Republic Commando_ True Colors Part 12

"Alpha-Thirty thinks we're going to kill him, Sarge. We're bringing him back to base until we get this sorted."

"Moron." Sull sounded as defiant as ever. "You've got no idea, have you?"

"What?"

"You're dead men."

He didn't say it like a threat. Sull said it like Skirata did.

That was what Skirata used to call them back in training: his dead men. It was all part of his unconvincing veneer of abuse, because the whole company knew Sergeant Kal would give them his last drop of blood, but the words now made Darman shudder.

"We all are, sooner or later," he said.

It was sooner for clones than most.

Chapter 5.

Order 4: In the event of the Supreme Commander (Chancellor) being incapacitated, overall CAR command shall fall to the vice chair of the Senate until a successor is appointed or alternative authority identified as outlined in Section 6 (iv).

Order 5: In the event of the Supreme Commander (Chancellor) being declared unfit to issue orders, as defined in Section 6 (ii), the chief of the defense staff shall a.s.sume GAR command and form a strategic cell of senior officers (see page 1173, para 4) until a successor is appointed or alternative authority identified.

-From Contingency Orders for the Grand Army of the Republic: Order Initiation, Orders 1 Through 150, GAR doc.u.ment CO(CL) 56-95 * * *

GAR landing strip, Teklet, Qiilura, 473 days after Geonosis Etain stood on the deserted landing strip by the troop trans-porter, up to her ankles in a fresh fall of snow.

The only footprints were hers and the ridged soles of army boots, whose impressions were so much larger than hers that for a moment she felt like an insignificant child.

The farmers weren't going to show. She hadn't expected them to; now her duty was unavoidable. She'd given them two extra hours, kidding herself that they might have had difficulty pa.s.sing blizzard-blocked roads, but the deadline had Pa.s.sed and Levet was walking toward her from the HQ building, datapad in one gloved hand. She turned and walked back to save him the journey.

"One last try, Commander," she said. "I'm heading into Imbraani to give them the now-or-never speech."

Levet handed her his datapad. "Orders just in, ma'am. Direct from Zey. The Gurlanins just gave him a little demonstration of intent."

Etain swallowed to compose herself before reading.

Zey had a terse message style. She could have spoken to him by comlink, even had a virtual face-to-face meeting, but he'd sent Levet a message-stark, to the point, and leaving no opportunity for discussion or argument.

GURLANINS CLAIMED RESPONSIBILITY FOR CLa.s.sIFIED IN-FORMATION ON TROOP MOVEMENTS AND READINESS STATUS RELEASED TODAY TO CIS COMMANDERS. LEAK HAS RESULTED IN 10,653 CASUALTIES: FLEET AUXILIARY CORE GUARDIAN DE-STROYED WITH ALL HANDS WHILE DEFENSIVE CANNON WAS OFFLINE DURING UNSCHEDULED MAINTENANCE. REMOVE QIIL-URA CONTINGENT IMMEDIATELY. CIVILIAN CASUALTIES ACCEPT-ABLE IF COLONISTS USE LETHAL FORCE.

Etain handed the datapad back to Levet and saw ten thou-sand dead troopers in her mind's eye before she saw farmers, dead or otherwise. It hit her hard. Her imagination blanked out and was replaced by a cold hard focus on the next steps to remove the remaining farmers.

"He's not a happy camper, ma'am."

"They warned they could be anywhere and pa.s.s as any-one." Etain carried on walking. Why didn't I feel them dying in the Force? Am I that out of touch? "So there's a little re-minder of the damage they can do whenever they want. It'll escalate. Let's get this over with."

"You could have prevented the deaths," said a voice be-hind her.

Jinart appeared out of nowhere, loping like an arc of black oil. She could have been a mound of snow, a piece of machinery, or even one of the leafless trees on the strip perimeter before she metamorphosed into her true form. She darted a little ahead Etain and Levet, leaving featureless round paw prints behind her. Gurlanins could leave false tracks, making them impossible to hunt down. They were, as so many had said, perfect spies and saboteurs-as long as they were on your side. If they were the enemy then they seemed very different indeed.

"You didn't have to kill troopers. Don't you think they've got short enough lives as it is?" Etain tried not to lose her temper, but it was hard. She didn't want the baby sensing any of this ugliness. "We're evicting the colonists anyway. You could have waited."

"You don't have the stomach for killing unless you're put in a corner, girl," Jinart said. "Unlike that soldier of yours. And I know where he is."

It was a risky thing to say in front of Levet, but he didn't react. Etain took a moment to realize that Jinart was making a veiled threat. Her pulse began hammering in her throat.

"If anything happens to him," she said, "you know what Skirata will do to you."

"So now you know the stakes, and what we both stand to lose. . ."

Etain's anger welled in her throat, choking off any coherent response. She stopped dead, hand going straight to her lightsaber without any conscious thought, and a blind urge to kill swept over her. It wasn't a Jedi's reaction at all. It was a woman's-a mother's, a lover's. It took all her self-control not to draw the lightsaber.

Her dead Master, Kast Fulier, would have understood. She knew he would.

"They're leaving today." She thought of the Separatist collaborators caught by Gurlanins not far from here, throats ripped out as befitted a carnivore kill. "But you can't deal with them yourselves, can you? Just two thousand humans, and that's too many for you to take on. Which tells me how very few of you there really are."

Jinart slowed down and looked back over her shoulder. Two twin-pointed fangs extended almost to her chin. When she spoke, they gave her a strangely comic lisp that almost took the edge off her menace. "If we were many, there would be no farmers left for you to remove. What you need to re-member, Jedi, is where we might be, and that like your gallant little clone army, a very small force applied intelligently can cause serious damage..."

Level interrupted at just the right moment. Like Commander Gett, he had a knack for defusing situations. "Permission to put the men in position, General?"

"The farmers have already scattered. They won't all be in Imbraani."

"I know, but we have to make a start somewhere. We'll move on and clear stragglers area by area."

Jinart loped ahead. "We'll locate them for you."

Gurlanins were predators. Etain had no doubt that tracking humans was easy for them. She watched Jinart disappear into the distance, and then she really disappeared-vanished, merged into the landscape, melted. It was disturbing to watch. Metamorphosis was a shocking enough spectacle, but the way the creatures could simply step out of existence troubled her more than anything.

She had no idea if one was right behind her, or in her room in her most private moments.

"I know all the places the colonists used to hide out during the Sep occupation," she said to Level. "Zey and I used them, too. I still have the charts."

The commander dipped his head and put his hand to the side of his helmet for a moment as if he was listening to his internal comlink. "So, ma'am, how are you interpreting lethal force? Can we shoot as soon as they try to kill us, or do we have lo wait until they actually do?"

Up lo a year ago, Etain would have had a clear-cut answer based on a Jedi's view of the world, where dangers were sensed in advance and intentions clearly fell: she knew who meant her harm and who didn't Now she saw the war through the senses of ordinary human men, who were trained lo react instantly and whose long-drilled movement eventually bypa.s.sed conscious thought. If someone targeted them, their defensive reflex kicked in. Sometimes they got it wrong by firing; sometimes they got it wrong by hesitating. But she had no intention of handicapping them by expecting them to be able to make the judgment calls that she could. Zey could promulgate all the rules of engagement he wanted. He wasn't here, in the line of fire.

"Once they open fire on you," Etain said, "return it. They can't be civilians and engage in armed conflict. Their choice."

She'd square it with Zey. If she couldn't-too bad. It was her command, and she'd lake the consequences. Levet summoned a speeder bike, and she climbed onto the pillion behind him. They set off for Imbraani at the head of a column of armored speeder buses and speeder bikes while an AT-TE carrier pa.s.sed overhead lo deploy troops lo the east of the town.

"Are you wearing any armor, ma'am?" Levet asked.

The chest plate didn't fit properly now, but she couldn't tell him that her b.u.mp got in the way. She'd leaned back a little so that he wouldn't feel it press into him. To her, it felt enormous, but n.o.body appeared to have noticed it yet. "As-sorted plates, yes. And a comlink."

"Good. Two things I don't like-a general who can't communicate with me, and a general who's dead."

"Well, I'll be a live general who listens and takes notice of her commanders in the field."

"We like that kind of general."

And Etain liked clones. The only thing they all had in common was their appearance-although they were starting to age differently, she could see that now-and what the Re-public had done to them. Apart from that, they were individuals with the full range of virtues and habits of random humankind, and she now fell completely at home with them.

If she had a side in this war, this was the one she chose: the disenfranchised, unreasonably loyal, heartbreakingly stoic ranks of manufactured men who deserved better.

"We're going to run out of Jedi if this war spreads to more planets, Levet," she said, not sure if the lump rising in her throat was her hormonal upheaval or pity for the clones get-ting the better of her. "Would you mind taking a detour down the course of the river?"

"Very good, ma'am."

Levet signaled the lead speeders in the convoy to carry on and banked left. Soon they were snaking through two lines of trees between which the Braan River formed a frozen road. She'd first met Darman here: she'd sensed a child in the dark but come face-to-face with what she thought was either a droid or the Seps' Mandalorian enforcer, Ghez Hokan. She didn't imagine she was meeting the future father of her son.

I miss you, Dar.

She found herself thinking about Hokan more often these days, and finding it ironic that her first kill was a Mandalorian, and that he'd been fighting against commandos who found so-lace in a tenuous Mandalorian heritage. She wondered why Mandalorians bothered to fight other worlds' wars when they could have banded together for their own sole advantage.

"Five hundred meters to the town, ma'am." Levet skimmed above the frozen water. There were no gdan eyes reflecting back at her from burrows and crannies: it was too cold for them to venture out. "Are you sensing anything?"

Oops. Etain concentrated again. "Fear. Anger. But you don't need a Jedi to tell you that."

"Ma'am, they don't call me Commander Tactful for nothing..."

"Okay." Some of the farmers would be in the cantina in the center of the town. It had cellars; it was fortified. The farmhouses in the area were wooden construction, and a single artillery laser round was enough to reduce one to charcoal. Those farmers who weren't in the cantina would have dispersed to the hills or headed for the next settlement, a village called Tilsat. "Let's get it over with."

Imbraani wasn't much of a town. The center was an open common where merlies grazed and local kids played chase, although it was too cold today. The common was ringed by ramshackle buildings-a few farm supply stores, a cantina, two veterinarians, and a smithy. The speeders had already set down and a platoon of troopers had disembarked, some of them kneeling in a defensive line with Deeces ready.

Etain swung off the speeder, crunching through a thin layer of ice into packed snow, and for the first time she felt a hard kick from the baby.

It was too early. She had another crazy random thought: was her son already aging as fast as Darman? Had she made things worse by using her Force powers to accelerate the pregnancy? Did all first-time mothers worry about every twinge and twitch? She almost fell back on the speeder and got a curious tilt of the head from Levet.

"Steady, ma'am."

"I slipped on the ice," she said. There was no sign of activity, but a thin thread of smoke rose from the cantina's chimney. This was a world of wood fires and low tech. The high tech the Qiilurans did have was weaponry provided by the Republic. "Oh well. We know their tactics and we know the capability of their kit, because we trained and supplied them."

Normal procedure was to carry out house clearance, property by property, but Etain needed to give the farmers one final chance for her own peace of mind, even though she now knew it was pointless. It was, she realized, her deal with her conscience so that she could open fire and not be racked by guilt later.

She stood at the doors and took out her lightsaber; Master Fulier's weapon still hung from her belt.

"This is it," she called. "You come out, you get everyone together, and we load you on the transports." She paused and listened. "You don't come out-we come in and drag you out, cuff you, and load you on the transports. Your call."

There was still silence, but she sensed danger, the preparation of dozens of weapons, and the breathless panic of people who thought this was their last day.

This would be a battle.

"I'm sorry," she shouted, looking at the tiny windows just in case she caught a glimpse of a face. "I have to do this, and it has to be now."

Etain turned to Levet and gave the signal to bring up the rapid entry teams. The troopers stacked either side of the doors, some with dispersal gas pistols, and Etain slipped a respirator mask over her face.

She could have left it all to her men.

I'm crazy. I'm pregnant and I'm leading an a.s.sault. Do I trust the Force that much? Yes, I think I do.

Etain thumbed the controls of her lightsaber, and the blue blade sprang into life. Visualizing a ball of energy building in her chest, she exhaled and aimed a ma.s.sive Force push at the doors to rip them apart. Two troopers fired gas canisters inside and stood back; the rest of the platoon stormed in. Snapping and whining of blasterfire shattered the still, frosty air, and gas billowed from the entrance.

She ran in after Levet, thinking she should have gone in first, knowing that wasn't how it was done, and looking for opportunities to use the Force to bring this to an end as fast as she could. White armor was everywhere, making that distinctive clack-clack sound as troopers dropped into firing position or smacked up against walls for cover. The cantina was a warren of rooms and pa.s.sages.

It was when she deflected blasterfire with her lightsaber and heard someone yell that she was a traitor, a kriffing murderer, that reality sank in.

The noise was deafening; screams, shouts, shots. The smell of blaster-seared air, charred wood and stale yeast- ale, she thought-made her gag. Levet stuck by her, holding her down at one point with a firm hand on her head.

"You're all the same! You're all the same!"

Two troopers hauled a middle-aged man past her. He was alive and cursing, gas-induced tears pouring down his face, trying to aim kicks.

The clear-cut days of friends and enemies were gone, if they had ever existed at all. Etain longed for a simple moral struggle of good versus evil, but she could feel neither that the Republic was wholly good nor that the Separatists didn't have a case. Now she was laying siege to former allies to placate spies who'd helped kill clones.

It was too much to work out. All that mattered then was staying alive for her unborn child and looking out for the men around her. She took out Master Fulier's lightsaber and prepared to lunge forward, a blue blade of light in each hand.

Offices of the Republic Treasury Audit Division, Investigation, Audit, and Enforcement Section, Coruscant, 473 days after Geonosis The best thing was to keep busy, Besany decided, and not to build her life around HNE news bulletins on the war. If Ordo had something to tell her, he'd tell her. If anything had happened to the unusual circle of military friends she'd acquired almost instantly-then Kal Skirata would tell her. He needed to keep her sweet to get his information, and she knew it.

And she had plenty to occupy her. The gaps in the ac-counts and audit trails for the Grand Army staggered her forensically tidy mind. Her introduction to army accounting had been a simple procurement fraud investigation a few months ago, when Ordo crashed into her life.

She sat with her elbows propped on her desk, forehead resting on extended fingers, and found she was making in-voluntary huffing noises of frustration at every screen that appeared on her monitor. The Grand Army had catapulted into existence 473 days ago, and the Republic budget cycle was three years: estimates, allocation, and expenditure.

But there wasn't any indication of an expenditure budget allocated to the creation of the Grand Army.

So Ordo was born around. . . eleven or twelve years ago. She found it hard to take that in even now, and simply skimmed over it again. That means funding would have had to be in place at least three years before then, unless there was an emergency budget...

Besany skipped back further and further in the archive, but there was no financial record at all of an army of millions being ordered from the Kaminoans. Prior to the Battle of Geonosis, the Republic's minimal armed forces were a very small line budget item in a balance sheet of quadrillions- some years, even quintillions-of credits.

What, the Kaminoans gave us an army for free? And what about the s.h.i.+ps and other equipment? Who paid for that? Who paid Rothana and KDY for the initial fleet?

It was a black hole in the books. Besany wasn't a woman who felt comfortable around black holes and unexplained omissions.

Okay, so they hid the funding. Let x not ask why at the moment. Let s ask how much, because that tells me the size of the carpet it needs to be swept under.

She sat back in her seat and tried to estimate. She didn't know how much Tipoca City billed for clones, but there were a few million of them. On top of that, wars.h.i.+ps alone cost billions. So it was at the very least a trillion creds, and prob-ably many times that. In a single transaction, that could be found even in the Republic's annual budget. It was a big lump under the carpet.

But she hadn't found it. Either it hadn't appeared, which was fraudulent accounting on an unthinkable scale, or it had been dispersed in line items around a dozen government departments-which was still counter to financial regulations.

So what other services would a big standing army need? Well, no infrastructure for accompanying families, not for those poor clones. How about... health?

Spread over ten or more years before Geonosis . . .