[Republic Commando] - 03(160)

“Why don’t you take Besany home?” Skirata said. “Come back later. If there’s any change I’ll call you.”

“I feel like I’m abandoning him.”

“Okay, but get some rest. When did you last sleep, Ord’ika?”

Ordo didn’t want to leave Skirata on his own, either, even if the Obrims were there to keep him fed and watered. It had been a grueling couple of weeks; Kal’buir wasn’t a young man.

“Okay,” Ordo said. “I’ll shut my eyes for a few minutes.” He thought he had. He took off his kama and pauldron and laid them over the back of a chair, then settled back on the sofa by the window. It was the most deeply upholstered thing he’d ever sat on, and he felt he was drowning in it. The next thing he was aware of was waking up to find Besany’s head on his shoulder, wondering how she could sleep with a hard plastoid plate pressing against her face, and Kal ‘buir gently tapping the back of his hand. Four hours had gone. “You need to see this,” Skirata whispered. “You really do.” Jusik stood and stretched, joints cracking with alarming pops. “Brain tissue is capable of a great deal of regeneration, even the human type.” Besany stirred. “What is it?”

“Show them, Bard’ika,” Skirata said. Jusik ruffled Fi’s hair, and he moved. He did it a few more times; the reaction was consistent.

“Don’t get too excited,” Jusik said. “He’s not in such a deep coma now. That’s a long way from being conscious, but he’s not brain-dead, either.”

“You healed that much tissue?”

Jusik shrugged. “Oh, medics misdiagnose brain death all the time. I’m just reluctant to give up. Always was a sore loser.”

But Ordo knew when Jusik was pleased with himself. It was the same quiet amusement as when he made some clever gadget. Jusik was good at fixing things, and it seemed he could fix people, too. He basked in the contentment of successful problem solving.

“This is all guesswork, but for once I’ll take the mystic Jedi method over the medcenter,” Skirata said. “How long do you think you’ll have to keep this up?”

“Days. Maybe weeks.”

“Zey’s going to notice sooner or later. Delta can’t stay on Dorumaa indefinitely.”

“It’s going to take them a week even to start working their way into Ko Sai’s facility, unless we want to risk drilling in there with big conspicuous industrial-sized machinery” Jusik said. “I can take a few days away from Fi then and catch up with them. But I wouldn’t rely on Zey turning a blind eye to my bending the rules on Fi, and I’d rather be in trouble for not obeying orders on the Ko Sai search than indicate to Zey that I know where Fi is.”

“Sooner or later,” Skirata said, “he’s going to notice he’s getting a lot less out of the Nulls, too. Maybe that’ll be the time to tell him that Jaing knows where Grievous is.”

“Ah, I thought you might…” Jusik said quietly. “Well, we’ve all got our little secrets to trade now, haven’t we? Yes, Jaing knows, and he thinks it was too easy to be true. Hence my silence on the matter.”

“What a dirty galaxy we live in.” Ordo did a few rough calculations. “I think we can count on Delta being stuck on Dorumaa for weeks, and not just because of the cocktails. They’re doing the equivalent of excavating with a spoon.”

“They’re not a cocktail kind of squad,” Jusik said, sounding almost regretful. “They won’t take advantage of it at all For some reason, that depresses me.”

It was a waiting game now in both the areas that mattered most to them-Fi’s recovery and Ko Sai’s gradual revelation of what she could do to regulate the aging genes. While Jusik worked on Fi, Skirata used the time to catch up by comlink with every commando in his former training company and each of the deployed Nulls. He had a sense of urgency about him, as if there were things he didn’t want to leave unsaid as he had with Fi.

Ordo took Besany back to her apartment and debated whether this was the right time to do as Sergeant Vau had told him.

But she’d already had quite a week when it came to skating on thin legal ice. Spying on classified defense projects and abducting patients at blasterpoint was plenty to be going on with.

He’d wait a few days before he involved her in the murky world of bank raids and stolen shoroni sapphires.





Chapter 17


Sir, we’ve managed to get a strip-cam filament into the collapsed chamber using the mechanism from a self-embedding charge. It’s going to take weeks to remove enough material to search for organic remains, but one thing the cam has picked up is what looks like a chest plate of Mandalorian armor. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if you want to pass that information on to General Zey.