He was perfectly at home rappelling from a roof to capture a prisoner or storming a building with blaster in hand. Walking into a bar and making cautious small talk was not his style.
But it had to be done. Get it over with, Fett.
Inside the bistro, everything was polished, orderly calm. He walked up to the bar and took a seat, browsing the menu. Without his helmet, he could actually eat something. The novelty of that idea seemed astonishing and reminded him how many things he had never done and now might never do if he didn’t find that data.
“Can I get you something?”
Again Fett found himself looking into the face of a bartender, but this one was looking back as if he only saw a man, not a bounty hunter. Nobody else at the bar seemed to take any notice of him, either. He could usually bring nervous silence to a bar just by walking into it.
“An ale,” he said. It’s so simple. It’s what everyone else does. “One of the Corellian ones.”
A foaming glass appeared before him. “Visiting?”
Here’s a man who makes a note of strangers. A cautious man. “Thinking of buying a place here.”
“Good time to buy, too.” The barman slid a glass bowl of some unidentifiable snack toward him. “Now that AruMed’s expanding, the prices will go crazy.”
Fett sipped the ale, almost totally distracted by the simple freedom of having a drink in public. He tried the snacks, too, which turned out to be salt-sweet and crunchy, like fried nuts. “Shares are doing well.”
“It’s those scientists they poached from SanTech. They say it’s going to mean a big share of the gene therapy market.”
SanTech. Fierfek. I guessed wrong. “Not Kaminoans, then?”
The bartender laughed. A man farther along the bar turned to look at him. “Ever seen one?”
Steady. “Yes. Knew one very well indeed.”
The silence deepened. There was quiet, and then there was the silence of people taking serious notice, and the two did not sound the same.
“Customer here the other day said one had turned up at Arkanian Micro, but I think he was having a laugh,” said the barman.
Arkanian Micro: well, if you deal in cloning, that’s one more place to head. It was a knife-edge point in the conversation. Fett’s stomach churned, and that rarely happened. Wrong planet. But maybe the right track.
“I knew a pathologist at Arkanian Micro,” said a man sitting a little farther along the bar. “She said some interesting things about Kaminoans.”
Ah, you’re testing me. Do I work in the industry? Am I bluffing to get insider information? “What, that they’d never go outside in the sunlight? That they’re obsessed with perfection?”
The man considered him carefully. “That they’re gray with long necks and incredibly arrogant once you get past the polite exterior.”
Well, that confirms you’ve met one, or your friend has. Thanks. Fett busied himself with his ale. Not many people knew that much about Kaminoans; over the centuries, only a handful of people had even known they existed, let alone seen them or had enough contact with them to describe their outlook on the non-Kaminoan world. But industry insiders here knew, all right. “Did Micro give them a nice dark hole to live in?”
“It was an issue,” said the man, and looked satisfied.
So Kaminoans had probably defected to Arkanian Micro on Vohai. The intelligence was flimsy, but given that there was normally no Intel at all on Kaminoans, it had a great deal more credibility.
Fett had already worked out his route to the Outer Rim by the time he drained his ale, put his credits on the counter, and stood up to leave.
“I like this neighborhood,” he said.
On the way back to Slave I, he did what he had done so many times: he used his datapad to carry out an automated purchase of an asset. He bought half a dozen homes in Upper Parkway and transferred them to one of his holding companies; they’d double in value inside the year. It was as near as he ever came to indulgence, but he would never live in any of them. They were an investment.
He never gambled. He speculated.
What are you investing for? Why did you ever invest? When did you stop and think what you were going to do with it all?
He hadn’t. He was in it to succeed, to show how good he was. And the only person who would have cared how well he did, what a clever boy he’d been, was long dead.
Fett flexed his fingers discreetly as he sat in the back of the taxi, feeling the joints and tendons burn. The pain was still occasional rather than ever-present, but he knew it would get worse as his condition deteriorated. A few analgesics, when pain finally impaired his efficiency, would keep him going. No, he wasn’t dead yet.