[Republic Commando] - 03(104)

“What if they hadn’t been Jango’s clones?”

“What?”

“Mando’ade don’t care about bloodlines. What if they’d been from a Corellian donor, or a Kuati? Would it still tear you up to see them used?”

Mereel seemed to be making a point of staying out of the conversation. Skirata sucked his teeth thoughtfully.

“If I’d met them as little kids about to be exterminated, I think I’d have done the same.” He looked distracted by the idea, as if he hadn’t ever considered it. “Being Jango’s blood just made it more relevant. But Jango or not, they’d still have needed a sense of belonging, wouldn’t they? And it would still have been my duty to give it to them. And that would have made them Mando’ade.”

“Interesting formations ahead,” Mereel said. Vau thought he might be trying to change the subject, but maybe not. “Going in for a closer look.”

Vau looked at Mereel in profile and tried to see Jango in him, but it was surprisingly hard. Odd as that might have sounded to an outsider, it was true: the clones usually didn’t remind him of Jango Fett at all. Part of that was living among them for years, and becoming blind to the superficiality of appearance, but there were many ways in which they didn’t even look like their progenitor. Jango-born of parents who lived hand-to-mouth, undernourished as a youngster-hadn’t been much taller than Skirata, but the Kaminoans had managed the clones’ nutrition carefully from the day the egg was fertilized, and they’d turned out tall and muscular. In a hundred and more ways, they weren’t exact replicas of Fett.

Nor was his son, Boba. Poor kid: it was a terrible age to lose a father, and the boy had nobody else in his life. He was worse off than any trooper. If he managed to survive, Vau predicted he’d turn into the hardest, most bitter, most messed-up shabuir this side of Keldabe.

Even I had a second father to adopt me … too late, maybe, but better than never…

“What’s that?” Skirata said suddenly. He pointed forward. “Lots of debris.”

They were on the northwest quadrant of the island’s shelf, and the slope on their starboard side was pocked with dark depressions that could have been caves. Strewn across the smooth seabed was a sharply delineated area of small fragments. They were visible even in the filtered sunlight, but when Mereel directed the external lamp ahead of the vessel they stood out in sharp relief.

“That’s not a rockfall,” he said. “If it was scree, it’d cover the whole area from the foot of the slope, because it slides. But there’s a gap, about ten meters. Rock doesn’t jump, does it?”

Mereel brought Aay’han up twenty meters and maneuvered to a dead stop right above the debris. From the exterior holocams, the aerial view projected onto the cockpit monitor reminded Vau of a bag of flour dropped on a clean floor.

“Relatively recent, too,” Skirata said. “Or the silt would have covered it.”

“Looks like someone dropped a load of spoil from an excavation a long time after the island was terraformed.”

Vau actually felt excited. It was an odd hunt, but every bit as exhilarating as a chase. Mird picked up on his excitement and slid off his lap, rumbling in anticipation. “It’s very tempting,” Vau said, “to work out a direction of travel from the shape of that spoil…”

The three men looked at one another.

“Let’s go for it,” Mereel said, with a big grin.

They were above the fifty-meter limit now, and as Aay’han circled slowly above the island shelf, the sensors picked up the throb of drives and the churning sounds of propulsion units from submersibles and surface vessels exploring the turquoise shallows. The scan showed them as points of light, most of them well within the ten-kilometer safety zone. They wouldn’t be disturbed down here.

“I never completed the diving course,” Skirata said suddenly. “I just thought you ought to know that.”

“Might not even need to get our feet wet, Kal’buir.” Mereel took Aay’han deeper, facing the submerged cliff. “Look at the three-D scan.”

Head-on, the sonar showed a complex pattern of holes, although none of them seemed to extend far into the rock. But there was an overhang that was more or less in line with the patch of debris. Mereel skimmed the seabed, stirring silt into the clear water, and came in close to the jutting shelf of weed-coated rock.

And there it was. From this angle, the scan picked up a deep tunnel, mostly hidden from casual inspection by the overhang, but now visible as a rectangular shaft with rounded corners and an aperture about eight meters by five. Aay’han had a twenty-meter beam.