fat belly. The cargo bay door yawned, revealing a dark interior.
Hidden in the tree line, Nyss increased the magnification of his goggles and eyed what he could see of the inside. Bits of machinery and ragged clothing were cast about like flotsam, a toppled stasis chamber. There was also a body, female. She looked dead. He watched for a while longer and saw no movement in the hold.
In the handcant he and Syll had developed as children, he signaled, One body. I’ll go in. You cover.
She nodded, unslung her crossbow, fitted it with one of the razor-tip quarrels they favored, and took sight at the doorway.
Nyss put a vibroblade in each hand, the familiar vibrations of the weapons welcome in his palms. He slipped from the shadows and darted across the clearing. He consciously restrained the Force-suppressing field he could generate around him. If any of the clones were inside, they would be alerted if their connection to the Force were severed.
He could smell the decay before he reached the ship. He lurked at the boarding ramp for a moment, head cocked, listening. Hearing nothing, he signaled back to Syll that he was going in, and then hurried up the ramp.
Inside the cargo bay, the smell hit him more strongly. He noted the bodies. Their clothing consisted of worn layers of Thrawn-era Imperial garb, their hair long, thick, and unkempt. Clones. He noted a male, a female, and two young children, a boy and girl.
The clones had children.
He could tell at a glance that the male was not the Prime—the face was wrong—so he took his time in examining the bodies. The woman had died first, and the burst boils and sores that covered her skin showed that she had died in pain, no doubt of some illness associated with genetic decoherence. He’d never seen a case so acute. He’d never heard of a case so acute. A long scar ran from the bottom of her throat to her navel, a zipper put there by one of Thrawn’s doctors decades earlier. He put his fingers on the lightsaber hilt still affixed to her belt. The crystal that powered it, connected as it was to the Force, felt like an itch behind his eyes.
He moved to the children, saw no visible wounds on them. He assumed that the decoherence had manifested differently in them, born as they were, rather than grown.
The adult male, on the other hand, had died in combat. His skin was seared on the arms and chest—perhaps from Force lightning, but that had not been his cause of death. Given the hemorrhaging in his eyes, the bruises on his throat, Nyss judged that he’d died of suffocation.
He stood, thinking. The clones from the moon were dying from complications associated with genetic decoherence. For some reason, the decoherence in these clones had resulted in symptoms far more acute than usual. Eleven clones had fled the moon in the cloakshape fighter. Assuming they had not disposed of other bodies en route, four were dead, the Prime not among them.
He whispered into his comlink. “Four dead inside. I’ll check the rest of the—”
The sizzle and hum of igniting lightsabers pulled him around.
A male clone, well over two meters tall, his long brown hair and thick beard obscuring much of his face, stood in the narrow hatchway that led from the cargo bay toward the cockpit. He was soaked in sweat and swayed on his feet. His glassy eyes fixed on Nyss.
A red lightsaber burned in each of his hands. Both of them sizzled, spitting sparks like a campfire.
“Get away from them,” the clone said, his speech slurred but his intent clear. He took a lurching step toward Nyss.
“I am looking for the rest of your … family,” Nyss said. He readied himself, held his blades under his cloak, shielded from the clone’s view.
The clone took another step toward him, his breathing loud and rapid. He sniffed the air in Nyss’s direction, as if for spoor.
“You want to kill them,” he said. The flesh of his arms shifted and bulged, as if something within him were trying to escape the prison of his skin. He stared wide-eyed at his arms, then his face, too, twisted and swelled, for a moment looking like a reflection in a festival mirror.
“No!” he said, spraying spit.
Nyss had never seen anything like it. “I can help you,” he said, a lie.
The clone shook his head like an animal and roared, and Nyss saw only pain and rage