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Find Skirata. He’s the only one who can talk these men down. And no, I’m not going to obliterate a whole barracks block just to neutralize six ARCs. So get me Skirata: he can’t have traveled very far.
-General Iri Camas, Director of Special Forces, to Coruscant Security Force, from Siege Incident Control, Special Operations Brigade HQ Barracks, Coruscant, five days after the Battle of Geonosis
Tipoca City, Kamino, eight years before Geonosis
Kal Skirata had committed the biggest mistake of his life, and he’d made some pretty big ones in his time.
Kamino was damp. And damp didn’t help his shattered ankle one little bit. No, it was more than damp: it was nothing but storm-whipped sea from pole to pole, and he wished that he’d worked that out before he responded to Jango Fetes offer of a lucrative long-term deployment in a location that his old comrade hadn’t exactly specified.
But that was the least of his worries now.
The air smelled more like a hospital than a military base. The place didn’t look like barracks, either. Skirata leaned on the polished rail that was all that separated him from a forty-meter fall into a chamber large enough to swallow a battle cruiser and lose it.
Above him, the vaulted illuminated ceiling stretched as far as the abyss did below. The prospect of the fall didn’t worry him half as much as not understanding what he was now seeing.
The cavern-surgically clean, polished durasteel and permaglass-was filled with structures that seemed almost like fractals. At first glance they looked like giant toroids stacked on pillars; then, as he stared, the toroids resolved into smaller rings of permaglass containers, with containers within them, and inside those
No, this wasn’t happening.
Inside the transparent tubes there was fluid, and within it there was movement.
It took him several minutes of staring and refocusing on one of the tubes to realize there was a body in there, and it was alive. In fact, there was a body in every tube: row upon row of tiny bodies, children’s bodies. Babies.
“Fierfek,” he said aloud.
He thought he’d come to this Force-forsaken hole to train commandos. Now he knew he’d stepped into a nightmare. He heard boots behind him on the walkway of the gantry and turned sharply to see Jango coming slowly toward him, chin lowered as if in reproach.
“If you’re thinking of leaving, Kal, you knew the deal,” said Jango, and leaned on the rail beside him.
“You said-“
“I said you’d be training special forces troops, and you will be. They just happen to be growing them:’
“What?”
“Clones.”
“How the fierfek did you ever get involved with that?”
“A straight five million and a few extras for donating my genes. And don’t look shocked. You’d have done the same.”
The pieces fell into place for Skirata and he let himself be shocked anyway. War was one thing. Weird science was another issue entirely.
“Well, I’m keeping my end of the deal?” Skirata adjusted the fifteen-centimeter, three-sided blade that he always kept sheathed in his jacket sleeve. Two Kaminoan technicians walked serenely across the floor of the facility beneath him.
Nobody had searched him and he felt better for having a few weapons located for easy use, including the small hold-out blaster tucked in the cuff of his boot.
And all those little kids in tanks …
The Kaminoans disappeared from sight. “What do those things want with an army anyway?”
“They don’t. And you don’t need to know all this right now.” Jango beckoned him to follow. “Besides, you’re already dead, remember?”
“Feels like it,” said Skirata. He was the Cuy’val Dar-literally, “those who no longer exist,” a hundred expert soldiers with a dozen specialties who’d answered Jango’s secret summons in exchange for a lot of credits … as long as they were prepared to disappear from the galaxy completely.
He trailed Jango down corridors of unbroken white duraplast, passing the occasional Kaminoan with its long gray neck and snake-like head. He’d been here for four standard days now, staring out the window of his quarters onto the endless ocean and catching an occasional glimpse of the aiwhas soaring up out of the waves and flapping into the air. The thunder was totally silenced by the soundproofing, but the lightning had become an annoyingly irregular pulse in the corner of his eye.
Skirata knew from day one that he wouldn’t like Kaminoans.
Their cold yellow eyes troubled him, and he didn’t care for their arrogance, either. They stared at his limping gait and asked if he minded being defective.
The window-lined corridor seemed to run the length of the city. Outside, it was hard to see where the horizon ended and the rain clouds began.