"And now to business," Lama Su said. "You will be delighted to hear we are on schedule. Two hundred thousand units are ready, with another million well on the way."
"That is good news," Obi-Wan replied, thinking quickly.
The Kaminoans had been expecting him, or… a Jedi, at least. But the Temple Archives had had the information about Kamino erased.
Who would have done that – and why?
"Please tell your master Sifo-Dyas that we have every confidence his order will be met on time and in full," Lama Su went on. "He is well, I hope?"
"I'm afraid not, actually," Obi-Wan replied, deciding to take a different tack. "It's been a source of great sadness for us all."
"Oh my," Lama Su said, sounding genuinely quite upset. "That is a shame… I hope that there will be no problems with the contract on the Jedi side of things?"
"I would hope not," Obi-Wan agreed. "However, as a consequence I would like to hear about the financial arrangements. Itemized, if possible… regardless of the status of the primary payments, I'd like to check the accounts involved in all the transfers to confirm which ones will need to be maintained and which ones can be safely wound up."
"Ah," the Kaminoan minister said, with a slow and subtle nod. "I understand, yes. Succession is a difficult topic to plan for, and the accounting work can be difficult… we will have to give you a full rundown of the entire order. I'm sure you will see that our work has been sufficient to fulfil the order in all particulars."
Obi-Wan nodded.
"That would be ideal," he said.
The revelation that Sifo-Dyas had ordered a clone army – if that was truly who had done the ordering – had been difficult for Obi-Wan to handle… at least, at first.
He'd known in the abstract what Dexter had told him, that Kaminoans were cloners – but it was quite another thing to see the millions of clones. They were in every phase from gestation to fully deployed combat drills, the Kaminoans clearly intending not just to provide an army but to have a fully formed replacement pipeline that would – if he was understanding correctly – take at least nine additional years to fully empty out.
Clones being started today, as some of them were, would not be mature until nine years in the future. So either the Kaminoans were cloning a large army for a long period of use, or they were cloning an army that would swell to full size over the course of an entire decade.
It was hard to tell which, certainly.
The news that the source of the raw material for the clones wasn't on Kamino yet, but would be back at some point soon, was just an addition – and, at this point, not even an important one.
An assassination attempt on Senator Amidala was one thing, but this was evidence of something that was more important than a single person's safety – especially then that person's safety was being guaranteed by a Jedi protector like Anakin.
Then, with the inspection of the army over, Obi-Wan moved on to checking the financial records… carefully taking notes on all the information involved, and spotting something of a pattern.
The initial transfers had come from one set of accounts, but then there'd been a shift… a shift that corresponded roughly with the time of Master Sifo-Dyas's death.
"I have to check," he said. "This switch from these accounts to those ones… those were authorized by Sifo-Dyas in person?"
They hadn't been, of course. Obi-Wan knew they hadn't been, because Sifo-Dyas had died before then.
"Oh, no," Lama Su replied. "The authorization for the change in accounts drawn was made digitally. We value discretion in our business."
"I see," Obi-Wan frowned. "I'm sure there won't be any serious problems, but can you provide me with all the information on that authorization? We want to make sure the Jedi don't incur any… unexpected liabilities."
"Naturally," Lama Su agreed. "I would be happy to provide you the information. We are most interested in seeing what the Jedi do with their army – on a purely professional level, of course. So it is in our interests to be certain of the propriety of all transactions."
"I'm sure it's no surprise," Jocasta Nu said, some hours later, "but the new accounts and the account authorization provided were nothing to do with the Jedi Temple."
She sounded personally offended that she'd given Obi-Wan incorrect information earlier in his investigation, and Mace Windu concealed a slight smile.
"What can we tell about them, then?" he asked. "Do we know anything?"
"We know a few things," Nu answered. "Firstly – these transactions are absolutely enormous. We're talking about… I would roughly estimate, the complete cost of feeding and housing and educating fifteen million people over the complete time they grow to adulthood, would be the effect of current expenditure over twenty years. That's on the side of things related to the actual clones alone. Then there's equipment, which is… not cheap. The financial statements include the construction and purchase of starships, hundreds of them, at one hundred and eleven million credits per ship list price, plus at least thirty million extra in deployable combat vehicles per starship… the point is, this is an amount of money that the Jedi Temple simply would not be able to effectively provide. At any point."
"I'm not sure I follow," Obi-Wan admitted, from Kamino.
"The Temple has a good deal of resources, but the funding that we get from the Republic is… enough for comfort and convenience," the archivist said. "Enough for discretionary funds for a Jedi on a mission to be in tens of thousands of credits, though that usually doesn't get spent. It is not enough to buy every single Jedi Knight their own personal gunship complete with a company of bodyguards, or to buy a capital ship for every twenty Knights. The amount of money involved is astronomically beyond what Master Sifo-Dyas could have committed by himself. I don't think the Jedi Temple could have afforded it short of actually selling the Temple itself for redevelopment."
"The money, we must follow," Yoda suggested.
"It's not very hard," Jocasta Nu replied. "It's all coming from the Chancellor's office."
"...that was quick," Ki-Adi-Mundi said. "You're sure?"
"Yes," Nu replied. "Or as sure as I can be at this point – the change in accounts matches the change in Chancellor and I recognize the old ones… and Sifo-Dyas was a friend of Chancellor Valorum. The key is that the scale of resources involved here are on the level of governments – and not small ones, either."
"This is all very disturbing," Obi-Wan mused, after some seconds of silence. "But what exactly am I going to do about this? I don't intend to just tell the Kaminoans that the money is going to dry up… at this point, they've still got the army."
"Ask who made the decision on the clone template," Mace suggested. "And on the training methods. They think someone had the ability to make decisions on behalf of the Jedi, let's try and track down who it was."
"I have the feeling this is going to end with me getting in a fight," Obi-Wan sighed. "All right, Masters. I'm on it."
AN:
As established, Sifo-Dyas ordered the army.
The amount of money involved is truly staggering – we're talking about multiple procurement programs for state of the art military technology, and those things are not cheap.