4

This is the true art of genetic selection and manipulation. A human is naturally a learning creature, but it is also violent, selfish, lustful, and undisciplined. So we must walk the knife-edge between suppressing the factors that lead to disobedience and destroying that prized capacity for applying intelligence and aggression.

–Hali Ke, senior research geneticist of Kamino

Niner was hauling in his canopy when the explosion jerked him upright. A column of white roiling fire shot into the night sky above the tops of the trees. He knew it was hot and bright because his helmet visor’s filter kicked in to stop it from overwhelming his night vision.

Even though he knew it was coming, his heart sank. Dar­man probably hadn’t made it. He’d disobeyed his order. He hadn’t jumped when he told him to.

So maybe you’ve lost a brother. Maybe not. Either way, you’ll lose two more if you don’t get your act together fast.

Niner triangulated the position of the blast and then went on bundling up the free-fall canopy, cutting away the lengths of cord before burying it. With a breaking strength of five hundred kilos, the cord was bound to come in handy. He wound each length in a figure-eight around his thumb and smallest finger and slipped the skeins into a belt pouch, then went in search of his extra pack.

It hadn’t fallen far from him. The low-opening technique worked well if you needed accuracy. Niner found the pack at the edge of a field, covered in small dark-furred animals that seemed fascinated by it and were gnawing at the soft padding strip on one side. He flashed his spot-lamp to scatter them, but they stared back up the beam, burst into angry chatter, and then turned toward him.

It was unnerving, nothing more. Their little teeth snapped impotently on his armor. He stood still, assessing them, his data bank scrolling in front of his eyes and telling him that they were gdans, and that they weren’t logged as a hostile alien species. All the nonhuman life Niner had ever seen for real, other than Kaminoans and various instructors, had been on Geonosis and through a blaster sight. He was utterly de­pendent on the intelligence loaded into his database—that, or finding things out for himself.

All but one of the gdans gave him up as inedible within a minute and disappeared into the waist-high crop. The re­maining creature worried away at his left boot, a tribute to its tenacity, if not its intelligence. Those boots were specced to withstand every assault from hard vacuum to acid and molten metal. The little animal clearly believed in aiming high.

Darman would have found it fascinating, he was sure. It was a pity to lose him. He had all the makings of a good comrade.

“Come on,” Niner said, nudging the animal with the butt of his blaster rifle. “I’ve got to get to work. Shove off.”

The gdan, teeth locked around a clamp, looked up and met his eyes, or at least it seemed like it. It could only have really seen a faint blue light. Then it let go and trotted back toward the field, pausing once to stare back at him before disappearing into a hole in the ground with all the ease of a diver.

Niner took out his datapad and calculated his position. There was no GPS he could lock in to without the Neimoid­ians detecting him, but he could at least use dead reckoning based on the sprayer’s last position, matching features on the landscape to his chart. It was old-fashioned soldiering. He liked it. He had to be able to do the business when the tech wasn’t there, even if that meant using nothing but a Tran­doshan blade.

If you stab someone in the heart, they can still run. I once saw a man run a hundred meters like that, screaming as well. Go for the neck, like this. Sergeant Skirata had taught them a lot about knives. Put a bit of weight behind it, son.

Still, tech had its place. A speeder bike would have been handy, although they hadn’t thought they’d need them. The insert was supposed to be five klicks from the target.

Never mind, he thought. It would make me look pretty con­ spicuous out here anyway. The gear would slow him on his way to the pre-agreed rendezvous point, but he’d get there. If Fi and Atin had landed safely, they’d be heading for RV Alpha, too.

He started tabbing, trying to make ten klicks an hour, avoiding tracks and open ground. In the end he had to drag the extra pack behind him on straps like a sled. Tactical advance into battle—tabbing, as Skirata called it—meant walking at six to ten klicks an hour with a twenty-five-kilo pack. “But that’s for ordinary men,” the instructor would say, as if nonclones were subhuman. “You are clone commandos. You will do better because you are better.”

Niner was lugging nearly three times that load now. He didn’t feel better at all right then. He decided to add a portable repulsorlift to his new list of gear to request upon return.

Qiilura’s moon was in its new phase, and he was grateful for that. In his light gray armor, he would have stood out like a beacon. Hadn’t the top brass thought of that, either? He stifled the uncharacteristically critical opinion about his superiors and decided there had to be something he didn’t know but they did. He had his orders.

Even so, he diverted to a narrow river shown on the holochart and stopped long enough to smear mud over his armor and gear. There was no point chancing his luck.

At four hundred meters from RV point Alpha, he slowed down, and not because he was struggling under the weight. A silent approach was necessary. He hid the pack he was dragging deep in the undergrowth and recorded its location to collect later. Fi and Atin might have been tracked. They might not have made it at all. There was always the possibil­ity of ambush. No, he definitely wasn’t taking chances.

For the last two hundred meters, he got down in the grass and crawled.

But they were there, and alone.

Niner found himself staring up into the beam from Fi’s helmet and he knew that the infrared targeting was centered at the point between his filtration mask and the top of his chest plate. It was a vulnerable point, provided one got close enough and used the right caliber rounds. Not many hostiles could get that close, of course.

“You gave me a start, Sarge,” Fi said, holding his blaster clear and looking him over. He killed the light and indicated his chest plate. “Great minds, eh?”

Fi’s armor was no longer pristine, either. Niner wasn’t sure what he’d smeared over it, but it disrupted his outline well enough. The thought had obviously occurred to all of them. Atin was daubed with something dark and matte as well.

“Shape, shine, shadow, silhouette, smell, sound, and movement,” Niner said, repeating the rules of basic camou­flage. If it hadn’t been for Darman’s absence, he would have found the situation funny. He tried. “Shame they couldn’t find something beginning with S to complete the set.”

“I could,” Atin said. “Any contact from Darman?”

They were forty kilometers from the point where Niner had landed. “I saw the blast. He was last off.”

“You saw him jump, then.”

“No. He was grabbing as much gear and ordnance as he could salvage.” Niner felt he needed to explain. “He shoved me out the hatch first. I shouldn’t have let that happen. But I didn’t abandon him.”

Atin shrugged. “So what have we got, then?”

“We’ve got a brother missing.”

“I meant by way of resources. He had most of the demoli­tion ordnance.”

“I know you meant that, and I don’t want to hear it.” If he could feel concern—even sorrow—for Darman, then why couldn’t Atin? But it was no time to start a fight. They had to stick together now. A four-man mission with three men: their chances of succeeding had plummeted already. “We’re a squad now. Get used to it.”

Fi interrupted. He seemed to have a knack for defusing sit­uations. “All our gear’s intact, anyway. We can still put quite a dent in them if we have to.”

And what did they have to put a dent in, exactly? They had high-altitude drone recces of the target building, but no idea yet if the walls were just plastered blocks or if they were lined with shock-absorbing alloy plates. There could be just the thirty or so guards seen walking the perimeter, or hun­dreds more holed up in underground barracks. Without bet­ter intelligence, they had no way of knowing just how much gear was enough for the job.

It was a case of adding P for plenty, just to be sure. Niner liked to be sure.

“How much time are we going to spend looking for him?” Atin asked. “They know they’ve got company now. It wasn’t exactly a silent insert.”

“SOPs,” Niner said. Standard operating procedures: that was how things should be done; how commandos expected them to be done. “We get to each RV point for the time we agreed upon, and if he doesn’t show we’ll go to the position of the blast and see what’s left. Then we’ll decide if we’re going to consider him MIA or not.”

“You’d want us to search if it was you missing,” Fi said to Atin. “He can’t call in. Not at this range. Too risky.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to compromise the mission for me,” Atin said, distinctly acid.

“He’s alone, for fierfek’s sake. Alone.”

“Just shut it, will you?” Niner said. The good thing about ultra-short-range comlinks was that you could stand around and have a blazing argument inside those helmets, and no­body outside could hear you. “Finding him isn’t only the right thing to do, it’s the sensible thing to do. Locate him and we find his gear. Okay?”

“Yes Sarge,” Fi said.

“Got it,” Atin said. “But there has to be a point where we consider him dead.”

“Without a body, that’ll be when Geonosis freezes over,” Niner said, still angry and not knowing why. “Until then, we’re going to sweat our guts out to find him, provided it doesn’t blow the mission. Now let’s see if we can sling this gear between some poles or something. We’ll never keep this pace up for tens of kilometers unless we find a better way of transporting it.”

Niner set his helmet comlink to receive long-range any­way. There was no harm in listening. If Darman was out there, Niner wasn’t planning on abandoning him.

The clearing hadn’t been there yesterday.

Etain picked her way through flattened kuvara saplings and into a circle of blackened stubble, following Birhan’s steps. The air smelled of smoke and roasted barq.

He was swearing fluently. She didn’t know much Qiiluran, but she knew a curse when she heard one.

“This is your lot again,” Birhan said. He surveyed the field, hands to his brow to block out the sun breaking over the horizon. Now that it was daylight, they could see the extent of the damage from last night’s explosion. “What am I going to do? What’s going to happen to our contract?”

It wasn’t phrased like a question. The Neimoidians weren’t known to be sympathetic about the host of natural disasters constantly threatening the farming communities’ precarious existence. But this was no natural disaster.

The blast area spanned around five hundred meters, and the crater at the center was twelve, maybe fifteen meters wide. Etain didn’t know how deep it was, but a Trandoshan and an Ubese were standing at the edge of it, peering down, blasters in hand, looking as if they were searching in the soil. They didn’t take the slightest notice of her or Birhan. She must have looked suitably starved and dowdy, rough enough to pass for a farm girl.

It was probably too late to convince them the crater was caused by a meteor fragment. But at this point Etain didn’t know any more than they did.

“Why do you think it’s my lot?” she asked.

“Obvious,” Birhan said sourly. “I seen loads of speeders and freighters and sprayers come down hard. They don’t leave craters. They falls apart and burns, yes, but they don’t blow up half the countryside. This is off-planet. It’s sol­diers .” He kicked around some of the charred and blackened stalks. “Can’t you have your fight on someone else’s planet? Don’t you think I got enough problems?”

She wondered for a moment if he was considering turning her in to Hokan’s men for a few credits to make up for the loss of the precious barq. She was already an extra mouth to feed at a time when money he was counting on had just gone up in a fireball with much of his crop. It was time to find somewhere else to hide, and some other plan for getting that information off Qiilura.

Etain was still considering the scorched land when the Ubese and the Trandoshan jerked upright and turned to jog away toward the dirt track beside the field. The Ubese had one hand pressed to the side of his helmet as if he was listening to something: a comlink, probably. Whatever the sum­mons had been, it had been urgent enough to get them running. It also confirmed that this wasn’t just a Narsh sprayer making an all-too-frequent crash landing.

Etain waited a moment longer, then walked forward to peer into the pit to see what had so engrossed them.

It had been a monstrous blast. The sides of the blackened crater were blown almost smooth, and there was debris everywhere. It was an enormous blast area for a small craft.

She left Birhan and walked around inspecting the ground as Hokan’s men had done, not sure what she was seeking. She was almost at the kuvara orchard before she saw it.

The early sunlight caught a scraped metal edge of some­thing embedded in the ground, rammed deep by the explo­sion. Etain crouched down, as casually as she could, and worked the soil loose from it with her fingers. It took her a few minutes to expose enough to understand the shape, and a few more to work out why the scorched colors were so fa­miliar. It was distorted, the metal frozen in a moment of being torn apart by enormous force, but she was pretty sure she’d seen one intact before.

It was a plate from an R5 astromech droid—a plate with Republic markings.

They’re coming.

Whoever they were, she hoped they’d made it alive.

Darman knew it was risky moving around by day, and the fact that his right leg seemed to scream every time he put his weight on it didn’t help matters.

He’d spent two painful hours scooping out a shallow de­pression in a thicket about a hundred meters from what passed for a road. Roots and stones had slowed him down. So had the pounding he’d taken hitting the canopies of trees during his landing. But he’d dug in now, and he lay under a lattice of branches and leaves on his belly, watching the road, sometimes through his rifle sight, sometimes with the elec­trobinocular panel that flipped down in his visor.

At least the little animals that had swarmed over him in the night had disappeared. He’d given up trying to fend them off. They had explored his armor for a while and then moved on to watch him from distance. Now that it was daylight, there were no more glittering eyes staring out from the under­growth.

He still wasn’t sure of his position, either. There was no GPS network he could use without being picked up. He needed to get out and about and do a recce if he was going to have any chance of aligning landscape features with the holochart.

He knew he was facing north: the arc of small stones around a thin branch he’d stuck in the soil charted the sun’s progress, and gave him his east-west line. If his datapad had calculated speed and distance correctly, he was between forty and fifty klicks northeast of the first RV point. He’d never cover that distance on foot in time, not with the extra gear and not with his leg in this state. If he dragged the pack, he’d draw a neat follow-me line through the vegetation.

Darman eased himself over on his back, removed his leg plates, and unsealed his undersuit at the knee. It felt as if he’d torn a muscle or a tendon above the joint. He soaked the makeshift bandage with bacta again and replaced the legging and plates before rolling back into position.

It was high time he ate something, but he decided that he could wait a little longer.

He checked the dirt road through the crosswires of the DC-17’s electromag scope. The first time he had worn the helmet with the built-in display shimmering before his eyes, he had been overwhelmed and disoriented by the flurry of symbols in his field of vision. The rifle scope made it seem even more chaotic. Lights, lights, lights: it was like looking from the windows of Tipoca City at night with the lamps and reflective surfaces of the refectory behind you—so many competing images that you couldn’t focus on what lay be­yond the stormproof glass.

But in time—that time being the short, desperate morning when the whole of Kilo and Delta squads first wore the HUD display while using live ordnance—he got used to it. Those who didn’t get used to it fast didn’t return from the exercise. He learned to see, and yet not see. He was constantly aware of all the status displays that told him when his weapons were charging, and if his suit was compromised, and what was happening around him.

Now he was focused solely on looking down a clear tun­nel framed by interlocking segments of soothing blue, with a highlighted area to show when he had an optimum firing so­lution for his target. The information on range, environment, and the score of other options was still there. He could take them in without consciously seeing them. He saw only his target.

A faint rumbling sound made him stiffen. Voices: they were approaching from his right. Then they stopped.

He waited. Eventually the voices started again and two Weequays came into his field of view, too slowly for his liking. They were looking at the road’s shoulders with unusual diligence. One stopped suddenly and peered at the ground, apparently excited, if his arm gestures were any indication.

Then he looked up and started walking almost directly toward Darman’s position. He took out a blaster pistol.

He can’t possibly see me, Darman thought. I’ve done this by the book. No reflection, no movement, no smells, nothing.

But the Weequay kept coming, right into the bushes. He stopped about ten meters from Darman and was casting around as if he’d followed something and lost the trail. Then he moved forward again.

Darman had almost stopped breathing. His helmet masked all sound, but it certainly didn’t feel that way. The Weequay was so close now that Darman could smell his distinctive sweat and see the detailed tooling on his sidearm—a KYD-21 with a hadrium barrel—and that there was a vibroblade in his other hand. Right at that moment Darman couldn’t even swallow.

It’s okay to be scared.

The Weequay stepped sideways, looking at waist height as if browsing for discs on a library shelf.

It’s okay to be scared as long as you…

The Weequay was right on him now, squatting over his po­sition. Darman felt boots depress branches that were touching his back, and then the creature looked down and said something that sounded like gah.

… as long as you use it.

Darman brought his fist up hard under the Weequay’s jaw, ramming his own vibroblade up into the throat and twisting his fist off to one side to sever blood vessels. He supported the deadweight of the impaled Weequay on one arm, until it stopped moving. Then Darman lowered his arm, shaking with the effort, and let the body roll to the ground as quietly as he could.

“What you find?” the other Weequay yelled. “Gar-Ul? Gar?”

No answer. Well, here we go. Darman aimed his DC-17 and waited.

The second Weequay began running in a straight line toward the bushes, and that was a stupid thing for him to do when he had no idea what had happened to his comrade. They’d been lording it over farmers for too long; they were sloppy. He also made the mistake of pulling out his blaster.

Darman had a clear head shot and he took it almost with­out thinking. The Weequay dropped, cleanly and silently, and lay crumpled, with wisps of smoke rising from his head.

“Oh, clever,” Darman sighed, as much to hear the reassur­ance of his own voice as anything. Now he’d have to break cover and retrieve the body. He couldn’t leave it there like a calling card. He waited a few minutes, listening, and then eased himself onto his injured leg to limp out into open ground.

He dragged the Weequay into the bushes, noting the smell of cooked meat. Now he could see what the first Weequay had been following: a broad path of tiny animal footprints. The curious gdans had given him away. He limped out again, checking carefully, and obliterated the drag marks with a branch.

Waste not, want not. The Weequays wouldn’t be needing the blasters or vibroblades now. Darman, pulse slowing to normal, searched the bodies for anything else of use, pocketing data cards and valuables. He didn’t feel that he was a thief; he had no personal possessions that weren’t the Grand Army’s property, and he felt no need to acquire any. But there was a chance the cards contained information that would help him achieve his objective, and the beads and coins would come in handy if he needed to buy or bribe something or someone.

He found a suitable spot to hide the bodies. He didn’t have time to bury them, but was suddenly aware of movement in the undergrowth, animal movement, and gradually small heads appeared, sniffing the air.

“You again, eh?” Darman said, although the gdans couldn’t possibly hear him beyond the helmet. “Way past your bed­time.” They edged forward and then swarmed across the

Weequay with the shattered head, taking tiny bites as they settled on him in a dark-furred blanket of snapping motion.

Darman wouldn’t have to worry about burying anyone.

The faintest of liquid sounds made him look around at the other Weequay. Darman had his rifle aimed instantly. The Weequay wasn’t dead, not quite. For some reason, that upset Darman more than he could have ever imagined.

He’d killed plenty of times at Geonosis, smashing droids with grenade launchers and cannons at a distance, hyped up on fear and the instinct to live. Survive to fight.

But this was different. It wasn’t distant, and the debris of the kill wasn’t metal. The Weequay’s blood had dried in a stream down his glove and right forearm plate. And he hadn’t managed a clean kill. It was wrong.

They had drilled him to kill, and kill, and kill, but nobody had thought to teach him what he was supposed to feel after­ward. He did feel something, and he wasn’t certain what it was.

He’d think about it later.

Aiming his rifle, he corrected his mistake before the small army of carnivores could move on to their next meal.