“A positive future.”
“Ah.” She nodded and managed a smile. The future was obviously as tantalizingly fragile for her as it was for any clone. “Tell Kal it’s an excellent name.”
Ordo waited by Mereel’s shuttle and took in the clean silence of the snow while he waited for Etain to say her good-byes. Every time he tried to be civil to her, he couldn’t seem to make it work. It wasn’t as if he even disliked her. He just couldn’t find any common ground, despite the parallels in their lives.
She emerged from the building and trudged through the snow, seeking out the path already worn down by boots.
“Where are we going, then?”
Ordo opened the hatch. “A resort beach.”
“You’re winding me up, aren’t you?”
“No. It’s what I believe they call a tropical paradise. I’ll acquire a change of clothes for you.”
Etain settled into the copilot’s seat and looked like she was having trouble taking it all in. Ordo suddenly had an insight into the mind of a Jedi who wasn’t comfortable with authority like Zey, or happy being one of the ordinary people as Jusik was.
She s never done this. She s never been somewhere purely for relaxation. She x as institutionalized as any clone trooper. And there s no Kal’buir to look out for her.
Yes, he pitied her, as he’d told her once before. It surprised him that he could, if being grateful that he wasn’t her was pity.
“I don’t feel right about going to a resort when men are still fighting, Ordo.”
“And indulging in self-flagellation when you’re pregnant and in danger of losing the child serves no purpose at all.”
“I suppose that’s your unique way of telling me to be kinder to myself…”
It was so much easier to have a conversation with Besany. She was a precise woman, and endlessly patient when he didn’t understand some finer point of civilian etiquette.
“Dorumaa,” Ordo said, trying hard for Darman’s sake. “Mereel says it’s an excellent place to relax.”
Kal’buir had only told him to make sure Etain was safe and well. He hadn’t told him not to return to the hunt for Ko Sai.
Like Etain, Ordo didn’t like sitting on his shebs while the people he cared about were facing danger.
Chapter 9
Millions of us were wiped out when the seas rose and engulfed Kamino. We survived as a species because we were willing to think the unthinkable. Some genetic characteristics helped us survive the starvation and overcrowding, and some did not, and there was no room for sentiment or for weaklings. We culled; we refined; we selected. The prospect of extinction forged us into the species we designed ourselves to be, the purest expression of the Kaminoan spirit, and at a level of social maturity that weaker mongrel species will never attain, because they lack the courage to cull. We are the masters of genetics and sole arbiters of our fate, never to be at the mercy of chance again.
-Draft memoirs of former Chief Scientist Ko Sai, on Kaminoan eugenics and the desirability of the caste system; never published
Eyat City, Caftikar, Outer Rim, 477 days after Geonosis
The bodies of the two covert ops troopers were much heavier than Darman expected.
The wait for Niner and Fi to show up-two hours-was the longest of his life, and every creak and click made him think the Eyat police were surrounding the apartment. When his brothers finally arrived, he felt inexplicably guilty, as if he had to explain himself.
Niner stood staring down at the two troopers.
“Have you tidied them up, Dar?”
Darman had done his best. Apart from the damage to the one he’d shot in the face, they both looked quite peaceful now. They looked like him, but dead-and he was having a. hard time dealing with that. Their arms were neatly at their sides, legs straight.
“I felt bad leaving them lying around like meat. What are we going to do with them?”
Fi shrugged. “Can’t leave them here as air fresheners …”
“Fi, they’re our own.” Darman couldn’t bear looking at the faces any longer, and grabbed a blanket from the bedroom. “We have to dispose of them properly.”
“We’ve got their armor,” Fi said. “Sergeant Kal will want the tallies. He’s funny about that.”
“Okay, let me put it another way-what if that was your carcass lying there? What would you want done with it?”
“I’d want someone to shake their head and say, What a waste of such a fine-looking and stylish young man! and then give me a big state funeral,” Fi said, taking the blanket out of Darman’s hands and rolling one of the covert ops troopers in it. “With loads of women weeping that they never had the chance to sample my charms. But apart from that, I wouldn’t give a mott’s backside by then, would I? It’s just a temporary shell. Only the armor lasts.”