But Skirata was never really oblivious of anything. Nor was Vau. They had eyes in their backsides, those two. Scorch still hadn't worked out how they'd managed to keep such a close eye on their respective training companies back in Tipoca City. To a young clone, they'd seemed like omniscient gods who could not be deceived, evaded, or outsmarted, and they still came pretty close now.
Scorch could hear the mumbling rumble of low voices. It had a sort of rhythm to it. Yes, they were reciting a list. Now that he could hear, he caught sounds he recognized.
Names.
They were reciting names.
Sev was the first to hesitate. He caught Scorch's elbow. "I don't think we should interrupt them, ner vod."
Skirata turned slowly, lips still moving, and then Vau looked up.
"You want to join in, ad'ike?" Vau said kindly, and he was not a kindly man. "Just commemorating brothers gone to the manda. You forgotten what day it is?"
Scorch had, although it should have been etched in his memory. Seven hundred and thirty-six days ago, all ten thousand Republic commandos had been deployed to Geonosis with the rest of the Grand Army at zero notice, a scramble to board ships that left no time for farewells to their training sergeants. Of the ten thousand men who shipped out, only five thousand had come back.
Scorch felt like a fool. He knew what the two sergeants were doing now, and why: they were reciting the names of fallen clone commandos. It was a Mandalorian custom to honor dead loved ones and comrades by repeating their names daily. He wondered if they went through all those thousands every single day.
"You didn't memorize every name, did you, Sarge?" Sev asked.
"We remember every lad we trained, and we always will," Skirata said quietly, but Scorch saw that he kept glancing down at a datapad clutched in his hand. Five thousand names--plus those killed after the Battle of Geonosis--was an impossible feat of memory even for Skirata's devotion. "The rest ...we only need a little prompting."
Scorch couldn't now name half the squads in his batch at the Tipoca training center, let alone the men in them. He felt ashamed, as if he'd betrayed them. Vau gave him a nod and gestured with his own datapad, indicating he was transmitting, and when Scorch checked the 'pad clipped to his belt the list was there, highlighted at the company currently being recited. He joined in the reading obediently. So did Sev.
There were many clones with identical nicknames based on their numbers--a lot called Fi, or Niner, or Forr--and it gave Scorch a shudder to say the name Sev more than once.
It probably didn't do much for Sev's morale, either. Scorch glanced at him, but he looked unmoved as usual, eyes fixed on his datapad.
"Baris, Red, Kef..."
"...Vin, Taler, Jay..."
"...Tam, Lio..."
The list went on. After a few minutes, their voices synchronized; there was a strange hypnotic feel to it, like an incantation, a rhythm and pitch that left Scorch almost in a trance. It was just the effect of simple repetition, but it still unsettled him. He wasn't the mystic sort.
Behind him, he heard the faint crunch of boots, but he didn't dare break the spell and turn to look. Other commandos were joining the ritual. There were never many men in the barracks at any one time, but it seemed like they were all turning out to pay their respects.
So many names.
Is mine going to be on that list this time next year?
Fi was on it; Fi, RC-8015, Omega Squad's sniper. Skirata didn't even blink when he said the name, and neither did Vau, even though word was getting around that Fi wasn't dead. It was a strange moment, repeating the mouthy little di'kut's name as if he were gone. Scorch, feeling suddenly guilty at escaping so much personal bereavement, saw Sev take a slow look to his left as if he'd spotted someone. Scorch didn't want to break his concentration. He didn't look to see what had distracted Sev.
Reciting the list of the fallen took well over an hour. Eventually, when the last name was read, Skirata and Vau stood silent for a moment with their heads bowed. Scorch felt he'd been woken abruptly, suddenly aware of sound and harsh sunlight as if he'd stepped out of a dark room, and he was almost expecting some momentous end to the ceremony; but in typical Mandalorian style, it simply ended because all that needed to be said had been said.
Skirata looked up. A couple of hundred commandos had assembled, some with helmets and some without, each man in individual painted armor that looked incongruously cheery for such a solemn event. But that was very Mando, too. Life went on and was there to be lived to the full, and constant remembrance of lost friends and family was an integral part of that. Aay'han. That was the word for it: a peculiarly Mandalorian emotion, a strange blend of contentment and sorrow when safely surrounded by loved ones and yet recalling the dead with bittersweet intensity. The dead were never shut out. Skirata's DeepWater-class submersible was called Aay'han. That said a lot about the man.
"What are you waiting for, ad'ike?" Skirata asked. He always called them that: little sons. Scorch wondered if he'd formally adopted all his squads. That was Skirata all over. "Just make sure I don't have to add any of your names next year, or I'll be very annoyed."
"You reckon there'll be a next year, Sarge?" The commando who asked wasn't a guy Scorch knew, but then Delta kept to themselves. His armor was decorated with navy-blue and gold chevrons. "I like to plan ahead. Who knows, I might have a social engagement..."
Skirata hesitated for a moment. "You know how the war's gone so far. Maybe we'll all be here in ten years."
"Your grandson will be big enough for full armor by then."
There was a ripple of laughter and Skirata smiled sadly. Scorch expected him to be happier at the mention of the baby boy that one of his kids--his biological kids--had dumped on him. He certainly seemed to dote on the child. But it looked as if something had taken the happy grandfatherly gloss off the situation.
"My dearest wish," Skirata said, "is that you all get to see him grow up."
Well, it wasn't a day for hilarity anyway. They'd just stood there on a big, empty parade ground and recited the names of thousands of dead brothers, so Scorch felt it was a suitably downbeat note to end on. Nobody was singing much about darasuum kote--eternal glory--these days, although Scorch thought a verse of Vode An might have been appropriate.
But the impromptu assembly broke up in silence, and Skirata walked off with his usual limp, Vau ambling beside him. Out of curiosity, Scorch kept an eye on the two sergeants all the way to the hangars on the far side of the barracks.
"Come on," said Sev. "Can't hang around all day. Got a mission briefing before lunch. I need to calibrate my HUD."
"What do you think they're up to?"
"Getting old and working out how to spend Vau's bank haul."
"No, they're up to something serious. I can tell."
"Mind-reader now, are we?"
Scorch couldn't understand why Sev never saw what he saw. They'd grown up with those two old shabuire, and when either of them had some scam running, they had this look about them, subtle but discernible to clones who relied on subliminal detail for recognition in a sea of near-identical brothers. Skirata had his scam face on, for sure.
"He definitely knows something we don't," Scorch said.
"Whatever it is, then, it won't hurt us."
Skirata and Vau paused at the entrance to the armory. Then Scorch saw something that vindicated his paranoia. Two familiar figures that he hadn't seen in a couple of years--figures in beskar'gam, traditional Mandalorian armor--emerged from a side door and greeted the two sergeants with that distinctive hand-to-elbow grip. Mandalorians shook hands by mutually clasping above the wrist. Vau said it was to prove you had a strong enough grip to haul a comrade to safety.
Maybe they'd arrived to mark the anniversary. Nobody outside the Grand Army seemed to bother about it.
"What are they doing here?" Sev muttered. "Why now?"
Wad'e Tay'haai and Mij Gilamar were two of the Cuy'val Dar, the training sergeants recruited personally by Jango Fett to train clone commandos in Kamino. Most were Mandalorians, and most had disappeared again once their contract was over, living up to their title: "those who no longer exist." But now they were reappearing in ones and twos. It just made Scorch feel that his general suspicions were justified.
"I don't know," he said. "Maybe Kal's decided he likes the company of intellectuals." He paused. Tay'haai still had that ancient bronzium spear slung across his back and a beskar flute hanging from his belt. They were both lethal weapons. "You think he ever uses those things?"
"Sure of it," Sev said. "I heard Zey was trying to recruit Cuy'val Dar again to cross-train ordinary troopers."
"Smacks of desperation."
"In case you hadn't noticed, we are desperate."
The four Mandalorians exchanged a few words and disappeared. Without his helmet systems, Scorch couldn't overhear anything at that distance. "Why did Fett recruit any non-Mando sergeants at all?"
Sev shrugged. "He said it was for the skills mix, but I reckon he just couldn't find a hundred Mandos to front up for him."
Scorch followed Sev back into the accommodation block. He often wondered how the commandos trained by aruetiise--non-Mandalorians, a word that could mean anything from foreigner to traitor--felt about being surrounded by others who were so steeped in Mandalorian culture. There weren't that many left, though. Out of twenty-five hundred or so who completed training by aruetiise, fewer than a thousand remained. It said a lot for Mandalorian training.
"We could train the white jobs better ourselves," Scorch said. "We've got experience to pass on to them."
