Vision of the future

She twisted her head. Behind them, the men who'd been examining the Falcon had come out from under the ship and were standing silently in a row, also watching. Different clothing, different hairstyles, some with beards or mustaches, here and there a scar—

But otherwise identical. Completely identical. 'Han...?'

'Yeah,' he said; and as she focused on his thoughts, she knew that he'd caught on, too. 'Brothers, huh?'

Carib shrugged uncomfortably. 'It sounds better,' he said quietly, 'than clones.' For a long minute the only sound was the soft hiss of the breeze rustling through the tallgrain stalks. 'Ah,' Han said at last, his voice studiously casual. 'That's nice. So what's it like being a clone?' Carib smiled bitterly—the exact same smile, Leia noted with a private shudder, that Sabmin had shown a minute earlier. 'About as you'd expect,' he said. 'It's the sort of secret that gets heavier with time and age.'

'Yeah,' Han said. 'I can imagine.'

Carib's face hardened. 'Excuse me, Solo, but you can't possibly imagine it. Every time one of us leaves this valley it's with the knowledge that every outside contact puts our lives and those of our families at risk. The knowledge that all it will take will be one person suddenly looking at us with new eyes, and the whole carefully created soap bubble of the ever-so-close Devist family will collapse into the fire of hatred and rage and murder.'

'I think you're overstating your case a little,' Leia suggested. 'We're a long way past the devastation of the Clone Wars. The old prejudices aren't nearly so strong anymore.'

'You think not, Councilor?' Carib countered. 'You're a sophisticated woman, a politician and diplomat, fully accustomed to dealing with the whole spectrum of sentient beings. And you're good at it. Yet you, too, are feeling uncomfortable in our presence. Admit it.' Leia sighed. 'Perhaps a little,' she conceded. 'But I don't know you as well as your friends and neighbors do.'

Carib shook his head. 'We have no friends,' he said. 'And if we're a long way past the Clone Wars, we're not nearly so far past Grand Admiral Thrawn's use of soldiers like us in his bid for power.'

'Is that who you're working for now?' Leia asked, studying Carib's face. There was something disturbingly familiar about him...

'The orders have come in over Thrawn's name,' Carib said cautiously. 'But of course, you can put any name on any order.'

Beside her, Leia felt Han's sense suddenly change. 'I got it,' he said with a soft snap of his fingers.

'Baron Fel. Right?'

'Baron Soontir Fel?' Leia asked, her stomach tightening with the sudden realization. Yes, that was who Carib reminded her of: a young Soontir Fel. Once the Empire's top TIE pilot, Fel had married Wedge Antilles's sister and then been forced to strike a reluctant deal with Rogue Squadron to save his wife after Imperial Intelligence Director Ysanne Isard set out to kill her. The rescue had succeeded, but an impeccably laid trap had subsequently snared Fel himself back into Isard's hands. At that point he'd disappeared, presumably to a brief trial and a quick execution. Except that all that had happened only a few months after Endor, years before Thrawn had returned from the Unknown Regions and begun his cloning operation. Which left the question—

Han got there first. 'So how come Fel lived long enough for Thrawn to get the cloning tanks up and running?' he asked.

Carib shook his head, a brief flicker of pain crossing his face. 'We don't know,' he said in a low voice. 'Our flash- learning didn't include any of Fel's personal history. We assume—' He hesitated.

'We can only assume that whatever sympathies he might have had toward the New Republic were burned out of him by Isard.'

'Or by Thrawn?' Han asked.

'Or by Thrawn,' Carib agreed heavily. 'Otherwise, I doubt Fel would have been thought reliable enough to have clones taken from him. No matter how good a pilot he was.' There was another moment of silence. Leia stretched out with the Force, but if Carib was disturbed by the discussion of wrecked minds, it was masked by the odd clone- sense surrounding all of them. 'Yet you saved our lives just now,' she reminded him.

'Don't give them too much credit on that one,' Han growled. 'If they'd left us alone, we'd have hit dead center in this valley of theirs. You think their secret could have stood up to all the investigators who'd have swarmed over the place?'

'Yet our secret is now out anyway,' Carib reminded him calmly. 'Depending on what you decide to do.'

'Maybe,' Han said, his hand dropping casually to hover beside his blaster. 'Or maybe depending on what you plan to do.'

Carib shook his head. 'You misunderstand. We have no intention of harming you. Nor do we wish to fight for Grand