Sai could hide a laboratory on the surface, either; she’d have to go underwater.
It explained the equipment being freighted around. Ko Sai was looking to build a hermetically sealed lab, and maybe not just because she wanted it to be hyperclean.
Skirata flipped open his datapad and thrust it under Vau’s nose. “There’s the hydrographic charts, anyway.”
Vau tried to make sense of the three-dimensional maze of colored contours. “Remember it only goes down to fifty meters. The developers were too scared to risk surveying any deeper.”
“Then the same goes for her. And she’d have to pick a natural rock formation to hide in, or she’d need to import a lot of heavy engineering to excavate something.”
“You better hope it’s within the fifty-meter depth, then …”
“Kaminiise aren’t a deep-sea species.” Skirata held out his hand for the datapad. “If they were completely aquatic or could cope with depths, they wouldn’t have been nearly wiped out when the planet flooded. They just like to be near water, preferably without too much sunshine. So … what better place to hide than a nice sunny pleasure resort? Who’s going to look for her there?”
Vau snorted. “Delta Squad… the Seps … us…”
“I didn’t say she had any common sense. Typical scientist. All theory. No idea how bounty hunters work.”
“Well, she’s evaded you for well over a year.”
“Yeah? And now she’s run out of road.”
Vau hadn’t actually disliked Tipoca in the eight years he’d been cooped up there. Inside the pristine stilt-city, it could have been any urban environment; he didn’t miss shopping and entertainment, so it was largely indistinguishable from Coruscant, although the lack of hunting troubled Mird. The strill stalked Kaminoans instead. It even caught one once, but its prey was just the blue-eyed variety, the lowest genetic caste of Kamino, and the gray-eyed elite seemed only annoyed at the loss of a menial.
Yes, that was probably the day Vau’s ambivalence toward
Kaminoans evaporated, and he joined Skirata in thinking of them as aiwha-bait.
“And what are you going to do when you get hold of her?”
“Take her research.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“You think she’ll have a file marked SECRET FORMULA FOR
STOPPING THE AGING PROCESS IN CLONES–-DO NOT COPY?”
Skirata clicked his teeth, impatient. “She’ll need to be persuaded”
“No, you’ll need to get her to work for you. That means no choppy-choppy slicey-slicey.”
“Or get another geneticist on the case.”
“Of course. They’re ten a credit. They queue up at employment centers.”
“Look, Walon, I’m not stupid. I know there’ll be a gap to fill between getting hold of the research and making it into something my boys can use.”
“Just reality-checking.”
Skirata’s voice had the tinge of a smirk in it. “And I can get my hands on a geneticist who knows her way around a Fett genome.”
Vau kept his gaze on the riverside path, distracted slightly by a loud glop as something leapt from the river beneath and snatched a low-flying creature that might have been avian or insectoid. Either way, it was lunch now.
“Tell me you’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking,” he said slowly.
Skirata ejected his knife from his forearm plate again and resumed sharpening. “Atin nearly got killed hauling her shebs back from Qiilura. Might as well make it worth the journey.”
“Oh, you are thinking it. You’re insane. Dr. Uthan’s kept under tight Republic security. Chancellor’s office level.”
Skirata just laughed. Vau suspected he had no idea what his limits were, and that he’d get killed finding out the hard way. The fool should have grown out of it at his age.
“Last I heard,” Skirata said, “was that she was bored out of her skull and reduced to trying to interbreed soka flies in her cell to stay sane. They don’t care who they work for, these folks. No ideology. They just want to play with their toys. If she can develop a clone-specific pathogen for the Seps, she can apply Ko Sai’s research-if you can take it apart, you can rebuild it, right?”
Vau had to hand it to Skirata. He always thought outside the box. “I’ll consider that an incentive for getting Ko Sai to do the work.”
Skirata sheathed his knife again, and the two of them leaned on the bridge rail to contemplate the twin evils of polluted waterways and having to wait so long at their time of life. Mird wandered around, rubbing its jowls on the bridge balusters to mark its territory.