[Legacy Of The Force] - 08(19)

“Maybe she’ll be able to tell us how she ended up here, “he said, swallowing everything he wanted to say. It was fifty years too late. “Get the repulsorlifts.”

He clamped a unit on each edge of the slab and glanced around the room. There were just crates of varying sizes, sealed and dusty. He had no choice but to take them and go through them in detail later, in case they shed any light on Sintas’s fate.

Mirta checked the boxes and began attaching repulsors to them. She never needed to be told to make herself useful; she learned fast and got on with the job, uncomplaining, and did it thoroughly. It was only the emotional things, the issues about family and heritage, that seemed to provoke her into surly scolding. She walked the boxes out across the landing area and steered them up Slave I’s cargo ramp with a practiced hand, then jogged back and moved the next crate. Fett stayed with Sintas’s slab, unable to leave her alone in this miserable place.

“You ready?” Mirta asked, peeling off her liner-gloves and whacking them hard against her thigh plate to get the dust out. She put them back on and slipped her gauntlets over the top. “I’d ask you if you were okay, but I’d never get an answer.”

“I’m okay, “Fett said. “Are you?”

“No. I’m scared. I don’t know how to tell her about Mama. I don’t know how I’ll handle it if she ends up crazy and would have been better off dead anyway. But I’ll deal with it.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“Give me some warning. How did you two part the last time you met?”

Fierfek, there’s no way around this, is there?

“I shot her, “Fett said. “And it was for her own good.”

“Yeah, somehow I didn’t think it would be a moonlit walk along a shore on Naboo and a tearful promise to stay friends.”

“It was to stop her opening a booby trap.” Fett flicked the controls on the repulsors and eased the carbonite slab off the trestle, aiming it at the exit doors. Mirta stepped to one side to avoid it. “Just a small blaster burn. She would have been fine in a few hours. She always healed fast.”

“You didn’t wait to find out?”

“She wasn’t dead when I left her.”

“Well, she did better than Shysa, then.”

He should never have mentioned Shysa. It was a mistake; he kept making them with Mirta. He made them with all women, in fact. Sintas didn’t know how lucky she was that they split before he could really foul up her life. “Shysa was a mercy killing.”

Mirta turned her back on him, displaying a saffron plate decorated with gold sigils and glyphs that he’d seen on the Vevut clan’s armor. She was definitely serious about Ghes Grade, then. That meant Fett would have a grandson-in-law soon, and with it a kinship to Novoc Vevut and the rest of the clan; it was all getting too much for him, too involved, too rooted. Fett craved loneliness right then-yes, loneliness. It was a much simpler emotion to handle.

“You sound as if you’re straining out a confession a word at a time, Ba’buir, “she said. “So either spit it out or let’s concentrate on worrying about…. Ba’buir.”

“Grandmother” and “grandfather” were the same word in Mando’a. The language had no gender, not that he spoke it beyond the odd word that Mirta had forced on him. It was the first time that something had grated on him. He was Ba’buir, nobody else. That reaction made him realize that he’d become a little too invested in the name.

“I didn’t want to do it, “he said. “I didn’t even want to be Mandalore. But if I hadn’t shot Shysa, he’d have died a rotten death. I owed him better than that.”

“You could have done the decent thing and still handed over the kyr’bes to someone else.”

Fett had learned that word early in their relationship: the crown, the mythosaur skull reserved for the office of Mand’alor. “I gave Shysa my word that I’d honor his dying wish.”

Mirta paused and glanced back over her shoulder at him but didn’t say anything else. He wondered if she believed him. He found he was completely unable to go on talking, and passed off his silence in settling the carbonite slab down on a bench in the cargo hold and draping it with the velvetweave cloth.

It was one way of dealing with a painful memory-sticking a different one in its place. A change could be as good as a rest. On the journey back to Mandalore, Mirta kept getting out of the copilot’s seat and disappearing into the hold. When he went aft to see what she was doing, he found her sitting next to Sintas, one hand on her shoulder, talking quietly to her.