Venku stepped in. “He’s had enough. Maybe later.” He retrieved his helmet and tried to steer the old man away. “Come on.”
“I don’t know about the when,” the old man said, pulling from Venku’s grasp, “but I know it’s Phaeda. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
He handed the stone back to Mirta, placing it in her cupped palms with both hands as if it were a live fledgling. Fett had never been comfortable around that mystical kind of thing. He simply observed.
“It’s okay,” Mirta said. “You’ve told me a lot, and I’m grateful. Let me buy you an ale.”
“Maybe another day, ner ad’ika,” Venku said. “But thank you.”
Mirta watched the door close. As she turned back to Fett, the door opened again and disgruntled drinkers filtered back in, giving the two of them a wide berth.
“Well? Was he right, Ba’buir?”
Fett shrugged. It had shaken him, like all the painful memories that flooded back without his permission. “On the nail.”
“Well, we can follow that lead.”
Fett dreaded what else the old man had seen in the stone. Old man. He was only ten or maybe fifteen years older than Fett. “I don’t think I’ve ever been to Phaeda.”
The tapcaf owner lined up fresh ales on the bar. “I see you’ve met Kad’ika, then, Mand’alor.”
“Yeah. Fascinating.”
“The old man with himdon’t see him around much. Gotab, I think. I used to think that was Kad’ika’s father, but apparently not.”
The name didn’t mean a thing to Fett, but he filed it mentally under subjects to investigate later. Phaeda. He’d scour Slave I’s databases, maybe hack into the Phaeda archives. Mirta was examining the stone closely.
“Must have cost every credit you had, Ba’buir.”
She passed the heart-of-fire to Fett and he turned it over in his fingers, touching the carving on the edge. Only the most skilled cutter could facet the uncut stones without shattering them, let alone carve them.
“It’s rare to find one with all the colors in it. They’re usually red or orange, but the light ones with the whole rainbow … they cost.”
“I saw a blue one once,” Mirta said.
“I was sixteen. I couldn’t afford a blue one.”
Fett could afford one now, any number of them, even the rarest of deep royal-blue stones that showed their incredible range of multicolored fire only in bright sunlight. But he no longer had a lover to give them to. It had been a very long time.
“Tell me something about Ailyn,” he said. “Was she ever happy?”
Mirta chewed over the question. “I don’t think so.”
The only thing Fett knew about his own daughter beyond the people she’d killed and what she’d stolen was that she had never been happy, never called him Dad, and that she’d taught Mirta to hate him. He still hadn’t questioned the girl about that. The time never felt right.
“Were you ever happy?” Mirta asked.
Fett never considered if anyone wondered if he was happy or not. There seemed to be a blanket assumption that Boba Fett coasted along on a narrow path of dispassion, never angry, never happy, never sad.
“I was happy as a kid,” he said at last. “I stopped being happy on Geonosis and I never bothered trying again.”
But he’d been angry, all right: angry, grief-stricken, terrified, lonely, and hostile. He’d run through all the negative emotions at full intensity in those days after his father’s death, crammed in the spaces between doing what he had to do to survive, when he needed to be all cold logic. It was a switch he had to throw, off and on, off and on, until one day it didn’t switch on again, and the pain was gone. So were the joy and the love.
If he did what his dad wanted, it might come back. If he did an honorable job, and tried to at least understand the remnant of his own family, he stood a chance of recapturing some of what was ripped from him in that arena on Geonosis.
“Drink up, Ba’buir” Mirta said. “I want to go and do some digging about Phaeda.”
GALACTIC ALLIANCE WARSHIP OCEAN.
ON STATION JUST BEYOND CORELLIAN SPACE
It’s awfully good of you to join us,” said Admiral Niathal. Jacen walked onto the bridge and tasted the mix of emotions around him, ranging from vague interest to nervousness. “I was very sorry indeed to hear of your loss.”
Jacen nodded politely. She sounded as if she really meant the condolence, but then she was pretty good at hitting the right note. He was visiting Ocean in his capacity as Chief of State to try out a little hearts-and-minds on a gathering of the various ally worlds. There was nothing like a meeting on a suitably mighty warship to show folks what was at stake. The Confederation was now planning a major push against the Core Worlds, intelligence suggested, so Jacen hoped everyone was paying attention.