Ollo selected the biggest hammer in the box, handed it to Lammin, and put his fingers in his ears. Lammin leaned back as far as he could and took a mighty swipe at something Pellaeon couldn’t see. The resulting clang of metal was so loud that it hurt.
Lammin whacked the defiant bolt—or whatever it was—a few more times for good measure. It was like standing inside an Andoan monastery bell when the monks struck it. Pellaeon felt his teeth vibrate clean through to his sinuses.
“Ah, that shifted it…,” Lammin said happily.
“I’m relieved you’re not a surgeon, Chief.”
“Well, if I was, my patients wouldn’t be in pain for very long, sir.” Lammin eased himself out of the tiny gap and peered at the gauges on the bulkhead. “I freed up something. Better check exactly what. I hate mysteries.”
“Carry on,” Pellaeon said. He opened his comlink and called his first lieutenant. Every single fault was being collated and transmitted back to Fleet to be passed to the procurement overseers, and no doubt to the accountants to enable them to argue about the costs. “Number One, make another note for the yard, will you? The damper pressure relief valves—”
“Sir, sorry to interrupt, but long-range sensors just picked up some activity in the adjacent sector, off Tangar. A Sep flotilla dropped out of hyperspace, then jumped again.”
Pellaeon conjured up a mental three-dimensional chart of the region, calculating transit time. If anything kicked off, he needed to know if Leveler could respond, and how fast.
“Keep an eye on it, Rumahn,” he said. “Any friendlies in range?”
“Only us, sir. Dark and lonely work out here.”
Working-up had to be done in remote places or very well-defended ones these days because nothing invited an attack quite like a ship that wasn’t at full fighting efficiency. And there was nothing to be gained in charging after every Sep hull that presented itself. Some commanders might have felt obligated out of some bizarrely misplaced machismo, but Pellaeon preferred prudence over showy enthusiasm. He’d bide his time.
“Let’s hope they don’t present us with an inevitable target, then,” he said. “I want the ship to be ready to fight. We’ve still got some problems.”
He left the engineering crew to their task and continued his tour of the lower decks, checking through the tick-list on his datapad as he visited each section to see how well Leveler was holding up. He could have called the section heads to a meeting and just listened to their reports. But that wasn’t Gil Pellaeon’s way. He needed to see. He needed to feel. He needed to listen to the sounds of the ship. And he needed to see the men and women who worked to keep her spaceworthy and ready to fight.
There was no substitute for firsthand examination of the many small systems that made this vast, complex island of durasteel into a fighting machine.
And it was home, too. It was community. No civilian could possibly understand the emotional significance of a ship to those who served in her. It didn’t matter if they were clone or nonclone; this was one united ship’s company, and he refused to allow it to be any other way.
I just wish I could tell them apart more easily…
He had his techniques, though.
A group of clones passed him, all helmeted. “Sir,” one said, nodding polite acknowledgment.
Pellaeon had taken off his cap, so there were no formal salutes. He checked the electronic reader that scanned clone armor tallies to identify them, and a list of names flashed up on the tiny screen.
“Petty Officer Bren,” he said. “Mess deck accommodation to everyone’s satisfaction?”
“Small problem with the water pressure in A-seven-two ’freshers, sir, but that’s been resolved.”
“Splendid.” Pellaeon made another quick note, tapping on his datapad. “Carry on.”
So I need a prompt. Any commander of a ship this size does. What matters is that every crew member knows he or she matters, too.
He strode on, distracted for a moment by the thought of where Hallena might be now, and what she would think of Leveler. Yes, he’d bring her on board and show her. Gossip didn’t bother him. He had nothing to lose now except battles.
Overall, the yard had done a typical rush job—Pellaeon-grade inadequate, anyone else’s reasonable. There was always some nagging problem that irritated him, often small but potentially lethal oversights like fresh paint blocking valves, hidden wiring faults, or unseated gaskets pinched between blocks, ready to leak at any time. Those were the things he sought out. Any idiot could see major defects from ten klicks; he could, anyway.
So far, all he’d found to trouble him were the dampers and some of the command systems. Software, the technicians said, could be fixed.
Show me, then.
Climbing the ladder to one of the concussion missile bays, he found himself looking up at Rex as the clone commander leaned over from the gantry above. Rex, even without his distinctive blue-and-white 501st armor, was easy to spot among the ship’s company. He had his helmet clipped to his belt, and he was sporting another new hairstyle. Instead of being shaven to a fine polish, as when Pellaeon had last seen him, his scalp was now covered with short fuzz of blue-dyed hair cut into stripes.
“Very… different, Rex,” Pellaeon said.
Ahsoka leaned over the rail beside Rex, although she had to stand on tiptoe to do it. She twitched her striped head-tails. “Nothing wrong with stripes, sir.”
“Bolo-ball final,” Rex said. “I’m somewhat partisan. Bylluran Athletic.”
Pellaeon had no idea how Rex—bred on Kamino without any of the usual sense of geographic or species tribalism—decided which team to support. Bylluran was a Sullustan team. But most teams had fans who’d never been within ten parsecs of their home ground, and some couldn’t even breathe the same atmosphere, so maybe that was… normal.
Stang, he’s like any other being. A normal human male. It’s hardwired in all of us, this need to ally and belong.
“So, Rex, what do you think of the upgrades?”
Rex replaced his helmet. “I can’t judge the new concussion missiles until I see them take out a city or a capital ship, but I’m not convinced that the improved laser recharge time was worth the expenditure.”
“That’s the Treasury’s problem.”
“Maybe so, but—”
Rex stopped. Pellaeon heard the comm alert at the same time as the clone commander did, a nasal tone from the small transmitter in the comlink attached to his belt.
“Ops to Pellaeon, we have enemy vessels exiting hyperspace in the Fath system. Stand by.”
“That’s a couple of hours away,” Ahsoka said. “What are they doing there?”
Pellaeon climbed the ladder and headed for the nearest ops room to see what was on their sensors. Fath was close to a hyperspace lane; apart from that, it was the scruffy backside of the Outer Rim, nothing remarkable. Were the Seps just emerging from hyperspace, dropping out to receive essential comms before jumping elsewhere again, or did they have a more local target?
“How many vessels?” Rex asked. “I can’t patch my HUD through to the ops display. One more glitch for the list.”
“Six.” Pellaeon decided there was no harm keeping an eye on the flotilla. “Comms, can you intercept any signals?”
“Just out of maximum range, sir,” Rumahn cut in. “Another problem we’ve found.”
“Very well, assuming that we still have propulsion, Number One, can we move within range?”
“I’d rather not jump until the dampers are sorted, sir.”
“Let’s stroll in their direction on sublight, then.”
Pellaeon trusted his gut as much as any sensor, and his internal alarm bells were starting to ring. The crew knew that. The more relaxed his tone, the more worried they knew he was. Rex stood and watched the scan with him—or at least he appeared to be facing it. Once Rex had his helmet on, there was no way of telling whether he was watching what was in front of him or occupied with something happening on his HUD. Ah
soka edged up beside them.
“I feel it,” she said hesitantly.
“What, my dear?” Pellaeon asked.
“A disturbance in the Force.” She reached out and held her hand close to the repeater screen without touching it. “A lot of… misery boiling over into anger.”
Pellaeon never turned down useful intelligence. He just preferred definitive bearings, coordinates, and distances, and Jedi unnerved him; the young ones troubled him most of all, like this little Togruta, a gauche kid arguing about her short skirt one moment and then changing before his eyes into an ancient and primal creature connected to something he could never see. It seemed a vast gift for the universe to grant such a child. “You can tell that from touching the screen, can you?”
“No, Captain, it just helps me concentrate if I focus on an image.”
“So is that a threat assessment?”
“Last time she said that,” Rex muttered, “the next word was incoming.”
Pellaeon was reassured that his gut worked almost as well as a Jedi’s senses. “I’ll take that as a solid early warning, then.”
“I’ll round up my men,” said Rex.
There was always the chance it would end in nothing; there was a great deal of seething anger everywhere in the galaxy these days, and predicting trouble was a safe bet. But Pallaeon knew he wasn’t that lucky.
He opened his comlink. “Lammin,” he said. “Let me know the moment you get those dampers fixed.”
A TapCaf in the Metalworkers’ Quarters,
Athar, Janfathal
Later That Night
Hallena was sure she’d never be able to lift her arms again.
Twelve hours. Twelve hours of sweeping and scrubbing that cesspit of a factory. There was only so much sweeping she could do before she was conspicuously idle, so she’d ended up cleaning all the refreshers, and the smell of disinfectant clung to her.
She braced her elbows on the tapcaf table and stared at her hands, fingertips still wrinkled from being constantly wet.
“You timed this very well,” said Merish. Shil placed two mugs of ale in front of them on the table and pulled up a chair. “Who sprung you?”
Hallena was now in the limbo of winging her way through a conversation that could end in victory or death. At least she was exhausted enough to act convincingly surly. “You don’t need to know.”
“True.” The woman kept glancing at the doors. She seemed more triumphant than nervous. “You might find some familiar faces joining us tonight, then.”
I hope not. There aren’t any.
“So what do you want from me?” Hallena asked.
Open questions, suspiciously asked. It was all she could do. Local intelligence hadn’t filled her in on all the blanks, evidently. No wonder they needed backup from Republic Intel; they were only good for spying on citizens for minor garbage like being dissatisfied and vocal about it.
“When things change, we need people who we can trust,” said Merish. “People we know aren’t tainted by association with the old regime.”
“And I qualify.” Posing as a newly released political prisoner excused all hesitation and cluelessness on Hallena’s part. “Well, thanks.”
“You’re union. You know how to organize people. We’re going to need that very soon.”
“Forget it,” Hallena said. No, don’t. Keep it coming. “I’ve had enough of that. I can’t face the prospect of year after year of banging my head against a wall and seeing nothing change.”
“Oh, change is coming all right, Sister. Sooner than you think.”
“Yeah. Whatever.”
Merish looked beatific. That was the only way Hallena could describe it. As more people crowded into the tapcaf for an ale to end the day, and the noise level rose, she kept an eye on the doors. The place smelled of sweat and musty spices. Exotic tunes—discordant half notes, not unpleasant, just unfamiliar—crackled from an old audio unit set high on the wall to her right. The conversations around her, while part of a general high level of noise, were somehow hard to eavesdrop upon, as if everyone in that tapcaf had grown used to speaking in a way that wouldn’t attract the attention of the authorities.
She’d seen almost no droids here at all since she’d arrived on the planet, the office droid at the factory being a notable exception. When she craned her neck to look through the open doors to the tapcaf kitchen, there were no droids there, the one place she was certain they’d have mechanical help.
She couldn’t ask why. She was supposed to be a native.
“No kriffing droids,” she said flatly. It could have meant anything. She meant someone throw me a line here.
“No, at least that hasn’t happened yet,” Merish said. “Flesh and blood is still cheaper. And most people are still more docile when they’re kept busy all day.”
Thank you, Merish.
There were all kinds of things the intel briefings never really told an agent. But these were the things she liked to know: she liked to know about attitude. She liked to know why.
But all that she had been told was that the dissidents in Athar had regular contact with Sep agents. Her sole task was to map that network, identify as many individuals in it as she could, and turn that information over to someone else to…
To what? Observe. Break. Arrest. Maybe even to flood the network with disinformation and double agents.
Shil was so quiet that Hallena wondered if he was allowed to talk when Merish was around. She watched him from the corner of her eye, and tried not to look too curious about why he kept tugging his right sleeve down past his wrist. At first she thought it was a nervous tic, and then she wondered if he was simply concealing a weapon. It was only when he reached for his ale and knocked a sodden table mat onto the floor that she understood what he was covering up. As he bent down and stretched out his hand to retrieve the mat, his sleeve slid back, and she saw the scars.
They were not random.
They were old cuts; not the irregular marks of an accident, or the clean incisions of surgery, but a carefully inscribed network of cut after cut after cut, as if someone had tried to decorate him like a piece of Emori leatherwork. Her eyes froze on the raised scars for a long second. She knew without asking that they weren’t some form of body art or anything voluntary. A couple of the lines had odd branches, as if he’d moved during the process and someone had to do it again.
It was odd how something glimpsed so briefly could sear an indelible image into her mind. She wouldn’t forget those scars. As Shil straightened up, he caught her eye for a moment, then pulled his sleeve back into place.
“To set an example to the rest,” Shil said softly. “Fear needs its advertising like any other commodity, or else who’s going to buy it?”
And that was why he was covering it up. Not shame; not embarrassment. He didn’t even need to flaunt that he’d been tortured but was still walking free, still defiant. He was simply denying whoever had hurt him the outcome they’d wanted. He was not going to let anyone else see what his punishment had been, and be cowed by it.
“I understand,” Hallena said.
Yes, I do. And I mustn’t.
Merish, distracted for a moment, reached to smooth Shil’s hair, then went back to watching the door as she sipped her ale. Her free hand rested on his leg in the shadow of the table.
Hallena had been trained to do a dirty job. One of her earliest lessons had been that there was no clear-cut line between enemy and ally, and that if she looked for one she would only forget what she was there to do. She would, her spymaster had once said, meet enemies she liked, and allies she hated. It wasn’t her job to decide who was more worthy of support. Her sole task was to serve the Republic because she could have no idea of the bigger picture in which she blindly painted small sections.
It’s going to be hard sometimes, Hallena.
She could hear his voice now, even through the hubbub of the tapcaf.
You’re not immune to good and evil. You’re not on the wrong s
ide. You’re just ignoring smaller complications that get in the way of the bigger task.
Gil Pellaeon called it collateral damage. Sometimes she wanted to talk to him about how he handled causing death and pain to people who got in the way when his ship was seeking bigger targets. But she’d never found the right moment to explain why, and reveal all the things she’d done.
Am I a bad person? Why can’t I answer that question?
“So what did they do to you?” Merish asked at last.
Hallena didn’t look at her. “What would drive me crazy quickest. Keeping me in solitary.”
She couldn’t claim it was violence. She was sitting beside people with real scars, and if anything went wrong, the story was easily disproved by examining her. But crazy—crazy was invisible. She could do crazy. She had no idea yet how long she might have to keep it up, but she was sure she could manage a long, long time.
“You’re not going to trust us until we show you, are you?”
It was cruelly easy. First there was guilt, and then, when an agent found pleasure in being clever, there was callous smugness. Then, as age and bitter experience eroded that layer, guilt and disgust crept back in.
“No,” Hallena said, playing the game of stating the truth to create a lie. “Look, I don’t know anything about you, and you don’t know anything about me. Why should either of us trust the other?”
“Oh, we know plenty about you. The office droid’s very cooperative about sharing identichip data, if you know how to ask nicely.”
The preloaded persona on the bogus chip had looked pretty bland to Hallena—a long-forgotten person from a town swept clean off the map—but it seemed to have more import to Merish and Shil.
“So prove to me you’re not just them jerking me around before hauling me back inside again.”
“Why would they want to do that?”
“Because they’re scum,” Hallena said, “and that’s what small people with too much power do.”
Merish stared into her face for a few moments as if looking for cracks in her story. “In a day or so it won’t matter anyway.”
Ah. There’s a timetable. For what?
The Clone Wars: No Prisoners Page 4
