She had a funny idea of romance, that girl, but Orade seemed close to besotted, so maybe he didn’t care where he had to follow her. They both looked around and watched Fett as he approached. He tried to avoid crushing clumps of fragile amber ferns.
“Tell me if I’m interrupting,” Fett said. Orade looked up at him and got to his feet. “Here’s the deal. You break her heart, I break your legs.”
“Deal,” said Orade. He had a sharp-featured pale face and a scrap of bright, blond beard. “See you later, Mirta.”
Mirta looked past Fett to watch Orade leave, and then glared at him. “I suppose that’s your idea of protective concern, Ba’buir.”
“Meant it,” Fett said. “You’re no use to me when you’re emotional.”
“So … what did you want me for?”
“Didn’t. Just came to visit Dad’s grave.”
Her nerf-frying stare softened, probably from embarrassment. Weeping together over Ailyn just that one time hadn’t opened the emotional floodgates and given them a blood-bound relationship cemented by shared grief. It was, and probably always would be, wary and restrained.
“I’ll come back later,” Fett said.
“No, I was just leaving anyway.”
“Okay, let’s both stand around in awkward silence for a while and I’ll give you a ride back to town.”
For some reason, the one thing that never embarrassed Fett was admitting his love for his father. He didn’t care if that made him look soft. People said it didn’t, especially if they wanted to carry on breathing. He hooked both thumbs in his belt and contemplated the slight depression in the soft mossy ground, realizing he should have filled the grave with more soil to allow for settling.
I’m not doing too bad, Dud. Did you ever have to make domestic -policy when you were Mandalore, or did you just fight? I suppose you know I’m dying.
The last thought caught him unawares. Fett believed in decomposition and eternal oblivion: he’d dealt them out so many times, he knew what awaited him. It was Beviin and his talk of the manda that had him falling into those stupid thoughts about eternity.
“I knew you were basically okay when you split the heart-of-fire to bury half with Mama,” Mirta said quietly.
“I’m not sentimental.”
“A real scumbag would have kept the stone intact and sold it.”
Fett resented the interruption of his one-sided conversation with his father. “Maybe if I’d left it whole, somebody could have read the information in it.” He straightened up, arms at his side. “Are you done here?”
Mirta shrugged, collected her helmet, and began walking toward the speeder. It was an answer of sorts. They set off for Keldabe. There were no straight roads; it made ambushing and pinning down would-be invaders a lot easier.
“What does everyone else do with bodies?” Fett asked.
“Turn left when we get to the river and I’ll show you.”
Mirta seemed to have taken this born-again Mando thing seriously. Fett had expected her to kick over the traces and turn wholly Kiffar, like her mother, but she’d jumped to the other extreme. If he hadn’t known she wasn’t motivated by wealth, he’d have thought she was positioning herself to inherit his fortune. That would have been easier. Right now, he had no idea what her motive was.
“Gejjen’s been assassinated, by the way,” he said, banking the speeder to turn along the course of the Kelita River. “Heard it on the news.”
“Good,” she said. She was definitely his granddaughter. “Slimy shabuir!”
“I put the full fee for Sal-Solo in a trust fund for you.”
“Thanks. You didn’t have to.”
“No. I didn’t.”
“There it is.”
“What?”
“The grave.”
Fett couldn’t see anything, just lush water meadows flanked by rich pasture, vibrantly green even after harvesttime. They said the area had beaten the Yuuzhan Vong’s attempts at environmental destruction because the fast-flowing water in the meadow and the river carried the poisons away downstream. Even to Fett’s urban and unagricultural eye, it looked like rich soil. “Where?”
“Try your terahertz GPR.”
Fett blinked his ground-penetrating radar into life. When he looked at the land now, he saw the variations in density and the pockets of less compacted soil. He also saw clusters of lines and debris so tangled together that he couldn’t make out what they were.
“It’s a mass grave,” Mirta said.
Fett stopped the speeder and they got off to look. His boots squelched in the sodden grass, and while it was far from the first time he’d walked on a carpet of the dead, this felt vaguely uncomfortable.