“Nothing to worry about, ma’am,” he said. “Some trouble at the Temple. There’s been an attempted coup, but it’s under control now. You’re free to go anywhere, but the skylanes around the Temple are closed for the time being because of drifting smoke.”
His accent was different. He was almost like the men she knew and served with, but not quite. Now she was as sensitive to tiny variations as any clone.
“Thank you, Captain,” she said.
Her comlink blipped again. She checked it, and it was Jusik: I SAY AGAIN, WAIT UNTIL I COLLECT YOU.
Etain was getting annoyed. She didn’t have time to stop and send messages now. She didn’t have far to go—five or six klicks, no more. She tapped a reply. I’M FINE. STAY THERE. WHERE’S DAR? TELL HIM TO GO. CAN’T REACH HIM.
She started walking toward the reservoir sector. It would take her ten minutes to cover the walkways to the speeder bus terminal. If she stayed among crowds, she’d be fine. The only uncertain part of the journey was when she had to descend to the lower levels, and that was because of the low-life scum she’d encounter, not because she’d be hunted for having been a Jedi.
She strode out across the paved plaza, feeling awkward because Soronna’s borrowed shoes were a little too big for her and she was sliding around in them. As she rested her hand in the bag slung over her shoulder, and felt the silky fur of the toy nerf, she realized that her jumble of emotions didn’t include shock at the fact that Master Windu had tried to oust the Chancellor.
Skirata obviously had good intel, but she was more surprised that someone had managed to kill Windu during the attempt.
Aay’han,
emergency reservoir,
2235 hours
“No,” Skirata said firmly into the comlink in his fist. “I’m not having everyone running around this shabla city like maniacs. Get your shebs down here, Corr. And drag Atin by his ears if necessary. It’s under control. We’re dealing, okay?”
“Yes, Sarge, but—”
“I love you, son, but I need you to do exactly what I tell you. Okay?”
“Yes, Sarge.”
Skirata understood completely how Corr felt, because his own instinct was to get up top and haul people in. He’d never been good at securing the hatches and leaving, even when it was the most sensible option that would save the most lives. He stared up at Aay’han’s deckhead as if he could see through it if only he concentrated hard enough, and kept checking the chrono readout on the bulkhead. Eventually, he heard familiar voices through the open outer hatch. He breathed easy again, at least for a moment.
Atin gave him a playful punch in the shoulder.
“I said to dump the armor,” Skirata scolded.
“I know, but we looked more conspicuous in bodysuits.”
Corr looked around the crew cabin, thumbs hooked in his belt. “It’s cramped, but I’ll take it.”
Fi stuck his head out of the galley. “You think you’re funny, but I’ll show you how it’s done properly.”
Nerves were frayed. The banter, the sharp and strained humor, had started. Skirata could hear the edge in their voices, even Fi’s. He paced up and down the deck.
“Okay, we’re still short Etain, Niner, Dar, and A’den. Etain’s on her way, and won’t behave and let us collect her—Dar and Niner haven’t called in for fifteen minutes—and A’den, as far as I know, is—”
“Where’s Ordo?” Fi asked.
“At the barracks, doing a final check to make sure we haven’t forgotten anything.”
It was crowded in the small submarine. They all had cabins or bunk space, and Skirata wanted everyone to keep clear of the main crew deck, mainly because he was getting agitated with folks trying to keep out of his way. But also because he was worried about Vau. The old chakaar had taken the news about Sev in complete silence, not a twitch on his face, and that usually meant things within him were fermenting at an unhealthy rate. Vau stood leaning with one hand flat on the bulkhead, the other tucked in his belt while he gazed down at his boots. Mird sat at his feet, staring intently into his face. Vau obviously wasn’t looking at the strill.
“Walon,” Skirata said, “can I do anything?”
“I understand,” Vau said quietly. “I actually get it. Shab, why didn’t I see this coming?”
His tone was so un-Vau-like that it got instant silence on the deck. “You want to talk?” Skirata asked. It was a lousy time. “What’s the problem?”
“Jango… Jango had patience. Jango could wait for eternity if he had to. And, wayii, it seems he could wait after death, too.”
Skirata glanced around the deck at everyone standing idle. “Bard’ika,” he said, “come here. Everyone else—into your cabins, and get some rest if you can. There’s still a hard night ahead.”
It was an order, however softly it was phrased, and they all got the picture pretty fast. The deck emptied. Jusik stood between the two men, silent.
“Get it off your chest, Walon,” Skirata said. “Come on, ner vod.”
Vau straightened up. “You never liked Jango, did you?”
“I liked him enough. What I didn’t like was how he ended up. Jango never gave a toss about anyone but himself. Some Mandalore he turned out to be—he was always away in the latter years, and he was as bad as the Jedi when it came to turning a blind eye to what was happening to his clones. No, Shysa’s a fool if he thinks a Fett dynasty is good for Manda’yaim. We’re better off without him.”
“You reckon?”
“I do. Sorry, but I do. You suddenly his best mate or something?”
Vau suddenly grabbed Skirata by the collar. Shab, he was strong; he almost lifted Skirata bodily as he shoved him against the bulkhead. They’d brawled many times, drawn blood, come close to killing each other, but Skirata had never seen Vau lose his temper, not once. And that was enough to stun him into silence.
“Now do you see? Do you?” Vau hissed the sibilant like escaping steam. Mird cowered on the floor, whining softly. “I’m sick to death of your sentimental twaddle about Jango betraying us by letting Kamino use his genes. He did it to stop the Jedi. He did it to create an army strong enough to bring them down. You drone on about the injustice of un-elected elites, my little working-class hero—well, now they’re gone. Yes, it cost our boys’ lives, but the Jedi are gone, gone, gone. And they won’t be killing Mandalorians again, not for a long time. Maybe never.”
Vau was white-faced and trembling. Then he seemed to shake himself out of whatever alien persona had taken hold of him, adjusted his collar, and tugged down the sleeves of his flight suit. He was the ice-cold patrician again. Skirata still couldn’t summon up any love or guilt about Jango, but suddenly it made sense, and he knew in his guts that it had been about a lot more than five million creds.
I should have known. Why demand a son as part of the fee? Jango lost everyone he ever loved or cared about, time after time.
And the Jedi had still killed him in the end. If Boba was anything like his father in more than looks, then he’d have a monstrous sense of vengeance boiling up in him now, and no Jedi to take it out on.
“You never told me what you got up to on Kamino in the time before the rest of the Cuy’val Dar showed up,” Skirata said, trying to look as if he’d taken the outburst in stride. “So what else are you going to tell me?” Shab, they might not have been best buddies from birth, but they were as close as two Mando’ade could get. Vau owed him some honesty. “You were the galactic freestyle dancing champion, too?”
Vau didn’t meet Skirata’s eyes for a moment, but he glanced at Jusik. “I could have been at Galidraan, but I wasn’t, and I never forgot that. Not my fight. Should have been my fight.”
“And you could have been dead, now, too. Bard’ika, if you don’t know—”
“Oh, I know what happened at Galidraan,” Jusik said. “I know Jedi wiped out Jango’s entire army.” He paused. “And I know Jango killed Jedi with his bare hands, too, because I once talked to a Jedi who was there.”
> Vau nodded approvingly. “See, if you want to take out Jedi,” he said, “only the likes of Jango could really do it. Only his clones, trained by him, and by men and women like him. That’s why he knew it had to be done. He couldn’t take them all down alone, but he knew an entire army of Jangos could.”
Skirata thought of the abuse he’d heaped on Jango. He knew the man; he’d fought with him, in every sense of the word, and he’d also had comradely moments with him. The thought that he might have done him a disservice was one burden of guilt too many. He shut it out. If Jango had been playing the long game, Skirata had never caught a whiff of it. He knew it wasn’t all about the credits. He’d seen Jango cradling Boba in the early days, and that man wanted a son as much as any man ever had. So Skirata hadn’t looked for any motive beyond that. It was the only motive Skirata would have had.
“I stand corrected,” said Skirata. How do I apologize? Where do I even start, with the osik I have to deal with now? “So I was wrong about Jango.”
And now I know why Shysa wants Jango’s legacy to live on at any cost.
Vau shrugged. “I let him down once.” Vau would never shake off that feeling of having failed, the legacy of his vile father. He’d instilled it into his clones, despite himself. “But I never let him down again.”
“Don’t beat yourself up. I should have been at Galidraan, too.”
“I know,” said Vau. “That’s why I chose you for the Cuy’val Dar.”
Skirata grappled with the stomach-knotting realization that he really didn’t know Vau half as well as he thought he did.
He chose me. Shab, he chose me.
“Okay, Walon, answer me this, will you? No osik. Did Jango want me on the team?”
“We discussed all personnel fully.”
“Don’t talk like some shabla administrator to me. Did he want me?”
Vau wavered for a moment. Outbursts and wavering in one night; it was all revelations. “You know Jango. He could get his downs on people, and then he’d see sense. Does it matter a shab now?”
“No, Walon, it doesn’t.” Skirata knew he was everything Vau said—thug, thief, killer, uncultured oaf, and way too emotional. But he knew how to fight—anything, anytime—and he knew how to love. It was as much a survival skill as using his blade or knowing how to construct a vheh’yaim for shelter in the field. That’s the gift. That’s what both my fathers taught me. He held out his hand to Vau. “Walon, whatever we’ve said or done to each other before this moment, it doesn’t matter. Cin vhetin. A fresh field of snow.”
Vau looked at him blankly for a moment. Maybe he knew how precariously Skirata balanced on the edge of his resources right then, but that craggy humorless face softened for a few telling seconds.
“Cin vhetin.” Vau grasped Skirata’s arm in a vise-like grip. “Mhi vode an, ner vod.”
Vau seemed purged. He slapped his thigh plate, and Mird trotted after him into the galley.
“Sorry about that, Bard’ika,” Skirata said. It couldn’t have been easy for the kid to hear all that bad blood about Jedi on this particular night. He might have turned his back on them and put on the beskar’gam, but they’d been his family, and some of those killed must have been his friends. Jedi were living beings, too; some might have got what was coming to them, but others were probably decent like Etain and Jusik. “We’re tired old men, with tired old grudges.”
Jusik looked at his chrono and then checked his comlink. “Had to be said.” He shook his head slowly. “I’ll make sense of this later… maybe. But… okay, I understand Fett’s vengeance. But if the whole Grand Army was planned just to take out the Jedi Order, then Fett alone couldn’t have done this or even hijacked it. Why is nobody asking this question? Who planned the army in the first place? Who bankrolled it? And what’s Fett got to do with the second wave, the Centax clones, the massive new fleet? What’s the link between the Chancellor and the Jedi plan?”
It was a shabla good question.
It would also have to wait.
Skirata opened the comlink. “Dar? Niner? Wrap up whatever it is you’re doing, and make your way to the RV point. It’s endex. It’s over.”
Arca Barracks, Special Operations Brigade HQ,
2240 hours
Ordo finished his sweep of the accommodation block, satisfied that Omega hadn’t left anything foolish or accidentally incriminating in their quarters.
They were smart men, but the smallest thing might be a link in a trail that would lead eventually to Kyrimorut, or—worse—to the discovery that Etain and Darman had a child. Kal’buir was already on Palpatine’s list for stealing Ko Sai’s data from under him. It wouldn’t take a genius to guess that Mandalore was a likely bolt-hole.
But Manda’yaim was a big empty planet, mostly wild and unspoiled, and nobody could disappear quite as well as Mando’ade when they put their minds to it.
Ordo changed into his red Mandalorian armor, his beskar’gam. It was the final act of severance from the Grand Army of the Republic, which had never asked him if he wanted to sign up anyway. He left his fine white ARC trooper’s armor in a tidy pile on the bunk that he rarely used, then relented and scooped up the helmet in the red-trimmed, gray leather kama. It was a sentimental act; he thought he was less tied to his memories than that.
There was one place left to clean up, just in case. That was Arligan Zey’s office. Ordo came down in the turbolift with his ARC bucket tied in the kama like a sack of booty, his red Mando buy’ce in his other hand, to find himself in an echoing emptiness. The faint disembodied voices of comm traffic drifted down the corridor from the ops room. All command and control had been switched to the GAR HQ, but nobody had shut down the room. It was as if SO Brigade had suddenly ceased to exist.
Special Operations had been a Jedi project. Now the Jedi were dead and gone, from the Temple a few kilometers away to the besieged worlds of the Outer Rim, shot where they stood.
Fine. No interruptions.
Ordo activated Zey’s computer and bypassed all the security lockouts, then began stripping out the data onto his own ’pad as he erased it irretrievably from the Republic’s system. It didn’t matter what it was. If there was anything in there that would compromise Kyrimorut, then it was safer to trash the lot.
Five minutes. Kal’buir, you haven’t called in. I’ll call you when—
The sound of someone lurching along the pleekwood floor outside, boots scuffing, caught him unawares.
He hadn’t expected to see General Zey tonight. Zey, it seemed, definitely hadn’t expected to find a Mandalorian rifling through his desk. The general filled the doorway, disheveled and smoke-stained. Blood had dried in a thin trickle from his forehead down to his chin. His left arm hung limp at his side. Someone had nearly killed him.
Ordo tried to feel some compassion. But Zey was outside the small group of beings that Ordo had bonded with, and he accepted that he couldn’t convert that intellectual understanding of Zey’s human failings and virtues into the sensation in his gut that told him that this was someone he loved and cared about. It would be enough not to kill him.
“General,” Ordo said. “I’ll be gone in a moment. Do you think it’s wise to be here?”
“Ordo?”
Ordo took off his helmet, wondering if it made any difference in helping the Jedi recognize him. But he always seemed to. “Hide while you still can.”
“They killed us… They killed us all… Why?”
Ordo stood up and pocketed the datachips, then tucked his helmet under one arm. Power was a strange, shifting thing. Ko Sai had been the arbiter of life and death for him as a small child, and then the Jedi had become his masters—or so they thought—and now both were dead. It was best to be your own master, and lord it over nobody, because, sooner or later, the beings you trod down always came to get you.
“Orders,” Ordo said. “You never read the GAR’s contingency orders? They’re on the mainframe. I suppose nobody thinks contingency orders will ever be needed.”
> Zey leaned panting against the door frame as if he was about to collapse. “But why?”
“Because,” said Maze’s voice from outside the doors, “it’s neither your right nor your position to decide who runs the Republic. Who elected you?”
Ordo heard the click and whir of a sidearm. It was time to go. This wasn’t his war or his world any longer. He picked up his belongings and took a few paces toward the doors, wondering what would happen when he had to shift Zey out of his way.
“Maze, what are you going to do now?” Ordo asked.
“I’ve never disobeyed an order,” said the ARC captain. Zey didn’t seem to have the strength to turn and look at his former aide, just shutting his eyes as if he was waiting for the coup de grâce. “What am I supposed to do? Pick and choose? That’s the irony. The Jedi thought we were excellent troops because we’re so disciplined and we obey orders, but when we obey all orders—and they’re lawful orders, remember—then we’ve betrayed them. Can’t have it both ways, General.”
Zey summoned up some effort and stumbled toward his desk to slump over it. Ordo put down his two helmets and slid the man into the chair. Maze walked in. He was holding his blaster at his side, not aiming it. He wasn’t the one who’d shot Zey; there was no smell of discharged weapon clinging to him.
“I really must be going, General,” Ordo said. But he had to know. “Just tell me, is it true that Windu tried to depose the Chancellor?”
Zey raised his head, all anguish and agony. “He’s a Sith. Can’t you see? A Sith! He’s taking over the government, he’s occupying the galaxy with his new clones, he’s evil…”
“I said, is it true?”
“Yes! It was our duty as Jedi to stop him.”
“What’s a Sith?” Maze asked.
Jango Fett hadn’t been very thorough in the education of his Alpha ARCs, or maybe he didn’t want to muddy the waters with sectarian trivia.
“Like Jedi,” Ordo said, “only on the other side. Mandalorians fought for them thousands of years ago, and we got stiffed by them in the end. We got stiffed by the Jedi, too. So, all in all, it’s a moot point for us.”
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