Kamino was damp. No, it was worse than damp: it was an ocean world permanently covered in a torrential downpour. It did nothing to help the mild arthritis in Derpy Hooves’s wing joints, nor did the Kaminoans’ remarks about her “aberrant” eyes help her feel at ease. She had come to this Force-forsaken hole for work: her old comrade Jango Fett had called weeks earlier, offering six million credits to train elite commandos in exchange for disappearing from the face of the galaxy. Derpy was now part of the Cuy’val Dar: those who no longer exist. It was just as well, because as far as the grand scheme of life was concerned, the gray pegasus had already been dead for years.
Derpy removed her helmet, clipped it to her belt, ambled onto a walkway, and took stock of her surroundings. The sterile, white dome ceiling rose forty meters above her head, and the equally pristine floor fell even farther below. The height did not bother her: a high-flying species such as hers could not afford to be afraid of heights. However, what she saw taking place in the room bothered her quite a bit.
Enormous white pillars stretched from the floor to the ceiling, and stacked on each pillar were multitudes of thick black rings made up of smaller rings, and within those were… “What the hay?” she said aloud. Within each smaller ring were glass vats, and inside each of the vats was clear liquid and faintly moving bodies. Human babies. Derpy gaped. All those poor kids… She tried to imagine herself in that position, and an unwelcome chill ran down her spine. It must have felt like drowning, floating in those humanoid equivalents of fish bowls. She looked away, and noticed that Jango was watching her. “Su’cuy, Jango,” she said, managing a friendly smile. “It’s good to see you.”
Jango stood beside her, looking out onto the surrounding room. “Thank you for coming, Derpy. I trust disappearing was easy for you?”
The mare shrugged. “Dinky left the house six years ago. She doesn’t need me anymore.” She looked once again at the vats of submerged children. “So where are the commandos you’re paying me to train? All I’ve seen so far are babies, you, and those snake-necked freaks that run the place.”
Jango rolled his eyes, as though he had gone through similar conversations before. “These particular clones you won’t be training, but there is a batch waiting for you in the classroom down the hall.”
Derpy looked to Jango. “Clones? Of who?” The smirk on the human’s face answered her question. “You?” Jango nodded, and Derpy looked back at the vats. “An army of Jangos… I feel sorry for the poor shabuirse who have to fight these guys.”
Jango actually laughed. “Well, you certainly take it better than Skirata or Gilamar did.” He steered Derpy back down the white corridor she had come from.
“So, how many of these clones am I going to be training?” Derpy asked.
“One hundred and forty-four, tops.”
Derpy paused. “How many?”
“One hundred and forty-four,” Jango repeated, tapping a keypad on a nearby door and walking Derpy inside. “You may want to familiarize yourself with each one today, because their actual training begins tomorrow.”
“Wait, what?”
“Make them soldiers.”
The door slid shut behind, cutting off the conversation. Derpy rolled her eyes, turned, and found herself in at a large room filled with stock-still young boys. She stared at them; their wide, dark eyes stared right back. They each looked to be four or five years old and all had the same black hair, brown eyes, and little blue fatigues. They’re so young… Jango had made it sound like she was going to be training full-grown men, not children. She worked her jaw a little, trying to wet her suddenly dry mouth with saliva. What unnerved her even further was their sheer silence: children at their age would normally be bouncing off the walls and getting into little tussles. Derpy swallowed and stood front and center of the class. “Good morning, commandos,” she said, putting on her well-practiced sergeant persona. “I am Sergeant Derpy Hooves. I am not an officer, so you will either call me Sarge, Sergeant Hooves, or Sergeant Derpy. I am your mother and your father now, and you will execute every order I give to. The. Letter. Do I make myself clear?”
The children responded as one voice. “Yes, Sarge!” Fierfek, they really were clones. Derpy was still unnerved, but glad that these children would listen to her. They were nothing like her boisterous daughter Dinky, not at all. The aged sergeant wondered if these clones had names like normal children, and she decided it would not hurt to ask.
“Do you have names?” she asked.
One of the clones spoke up. “We have serial numbers, Sergeant. Do wish us to tell you those?” His accent was like Jango’s, but much less pronounced. Moreover, he was perfectly fluent and articulate, a miniature adult.
Derpy was taken aback. None of them had actual names? That should not have been a surprise, given that the Kaminoans considered them standardized units instead of people, but she was surprised anyway. “I’ll give you boys real names,” she said, her sergeant act slipping away and returning in a moment. “Each of you, split into your assigned squads, and I’ll name you four at a time.”
Individually naming 144 clone children took a couple hours, but Derpy was amazed that she had gone through all of them without going back to the same one at all. Yes, they all looked the same, but they were, well, different. Soren, from Wampa Squad, had a habit of quietly sucking his teeth, with one eyebrow slightly raised; Cotton Top, from Rancor Squad, had a knowing smirk plastered onto his face and tended to blink more often than his brothers; and Jaster from Dynamo Squad had a habit of scratching the back of his head every couple minutes. When she had finished naming everyone, Derpy retook her place at the front of the classroom. She was about to call it a day and dismiss her charges, but one child—Ijaat, from Jawa Squad—raised his hand. “Yes, Ijaat?”
“Sergeant Derpy?” the kid asked. “What does my name mean?”
Derpy almost face-hoofed at her own stupidity. How could she have not taught these kids their Mando heritage? Without it, they would be dar’manda: eternal Dead Men, men without a Mando soul. “The word ijaat is the Mando’a word for ‘honor.’” A hundred more hands went up. “Before we become bogged down in individual meanings, let me tell you about what I am.” The hands went down, and Derpy continued. “I am a Mandalorian warrior. I fight for my allit, or family; I also fight for those who offer me the most credits…” For the next three hours, Derpy explained to over a hundred little boys what a Mandalorian was, that they were Mandalorians, and that they had a history, a culture, and a language to be proud of. She was glad that she had been a teacher before she became Mando, because she would have otherwise struggled to teach a language to kids who already spoke fluent Basic. She also explained that Mando’a had no word for “hero,” because all Mandos could be heroes if they put their minds to it. She even briefly left the room to give them a taste of her special uj muffins, an adaptation of a sticky, sweet cake made with berries. It was a uniquely Mando treat, and the little commandos loved it. Derpy decided to ask Jango later to buy a few more uj cakes the next time he went offworld.
She let her sergeant façade drop once again, and she looked lovingly on the boys as they ate. She felt quite proud, proud that someone liked her baking and proud that these boys were soaking up the knowledge she freely gave them and using it.
When she dismissed them to their barracks after a long four hours, she could hear snatches of Mando’a in their conversations: Sev and Kadral of Krayt Squad were speaking almost entirely in their new language. She watched them go until all of them were gone and the classroom door slid shut. Derpy allowed herself a yawn. She had not noticed how tired she really was until then. She looked at the chrono on the wall opposite her: it read 2021 hours. The gray mare half-stumbled out of the room to her quarters, and she could not recall her head hitting the pillow before falling asleep.
A particularly loud slap of thunder jolted Derpy awake. The chrono on her nightstand read 0100. She groaned, trying to fall back to sleep, but a yelp outside her door caused her to snap to full alert. She had raised children before, and this yelp was no different than Dinky’s: it was a cry of pained surprise, like that of a child who accidentally touched a hot stove. Derpy slipped on her helmet, drew her blaster, and ran out the door to investigate. To her horror, she spotted four clone children—Derring, Tor, Kane, and Jaster—cowering before a Kaminoan that appeared to be holding a stun baton. “Return to your chambers, or you will be taken to a reconditioning unit,” it said in that neutral, clinical tone all Kaminoans seemed to speak.
Jaster, who appeared to be shielding his other three brothers, looked pleadingly at his apparent assailant. “Kino Su, we just needed to see our sergeant—” he was cut off by a blow from the stun baton, and he fell to the floor, spasming.
Instinct reacted before her brain. Derpy cannoned into Kino Su, knocking him to the floor with a thud. He tried to hit Derpy with the baton, but she was on her hooves before he could connect.”I’ll teach you to hurt little kids, you filthy hut'unn!” She raised her blaster, acquired the Kaminoan’s head in her HUD, and fired. The smell of ozone and burning fish suddenly filled the air.
The sound of running boots caught her ears, but Derpy slightly relaxed when she saw Jango and a few other of the Cuy’val Dar coming down the hall. “What happened here? We heard a weapon go off,” Jango demanded. He looked at the clone children, at Derpy, and then at the dead Kaminoan and the stun baton gripped in its hand. “Shab," Jango said. “I expected this from Skirata, but not you..."
Derpy growled. “Sorry about the mess, but I will do it again if any of those yellow-eyed freaks touch my boys again.” She walked over to Jaster and checked his vitals while Jango had a droid take the body to a medcenter to be disposed. When she found nothing wrong with Jaster’s vital signs, she scooped him up in her arms and beckoned for the other three members of Dynamo Squad to follow. She paused for a moment when Jango gave her an annoyed look, but neither Mando said anything. Derpy continued to her chambers, set Dynamo Squad on her bed, and removed her helmet. “Now, I’m sorry you had to see that,” she said gently, “but what were you four doing out of bed this late?”
Jaster looked away, ashamed. “I had a bad dream, Sergeant,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do about it, so I wanted to ask you myself. Tor and the others insisted on coming with me. You know much more than I or my brothers do, so…” he trailed off, gazing up at the pegasus in a silent plea.
Derpy knelt so that she could be eye-to-eye with Jaster. “You want to know something? I had bad dreams when I was your age, too. All the time, in fact. But, you have something to help you cope that I did not have then.”
“What was that, Sergeant?” Jaster asked.
“Someone who cares about you.” Derpy gathered her boys—yes, they were her boys now—into a tight hug. They could be soldiers in the morning: right now, they could be the little boys they rightfully deserved to be. “And you don’t have to call me Sergeant if you don’t want to; you can just call me Derpy.”
The four children replied as one voice. “Yes, Derpy.” Maybe being stranded on Kamino would not be as bad as it seemed after all.