No, Darman was going to say it.

"Ner vod, you have no idea how glad we were to see you." Darman cradled his helmet and inhaled the cool conditioned air inside the crew bay. "I thought those chakaare were going to be wearing my gett'se for earrings."

The sergeant was probably staring at him. His head was in a position that looked as if he was, but he said nothing, as if he hadn't heard right.

"What?" he said at last.

"Things were getting shabla hairy down there." Maybe he didn't understand what the Maujasi rebels did to their enemies for revenge. "Thanks."

"Is that the local language?"

"What is?"

"Nair vowd," the sergeant said carefully, as if it was the only phrase he'd caught.

Darman didn't expect white jobs to understand Mando'a. It was only the Republic commandos trained by Mandalorians like Sergeant Kal who spoke the language. But every trooper flash-learned the words to the marching song Vode An, and some phrases-like ner vod and the best profanities-had percolated through the ranks fast.

Not to this guy, though. Odd.

"You Eighty-fifth?" Darman asked.

"Fourteenth Infantry," said the sergeant.

"Okay, maybe we'll get you a crash course in Mando'a so you can exchange chitchat with Shiny Boys like us."

"Sorry," said the trooper. His accent was different from the rest of the white jobs Darman had come across. "Never heard of it. I'm new."

He was new, all right. As the man moved forward to the cockpit, hand over hand on the grab rail, Darman replaced his helmet to talk privately with the squad.

"Does that look like reinforcements to you? New clone intake?"

Niner clicked his teeth. "If it is, they've changed the training program on Kamino. The meat-cans all learn Vode An."

Atin secured his restraints, leaned back on the seat with arms folded across his chest, and stretched out his legs, indicating that he planned to sleep. "Maybe the Kaminoans think the Mando thing is getting out of hand and making the lads too uppity."

"Maybe they're cutting corners in production," said Niner.

"Maybe they told some aiwha-bait to kovid lo'shebs' ul narit once too often," Corr said and laughed.

It was a small thing, but life and death in this business hung on the apparently inconsequential detail. Darman made a mental note to tell Skirata. Then he switched out of the squad link with a couple of blinks, and opened a private comlink to Etain's code.

She needed to know he was okay, wherever she was.

Republic Fleet Auxiliary support vessel Redeemer, off Thyferra, 940 days ABC "What's your name, Commander?"

The Jedi looked up at Etain as she leaned over the hangar deck gantry. She was a human female, brown-haired maybe Etain's age, but she didn't look like any Jedi that Ordo had seen before; no traditional brown robes, just clean but well-worn overalls as if she'd stepped straight out of a factory. Only the lightsaber she was checking over gave any indication of what she was, and even that was different from those Ordo was used to seeing. The blade was yellow, and the handle was carved with sea creatures. She wasn't one of Zey's regulation-issue Jedi.

Ordo was dismayed to realize he found her rather attractive. Guilt consumed him for a moment. He felt disloyal to Besany for even noticing another female, and made a mental note to ask Kal'buir if this was a terrible failing. There was no point asking Mereel. He seemed to think it was compulsory.

"Callista, General," said the Jedi. "Callista Masana." She nodded politely at Ordo. "Captain."

"Delta Squad are on their way." Etain seemed at a loss for the right words, as if there was something about Callista that bothered her. "Thank you for responding. Every pair of hands counts."

Callista gave her an equally odd look back. "You'll get used to our funny little ways, General."

The woman walked away toward the LAAT/i on the hangar deck, where a few other equally un-Jedi-like Jedi had gathered. Ordo was fascinated as much by Etain's reaction to these unusual officers as by their behavior. Callista put her arm around one of the young male Jedi and gave him a kiss on the cheek that was definitely not comradely. They were, as Mereel would have put it, clearly an item.

"Master Altis has some unconventional views on how Jedi should conduct themselves," Etain said quietly, giving Ordo a gentle shove toward the hatch. "He and his followers hark back to a less rigid and ascetic age."

Jedi kissing in public. And Etain has to hide her relationship with Darman? These people need to work out what they stand for.

"This Master Altis," Ordo said following Etain to the briefing room. "How does he feel about marriage and children? Is this what Callista means by funny little ways?"

Etain took a breath as if she was preparing to give him a rehearsed speech. "In the early Jedi Order, there was no ban on attachment, and Masters could take as many Padawans to train as they liked-even if they were adult. It was all much more informal. Altis is a back-to-basics kind of Jedi."

"Maybe you should join him."

"They've joined us."

"You know what I mean, General..."

"What do you think Bardan would say?"

Jusik had rapidly become a kind of moral compass for the younger Jedi as speculation about his resignation spread. He had a reputation even before he walked out; he'd already berated the Jedi Council about its stance on the war. To some he was an example they wished they could follow, but Ordo had the feeling he shamed others, and they seemed hostile in their polite Jedi way.

"I think he'd tell you that everyone has to make their own decision," Ordo said.

"And I'd say that joining a more liberal group of Jedi would be trying to have the best of both worlds, and ignoring the issues that made Bardan leave."

"You plan to leave the Order."

"I certainly do."

And that was the least of Etain's challenges. Every day that she didn't tell Darman that Kad was their son made the revelation harder. Ordo had racked his brain trying to think of a gentler way to break the news, but there was no good way to do it.

When they reached the briefing room, Delta Squad were listening intently to the air group commander with two other commando squads-Orar and Naast-that were made up mostly of Rav Bralor's former trainees. None of them paid any attention to Ordo and Etain slipping in at the back. The rest of the seats were taken up by infantry troopers and pilots, but there was no sign yet of Ordo's five brother Nulls.

There was rarely an operational need to meet face-to-face, but they missed one another, and Kom'rk had been out in the field for a long time on his own.

"What are you doing here, anyway?" Etain whispered. "Kal sent you to keep an eye on me?"

"No, I'm here to keep an eye on Kal'buir."

"Anything wrong?"

"Maybe."

Etain turned her head slightly to stare at him. "You'd better finish the sentence."

"One of his sons contacted him to say his daughter was missing."

Etain closed her eyes for a moment. "Poor Kal. He never said. Missing how, exactly?"

"I don't know. I'm waiting for Kal'buir to tell me." She let out a long breath. It wasn't so much a sigh as the sound of sheer fatigue and disillusion escaping from her. "I would so like a simple life for us all, however hard the work."

"We shall have it. Make no mistake, we shall have it."

Ordo rarely felt pity, but when he did-and if it wasn't for his small circle of brothers-he felt it for Etain. He felt it all the more now that he knew that there were Jedi who did things differently, and that if Etain had been born in a different place, or a different time, that she might have been old enough to choose whether she wanted to be a Jedi, not simply taken as a helpless baby and indoctrinated. And she could have chosen to love without fear of censure.

If the galaxy had been that different, there might not even have been this war to worry about.

"We won't wait until the end of the war, will we?" she whispered lips barely moving. "But when will we know when the time is right?"

She was referring to desertion-getting out, leaving the war behind. It was an odd question for a Jedi to ask. Ordo had always thought that their senses would tell them when momentous events would happen. He realized he had a far better chance now of predicting that from intelligence than Etain had from listening to the Force.

I'll know," he said. "And so will Kal'buir."

There was no point finding a way of stopping accelerated aging if nobody survived to have the therapy. And that meant leaving millions of brother clones to fight on while the small and fortunate circle of Kal'buir fled.

Yes, Ordo understood now why Etain couldn't bring herself to follow Jusik out of the Republic's service.

"Do you think Callista and her freethinking friends are up to the task?" he asked. On the dais at the front of the briefing room, the air group commander was still demonstrating with the aid of a holochart how they would insert troops to secure the spaceport. "They've never led troops, and we know what happened last time that role was dumped in Jedi laps without training."

"I have no idea," Etain said, "But I've told the squads to ignore them if they give suicidally stupid orders. They know that."

Etain was a smart woman. She knew what she didn't know, and she trusted her troops. Ordo took his leave of her with a nod and slipped out into the passage to look for his brothers.

The RV point was one of the engineering spaces where the only interruption was likely to be by a maintenance droid. It wasn't ideal, but Redeemer was more or less in a convenient place at the right time, and thanks to Etain, Ordo had numerous excuses for being there. There was no sign of the other Nulls when he stepped through the hatch, but Skirata was already there. He didn't seem to hear Ordo enter and carried on talking on his comlink in fond tones, his back to the hatch. "I know, son," he said. "But other than that, do you need anything? Is everything okay?"

He seemed to listen for a while, laughed ruefully, and said "Ret'" to end the conversation. Then he tapped in another code and waited. "'Cuy, Gar'ika. Me'mar ti gar?"

Ordo had thought he was talking to one of his real sons, Tor. But he was doing a regular call-around of his commando squads, just chatting and seeing how they were. It was important, he said. Men needed to know that someone cared if they lived or died. Etain had taken that to heart, because she was visiting every single squad in her commando group, all 125 of them.

Ordo waited until Skirata came to a natural pause and coughed politely. Skirata jumped as if someone had discharged a blaster behind him.

"Sorry, Kal'buir."

"Son, you know I'm a bit deaf." Skirata turned to swing his leg over a metal bench and sit astride it. "Just catching up with the ad'ike."

It was a compartment of Skirata's life that Ordo and the other Nulls weren't quite part of, like the family the veteran sergeant had before he came to Kamino. Skirata somehow kept all three separate; the Nulls had barely known the commandos under Kal'buir's care until after Geonosis. Ordo rationalized it as Skirata's way of avoiding any comparison between the amount of time he devoted to the Nulls and how thinly his attention was spread among a hundred or so young commandos.

"I've called the vode together," Ordo said. "We need to get a few things straight."

"All of you?" Skirata looked embarrassed. "That sounds ominous. Going to give me a talking-to?"

"Yes."

"Look, I'll book an appointment to get the leg fixed. I swear. Next week."

Ordo opened his datapad and checked the calendar, thumbing through the medcenter codes. Mereel had fixed a slot for the surgery. "No need, Buir'ika. Done."

Skirata wasn't himself. The news from his estranged family had hit him hard. Ordo thought it was unjust that his sons could disown him and yet expect him to come running when something went wrong; they were grown men, old enough to have grandchildren of their own. But this was his daughter in trouble. She hadn't declared him dar'huir. Ordo was prepared to give her some benefit of the doubt for Skirata's sake, with one hand on his blaster in case she turned out to be trouble that his beloved father didn't need.

Am I jealous? Am I worried because he's our father, our buir, and we don't want any interlopers? It wasn't a very Mando thought. Ordo suppressed it. It was another guilty moment that made him wonder what he really was.

"You don't need to be a Jedi to feel something's shifting," Skirata said. "And I've had word from Omega."

"They're okay. I checked."

"Yes, I know, but Dar said they've come across troopers who don't seem to know Vode An."

In the context of a galactic war, it was less than nothing. In the context of what the Nulls had discovered on Kamino-the looming end of its clone production, facilities set up on Coruscant itself-and the evidence Besany had turned up about a clone program on Centax 2, it was significant; it meant that there was a new basic training schedule. The aiwha-bait were nothing if not mind-numbingly consistent. The song was part of the flash-learning module that taught young clones the purpose and nobility of the Republic's cause.

"Is this the first of our Centax batch?" Ordo asked. "Because I've not noticed any real increase in troop numbers. Believe me, Kal'buir, I've been monitoring that very closely."

"They'd have to test a few in combat, wouldn't they? Or maybe give the new clones a chance to assimilate. But if they weren't trained on Tipoca, and Kamino didn't provide embryos for Centax, the dates Besany found for cloning materials being sent to Centax means we have fully grown troops being produced in a year or less."

There was only one way of doing that as far as Ordo knew. "Spaarti cloning."

"Arkanian Micro?"

"I don't think even they can beat the year barrier yet. They'd have to come from Spaarti Creations on Cartao. Or else Palpatine's brought in some ex-Spaarti clonemasters, which is more likely."

"He's got Kaminoans somewhere on Coruscant, too," Skirata said. "The man's quite the recruiter."

Ordo didn't even need to consult his datapad. His eidetic memory summoned up an entire report from nearly two years before of the Separatist destruction of the Spaarti facility on Cartao. "I think he picked up a few scientists after the attack on Cartao, Kal'buir."

"Spaarti clones, then. How much use do you think they'll be if they churn them out in a year?"

Ordo felt uncomfortable to hear these men-men exactly like him in most ways-referred to like that, even benignly, and even by Skirata. "It's not just the process," he said. "It's the genetic material they're grown from. The Kaminoans weren't happy with results from second-generation tissue, which is why they kept Fett around."

"We need to do some serious digging."

"Why? All we need to keep an eye on is when the Chancellor plans to deploy them. That's our cue to leave."

"I wasn't thinking of asking Besany to take more risks, son."

"I know."

The comment hung between them for a moment or two. Then the hatch opened and Kom'rk stuck his head into the compartment.

"So, nobody missed me," he said. "I'm gone a year, and nobody baked a cake."

"Kom'ika . . ." Skirata got up and embraced him with a crunch of armor plates. Ordo waited his turn. "Come on, get that bucket off and let's take a look at you . . . shab, son, you're looking thin."

Kom'rk shrugged clipping his helmet to his belt. His face did look drawn. Ordo took advantage of the moment and moved in to hug his brother. Then the rest of the Nulls showed up and the engineering space was suddenly very crowded. It was just like old times, the seven of them together, ready to take on anyone.

"I've been babysitting him, Kal'buir," Jaing said. "Someone has to keep him away from Mereel and his wild debauchery, after all."