Part 25 (1/2)
Vau opened the top hatch and motioned Mird inside. ”Where's your spirit of adventure, Kal? Have overpriced Deep Water hybrid, will explore ...”
”I got this tub for a good price.” Insulting Skirata's ability to drive a deal was marginally worse than questioning his courage, and he realized Vau had baited him yet again. ”And I wonder what you'd do with yourself if you didn't have me to torment.”
Vau raised one eyebrow-now, that was annoying dumb insolence, it really was-but Skirata ignored the impulse, thought of the fortune Vau had handed over to him as if it were a cred chip he'd found on the street, and stood up. Mereel slipped the mooring line and prepared to get under way.
The islands were constructed on the tops of natural peaks jutting from the sea, like porceplast crowns on the stumps of teeth. Once submerged, it was simply a matter of doing what he'd do on land if he was hunting an animal in a lair: looking for signs of activity, checking out cave mouths, and venturing inside.
It was just a recce, just a discreet dive to scope out the topography that wasn't shown on any of the charts, so they could come back later to stage a planned a.s.sault. But if an opportunity presented itself, they'd take it.
Outside the transparisteel bubble that formed a clear dome over the c.o.c.kpit, a tourist brochure of an underwater world drifted past them in vividly colored serenity. Mird seemed fascinated, pressing a snotty nose to the transparisteel and making excited grumbling noises, and Skirata risked reaching out to haul the strill back by its collar and wipe the view-port clean. Filthy thing, but it has its uses, just like us. Vau took the hint and beckoned to Mird to sit on his lap.
Relations had definitely relaxed between Skirata and Vau. There was a time when they'd have brawled over less.
Aay'han dropped below sixty meters, past the charted depth. The water was surprisingly clear; lacy weeds swayed gracefully in the currents. Brilliant pink and yellow fish like ribbons wove themselves between the fronds, flas.h.i.+ng dis-plays of lights like a Coruscant casino.
”That's more like it,” Mereel said, sounding pleased. The navigation displays stripped away the layer of marine life and showed a three-dimensional landscape of slopes marked with fissures and channels that penetrated deep into the face of the submerged mountain forming the one island within the fifteen-kilometer zone. Aay'han came alongside a deep shadow that appeared as a hole on the sensors.
”Worth a ping,” said Mereel. ”Let's just line up the sensors and see how far into that feature we can map.”
”You okay with this, son?”
”Yes, Kal'buir.” He turned the vessel ninety degrees and pointed Aayhan's nose at the opening for a deep scan. ”Now, that's a likely one. Goes back a hundred meters at least. Mark that on the chart, please, Sergeant Vau.” He turned to Skirata. ”I'm several pages ahead of Ordo in the manual now...”
There'd be a contest later, Skirata could tell. Ordo and Mereel, a double act right from the time he'd met them as two-year-old clone kids-no names, just numbers, and already handling blasters-sometimes indulged in a little rivalry and one-upmans.h.i.+p. It explained Mereel's love of risk taking. He had to edge out of Ordo's shadow somehow.
They worked along the thirty kilometers of submerged coastline, checking and scanning cave after cave. Some were immediately obvious as dead ends when the sonar scan was mapped onto the three-dimensional view, just depressions in the rock that went nowhere. Some were so deep and twisted that the sonar didn't find an end, and those were marked. As Mereel eased Aay'han through the extraordinary forest of weed and marine creatures-some of which slapped sucker-like mouthparts onto the c.o.c.kpit bubble as if testing the s.h.i.+p for flavor-Skirata kept an eye out for signs of disturbance to the environment that might indicate recent construction work. If Ko Sai was here, she'd only been in residence for a few months. Signs of activity might still be around-fresh-cut rock face, debris from cave mouths, any number of telltale signs that she'd had a hideaway built down here.
Vau stared out of the dome, too, with Mird mirroring his posture as exactly as a six-legged animal ever could, blinking from time to time and pausing once or twice to turn and gaze at its master before giving him an enthusiastic and s...o...b..ry lick across the face with a dripping gray tongue.
Skirata shuddered. But at least there was one being in the galaxy that loved Vau unconditionally. Fierfek, if he'd started feeling sorry for the chakaar after so many years, it was a bad sign. The fortune was just creds Vau had no use for, Skirata told himself, something he wanted to deny his own privileged cla.s.s and that simply happened to be useful in the plan to rescue clones-an afterthought.
It's not true, though, is it? He's a Mando too. The same thing that drew him to Mandalore is the same thing that kept me there. We chose it. Maybe I hate him because of the parts of him that are too much like me.
”All stop,” Vau said suddenly.
Mird stiffened, always sensitive to Vau's reactions. The strill was hunting, even if it couldn't get out there and taste the scents and currents. Mereel brought the s.h.i.+p to a halt and she drifted, silent except for the hum of the s.h.i.+elds and environment controls.
Vau pointed ahead, slightly to port.
”In that weed forest. Look.”
Aay'han's exterior holocams trained in the direction of Vau's finger and Mird's snout. The weed was thick and populated by shoals of glowing orange discs that could have been fish, worms, or swimming crustaceans. The impression was one of a tapcaf courtyard strung with decorative lights.
Not all the weed was pale green. Some looked white in the aquamarine light. Skirata strained to focus, and then a cur-rent moved the weed a little more and he realized he wasn't looking at weed at all, but bones.
It was a skeleton.
”Shab,” Mereel muttered. ”I think we're too late for resuscitation, Kal 'buir.”
”I hope he bought travel insurance.” Skirata couldn't see any marks on the bones at this distance. ”Or she.”
Who'd died down here? And why?
The skeleton was swaying in the current as if dancing with the weed. It was definitely a humanoid of some kind, picked clean and as white as an anatomical specimen, although a closer inspection-as close as they could get without leaving the vessel-showed a few colonies of pale yellow growths that looked like closed shadow barnacles. It was hard to see what was holding it down. If the flesh was gone, the connective tissue that held the bones together should have been gone, too. Skirata couldn't think of a species that fitted the bill, but it didn't matter. He-or she-wasn't going any-where.
”Diver who ignored the hazard warnings?” Vau asked.
Skirata's instinct for bad signs was more reliable than any sonar. ”What kind of marine life eats a diving suit and apparatus as well as the meat?”
Mereel, engrossed in the controls for the external security holocam, let out a long breath.
”And when did you last see a fish with fingers?” he said quietly, switching the holocam image to one of the large monitors. ”Look.”
The close-up view of the weed bed that swayed around the skeleton's ankles like a deep-pile carpet showed a splash of bright orange. As Mereel magnified the image and went in for a close-up, Skirata realized what it was.
Mereel was right. There weren't too many marine species that could take a length of fibercord and secure a body to a rock.
The close view on the monitor showed a knot: a competent, nonslipping, textbook Keldabe anchoring bend. In a galaxy of loop rings, gription panels, and a hundred high-tech ways of attaching things, few people bothered to learn to tie knots properly, let alone one as distinctive and complex as that.
Very few people indeed: only clone soldiers-and Mandalorians.
Chapter 10.
Naasad'guur mhi, Naasad'guur mhi, Naasad'guur mhi, Mhi n 'ulu. Mhi Mando'ade, Kandosii'ade, Teh Manda'yaim, Mando'ade.
No one likes us, No one likes us, No one likes us, We don't care.
We are Mandos, The elite boys, Mando boys, From Mandalore.
-Mandalorian drinking song, loosely translated; said to date from a ban on Mandalorian mercenaries drinking in local tapcafs, when employed by the government of Geris VI * * *
Republic Treasury building, Coruscant, 478 days after Geonosis Besany closed the doors to her office and obscured the transparisteel walls with a touch of the b.u.t.ton on her desk-She didn't want to be disturbed.
Centax II. Do I concentrate on that?
She fondled the blaster that Mereel had given her and wondered what it would take to make her use it; she'd never fired one in anger. She hadn't even been trained to shoot, but now seemed a pretty good time to learn. Then she began trying to work out how she might take a closer look at Centax II-in person, or at a distance-and work out what was going on. It was a military area, and no member of the public could stroll in there unannounced. There weren't that many excuses to pay a visit even for a Treasury agent.
The public accounts showed a number of contractors providing services to the Grand Army that could be cross-referenced to Centax, and one of them-Dhannut Logistics- also showed up on the health budget. It was worth a look as long as she was thinking medcenter.
I could be totally off beam, of course.
And I got Mereel his answer anyway. I should walk away from this.
But she couldn't, because Ordo couldn't walk away, and neither could Corr, or any of the others. She realized how empty her life must have been to have filled up so fast and so easily with people who-possibly-didn't give her a second thought except as a useful contact.
I'm not stupid, Kal.