It was harder than he thought: the dummy made no impression in the Force, which limited Ben's senses. And it kept getting up and walking around each time, a distressing gel ghost of a man he was going to kill.
There was no emotion in it. That made it hard. But he was getting good single shots. He tried to see it as a technical exercise, like light-saber drill, an action totally separate from the nasty business of taking off heads, and imagined the gel-form with the short dark hair of Dur Gejjen.
"Ben," Lekauf said quietly, "I'll be there and so will Shevu.
You've got backup if anything goes wrong. If you can't get at him, or you don't get a clean shot, we'll make sure he drops and stays down. Don't sweat it."
"But that'll expose you two."
"Like I said, it's just in case things don't go according to plan.
Makes sense to build in some contingency in case we don't get another chance—because it'll be easier than hitting him on Corellia."
Ben pondered. "We don't even know the location. I could be doing this in the middle of a field or a crowded restaurant."
"You sabotaged Centerpoint. This is going to be a lot easier."
"When I did that, I still thought it was fun."
"Come on, you can do it."
There was something about Lekauf's faith and admiration that galvanized Ben. He concentrated on the dummy and tried to see himself not as shooting a helpless automaton or even a corrupt politician, but as solving a problem. A couple of hours later, he was hitting the five-centimeter zone 95 percent of the time.
"Better have a break now," Lekauf said.
Ben checked to make sure the adjacent lanes were clear and walked up the range to look at the gel-form. The more times he'd hit it, the slower the self-repair became. Its internal power supply needed recharging. It was struggling to get up, and Ben found himself increasingly disturbed as he watched the pathetic, anonymous figure scrambling to roll onto its chest and get on all fours. He forced himself to stop looking at it.
It was all the worse for there being none of the real aftermath of injury that he'd seen once too often.
"Lunch," Lekauf called, more insistently this time.
Ben wasn't certain he was that hungry.
BEVIIN-VASUR FARM, TEN KILOMETERS OUTSIDE KELDABE, MANDALORE
Goran Beviin looked up from the trench, a pitchfork in one hand and a muddy grin on his face. It was beginning to rain and he was up to his ankles in animal dung, but it seemed to make him perfectly happy.
"And they said being acting Mandalore would go to my head," he said, rubbing his nose on his sleeve. "So you came home fast, then."
Fett kept his distance. "Found what I was looking for. You didn't expect me back."
"I did. Some of the clan chieftains didn't. You have a habit of wandering off for a few years at a time." Beviin heaved himself out of the trench and wiped his palms on the seat of his pants. He looked very, very pleased with himself. "If you'd been away any longer, I'd have called you, but since you're back . . . Want to see something amazing?"
Fett wondered if now was a good time to tell Beviin the truth about his illness. The man had to know sooner or later. He could have formally
declared himself Mandalore while Fett was gone, and probably found a lot of support among the clans, but he hadn't; he'd gone on shoveling dung and running his farm. He was happy with his life as it was. The galaxy would have worked better with a few more Beviins around.
"Okay," Fett said. "Amaze me."
Beviin beckoned and trudged through the mud toward the farm buildings. The fine drizzle was turning into rain, and the land looked bare—not in the ruined sense of the postwar devastation that blighted so much of the planet, but as if it had settled down to sleep for the coming winter. Despite the derivation of the Fett surname—derived from the word for "farmer" —and his father's childhood on his parents' Concord Dawn farm, Fett knew nothing about agriculture. He wished he could learn, sometimes, to better understand who his father had once been.
"Mirta behaving herself?" Beviin didn't look back over his shoulder. "Well, at least she hasn't tried to kill you again. It's a good sign. Kids can be such a handful."
Fett felt the mud suck at his boots. "She's a useful pair of fists in a fight."
"She'll produce wonderfully ferocious great-grandchildren for you, Bob'ika." Beviin paused a few beats. Fett tried to take in the phrase great- grandchildren, and it left him stranded. "So whatever it was you went to do ended in a fight, did it?"
"Just had to ask questions emphatically"
"You going to tell me about it?"
It seemed as good a time as any, and Fett didn't see the point of sugarcoating it. "I'm terminally ill. Two years, tops. Eight, nine months if I carry on like this."
Beviin still didn't turn around. He walked on for a few more meters, head lowered against the rain, and then stopped in his tracks and finally faced Fett. He looked genuinely upset. Fett couldn't recall anyone being upset for
Maybe Sintas had felt for him. He hadn't noticed.
"You're not going to sit back and let it happen, are you, Bob'ika?
We can do something, surely."
Using the way-too-familiar form of his name didn't bother Fett at all now. "I found a clone who survived."
"So they did get a little more out of Ko Sai than revenge and a few souvenirs, then."
"There's no research data. Just the clone, Jaing Skirata. He wouldn't give me a blood sample, but he says he's got good medical resources." Now that Fett was back on Mandalore and Jaing was light-years away, though, the whole premise struck him as flimsy. The man hadn't even accepted a meal from him, which would have at least left useful traces of his genetic material on the utensils. Fett had nothing except time counting down and a suspicion that his judgment was failing just like his health. "I'll explain later."
"Why didn't you tell me? I could have tracked some clones for you.
Enough of them deserted and ended up here."
"Ones who'd had the accelerated aging stopped?"
"I don't know, but I could have worked from those leads. Shab, Bob'ika, couldn't you have squeezed a little sample out of him anyway?"
"It's done now. And there was never a guarantee that Taun We or Beluine could make anything from it anyway."
Beviin looked disappointed for a moment, as if Fett had let the side down by not simply grabbing what he needed. But Jaing had been right. Fett needed Taun We to decode whatever it was in that clone's cells that
stopped the degeneration, and Taun We would have turned that research over to her new bosses at Arkanian Micro. That was a bad deal for the clone, and a bad deal for Fett, because if anyone was going to make credits out of that data, it was him, and Mandalore needed those—
Well, there's a funny thing. Now I'm thinking long-term.
Beviin turned around and started walking again in silence. Fett's news had certainly taken the shine off whatever had made him so happy a little earlier.
The farm was a rambling collection of buildings scattered around a stone farmhouse with impressive dirtworks and defensive walls. The other structures—including the outbuilding that Fett was staying in—weren't so well defended, just variations on the traditional circular vheh'yaime set in deep pits and so thickly thatched that they were camouflaged. But the farmhouse was the last bastion in the event of an attack.
At the back of the building, and connected to it by an underground tunnel, stood a workshop with a smithy. Fett could hear the rhythmic hammering of metal across the clearing. There was no smoke curling from the roof. It vented many meters away to hide the location, and Fett was sure there was a network of tunnels extending a long way into the hills to the west of the farm. It was one of the ways the Mandalorians had fought—and beaten —the Yuuzhan Vong.