“There is,” he said. He was still looking down at the lightsaber scar across his plates. “I’m waiting for you to work it out.”
Jaina straightened up and finally decided it was safe to deactivate her lightsaber. If anyone was going to try their luck with her, they’d have done it by now. “So that’s beskar armor, is it?”
“Beskar’gam,” Beviin said behind her. “It means ‘iron skin.’ We live in our armor. And if the Mand’alor hadn’t been wearing it, I wouldn’t have let him get that close to you.”
“If I hadn’t been wearing it,” said Fett, “I wouldn’t have tried.”
Beviin, helmet under one arm and a pleasant smile on his face, drew his saber one-handed and held it vertically so that Jaina could look at it. “If you’re willing to spar with me, I’ll assess your technique.”
“Modest, aren’t we?” Jaina said.
“Does your brother know how you handle a lightsaber?”
“Yes …”
“So maybe I can show you how he might use that technique against you.”
Humility, girl. Remember humility. “Of course. Thank you.”
The barn was roughly constructed out of timber and duraplast sheeting, pierced by shafts of sunlight from dozens of gaps in the boards. All Jaina could see those gaps as now were sniper positions, vulnerabilities, and she’d never felt exposed like that before. She had strong enough Force powers to get herself out of trouble, didn’t she? She could deflect blaster bolts. She could leap clear. She could Force-throw.
Fett had psyched her out.
That was it. It had to be. It was all the family baggage, all the stories she’d grown up with about what he’d done to her father, and how he never stopped, never gave up, how he just kept on coming and not even the Sarlacc could kill him. But that wasn’t going to help her defeat Jacen. Now that she could pause to look at her small audience, she found it was a big man in dark gray armor, face obscured by a helmet, a young, blond, bearded man who seemed to be with Mirta, and another older man with magnificent black matted braids strung with gold clips, his ebony skin marked with raised scars. He gave her a knowing wink. If she’d met him in another context, she would have taken an instant liking to him.
“Don’t you get it, Solo?” Fett asked.
“You played on your propaganda, I think.”
“No, I played on your mistakes. You read my body language wrong. You assumed you were safe.”
“It’s hard to sense danger from you.” Oh, that’s clever. You’re just confirming how he can kill more Jedi. She gestured with her thumb at Beviin. “I was picking up more from our friend here.”
“And you still held back.”
She pointed to the burn across his plates. “Hey, I hit you fair and square.”
“You assumed too much. You’re just training, nobody wants to hurt you, the nice Mando is helping you, he’s standing all wrong to attack … you want to win? Start out to win. Hit first.”
“You’re telling me to fight dirty. I get that.”
“No, I’m telling you this isn’t about lightsaber technique. I’m more than twice your age, no Force powers, and I still got you to drop your guard. Winning isn’t about being better. It’s finding your opponent’s weakness and exploiting it.”
“So what’s Jacen’s?”
“What’s yours?”
Jaina chewed her lip in thought, aware of Mirta’s gaze. She looked like more trouble than her grandfather. What if I’d just walked in and laid into Fett, no hello, how are you, anything? Just went for him? Could any of them have stopped me? I—
The realization dawned on her. “I use appropriate force. With a small f. I follow the rules of combat.”
“Good.” Fett rolled the lightsaber hilt in his palm and then slid it into the dump pouch on the thigh of his pants. “You’re learning. Next lesson—Goran will show you how to go crazy with a blade.”
“But what about Jacen’s weaknesses?”
“They’re yours.”
“He’s my twin. I know him.”
“And he knows you. Be someone else.”
Jaina clipped her lightsaber to her belt and understood both the simplicity and enormity of her task. The solution was obvious. It was just very hard to achieve. She didn’t need to be fitter, or stronger, or more skilled; she needed to play it so out of character that Jacen wouldn’t be able to counter or anticipate her.
“If I could be that different, Fett, I wouldn’t be a Jedi.”
“There you go,” said Fett, and walked away.
Mirta and the two men without helmets followed him. Beviin stayed. The big guy in dark gray took off his helmet and gave Jaina the kind of look that said she was something he’d wipe off his boots.
“Is this Fett’s idea of mystic enlightenment?” she asked.
Beviin shrugged. “It’s not hyperspace engineering.”
“Pity.” Jaina considered wiping the scowl off the big silent guy’s face but decided it was impolitic. “I could handle that.”
Beviin walked toward the doors and jerked his head for her to follow. The man in gray ambled along beside him.
“We’ll try to give you an alter ego,” Beviin said. “A nasty Jaina. A crafty, cheating Jaina. A bounty-hunting Jaina. You up for that, Med’ika?”
“I’m all for giving folks a second career option,” he said. He was very well spoken, surprisingly so, as if he was a highly educated man. Jaina had expected him to be an inarticulate brute. “But she can service the tiller droids first. Can’t we send her back and get an AgriCorps Jedi instead?”
Beviin laughed. “Ingrate.”
Fett had vanished. Jaina wondered what he got up to in his private hours, and when Beviin pointed out the hovel Fett was staying in, she was genuinely shocked. He could have had a palace. Beviin’s farmhouse, with its shantytown of outbuildings and moat-like boundaries, reminded her more of a bastion than a haven of rural peace. The tunnels and passages seemed to run everywhere. Nothing was quite as it seemed.
She stood in the grimy workshop with her arms in the oily guts of a tiller droid, listening to the whine and roar of vessels overhead—fighters, definitely, the way the falling note indicated something moving away from her at high speed. While she adjusted clearances and checked filters, a small girl—five, not a day older, she was certain—appeared in the doorway to stare at her. She wore a tiny version of the flight suit every Mandalorian had, with scaled-down but loose fitting plates that looked a couple of sizes too big, and a hold-out blaster hanging from the belt that looked full-size on her.
The blaster was real.
“Hi, kid.” Jaina smiled, ready to deflect a bolt.
“Su’cuy, jetii.”
“Is that your blaster?”
“Mama gave it to me.” The girl unholstered it like a professional, checked the safety catch, and held it with the muzzle pointing safely away from Jaina. “I’m five and a half. I’m training.”
“You and me both, sweetheart.” Jaina swallowed hard, more touched than worried. “You and me both.”
No, Mandalorians weren’t what she’d expected at all. And she would learn to be as much of a surprise to her brother as they were to her.
Thanks, Fett.
IMPERIAL PALACE, CITY OF RAVELIN, BASTION: TWO DAYS LATER
“Show the young lady in, Vitor.”
Receiving visitors in the Palace drawing room always reminded them what they were dealing with, Pellaeon thought. It was an imposing chamber that whispered casual wealth; it hinted that the Empire didn’t have to try too hard. While he never let himself think of having an emperor’s role—that way lay delusion and moral corruption, he was sure—he was in command, and he liked visitors to know that.
“And will it be caf or murrih tisane, sir?”
“Both, please.” Pellaeon could see a patch of vivid turquoise sky from the floor-to-ceiling windows, a little promise of escape in an otherwise stormy day. He missed being out with the fleet. “And monitor the meeting, will you?”
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“Of course.”
Pellaeon saw no reason not to listen to what Jacen Solo’s envoy had to say. Listening committed him to nothing; it simply filled in the gaps, if his informants had actually left any. In a career spanning more than seventy years, he had built up a personal network that could give any state intelligence corps a run for its money. Even the apparently omnipotent Jacen couldn’t do much without leaving traces. He had to work with the raw stuff of society—troops, civil servants, clerks … even droids. The ship of state could leave an awfully big wake if you knew where to look.
Tahiri Veila glided into the room right on time. Her bright blond hair and general artless demeanor made her look too young to be sent on a task like this, although the Yuuzhan Vong markings still visible on her forehead evoked unpleasant memories.
Jacen, if you send a pretty girl to sweet-talk me, don’t break the spell by reminding me of the Vong …
Pellaeon stood and ushered her to her chair. The spell was definitely broken before she’d even had a chance to cast it.
“Is this your first visit to Bastion?” he asked, pouring her a murrih tisane that spread an amethyst pool of light on the white marble table. “If it is, don’t leave without seeing the Imperial Gardens.”
“I’ll make a note of that, Admiral.”
“So …” He settled down in his seat, making a point of being slow and old, looking like easy prey. “We live in challenging times. But here in our little backwater, we’ve managed to avoid the war, and I’m wondering what could possibly make it worth our while stepping out into that fray.”
“You have a very small empire.”
“But it’s perfectly formed.”
“Here’s our view in the GA.” Tahiri leaned forward slightly like an earnest student. “The longer the war goes on, the worse the prospects for all of us, not just those directly involved in the fighting. We want stability. What we have is not just a split between GA and Confederation, but also systems unaligned to either and fighting their own local disputes. Hit the most powerful systems working against the GA, and things will be over faster.”
“You realize,” Pellaeon said, “that I’ve been here before, and more than once? And wasn’t the short, sharp shock supposed to bring Corellia into line?”
Tahiri evidently hadn’t been briefed to argue a wider case than the offer to be put on the table. She blinked a couple of times. “It would work if you added your fleet and troops to ours.”
“Now give me a more immediate benefit for expending Imperial citizens’ lives on this gamble—and it is a gamble.” Pellaeon couldn’t look too willing; every word would be reported back—recorded, he suspected—and Jacen would look for a deeper motive if he didn’t raise objections. He’d raised them over targeting Corellia, after all. “I have to make a good case to the Moffs beyond vague plans for peace and galactic harmony. Permacrete, not vapor.”
“The GA is prepared to offer you Borleias and Bilbringi.”
“What are the conditions?”
“That the … Empire first sends vessels and troops to attack Fondor with the GA.”
“Ah, performance-related pay. Very wise. With what objective?”
Tahiri’s eye movements—the occasional wobble as she tried to process the words—showed she wasn’t yet used to the military jargon. “To bring it back to the GA.”
“But the detail matters, my dear. Is Jacen planning to take over the orbital yards, or destroy them? What about the planet itself? Does he simply want to force a surrender? Is he preparing to subdue it by occupation? Each objective requires very different resources.”
Tahiri recovered well. “I think the strategy is something you need to discuss with the joint Chiefs of State. I’m only here to make the initial offer.”
“A good point,” Pellaeon said. Jacen was nothing if not consistent. He really was working through his shopping list of planets to batter into submission. “I’ll put it to the Moffs.”
“But it’s you who really calls the shots here, isn’t it?”
“However much power a man has, it’s impossible to keep it for any length of time unless he has the support of most of those under him. I consult.”
Chew on that, Jacen Solo. If he was smart, Jacen might take it as advice from an old man who’d seen other autocrats pulled down by their underlings over the decades. Either way, Jacen needed the Empire. If Pellaeon had read him right—no, if Jacen thought like Pellaeon—then he knew he didn’t have the numbers now to quickly crush key targets in the Confederation, but a sudden injection of troops and hulls might well tip the balance. One battle could change the course of a war. The only problem was that you never knew which one until years after the cease-fire.
And if you do win, Jacen … the war still won’t be over for the Empire. What kind of a galactic regime do you really have in mind?
“Thank you for the tisane,” Tahiri said. “We’ll be in touch, I hope.”
After she left, Pellaeon summoned Reige. “Vitor, call the Moffs. Let’s see who jumps at this and how fast.”
Reige consulted his datapad and began tapping messages into the office comlink system. “Well, most of them are on Bastion at the moment, so you’ll have nearly a full house to debate this. Are you accepting the offer, sir?”
Pellaeon nodded. “If or when Jacen gets his backside kicked, then the GA might fall apart, and we’ll be there to pick up the pieces. If we sit it out, we take our chances, but if we back him, then we at least get greater control over events whether he succeeds or not in the long run.”
“You think he will fail?”
“He’s now faced with occupying or subduing half the galaxy to put the GA back together again, and he can’t keep that up forever, however successful he is as a commander. Unless he comes up with a convincing peace deal that somehow bypasses the principle of a pooled GA defense force, then I don’t see this ending. That’s why the war started, remember.”
Pellaeon waited for the Moffs to gather in the meeting room, and tried to think like Jacen. The man wasn’t a fool, but could he see the galaxy through Fondorian eyes? Did he know which battle he was trying to win? He seemed to see worlds as controlled by a few stubborn leaders, whose removal would free the population to see things his way. He didn’t see that the general population didn’t want to do things the GA way, either.
If you wanted to build an empire … well, the trick was to leave the population to get on with their lives. Pellaeon got up and walked across to the cabinet that housed hundreds of datapads, antique bound flimsi, and even ancient animal-skin scrolls, military histories from a thousand worlds spanning millennia. He knew that if he picked one at random, any history at all, he would find much the same story as the one he was living through today: seizure of power, the desire for expansion, and the inevitable inability to hold all that had been grabbed. The only variable was how long it took to fall apart. The longest-lived empires were those with the lightest hand on the reins.
“Empire can be different,” he muttered aloud. “Provided we shoot all the lunatics who enjoy the idea.”
Where that left him—no, he was purged of ambition at ninety-two. He simply wanted to leave the galaxy tidy and clean when he left it for the last time. That was what government was about, and the military was its instrument to achieve it.
The Moffs, predictably, were mostly split between enthusiasm for the Jacen Solo plan, ill defined as it was, and those like Rosset who wanted to know more before signing up.
“I’m with you on this, Admiral,” said Rosset, sitting opposite him across the mirror-polished table. “Putting orbital yards out of action is a very different proposition from subduing the planet itself. Are we going to end up policing Fondor for Jacen Solo until Mustafar freezes over?”
Pellaeon was fascinated to note how Admiral Niathal had been erased from the scene. It was seen as Jacen’s war. The Mon Cal schemer would probably be happy about that, he thought. She could step in when Jacen hit the buffers, hands relatively cl
ean. “How badly do we want Bilbringi? Borleias?”
“They’re not going to be costly to take,” said Quille. “Very small population on Borleias post–Yuuzhan Vong, probably happier to have someone like us look after them than not. Bilbringi might require some military effort, though.”
“Like I mentioned before,” Rosset said, “we could take both systems if we wanted to without committing anything to the GA, because I don’t think Jacen’s in a position to stop us.”
Quille had an expression of almost religious epiphany on his face. “But the GA isn’t going to be able to hold Fondor without us, because that’ll require an occupying army after it surrenders. Poor old GA, short of hands—and we offer to look after the place while it’s busy hammering more wayward systems back into the Alliance fold. We end up staying. And … possession is nine-tenths of the law, after all.”
Rosset let out a long breath. “I think they’ll notice we tried to steal Fondor from under their noses.”
“I don’t think they’ll see it like that.”
Pellaeon interrupted. He was wary about agreeing with Quille even about the time of day, but the Moff had a point. And if Jacen was going to fall sooner or later anyway, when he stretched himself just that little bit too far—
“If we have both Borleias and Bilbringi, then that gives us a platform from which to maintain a presence on Fondor, and then we’ll have expanded down past the Core again.”
Pellaeon didn’t have to elaborate on that at all. Every Moff understood the potential.
“Are we all agreed, then, gentlemen? We accept the GA’s invitation, subject to their sharing the Fondor plan with us, and our being able to resource our role?”
Normal practice was to go around the table and record votes for and against, but the Moffs paused in silence for a moment and then all burst into spontaneous applause. Pellaeon wasn’t sure if they were applauding him, or simply overwhelmed with martial emotion at the prospect of being back in the saddle.