Leia closed her eyes for a moment as if marshaling her thoughts. “We’ll deal with it if and when it happens. It might not be our biggest problem.”
“What, that our son ticks off the galaxy’s most lethal bounty hunter? What’s higher than that on the list?”
Leia got up from the copilot’s seat and made her way aft to the hatch linking the cockpit to the cargo bays. Han knew she was going to take another look at Ailyn Vel’s body; maybe she was going to make her look a little more presentable for her father, or somehow gather information from her last moments in those Jedi ways. He didn’t ask.
“I’ll tell you what’s a bigger problem than having a feud with Boba Fett,” she said. “Having a son who kills when he doesn’t have to.”
Han wondered if it was the first time Jacen had done that, and felt ashamed for even thinking it.
Then he wondered when Jacen would do it again.
CORONET CITY SPACEPORT, CORELLIA.
Mirta was waiting for Fett when he opened Slave I’s forward hatch. She didn’t have a blaster in her hand, so he gave her the benefit of the doubt.
He was feeling both his age and his illness right then. Dull pain gnawed at him. He ignored it. “The Solos are bringing back Ailyn’s body,” he told her.
“I know. I want it.”
Here we go. “You don’t have a ship and you don’t have any credits. What are you going to do with her?”
“What are you planning to do with her?”
“Bury her.”
“Little late to take care of your daughter now.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Fett noted that she was wearing the heart-of-fire around her neck. “So she gave you the necklace as a lure for me.”
Mirta clasped her hand around the stone. “No, I really did recover it.”
“So what happened to Sintas?”
“Why do you care?”
“Because I loved her. And not even Ailyn could possibly know what happened to us and why I left. So don’t judge me.
Mina’s face was set in a snarl. “You never made any attempt to contact them.”
“You want to know what my life was like?”
“Yeah, it must have been tough building that fortune.”
“My dad was killed in front of me when I was thirteen. I was on the run for three years. I married Sintas at sixteen because I thought I could make my life right by doing what normal people did, but I was wrong. I tried to be a Journeyman Protector but I killed a superior officer and I was jailed and exiled from Concord Dawn. And that was the end of trying to be a regular man. After that, I settled on being Boba Fett, because I just didn’t know how to do anything else.”
Mirta looked at him as if she was debating whether to put a couple of bolts in his head or try a chest shot. He didn’t want her sympathy. He wanted her to understand why he would have made Sintas and Ailyn a lot more miserable by coming back to them after his sentence than by leaving.
And he’d killed an officer who had once been his mentor, his friend. They hadn’t really needed to exile him. He’d wanted to get as far from his pain as he could.
But why did he want Mirta to understand at all? She was just a stranger he’d met a few weeks ago. She’s nothing to me. Maybe she isn’t even my own flesh and blood, just a chancer trying to make a few credits out of me.
There was one way of settling this once and for all. He took out his datapad and accessed his accounts. “Got a bank?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“You put the first round into Sal-Solo. Take the million credits and get lost.”
Her face was a mask of contempt. “You know what you can do with your credits.”
She was family all right. He knew it at a gut level, anyway. “Got any brothers or sisters?”
“No. And no kids, either.”
He never thought to ask that. “You’re too young anyway.”
“I was married. We marry young, don’t we?”
Oh, how we repeat history. I don’t need this trouble. I’ve got enough of my own.
Fett didn’t ask why she wasn’t married any longer. Her sour manner might have had something to do with that. But he’d started to respect her; and she was his granddaughter. She was all the family he had.
No, you need her to find the clone, and she knows what happened to Sintas…
He was playing games with himself, justifying his sentimentality with bogus pragmatism. He could find the clone on his own. He didn’t need to know what happened to his wife. No, he was driven by the same craving that had made his father ask Dooku for a cloned son as part of his fee for being the progenitor of the clone army: he badly wanted family. It would have been simpler to find a wife and settle down, but Boba Fett was no more capable of that than his father had been.