“Change of plan,” he said. “We’re going to Parmel sector, Outer Rim.”
He waited for sounds of protest. Nothing. He checked the cam again to make sure Mirta was still there.
“Did you hear me?”
“Yes.” She sounded a little out of breath and stood looking into the cam’s lens. “You’ll pay me sooner or later. I’m young. I’ve got time to wait.”
She had no idea how pointed that observation truly was. Fett wondered if she knew he was ill, but there was no way she could know he was dying.
“Vohai,” he said, and wondered why he volunteered the destination. She was making him drop his guard. Nobody managed that. He made a conscious effort to be himself again, untouched by anything beyond his own needs. “Sit up front where I can keep an eye on you.”
He released the security locks on the aft compartments and fired up Slave I’s sublight drives. Mirta belted herself into the copilot’s seat just as the ship lifted, the acceleration flattening her like a punch.
Fett paused. “I don’t bother with the g-force dampers on takeoff.”
Why did I say that? He’d developed a rhythm of bare-bones conversation over the years. His passengers were never volunteers. Nobody wanted him to catch up with them. This was how it went: they whined, and he slapped them down, with a blunt word or sometimes a blunt object.
Mirta didn’t whine. He still felt the compulsion to slap down.
She stared ahead from the viewscreen. “I didn’t pay for a ticket so I’m not complaining.”
There was no answer to that. Fett took Slave I out on manual to check that he could still pilot without computer assistance. So far, so good. The illness was still just pain, not yet infirmity. Roonadan dwindled beneath them into a rusty red coin, and the viewport filled with star-specked void as Slave I cleared the planet. Then he took the risk of losing his main psychological aid to remaining aloof, and eased off his helmet. He expected Mirta to react; but she just glanced at him and then looked away again, apparently more interested in the starfield ahead.
“You’re a clone, aren’t you?” said Mirta at last.
She gets right to the point. “Got a problem with that?”
“No. I met a clone once.”
“So did Ailyn. She killed him.”
“Only because she thought he was you.”
I don’t want to chat. He didn’t answer.
Mirta persisted. “But this clone said he’d fought at Geonosis.”
“Couldn’t have.”
“Why?”
“Those clones were designed to age fast.” Fett did a quick mental calculation, doubling the years. “He’d be a decrepit hundred-forty-year-old now.”
“He was alive all right.”
The clone army had been designed to mature in ten standard years, and then they carried on aging at twice or more the rate of ordinary men. Fett remembered feeling sorry for them as a kid, but his father had told him to be proud because they were perfect warriors. Sometimes he remembered that they were also his brothers. Whenever he met a stormtrooper going about Vader’s business, he’d always wondered whether some remnant of his father’s template—of himself—was behind that white visor. But he never asked.
“When did you meet him?” Fett asked carefully.
“Last year. I got in his way on a job.”
“Bounty hunting?” Where? Don’t rush her.
“Yes.”
“A one-hundred-forty-year-old clone?”
Mirta studied his face for a moment, impassive. “He looked a lot like you, except for the scars.”
“He’d be too old to even walk.”
“Oh, he could walk all right. And handle a weapon. Big scary guy with a custom Verpine rifle and this long, thin, three-sided knife.”
No clone from the Grand Army of the Republic could have survived, let alone have left the service. Their whole life was fighting: how could they have coped on their own? But clones were men, and they had been scattered across the galaxy in the war, so it was inevitable that some had fathered children. This had to be one of them. He was almost reassured to know that the clone bloodline hadn’t been erased completely, but he wasn’t sure why.
“You sure?”
“Yeah. He said his clan name was Skirata.”
Skirata.
Fett jerked his head around and knew instantly that he’d displayed too much interest. But he knew that name. Back on Kamino in the years before the war with the Separatists started, his father had had a friend called Skirata: a short, tough, fanatical man who trained clone commandos and—according to his father—was the dirtiest fighter he’d ever known. He seemed to like that about him.
“What else did he say?”
“That he and some of his brothers left the army after Palpatine came to power. He wasn’t very talkative. You’re definitely related.”
That made Fett pay much closer attention.
No clone from the Kamino labs could have survived this long—except unaltered ones, like him.
Or … one whose accelerated aging process had been halted. Only Ko Sai knew enough to be able to do that.
“I’m interested,” he said.
“Why?”
He’d rarely needed to lie, but he lied now. “They’d be my brothers too, wouldn’t they?” And then he wasn’t sure how much of that was actually untrue. He had always been alone, just the way he liked it, and now he was suddenly curious about not being that way.
Mirta leaned back in the seat and looked up at the deck-head. The heart-of-fire was strung around her neck, which struck him as an odd thing for a bounty hunter to do with an object she’d retrieved. She was just a young girl, and girls liked baubles, but she didn’t seem the type to go in for jewelry.
“He looked like you, more or less,” she said at last. She tugged at the necklace like worry beads. “He had full Mando armor. Light gray. And these pale gray leather gloves with an unusual grain.” She held both hands out above her lap, palms down, fingers spread, as if she was imagining those gloves on her own hands. “Really immaculate gloves.”
Fett thought gray and an image of Taun We’s long silver-gray neck and neat, yellow-eyed head dominated his field of view, as vivid as his helmet’s display, right there in front of him and yet somehow not there.
If Mirta wasn’t spinning him a line, then someone had managed to get hold of Ko Sai’s data. And they’d made use of it.
But maybe she knew more than he gave her credit for. His father had taught him to watch out for traps. This was so close to what he wanted to hear that it triggered every suspicious nerve in his body, which was all of them.
If those clones survived, why haven’t I heard about them before? If this kid’s trying to set me up for something, she’s got a lot to learn.
Even Ailyn had tried to kill him once. He glanced sideways at Mirta.
“Fierfek, you look just like him when you do that.” She looked rattled. “It’s the way you tilted your head.”
Whoever the man with the gray gloves was, he seemed to have made an impression, or else she was an expert actress. She had a tight grip on the heart-of-fire as if to protect it.
Fett decided to make sure she was secured in the aft section when he needed to sleep. She still seemed to think that the goods she had to sell was Ailyn’s location; maybe she didn’t realize that she now had two things he wanted, and that was information on both his dead wife and—impossible, but he couldn’t ignore it—his living brothers.
If she had known, she’d have asked him to pay for it.
But Mirta had the necklace. It was somehow all he could recall of Sintas Vel at that moment.
He suddenly missed her, and he knew he had no right to.
SENATE LOBBY 513, SENATE BUILDING, CORUSCANT: 0835 HOURS.
Admiral Pellaeon resigned as Supreme Commander of the Galactic Alliance Defense Force at 0800, a little too late for the main morning holonews bulletins, but early enough to interrupt drive-time programming for a few moments. He
had objected strenuously—in private—to the powers granted to the Galactic Alliance Guard, but said nothing publicly. He was an old man. Nobody outside Omas’s cabinet—and presumably the military—thought it unusual that he should let a younger officer take his place.
Jacen watched the news on the chamber’s holoscreen, sound muted.
While he wasn’t surprised that Pellaeon had finally gone, he still wasn’t prepared for the speed at which events were moving. He wondered if Lumiya had influenced matters somehow. But she denied it. She sat beside him in the deserted lobby chamber, document case on her lap, face invisible under that dark red cowl and veil. The chamber was normally full of lobbyists and media seeking audience with Senators, but it was too early for the majority of the power brokers to be about their business. The Jedi council, though, was meeting Niathal in the Supreme Commander’s suite: and it was interesting that she had not gone to see them, but that they had come to her.
Start as you mean to go on.
Jacen wondered what Uncle Luke would make of the Mon Calamari officer. She would replace Omas one day. He hoped Luke would see that coming and support her so that the war would be short and sharp, and so Jacen wouldn’t have to take up the mantle Lumiya had thrust upon him.
There you go again. You know this is meant to be. You can’t avoid it; Lumiya is part of the inevitable, just as you are. Submit to it.
“Tell me you didn’t influence Admiral Pellaeon,” said Jacen quietly.
“I didn’t need to. He’s furious about your appointment and he’s old.” Lumiya’s voice was so low that Jacen almost had to amplify it with the Force in his mind. “By the time he decides he wants to return, it’ll be too late for him to stop you.”
The resignation of an elderly chief of defense was no shocking news story for HNE, merely a chance to recap on Pellaeon’s distinguished career; but the succession of Admiral Niathal was significant. She was known as a hard-liner. Jacen switched the wall-mounted holoscreen to a Corellian news station where her appointment was provoking reaction. Thrackan Sal-Solo, Head of State, was holding forth on the certain threat to Corellia. With the audio muted, Jacen lip-read.
Sal-Solo announced that Centerpoint Station would be brought back online for the defense of Corellia within three months.
“You have an interesting selection of relatives,” said Lumiya.
“All the more reason for me to do the decent thing and sort out the problems the various branches of my family appear to be visiting upon the galaxy.”
“You’re more like your grandfather than you think.”
Lumiya knew Anakin Skywalker as her Lord Vader. He’d selected her as an intelligence agent. “I haven’t failed to notice the parallels,” said Jacen.
“And that makes you wary.”
“I’ve seen the steps he took.” Literally, Grandfather: I stood behind you and watched you kill children. “I have to do things a little differently.”
“And you still want Ben Skywalker as your apprentice.”
“Yes.”
Lumiya emanated satisfaction, as if this was an extra layer of vengeance on Luke, but he knew she was past that point. “That’s a choice only you can make.”
“If there’s another candidate, I can’t think of one.”
“Are you still going ahead with the Galactic Alliance Guard?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“You have an ally in the Supreme Commander now,” she said. “You could go straight to the military solution.”
“There’s still a real job to be done in restoring security here. And Niathal needs time to stamp her leadership on the GADF. And Chief Omas.”
“Commendable, pragmatic analysis.”
Jacen wondered if he was taking a risk by having this discussion in the Senate Building. But if any of the Jedi council were as adept as he was at listening in the Force, he suspected they would be too tied up in their discussion with Niathal to hear. What would they be saying to her?
He could listen. He could snatch the sounds out of the air from behind closed doors at the far end of the floor and witness for himself, but it was irrelevant, and he didn’t need to.
He knew they would be pressing caution on her.
He also knew Niathal would smile politely in that tight-lipped way of hers, twist her head sideways to stare them out, and say that she thanked them for their counsel.
Then she would ignore that counsel.
Jacen’s mind leapt away from the business at hand for a brief moment and he found himself wondering why the Jedi Council hadn’t given his grandfather the guidance he needed as a Padawan. If they knew he was the Chosen One, why had no Master from the Council taken on the role of training him?
Poor Obi-Wan. They dithered and left the task to you. Now they’re dithering over another galactic war.
On the holoscreen, Corellian political commentators had worked themselves into a froth of outrage at Niathal’s appointment. Jacen switched channels back to HNE just as the sound of footsteps began echoing down the long passage to his right. The meeting in the Supreme Commander’s office had ended.
“Relax,” said Jacen. He centered himself and projected a Force illusion around Lumiya to bolster her own cloaking of her identity again. He felt the sensation of a ball of heat building in his chest, and he nudged her with his elbow. “Go on. Brief me on the strength of the Corellian fleet and don’t react to anyone passing by.”
Jacen and Lumiya waited. The lobby and the corridor leading off it were empty. Eventually they heard boots thudding fast on the marble floor—Luke’s, for certain—as if he hadn’t much enjoyed the meeting and wanted to get out.
Okay, Lumiya, let’s see how you react to Luke this time—and how he reacts to you.
Luke approached them, eyes downcast, distracted and frowning. He seemed about to walk past Jacen and then paused to acknowledge him as if it was an effort.
“Are you waiting for Niathal?” asked Luke.
“I’m paying my respects as head of the Galactic Alliance Guard.” Jacen indicated Lumiya. “This is a colleague from the university’s Defense Studies Department.”
Luke nodded politely at Lumiya then turned back to Jacen. “Are you certain that’s the right choice?”
“If I don’t do it, who will?”
“Maybe nobody should,” said Luke.
“If Chief Omas needs the job done, I’ll do what I can.”
Luke fixed Jacen with a frank blue gaze for a few moments, but he didn’t look at Lumiya again, and—more to the point—Lumiya didn’t look at him.
“Mind how you do it,” Luke said, a slight frown still creasing his nose, and walked away. Jacen waited a full ten minutes, still holding the heat in his chest to maintain the illusion, before relaxing.
“I’m impressed by your ability to deceive Luke,” said Lumiya. “And you appear to have no doubts or misgivings about it.”
Jacen stood up. Lumiya had been given the best chance she had for decades to kill Luke Skywalker, and she hadn’t shown the slightest inclination to take it.
“No doubts,” said Jacen. “But no enthusiasm, either.”
“That’s as it should be,” she said. “Tell me what your next task is.”
There was no harm telling her. It would be all over HNE in a few days.
“Internment,” said Jacen. “We’re confining Corellians until this current wave of terror is contained. Come on. Let me introduce you to the officer who’ll be in the Chief of State’s office within the year.”
Internment. Extreme, dangerous … and inevitable.
When you could let go of your own need to be the hero, the admired one, the respected, and face being reviled for doing a necessary job, then you had finally overcome the most poisonous attachment of all: the love of ego.
Jacen was prepared to be hated in pursuit of a greater good.
chapter nine
I heard stories about his grandfather when I was a boy, and Jacen Solo struck me as walking the same path. Vader liked a
loyal military elite at his back, too. And sometimes ends do justify the means. The protest from the media and civil rights groups that greeted our announcement that a Galactic Alliance Guard had been formed to deal with the new threat to public safety was to be expected. It did not, however, make it any easier to hear myself decried as the new Palpatine.
—Chief of State Omas, Memoirs
CORELLIAN QUARTER, CORUSCANT.
Ben knew he was taking an insane risk by going back to the Corellian neighborhood, but he had to find Barit.
This time he made sure he was wearing regular clothes, not Jedi robes. He worried that he was a coward for hiding his status, but a sensible voice inside him said that there was no point in getting beaten up before he found out something useful. That was pragmatism, as Jacen called it.
Corellians didn’t have a fight going with the Jedi. Just the Alliance. But the distinction between the two wasn’t always clear.
He sauntered along the walkways, stopping to stare at things that made him curious, reminding himself that he was a thirteen-year-old boy and not a soldier this time. Nobody seemed to notice him.
All he wanted to do was to look Barit in the face and ask a simple question: what made him see Coruscanti as the enemy?
The fact that two governments were behaving like idiots didn’t seem like justification enough for Ben. He didn’t want to attack Corellians just because the government had a problem with Corellia: even the raid on Centerpoint Station hadn’t been directed against people. He felt no hatred for Corellians at all.
But Barit, who wasn’t that much older than him, had tried to shoot a CSF officer. He hadn’t aimed at the mob stoning the Corellian embassy. He had tried to shoot a complete stranger who was trying to stop the riot.
Ben didn’t understand, and he needed to.
The Corellian neighborhood was quieter today, as if people were waiting for something to happen. Some of the shops were closed. Ben stopped at a grocery store to pick up a bottle of fizzade and ask for directions to the Saiy workshops. He drank as he walked the kilometer or so to Barit’s family business.
Ben found two men who looked about his father’s age leaning over a large repulsor drive with hydrospanners in their hands. They glanced up sharply but relaxed when they saw him. Just a kid.