Part 5 (2/2)
He had a daughter, too, and her name hadn't been on the edict. He hadn't heard from her in years. One day . . . one day, he might find the courage to go and look for her. But now he had more pressing business.
”It'll be okay, son,” Skirata said. ”If it's the last thing I do, you'll have a full life span. Even if I have to beat that information out of Ko Sai a line at a time.”
Especially if I have to.
Ordo seemed to take a sudden and intense interest in the throttle controls. ”The only reason we're alive at all is be-cause you stopped the gihaal from putting us down like animals.” For a moment Skirata thought he was working up to saying something else, but he changed tack. ”Okay, let's see if I can at least follow the manual for this one ...”
Ordo pushed the throttle lever hard forward. The Deep Water's nose lifted slightly, and the acceleration as she burned across the surface of the waves slapped Skirata back in the seat. In the aft view from the hull-mounted safety cam, a wake of white spray and foam churned like a blizzard. The red status bar on the console showed that the speed was moving steadily closer to the flas.h.i.+ng blue cursor labeled OPTIMUM THRUST. The airframe vibrated, the drives screamed, and then Skirata's gut plummeted as the Deep Water parted company with the surface of the sea.
”Oya!” Ordo grinned. The s.h.i.+p soared and he was suddenly as excited as a little boy. Novelty always delighted him. ”Kandosii!”
Behind them, the blizzard on the monitor gave way to gray-blue sea. Skirata admitted mild relief to himself and watched Ordo laying in a course for the RV point, marveling at his instant proficiency.
”You put a lot of trust in me, Kal'buir,” he said. ”I've never piloted a hybrid like this before.”
”I look at it this way, son. If you can't do it, n.o.body can.” He patted Ordo's hand, which was still gripping the throttle lever. ”I name this s.h.i.+p . . . okay, any ideas?”
Ordo paused, staring ahead. ”Aay'han.”
”Okay ... Aay'han it is.” It was a telling choice: there was no Basic translation of the word, because it was a peculiarly Mandalorian concept. Aay'han was that peaceful, perfect moment surrounded by family and friends and remembering dead loved ones, missing them to the point of pain, a state of mind that bittersweet could hardly begin to cover. It was about the intensity of love. Skirata doubted if aruetiise, non-Mandalorians, would believe that such a depth of feeling existed in a people they saw as a bunch of mercenary thugs. He swallowed to clear his throat and grant the name the respect it deserved. He found he was thinking of his adoptive father, Munin, and a teenage clone commando called Dov whose death in training was Skirata's fault, a pain that made his aay'han especially poignant. ”This s.h.i.+p shall be known as Aay'han, and remembered forever.”
”Gai be'bic me'sen Aay'han, meg ade partayli darasuum,” Ordo repeated. ”Oya manda.”
I'm sorry, Dov. There'd better be a manda for you, some kind of immortality, or there won't be enough revenge in the galaxy for me.
Skirata turned his attention to the living again. This wasn't a bad s.h.i.+p at all, and she only had to complete one mission- the most critical one, to find Ko Sai and seize her technology to halt the clones' accelerated aging. He went aft through the double doors into the crew lounge to check out the cosmetic detail. A smell of cleaning fluid, stale food, and mold hit him. The refreshers and medbay were on the starboard side, stores and galley to port, and the galley lockers were completely empty. He made a note of supplies they'd need to lay in at the first stopover, scribbling reminders on his forearm plate with a stylus. It really didn't matter what the accommodation was like as long as Aay'han flew-or dived-in one piece, but he checked the cabins anyway: same gray-and-yellow trim as the rest of the interior, and not much cosmetic water damage. Not bad, not bad at all.
He prodded the mattresses on the bunks, calculating. Eighty thousand creds-but we've got four million from scamming the terrorists, and n.o.body will ever miss it. Six-teen berths, then, and if they needed it there was plenty of cargo s.p.a.ce that could be used for crew, maybe enough for thirty people. So if we need to bang out in a hurry, that's ample room for my boys, Corr, Omega Squad, and any of the ladies, with places to spare. And then there were all the other Republic commando squads he'd trained, still more than eighty men out there in the field, his boys and his responsibility every bit as much as Omega, and he was neglecting them. They needed a refuge when this war was over, too, maybe even before then. Did I do enough?
I can make the difference now, lads. Shab Tsad Droten- curse the Republic.
Skirata was still refitting Aay'han in his mind's eye when Ordo loomed in the hatchway.
”I think we need to change course,” he said. ”Go ahead, then, son.”
”I mean we need to divert to do an extraction.” Skirata sighed. Okay, they were on Republic time, and he was on Republic pay even if the clones weren't. It had better be our lads. I hate every second I spend on civilians. He trusted Ordo's a.s.sessment of necessity, and turned to go back to the c.o.c.kpit. Ordo simply held out a crackling comlink.
”It's Delta,” Ordo said. ”They had to bang out of Mygeeto in a hurry, and Vau got left behind.”
Skirata grabbed the comlink, all the bad blood between him and Vau forgotten. He motioned Ordo back to the c.o.c.k-pit, mouthing do it at him.
”RC one-one-three-eight here, Sergeant.” It was Boss. ”Apologies for the interruption.”
Skirata slid into the copilot's seat, trying not to imagine how badly things had gone if Vau had been stranded behind enemy lines. He was an escape artist. ”Where are you?”
”We rejoined the fleet on station. We wanted to retrieve him, but General Jusik says...”
”...we're on our way. Sitrep?”
”About twenty kilometers from Jygat. We were leaving the Dressian Kiolsh bank when we met some resistance and he fell down a creva.s.se.”
”Bank?” They'd been there to locate communications nodes for the Marines. ”Run out of creds, did he? Needed some small change?”
”It's a long story, Sergeant, and that's why General Jusik thought you'd be ... a wiser choice.”
”Than who?”
”Than telling General Zey.”
”I won't waste time asking what the shab you were doing in a bank.” Jusik: he was a smart lad, Bard'ika. Whatever it was, the Jedi had decided that the extraction needed to be kept quiet. ”Is Vau alive?”
”Unconfirmed. We lost his signal. He had kit with him that General Jusik felt you would want to recover.”
”What for?”
”He cleaned out a bank vault. Credits, jewelry, bonds, the works. Two bags.”
Vau robbed a bank? Skirata was taken aback. The miser-able old di'kut was game for breaking any law, but plain theft-never. This was Skirata's style, not Vau's. ”Last known position?”
”Sending you the coordinates now, with our last good ground radar scan of the terrain.”
”The strill's still with him, of course.”
”Yes. We didn't see it fall.”
That was something. Skirata would never trust the animal, but it would lead them to Vau, if it hadn't already located his body and hauled him out. If he found the strill, he found Vau.
”Tell General Jusik we'll sort it out, Delta,” he said, and closed the link.
Ordo looked totally unmoved, hand hovering over the hypers.p.a.ce drive controls. ”No point asking Commander Bacara to steer clear of us, is there?”
No, there wasn't. The fewer people who knew they were coming, the better. It would be hard to explain why two men in Mandalorian armor were blundering around a Separatist planet on the Republic's tab without authorization, but the fewer the records of conversations, the easier it was to make events vanish. And Bacara wasn't the kind to ask for ID first.
Skirata didn't want his useless Jedi general Ki-Adi-Mundi in the loop, either. Jedi hypocrites. It's okay for Conehead to have a family, but they'll bust Etain down to the Agricorps for it. Skirata would take his chances.
”No, just save Walon's shebs and get out of there,” Skirata said. If he's still alive. ”Jump.”
Aay'han lurched into star-streaked s.p.a.ce. She was holding together just fine.
Caftikar, Outer Rim, rebel base, 471 days after Geonosis Darman decided that Null sergeant A'den was a man after his own heart.
”Can't think straight on an empty stomach.” A'den fired his blaster into a nest of twig shavings to get the campfire going. The sun was coming up-they'd lost a night's sleep, then-and the lizard-like Gaftikari were still trotting back and forth in neat lines ferrying the weapons they'd collected from the drop. ”Got some stew left over from last night. Don't ask what's in it, 'cos I didn't.”
Omega Squad sat cross-legged around the fire in their black undersuits, armor plates stacked to one side. Atin held Darman's jet pack on his lap and bent the wing hinge a.s.sembly back into shape with a pair of blunt-nosed grips. He hated letting mechanical things get the better of him. ”So what happened to the ARC?”
”MIA,” A'den said. His tone was totally neutral, and his expression blank: it wasn't his usual demeanor, either, be-cause Darman could see the white lines in the deeply tanned skin around his eyes and mouth. A'den usually smiled a lot, but he wasn't smiling now. ”So I've done a recce of Eyat and I've put together as complete a plan of the government buildings as I can.”
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