[Legacy Of The Force] - 02(21)

“You’re Boba Fett,” she said.

“You passed your eyesight test.”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Whatever it is, you can’t afford me.”

“But can you afford me?”

Fett thought for a moment that he’d really read her completely wrong, but she held out her clenched fist, palm up, and parted her fingers to reveal a flat disc of opalescent stone, gold shot with red, blue, and violet. A leather strip was threaded through a hole drilled on one edge.

It was a heart-of-fire gemstone. He knew, because he had given one like it to Sintas Vel when they were married: it was from her home, from Kiffu. He’d been just sixteen, Sintas not much older.

No: he had given this very stone to her. This was the same gem. He could see the carved edge, like rope.

Four lines of a Mandalorian marriage vow that we didn’t understand. A stone that she said had some part of my spirit and hers held in it forever.

Forever amounted to three years. They’d split up before Ailyn was two. Sintas had gone bounty hunting when Ailyn was sixteen and never returned.

That’s why my own daughter was ready to kill me.

“Where did you get this?” he asked as calmly as he could. It was clear that the girl knew he would recognize it. There was no point bluffing. He didn’t need to.

“From the man who killed your wife,” she said. “Your daughter owes me a bounty. And I know exactly where she is.”

CARD’S TAPCAF, BLUE SKY BOULEVARD, CORONET.

It was how you behaved that made the difference, Han decided.

He sat in the tapcaf facing the window and watched for Leia through the rain-streaked transparisteel. He’d thought he’d be recognized at last, but once he’d got used to not striding purposefully and drawing attention to himself, and started to move like a regular person-matching everyone else’s pace, shoulders relaxed-nobody seemed to notice him.

He became just another Coronet citizen having a caf and whiling away the time on the boulevard. There was a holoscreen on the wall behind him, and NewsNet was running. Normally it washed over him as part of the background noise, but even over the hiss of steam from the caf machine at the bar, he heard very clearly the words bomb and Corellian.

So did everyone else in the tapcaf. Silence fell. The staff even shut down the hissing caf pressure filter, and everyone turned in their seats or on their stools to watch the bulletin.

The scenes from Coruscant were terrible: one hovercam shot tracked down from a shattered hotel frontage where the remnants of a sign, just the letters ELI, hung from a dangling section of permacrete clinging to the tower by a thin strand of durasteel reinforcing wire. The cam dropped level after level to the bottom of the urban canyon, showing less damage as it descended, but then settling on a shocking image of what had fallen finally to the ground level: speeders, masonry, and bodies. Han, a man used to war, looked away and shut his eyes.

The stunned silence gave way to debate among strangers brought together by common outrage.

“We didn’t do that,” said a woman.

“We fight clean.”

“If we wanted to bomb Coruscant, we’d use the fleet.”

“They’re blaming us. Why? Don’t they know us by now?”

No, terrorism wasn’t Corellia’s way of doing things. There was military sabotage, but Corellians tended to be pretty clear-cut about who was a legitimate target and who wasn’t. Han wondered if the blast was a slick bit of black ops by Coruscant and the Alliance in general to polarize positions by bombing their own people.

I’m going crazy. This is Luke I’m talking about. The Jedi council wouldn’t let the Senate get away with it.

But there were all kinds of murky agencies that the Senate probably bankrolled and didn’t keep too close an eye on for pragmatic, plausibly deniable reasons. Luke wouldn’t even know. He was just the same decent, idealistic kid at heart that he’d always been.

They’re going to use this so-called bomb outrage to up the ante, to take a crack at us.

Han put his head in his hands and sat there for a moment, wondering what he could possibly do now to help Corellia when he wasn’t even welcome here. Eyes shut, he reached for the cup, and it wasn’t quite where he thought he’d left it.

Someone put a hand on his arm.

“Han …”

It was a man, and Han’s instinct was to jerk his arm back and draw a blaster; but he stopped dead, hand a split second from his holster. The man was about twenty-five: dark skin, black hair cut almost military-short. A stranger.

“Do you know me?” Han was ready to drop him where he stood. “Because I don’t know you, pal.”

“But your wife knew my father.”