[Republic Commando] - 03(180)

Skirata turned to go. Boss caught his arm. “I hear we lost General Jusik.”

“You’ll see him around …”

“And what did happen to Fi?”

Skirata looked aside, as if concocting his official line. Sev knew that look now.

“RC-eight-oh-one-five is dead, lads. Call me if you need anything.”

They watched him go and closed the hatch behind him.

“The shab Fi’s dead,” said Boss. “I’d love to know what really went on there.”

“No, you wouldn’t, because we don’t need to,” Fixer said. “Go deliver your present to the old man, then, Sev. Let’s call endex on this whole time-wasting exercise.”

Sev held the box gingerly in both hands, just in case he had an embarrassing spillage, and made his way down the corridor to Zey’s office. He wondered whether to tell Zey what was in the container or just to let him open it and ask him to make a wild guess. Sev would get a few moments of amusement out of his general’s reaction, anyway.

We just found the body. I swear. I’d tell you if I had.

“Yeah, sure you did, Kal,” Sev muttered. “I believe you.”

Sev would have been disappointed if Skirata had done anything less than fulfill all the vows he’d made to slice the Kaminoan into aiwha-bait. It crossed Sev’s mind that this also enabled him to look Vau in the eye and not have to feel he’d failed his sergeant.

Yeah, Skirata was a thug, and a thief, and even a little nuts, but he had his sense of honor and decency where the troops were concerned. This was a very generous favor to do for them all.

Sev put down the box, rapped the knuckles of his gauntlet against Zey’s doors, and waited, then tucked his helmet under one arm and Ko Sai’s neatly packaged head tightly under the other. He jerked his own head at the others in a leave-me-to-it gesture.

The doors slid open. The general was sitting at his desk, tapping a datapad on the edge of it in distracted annoyance at something other than Sev’s interruption. “Oh-Seven,” he said. “You’re back.”

“Sir.”

“I could do with some positive news, if you have any.” Sev placed the box in front of Zey and took a step backward. “Not sure if it’s positive, General,” he said. “But it’s certainly definitive.”

Zey stared at the package for a while. Then he looked up at Sev. “Oh,” he said.

Jedi had that spooky sixth sense. Maybe Zey knew what was in there already. But he looked anyway, and didn’t recoil even though his face went distinctly ashen when he lifted the inner seal.

“I think she’s dead, sir,” said Sev. Zey closed the box. “You think so? You should take up medicine, my boy.”

“You can check the DNA with the Kaminoans. At least the Chancellor has a definite answer, even if it’s not the one he was hoping for.”

“Would you care to fill in any of the details? Because Palpatine is going to ask me how this … trophy came into my possession.”

“We dug our way into the lab she’d constructed. It had collapsed after an explosion. Messy.”

“Ko Sai wasn’t the careless type…”

“No, but she had a lot of people with short tempers on her tail.”

“Dead when you got to her, you say.”

“We didn’t kill her, sir. You said alive. We can do alive.. when we try hard.”

Zey stared into Sev’s face, then sighed. “I know you’re telling the truth. If you have any information on who got to her first, though, I’m sure that the Chancellor would love to hear it.”

Sev rode his apparent honesty a little farther into dangerous deception territory and hoped the omission didn’t show up in the Force.

“I don’t have any proof who killed her, sir,” he said. “But I’d think that the Kaminoans took a dim view of her jumping ship with their trade secrets like that.”

“Speaking of which…”

“Nothing, sir.” It was all true, all of it. Sev could see Zey measuring each word he said, a little frown puckering his brow. “Her computers were totally trashed. No sign of any data.”

“And presumably Kaminoans would know what they were looking for.”

“We found a few dead Mandalorians, though.”

“Ah.”

“No ID. Might have been there to protect her, or might have been caught in their own attack. Either way-no Ko Sai, and no data. We did our best, sir.”

Zey’s shoulders sagged. He was a big man but suddenly he looked smaller than Skirata.

“I know, Oh-Seven. I know. You did well to find her. Take a day’s leave, all of you. Dismissed.”