The man fell backward with a grunt and a flash of blue light. Another shot sizzled past Darman’s ear, but his brain didn’t bother to get involved as his hand aimed of its own free will and sent blaster bolts-one, two, three-into another moving object that was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The shots must have hit the second intruder: Darman smelled burned hair. He instinctively dropped and found himself lying on the floor next to the inert body of the first man he’d shot, a figure in black coveralls with a charred hood covering the face. He scrambled to grab the man’s dropped weapon-a DC-15s sidearm-and took cover behind the angle of a wall, listening for movement.
The Deece handgun bothered him, because he had one, too; but Sull hadn’t. It wasn’t issued to ARCs, not that they didn’t acquire whatever took their fancy. He folded the magazine flat and shoved it in his belt.
Now there was no way out of the apartment other than back through the doors-or out through one of the front windows. Getting cornered was a weird mistake for an assassin to make. Darman was trapped in an apartment with someone who was trying to kill him-or Sull to be precise.
Darman knew he should have simply rushed the second man, firing both blasters, but he’d lost his momentum. If this was Republic Intelligence, they were badly misnamed. They hadn’t done a recce of the apartment.
Republic Stupidity, more like.
Or maybe they’d been very sure they could take Sull any-way.
Holovid directors would have been disappointed, he knew, but he didn’t bother to call a challenge to the other man. He sprang to his feet and came out firing, because there was nowhere to hide in a place this small, and no real protection offered by the furniture. It was simply a matter of who hit who first.
Darman fired, and fired, and fired.
The man, all in black, stepped out from the alcove near the door and took the blaster barrage full in the chest. It knocked him back a few paces, but he didn’t drop-and that was when Darman knew he was in real trouble and simply charged him. He knocked the man flat with sheer brute force and got a grip on his head, jerking it so hard to one side that there was a wet, muffled snap and the man went limp.
All Darman could hear now was his own breathing. He sank back on his heels and listened hard in case there were more men coming. But there was nothing.
Had the neighbors heard? Were the police on their way?
He had two dead men on his hands. That wasn’t an unusual situation for a commando, but it was bad news in a city that wasn’t supposed to know it had been infiltrated.
Before he decided whether to make a run for it, though, there was something he had to find out. Blaster aimed squarely at the head, he checked each body, grabbing the hood-like mask by the seam at the top and working it loose. Doing that one-handed was harder than it looked. The first man he’d shot was hard to identify with his face blackened and shattered, but he had familiar black hair. The second-he was recognizable, all right: and so was the gunmetal-and-purple armor disguised by his coveralls.
It was the face Darman saw every morning when he shaved.
He’d shot two clones, men just like him right down to the last pair of chromosomes. He’d killed two covert ops troopers.
The GAR was sending clone assassins after their own men.
Mong’tar City, Bogg V, Bogden system, 477 days after Geonosis
“I think you should leave this to me,” Vau said as gently as he could. Laying down the law never worked with Skirata. “A little cold distance might be called for.”
Skirata leaned on the rail of the bridge with one hand while he honed his three-sided knife on the metal. The thin rasping sound set Vau’s teeth on edge; Mird rumbled with annoyance at each scrape, too. Beneath them, the most filthy and polluted river Vau had ever seen attempted to flow like curdled milk. There was more debris than liquid.
“I’m not sharpening it for the pilot,” Skirata said.
“That’s what I meant. Kaminoans don’t answer questions when they’re in slices.”
Skirata didn’t look up. His head was tilted down as if his focus was fixed on the blade, although it was always hard to tell where a helmeted man was looking. Eventually, after a dozen more intensely irritating scrapes of the knife, he sheathed it in the housing on his right forearm plate and paced along the bridge, then back again.
Mereel was late, and he hadn’t commed Skirata.
“He’ll be here,” said Vau.
“I know.”
“Even if he doesn’t get the pilot, you’ve got the planet.”
“He’ll get the pilot”
Maybe it didn’t matter if Mereel didn’t find him. Dorumaa was 85 percent ocean except for the artificial resort islands, so any landing was easy to track. There was nowhere that Ko