So today I walked over to the mall to get Dark Nest III: The Swarm War. (Aside: I love the way you can see how many copies of books are in stock in certain stores online. I would be seriously annoyed if I walked 4 km one way only to find that it wasn't in stock!) Now I've been looking forward to the book ever since I finished Unseen Queen... but the REAL reason I needed this book ASAP is because of the Triple Zero excerpt. Got there, bought the book. But then.... I didn't want to walk all the way home before I read the excerpt. So I sat in the mall's food court, eating New York fries and reading the awesome part-of-a-chapter from Republic Commando: Triple Zero. (61 days!)

And wow, I am so excited. The excerpt is about Kal Skirata and the Null ARC Troopers. The 6 Nulls are about 2 years old (with accelerated growth, 4 years) and the Kaminoans want to "recondition" them because they don't follow orders. Poor little clone kids. When Kal moves to protect them, one of the clone kids grabs Kal's blaster, tosses it to his brother, and the second one aims it at the Kaminoans. (One of them has gotta be Ordo!) At this point, I am pretty much a puddle on the floor. The awww factor is off the scale. I'm not normally a person who likes children - I just can't deal with humans who cannot operate rationally - but wow, I want a little clone kid! So incredibly cute. (I know I said something similar when I read The Defense of Kamino and Alpha rescues the clone kids from the Seps but then tells 'em off for acting defenseless when they aren't.) Anyways, Jango manages to diffuse the situation. Kal gets to train the 6 Nulls, who trust him now. So much clone awesomeness.

I'm getting an idea for an alternate-universe scenario, where the clone children are adopted by regular families. That would be really interesting... having to raise a 5 year old child who looks and in many ways acts 10 years old, and has spent his entire life studying to be a perfect soldier, and knows nothing of the outside world or how to relate normally to his peers. So... tragic. :/ Anyways, I'll stop there so I don't enter the realms of fanfic...

I like Kal a lot. Though I can already tell that there will be things about him that scare me... just like Shan Frankland in Karen's other books (whom I also adore). But wow, it's going to be so cool to have him as a POV character!

Is it February yet? *bounce*