Part 19 (1/2)

Sev was first out as the starboard hatch swung open, drop-ping into gra.s.s that came up to his shoulders and smeared his visor plate with water. The ground squelched under his boots. He ran with his head lowered, s.h.i.+elded by the gra.s.ses, and Delta went into a sequence they'd drilled for a hundred times: storming an enemy vessel. Once they were close in to the fighter, there was little it could do, and with one wing missing it wasn't going anywhere in a hurry. Scorch fired a rappel line to hook onto the superstructure, then hauled him-self up to slap a strip of flexible charge around the hatch.

”I'd knock,” Scorch said, dropping down again and diving for cover, ”but I think they'll be upset about the wing ...”

Bang.

The hatch blew out, flinging twisted metal into the air, and Sev dodged a chunk that whistled past his helmet. His legs moved before his brain engaged and he leaned partway through the hatch, suddenly face-to-face with a human female pilot who had an impressive blaster. The shot knocked him backward, but blasterfire wasn't enough to penetrate Katarn armor, and he simply shook himself and raised his Deece again, finding his mind completely blank except for the single purpose of returning fire.

Sev fired. There was no such thing as winging someone or shooting them in the leg, whatever the holovids depicted, and he did what he was trained to do. The c.o.c.kpit was full of smoke, the pilot draped at an awkward angle across the seat. It was only when the smoke began clearing that Sev realized there was a copilot, a man, and he was dead, too.

”Shab,” Sev said. ”Maybe I could have done that better.”

Scorch peered into the c.o.c.kpit. ”Let's try that again with-out the dead bit, shall we?”

”I wanted a chat with them...,” Boss said. He hauled Sev back by his shoulder and rapped him in the chest plate. ”Now how am I going to work out who they are?”

”Leave it to me.” Fixer pushed past them and scrambled into the c.o.c.kpit, hauling the bodies out of the way and push-ing them out onto the gra.s.s with a wet thud. ”At least I can interrogate the onboard computer and tell you where they came from.”

Boss and Scorch contemplated the bodies in the gra.s.s, turning them over and rifling through their flight suits. Now that the adrenaline was ebbing, Sev felt a mix of vague dread flood him just as it had when he'd screwed up in training. There was no Sergeant Vau around to give him a good hiding for his incompetence, but it was as bad now as it ever was. Next time he saw Vau, he knew that his old sergeant would see the failure on his face and give him grief for it. There was no good enough. There was only perfect. Sev had no excuse for not being perfect, because he'd been designed from the genome up to be the galaxy's best. Anything he got wrong was down to laziness.

There were no excuses. Vau said so.

It was like waiting for the blow to hurt.

”Well,” Fixer said. ”Interesting.” He jumped out of the Crusher and brandished his datapad. ”They pa.s.sed through Kamino. And they transmitted data back. I'll unscramble that later.”

Scorch sucked his teeth noisily. ”Tipoca's not exactly the crossroads of the Outer Rim . ..”

So the Kaminoans had sent someone after them-after Ko Sai, in fact. n.o.body popped into Tipoca City uninvited or stopped to refuel. You only went there if you had business with the Kaminoans.

”Bounty hunters?” Sev asked.

Boss examined a handful of chips and flimsi. ”We can crack the identichips later. The important thing is that we know we're not the only ones who've tracked Ko Sai this far, and the aiwha-bait will know all about Da Soocha by now.”

Sev was starting to feel anxious. They were definitely going up against the Kaminoans and the Seps now. It was going to be a race. Tipoca would send someone else as soon as they knew the Crusher was missing, if they didn't already.

”Better get a move on,” said Scorch. ”No telling who else we'll have to elbow out of the way.”

Sev trailed the others back to the TIV, still uneasy and angry with himself for not taking the Crusher's crew alive.

”No,” he said. ”Could be anybody.”

Chapter 8.

Soldiers of the Grand Army, in honor of your courage and service in the fight against oppression, you shall want for nothing, and become instructors of the next generation of young men to defend the Republic.

-Chancellor Palpatine, in a message to all ARC troopers, commanders, and GAR commando units on Republic Day * * *

Caftikar, 477 days after Geonosis Darman was making sure the Marits knew how to lay charges for rapid entry-they did, all too well-when the woman walked into the camp.

He couldn't tell it was a woman at first because she was wearing a freighter pilot's rig, multipocketed gray coveralls that engulfed her, and a heavy pair of durasteel-capped safety boots. But when she turned down the collar that was s.h.i.+elding the lower half of her face from the wind, he could see it was a female human about Skirata's age, with short, light brown hair and a gaunt face that gave him the feeling she checked out the latest in blasters rather than fas.h.i.+on.

She didn't walk like any of the women he knew, but maybe that was the boots. He'd grabbed his Deece before it dawned on him that A'den wouldn't be such a slacker on security as to allow just anyone to approach.

Even so, Darman checked the charge on his Deece and stood by just in case. If an Alpha ARC could be caught off his guard, there was always the chance that the Nulls weren't as omnipotent as everyone thought, either. A'den strode toward her, Sull ambling behind him in the same drab working clothes.

Fi and Atin wandered out from the main building to watch. Fi held Sull's gray leather kama in one hand with half the blue lieutenant's edging removed. He'd insisted on having it. With the blue bits unpicked, he said, it went with the red-and-gray armor he'd salvaged from Ghez Hokan. Fi liked order in his wardrobe.

”Who's she?” Atin asked.

”K'uur!” Darman strained to listen. ”I can't hear with you yapping.”

A'den obviously knew her. He shook her hand, indicated Sull with a jerk of his head, and handed something to her, which she waved away, but A'den shoved it into her top pocket. All Darman heard of her response was, ”. . . rather have news of...”

The wind took the rest. There was a storm coming. At least Darman had the speeder to take him to Eyat to clear out Sull's apartment rather than trudging through the rain again. Sull seemed to be listening intently to the exchange between A'den and the woman, and then they both turned to him and A'den slapped him on the back. Sull's expression was set on what Darman now thought of as ARC default: deliberately blank, with one eyebrow slightly raised as if in disdain for the rest of the galaxy. That probably summed up ARCs pretty well.

”Come on, there's a good boy,” the woman said, and beckoned to Sull to follow her. Astonis.h.i.+ngly, he did. ”Long way to go.”

A'den called after her. ”I'll do what I can, Ny, okay?”

So her name was Ny, and that could have been the entirety of it, or short for any number of names. She paused to glance at the squad as if she'd never seen clones together before- chances were she hadn't, he thought-and went on her way.

Darman could only imagine that she was Sull's transport out of the system, and that guaranteed his obedience at least for a while. But if an ARC wanted to leave Gaftikar under his own steam, he could have found any number of ways to do it-Whatever A'den had said to him during that ARC-to-ARC chat must have been very persuasive.

Fi watched the incongruous pair vanish among the trees at the edge of the camp. The woman looked like a kid alongside Sull.

”Maybe it's his mother,” Fi said, trying on the kama with a critical frown. ”And he's grounded for a month for not doing his ch.o.r.es.”

”Stop going on about mothers.” Atin seemed to have lost interest. ”You don't know what any of that means. It's all off the holovids. Like some new alien species learning about humans.”

”Yeah, well, maybe that's what we are.” Fi undipped his helmet from the back of his belt and rammed it onto his head, shutting out the world again. His voice emerged from the audio projector. ”Aliens in a society of human beings. Excuse me, will you, gentlemen? I have to go play with some lizards.”

Cebz, the dominant Marit, scuttled around the camp but seemed to be keeping an eye on the squad. She could, after all, count, and maybe she was curious about the fluctuating number of clones in the area. If A'den hadn't leveled with her, then Darman wouldn't, either.

”I better go and clear any evidence out of Sull's place,” Darman said to Atin. He prodded his brother in the chin, right at the end of the thin white scar that crossed his face from the opposite brow. It was still visible through his beard. ” 'Cos I can look like him and you can't.”

”You say that like it's a good thing .. .”

That was another advantage of being a clone. It was easy to take a brother's place; few folks would be any the wiser, except those who really knew you. Darman put on Sull's original clothes, noted that they were loose on him-had he lost that much weight?-and set off in the speeder for Eyat.

On the journey, he pondered the nature of mothers and what it might have felt like to have one, deciding it must have been a lot like having Sergeant Kal around all the time. Kal'buir said they'd all missed the necessary nurturing of a parent when they most needed it as babies. Darman often wondered if he would have been a different man had he been nurtured- whatever that meant in real terms-but he couldn't feel what was missing in his life, only that something was.

Lots of things were, in fact. He'd only known what some of them were when he touched Etain for the first time. And Fi seemed to see many more things that were missing than even he did.

Can 't change the past. That was what Sergeant Kal said. Only the future, which is whatever you choose to make it.

Darman couldn't feel angry about Sull's decision to make a run for it, only a vague envy, and an uncertainty about whether he would have done the same.