Besany had a sensation of dread like cold water spilling in her lap. It was something she could have found out easily enough from Ordo; he’d know what they did with bodies, but it was one of a long list of things she’d never thought to ask. The inference was that troopers were simply discarded like waste, and that stoked her anger. She hovered on the edge of asking Skeenah if he knew anything about facilities on Cen-tax II, and decided that it was too dangerous to have that kind of discussion with a man she didn’t know.
“I audit some of the Grand Army accounts,” she said. That much was true, and hardly a secret if news of her meeting got back to her bosses. She slipped a plastoid contact card from her pocket and pressed it into his hand. “If there’s ever anything you think I should look at-discreetly, of course, because I’d be investigating other public servants-do let me know.”
“Ah, you’re the internal police …”
“I look after the taxpayers’ credits.”
“And here was I thinking you might be concerned about the welfare of our army.”
Besany bit her tongue out of habit but it was too painful a comment to let pass. “Oh, but I am,” she said. “They’re not just theoretical charity cases to me. I’m dating a trooper.”
Skeenah looked taken aback for a moment, and she wasn’t sure if he was reacting to her cutting comment or the unsolicited personal detail.
“Well,” he said, “there’s no point my haranguing you about the fact that they’re all human men like any other, is there?”
It was time for a little humility. “I know a lot of clones, by most people’s standards, and yes, I care what happens to them.”
“You might know, then, what happens to them.”
“In what sense?”
“When they’re wounded but can’t return to active duty You see, I can find out what happens on the Rimsoo medical stations-or at least I get some limited answers from the Defense staff-but I’m getting no answers about the men who can’t be patched up and sent back.”
Besany thought of Corr, temporarily assigned desk duties after a device he was defusing blew up and took his hands with it. He was awaiting the arrival of specialist prosthetics, and if Skirata hadn’t grabbed him for commando training, he’d have gone back to ordnance disposal.
“I would imagine they die,” Besany said. “The army seems to go to a lot of trouble to send them back.”
“Ah, but life isn’t that tidy,” Skeenah said. He lowered his voice, even though the doors were shut. “There’ll be injuries that a man can survive, but that means he’ll never be fit for service again. I can’t seriously believe something like that hasn’t happened in more than a year of this war. And yet there are no homes for these men, who must surely exist, and we know they don’t end up being cared for by family-because they have none. So where do they go?”
Besany didn’t even want to think about it, but she had to. The only answer she could think of right then was that the most badly injured who might otherwise have been saved were left to die.
But some mobile surgical units had Jedi advisers. No Jedi would let such a thing happen … would they?
She had to talk to Jusik. He’d tell her.
“I’m going to see if I can find out,” Besany said.
“And I’m going to carry on pressing for proper long-term care facilities.” Skeenah looked troubled. “Meanwhile, I’m also going to help raise funds for charitable care. There are some citizens out there who want to help, you know.”
“I’ll keep you posted,” Besany promised.
She took the long walk back to the Treasury building, pausing for a caf on the way, and found that the Senator’s question was now eating away at her. Yes, it could only mean that clone troopers lived, or died, and there was no middle way or disability provision. The war hadn’t reached the eighteen-month mark yet. Governments were always poor at thinking things through, especially when wars caught them on the hop.
Maybe this was what Dhannut Logistics was doing, then: care facilities out of the public eye to hide the signs that the war might not be going as well or as cleanly as the civilian citizens imagined, just as she’d first thought. She decided to check out their other projects when she got back to her desk, but while she sipped her caf, she checked them out via her datapad simply to get a street address from the directory.
And that was where things started to get interesting.
There was no entry in the public database for Dhannut. It could have been a subsidiary of another company, of course, or even one that wasn’t based on Coruscant; but either way, it would have to be registered to tender for government contracts, and it would have had to register for corporate taxation even if it was offworld, and so it would require a tax exemption number.