“All stop,” Vau said suddenly.
Mird stiffened, always sensitive to Vau’s reactions. The strill was hunting, even if it couldn’t get out there and taste the scents and currents. Mereel brought the ship to a halt and she drifted, silent except for the hum of the shields and environment controls.
Vau pointed ahead, slightly to port.
“In that weed forest. Look.”
Aay’han’s exterior holocams trained in the direction of Vau’s finger and Mird’s snout. The weed was thick and populated by shoals of glowing orange discs that could have been fish, worms, or swimming crustaceans. The impression was one of a tapcaf courtyard strung with decorative lights.
Not all the weed was pale green. Some looked white in the aquamarine light. Skirata strained to focus, and then a current moved the weed a little more and he realized he wasn’t looking at weed at all, but bones.
It was a skeleton.
“Shab,” Mereel muttered. “I think we’re too late for resuscitation, Kal ‘buir.”
“I hope he bought travel insurance.” Skirata couldn’t see any marks on the bones at this distance. “Or she.”
Who’d died down here? And why?
The skeleton was swaying in the current as if dancing with the weed. It was definitely a humanoid of some kind, picked clean and as white as an anatomical specimen, although a closer inspection-as close as they could get without leaving the vessel-showed a few colonies of pale yellow growths that looked like closed shadow barnacles. It was hard to see what was holding it down. If the flesh was gone, the connective tissue that held the bones together should have been gone, too. Skirata couldn’t think of a species that fitted the bill, but it didn’t matter. He-or she-wasn’t going anywhere.
“Diver who ignored the hazard warnings?” Vau asked.
Skirata’s instinct for bad signs was more reliable than any sonar. “What kind of marine life eats a diving suit and apparatus as well as the meat?”
Mereel, engrossed in the controls for the external security holocam, let out a long breath.
“And when did you last see a fish with fingers?” he said quietly, switching the holocam image to one of the large monitors. “Look.”
The close-up view of the weed bed that swayed around the skeleton’s ankles like a deep-pile carpet showed a splash of bright orange. As Mereel magnified the image and went in for a close-up, Skirata realized what it was.
Mereel was right. There weren’t too many marine species that could take a length of fibercord and secure a body to a rock.
The close view on the monitor showed a knot: a competent, nonslipping, textbook Keldabe anchoring bend. In a galaxy of loop rings, gription panels, and a hundred high-tech ways of attaching things, few people bothered to learn to tie knots properly, let alone one as distinctive and complex as that.
Very few people indeed: only clone soldiers-and Mandalorians.
Chapter 10
Naasad’guur mhi,
Naasad’guur mhi,
Naasad’guur mhi,
Mhi n ‘ulu. Mhi Mando’ade,
Kandosii’ade,
Teh Manda’yaim,
Mando’ade.
No one likes us,
No one likes us,
No one likes us,
We don’t care.
We are Mandos,
The elite boys,
Mando boys,
From Mandalore.
-Mandalorian drinking song, loosely translated; said to date from a ban on Mandalorian mercenaries drinking in local tapcafs, when employed by the government of Geris VI
Republic Treasury building, Coruscant, 478 days after Geonosis
Besany closed the doors to her office and obscured the transparisteel walls with a touch of the button on her desk-She didn’t want to be disturbed.
Centax II. Do I concentrate on that?
She fondled the blaster that Mereel had given her and wondered what it would take to make her use it; she’d never fired one in anger. She hadn’t even been trained to shoot, but now seemed a pretty good time to learn. Then she began trying to work out how she might take a closer look at Centax II-in person, or at a distance-and work out what was going on. It was a military area, and no member of the public could stroll in there unannounced. There weren’t that many excuses to pay a visit even for a Treasury agent.
The public accounts showed a number of contractors providing services to the Grand Army that could be cross-referenced to Centax, and one of them-Dhannut Logistics-also showed up on the health budget. It was worth a look as long as she was thinking medcenter.
I could be totally off beam, of course.
And I got Mereel his answer anyway. I should walk away from this.
But she couldn’t, because Ordo couldn’t walk away, and neither could Corr, or any of the others. She realized how empty her life must have been to have filled up so fast and so easily with people who-possibly-didn’t give her a second thought except as a useful contact.