[Legacy Of The Force] - 02(6)

“We have a use for that technology-“

“I don’t.”

“Taun We may yet be useful to you. She is most skilled.”

“Maybe you should have hired me to hunt Ko Sai a few decades ago, rather than go after Taun We now.”

“We have … reason to believe someone found Ko Sai. But we had sufficient expertise left to continue cloning without her, even if we had lost the original research on control of aging.”

“If anyone found it, they never tried to sell it. Who would sit on merchandise worth that much? Nobody I know.”

It was probably Ko Sai’s research that Fett needed now, but that was a trail that had gone very cold more than fifty years ago. Even he would have a tough job tracking it down.

But someone had it. Ko Sai had defected somewhere. There was always an audit trail to follow, as his accountant called it. And Taun We might be a lead to it. Maybe she had taken the same route out. Maybe she had the same paymasters; top-class cloners were rare.

“We both have reasons to recover as much data and as many personnel as we can,” said Koa Ne. If the minister had been human, Fett suspected he would have been smirking. “Will you help?”

“Making the most of me while I’m still alive?”

“Mutual benefit.”

“Benefit costs.” Fett turned away from the window and picked up his helmet. “I don’t do help.”

He wondered if Koa Ne ever thought of his father, Jango, and knew that if he did that it was purely in terms of his utility to the Kaminoan economy. He shouldn’t have been offended that another professional viewed life so dispassionately: he did, after all. But this was his father, and that wasn’t a subject he reduced to credits or convenience. Using clones of his own father to defend Kamino against the clone army of the Empire had always stuck in his throat. It was the ultimate exploitation. His father would have shrugged it off as an inevitable part of the deal, he knew, but he suspected it would have angered him deep down.

One of Dad’s friends used to call them aiwha bait. I remember that.

“We can pay.”

“Okay. Dead or alive?”

“Alive, of course. A million to bring Taun We back alive, with the data.”

“Two million to recover her, and an extra million for the data. Three million.”

“Excessive. I do believe your father was paid only five million for what amounted to creating and training an army.”

“That’s inflation for you. Take it or leave it.”

The thought left a staccato trail in his mind like skipping a stone across water, joining up previously disjointed ideas.

When the Kaminoans had last given any thought to Jango Fett, there had been hundreds of thousands-no, millions of men like him, and now there were none.

Fett lowered his helmet over his head again and settled into the reassurance and identity of its confines as so many of them would have done, inhaling the deflected warmth and scent of his own breath in the brief moment before the seal closed and the environmental controls kicked in. Had the men been deployed for the good of Mandalorians, the galaxy might have been a very different place today.

But that wasn’t his problem.

A year left. Time enough, if I concentrate everything on it.

He had no idea why he had started thinking so much about the long-distant war lately. Perhaps it was because he had known what news Beluine would break to him.

I’m really going to die this time.

“You need this technology as much as we do,” said Koa Ne. “One million.”

“I’ll find it. And it’s still three million if you want me to hand it back to you when I’ve taken the data that I need.” The most satisfying part of negotiation was knowing your walkaway point. He’d reached it now. “A professional’s worth his fee, Koa Ne. Take it or leave it. I’ll find someone able to pay a lot more than you can-just to cover my expenses, of course.”

“But what use is your wealth to you now?”

In a human, it would have been cruel mockery of a dying man. But Kaminoans didn’t have enough emotion in them for mockery.

“I’ve always got a use for it.”

Koa Ne was right. He didn’t need any more credits, or any more power and influence, either: politics really didn’t interest him. He’d served too many politicians, often in their machinations against each other, and he didn’t even relish being the Mand’alor, leader of the scattered Mandalorian community.

So why do I care at all?

He was the head of a ragbag of scattered Mando’ade. There were farmers and metalworkers and families scraping a living back on Mandalore, and there were any number of mercenaries, bounty hunters, and small communities in diaspora across the rest of the galaxy. It was hard to call them a nation. He wasn’t even a head of state, not in the way Corellians or Coruscanti understood it. In the wake of the Yuuzhan Vong war, he had just a hundred commandos to call on, but they were still doing what Mandalorians had done for generations: eking out a grim existence in the Mandalore sector, defending Mandalorian enclaves, or taking on the wars of others. He had no idea how many more people who thought of themselves as Mandalorians were spread across the galaxy.