“I’m not going to kill her,” he said, voice hoarse. “I know too much about Kaminoan physiology to make a mistake like that.”
He wasn’t bluffing. Ko Sai, slumped in her chair, seemed more skeletal and fragile now than elegant. Her long gray neck was curved down like the stem of a wilted flower. It was amazing what a few volts could do.
“I said you were savages, and I was right.” She raised her head and fixed Mereel with those awful eyes. It was the black sclera that did it: if the areas of pigment had been inverted-dark iris on a pale sclera-she might have had a serenely benign expression. As it was, to a human she looked permanently enraged. “Torturing me won’t make you any more worthy of survival. You’re genetically inferior. You weaken your species.”
Her gray pupils marked her as the ruling caste, bred to rule. Mereel flicked the electroprod back on and rammed it into her armpit. The convulsions weren’t a pretty sight.
“You created the recipe for my genome, sweetheart.” He sounded a lot more controlled now. “And just look what you made me do.”
Mereel pulled back and stood flicking the switch back and forth with his thumb. Skirata still hadn’t heard every detail of what had happened to the Nulls before he first met them two years into their development-the equivalent of four-or five-year-olds-but he knew far too much already of the way they’d been mistreated. And the botched attempt to improve on Jango Fett’s genome had given them a whole raft of problems beyond being traumatized and disturbed. Ko Sai was finally getting practical evaluation of her experiment.
“We had a dirtbag geneticist like you once,” Skirata said. “Yes, a mad Mando scientist. Liked experimenting with kids. He’s been dust for millennia, but we still know what the name Demagol means. The irony is that it can mean either ‘sculptor of flesh’ or ‘butcher,’ so I reckon you two would have had a lot of cozy chats about how to screw up living beings.”
“I find the idea of an academic Mandalorian quite amusing,” Ko Sai said, all venom and syrup. He hated that voice. “You’re not a culture of thinkers.”
“Shame on you, Chief Scientist. Have you forgotten the erudite Walon Vau? If you think Mereel’s a bad boy with a nerf prod, you need to meet Walon …”
“Your threats are predictable.”
Skirata gestured to Mereel. “Start stripping the data, son. Clear the mainframe.”
“Arkanian Micro won’t know what to do with it,” Ko Sai said. “They don’t have the expertise.”
“So who does? Who’s bankrolling you, aiwha-bait?”
“Nobody.”
“All this came from charitable donations, then?”
“I was given credits to carry on my research, yes, but I work for nobody now. Science can’t breathe with a paymaster pressing down on it.”
“And that’s why you’ve got the Seps and your own government after you. You stiffed them, hence the Mando bodyguards. You did a runner with the creds.”
“Charming phrase.” Her case-hardened arrogance began to crack a little. The faintest note of worry tinged her voice, and she swayed that long skinny neck-just like the ones Skirata had been tempted to grab so many times-to watch what Mereel was doing to her precious data. “If you’re not in the pay of Arkanian Micro, then you must be working for Chancellor Palpatine.”
Mereel actually laughed, but carried on plugging chip holders and bypass keys into the slots on Ko Sai’s system. The wall of the office was rack upon rack of data storage.
“Yeah,” Skirata said. “I bet he thinks we work for him, too. What made you leave Kamino? How much did they pay you?”
“I didn’t leave for some paltry fee.”
“You didn’t leave for a sunnier climate, either.”
“I left to prevent my research from being exploited by inferior species.”
“Oh, you mean the ones that keep your economy afloat by buying slave armies from you?”
Mereel tutted, now fully engrossed in transferring the files. Indicator lights danced and shivered, adding a welcome rainbow of colors to the sterile white decor. “Kal’buir, just hit her, will you? You can’t have a meaningful ethical debate with the thing.”
Ko Sai seemed genuinely outraged. Even sitting down, she could draw herself up to an impressive height. Skirata wondered where to land a punch on something that skinny.
“Your Chancellor wanted me to use my research into aging to prolong his own life indefinitely. I told him it was a massive waste of my skills to do that for such a corrupted and diseased species.”