The clear-cut days of friends and enemies were gone, if they had ever existed at all. Etain longed for a simple moral struggle of good versus evil, but she could feel neither that the Republic was wholly good nor that the Separatists didn’t have a case. Now she was laying siege to former allies to placate spies who’d helped kill clones.
It was too much to work out. All that mattered then was staying alive for her unborn child and looking out for the men around her. She took out Master Fulier’s lightsaber and prepared to lunge forward, a blue blade of light in each hand.
Offices of the Republic Treasury Audit Division, Investigation, Audit, and Enforcement Section, Coruscant, 473 days after Geonosis
The best thing was to keep busy, Besany decided, and not to build her life around HNE news bulletins on the war. If Ordo had something to tell her, he’d tell her. If anything had happened to the unusual circle of military friends she’d acquired almost instantly-then Kal Skirata would tell her. He needed to keep her sweet to get his information, and she knew it.
And she had plenty to occupy her. The gaps in the accounts and audit trails for the Grand Army staggered her forensically tidy mind. Her introduction to army accounting had been a simple procurement fraud investigation a few months ago, when Ordo crashed into her life.
She sat with her elbows propped on her desk, forehead resting on extended fingers, and found she was making in-voluntary huffing noises of frustration at every screen that appeared on her monitor. The Grand Army had catapulted into existence 473 days ago, and the Republic budget cycle was three years: estimates, allocation, and expenditure.
But there wasn’t any indication of an expenditure budget allocated to the creation of the Grand Army.
So Ordo was born around… eleven or twelve years ago. She found it hard to take that in even now, and simply skimmed over it again. That means funding would have had to be in place at least three years before then, unless there was an emergency budget…
Besany skipped back further and further in the archive, but there was no financial record at all of an army of millions being ordered from the Kaminoans. Prior to the Battle of Geonosis, the Republic’s minimal armed forces were a very small line budget item in a balance sheet of quadrillions-some years, even quintillions-of credits.
What, the Kaminoans gave us an army for free? And what about the ships and other equipment? Who paid for that? Who paid Rothana and KDY for the initial fleet?
It was a black hole in the books. Besany wasn’t a woman who felt comfortable around black holes and unexplained omissions.
Okay, so they hid the funding. Let x not ask why at the moment. Let s ask how much, because that tells me the size of the carpet it needs to be swept under.
She sat back in her seat and tried to estimate. She didn’t know how much Tipoca City billed for clones, but there were a few million of them. On top of that, warships alone cost billions. So it was at the very least a trillion creds, and probably many times that. In a single transaction, that could be found even in the Republic’s annual budget. It was a big lump under the carpet.
But she hadn’t found it. Either it hadn’t appeared, which was fraudulent accounting on an unthinkable scale, or it had been dispersed in line items around a dozen government departments-which was still counter to financial regulations.
So what other services would a big standing army need? Well, no infrastructure for accompanying families, not for those poor clones. How about… health?
Spread over ten or more years before Geonosis …
The Grand Army had appeared literally overnight. Some details of secret defense projects had to be hidden from public eyes, she accepted that. But not the funding. Somewhere, someone had to get approval to buy a whole army off the shelf. and that took a lot longer than the year of wrangling about the Military Creation Act before Geonosis. There was nothing in committee records before that date even to hint at it.
It was driving her crazy.
Health. Medcenters, specialist med droids, training. The Republic had never had an instant army, nor one on quite this scale in living memory. It would have-should have-sought advice on forming a medical corps and dealing with the triage, treatment, and aftercare of large numbers of casualties. Someone might have left that detail in the system, and then she might have a name, a date, or some other hard data to track.
Besany checked through her index for the Coruscant Health Administration and identified the policy planning office. She hadn’t intended to talk to anyone else while she rifled through the records on an illicit investigation-call it what it is, spying, why don’t you?-because it added one more cross-reference for someone who might be checking up on her. But talking to public servants across departments every day was routine, and thousands of staff did it.