[Legacy Of The Force] - 05(21)

Mara certainly had, so many times that she took it for granted. And at any given time, whether working for the Empire or for the New Republic, or whatever the stang her paymaster called itself, she’d always thought it was right.

“Yes, sweetheart, I have,” she said, and knew she now had no moral high ground from which to look down upon her son, or anyone else for that matter. “And the problem was that when I looked back, I found I’d done the wrong thing sometimes. But it’ll be years before I’ll know if what I’m doing now is right.”

“You have to go with the best data you have at the time.”

It was a weary man’s statement, not a boy’s. Ben was a soldier. He was what she and Luke had made him. She’d wanted a Jedi son, and now she had one.

“Next year,” she said. “Next year, we’ll have that party, come what may.”





chapter three


Mishuk gotal’u meshuroke, pako kyore.

(Pressure makes gems, ease makes decay.)

—Mandalorian proverb

SLAVE I. EN ROUTE TO BADOR, KUAT SYSTEM

Mirta Gev had settled for being tolerated by her grandfather, and although she made an effort to love him, it was hard. Part of her still wanted to make him pay for the life her mother—and grandmother—had endured. And part saw a man who had every form of regard shown him except love, and pitied him. Overall, she saw a man who put up duracrete barriers and defied anyone to breach them. As he took the Firespray out of Mandalore’s orbit and prepared to jump to hyperspace, his expression was set in apparent blank disdain for the everyday world. She decided his helmet presented the softer face of the two.

At least she got to sit in the copilot’s seat. That seemed to be the nearest that Boba Fett could ever get to approving of her as his own flesh and blood.

“Your clone’s not an active bounty hunter,” said Fett. There was never any preamble in his conversations, no small talk, no intimacy. He was all business. “I checked every bounty hunter and wannabe on the books, but none is called Skirata. Plenty of people on Mandalore knew Kal Skirata, and then—gone. Vanished.”

“But he was on a hunt, I know that. He told me to get out of his way.” Did Fett believe her? She’d stitched him up and tried to lure him to his death, so she could hardly blame him if he was having second thoughts about the clone. The man was real, all right. “So we’re retracing his steps?”

“Yours.”

“How are you going to pass yourself off as a client looking to hire a bounty hunter?”

“I’m not. You are.”

Mirta suddenly realized why he’d agreed to let her ride along. “My, I do come in handy, don’t I?”

“Earn your keep. Rules of any partnership.”

Mirta thought that sounded remarkably like her dead mother. Ailyn Vel was more a chip from the granite block of Fett than she’d ever admit, but that was impossible. She’d been a baby when Fett had left her grandmother, too young to pick up his callous ways.

“How do you cope?” Mirta asked.

“What?”

“How do you cope with being alone?”

“Are you going to yap all the way to Kuat?”

“You can’t bring yourself to tell me to shut up, can you?”

“I cope because I like it that way,” Fett said.

“Well, Mama was all I had and I don’t like it that way.”

Fett paused, and there was the faintest movement of his lips—as if he was stopping himself from saying something he’d regret. He ought to have understood, she thought. He’d lost his father at the hands of a Jedi, too.

“Yeah,” he said. “What about your dad?”

“He died in a hull breach. Not even in combat.”

“Why’d Ailyn marry a Mando? Sintas must have warned her we’re bad news.”

Mirta found she was clutching the heart-of-fire pendant tight in her fist. It was just half of the original stone. The other slice, split from it with a blow from the butt of Fett’s blaster, was buried with Ailyn Vel in a modest grave outside Keldabe, in an ancient wood that the vongese hadn’t managed to destroy.

I can’t feel anything from this stone. It ought to tell me something. I’m Kiffar. Part Kiffar, anyway.

“She hung around Mando’ade to get a better idea of how to hunt you. Then she met Papa. It didn’t last.”

“Romantic.”

“She cared about him.”

“And she let him make a Mando of you.”

“I spent two summers with Papa on Null, after he and Mama split up. He taught me everything he could. And then he got killed.”

She didn’t say it to shut Fett up. He was hardly a talkative man anyway, but there was quiet, and then there was breath-holding silence. That was what she heard now.