"How did it find me? I can't be sensed in the Force if I don't want to be, and I didn't let myself be detected until—"
A pause. Lumiya's eyes were remarkably expressive. She seemed very touched by the ship's attention. Jacen imagined that nobody—nothing —had shown any interest in her well-being for a long, long time.
"It says you created a Force disturbance in the Gilatter system, and that a combination of your . . . wake and the fact you were looking for the . . . redheaded child . . . and the impression that the crew of your ship left in the Force made you trackable before you magnified your presence."
"My, it's got a lot to say for itself."
"You can have it, if you wish."
"Quaint, but I'm not a collector." Jacen heard himself talking simply to fill the empty air, because his mind was racing. I can be tracked. I can be tracked by the way those around me react, even though I'm concealed. Yes, wake was the precise word. "It seems made for you."
Lumiya took a little audible breath, and the silky dark blue fabric across her face sucked in for a moment to reveal the outline of her mouth.
"The woman who's more machine, and the machine that's more creature." She put one boot on the ramp. "Very well, I'll find a use for this. I'll take it off your hands, and nobody need ever see it."
These days, Jacen was more interested by what Lumiya didn't say than what she did. There was no discussion of the test she'd set for Ben and why it had taken him to Ziost and into a trap. He teetered on the edge of asking her outright, but he didn't think he could listen to either the truth or a lie; both would rankle. He turned to go. Inside a day, the Anakin Solo would be back on Coruscant and he would have both a war and a personal battle to fight.
"Ask me," she called to his retreating back. "You know you want to."
Jacen turned. "What, whether you intended Ben to be killed, or who I have to kill to achieve full Sith Mastery?"
"I know the answer to one but not the other."
Jacen decided there was a fine line between a realistically demanding test of Ben's combat skills and deliberately trying to kill him. He wasn't sure if Lumiya's answer would tell him what he needed to know anyway.
"There's another question," he said. "And that's how long I have before I face my own test."
The Sith sphere ticked and creaked, flexing the upper section of its webbed wings. Lumiya stood on the edge of the hatch and looked around for a moment, as if she was nervous about entering the hull.
"If I knew when, I might also know who," she said. "But all I feel is soon, and close." Something seemed to reassure her, and she paused as if listening again. Perhaps the ship was offering its own opinion. "And you know that, too. Your impatience is burning you."
Of course it was: Jacen wanted an end to it all—to the fighting, the uncertainty, the chaos. The war beyond mirrored the struggle within.
Lumiya was telling the truth: soon.
MEETING OF THE CLANS, MANDALMOTORS HALL, KELDABE, CAPITAL OF
MANDALORE
A hundred or so of the hardest-looking males and females that Fett had ever seen were gathered in the stark charcoal-gray granite building that MandalMotors had donated to the community.
The hardest face of all was that of his granddaughter. Mirta Gev watched him from the side of the meeting hall with his father's eyes. My own eyes.
Fierfek, she really did have the Fett eyes. Maybe he was seeing what wasn't really there, but the look bored through into his soul anyway. It was a look that said: You failed. He didn't hear the murmur of voices around him, just the soundless accusations that his daughter Ailyn was dead, that he had never been there for her until it was too late, and that he might also be too late to start being a worthy Mandalore. His father had groomed him to be the best, and even if he'd never mentioned being Mandalore one day, it went with the legacy. Jaster's legacy.
Better be quick, then. I'm dying. I've got business to take care of. Priorities: a cure, then find out what happened to my wife, what happened to Sintas Vel.
It wasn't that Mirta wouldn't tell him.
She didn't know. She had the heart-of-fire gem he'd given Sintas as a wedding gift, but it had turned up at a dealer's shop. It was just bait. And he'd taken it.
But, Fett being Fett, it was more than bait. It was a motivator: it was another piece of evidence.
It's never too late to find out. I thought it was, but it's not.
The hubbub of the chieftains of the clans, heads of companies, and an assortment of veteran mercenaries faded voice by voice into silence.
They watched him warily. Not all of them were human, either: a Togorian and a Mandallian, both wearing impressive armor, leaned against the far wall, massive arms folded across their chests. Species didn't matter much to Mandalorians. Culture defined them. Fett wondered what that made him.
"Oya!" It was muttered at first, then shouted a few times. "Oya!"
It was a word with a hundred meanings for Mandalorians. This time it meant "Let's go, let's get on with it." They always started their gatherings this way, and this was the nearest Mandalorians ever came to a senate.
They didn't go in for procedural nicety.
A chieftain with an ornately shaved beard and an eye patch stood up to speak without ceremony. "So, Mand'alor? he said. "Are we going to fight or what?"
"Who do you want to fight?" Fett noted that they reverted to Basic when addressing him, in deference to his ignorance of Mando'a. "The Galactic Alliance? Corellia? Some Force-forsaken pit on the Rim?"
"There's never been a war we haven't fought in."
"There is now. This isn't our fight. Mandalore's got its own troubles."
"The war's escalating. Their troubles might come and find us."
Fett stood by the long, narrow window that ran the height of the west- facing wall. It was more like an arrow loop than a view on the city.
Mandalorians built for defense, and public buildings were expected to serve as citadels, even more so now. The Yuuzhan Vong had wreaked terrible vengeance on Mandalore for its covert work for the New Republic during the invasion, but the carnage had just made Mando'ade more ferociously determined to stay put. The nomadic habit was still there: it was more about a refusal to yield than love of the land. But they couldn't lose a third of the population and shrug it off, not while many still remembered the Imperial occupation.
Sore losers, the Vong. But it's not like I had any alternative.
Better the New Republic than the crab-boys.
Fett scanned the hall, aware of Mirta's fixed and almost baleful stare.
"What's the first rule of warfare?"
On seats, on benches, leaning in alcoves, or just standing with arms folded, the leaders of Mandalorian society—or as many as could get to
Keldabe—watched him carefully. Even the head of MandalMotors, Jir Yomaget, wore traditional armor. Most had taken off their helmets, but some hadn't. That was okay by Fett. He kept his on, too.
"What's in it for us," said a thickset human man leaning back in a chair that seemed to have been cobbled together from crates. "Second rule is how much is in it for us."
"So . . . what is in it for us this time?"
Us. Fett was Mand'alor, chieftain of chieftains, commander of supercommandos, and he couldn't avoid the us any longer. He didn't feel like us. He felt like an absent husband who'd sneaked home to find an angry wife demanding to know where he'd been all night, not sure how to head off the inevitable argument. They made him feel uncomfortable. He examined the feeling to see what was causing it.
Not up to the job.
He might have been the best bounty hunter, but he didn't think he was the best Mandalore, and that unsettled him because he had never been simply adequate. He expected to excel. He'd taken on the job; now he had to live up to the title, which was much, much easier in war than in peacetime.