{"product_id":"triple-zero-star-wars-legends-republic-commando-isbn-9780593722169","title":"Triple Zero: Star Wars Legends (Republic Commando)","description":"\u003cb\u003eDive into the epic series featuring the brave warriors of Omega Squad—an elite team of clone commandos fighting to protect the Galactic Republic.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFollowing the eruption of the bloody Clone Wars at the battle of Geonosis, both sides remain deadlocked in a stalemate that can be broken only by elite warrior teams like Omega Squad, clone commandos with terrifying combat skills and a lethal arsenal.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor Omega Squad, deployed deep behind enemy lines, it’s the same old special ops grind: sabotage, espionage, ambush, and assassination. But when Omega Squad is rushed to Coruscant, the war’s most dangerous new hotspot, the commandos discover they’re not the only ones penetrating the heart of the enemy. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA surge in Separatist attacks has been traced to a network of cells in the Republic’s capital, masterminded by a mole in Command Headquarters. To identify and destroy a Separatist spy and terror network in a city full of civilians will require special talents and skills. Not even the leadership of Jedi generals, along with the assistance of Delta Squad and a certain notorious ARC trooper, can even the odds against the Republic Commandos. And while success may not bring victory in the Clone Wars, failure means certain defeat.\u003cb\u003eKaren Traviss\u003c\/b\u003e is a novelist, screenwriter, comics writer, and the author of five \u003ci\u003eStar Wars: Republic Commando\u003c\/i\u003e novels (\u003ci\u003eHard Contact\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eTriple Zero\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eTrue Colors\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eOrder 66\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eImperial Commando: 501st);\u003c\/i\u003e three \u003ci\u003eStar Wars: Legacy of the Force\u003c\/i\u003e novels (\u003ci\u003eBloodlines\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eRevelation\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eSacrifice):\u003c\/i\u003e two \u003ci\u003eStar Wars: The Clone Wars\u003c\/i\u003e novels (\u003ci\u003eThe Clone Wars\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eNo Prisoners)\u003c\/i\u003e; five \u003ci\u003eGears of War\u003c\/i\u003e novels (\u003ci\u003eAspho Fields\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eJacinto’s Remnant\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eAnvil Gate, Coalition’s End,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Slab)\u003c\/i\u003e; the award-nominated \u003ci\u003eWess’har Wars\u003c\/i\u003e series (\u003ci\u003eCity of Pearl\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eCrossing the Line\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe World Before\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eMatriarch\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eAlly\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eJudge)\u003c\/i\u003e; and four \u003ci\u003eHalo\u003c\/i\u003e novels. She was also the lead writer on the third \u003ci\u003eGears of War\u003c\/i\u003e game. A former defense correspondent and TV and newspaper journalist, Traviss lives in Wiltshire, England.Find Skirata. He’s the only one who can talk these men down. And no, I’m  not going to obliterate a whole barracks block just to neutralize six  ARCs. So get me Skirata:   he can’t have traveled very far.  —General Iri Camas, Director of Special Forces, to Coruscant Security  Force, from Siege Incident Control, Special Operations Brigade HQ  Barracks, Coruscant,   five days after the Battle of Geonosis  Tipoca City, Kamino, eight years before Geonosis  Kal Skirata had committed the biggest mistake of his life, and he’d made  some pretty big ones in his time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Kamino was damp. And damp didn’t help his shattered ankle one little bit.  No, it was more than damp: it was nothing but storm-whipped sea from pole  to pole, and he wished that he’d worked that out before he responded to  Jango Fett’s offer of a lucrative long-term deployment in a location that  his old comrade hadn’t exactly specified.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But that was the least of his worries now.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The air smelled more like a hospital than a military base. The place  didn’t look like barracks, either. Skirata leaned on the polished rail  that was all that separated him from a forty-meter fall into a chamber  large enough to swallow a battle cruiser and lose it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Above him, the vaulted illuminated ceiling stretched as   far as the abyss did below. The prospect of the fall didn’t worry him half  as much as not understanding what he was now seeing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The cavern—surgically clean, polished durasteel and   permaglass—was filled with structures that seemed almost like fractals. At  first glance they looked like giant toroids stacked on pillars; then, as  he stared, the toroids resolved into smaller rings of permaglass  containers, with containers within them, and inside those—\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    No, this wasn’t happening.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Inside the transparent tubes there was fluid, and within it there was  movement.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It took him several minutes of staring and refocusing on one of the tubes  to realize there was a body in there, and it was alive. In fact, there was  a body in every tube: row upon row of tiny bodies, children’s bodies.  Babies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Fierfek,” he said aloud.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He thought he’d come to this Force-forsaken hole to train commandos. Now  he knew he’d stepped into a nightmare. He heard boots behind him on the  walkway of the gantry and turned sharply to see Jango coming slowly toward  him, chin lowered as if in reproach.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “If you’re thinking of leaving, Kal, you knew the deal,” said Jango, and  leaned on the rail beside him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You said—”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I said you’d be training special forces troops, and you will be. They  just happen to be growing them.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “What?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Clones.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “How the fierfek did you ever get involved with that?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “A straight five million and a few extras for donating my genes. And don’t  look shocked. You’d have done the same.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The pieces fell into place for Skirata and he let himself be shocked  anyway. War was one thing. Weird science was another issue entirely.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Well, I’m keeping my end of the deal.” Skirata adjusted the  fifteen-centimeter, three-sided blade that he always kept sheathed in his  jacket sleeve. Two Kaminoan technicians walked serenely across the floor  of the facility beneath him. Nobody had searched him and he felt better  for having a few weapons located for easy use, including the small  hold-out blaster tucked in the cuff of his boot. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And all those little kids in tanks . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Kaminoans disappeared from sight. “What do those things want with an  army anyway?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “They don’t. And you don’t need to know all this right now.” Jango  beckoned him to follow. “Besides, you’re already dead, remember?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Feels like it,” said Skirata. He was the Cuy’val Dar—  literally, “those who no longer exist,” a hundred expert soldiers with a  dozen specialties who’d answered Jango’s secret summons in exchange for a  lot of credits . . . as long as they were prepared to disappear from the  galaxy completely.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He trailed Jango down corridors of unbroken white duraplast, passing the  occasional Kaminoan with its long gray neck and snake-like head. He’d been  here for four standard days now, staring out the window of his quarters  onto the endless ocean and catching an occasional glimpse of the aiwhas  soaring up out of the waves and flapping into the air. The thunder was  totally silenced by the soundproofing, but the lightning had become an  annoyingly irregular pulse in the corner of his eye.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Skirata knew from day one that he wouldn’t like Kaminoans.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Their cold yellow eyes troubled him, and he didn’t care for their  arrogance, either. They stared at his limping gait and asked if he minded  being defective.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The window-lined corridor seemed to run the length of the city. Outside,  it was hard to see where the horizon ended and the rain clouds began.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Jango looked back to see if he was keeping up. “Don’t worry, Kal. I’m told  it’s clear weather in the summer—for a few days.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Right. The dreariest planet in the galaxy, and he was stuck on it. And his  ankle was playing up. He really should have invested in getting it fixed  surgically. When—if—he got out of here, he’d have the assets to get the  best surgeon that credits could buy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Jango slowed down tactfully. “So, Ilippi threw you out?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Yeah.” His wife wasn’t Mandalorian. He’d hoped she would embrace the  culture, but she didn’t: she always hated seeing her old man go off to  someone else’s war. The fights began when he wanted to take their two sons  into battle with him. They were eight years old, old enough to start  learning their trade; but she refused, and soon Ilippi and the boys and  his daughter were no longer waiting when he returned from the latest war.  Ilippi divorced him the Mando way, same as they’d married, on a brief,  solemn, private vow. A contract was a contract, written or not. “Just as  well I’ve got another assignment to occupy me.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You should have married a Mando girl. Aruetiise don’t understand a  mercenary’s life.” Jango paused as if waiting for argument, but Kal wasn’t  giving him one. “Don’t your sons talk to you any longer?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Not often.” So I failed as a father. Don’t rub it in. “Obviously they  don’t share the Mando outlook on life any more than their mother does.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Well, they won’t be speaking to you at all now. Not here. Ever.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Nobody seemed to care if he had disappeared anyway. Yes, he was as good as  dead. Jango said nothing more, and they walked in silence until they  reached a large circular lobby with rooms leading off it like the spokes  of a wheel.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Ko Sai said something wasn’t quite right with the first test batch of  clones,” said Jango, ushering Skirata ahead of him into another room.  “They’ve tested them and they don’t think these are going to make the  grade. I told Orun Wa that we’d give him the benefit of our military  experience and take a look.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Skirata was used to evaluating fighting men—and women, come to that. He  knew what it took to make a soldier. He was good at it; soldiering was his  life, as it was for all Mando’-  ade, all sons and daughters of Mandalore. At least there’d be some  familiarity to cling to in this ocean wilderness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was just a matter of staying as far from the Kaminoans as he could.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Gentlemen,” said Orun Wa in his soothing monotone. He welcomed them into  his office with a graceful tilt of the head, and Skirata noted that he had  a prominent bony fin running across the top of his skull from front to  back. Maybe that meant Orun Wa was older, or dominant, or something: he  didn’t look like the other examples of aiwha-bait that Skirata had seen so  far. “I always believe in being honest about setbacks in a program. We  value the Jedi Council as a customer.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I have nothing to do with the Jedi,” said Jango. “I’m only a consultant  on military matters.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Oh, Skirata thought. Jedi. Great.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I would still be happier if you confirmed that the first batch of units  is below the acceptable standard.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Bring them in, then.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Skirata shoved his hands in his jacket pockets and wondered what he was  going 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The storm raged against the transparisteel window, rain pounding in surges  and then easing again. Orun Wa stood back with a graceful sweep of his  arms like a dancer. And the doors opened.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Six identical little boys—four, maybe five years old—walked into the room.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Skirata was not a man who easily fell prey to sentimentality. But this did  the job just fine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He heard Jango inhale sharply.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Oh, he was. He was defending his brothers. Skirata was devastated.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “These units are defective, and I admit that we perhaps made an error in  attempting to enhance the genetic template,” Orun Wa said, utterly unmoved  by their vulnerability.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Skirata had worked out fast that Kaminoans despised everything that didn’t  fit their intolerant, arrogant society’s ideal of perfection. So . . .  they thought Jango’s genome wasn’t the perfect model for a soldier without  a little adjustment, then. Maybe it was his solitary nature; he’d make a  rotten infantry soldier. Jango wasn’t a team player.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And maybe they didn’t know that it was often imperfection that gave humans  an edge.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The kids’ gaze darted between Skirata and Jango, and the doorway, and all  around the room, as if they were checking for an escape or appealing for  help.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Chief Scientist Ko Sai apologizes, as do I,” said Orun Wa. “Six units did  not survive incubation, but these developed normally and appeared to meet  specifications, so they have undergone some flash-instruction and trials.  Unfortunately, psychological testing indicates that they are simply too  unreliable and fail to meet the personality profile required.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Which is?” said Jango.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “That they can carry out orders.” Orun Wa blinked rapidly: he seemed  embarrassed by error. “I can assure you that we will address these  problems in the current Alpha production run. These units will be  reconditioned, of course. Is there anything you wish to ask?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Yeah,” said Skirata. “What do you mean by reconditioned?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “In this case, terminated.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    There was a long silence in the bland, peaceful, white-walled room. Evil  was supposed to be black, jet black; and it wasn’t supposed to be  soft-spoken. Then Skirata registered terminated and his instinct reacted  before his brain.Book 2 of the Republic Commando series; The Essential Legends Collection","brand":"Random House Worlds","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300983263461,"sku":"NP9780593722169","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780593722169.jpg?v=1767742964","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/triple-zero-star-wars-legends-republic-commando-isbn-9780593722169","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}