch,” Skirata said.
“Something of an impossible dream, in normal beings. But with organisms designed to mature and age faster, it would be more a matter of restoring the status quo for the species in question.”
“Exactly.” Skirata kept Gilamar in his peripheral vision, waiting for the point in the conversation where he would have to step in and discuss technical stuff with the prof. “And we’re talking about humans. Which is your specialist area.”
“I’d need to see… a specimen genome.”
Gilamar leaned forward slightly. “This is highly confidential data, and we’d like some reassurance that you understand how very sensitive this is.”
Nenilin looked irritated. “Like Master Fal said, any cloning activity, direct or ancillary, is illegal within the Republic unless licensed.”
“And of course, no researcher in your position would compromise their reputation with illegal work.”
So they all understood each other. If Nenilin helped them, he’d lose more than his job if he revealed his source. And he seemed hooked now. Finding out exactly how clonemasters controlled maturation was heady temptation for a gerontologist. Most commercial cloning research took place in-house, each company with its own closely guarded industrial secrets. Cloning companies spied on one another, didn’t share data, and weren’t averse to enforcing nondisclosure agreements with staff the hard way—with a blaster, or worse.
Skirata could almost see Nenilin’s thoughts forming like a hologram above his head; the glittering bronzium globe of a Republic Science Accolade, and rippling applause.
Gotcha.
Gilamar held out a datachip. “Here are some sequences for you to examine. The geneticist on this part of the project was silencing genes H-seventy-eight-b and H-eighty-eight, one by zinc and one by methylation.”
“Interesting,” said Nenilin, inserting the chip into his data-pad and frowning at the screen. “I’d have expected some manipulation of telomere length via checkpoint genes. Not those two… yes, that’s very interesting indeed.” He paused as if framing a delicate question. “Are you really a Mandalorian?”
“You mean how come I can use big words and don’t walk on my knuckles? Well, some of us evolved.” Gilamar snapped his thumb and forefinger together in demonstration. “See? Give us a few more weeks and we’ll invent the wheel.”
Nenilin had clearly riled the doc. Skirata willed Gilamar not to take a swing at him.
“I meant that you sound as if you had a scientific education,” Nenilin said carefully.
“Just a country doctor,” Gilamar said. “I don’t think Mandalore has produced a geneticist of note since Demagol.”
Nenilin’s expression said that he felt he ought to have known who Demagol was, but he didn’t, and so had no idea if Gilamar was mocking him or not. When he found out—if he found out—he’d discover the insult. But Skirata could see that the biologist was now firmly hooked by insatiable curiosity, and a small matter like comparison with the most notorious and loathed scientist in Mandalorian history wasn’t going to divert him from his quest now.
There was always the chance that Nenilin would fail to come up with anything useful. Ko Sai, filthy aiwha-bait though she was, had been an exceptional genetic engineer, perhaps the greatest ever. She’d be a tough act to follow.
“This isn’t the entirety of your material, is it?”
“Of course not,” said Skirata. “But we have associates who’d be emphatically disappointed if we handed you the whole file…”
Nenilin looked to Gilamar as if he was the Mando with the brain cell. “What do you want me to do, then?”
“Look at the data I’ve given you and tell me if the silencing of those two H genes would affect any in the cluster at chromosome Nine-A, or possibly Fourteen-B.”
“You’ve pinned that much down, then.”
“You tell me.”
“It’s more than just telomere activity you need to control if you want to stop accelerated aging. But I suspect you know that. Do you mind my asking the obvious, though?” Nenilin had a smug little smile. Skirata thought he probably spent far too much time with adoring students who thought he was a god. Maybe he should have let Gilamar smack Nenilin after all. “If your… associates managed to achieve controlled acceleration of aging, then they’d know the route to roll back from that to an unaltered genome.”
Gilamar managed a smile even more smug than Nenilin’s. “They’re not just manipulating maturation of humans,” he said. “I can’t reveal too much, obviously, but they might even be adding material from another individual’s genome or… building wholly artificial genes. You know the havoc that would play with the expression of characteristics.”
Nenilin’s eyes seemed to light up at the mention of artificially created genes. Maybe that was a daring new adventure for these lab jockeys. “Or does this data come from a rival, and so you’re lacking critical parts of it?”
Skirata cut in. “Let’s just say the geneticist who could best help us is a little indisposed, because she’s dead.”
That knocked the smirk off Nenilin’s face. Skirata hoped that his cloudy mock-rustic ale choked him, but not before he did something useful. He hadn’t even asked how much he’d get paid. Skirata didn’t trust anyone who didn’t have a price.
“I have a condition,” Nenilin said. Skirata nodded. Nice normal greed. That’s a relief. “Of course.”
“If I can solve your little puzzle, then I want to be able to use the research for my own study. No embarrassing revelations about the source
, of course. I give you my word.”
It wasn’t as if the guy would forget it once he’d worked it out anyway; you didn’t forget that kind of stuff, and so it was bound to influence whatever experiments he was running at the university. But Skirata didn’t give a mott’s backside what Nenilin did with the data as long as he got what he wanted, a way of stopping the relentless accelerated aging in clones, specifically his clones, his boys—his sons. The definition of Skirata’s responsibility had expanded since he’d first decided to look for a solution, and now he was ready to offer the cure to any clone in the Grand Army who wanted it, but his immediate circle, his family, came first.
“Shab, we’ll even pay you,” Skirata said, and casually tossed him a high-denomination cash credit chip as if the scientist was a waiter. “That’ll help you make a start. Buy some test tubes or whatever it is you use.”
“It’s refrigeration, hydraulic shearing machines, and cuvettes,” Nenilin said. “But thank you.”
“We’ll be in touch every week, by comm.” Skirata got up and headed for the exit. “Pleasure doing business, Dr. Nenilin.”
Mereel and Gilamar followed Skirata out into the main salon of the cantina, through a noisy, braying crowd of well-spoken patrons with the same air of faded nobility that Nenilin had. And they say clones are all the same, do they? Skirata’s ingrained mistrust of the social classes above him came from more than just his Kuati roots. It was the way they combined detached cluelessness with their certainty that they knew best. That was what got his adrenaline prompting him to take a swing every time. He inhaled the cool air in the alley outside; it felt as if he was surfacing from drowning. Even the alley was built in a mock-ancient style, trying to pass itself off as some baronial fort. It was a year old if it was a day.
Skirata pulled three strips of ruik root from his pocket, handed them around, and chewed thoughtfully. “What do you reckon, Mij?”
“Let’s see what he comes up with.”
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