Operational house, Qibbu's Hut, 0200 hours. 385 days after Geonosis
Darman sat cross-legged on the floor next to Jinart, hands clasped in his lap, as if he was watching her. Jinart watched him in return, orange eyes closing occasionally, her legs tucked under her.
Etain sometimes had to look closely to see if Darman was just thinking or actually asleep, because the impression he was making in the Force was so ambiguous. When she knelt beside him to check, though, his eyes were closed. For a brief moment she wondered if Jinart could make telepathic contact with him.
His eyes opened. He glanced behind Etain and then brushed his lips against her cheek.
“No word from Zey yet?”
Etain shook her head. There was nothing to hide any longer and she rested her forehead against his, not caring what anyone else thought: it was impossible to hide their relationship in a tight-knit group of soldiers living in one another's pockets. “He's got to consult people. Even Zey can't make those decisions on his own.”
“You should have been a healer, you know. You're good at it.”
“Well, let's see if I'm any good at healing rifts. I need to clear something up with Kal.”
“Problem?”
“Nothing to worry about.”
Etain knelt back on her heels and stood up in one movement. Skirata was talking to Niner and Ordo by the flimsi sheets on the wall, cleaning his beloved Verpine gun with slow care while they discussed the concentration of Separatists in various locations on the brightly colored 3-D grid of the holochart.
She caught Skirata's eye and beckoned him to follow her. He inclined his head in mute agreement and laid the dismantled Verpine parts on the table beside him, where they sat wrapped in distorted lines of colored light from the holo-chart projection.
They walked onto the landing platform. The strill was asleep on its stomach, all six legs spread out like an ill-shaped furry insect.
“I did something very foolish,” Etain said.
“Again?”
“Ordo.”
Skirata looked stunned then balanced on the brink of anger. “Ordo?”
“No, nothing like that … I used a command that I heard you use. It upset him. I called check to stop him from killing Jinart outright. He told me why I should never use it.”
Skirata blew out a long breath. “And you understand now?”
“Yes. I'm sorry. He … he said he'd shoot me if I ever did it again.”
“He would. Don't ever doubt it.”
“I believe you!”
“I never taught the Nulls that Jedi were their betters, you see, and I never taught them to obey the Republic, and no Kaminoan engineered them to be more cooperative than Jango. But they obey me for some reason, and even then I encourage them to question everything.”
“Is he programmed?”
Skirata looked at her with sudden disgust. Then he simply swung his fist at her without warning, a savage punch, a street brawler's punch. She leapt back and drew her lightsaber in one movement, but his fist went past her head. Deliberately. She could see the calculation on his face. She held her breath, waiting for him to lash out again.
“So are you programmed?” he said.
The blue blade of energy thrummed as she brought the Lightsaber down from a raised position and then thumbed it off, feeling stupid and ashamed.
She was also shocked at Skirata's reflexes: he could have landed that punch, and he clearly wasn't afraid of her lightsaber skills. She would never take him for granted again.
“No. I'm sorry.”
“You should know better than anyone. You've been drilled in weapons handling from the same age that those boys were. Do you think? Or are you so well trained that your body just reacts”—he snapped his fingers—“like that?”
She had reacted all right. Her muscles remembered years of light-saber practice. Her Masters taught her to rely on instinct, on the Force, and not to think.
“I said I'm sorry.”
“And so you should be. I taught all my boys that command from the very start. I drilled them over and over and over until they'd stop whatever they were doing instantly. And I did it for them, for times when it was needed to save them from something.”
“I swear I'll never do it again.”
“Ordo will never trust you now.”
“But it only stopped him for a—”
“—a fraction of a second that could get him killed. You just used him. Like all the aruetiise do.”
Skirata was furious: even in the dim light on the platform she could see that the skin of his neck was flushed, that telltale sign of strong reaction. In the last few weeks Etain sometimes felt that he saw her as the personification of the Republic, using his men for their own agenda, and that she was a handy target on which to vent his spleen. He didn't seem to view Jusik the same way, though.
Exploitation was a raw nerve in Skirata. Etain desperately wanted him to like her and make her feel like family, the way he did everyone else.
“I'll apologize to Ordo.”
“Yeah, it really is him you need to make your peace with.”
She wondered why she hadn't realized that to start with. Do I really see them as men? Do I regret angering Ordo, or do I just want to be Skirata's little girl? She turned on her heel and decided to confront it.
Ordo was having a tense conversation via his bead comlink, forefinger pressed to his ear. Jusik fiddled with some piece of circuitry, glancing up at him from time to time. The side of the conversation that Etain could hear suggested that someone on Zey's staff wasn't moving as fast as Ordo wished.
Jusik mouthed Captain Maze at her.
She waited. Ordo grunted. “I'll stand by.” He shook his head and turned to her. “What's wrong?”
“Ordo, I owe you an apology. I was wrong to use the check command and you're right to be angry with me.”
He just nodded. It still surprised her that a man who was physically identical to Darman could somehow look so different.
“I realize you had a bad deal, Ordo.”
“On Kamino?”
“Even now, I think.”
Ordo blinked a couple of times as if she wasn't making sense. She had no idea where his mind ranged in those split seconds other than that he felt like a flurry of activity in the Force.
“I didn't have a mother or a father, but a stranger willingly chose me to be his son. You had a mother and father, and they let strangers take you. No, General, don't pity me. You're the one who's had the worse deal.”
It was shocking and it was true. The extraordinary clarity of his assessment hit her so hard that she almost gasped. It told her things she didn't want to know about herself. None of them changed her intentions. But she knew her motives better now, uncomfortable as they were.
She wondered if her real parents ever thought of her.
She would never know.
18
Withdraw from Qiilura? If that's what it takes to keep the Gurlanins from turning on us, it's a price we were going to pay anyway. We're too thinly stretched to maintain the garrison, and the Senate has no interest on continuing to support a mere two hundred thousand farmers on a backworld. Let me talk to Jinart and reassure her. The damage her people can do is enormous– far beyond the scope of one anti-terror operation. And we need them on our side.
–General Arligan Zey, to General Iri Camas and the chair of the Senate Committee on Refugees
The Kragget all-day restaurant, lower levels, Coruscant, 0755 hours, 385 days after Geonosis
Jinartthe Gurlanin had kept her word and provided the information she had promised—and no more. Zey appeared to have kept his. The sleek black predator had slipped out into the Coruscant night and vanished.