mamuzzy | [TRIPLE ZERO] Chapter 1: The fateful meeting

|| Republic Commando: Triple Zero || 2006 || Book series || Military, Sci-fi || 18+ for violence and harrowing themes ||

Kal's expectations what he is about to see:

poor marksmanship, poor endurance, lack of aggression? Not if these were Jango's clones. He was curious to see how the Kaminoans could have fouled up producing fighting men based on that template.

And what he got:

Six identical little boys—four, maybe five years old—walked into the room.

Skirata was not a man who easily fell prey to sentimentality. But this did the job just fine.

They were children: not soldiers, not droids, and not units. Just little kids. They had curly black hair and were all dressed in identical dark blue tunics and pants. He was expecting grown men. And that would have been bad enough.

Not fell prey to sentimentality, I wanted to say BIG FAT LIES, but then I realized that for a moment I mixed up sentimentality with being emotional. Kal is EMOTIONAL but not sentimental. So when these kids walked into this room, something truly break inside him.

The boys huddled together, and it ripped at Skirata's heart in a way he wasn't expecting. Two of the kids clutched each other, looking up at him with huge, dark, unblinking eyes: another moved slowly to the front of the tight pack as if barring Orun Wa's path and shielding the others.

Oh, he was. He was defending his brothers. Skirata was devastated.

Kal is so deep into the sentimentality, he already refers them as brothers. But no wonder. One of them - the one who is later called Ordo -, already protecting them from Orun Wa.