Triple Zero

by Karen Traviss

  Etain held out her hand to Gett. “Gloves off, my friend.”

  He shrugged, smiling, and slipped off the entire gauntlet. They shook hands as equals. Then she pressed a key on the console, opening the public address system that reached every cabin and flat and hangar and mess deck in the huge warship.

  “Gentlemen,” she said. “It’s been an honor.”

  Chapter Six

  In five millennia, the Mandalorians fought with and against a thousand armies on a thousand worlds. They learned to speak as many languages and absorbed weapons technology and tactics from every war. And yet, despite the overwhelming influence of alien cultures, and the absence of a true homeworld and even species, their own language not only survived but changed little, their way of life and their philosophy remained untouched, and their ideals and sense of family, of identity, of nation, were only strengthened. Armor does not make a Mandalorian. The armor is simply a manifestation of an impenetrable, unassailable heart.

  —Mandalorians: Identity and Language, published by the Galactic Institute of Anthropology

  RAS Fearless,

  upper dock, Fleet Support Depot, Coruscant,

  370 days after Geonosis

  The ramp went down, and for once the scene that greeted Fi wasn’t hostile droid-infested territory and red blasterfire.

  But Coruscant—impossibly high towers and deep canyons of skylanes—was every bit as alien as Geonosis. Fi had seen it once before, all too briefly, on the way to break a siege at the spaceport. It had been an exotic, exciting lightscape at night, but in daylight it was breathtaking in a totally different way.

  “Can we have a run ashore?”

  Niner stood with his hands clasped behind him, with his Deece slung across his back. “Not my call. I’m not the sergeant now.”

  Boss and the rest of Delta had formed up behind Omega in a neat line, presenting a more orderly rank. They were on the same comlink. Niner said it was ungrateful to block them out, seeing as they’d ridden to the rescue. But Omega would never hear the end of it, Fi was sure of that.

  The Forty-first Elite were disembarked first.

  Scorch leaned a little closer to Fi. He was right behind him. The nice thing about Katarn helmet comlinks was that you could switch between circuits and have totally private exchanges without any external sign that you were talking—or even having a stand-up fight, come to that. “So you want a run ashore?”

  “What’s that?” Sev said.

  Fi enjoyed Skirata’s wide-ranging and often bizarre language. No other squads talked quite like Sergeant Kal’s. “A night out on the town. Dinner at a fine restaurant, perhaps take in a Mon Cal ballet…”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “Don’t, Fi,” Niner said. “You’re just being cruel to the Weequay team here.”

  “Okay, ale and warra nuts. No ballet.”

  “And maybe a little shopping with your spook squad buddy?” Scorch said. “New kama, maybe?”

  Ah, news did travel, then. “Don’t let Ordo hear you say that,” Fi said. “He’ll rip your leg off and hit you with the soggy end.”

  “Yeah? ARCs are all mouth and kamas.”

  “Ooh, hard man, eh?”

  “I’ve seen Twi’lek dancing girls tougher than you,” said Scorch. “How many times are we going to have to save your shebs, then?”

  “Probably as many times as we have to clean up your osik,” said Niner. “Can’t you two talk about blowing stuff up and play nicely?”

  “Where’s the general?” Fi said.

  Darman interrupted. “Saying good-bye to Gett.” He seemed to be taking a keen interest in Etain’s whereabouts. “Can you see Sergeant Kal yet? She said he was meeting us.”

  “So… you’ve been ordered around by a geriatric and a child, have you?”

  Darman’s voice frosted over. “Scorch, do you like medcenter food?”

  “Touchy, touchy…”

  There was a faint click on the helmet comlink.

  “Delta! This is the geriatric. Get down and give me fifty, now!”

  “Fierfek,” Sev sighed.

  Omega parted ranks to give Delta the room to perform fifty press-ups in full armor, with backpacks. Fi watched appreciatively. He didn’t care for Sev at all.

  But he was also scanning the landing platform for Skirata, desperate to see his real sergeant again: when Skirata was around, Niner ceased to play the senior NCO. Generals tended not to get much of a look in, either. Skirata was his own command chain.

  “That was forty, not fifty,” Skirata said from somewhere behind them. “I hate innumeracy almost as much as I hate cracks about my personal state of disrepair.”

  Skirata just had a knack for sliding around unnoticed. There had been times when Fi had wondered if he was a Force-user, because only Jedi were supposed to be able to pull those kinds of stunts. But Kal’buir was adamant that he was simply good at his job, because he’d been doing it since he was seven years old.

  That made him a late starter—by clone standards.

  He appeared suddenly from between a knot of Forty-first men and ambled over to Omega, not limping quite as badly as usual and looking rather dapper in a smart leather jacket. In rough working clothes, he could disappear, but the jacket changed him utterly. Yet there was always something about the man that inspired relief and confidence. Fi felt instantly ready for anything, just as he had when Skirata had been the highest authority in his limited world on Kamino.

  Skirata paused for a moment in front of him. He didn’t seem worried whether Delta had cranked out the extra ten press-ups or not. He just clutched Fi’s arm, and hugged Darman, and slapped Niner across the shoulders, and grabbed Atin’s hand. He never seemed to have the slightest trouble now in showing how much he cared about them. Over the years he’d changed from shielding his emotions behind a veneer of good-natured abuse to abandoning the pretense altogether.

  Nobody had ever been fooled by it anyway.

  “Don’t scare me like that again, ad’ike.” He turned to Delta, easing themselves up from the floor. “And you bunch of di’kute, too. I’d better keep a tighter rein on you.” He watched the last of the Forty-first men disappearing into transfer vessels, presumably for return to barracks, and something appeared to amuse him. “Scorch, if you’re not a good boy then I’m going to make you wear a kama.”

  “Sorry, Sergeant. Is it true that Sergeant Vau’s back?”

  “He’s back, but he’s not a sergeant. I’m your sergeant now, Scorch.”

  “And General Jusik?”

  “He’s not your sergeant, either.” Skirata looked past Scorch and seemed suddenly startled. Fi turned and saw what he was staring at: Etain Tur-Mukan walked across the huge landing platform hauling the LJ-50 as if it were putting up a fight. “That has to be General Tur-Mukan, yes?”

  “That’s her,” Darman said. “She’s very keen to meet you.”

  Fi was distracted by a blip of movement in his HUD. A scruffy civilian air taxi had risen over the parapet of the landing platform. And it shouldn’t have been able to do that.

  His unconscious brain said danger and reacted a split second before his ingrained training reminded him that unidentified civvie vessels shouldn’t penetrate the Fleet base cordon. He was on one knee with his Deece charged and aimed before he even noticed from his HUD that Omega and Delta had both formed up into a single front contact formation.

  The taxi stopped dead in midair.

  “Check!” Skirata stepped in front of them. Fi froze but Delta aimed around the sergeant. “Stand down!” One fist held up clenched to hold off the squads, Skirata signaled vigorously to the taxi with his other hand held flat, slapping down on the air. Drop.

  The taxi settled slowly on the platform.

  Omega stopped dead at the check command; Delta took a second longer. Maybe it hadn’t been drilled into them as it had Skirata’s batch. But all of them still had their rifles trained. Fi’s heart pounded. They were all wound tight and still alert to any threat, alert
enough to let hard-trained reactions take over. It was what kept you alive. You could never switch it off. Your muscles learned to do things and then stopped asking your brain’s permission.

  “I’m sorry, lads.” Skirata spun around to face them. “Udesii, udesii… relax. It’s ours.”

  “I’m glad you pointed that out, Sarge,” Niner muttered. He lowered his Deece. Fi followed his lead, and glanced behind him.

  Etain was still lying prone with her concussion rifle aimed in the right direction, no easy task with a weapon that size, but her arc of fire left something to be desired. He hoped that her Jedi sense of right place and right time would have stopped her from blowing them all to pieces if she had opened fire.

  Fi gestured to her to stand down, and then gave up and just shook his head at her. No. She gestured back, palm up, and jumped to her feet. He wondered if anyone had thought to teach her basic hand signals.

  Skirata was still apologizing. “I should have warned you I had transport coming. That was sloppy of me.” The taxi’s hatch opened and a Wookiee—not a big one, just over a couple of meters tall—unfolded itself from the taxi and clambered out, throwing its head back and yawling in complaint.

  “Okay, my fault,” Skirata said. He held both hands up in admission to the mountain of glossy brown fur. “They’re just jumpy, that’s all. We’ll load now.”

  “All of us, in that?” Niner asked. It wasn’t a very big taxi. “With the Wookiee, too?”

  “No, the prisoners. Just load ’em in.”

  “Where are they going?”

  “That’s all you need to know right now.”

  Niner paused, then shrugged and beckoned Boss, Fixer, and Atin to follow him back on board Fearless.

  Etain had moved forward by now and walked up to Skirata, rifle slung across her back; she was so small that she looked more like a bolt-on accessory to the weapon. Darman reacted and stepped in to get Skirata’s attention. It wasn’t that he needed to, of course. Skirata was watching Etain, and he seemed to have one eye on Fearless’s ramp, and he was placating the clearly irritated Wookiee, somehow juggling situations as skillfully as he had ever done.

  “General,” he said. He paused to nod formally to Etain, which—given Skirata’s general contempt for anyone not in armor—seemed quite an encouraging start, Fi decided. “We’ve got a nice new job, and that includes you.”

  “Sergeant,” she said, and bowed her head. “You’re not what I expected.”

  Skirata raised an eyebrow. “Nor are you, General.” He shoved the Wookiee back a few meters, apparently untroubled by the fact that the creature could have used him for a cleaning rag. He rounded on it. “No, just put them on the back seat and drive. Let Vau do the rest.”

  The mention of Vau gave Fi a hint of what he couldn’t grasp from the Shyriiwook words. So the Wookiee was delivering the prisoners to Walon Vau. It seemed to have volunteered to do something that Skirata preferred to leave to Old Psycho, then. The Wookiee obviously wasn’t asking if they wanted to stop for lunch.

  “What’s happening here?” Etain asked. “What’s happening to the prisoners?”

  “Civilian matter, General,” Skirata said, and stood back as Niner and Boss jogged past steering a medbay repulsor with what looked like three large rolls of blanket on it. They bundled each into the back of the taxi with a little grunting and cursing, then slammed one hatch closed. “Don’t you worry about it.”

  “But I am worrying about it.”

  The Wookiee barked once and folded itself back into the taxi. The vessel lifted off and swung back over the parapet, dropping below their view into one of the artificial canyons that seemed to reach down into Coruscant’s core. Fi fought the urge to peer after it, then lost and walked a few paces to gaze over the edge.

  It was a long, long way down. He was thrilled by the sheer scale and variety of it: polished stone, sparkling glass, a blur of vessels in the skylanes, hazy sunlight. Alien, utterly alien.

  Skirata blew out a breath and rocked his head slightly as if easing tense neck muscles. “General,” he said. “You and I need to talk. Omega, Delta—a transport will be taking you back to barracks.” He paused to check his chrono. “You just relax until fifteen-hundred hours and then you report to the briefing room at HQ Main Admin Building.”

  “Yes, Sarge,” said Niner and Boss, absolutely synchronized.

  But Etain wasn’t giving up. Fi rather liked that about her, but she could be a pain in the shebs when she persisted. She stepped a little closer to Skirata.

  “I don’t like being left in the dark, Sergeant.”

  “Then this galaxy is going to be a constant source of disappointment to you, General.” For a second Skirata had that edge in his voice that made Fi stiffen. But it softened as soon as it had hit its target. “Things change. You can say no to this, and I’m rather hoping you won’t, but if you do, then Omega, Delta, and my Null boys will do it without you.”

  Etain lapsed into silence. Skirata could motivate a brick if he put his mind to it. She wanted to stick with the squad and everyone knew it.

  She looked at him as if she was listening to other voices. “If Omega can’t say no, then neither can I.”

  “Good,” said Skirata. He peeled back the collar of his jacket and muttered into a tiny comlink. It looked as if General Jusik still had a taste for supplying unusual kit. “Standing by.”

  Fi peered back over the dock platform parapet, gripping the safety rail to lean out a little more and get a better look. It was the kind of view the very wealthy paid a fortune to see from their window, but you could get it for free in the Grand Army, as long as you didn’t mind getting your head shot off to qualify for the privilege.

  Skirata leaned against the parapet beside him.

  “I’d like to fast-rope down there,” Fi said. He’d always enjoyed that in training on Kamino. He preferred endless vistas to cramped spaces, as did many of his brothers. They said it was the legacy of being gestated in glass vats; Ordo claimed he could even remember it. “How long have we got here, Sarge? Can we see some of the city? Please?”

  “Yeah, I promised you all a night out, didn’t I? How long ago?”

  “Eight months.” Fi remembered, all right: straight after the spaceport siege, the promise of a drink from Captain Obrim for a job well done—and then Ordo hauled them straight off for another mission. “I’d love to see it once before I—” He paused. “I’d just like to explore a bit.”

  Skirata’s brow creased briefly and he put his hand on Fi’s back. “Don’t talk like that, son. You’ll see plenty of this, I promise.”

  “Now?” Far below, something that might have been a bird leapt suddenly into the yawning crevasse of buildings and plummeted at high speed with wings folded back until Fi lost sight of it. The platform was at least five thousand meters high. “That’d be a nice change.”

  “So you like the new battlefield, then.”

  Fi dragged himself away from the apparently limitless view. “So we get a spell in a stone frigate?”

  “What?”

  “Just something I picked up from the lads on board Fearless.” So he’d taught Sergeant Kal some new slang: that was something. “A shore-based job. Filing flimsi and answering the comlinks. Lots of caf breaks.”

  “Try threat resolution. Interdiction.”

  “Oh.”

  “Welcome to the world of euphemism, Fi. We’re going to be fighting in the hardest terrain of all. Right in the middle of billions of civvies. Slotting bad guys on Coruscant.”

  “Good,” said Fi. “I hate commuting.”

  Arca Company Barracks, SO Brigade HQ, Coruscant

  Etain trailed Skirata down the long passage that ran from the main doors of the Arca barrack wing and felt like she was following a gdan.

  Omega Squad’s description had made her think of him as a kindly old uncle, a veteran soldier with a façade of tough talk who had sweated blood to give a generation of boys the benefit of his wisdom. But what she experienced in
the Force was very different, just as his appearance was unlike her mental image of him.

  He was a whirlpool of balanced conflict—truly cold black violence shot through with deep red passionate loves and hatreds. It marked him out as a complex man who had built a warrior elite. If she looked at him another way, though, he was very much the dark side—everything she had been taught to shun.

  Yes, he reminded her of a gdan, the nasty little carnivores that hunted in packs on Qiilura and would take on any prey; small by comparison with his strapping troops, but ferociously, tenaciously aggressive.

  And he wasn’t quite the elderly man the squad had first described, either. To twenty-year-old boys, he must have seemed ancient. But he was about sixty standard years—just middle-aged—and obviously fit except for his tendency to drag his left leg.

  And he looked armored.

  He was only wearing a civilian jacket—polished tan bantha leather with a high black collar—and plain brown pants, but he had that same presence that all the commandos had. He was ready for something. Given that he was a head shorter than his squad, had a pronounced limp, and yet still looked like trouble, Etain decided he must have once been a formidable soldier. She realized he still was.

  “In here, ma’am.” He could make ma’am sound like girl somehow; he could do the same with General. But as a Jedi she had no right to feel affronted by lack of deference. She realized that she simply wished he would like her. “Just a little chat and then you can find General Jusik and catch up on events.”

  Yes, Skirata gave the orders.

  He ushered her into a side room that turned out to be a cabin with a table, a chair, and narrow bed with a half-packed carryall sitting on it. There was a neat pile of clothing, military-grade fabric equipment cases with unidentifiable lumpy items in them, and a set of sand-gold, battle-scarred Mandalorian armor.

  The Force told her this was a tidy room filled with the wretched chaos of broken lives, pain, and misery. She wondered if it was entirely his, but she stopped herself from probing further in case he felt it and reacted. He was a dangerously perceptive man. She had no sense at all of any animosity directed at her.