501st: An Imperial Commando Novel (46 page)

“But then how would you know that both the FG thirty-six virus
and
the other thing are actually working?”

“That’s a good question.”

“And that means you’re going to have a deadly virus sitting in a bottle here …”

“Not quite a bottle, but you got the deadly bit spot-on.”

“Kal and Mij must trust you a lot.”

Uthan lined up the containers of enzymes and chemicals ready to modify the rhynacyria’s DNA, and thought that over. Yes, they obviously did. She hadn’t actually thought of it in those terms, because … well, that was how she did the job. She handled dangerous pathogens. It was the first time that she’d stopped to think how much faith these people had placed in her not to kill them or wipe out their entire world. Given how she’d first met the clones, she felt uncomfortably guilty for a moment.

My world’s gone. They might think I’ve got nothing to lose. That I’m still determined to wipe out the clone army
.

The more she thought about it, the harder it got.

Scout was a smart girl, learning fast, and remarkably dexterous. She followed her instructions to the letter—preparing the electrophoresis gel, sterilizing vials and containers, and lining up the various enzymes, reagents,
and nutrient solutions in exactly the right place. She didn’t fumble or drop things like so many technicians Uthan had trained at the university. Uthan hadn’t noticed until now how precise and sure Jedi were in their movements, that extraordinary visuospatial ability. But Scout’s expression told her that she was less interested in the techniques of gene splicing and switching than in Uthan herself.

“Would you use it?” Scout glanced sideways at her. “Knowing what it does, what it
really
means—would you use the FG virus yourself?”

If you’d asked me a few days ago … a few weeks ago … 

“I never thought of myself as a monster,” Uthan said. “I’m not. Am I? I’m no different from most beings, I think. But there’s part of me that wonders if I have a blind spot about this. And then I think—does the weapon matter? Does the number of dead matter? If I shoot one enemy with a blaster, or you cut down an enemy with your lightsaber, nobody would think we were
monsters
. How many more do we have to kill, and how, and why, before we cross that line into becoming … monsters?”

Scout chewed her lip thoughtfully. “That’s one for a Jedi Master.”

“We don’t need Jedi Masters to define morality for us.”

“I suppose I’m saying I don’t know.”

“Have you ever killed anyone?”

“No.”

“But you’re armed. You’d use your lightsaber if threatened.”

Scout seemed to be scanning Uthan’s face for proof of lack of monsterhood, and Uthan found herself regretting that she’d not seen Scout grow up even though the girl was a stranger. It was the oddest feeling, like having a daughter who’d only reappeared in your life after too long an absence.

Like Kal and Ruu. That must hurt him sometimes. And her. All that lost time that can never be recovered
.

“I’d probably think I didn’t have any other choice,”
Scout said at last. “But it wouldn’t be much different from what you did—thinking you had to kill in self-defense. It’s just a
feeling
that it’s different. Not a
reason.
”

Uthan smiled at her. “I enjoy our conversations. After nearly three years of having no company except soka flies and third-rate doctors who thought I was a lunatic, you have no idea how good it feels to have a challenging conversation.”

“So the soka flies thought you were crazy, too?”

Uthan had moments when the sheer weight of Gibad’s destruction left her unable to think straight. She wasn’t sure whether to hate herself for the other moments, the ones when she got on with life and even took pleasure in it.

She let herself laugh anyway. “I gave them names. Flies. What do
they
know?”

From the window, she could see the herd of roba rooting on the edge of the woods while Mird watched them at a cautious distance. Rural life went on around her, an existence that hadn’t changed much in perhaps five thousand years.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” she said to herself.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing.”

“Doctor, do you think it’s right to infect everyone on the planet with this?” Scout asked. “It’s just a bug that spreads like any disease. Nobody can avoid it. They don’t get a choice once it’s set loose.”

“Let’s put it this way,” Uthan said. “It’s a lot more ethical than watching Palpatine use FG thirty-six on the population and knowing I could have saved them.”

Mama knows best. Isn’t that always the way? But once everyone knows there’s a countermeasure for the virus, Palpatine will simply use something else
.

It kept Mandalore a few steps ahead of the worst the Empire could do to it. If she couldn’t bring down Palpatine, the next best thing was to look after a planet that could be a severe pain in his Imperial backside.

“It’s a bit like baking cakes.” Scout looked up from the curved transparisteel cover of the small biohazard cabinet where the DNA samples would be replicated and broken up into their component genes. “Wow. Can you hear that?”

Uthan stopped shaking the transparisteel flask in her hand. The homestead’s acoustics and the quiet of this remote place meant that sound carried, but all she could hear was the faint up-and-down buzzing of voices. It didn’t sound like an argument. She’d heard plenty of those in the last few days. A female voice. Not Besany or Jilka … not Ny … Arla, maybe. Definitely not Laseema or Kina Ha.

“Let’s go and see once this batch is set to run,” she said. “Whatever it is, the antigen comes first. What’s wrong?”

“It’s Arla. She’s getting worse.”

Arla was living with horrific memories. Maybe the medication shut them out, or maybe it simply trapped her with them but left her unable to scream or flee. Trauma did different things to different minds. Skirata had been galvanized to survive, Ordo had learned to shut it away most of the time, and Arla simply couldn’t handle it. There were no rules in psychology that Uthan could follow, not like the more predictable and orderly world of microbiology. It bordered on shamanism.

Gilamar seemed to be getting more frustrated each day, almost blaming himself for not being able to fix the problem. He was a man with pain in his past, too. Had
anyone
in this place escaped some kind of tragedy or suffering? Uthan didn’t think so. It was a colony of the damaged and dispossessed.

And me. Pain has found me, too. None of us is normal. But then, normal people never do anything of note, nothing magnificent or world changing or on the knife-edge of risk. I belong here
.

“Okay, let’s leave this batch and come back later,” she said. She placed the flasks in the cabinet and set the heat
cycle to run. “Three hours. Check your chrono. Now let’s go and be sociable.”

After years in solitary confinement, Uthan found it hard to get used to a house full of the activity of thirty-odd Mandalorians, Jedi, clones, and assorted beings who’d thrown their lot in with them. Even back on Gibad, she’d never lived alongside more than three or four people. She wondered how Skirata kept track of them all. But then this was a small family by his standards. Somehow, he’d looked after and trained not only the Nulls but an entire company of more than a hundred commandos as well. So had Gilamar, and Vau. She found that astonishing.

Gilamar was standing in the corridor near Arla’s room with Jusik and Jaing, all three of them muttering as if things weren’t going well. Gilamar held a hypospray in one hand, filling its reservoir from a plastoid vial.

“Anything I can do?” Uthan asked.

Gilamar held up the hypo. “Just debating whether to use this or not. Stop-a-bantha juice. I’m really not happy topping her up with sebenodone, but she’s doing herself damage now.”

Uthan could hear the sound of thudding coming from inside the room. The doors were slightly open. It sounded as if someone was hammering plaster with a soft mallet.

“Is that her?”

“Yeah.” Gilamar took a breath and lowered his chin like a nerf ram about to charge, steeling himself for the fray. “I like a shoot-out. Or a good old-fashioned fist-fight. But overpowering ladies just doesn’t sit right with me.”

“Why don’t I do it?” Uthan said. She was very conscious of Scout standing to one side, eyes closed. Jusik was doing the same. This Force business unnerved her. “She’s much calmer around women. I don’t look threatening. And I do know how to use a hypo without rupturing soft tissues.”

“No,” Jusik held out his hand, eyes still closed. “You’re going to think I’m a callous
shabuir
, but I say leave her for a while. Withdrawal’s pretty unpleasant, I know, but there’s something surfacing in her. It feels … rational. Sharp-edged. Real. Scout, can you sense that?”

Uthan fought an embarrassed urge to laugh. Scout, eyes screwed tightly shut, tilted her head back to concentrate. She was a skinny little thing, and Jusik was a small man alongside Jaing and Gilamar; they looked like two starving waifs sniffing the aromas of someone else’s dinner. But this was serious. The scientist in Uthan rebelled at the idea of diagnosis by communing with the invisible. She wanted lab results, numbers, reagents that changed color.

“Yes,” Scout said at last. “It’s like another presence, almost, but it’s her. It’s more solid. It feels to me like … oh … this is going to sound dumb, I know, but I’m feeling … a big block of dark granite tearing through thick drapes.”

“Mine’s all sharp edges, black-and-white contrast,” Jusik said. Uthan wondered if Jedi were all synesthetic. “Like something’s forcing itself back into her conscious mind, her old self, and it’s not what she wants to see.” He opened his eyes. “Suppressed trauma, obviously. I hate doing this to her, but I feel it’s better if we find out what it is.”

“I think we know that, don’t we?” Uthan said. “The Death Watch slaughtered her family and kidnapped her.”

“We need to be more specific than that to help her.”

Gilamar looked riveted. He was still clutching the hypospray in the filling position. “Has anyone ever done a brain scan on you?” he asked. “I’d give anything to see your brain activity while you’re sensing this stuff.”

“Agreed?” Jusik said, lips set in a grim line. “We let all this stuff come out?”

“Might as well.” Gilamar put the cover back on the hypo. “Because it’s that or just keep her drugged to her
eyeballs until the day she dies. If you’re going to try psychotherapy, this is the only way.”

“She’s not scared,” Scout said, eyes still shut.

“What?”

“Usually, she’s scared. I could feel it. Not so much now. She’s … full of hate and guilt.”

“Well, that fits her memory resurfacing.” Gilamar shrugged. “Hate for the Death Watch, guilt that she survived and her folks didn’t.”

“No, that’s not it. It’s about her. She hates being herself.”

Uthan watched, fascinated and horrified. Psychologists were all the same, even amateur ones like Jedi. It was all so
nebulous
. “Well, I’m still going in to talk to her. Isn’t Laseema around?”

“She’s taken Kad to visit Rav,” Jusik said. “With Besany and Ordo. Until
Kal’buir
relaxes a bit about having the kid in the same space as Zey.”

“Okay.” Uthan took off her lab tunic. She didn’t want to look like a medical orderly. “How hard can this be? At least I know what survivor’s guilt feels like.”

Uthan opened the doors wider and stepped into Arla’s room. It was big and airy enough not to feel like a cell at the Valorum, with a pretty view of open countryside, so at least the poor woman wouldn’t feel she’d swapped one prison for another. Arla had pushed her bed into one corner, and was kneeling on it facing the wall. She was banging her fist on the wall, pounding her hand against the plaster. Uthan edged around until she was at the head of the bed and could see better.

“Arla? It’s me, Qail.” She risked getting a little closer. She was a meter away, just out of range of a punch if Arla snapped. For a moment, she took a panicky glance at what might be in reach that Arla could use as a bludgeon. But she was sure that a male wouldn’t have been able to get this close. “Arla, my dear, you must feel wretched. Would you like me to get you some caf, or sit with you?”

Uthan thought Arla was using the heel of her fist. But
she wasn’t. Uthan could see now that she was using the knuckles, the bones covered by paper-thin skin, and there was a wet patch of blood on the honey-colored wall. Two thin trails of blood ran down and vanished behind the bed.

“Arla,” she said. “Can you stop that for a minute so we can talk?”

Uthan put her hand out—slowly, nervously—and just got a fingertip to Arla’s shoulder when the woman wrenched away and scrambled to the other end of the bed.

“Don’t touch me!”

“Okay, I’m sorry. But your hand’s a mess. That’s got to be painful. I’m a doctor.”
Well, not a physician, but it’s worth a try
. “Let me take a look.”

“Don’t!”
Arla stared at her hand for a second and then dug her nails hard into the inside of her opposite forearm. She drew blood. Uthan could only stare in horror. “I’m
filth
. I’m
filth
. Stay away from me.”

“Nobody thinks you’re filth, Arla.”

“You don’t know.”

“I know that’s got to hurt, and that you need a doctor to see to those wounds.”

“You don’t know what I am.
You don’t know what I’ve done.”
Arla started rocking, arms tight around her knees, head buried. The blood was now everywhere. “I’ll be okay in a minute. Leave me alone. You don’t want to be near me. Get away.”

Uthan had never been so scared in her life. She could handle privation, danger, any extreme that came her way, but watching someone else so devoured by despair and self-loathing was terrifying. She had no control over the situation. And she didn’t know how to begin to make Arla Fett feel better.

I know everything about the fabric of life. How cells work. What makes us what we are. What drives the living machine. But I have no idea how to reach out to another being in purgatory
.