But you're dead. So who are you?
“Heard of comlinks? I even had your landlord calling me, complaining you'd skipped without paying rent.”
I know you're dead because you fell a few thousand meters from a balcony after a chat with Walon Vau.
“Sorry, Supervisor.”
Wennen was all acid, lips compressed. “See me first thing in the morning. I'm off shift now.”
She shut down her workstation, grabbed her jacket, and made a move toward the doors. Then she paused and turned to Ordo.
“Corr, it's sixteen-thirty,” she said. “Come on. Time to go. Nobody will thank you for sitting there all night. Want me to drop you off at the barracks?”
Jiss, either you're dead or you're an imposter. So who did Vau kill?
“Thank you, Supervisor.” Ordo logged off and replaced his helmet, suddenly glad of the chance to hide behind an anonymous white plastoid visor and stare horrified at the face of a dead woman who seemed to be doing pretty well for a corpse. “I'm … I'm going to meet some comrades from the Forty-first. Could you drop me off at the first taxi platform in the entertainment sector, please?”
“I'm glad you're taking the opportunity to relax, Corr.” She seemed genuinely pleased. “You deserve it.”
Ordo took one last look at the woman who appeared to be Jiss, memorizing every pore and line, and followed Wennen outside to the speeder bays. He slid into the passenger's seat with a hundred questions that had, for once in his life, yielded no fast answers.
Wennen powered up her speeder and sat still for a moment, staring at the console.
“Honestly,” she snorted, all exasperation. “That's the most unreliable employee I have ever known. Sometimes I could just kill that woman.”
Operational house, Qibbu's Hut, 1630 hours, 384 days after Geonosis
“There they go … ,” Niner said.
Beads of red light were now dotted throughout the blue holochart of grids and lines that had expanded to fill a space a meter high and two meters long. The tracking Dust was transmitting the movements of the six Separatists they had tagged a few hours earlier.
Etain walked around the 3-D chart, studying tracks that were strung like necklaces with occasional solitary beads placed at intervals. The virtual representation of a section of Galactic City spanned the table. Some of the threads crossed and merged. Niner and Boss were still taking data from it and listing each location while Vau watched with Jusik.
“They do get around,” Vau said. “Jusik, my boy, has anyone ever told you you're a genius?”
Jusik shrugged. “And my friends are excellent shots. Good team, aren't we?”
Friends was an unusual way for a Jedi to describe clone troops who were technically his to command and use as he thought fit. But Jusik simply didn't see the world that way. Etain found it deeply touching.
“Yes, excellent team,” Vau said. Boss glanced up, evidently pleased. “It's wonderful to watch a job done well.”
That wasn't quite the Walon Vau that Etain had sensed and found to be sheer passionless brutality. He was no less complex and contradictory than Skirata. Atin, reading from his datapad, ignored him completely; Vau sometimes glanced at his former trainee but got no reaction.
Atin loathes him. He wants revenge of some kind. Etain found it hard to reconcile that with the methodical, considerate, and courageous man she knew, the one who had felt he had no right to survive Geonosis when his brothers had died.
While the locations were collated, another frustrating hiatus had forced the squads into rest and recovery. They seemed to need to be busy fighting, especially Delta. Etain could taste their collective impatience. Maybe it was youth; but maybe it was that they didn't enjoy having time to think.
Fi, Sev, Fixer, and Scorch had gone down to the restaurant to eat with Corr, but Darman was asleep in his room. Etain went to check on him and watched him for a while. He lay on his stomach, head turned to one side, cheek resting on folded arms, and twitched occasionally as if dreaming.
They grabbed every small moment together that they could find. And it wasn't enough. Etain kissed his temple and left him to sleep. Skirata, wandering around with his hands deep in his pockets, gave her a conspiratorial wink.
“Looks like we've got three clusters in residential areas,” Boss said. “And now about twenty-five other places they've at least stopped for a while, including shops.”
Skirata stood looking at the mesh of colored light. “We can't cover them all,” he said. “The clusters are the priority.”
“Probably their safe houses or bomb factories.” Boss indicated a static point of red light that hadn't moved in an hour. “I think that's our marked pack of thermal plastoid.”
“Could well be. Got a list now?”
“It gets longer by the hour. How long did you say that Dust can transmit?”
Jusik cocked his head, calculating. “Four, perhaps five weeks.”
“Well, I say we recce the cluster points for a day or so, confirm the activity, and then decide which are the priority targets and leave the rest to CSF.” Niner jabbed his finger into the holochart again to indicate another thread growing as the tagged suspect moved to a new location. “This target is trailing the other. No idea why. Maybe providing tail cover.”
“Okay, you draw up a surveillance roster for the next twenty-four hours and be prepared to pull people off it if I get the call from Perrive, or whatever his real name is.”
“Okay, Sarge.”
Skirata finally allowed himself a little satisfied grin, which put Etain more in mind of a gdan than ever. He gave both Boss and Niner ferocious pats on the back; Boss flinched while Niner turned and smiled, pleased with life. “Nice job. You two go and get something to eat.”
Etain fought an urge to walk across to Skirata and hug him. She had finally worked out what was happening. Omega—and Ordo—were clearly used to genuine affection from him: they touched all the time, from roughhousing and crushing hugs to hair ruffling. Delta didn't. They were uncomfortable with it. Whatever relationship they had with Vau was much more distant, more competitive, more a desperate quest for his approval. Skirata played the good father even now, dispensing treats, unashamedly pleased and proud of everything his boys achieved. Vau looked as if he played the master, and being judged good enough was rare.
It made her wonder more than ever about Atin. She would have seized the moment and taken him aside to ask, because it troubled her, but she was interrupted by the return of Fi and Sev. Fi strode up to Atin and grabbed the datapad from his hand.
“A strange blue woman with no taste in men wants to see you,” he said. “Go on. Laseema's complaining you haven't said hello to her today.”
Fi had a knack for teetering on the edge of offense. He also did a very good job of pretending that Atin's good fortune with Laseema didn't bother him one bit. The aching little void at the core of him, so plainly detectable in the Force, said otherwise.
Jusik caught Etain's eye: he spotted it, too. Then he looked past her toward the doors, and she felt something as well—anxiety and distress, very clearly emanating from a presence that could only be Ordo.
He strode into the room and began unfastening his armor, jaw clenched. Skirata just waited.
“So, did you have a good day at the office, dear?” said Fi.
“She's not dead,” Ordo said. “Vinna Jiss is not dead.”
“Start again, son,” Skirata said.
“A woman my supervisor identified as Vinna Jiss walked back into the logistics center at sixteen-fifteen today.” He stacked the plates and sat down on the edge of a chair, completely calm except for the telltale gesture of one fist clenched on his knee. He looked up at Vau. “And it was her, or at least she looked the image of the woman Jusik picked up. In one piece. Are you sure you killed her?”