Star Wars Republic Commando Triple Zero

Find Skirata. He's the only one who can talk these men down. And no, I'm not going to obliterate a whole barracks block just to neutralize six ARCs. So get me Skirata: he can't have traveled very far. General Iri Camas, Director of Special Forces, to Coruscant Security Force, from Siege Incident Control, Special Operations Brigade HQ Barracks, Coruscant, five days after the Battle of Geonosis Tipoca City, Kamino, eight years before Geonosis Kal Skirata had committed the biggest mistake of his life, and he'd made some pretty big ones in his time. Kamino was damp. And damp didn't help his shattered ankle one little bit. No, it was more than damp: it was nothing but storm-whipped sea from pole to pole, and he wished that he'd worked that out before he responded to Jango Fett's offer of a lucrative long-term deployment in a location that his old comrade hadn't exactly specified. But that was the least of his worries now. The air smelled more like a hospital than a military base. The place didn't look like barracks, either. Skirata leaned on the polished rail that was all that separated him from a forty-meter fall into a chamber large enough to swallow a battle cruiser and lose it. Above him, the vaulted illuminated ceiling stretched as far as the abyss did below. The prospect of the fall didn't worry him half as much as not understanding what he was now seeing. The cavernsurgically clean, polished durasteel and permaglasswas filled with structures that seemed almost like fractals. At first glance they looked like giant toroids stacked on pillars; then, as he stared, the toroids resolved into smaller rings of permaglass containers, with containers within them, and inside those No, this wasn't happening. Inside the transparent tubes there was fluid, and within it there was movement. It took him several minutes of staring and refocusing on one of the tubes to realize there was a body in there, and it was alive. In fact, there was a body in every tube: row upon row of tiny bodies, children's bodies. Babies. "Fierfek," he said aloud. He thought he'd come to this Force-forsaken hole to train commandos. Now he knew he'd stepped into a nightmare. He heard boots behind him on the walkway of the gantry and turned sharply to see Jango coming slowly toward him, chin lowered as if in reproach. "If you're thinking of leaving, Kal, you knew the deal," said Jango, and leaned on the rail beside him. "You said" "I said you'd be training special forces troops, and you will be. They just happen to be growing them." "What?" "Clones." "How the fierfek did you ever get involved with that?" "A straight five million and a few extras for donating my genes. And don't look shocked. You'd have done the same." The pieces fell into place for Skirata and he let himself be shocked anyway. War was one thing. Weird science was another issue entirely. "Well, I'm keeping my end of the deal." Skirata adjusted the fifteen-centimeter, three-sided blade that he always kept sheathed in his jacket sleeve. Two Kaminoan technicians walked serenely across the floor of the facility beneath him. Nobody had searched him and he felt better for having a few weapons located for easy use, including the small hold-out blaster tucked in the cuff of his boot. And all those little kids in tanks . . . The Kaminoans disappeared from sight. "What do those things want with anTraviss, Karen is the author of 'Star Wars Republic Commando Triple Zero ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780345490094 and ISBN 0345490096.