The Cestus Deception (21 page)

Deep in the mountains a hundred klicks southeast of the capital raged a mighty celebration. There was much dancing and laughter, and more than a bit of drunken boasting.

Nate leaned back against a rock, deeply satisfied. The operation had indeed gone smoothly, without a single life lost. His throat was a bit sore from General Kenobi’s lariat, but the support brace concealed in the neck of his cowl had worked perfectly. The extra padding in the shoulder of OnSon’s “Desert Wind” uniform had protected him from the carefully judged swipe of General Kenobi’s lightsaber. In every way, from obtaining the crucial intelligence from the criminal Trillot to transferring it, from evaluation to creation of a plan, from penetrating the transport security network to diverting the car, from impersonating the exhausted forces of Desert Wind to subduing resistance among the Five Families, from simulating combat with General Kenobi to effecting their eventual escape…

Every step had gone off without a hitch.

There was another, additional bonus: from his perch atop the roof of the car he had been able to witness the “duel” between the two Jedi. Nate had thought that he had seen and learned everything about unarmed combats. Now he knew that, in comparison, Kamino’s most advanced martial sciences were mere back-alley thuggery.

Nate knew that the Jedi had something that would keep troopers alive, if he could only learn more about it.

But how?
That thought burning in his mind, he sat back and looked up at the stars, deliciously content to replay each motion of lightsaber and whip.

Sheeka Tull had landed
Spindragon
a safe distance away, and walked into camp under a burgeoning double moon. She had just completed a tiring run connecting three of Cestus’s six major city nodes, delivering volatile cargo illegal to ship through the subterranean tunnels.

A familiar unhelmeted form in dark green fatigues approached her, waving his hand. “Ah, Sheeka. Good to see you.”

From brown skin to tightly muscled body, everything was familiar, but still she looked at him askance. “You’re not Nate,” she said, although the trooper’s casual dress lacked military insignia or other identifying marks.

Forry blinked then transformed into wide-eyed innocence. “Who else would I be?”

She grinned and pointed. “Nice try. He has a little scar right here on his jawline. You don’t.”

Sirty came up behind Forry, laughing at their brother’s efforts to fool her.

Forry grinned ruefully. “All right. You’re right. Just a little game we like to play.” He jerked his thumb. “Nate’s on the other side of camp.”

“Nice try.” She slapped him on the back and went to see her new… friend? Were they friends? She supposed that she could use that word for their relationship. Friends with her dead sweetheart’s clone. It was a bit morbid, but also strangely exciting.

She found him leaning back against a rock, lost in his own thoughts. He smiled and raised a cup of Cestian spore-mead as he saw her.

“What do we celebrate?” she asked, suspecting that she already knew the answer.

“A little operation that went even better than expected. And no, no one is dead.”

She searched his face. “Disappointed?”

He glared at her. “Absolutely. I was hoping for human barbecue tonight.”

She leaned back against the rock with him. “Touché. I shouldn’t blame you simply for enjoying your work. It’s what you were trained to do.”

“Superbly,” he agreed. She was relieved that these lethal, bottle-bred warriors had a sense of humor.

“And you’ve been fully trained in all matters of soldierly behavior?” she asked.

“Fully.”

She paused, and looked at him more carefully. “And do soldiers dance?”

Now he seemed to lose that smile and become genuinely thoughtful. “Of course. The Jakelian knife-dance is a primary tool for teaching distance, timing, and rhythm in engagement.”

She groaned. Practicality again. “No. Dancing. You know: man, woman. Dancing?”

He shrugged. “The cohorts compete with each other in dance. Team and individual events.”

Sheeka found herself fighting a growing sense of exasperation. “Haven’t you ever done it for fun?”

He squinted. “That
is
fun.”

“You exhaust me,” she said, and then held her arms out. “Come on.”

He hesitated, and then came to her.

The musicians were playing some fast-paced number with flute and drum. Their jig steps were bouncy and light. The other recruits grinned, laughed, chattered, and swung their partners around with the kind of enthusiasm that suggested a serious need to blow off steam. The troopers watched, tapping their feet to the rhythm. From time to time one of them would perform a series of precise, martial movements to the music, spiced with tumbling floor gymnastics. The recruits approved, clapping along and cheering.

Just what happened today?
She hesitated to ask. He had great coordination, but not much sense of moving in unity with a partner. Still, she liked it. She liked it a
lot.

“I heard things on the scanner,” she said, innocently enough.

“Really?” he asked. “What did they say?” He held her firmly and caught a half beat cleverly enough to spin her. Several of the other couples had as well, and the air filled with whoops of joy.

“Oh, something about a group of Five Family types being kidnapped and then rescued.”

“Kidnapped? Rescued?” he said, wide-eyed. “Goodness. Sounds exciting.”

So. He wasn’t going to say anything. Need-to-know, she supposed. Still, from the number of people celebrating, she knew that the operation had been substantial, and she guessed that she might be able to pry the details out of a farmer or miner.

He must have noticed the thoughtful frown on her face, and misinterpreted its meaning a bit. “So,” he said. “I get the sense that you don’t approve of our mission.”

“That wasn’t what I was thinking.”

“But you don’t. Why do you help us?”

“Not voluntarily.”

“Then why? What leverage does someone have?”

Her answering laugh was a bit tighter than she had intended. “Somewhere on Coruscant is a computer file listing every indiscretion ever committed in the galaxy. There was a need, my name came up, and doing a favor is better than spending a decade on a work planet.”

“And your name is on this list?”

She nodded. “You’re a quick study.”

“I believe that’s called sarcasm.”

“Ooh,” she squealed. “More human by the minute. Next we try irony.”

He scowled ferociously, and she laughed. “So… what did you do?”

“My younger sister joined a religious sect on Devon Four. When they refused to pay taxes Coruscant slapped an embargo on them. When a plague struck the colony, they were going to die, every woman, man, and child. No one would do a thing. So…”

He nodded understanding. “So you got them their medicine. And your sister?”

She brightened. “Raising a squalling brood of brats somewhere in the Outer Rim. I’d do it all over again.”

“Even though it brought you here.”

Strangely enough, she was feeling more than just comfortable, and a thought drifted through her mind that
here
meant both the planet and his arms.
Hmmm.
“Even though.”

“I notice you spend more time talking to me than my brothers,” he said, his lips close to her ear. “Why is that?”

“You hold my interest.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “Perhaps because you are the only one trained for command. That makes you more like Jango.”

His attention sharpened. “They say he was a loner.”

“Yes,” she said. “But a natural leader, too. At other times he could be invisible, as I understand quite a few people learned to their brief and painful regret.”

Nate gave a hard, flat chuckle. Yes, indeed.

“But if he wanted, when he entered a room every head would turn.” She paused a beat. “Especially mine.” Her voice grew softer. “But that was all so long ago. I was eighteen years old, and Jango was twenty-five.”

“Was he a bounty hunter then?”

She closed her eyes, dredging up old memories. “I think he was in transition. He’d only been free maybe two years, since the Mandalorians were wiped out. I met him in the Meridian sector. He’d lost his armor somehow, and was searching for it.” A ruminative smile. “We had just about a year together. Then things got dangerous. We were raided by space pirates. Our ship got blown from the sky, and in the middle of a really nasty space battle we were forced to take separate evacuation pods. I never saw him again.” She paused. “I heard he survived, and got his armor back. I don’t know if he looked for me.” Sheeka shrugged. “Life is like that, sometimes.” Her voice had grown wistful.

Then she chuckled, and he drew back slightly and looked at her in puzzlement. “Why do you laugh?”

“You do remind me of Jango. He always locked his emotions away. But I can remember times when he let them out of their cage.”

“Such as?”

Her sweeter, saucier side was bubbling to the fore, and she was happy to feel it. She’d feared she’d never feel that evanescence again. “If you’re lucky, I might tell you sometime.”

She knew he was curious now, and pardoned herself for the slight exaggeration. In truth, Jango was a man of few words who kept his feelings in check. In his life, and his chosen lifestyle, that reserve had been vital for survival.

Just from their few conversations, she knew that for all his practical and lethal knowledge, Nate hadn’t the foggiest notion about ordinary human lives. Until this, until the moment that he had taken her in his arms, she could feel that he had treated her with a certain respect and distance, more like a sister than anything else. He probably knew only two types of women: civilians to be protected or perhaps obeyed, treated with courtesy at the least. On the other hand were the sorts of women who offered themselves to soldiers in exchange for credits or protection, to be used and discarded. It could be emotionally risky to break down such a simplistic worldview.

But she had to admit that she was interested in breaking through his reserve, wondering what she might find beneath it.

What would happen, how might he respond if she allowed the bond between them to deepen? And if she took it in a new direction? She drew him away from the dancing and laughter into the shadows. “What now?” she asked.

“We’re off-duty until dawn, why?”

She took his hand. “Come,” she said. “I’d like to show you something.” Confusion darkened his face.

“I have to be available—”

“You said you were off-duty. Are you confined to base?”

“No—” He stopped. “If I’m called, I would need to be back within twenty minutes. Can you guarantee that?”

She calculated distances and velocities in her head. “Yes.”

Five minutes of scrambling over broken rock took them to
Spindragon.
As he strapped in, Sheeka swiftly completed her predeparture checklist and lifted off. With a practiced touch she rocketed almost a hundred kilometers to the southeast in about twelve minutes. At first she skirted the ground to elude scanning. Then, when they were a sufficient distance away, she rose up into a standard transport lane, filled with commuter pods and double-length cargo ships transporting goods among clients reluctant to pay the orbital tax.

Nate watched the ground whirl beneath them, enjoying the ease and command with which Sheeka piloted the craft. Competence was something he could always appreciate. This woman was different from others he had known, and that difference disoriented him slightly. Curiously enough, he enjoyed the sensation. So Nate relaxed as she took him into a saw-toothed stretch of hills, and then set them down again gently, not eighteen minutes after they left the camp.

The camp was built into the hillsides, several different mine openings suggesting both natural and artificial breaches in the surface. As she landed, a dozen offworlders and two X’Ting emerged to meet them. All grinned, nodded, or waved at them in greeting.

“What is this place?”

“They are my extended family,” she said. “Not by birth. By choice.”

“Is this where you live?”

She smiled. “No. We don’t know each other that well yet. But… my home is a lot like this.”

Now he was able to make out more dwellings. They appeared to be camouflaged, the coloration perhaps designed to make them more difficult to see from the air. From the ground, though, they still tended to melt into the shadows and rock formations.

“Why do they hide?”

She laughed. “They don’t. We just love the mountains, and enjoy blending with them as much as possible.”

Again, the danger of seeing everything through a soldier’s eyes.

High, sweet voices rang down from the slope. Nate turned to see several young human boys and girls up there playing some game of laughter and discovery. They dashed about calling names, squealing, enjoying the long shadows.

Down around the rock-colored dwellings swarmed older children. Some of them were graceful X’Ting, slender and huge-eyed, reminding him a bit of Kaminoans. Adolescents, he supposed, working with adults. Building, repairing tools perhaps.

He watched them, thinking, feeling. He found the environment a bit confusing. Or could it be Sheeka herself who troubled him? Whichever, he found himself remembering his own accelerated childhood, the learning games he had played…

Once again, Sheeka Tull seemed to have read his mind. “What were you like as a child?” Clever. Had she brought him here to see children, hoping that it would spark his own memories?

He shrugged. “Learning, growing, striving. Like all the others.”

“I’ve visited a lot of planets. Most children’s games help kids discover their individual strengths. How can you do this? Aren’t you all supposed to be the same?”

Teasing him again? He realized, to his pleasure, that he hoped so. “Not really. There was a core curriculum that we all mastered, but after that we specialized, learned different things, prepared for different functions, went on different training exercises, fought in different wars. No two of us have ever had the same environment, and because of that we are stronger. In the aggregate, we have lived a million lives. All of that experience grows within us. We are the GAR, and it is alive.”

“Loosen up, will you?” she clucked, and stretched out her hand to him. He hesitated, and then after checking his comlink to make certain that he could be reached in case of any emergency, he followed her.