Sacrifice

  At the back of the building, and connected to it by an underground tunnel, stood a workshop with a smithy. Fett could hear the rhythmic hammering of metal across the clearing. There was no smoke curling from the roof. It vented many meters away to hide the location, and Fett was sure there was a network of tunnels extending a long way into the hills to the west of the farm. It was one of the ways the Mandalorians had fought—and beaten—the Yuuzhan Vong.

  Beviin walked down the steps cut into the hard-packed soil and leading down to the front door. It opened and Dinua, his adopted daughter, stood with hands on hips.

  “Boots,” she said ominously, pointing at the clods of dung and mud. Two small children clung to her legs. “You too, Mand’alor. And you can take those coveralls off as well, Buir.”

  “Okay, okay.” Beviin—spy, fixer, veteran commando—was driven back by a resolute woman. But Dinua had fought and killed Yuuzhan Vong from the age of fourteen, so making a mess on her clean floor wasn’t to be attempted rashly. “We’ll go the long way around.”

  They tramped around the perimeter of the farmhouse, following the sound of ringing metal.

  “She’s a good girl,” Beviin said. “Just a bit irritable now that Jintar’s away fighting. She’s not one for staying at home. But the little ones are too young for both parents to be away.”

  So some had already taken mercenary work. Fett didn’t think Beviin’s farm was doing that badly, but maybe Jintar was too proud to accept his father-in-law’s support.

  “But you and Medrit are good with kids.”

  “Yeah, but this way, one parent stays alive …”

  That was the harsh reality Fett had grown up with. It bred hard people.

  As the door to the workshop swung open, a blast of warm air registered on his sensors. The interior was bathed in a red glow; sparks flew in arcing showers. How Beviin stood the noise, Fett would never know. His helmet controls had decided the volume was above danger level, and buffered the sound.

  A mountain of a man in a singlet, burn-scarred leather apron, and ear defenders was hammering a strip of red-hot metal. Every time he raised his arm, sweat flew from him and hissed into steam on the hot surfaces. He folded the strip with tongs as he hammered, layering the metal with a steady rhythm that said he was a master armorsmith. After a while, he realized Fett and Beviin were standing watching; he gestured with an impatient jab of his finger to show he was going to finish working the metal before he’d stop to talk.

  It was actually fascinating. Fett could see from the length and emerging form of the metal bar that he was making a beskad, the traditional saber of the ancient Mandalorians. Beviin had one, an antique blade fashioned from Mandalore’s unique iron—beskar. Fett had watched him swing the weapon so hard into a Yuuzhan Vong officer that he’d had to stand on him to pull it free.

  “There.” Medrit Vasur cooled the rough form of the saber in a tub of hissing liquid and turned it this way and that to check the line. He took off his ear defenders, and his face cracked into a beatific smile of satisfaction as he wiped the sweat from his brow with his forearm. “Now, that’s going to be a thing of beauty.”

  “Med’ika, I haven’t told him yet,” said Beviin.

  “Shall I blurt it out, then?”

  “You’re the metallurgist …”

  “Mand’alor,” Medrit said stiffly, “you’re looking at a test forging from a new lode of beskar.”

  It took Fett a slow second to grasp the importance of what Medrit had said. “But the Empire strip-mined Mandalore. They took all the iron.”

  “They missed a bit. A big bit.”

  “How? And how big?”

  “This is a big planet with a tiny population, and even the Imperials didn’t survey all of it. They stripped the shallow veins. This is a deeper lode, and we’d never have found it if the vongese hadn’t left craters you could sink a small moon in.” Medrit picked up a cloth and wiped his face. Fett couldn’t feel the full impact of the temperature in the workshop, but Beviin had started sweating visibly; he left a mucky smear across his forehead as he wiped it. “There’s a crew a hundred klicks north of Enceri still doing test drills, but it looks like a big, big lode that was exposed.”

  Enceri was remote even by Mandalore’s standards; no wonder it had taken years to stumble across it. The Yuuzhan Vong had used singularity ordnance indiscriminately, smashing huge craters across the planet because they wanted to annihilate Mandalore, not conquer it. Fett enjoyed a rare moment of pleasure imagining the look on their vile, arrogant, disfigured faces if they’d known they were helping Mandalore find a new source of the metal that had once made it mighty.

  Beskar was the toughest metal known to science. Even lightsabers had trouble with it. There had been a time when every army in the galaxy wanted a supply.

  It was still the most valuable metal on the market, and there was a war raging around them.

  “I feel a new economic era coming on,” said Fett.

  Beviin winked. “Oya manda.”

  “And it’s not on anyone’s land.” Fett realized the reason he’d never quite got a handle on what Mandalorian government actually meant was because it was so nebulous. “This is a resource for Mandalore as a whole.”

  “If you say it is, then it is. That’s the Mandalore’s prerogative.”

  “Okay, I say it is. Time to gather the chieftains and do a little forward planning.”

  “Shab,” said Medrit, underwhelmed by the Mand’alor’s power to requisition resources. “You’re sounding just like a proper head of state.”

  Fett would normally have found a family meal and a long explanation of the finer points of metallurgy worse than a spell on the Sarlacc. It was hard enough getting used to having a granddaughter without being besieged by Beviin’s noisy, messy, demonstrative family. But that evening, he tolerated it.

  “It’s not just the ore,” Medrit said, drawing an imaginary graph in midair with a nuna drumstick. “It’s the processing. Part of the strength of the metal is in what’s added during smelting and how it’s worked. What you saw was just a test batch.”

  “Have we got the facilities to do that anymore?” Fett wasn’t used to eating in front of anyone else. Dinua’s son and daughter, Shalk and Briila—seven and five, he estimated—stared at him, unimpressed, across the table. The scrutiny of small children was unnerving. “Do we have a windfall we can’t exploit?”

  “On a small scale—we can do it,” Beviin said. “I’ve done a few rough calculations. If the lode produces the yield we think it will, we’re going to need some help from mining right through to processing. MandalMotors could process some of it, if they’re willing to shift resources from combat craft. But the rest … we need droids.”

  “But what are you going to do with it?” Dinua asked.

  “What?”

  “Sell it for foreign currency, or use it to arm ourselves?”

  Dinua, orphaned on the battlefield like Fett, was a savagely smart woman. Beviin had adopted her the moment her mother was killed, but Fett found that ability to turn strangers into family—that central part of Mandalorian culture—was beyond him. Even Medrit—impatient, critical, short-tempered—had accepted the unexpected addition to their household without a murmur. Adoption was what Mandalorians did, and always had.

  If he can do it, why can’t I? With my own flesh and blood, too.

  “We do both,” said Fett, trying to stay on the subject. “Some manufactured goods for export, some for our own rearmament.”

  “You’ll find a lot of support for that,” Beviin said. “Satisfies both camps.”

  What else can I do with the time I have left to me, except leave Mandalore in decent shape? “If we’ve got it, someone will want to take it.”

  “You think anyone’s stupid enough to try invading like the Empire did?” Beviin said. “After we kicked Vong shebs like that?”

  “Ba’buir’s cussing,” said Shalk gravely. “Can I say shebs, too?”

  “No, you can’
t.” Dinua clicked her teeth in annoyance. “Buir, please, not in front of the kids. Mand’alor, how are you going to announce the find? Other than the old-fashioned Mando way, by showing up at the border with an invading army?”

  “Do we have to announce it?”

  “If we want foreign revenue.”

  “We don’t have a finance minister, but the job’s yours.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Commission a few starfighters and see who notices,” Fett said. “Maybe this Kad’ika has a point—that we don’t have to be on one side or the other. There’s a third side, as … Goran says.” It was only courtesy to address him by his first name in his own house. Fett had so little nonhostile interaction with anyone that basic etiquette felt like a minefield. “Our own.”

  “I could make sure the aruetiise notice,” said Beviin. “But maybe a surprise is better.”

  “What kind of surprise?”

  “The kind that makes you look up and run for a bomb shelter,” Beviin said. “With a MandalMotors logo on the fuselage.”

  “We’ve got no territorial ambitions beyond the sector. We’ve got at least a dozen planets here to worry about.”

  “I know. But take a planet in postwar recovery, an ongoing civil war, and a new find of beskar, and we might have visitors. If not armed, then at least trying to do deals.”

  “Whatever. I don’t lose sleep over what …”

  Beviin filled the gap. “Aruetiise.”

  “… aruetiise think of us. I’ll talk to Yomaget in the morning. See what MandalMotors can commit.”

  Medrit chewed thoughtfully, staring at Fett. “You could have a decent set of beskar’gam to replace that durasteel osik you’re wearing, too. It’ll last several lifetimes.”

  “It only has to last a year, then.”

  Medrit stared at Fett, got no response, and turned to Beviin. He shook his head: Later. Dinua took the hint, too. Her kids gazed from face to face, looking for an explanation of what had plunged the grown-ups into silence. Fett was past caring whether anyone knew he was dying. Most wouldn’t believe it anyway. It was hard to imagine the mortality of someone whose face you couldn’t see.

  “Plenty more nuna,” Beviin said suddenly, pushing the serving plate of glistening, spice-crusted meat in front of him. “Home-raised, too.”

  It was never going to be a relaxed family dinner anyway. Just being Fett made sure of that. The food was spicier than he was used to and the portions were too big, but he cleared his plate because these were generous people who gave him a refuge here and who refused payment, even though he could have bought the entire planet twice over. It was what Mando’ade did for one another when someone was in trouble. The fact that he was Mand’alor was irrelevant.

  He could almost hear Medrit telling Beviin later what a surly shabuir Fett was, and asking if Beviin really had to invite him around so often.

  “You didn’t tell me how the lode was found,” Fett said. It was his best shot at small talk, given that they didn’t seem to want to talk about his death. “After ten years? In the middle of nowhere?”

  “From orbit.” Medrit paused in midslice as he carved a sticky pile of nut-studded, glistening pastry into six portions and licked his fingers. Little burn scars peppered his hands. Fett wondered if he’d find metal filings in the cake. “Some Mando’ade coming home after a few generations in the Outer Rim. A minerals engineer and a geologist ran a few scans, compared them with the old geological charts, and decided to take a look on close approach. Result—wayii!”

  “Good timing,” Fett said.

  “We’re getting a lot of skilled people coming home, Bob’ika,” Beviin said. “You said you wanted Mando’ade to come back, and some already have.”

  “Impressive.” Fett was surprised at the willingness of people to abandon all they’d ever known simply at his suggestion. “Let’s hope they’re all that lucky.”

  “More resourcefulness than luck.”

  Fett thought of the last thing that Fenn Shysa had said to him. If you only look after your own hide, then you’re not a man. No, Jaing didn’t have any idea what went on between them in those final moments. People generally believed what they wanted to.

  “Makes me wonder what else is still lying undiscovered on this planet,” said Fett.

  That night, lying awake far too long on the rickety trestle bed in the outbuilding, Fett reflected on the fact that Mirta hadn’t been in touch since they’d returned, and wondered what his father would have done had he been Mandalore now.

  Exhaustion was the best sleeping pill he knew. Before he let it engulf him, his last thought was that the beskar changed everything, except his own mortality.

  chapter eight

  Once Omas pulls his troops back, we’ll talk the Bothans into behaving. Give it a month or two, let everyone calm down and get used to a cease-fire, and we’ll use that lull to regroup with Commenor, Fondor, and Bothawui to give Coruscant a pounding it’ll never forget.

  —Corellian Prime Minister Dur Gejjen, discussing longer-term plans with Confederation defense staff

  GAG HQ LOCKER ROOMS, CORUSCANT: 2100 HOURS

  Shevu took a long look at Ben and handed him a small container. It was filled with a dark brown fluid.

  “You look dead beat,” said Shevu. “But before you turn in for the night, there’s a few loose ends to tie up.”

  Ben, slumped on a bench with his back resting on his locker door, was ready to drop. He had to be up at 0300 to prep for the flight to Vulpter, and he still didn’t know his final destination, or the location for the hit.

  That wasn’t unusual, apparently. It was just as well he was used to improvising.

  “I’m scoring ninety-seven percent, sir.”

  Shevu sounded as if he’d stifled a laugh. He exuded a sense of pity. “It’s hard to know what to say.”

  “I’m ready. Really I am.”

  “I meant that it’s amazing that we can pretty well train a sniper in a day. If he’s a Jedi, of course.” Shevu put the bottle in Ben’s hand. There was the slow and steady drip of water somewhere in the locker rooms, and the scent of faintly herbal soap. “You’re being inserted ahead of time with Lekauf, and I’ll be shadowing Omas’s flight. We’ll RV on Vulpter at Charbi City Spaceport, because he’s meeting Gejjen in one of the conference rooms there that they hire out for business meetings by the hour. Personally, I think GA Intel is insane to let him do that. No sterile area, no screening, no security except for two guys with him for close protection. But it’s anonymous, there’s no advance booking to trace, Charbi is a slum—and we can stroll in.”

  “Won’t someone recognize him?”

  Shevu pointed to the bottle of brown liquid. “I don’t think it’ll even take some of this to let him get through a spaceport unrecognized. How many checks does a business passenger go through, landing in a private vessel? One, at the Customs and Immigration desk. And this is Vulpter, for goodness’ sake—their security isn’t exactly a ring of durasteel. He could even use the rooms on the other side of that control, and he never has to be seen at all. Effectively, it all happens on the landing strip side.”

  Ben thought it through, seeing the spaceport in his mind’s eye, adding permacrete and passengers to the holochart image of red and blue lines. He was getting used to thinking like this, and part of him relished solving the puzzle while the other half wondered what was happening to him.

  “In a way, it’s better for us if he meets Gejjen in the conference rooms on the public side of Customs,” Ben said. “A bigger crowd out there for us to disappear into.”

  “I agree. In the end, we’ll grab what chance we get.”

  Ben held the bottle up to the light. “So what’s this?”

  “Hair dye. Most species tend to recall redheaded humans a bit too well. You’re still a genetic minority. And Omas knows you well enough to look twice if he spots you.”

  “Tell me I don’t have to wear makeup to cover my freckles …” Ben’s mind was a coup
le of hours ahead, thinking of the few hours’ sleep he could get on the flight. He could study the layout of the spaceport on his datapad. It was all going to go fine, he told himself. “So the second vessel’s for backup in case he diverts?”

  “Partly. And partly so we have something incriminating to abandon on Vulpter. Read the label, dye your hair, and report to the landing strip at twenty-two thirty. I’ll see you there.”

  Shevu started to walk away. Ben jumped to his feet.

  “Sir, what’s going to be incriminating?”

  The captain always seemed old to Ben, but he was younger than Jacen; twenty-eight, maybe. He looked at Ben with that mix of sadness and patience that Ben had seen on his dad’s face too often.

  “I think anyone would believe Corellians had neutralized Gejjen, given the right vessel abandoned at the port. You know … Corellian-registered, Corellian trace for forensics … you can do a Corellian accent, can’t you? If push comes to shove and you need to speak, that is. There have to be plenty of Corellians with a grudge against him, knowing their politics.”

  Ben thought of Uncle Han’s accent, or what was left of it. He sounded more Coruscanti these days. “Can do. But how do we know we won’t fall over real Corellians trying to stop Gejjen doing a deal with the enemy?”

  “That,” said Shevu, “would be unbelievably hilarious for all the wrong reasons. Assuming he has a deal to put on the table anyway.”

  I’m going to kill someone, and in twenty-four hours I’ll be back here as if nothing’s happened.

  “Any reason why I can’t take my vibroblade?” Ben fished it from his pocket and held it out to Shevu. “My mom gave it to me and … well, you know.”

  “You can take whatever works for you, as long as you don’t leave or carry evidence that links the hit to us.” Shevu examined the blade. “Yeah, I understand.” He pulled down the neck of his shirt a little to reveal a gold chain. “No ID, of course, but my girlfriend gave it to me, and I never go on patrol without it.”