Part 19 (2/2)

Can't leave my brothers in the lurch. They put their lives on the line for me, and I do the same for them.

He put it out of his mind and concentrated on the road, knowing that if he ventured any further into those thoughts, then things would start to become confusing and painful. He distracted himself with finding the route to Sull's apartment again, reversing the route he'd taken out of Eyat.

Almost without thinking, Darman set the speeder down a little way from the apartment, walked around the block to check if he was being followed, and then ran up the external stairway to let himself in. A human male coming along the access walkway toward him nodded in acknowledgment to Darman, as if he knew him.

”Your boss was here, hammering on your door,” he said, not stopping. He kept talking and walking as he looked back at Darman. ”You been away?”

Darman was a lot more confident about his acting skills since the Coruscant deployment. ”Yeah ... I suppose I better explain myself to him ...”

The man shrugged and went on his way. So far, so good. Inside the apartment, the place was as they'd left it after the scuffle with Sull: Darman hadn't cleared it out while he'd been waiting for Atin to return with transport, partly because he didn't know if they'd need to use the place for cover in the near future. The back of his hand still showed the neat purple depressions of Sull's no-holds-barred bite.

It wasn't the kind of place he would have picked to live, Darman decided. There was no rear exit, and the windows were poorly placed to keep watch. Sull must have felt unusually safe to risk living in such an indefensible location, and that in itself was unexpected in an ARC trooper.

Sull hadn't ama.s.sed a lot of effects in the couple of months he'd lived here. He had two changes of clothes in the closet, basic hygiene kit in the refresher, and a conservator full of food, as if he spent all his wages on it. That's what we 're all like, isn't it? No idea what to do with possessions, but always hungry. Darman checked for anything else that might identify the ARC as being a GAR officer, and found a packet of crumbly, very sweet cookies that were irresistibly coated with seeds of some kind. He munched happily as he rummaged through the apartment. The place was military-tidy and anonymous, apart from a neat stack of holozines next to an equally neat stack of holovid chips that showed Sull stayed home at night.

Caged nuna. Yeah, even an ARC found it hard to step out-side the cage when someone opened it. Maybe Sull had been sampling the outside world at a distance, through the entertainment that regular folks took for granted. Darman wondered where Sull was now: well clear of Gaftikar s.p.a.ce, anyway.

The apartment's comm was flas.h.i.+ng with unanswered messages. When Darman played them back they were- predictably-a broken stream of angry invective from a male voice demanding to know why Cuvil-not Sull to his new acquaintances, then-hadn't shown up for work again. There were also a couple of silent calls, brief clicks before someone shut the link again. Darman wondered where Sull had picked the name Cuvil and went on sorting through bins and other hiding places for any telltale links back to the Grand Army.

It wasn't the Gaftikari that he was trying to throw off Sull's trail. It was his own side. Suddenly that bothered him, be-cause now they were all complicit in helping the man desert, and that was a lot more serious than going outside their rules of engagement on Triple Zero to take out a few terrorists. There was no way this could be spun as getting the job done.

Darman was still checking the holovids to make sure there was no rental code on them that would lead back to Sull when his fine-tuned instincts told him something wasn't right.

It was the way the silence outside seemed ... heavy.

Sometimes there was the kind of quiet that was just ambient sound with nothing to disturb it. Then there was what he thought of as an effort to be silent. That was what he could sense now. Somewhere in his subconscious, his brain had processed something he hadn't even noticed hearing and tripped his alarm.

There was someone outside.

The blinds were still drawn. Darman knelt on the floor and placed a sensor on the exposed tiles, trying to detect the faintest vibration. The red bars of the readout showed occasional spikes that usually meant footsteps, even though he couldn't hear movement when he concentrated. He took out his blaster, checked the charge, and squatted down behind a chair to see what happened next, holding his breath.

When the doors opened-very quietly-he didn't dare look around the chair and expose his position. Whoever had let themselves in held the two sections of the door apart so that it didn't close with a characteristic faint slap, but eased slowly back again. Then he smelled something very familiar: the faint scent of lubricating oil, the kind used on blasters and vibroblades.

Darman wondered for a moment if Sull had given his key code to a girlfriend and not mentioned it, but he knew what females smelled like and this wasn't female. He wondered what kind of company Sull kept at work, and if his boss had run out of patience and sent someone around to teach him what happened to no-shows.

But Eyat didn't seem like that kind of place. People here seemed ... almost friendly.

Darman watched a shadow fall across the carpet against the hazy light filtering through the blinds. Then another one joined it, and there was the faintest creak.

They knew he was here.

But maybe it was the local police, and the neighbor had realized he wasn't Sull after all, and alerted them to an intruder.

”So, Alpha-Thirty, you thought you'd try a new career, did you?”

He thought he knew that voice.

No, that wasn't something the Eyat cops would care about. The faint rustling of fabric and the occasional s.n.a.t.c.hed breath came closer. Darman squatted with his sidearm steadied in both hands. Then the shadow fell on him.

He looked up into a masked face, eyes covered by a sun visor, and he was staring at a blaster muzzle as he fired. He pulled the trigger even before he consciously registered the blaster aimed at him because his training and common sense and raw instinct told the primitive, self-protecting parts of his brain that a masked man sneaking around was a bad, bad sign. He shot him in the face. It was a simple reflex.

The man fell backward with a grunt and a flash of blue light. Another shot sizzled past Darman's ear, but his brain didn't bother to get involved as his hand aimed of its own free will and sent blaster bolts-one, two, three-into an-other moving object that was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The shots must have hit the second intruder: Darman smelled burned hair. He instinctively dropped and found himself lying on the floor next to the inert body of the first man he'd shot, a figure in black coveralls with a charred hood covering the face. He scrambled to grab the man's dropped weapon-a DC-15s sidearm-and took cover behind the angle of a wall, listening for movement.

The Deece handgun bothered him, because he had one, too; but Sull hadn't. It wasn't issued to ARCs, not that they didn't acquire whatever took their fancy. He folded the magazine flat and shoved it in his belt.

Now there was no way out of the apartment other than back through the doors-or out through one of the front windows. Getting cornered was a weird mistake for an a.s.sa.s.sin to make. Darman was trapped in an apartment with someone who was trying to kill him-or Sull to be precise.

Darman knew he should have simply rushed the second man, firing both blasters, but he'd lost his momentum. If this was Republic Intelligence, they were badly misnamed. They hadn't done a recce of the apartment.

Republic Stupidity, more like.

Or maybe they'd been very sure they could take Sull any-way.

Holovid directors would have been disappointed, he knew, but he didn't bother to call a challenge to the other man. He sprang to his feet and came out firing, because there was nowhere to hide in a place this small, and no real protection offered by the furniture. It was simply a matter of who hit who first.

Darman fired, and fired, and fired.

The man, all in black, stepped out from the alcove near the door and took the blaster barrage full in the chest. It knocked him back a few paces, but he didn't drop-and that was when Darman knew he was in real trouble and simply charged him. He knocked the man flat with sheer brute force and got a grip on his head, jerking it so hard to one side that there was a wet, m.u.f.fled snap and the man went limp.

All Darman could hear now was his own breathing. He sank back on his heels and listened hard in case there were more men coming. But there was nothing.

Had the neighbors heard? Were the police on their way?

He had two dead men on his hands. That wasn't an unusual situation for a commando, but it was bad news in a city that wasn't supposed to know it had been infiltrated.

Before he decided whether to make a run for it, though, there was something he had to find out. Blaster aimed squarely at the head, he checked each body, grabbing the hood-like mask by the seam at the top and working it loose. Doing that one-handed was harder than it looked. The first man he'd shot was hard to identify with his face blackened and shattered, but he had familiar black hair. The second- he was recognizable, all right: and so was the gunmetal-and-purple armor disguised by his coveralls.

It was the face Darman saw every morning when he shaved.

He'd shot two clones, men just like him right down to the last pair of chromosomes. He'd killed two covert ops troopers.

The GAR was sending clone a.s.sa.s.sins after their own men.

Mong'tar City, Bogg V, Bogden system, 477 days after Geonosis ”I think you should leave this to me,” Vau said as gently as he could. Laying down the law never worked with Skirata. ”A little cold distance might be called for.”

Skirata leaned on the rail of the bridge with one hand while he honed his three-sided knife on the metal. The thin rasping sound set Vau's teeth on edge; Mird rumbled with annoyance at each sc.r.a.pe, too. Beneath them, the most filthy and polluted river Vau had ever seen attempted to flow like curdled milk. There was more debris than liquid.

”I'm not sharpening it for the pilot,” Skirata said.

”That's what I meant. Kaminoans don't answer questions when they're in slices.”

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