The galaxy didn’t do miracles. It only gave you what you took from it. Skirata was persistent to the point of wasted obsession, and maybe even beyond, but even he reached a point where he sank beneath the weight of a task. There’d been just too much bad news today. Perhaps tomorrow would be better. They still had a fortune to fall back on. Ordo turned around, looking like a scared little boy again for the first time in ages. There was nothing Skirata couldn’t forgive him.
“I’ve hurt you, Kal’.buir, and I can’t undo that. But I’ll make it up to you, I swear.”
“You don’t have to, son.” I forgot they hadn’t seen Ko Sai up close since she finished testing them and told them they were going to be put down. I stuck abused kids in front of their abuser and expected them to cope. What was I thinking? “You don’t owe me a thing.”
Down below, Ko Sai was in bad shape. Skirata wasn’t shocked to find himself satisfied to see it. She was behaving like a bereaved human, head bowed, making a little cooing sound-whimpering, in fact. If anyone thought aiwha-bait were emotionless, they were wrong. It was just that different things mattered to them. She looked up into his face and he knew that, for once, they understood that they shared the same emotion, if for very different reasons-irreplaceable loss.
Etain and Vau had retreated to the seating on the opposite side of the crew compartment, leaving Mereel to deal with the Kaminoan. He stood in front of her, arms folded.
“Sooner you stop wallowing in self-pity, the sooner you can start rebuilding that work,” he said. “If you’re nice to me, I’ll give you a hand.”
She raised her head slowly. “That was decades of my work, you imbecile. Decades”
“Ori’dush,” Mereel said. “Too bad. But that’s what you get for building us crazy. Sure you don’t want to make a start on recording it all again? Might as well do it while your memory is still fresh.”
“I can’t even access the material on Kamino.”
“Maybe I should make sure they can’t, either, next time I drop in. Tipoca City security’s no better than when I was a kid…”
“You’re savages. Why should I cooperate with you now if I didn’t before?”
“Because you’re stuck in a ship with four creatively sadistic people who hate your gray guts, and maybe the strill and the Jedi aren’t too fond of you, either, and all you’ve got is the clothes you stand up in. Not even a scrap of flimsi to make notes. See how long you last…”
Skirata met Ko Sai’s eyes. She looked back and forth from him to Mereel and Ordo a few times as if calculating something-don’t even think about it, aiwha-bait-and then settled on Mereel again.
“And you’ll starve me into submission, you think.”
“Oh, you’ll get well fed,” Mereel said. “I want you healthy for a long time, so I can watch you suffer. I might not get a long life, but seeing you go crazy is cleaning some osik out of my heart that’s been there for far too long.”
“Cathartic,” said Ordo. “It really is.” He turned to the cockpit. “I need to check up on Fi’s condition, and then we have to make a move, Kal’buir. Any preferences?”
The one place Skirata could guarantee to find some Sep-proof, Republic-proof, Jedi-proof accommodation was Mandalore. He had business to take care of there as well. He turned to Etain.
“Want to see the home turf, ad’ika? Visit Manda’yaim?
She still looked in shock. There were no fancy Galactic City doctors on Mandalore, but plenty of women who knew how to handle a pregnancy.
“What do I tell Zey?” she asked. “He was sold on your story that I was staying on after Qiilura was cleared to help the Gurlanins for a few months.”
“I’ll think of something. I always do.”
She shrugged. “Okay. I’ve never seen Mandalore. What’s it like?”
“I’d like to say it’s paradise,” Skirata said. “But it’s as rough as a bantha’s backside, and half as pretty.”
“I never liked beach vacations anyway.” Vau held his hand out to Ordo. “Better give me the code key for your shuttle. I’ll take it back to Coruscant and meet you all there, as and when.”
Maybe Vau had business to sort out. He had his inheritance, after all, and there were probably items he wanted to fence, because he had his expenses like everyone else. The shuttle needed to go home, too; they couldn’t keep abandoning small vessels and charging new ones to the GAR budget. Enacca the Wookiee couldn’t retrieve everything they were forced to dump.