[Republic Commando] - 03(49)
“What do you mean, did we make provision for medical support for the Grand Army?” said the Nimbanel in policy planning. “Had we been asked, we would have. I’ve worked here for thirty years. I recall nothing like that.”
Besany shouldn’t have been surprised. If the procurement of an army had been hidden that well, so would its attendant services. She decided to start from the other end-the present day. “So what does the CHA actually provide for the army now?”
“Nothing.”
“So what happens if a soldier is shipped back to Coruscant for treatment?”
“CHA doesn’t deal with them. Civilians only. If they’re treated anywhere, it’ll be by GAR medical units.”
Besany wound up the conversation and went back into the Treasury records she’d already combed on the last investigation. She could track all the routine supply and procurement transactions since Geonosis-armaments, victualing, leases on merchant vessels, maintenance contracts, refueling-but still there was nothing to point her at transactions with Kamino.
Her stomach rumbled and reminded her she’d been at this for hours. It was well past her usual lunch break. Just one more trawl, then I’ll break. Come back with a fresh eye. Do a little real work to cover my lack of output today. She’d try another route: the Customs Bureau. There might have been duty payable on something, export licenses, anything that would give her an audit trail between Tipoca City and Galactic City.
But you got Mereel ‘s answer already. There’s nothing in the budget estimates to pay for more clones for next year or the year after. There’s no indication if or how the Kaminoans are being paid at all.
That was odd in itself. The only reason she could think of was that the costs were far more than anyone imagined. It was a very good reason indeed to make the budget disappear.
“Lunch. Bez?”
Besany jumped. Jilka Zan Zentis-Corporate Tax Enforcement, no stranger to taxpayers who wanted to cut their liability via a blaster-stuck her head around Besany’s doorway. Shutting the doors looked suspicious, but nobody seemed to want to know what you were working on if they could walk in and peer over your shoulder.
“Busy … monitoring reports to do …”
“Are you okay?”
Besany tried to memorize where she was on the balance sheet. “You keep asking me that lately.”
“You haven’t been yourself for a while.”
Just get lost. I need to drill down into this budget. It’s the only thing I can do that’s useful right now.
“My … boyfriend’s serving in the Grand Army,” Besany said. There: she’d said the B word to herself, and now to Jilka. If she called Ordo anything else, she would have proved to herself that she was ashamed of what he was, making him less than human. “And I spend my days waiting to hear that he isn’t dead. Okay?”
Jilka straightened up as if Besany had slapped her. “I’m sorry-I didn’t realize. We don’t have that many citizens serving, do we?”
Besany’s common sense grappled with her conscience. No, I won ‘t deny him. “Clones don’t get citizenship.”
The two women stared at each other for a moment, and Jilka looked away first. It was a terrible moment: and maybe Besany had said too much, revealing that she had far too much contact with the Grand Army.
“Wow,” said Jilka, ducking back out of the doorway. “You must have had more fun doing that investigation at the logistics center than I thought.”
Besany waited for the sound of Jilka’s shoes clattering down the corridor to fade to silence, and rested her chin on her hands. That would get around the building like wildfire.
So what? I ‘in not ashamed.
She’d lost her appetite now. She went back to the public accounts menu on the Treasury system and started working through the Customs section, keying in KAMINO, TIPOCA, and CLONING. And it threw up a lot more documents than she’d expected, mostly the trade ban on the supply of cloning apparatus and services under Decree E49D139.41. Kamino didn’t feature a great deal, but Arkania did.
Arkanian Micro must be working all kinds of dodges to get around this. Big chunk of their exports, gone in a single amendment.
There was a big, dull section marked MEDICAL EXEMPTION LICENSES. Her natural tidy curiosity told her she should see what items did manage to bypass the cloning ban, and when she did, she couldn’t help but notice the sheer volume of the transactions: trillions of credits. That was a lot of organs and skin grafts. Or…
Or…
Besany checked the codes. It was always possible that the codes were wrong or falsified, but they appeared to be licenses for imports to Coruscant itself with a destination code for Centax II-especially Centax II. It was just one of Coruscant’s moons: a sterile sphere used for military staging and fleet maintenance. For a moment Besany made a mental connection and wondered if there was an army medical center there, and that was why the Coruscant Health Authority took no military patients: maybe the GAR had its own acute care facility on Centax II, and the cloned tissues were destined for that.