“You said I had a year to live. I’m fine now.”
Beluine squirmed visibly. “You found your Kaminoan scientist, then.”
“I found what I needed.” Fett hadn’t had a checkup since the veterinary lab had cleared his blood samples. Physically, he felt fine. He suspected fate had spared him a premature death so he could hang around and have his past catch up with him. I’m not proud of anything I’ve done. I’m not ashamed of anything, either. I did what I had to do. “I’ll find Sintas what she needs. If I need you, I’ll call you.”
Beluine was always good at knowing when he’d been dismissed. Mirta stuck her head out of the doorway, face set in a frown.
“Whatever Medrit says, Beluine did a good job,” she said. “You’re so ungrateful. Grandmama could easily have died.”
Fett recalled his first lessons in combat, learned at his father’s side. Commit fully to the attack. Don’t let up. Don’t stop to think. It was good advice for facing your past, too. He walked in and sat down at the bedside. Sintas was sitting cross-legged on the mattress, turning the heart-of-fire over in her hands as if she was searching.
“Who are you?” she asked, turning her face to him.
Don’t stop to think.
“I knew you when we were younger.”
“What’s your name?”
Don’t stop to think. Don’t … “Boba. Boba Fett.”
He expected the world to come crashing down at that moment, but Sintas just looked blank, as if she was trying to remember something minor, not the man who’d put a huge dent in her life. “I’m Sintas Vel, and you’re Boba Fett, and she’s … she’s …”
Mirta took up position on the opposite side of the bed. “I’m Mirta Gev,” she repeated patiently.
“Yeah, Mirta … are you my little girl? I have a daughter.”
Fett switched off. He hadn’t planned to, but it happened automatically. It was like a thermostat switch that tripped whenever things were in danger of overheating.
“Ailyn,” he said. How could he know how much she could handle at one time? She forgot it all the next moment, anyway. “Your daughter’s name was Ailyn. She was about sixteen last time you saw her.”
“I have to find her. She’ll be wondering where I am.”
Mirta fixed Fett with a stare that said Don’t even think about it. “Lots of things have happened while you’ve been in carbonite.” Mirta took a deep breath. “I’m your granddaughter.”
Sintas didn’t react for a while. She kept turning the heart-of-fire between her fingers, lips moving silently. Fett wondered if she was reading it and trying to tie up its information with what she was hearing. Sin was always sharp, analytical, looking for the angle. He didn’t know what always meant, of course; from meeting her to leaving her had been just three or four years, tops.
She placed the heart-of-fire around her neck, one hand still clutching the stone. Orade leaned over and held the flowers in front of her.
“These are vormur blooms,” he said. “It’s me, Orade. Remember? From yesterday?”
Sintas inhaled the scent and just smiled. At least she wasn’t distressed now; that was something. Mirta got up and took something from the cupboard, something Fett hadn’t seen in a very long time. It was a red oblong canister with a handle on the top. Somewhere—not here, not now—his heart sank, but he didn’t let it touch him.
“We found this in Rezodar’s effects,” Mirta said, opening the lid.
A hologram leapt into life with a faint hum, triggered by the mechanism. Mirta looked up slowly, fixing Fett with an expression that might have been recrimination or a cue to tell Sintas what he could see and she couldn’t. Fett couldn’t tell which. The hologram showed Sintas holding a baby, all smiles, and Fett standing with one arm around her shoulder.
I could have said it was Spar standing in for me, doing Shysa’s bidding as usual, the idiot. But that’s me standing there. I remember the day.
Fett also remembered killing a lot of scumbags to retrieve that hologram for her, long after they parted. He couldn’t—wouldn’t—remember how he’d felt when the image was recorded.
“What is it?” Sintas asked, reaching out toward the source of the hum.
“It’s an old hologram,” Mirta said gently. “It’s you and your daughter, I think. My mother. And—your husband.” Her eyes were fixed on Fett’s, back to the cold black stare she had given him when they’d first met. It was as if Ailyn’s lessons in hating him were all flooding back to her. “It’ll make sense when you can see again.”
Sintas half smiled, looking embarrassed. “I have a husband? What happened to him? How long have I been out of it? Come on, tell me.”
She might have lost her memory, but this was the old Sintas, all right, a no-nonsense bounty hunter who didn’t have time for excuses and platitudes. She always wanted to know the score.
Fett took a long, slow breath in the same way he did to prep for storming a room.
She won’t remember tomorrow, Orade mouthed at him.
Fett kicked down the door in his mind. “Thirty-eight years.” Get it over with. He even looked Sintas straight in the eye, although she couldn’t see him. “And I was your husband. I’m Boba Fett.”
He counted to three, like timing a det and getting ready to fling himself flat just before the blast wave reached him. But it never came. Sintas’s eyes moved from side to side as if she was searching. Her expression was almost beatific as some realization dawned on her.
“Who carbonited me?”
“I don’t know. Yet.”
“But you found me.”
“Yeah.”
“You found me.”
“We found you.” There was no point giving Sintas the wrong idea. He owed her more than that. “Mirta did all the work.”
“I don’t remember,” Sintas said. “I don’t remember anything. But if you came for me—after all that time, you were still looking …”
Fett parted his lips to explain that it wasn’t quite like that, but Mirta held up a warning finger. She doesn’t need to know that right now. He stopped in his tracks.
“You’re going to be fine,” he said. “I’ll come back later.”
It was a tactical withdrawal. When Fett turned, Beviin was standing in the doorway with his arms folded. He stepped back to let Fett pass, and then followed him down the passage through to the front of the farmhouse, where Dinua and Jintar were having breakfast with their kids in the kitchen, in a world of their own and clearly delighted to be together again. Fett caught a snatch of their conversation; Jintar was discussing his plans for a new workshop, so he obviously wasn’t planning on more mercenary contracts for a while. Some people managed family life effortlessly even in the most trying conditions.
“I could take the Jedi off your hands today,” Beviin suggested. “Unless you want to be elsewhere.”
“Sooner I kill her idea that I’m some devoted husband, the better,” said Fett. “Just makes it harder for her when she finally gets the full picture.”
He reached the front entrance, but Medrit was blocking it. He was big enough to do that. Medrit had been born solid and tall, but years of pounding metal as an armor-smith had added prodigious muscles to his frame.
“Wait,” Medrit said imperiously. “No sparring with jetiise until you’re properly dressed.” He crooked a soot-stained finger at Fett and led him to his workshop. “Heads will not roll. Okay?”
Laid out on the bench was a set of armor plates, the mid-green paint still unmarked. It was a common color for Mandalorians; it happened to be Fett’s color, too.
“Might as well make the most of the new beskar deposits.” Medrit picked up the breastplate and twirled it between his hands. “I said you should ditch that durasteel armor, didn’t I? Here’s your proper beskar’gam. Wear it in case the Jedi gets lucky. She’ll need to hack away with her jetii’kad for a week to dent this.”
“Humor him,” Beviin said. “He made a collar section specially …”
Fett didn’t plan on testing the beskar’gam in earnest, but the collar intrigued him. It was a near-circular band that hinged open and protected the neck between the helmet and gorget plate. If his father had worn one, he would probably have survived Mace Windu’s decapitating lightsaber blow. Fett slipped it on and rolled his head to test the range of movement in it.
“You think I’m going to spend my time fighting Jaina Solo, do you?” Fett submitted to having some plates swapped out. “Plenty more ways to train her to hunt her brother than wearing myself out.”
“If I had my way, you’d be wearing greaves, too. You ask for trouble, Mand’alor.”
“It doesn’t look like mine. Too new.”
“Okay, you want your dents in it? I’ll paint dents on it if you want to look roughy-toughy. It’s beskar. It doesn’t dent.”
Mirta’s reminder that he was an ungrateful shabuir wormed into his head. “It’s good, Medrit. Thanks.”
Beviin helped him attach the rest of the plates. The new helmet—he’d sort that later, himself. The durasteel one would do for today. He swung his arms a few times and accustomed himself to the extra weight before replacing his jetpack and Wookiee braids, and then set off for the hangar that he’d earmarked as a training area.
Beviin followed him.
“You want to watch the show?” said Fett. “I’m just going to see what skills she’s got first.”
“I don’t trust Jedi, Bob’ika. Not that I don’t think you can handle her.”
“We all trusted Kubariet during the war.”
“He was a different kind of Jedi, may he find rest in the manda.” Beviin was a traditionalist; he might not have believed literally in the collective oversoul, but he wished fervently for its existence. He patted the pommel of his beskad. “But I’ll give the woman the benefit of the doubt.”
Jaina was waiting for them in the barn, looking very small and dejected as she sat on an upturned pail. She flinched when Fett approached her; he was so used to getting that reaction that he thought nothing of it until he realized the look on her face wasn’t alarm but concern.
“Something wrong?” she asked.
Fett felt naked. She could sense anxiety clinging to him. He was sure that he wasn’t letting Sintas get to him, but Jaina seemed to smell trouble anyway.
“Family problems,” he said.
“Yeah, tell me about it …” She stood up. “Your granddaughter?”
There was no reason not to tell her. Everyone in Keldabe knew anyway. The shock might teach her a lesson about not letting anything distract you from the task in hand.
“My ex-wife,” he said. “She’s just shown up after being carbonited for thirty-eight years. And she doesn’t know your brother killed her daughter—yet.”
“If you’d rather be with her now—”
“We’ve got work to do.”
His eyes met Jaina’s, and he saw a shared pain he wasn’t expecting. Both of them had families torn apart by tragedy; both had harsh duties ahead. For a heartbeat, they looked at each other, and he could have sworn there was some sympathy, some real compassion in her. He didn’t like that at all.
Jaina drew her lightsaber with slow caution as if she didn’t want to make anyone too jumpy. “Want to see what I can do?”
Fett’s mind emptied instantly of all superfluous thought. Combat was cleansing; he’d done this so often that it was almost a form of meditation. He was in his natural element again, freed from the alien world of relationships he’d never learned to handle.
But he’d learned to master every weapon the galaxy had to offer, bar one.
“Me, too,” said Fett, drawing a lightsaber. “We can teach each other some new tricks.”
BEVIIN-VASUR FARM, OUTSIDE KELDABE
Jaina had thought that she might start her bizarre apprenticeship with a discussion about Jacen’s prodigious catalog of Force powers, but it wasn’t to be.
“I’m no swordsman,” Fett said, holding the lightsaber like a hammer as he circled her. Its blade was green. She wondered whose hand he’d taken it from, and how. “And I’ve never trained anyone. It’ll be an education for both of us.”
It had to be a trick. Jaina matched his movements, keeping a constant distance from him. She was aware of Beviin as a deep blue blur to her right, watching, and she didn’t feel comfortable. Suspicion emanated from him, but there was a core of … she could only call it good humor. Maybe he felt this was a joke; but palpable malevolence was missing. She found herself mapping him in her Force awareness of the environment anyway, a transponder on a holochart, an enemy vessel not in range but worthy of cautious monitoring.
“I want to learn what Jacen hasn’t,” she said.
Fett stopped and stood with his head slightly tilted. He looked as if he might be smiling under the helmet, and she was ready for that; she thought he’d taunt her, mock her, generally wind her up to see how fast she lost her temper and how many mistakes she could be provoked into making.
“Tell me what he can do,” said Fett. “Other than kill unarmed women without touching them.”
Jaina felt Beviin move slowly out of her peripheral vision. So Fett didn’t want to test her fighting technique. He was distracting her.
“Apart from the academy basics?”
“Apart from the leaping, mind-influencing, throwing rocks around with his mind …”
“Telekinesis.” Jaina took a step back to keep Beviin in physical view. He had a blaster and that short, flat saber, both hanging from his belt. “I’ve known him to move star-ships, deflect ion cannon … even turbolasers. He can hear at huge distances with some Theran Force-listening technique. He can create elaborate Force illusions that feel real, he can walk into the past or future, he can control objects like scanners, and he can mind-rub—he even mind-rubbed Ben.”
“Made him forget.”
“Yes.”
“He could get rich on that.” Fett didn’t sound as if he were mocking. In fact, he felt totally neutral to her; a blank slate in the Force, nothing to read. “Why does he need spies and secret police if he can eavesdrop wherever he wants?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“If he can stop turbolasers single-handed, why does he need a fleet?”
Jaina looked for the angle. “Again, no idea.”
“Why does he need shields on ships when he can create his own?”
She was balanced on the balls of her feet now, ready to leap. It was so instinctive, so ingrained by training, that she couldn’t override it. She felt threatened. In the corner of her eye, the thin strip of light that marked the barn doors expanded into a wider ribbon and someone—several someones—came in. She had an audience.
I’m the cabaret. Okay, Fett. I never thought this would be a stroll anyway.
Fett lowered the lightsaber and held it with its tip just above the dusty floor, kicking up little clouds of particles as he walked slowly toward her. “Anything else?”
“We … can’t sense him in the Force—”
“Welcome to the mundane world.”
“—and he can make himself invisible, sometimes.”
Beviin burst out laughing. “Wayii, gar ori’shukla!”
Jaina almost turned, triggered by the simple instinct to face the source of a sudden sound, but she fought it. Fett was totally relaxed, now a couple of meters from her, lightsaber held loosely in one gloved hand. His armor looked different—cleaner, brighter. Maybe he’d put on his holiday best.
“What’s that mean, Mirta?” Fett said.
One of the Mandalorians who’d come in was a young woman. Jaina remembered. Uh-uh, his granddaughter, the one Mom and Dad met … the one who tried to kill him. I’ve come to the right place. Fett understood family rifts. She could feel anxiety in the girl, but it had nothing to do with her. It was more like a bad memory she was trying to forget.
“Beviin says, ‘Oh, dear, you’re totally screwed,’ Jedi.” Mirta moved into her field of view behind Fett, a figure in egg-yolk yellow plat
es with her helmet under one arm. She felt sharp and bitter now. “Jacen’s very clever, isn’t he?”
He killed her mother. Oh boy.
Jaina felt them all come to a halt. She was tracking multiple targets in her Force sense, aware now of Beviin, Fett, Mirta, and three other armored figures that stood waiting. Maybe she’d made a terrible misjudgment; maybe they were just going to make her pay for the death of Ailyn Vel, an eye for an eye, a daughter for a daughter. Fett was now within striking distance. But his weight was on one leg, not evenly balanced to ready for a blow, and he exuded calm. He was just tormenting her. He shut down the lightsaber blade and studied the intricately carved hilt. Jaina lowered her lightsaber and then shut it off.
“You’ve got problems, Solo,” Fett said, hooking his thumb in his belt, weight still on his right leg. Jaina didn’t need to be told that. “How you going to take him, then?”
She had no answer yet. Fett shrugged, and then—
The next thing she knew, the wind was knocked out of her as he landed a punch in her gut. Her lightsaber was back on and slashing up across Fett’s chest in a split second, unplanned; she snapped straight to instant raw instinct. Fett fell back a couple of steps. Jaina bent almost double, gasping for air as her solar plexus screamed in agonized protest at the punch, but she held her lightsaber out in front of her to ward him off.
“You—” Nobody had ever jumped her like that before. She hadn’t sensed it coming. She struggled for breath. But nobody was mocking her and she’d expected contemptuous laughter. “What’s that—”
“Lesson over,” Fett said, inspecting his chest plate. Jaina’s eyes were watering, but she could see a scorch mark across Fett from belly to chin, the green paint burned away in a line that spanned the sections of armor like a careless black brushstroke exposing a streak of bare gray metal beneath. “Hurts, doesn’t it?”
Jaina steadied her breathing with a little help from the Force to settle the disrupted nerve impulses. Yes, it hurts, you cretin. She fought to keep her dignity in front of the audience. News of her gullibility would be all over Keldabe in hours.
“And there’s … a point to … all that …,” she said, determined not to show just how painful the blow had been. Fett still held the lightsaber hilt in his right hand. He’d used it like a knuckleduster, and seventy-plus or not, he still had a serious punch on him. “I hope.”