“When did you meet him?” Fett asked carefully.
“Last year. I got in his way on a job.”
“Bounty hunting?” Where? Don’t rush her.
“Yes.”
“A one-hundred-forty-year-old clone?”
Mirta studied his face for a moment, impassive. “He looked a lot like you, except for the scars.”
“He’d be too old to even walk.”
“Oh, he could walk all right. And handle a weapon. Big scary guy with a custom Verpine rifle and this long, thin, three-sided knife.”
No clone from the Grand Army of the Republic could have survived, let alone have left the service. Their whole life was fighting: how could they have coped on their own? But clones were men, and they had been scattered across the galaxy in the war, so it was inevitable that some had fathered children. This had to be one of them. He was almost reassured to know that the clone bloodline hadn’t been erased completely, but he wasn’t sure why.
“You sure?”
“Yeah. He said his clan name was Skirata.”
Skirata.
Fett jerked his head around and knew instantly that he’d displayed too much interest. But he knew that name. Back on Kamino in the years before the war with the Separatists started, his father had had a friend called Skirata: a short, tough, fanatical man who trained clone commandos and-according to his father-was the dirtiest fighter he’d ever known. He seemed to like that about him.
“What else did he say?”
“That he and some of his brothers left the army after Palpatine came to power. He wasn’t very talkative. You’re definitely related.”
That made Fett pay much closer attention.
No clone from the Kamino labs could have survived this long-except unaltered ones, like him.
Or … one whose accelerated aging process had been halted. Only Ko Sai knew enough to be able to do that.
“I’m interested,” he said.
“Why?”
He’d rarely needed to lie, but he lied now. “They’d be my brothers too, wouldn’t they?” And then he wasn’t sure how much of that was actually untrue. He had always been alone, just the way he liked it, and now he was suddenly curious about not being that way.
Mirta leaned back in the seat and looked up at the deck-head. The heart-of-fire was strung around her neck, which struck him as an odd thing for a bounty hunter to do with an object she’d retrieved. She was just a young girl, and girls liked baubles, but she didn’t seem the type to go in for jewelry.
“He looked like you, more or less,” she said at last. She tugged at the necklace like worry beads. “He had full Mando armor. Light gray. And these pale gray leather gloves with an unusual grain.” She held both hands out above her lap, palms down, fingers spread, as if she was imagining those gloves on her own hands. “Really immaculate gloves.”
Fett thought gray and an image of Taun We’s long silver-gray neck and neat, yellow-eyed head dominated his field of view, as vivid as his helmet’s display, right there in front of him and yet somehow not there.
If Mirta wasn’t spinning him a line, then someone had managed to get hold of Ko Sai’s data. And they’d made use of it.
But maybe she knew more than he gave her credit for. His father had taught him to watch out for traps. This was so close to what he wanted to hear that it triggered every suspicious nerve in his body, which was all of them.
If those clones survived, why haven’t I heard about them before? If this kid’s trying to set me up for something, she’s got a lot to learn.
Even Ailyn had tried to kill him once. He glanced sideways at Mirta.
“Fierfek, you look just like him when you do that.” She looked rattled. “It’s the way you tilted your head.”
Whoever the man with the gray gloves was, he seemed to have made an impression, or else she was an expert actress. She had a tight grip on the heart-of-fire as if to protect it.
Fett decided to make sure she was secured in the aft section when he needed to sleep. She still seemed to think that the goods she had to sell was Ailyn’s location; maybe she didn’t realize that she now had two things he wanted, and that was information on both his dead wife and-impossible, but he couldn’t ignore it-his living brothers.
If she had known, she’d have asked him to pay for it.
But Mirta had the necklace. It was somehow all he could recall of Sintas Vel at that moment.
He suddenly missed her, and he knew he had no right to.
SENATE LOBBY 513, SENATE BUILDING. CORUSCANT: 0835 HOURS.
Admiral Pellaeon resigned as Supreme Commander of the Galactic Alliance Defense Force at 0800, a little too late for the main morning holonews bulletins, but early enough to interrupt drive-time programming for a few moments. He had objected strenuously-in private-to the powers granted to the Galactic Alliance Guard, but said nothing publicly. He was an old man. Nobody outside Omas’s cabinet-and presumably the military-thought it unusual that he should let a younger officer take his place.