The declining value of life in Etain’s personal galaxy depressed her more each day. The war seemed to be eroding everyone’s decency, or maybe it had always been that way but she was noticing it close to home now. Darman had joked that droids were more valued than clones because they had a scrap value, but it wasn’t funny anymore. She hardly knew how to react.
And as Jedi, we’re supposed to defend this Republic? Etain settled for pragmatism rather than outrage. “Kal, she’s a very competent woman, but she has no experience with firearms. She’ll get hurt.”
“Jailer will sort things out. He always does.”
“Then why didn’t you call him first? And isn’t Vau around?”
“Vau was on Aargau but he’s on his way back now-and I thought this was just some argument over budget codes. We’re not abandoning her, ad’ika. Got to go. I’ll keep you updated.”
Ordo was completely silent. She watched his retreating back and guessed that he was going to have a rough few hours in transit, fretting about both Besany and Fi, and struggling with his own feelings about the datachips. She could taste his guilt. Every time she caught him looking at Skirata, it was with a regret that was eating him alive.
But Skirata was, as she’d thought on first meeting him, a gdan-one of Qiilura’s assortment of carnivorous wildlife, very small aggressive creatures armed with dreadful little teeth, and who’d take on any prey regardless of its size. Feisty didn’t begin to cover it. And Skirata, like gdans, bounced back from a drubbing fast.
Mereel came out of what Etain had started to think of as the interrogation room and laid a couple of datapads on the table. “Did I hear right? The lovely Agent Wennen started a shoot-out?”
“You gave her the blaster …”
“Just aiming at levity, although I don’t feel like it.” He scrolled through the datapad screens while he sliced a chunk from the leg of nerf one-handed and chewed it thoughtfully The roasts seemed to sit on the table most of the day, losing a chunk or a slice every so often, and only the bone was left by the evening. “It’s funny how scaring someone in an interrogation can be more effective than giving them a good hiding.”
“You’re talking as one professional interrogator to another, of course.”
“You did a nice job with the Nikto, as I recall, when Vau hadn’t made much headway.”
“So what scares Ko Sai? Found it yet?”
“Anonymity.”
“She’s a Kaminoan. They don’t take prime-time ads on HNE.”
“I mean that she won’t go down in her own history as one of the greats. With her work gone, she’s nothing. Even when she betrayed her government and did a runner with their most lucrative industrial secrets, she could still think of herself as one of the greatest geneticists of all time-maybe the greatest. Now she’s got nothing to show for her work. We trashed her lab and the last of her cell cultures, too. She’s effectively erased from science history, which is probably worse than being dead for her.”
“So what do you offer someone to get them to cooperate when they already think they’ve lost everything?”
“To rebuild her lab here and put her back on the map.”
“But she knows she can’t ever apply what she discovers. You won’t let her. She knows you well enough for that.”
“She’s quite interested in Jedi genetics…”
“Oh no. No. Absolutely not.” Etain was instantly furious. “How could you?”
Mereel looked genuinely wounded. “I was only lying to her.”
“You’re using my child as some bargaining chip!”
“I’m using the idea of your child as a way of getting its father a normal life span, General.”
“You want me to go in there, don’t you? You want me to work on her.”
Mereel shrugged. “Here’s my problem. I find it hard to separate what I want to do to her from what I want to get out of her. She hurt me and my brothers badly from the day we were … hatched, to the day two years later when Kal ‘buir showed up and stopped her. They don’t really understand human pain and stress, except written on flimsi as some theory, and they don’t care anyway as long as the flesh machine that they build works. Think about your child, and then think how you’d feel if she did to him what she did to us. And that’s without being put down at the end of the experiment for fighting back.”
Mereel always knew how to target her worst nightmares. That was probably why Skirata had let him loose on Ko Sai: he knew how to hurt, and he was much more subtle than Vau. Etain didn’t answer.