[Republic Commando] - 03(142)

Ordo was wandering around the place, making notes on his datapad for reasons best known to himself. Ko Sai’s head drooped. Either she was utterly demoralized or she was taking a sneaky look at the tunnel exit. Etain decided to keep an eye on her.

Bralor seemed to be keeping one eye on her, too, but then she’d been stuck on Kamino for eight years just like Skirata and Vau, and she probably had her reasons. “So what information are you going to beat out of her, Kal?”

“How to switch off the accelerated aging in clones.”

Bralor snorted. “If she could do that, she’d have tried it out by now. You know how this demagolka loved her experiments.” She patted Skirata’s shoulder. “I know you talked about it, but I never thought you’d actually do it. Kandosii, ner vod.”

“You’d be amazed,” Skirata said quietly. “Come on, ad’ike. It’s been a long day. Let’s eat and then get some rest.” Ko Sai looked back at Etain as Bralor led her away. “The genome of your child will be fascinating.”

So she’d worked it out. Skirata was right. Kaminoans had few facial expressions that Etain could recognize, but she knew avarice when she felt it. Ko Sai could think of nothing but a new puzzle to solve and rebuild. Then the fire of that new enthusiasm waned in the Force, and Etain suspected she’d remembered that her personal research was now melted plastoid fragments in the silt of an idyllic crystal harbor on the other side of the Core.

Etain drew her lightsaber out of her pocket and simply let Ko Sai see the hilt.

“Come anywhere near me or my child,” she said, “and you’ll find out just how little I’ve embraced the peace and serenity they tried to teach me at the academy.” Skirata winked at her. “Mandokarla …” Mereel sat Etain down on a wide, deeply upholstered bench against the wall and shoved a few cushions behind her back. “He says you’ve got the right stuff.”

So she was back on Skirata’s good side, for the time being anyway. The meal turned out to be an assortment of dumplings, grains, and noodles smothered in various spicy sauces, preserved meats, and a pot of small red fruits swimming in what looked like syrup-the only thing she didn’t try. Bralor seemed to have raided the contents of her store cupboard to feed her guests. Etain devoured it in the full knowledge that her stomach would rebel later.

The meal was taken in grim silence, which could have been exhaustion, but Etain sensed that Skirata was more crushed than tired. He drained a little syrup out of the pot into a small glass and gulped it down.

“Rav still makes good tihaar” he said hoarsely, and then started coughing. It was the throat-searing, colorless fruit alcohol that he had a taste for. “Best painkiller there is.”

“You haven’t been taking your daily dose, Kal’buir.” Ordo sounded a little strained, as if the realization of what he’d done to Ko Sai’s research was now catching up with him.

“I found I could sleep without it.” Skirata wiped his plate clean with a chunk of dumpling speared on a fork and chewed as if it hurt him. “Anyway, time for a sitrep. Work out what we do next. We’ve got Fi in bacta, we’ve got to go back through the Tipoca research stuff and see where we can pick up, and we’ve got confirmation that the Republic’s got its own clone program without Kamino’s involvement. And I’ve got to persuade Jinart to keep up the pretense that Etain’s helping the Gurlanins get back on their feet now that the farmers have gone.”

“She’ll do that,” Etain said. “She really thinks you’d maneuver Zey into trashing the planet if she doesn’t cooperate.”

Skirata finished his last dumpling. “Oh, I really would.”

“Leave the research to me,” Mereel said. “I think I know where to start shaking down Ko Sai. I’ll go through the Tipoca data with her and see what sets her off. She’s devastated about losing her own material. It’s really broken her.”

“Can’t you just compare the trooper genome with Jango’s and see what’s different?” Etain asked.

“That only tells us which genes have been added, mutated, or removed,” said Mereel. “It doesn’t tell us what’s been turned on or off. You can even turn them down, and make them work just a little. It’s about expression-how the machine gets built from a blueprint-and that’s messy, because if you tinker with one gene, it can have an effect on another set that’s got nothing to do with the area you’re working on. And then there’s identifying what aging really is, because it’s not just one factor. Am I boring you yet?”