Sacrifice

  The alley was fifteen meters wide and stretched twenty meters ahead of him, with no exits: it was just a box with a terrified Rodian rattling loose in it. A quick scan for weapons—there was no point being careless about this—showed that Wac had a hold-out blaster that wouldn’t trouble him. He walked slowly toward the rustling, shivering crates.

  “Get a move on,” Fett said, checking the chrono in his HUD.

  “You haven’t got a scrap of morality in you.” Wac’s insult was rich coming from a criminal forger. “It’s not like Gebbu’s a victim. Why don’t you go after real criminals?”

  “Because Gebbu thinks you’re special. Are you coming with me or not?”

  The packing cases rustled. Wac didn’t emerge. It was an answer of sorts.

  “Okay, nothing personal,” Fett said, and raised his blaster to concentrate on the thermal-imaging target, hold his breath as he had so many times before, and squeeze …

  Bar Jaraniz, Nar Shaddaa: Hutt space, 24 A.B.Y.

  The infidels call it preparing the battlefield.

  This is the careful, patient work before an attack to ease the path for the army of the faithful that follows. I prepare well: I leave nothing to chance. I’m Nom Anor, executor, and my task is infiltration and destabilization.

  And I seek allies in this filthy place.

  Do Yuuzhan Vong need allies in this abomination of a galaxy? No. We will, sooner or later, glorify the Great Ones by cleansing these worlds of their machines and the corrupt creatures who willingly enslave themselves to them. But I’m a pragmatist, and pragmatists never waste an advantage, nor leave a powerful army for our enemy to enlist.

  Vergere says a group of warriors called the Mandalorians are the most resistant enemy the Jedi have ever faced, other than the Sith. So being a pragmatist, I would rather have them at my side than at my back. And, in the way of all abominations, these Mandalorians sell their act of faith, sacred warfare, for credits. They fight not for gods—they don’t seem any more devout than I am—but for wealth.

  What do they find to buy that’s more important than honor, though? Why do I even sully myself by contacting them?

  It needs to be done, and it’s more pain I gladly bear.

  As the Mandalorians’ skill comes so cheaply, as they have no honor, I can buy them and use them.

  So this is a tapcaf. This is where I pretend to be an infidel and speak reasonably to abominations. I can look like them, and I can talk like them: but I must never become like them, and I’ve been hiding among them for so many years now that I fear I might. As a precaution I entreat Yun-Harla, just in case she does exist, to guide me so that my life of deception doesn’t finally deceive me.

  Under the table, where no infidel can see, I pass my knife through my palm and use the pain both as worship and focus. I have just one more year to endure before the fleet arrives.

  I have no faith in the Great Ones, but I might be wrong: and I’m a pragmatist, so I keep my options open.

  So I shall order … an ale. And I shall sit, and wait.

  Bar Jaraniz, Nar Shaddaa: Buy-One-Get-One-Free Night, fifth month, 24 A.B.Y.

  The sign above the blaster-charred door frame said that the Jara’ never closed, and despite any number of gang wars, shoot-outs, and minor armed disagreements between business partners, it hadn’t yet.

  Goran Beviin walked through the open doors of the Jara’—welded open, for a reason known only to the owner—and paused to scan the unusually crowded bar.

  “Over there.” The bartender, preoccupied with building an elaborate cocktail, jerked his head in the direction of the badly-lit booths in the far corner. His hands were full of fruit segments, skewers, and a sky-blue spiral bottle of two-hundred-proof vosh with those nasty little lumps of geref bobbing in it. “The handsome one in the black suit. Lookin’ for Mando help.”

  Beviin turned his head discreetly for an old-fashioned visual check by eyeball. Shab, the man was ugly. Seriously ugly: a face like a speeder smash and half as tidy. Beviin considered offering him a spare helmet for the good of the other customers. But they were as carefully preoccupied as the bartender, studying the foam blanketing their ale or the solid chunks in their glasses of vosh subliming into vapor. It was the kind of bar where patrons tried very hard not to stare at one another. That normally got you vibrobladed. The management was proud of the bar’s strict etiquette on that matter.

  Beviin held out his gloved hand for a bottle of ale, planning to drink it later. He wouldn’t take his helmet off here. “We don’t do beauty therapy.” The bartender passed him two, and he slipped both into the pouch hanging from his belt. “Seen him before?”

  “No.”

  “Not a face you’d forget.” There was a loud whoop of female voices and laughter from the far side of the bar, and Beviin noted a human woman and a young girl in full true-style beskar’gam—Mandalorian armor—huddled over a table as if sharing a joke. There were a lot of empty glasses on the table next to their blasters. “Ladies’ night again, I see.”

  “Look, I don’t want any trouble.”

  “Not planning any.”

  “I meant them.” The bartender put the finishing touches to the cocktail. “Your womenfolk can get well out of hand.”

  Beviin didn’t recognize them. They seemed to be having a good time, and they certainly didn’t seem worried about being the only females in the bar who weren’t actually working. There were small Mandalorian communities in this sector, but the Jara’ was one of the places mercenaries and bounty hunters touted for work, so the women could have been from anywhere. Their armor—dark red, with the same saber sigil picked out in black on the breastplate—marked them as one clan, and they looked like mother and daughter. Their helmets were stacked on the floor.

  “There’s only one thing that scares a Mando man,” said Beviin, “and that’s a Mando woman. Just make sure you don’t forget their napkins.”

  They were still howling with laughter as he made his way across the bar to the booths. He heard the word verd’goten. So the girl had finally completed her training as a warrior: she’d turned thirteen, then, a grown woman by Mando reckoning, trained to fight just the same as a boy. They were celebrating her coming of age. He should have put an ale on the table at the very least, or joined in the oya manda, but he had business to take care of first. Maybe later. The girl—and she looked like such a young kid, she really did, even with that unidentifiable dried scalp hanging from one shoulder plate—made him think it was high time he had a son or daughter to train.

  Maybe later.

  The man in the black suit watched Beviin’s approach, unblinking: the crowd parted to let him through without a word or a glance. Even the gangster clientele here wouldn’t risk offending a Mandalorian. Beviin slid into the booth across the table from his prospective client, lifting his holster clear of the seat. He caught a faint metallic whiff of blood in his environment sensor. There must have been a brawl in the bar earlier.

  “I hear you people are very good at solving problems,” said the man. He had watery blue eyes and a face that looked as if it were a sculptor’s first effort at hacking out features from a lump of granite. Not scarred: just crude, brutal, and devoid of any living warmth. He placed both gloved hands flat on the tabletop, one on each side of a glass of colorless liquid. “I have a problem that needs solving.”

  “I’m Goran Beviin. And you are …?”

  “I thought bounty hunters were discreet.”

  “Discreet, yes. Stupid, no.” Protecting client confidentiality was one thing; not knowing who you were dealing with was another entirely. “Once you’ve taken the risk of telling me what you want, it’s either full payment up front or enough information to check that you can pay.”

  “That’s ironic coming from a man who hides behind a helmet.”

  “I’m Mandalorian.” Beviin was aware of movement behind him, and his helmet’s wide-angle view picked up the red-armored woman walking past the booths in the direction of the refreshe
rs. “That’s usually good enough references for most customers.”

  Beviin couldn’t place his accent. He was forty, maybe forty-five, and he was clearly dissatisfied at not being able to see Beviin’s eyes. People always searched for meaning—gaze darting over the visor, up-down, left-right—looking instinctively for facial expressions that just weren’t there. Sometimes it was harder doing business with humanoids than with other species, because they just had to see a face. Where was this guy from? Not somewhere used to Mando, that was for sure.

  Shab, he was a grim-looking piece of meat.

  And then the man made the mistake of reaching below table level.

  Beviin tasted the spike of adrenaline drying his mouth and instantly his hold-out blaster was in the man’s face, its indicator red with a full charge. It was pure reflex, the kind honed by years of war and assassination and just trying to stay alive. He hadn’t even thought about it. His hand just did it.

  The man blinked and looked to one side, but he didn’t seem too worried that Beviin’s blaster wasn’t the only one leveled at him. The woman in red armor had drawn hers, too, and was standing frozen as if waiting for an order to open fire. The bar was—as usual at moments like this—carefully silent and totally, studiously, self-preservingly uninterested.

  “Copaani gaan, burc’ya?” she asked. Need a hand, pal?

  For all the revelry at her table, she was rigidly sober now: brown hair in a tight braid, hazel eyes that should have had a sparkle in them but were predator-cold. The knuckles of her right hand showed white under an intricate lacework of blue tattoos. Her target stared at them in an oddly absorbed way, as if they held some meaning for him.

  Beviin shook his head. “Naysh a’vor’e, vod.” Thanks, sister, but no. “I’m just a little tense these days.”

  She waited two beats before holstering the blaster and going on her way. She’d backed up a brother, even if he was a total stranger. It was the Mando way. Beviin lowered his weapon and leaned back against the wall of the booth, waiting for a response.

  “My name is Udelen,” said the man. Voice level, he seemed more curious about the woman, watching her until she was out of sight: no, he didn’t scare easily. His gaze fell back on Beviin again. “I need to focus someone’s attention.”

  “How well?”

  “Permanently.”

  “Debt? Rivalry?”

  “You don’t need to know that.”

  “Can’t price a job without a few details.”

  “Very well, rivalry.”

  “Care to specify?”

  “No.”

  “That’ll be extra.”

  “Are you familiar with the politics of Ter Abbes?”

  Beviin activated the head-up display in his helmet with a couple of quick blinks, and icons cascaded down one side of his field of view. “Ter Abbes,” he repeated. The audio feed picked up the words and chewed them over, spitting out a stream of GalaxSat images and police data he shouldn’t have had access to. A grim industrial planet off the main Perlemian Trade Route: a few bad boys passing through now and again, but not exactly a full ten on the Hutt scale of criminality.

  What was this guy’s game, then? Politics. That suddenly didn’t sound quite so attractive. Gangsters, debt-dodgers, and assorted hut’uune were fair game, but politicians were a different bucket of chags.

  So far, though, this had been a lean year. He had to eat. Bounty-hunting wasn’t the kind of business that ran on five-year plans. It was feast or famine, grabbing what you could.

  “What did you have in mind?” Beviin asked.

  “I need a politician removed,” said Udelen.

  “In power or not?”

  “Does it matter? I want him dead.”

  Well, that was a complication he didn’t fancy. Beviin enjoyed arresting people, and if arresting meant dead, then he was comfortable with that, too. He didn’t like subverting elected governments, though, not as long as they hadn’t done anything to him or to Mandalorians in general. That was work for spies. He had his limits.

  But his farm back on Mandalore was having a tough year. A subsistence, hand-to-mouth, zero-profit year.

  “What’s he done?”

  “He takes bribes.”

  “No, I mean what’s he done that all the others haven’t?”

  “He hasn’t delivered on his promises.” Udelen moved his hand to the opening of his jacket with slow deliberation, obviously having learned his lesson, and pulled out a datachip. He slid it across the table toward Beviin, smearing some drops of liquid that might have been condensation from a previously frosted glass. “Here’s who I’d like dealt with. I’d like him to cease functioning as a politician before next month’s elections.”

  Beviin slid the chip into the port on his forearm plate, and the data fed straight through to his HUD. The display rolled. Data—numbers, letters, simple icons in one or two colors—merged easily with his field of vision, but a full-color holoimage was intensely distracting. There was a lot of detail demanding attention, and—here was the really hard bit—it was hard to look clean through a face and keep the view beyond under scrutiny when his human brain was wired to concentrate on features. He found himself staring into the eyes of a man who looked straight at him but would never see him.

  “Osik …” No, he hadn’t been expecting that face at all. This was no ordinary target, no party drone doing dodgy deals in smoke-filled tapcafs. “This is their opposition leader. Tholote B’Leph? Okay, he was known for his unnatural generosity in awarding government contracts when he was in power, but killing him will start riots across the planet. Wouldn’t you prefer me to break his fingers or something? It usually works.”

  Udelen’s grim face cracked slightly. “The aftermath is Ter Abbes’s problem.” He held out his palm for the datachip. “A hundred thousand credits. Usual deal—half in advance when you accept, half on completion, which must be a few days before the election.”

  Timing like that meant it wasn’t about wasted bribes. But a hundred thousand was a lot of credits. It was enough to stop him worrying about crops and where the next bounty was coming from for the next few years.

  It was also a lot of potential trouble, and maybe more than he could handle alone. His finely-tuned sense of self-preservation grappled with his need to eat.

  “I might need to recruit backup. How long have I got?”

  “Until the end of our host’s shift,” said Udelen. “Dawn. I’ll be here until then.”

  “I’ll be back before then.”

  The verd’goten celebration was still in full swing when Beviin left, and he kept an eye on the tattooed red-armored woman in his visor’s 360-degree sensor. She seemed to be keeping an eye on him, too.

  He should have stopped by and wished her kid well. If they were still whooping it up after he’d finished talking to the Mand’alor, he’d do just that.

  Yes, this job needed to be run past Boba Fett.

  Nom Anor: daily report.

  Nearly eighteen years; I’ve been away from my own people for too long. But we make home wherever we are, because we have no homeworld now. I hear the Mandalorians have been wanderers, too, and that they were conquerors like us, and their god was war itself. And now—now they are not, and their worship of war itself has vanished because one of their leaders wanted things to be more civilized. They fight other nations’ wars for money, if they fight at all.

  When I saw the tattoos on that female’s hand, I thought for a moment that there might be a vestige of the true warrior left in the Mandalorians and that they might be like us in valuing their own pain and death. But no—this is vanity, decoration, nothing more. They have no castes, no order, no aspiration to improve the universe or save it. They care only about surviving day to day. Their culture’s borrowed, and they no longer impose it on others. They can have no faith in it, then.

  What you value and respect, you must make others respect, too. But no matter. They’ll still be useful.

  Nar Shaddaa: Gladiator a
ssault ship Beroya, air-speeder parking lot.

  “Losing your nerve?” Fett asked.

  The Mandalore, ruler of the clans, was a shimmering blue holoimage floating above the console of Beviin’s assault fighter, cleaning his blaster.

  “It’s not my usual contract, killing an opposition politico,” Beviin said.

  “What’s bothering you?”

  “The civil unrest it’ll cause.”

  “There’s always civil unrest,” Fett said. “The day you start deciding who’s got the moral high ground before you take a bounty, you might as well join the New Republic Army. And they don’t let you pick and choose your battles there, either.”

  Beviin buried his annoyance. Fett had a point: yes, he could be over-picky about contracts and he probably drew too many lines about which assassinations and executions were okay and which weren’t. “But this still feels like something beyond punishment for failing to come good for his paymaster.”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s too strategic. It’s the timing.”

  “It’s a hundred thousand creds. When did you last see that kind of money?”

  “Okay, let’s go through this.” From the Gladiator’s cockpit, Beviin noted the nervous glances as passersby took sly glances at the dimly-lit canopy of the fighter and realized not only that it was a Gladiator, but also that it was occupied. When he turned his head they scuttled away, fast. Even in a criminal hot spot like Nar Shaddaa, a cannoned-up assault vessel with a Mando pilot on board was a rare sight in the parking lot. “He doesn’t just want me to do a bit of leg-breaking or whacking. He wants an opposition politician taken out just before the election. That’s not a reminder that his invoice is overdue for payment.”

  “So it’s political. So is dealing with Hutts.”

  “No, it’s all very … impersonal.” Beviin, one eye still on the trickle of lowlives gawping at the Gladiator, gave the navigation lights a quick blip and sent the sightseers running. “I’ll exercise … prudence.”