[Legacy Of The Force] - 05(23)

Bador was a striking contrast to Mandalore. Slave swept on a descent path past orbiters and over cities studded with straight roads and open plazas. Mirta checked her datapad to orient herself.p>

“What was your dad’s name?” Fett asked.

“Makin Marec.”

Fett always had a reason for asking questions. Perhaps he was wondering who else he might be related to. They landed at one of the massive public ports in Bunar and Fett went through his ritual of setting all the alarms, trip-beams, and other lethal traps that would greet anyone stupid enough to try breaking into Slave I. He’d brought a small

speeder bike in the hold, and he swung onto the seat a lot more easily than he had last time. The painkillers were strong enough to anesthetize a bantha.

“You’re navigating,” he said. He bounced a little on the leather saddle as if testing whether he could feel any pain. “Get on.”

Mirta patched her datapad into her helmet’s system. “Head down that speeder lane and go south for five kilometers.”

She was getting used to wearing a buy’ce. At first, it had seemed suffocating and disorienting, but weeks of being surrounded by people who relied on theirs had made her feel a misfit without one. The streaming data on the HUD now got her attention without distracting her. She hadn’t fallen over anything for a while.

And—it made her feel Mando. Her father would have approved, but she tried not to think what Mama would have said. I miss you, Mama. I miss you so much, and I never even said good-bye. Fett’s tattered cape slapped against her visor in the slipstream, jerking her out of her memories, and Mirta wondered if she’d eventually become like her grandfather—or like her mother. Bitter resentment about being robbed of a parent seemed to run in the family.

Fett steered the speeder through increasingly seedy neighborhoods and canyons of high-rise warehouses and apartment houses. Bounty hunters tended not to ply their trade in the better parts of town. The number of shabby family homes decreased and the scattering of unsavory characters loitering on corners and in speeders increased.

“So what were you after here?” Fett asked.

“Recovering stolen data.”

“You mean people around here can read?”

“No, I have clients who can. The locals steal anything, even if they don’t know what it is. I go and persuade them to hand it back.”

“And your clone with the gray gloves was definitely here.”

“Yes.”

After a couple of wrong turns, the cantina appeared right on cue. In daylight, it looked even worse than it had when she’d last visited. A peppering of blaster burns had left blisters in the paint on the doors, and the masonry was pocked with holes from ballistic rounds that hadn’t been there last time—as far as she could tell. A trail of blood drops from the door ended in a larger pool, dried to a dull tarry blackness. Street cleaning wasn’t frequent here.

A sign above the door said welcome to the paradise cantina. It also said no helmets.

“I’m offended that they don’t respect cultural diversity,” Fett muttered.

“That’s how I know what the clone in gray looked like. He took his helmet off.”

“Fine.” A couple of low-life males—a human and a Rodian—ambled to within ten meters of the speeder and stared at it. Then they seemed to notice Fett, and then his blaster and rocket-loaded backpack, and suddenly they appeared to remember pressing business elsewhere. Fett locked the speeder and set the anti-theft device with a thermal detonator. The two males broke into a run in the opposite direction and vanished. “They don’t seem to know me here, anyway. Fame’s fleeting.”

Mirta took off her helmet. Fett ignored the request above the doors. The bar smelled as bad as it ever had, a mix of vomit, stale ale, and oil that could have been from machines or very old fried food. The clientele matched their environment, possibly because they’d spent their disposable income on state-of-the-art weaponry. The Kuati barkeeper was filling small dishes on the countertop with pickles that bore an unappetizing resemblance to eyeballs, so they stood at the bar trying to look normal—normal for the Paradise, anyway.

The barkeep caught sight of Mirta first. She must have been staring at the pickles too carefully.

“You got to buy a drink,” he said. “No snacks without—” Then his gaze swiveled. The helmet got his attention the way a chest plate alone didn’t. “Ohhh, you got the nerve to come in here, have you, you Mando slag?”

He ducked below the counter for a split second, and that meant only one thing. Mirta wasn’t sure if she had her blaster level before Ba’buir did, but when the man straightened up with a highly illegal short-barreled Tenloss disruptor that could have reduced them both to ground nerf, he was looking down the muzzles of Fett’s sawn-off EE-3 and her BlasTech 515.