Jaina brushed the tip of her nose discreetly with the back of her wrist, and seemed to take an unnaturally fixed interest in the ornate carvings on a chair leg nearby. "I'll inform them, but I'm done with all that personal stuff. I'm going to concentrate on one thing, and that's making Lumiya pay. If I'm supposed to be the Sword of the Jedi, then it's time I took it seriously, and there's nothing that's worth my time more than this."
The duty captain of the guard came in later with a datapad on a bronzium platter and held it out to Luke. When he hesitated, Jaina took it and pored over it. The expression of I-told-you-so on her face told Luke that it wasn't going to be comfortable news.
"You want the short version, Uncle Luke?"
"Up to you."
"Mara shows up after Jacen, in Five-Alpha, and asks Ops to keep an eye out for an orange spherical ship with cruciform masts, because our new Chief of State might be under threat."
Luke always tried not to be swayed by circumstantial evidence, because two and two frequently proved to add up to anything but four. But he didn't know if they'd find any other evidence. He didn't know if they'd ever find Mara's body—or even if she'd left mortal remains. He couldn't ignore this.
"Jaina," he said. "I think you have to leave this to me."
"What was it you said about none of us thinking straight?"
"I don't want anyone acting on half the facts."
"What's it going to take, then?"
"She's—she was my wife. I insist that I handle this myself."
"You shouldn't have to."
"I want to. Don't take this from me."
Jaina actually flinched. Luke didn't think he'd snapped at her.
Maybe his pain was so intense that the sudden burst of it then had touched her in the Force.
"Okay, Uncle," she said quietly. "But you just say the word, and I'll be there."
There was still no sign of Jacen by the time Luke had tried unsuccessfully to sleep for six hours. He'd dropped off the charts, as Jaina put it. And Ben had not reappeared. Ben, at least, had good reason.
The search for Five-Alpha resumed early in the morning.
KELDABE, MANDALORE
The fourth Bes'uliik off the production line rolled out of the hangar to meet the scrutiny of a small crowd of silent, armored men.
They'd folded their arms in that typical go-on-amaze-me Mando way, but as soon as the fighter came alive and sent dust pluming with its downdraft, they all applauded and yelled, "Oya!"
Yes, they thought it was okay. Fett watched it with a certain pride. The
higher frequencies in its drives made his sinuses tingle.
"Who says defense procurement drags its feet?" said Medrit. He didn't seem bothered by the noise, even minus his helmet, but then blacksmiths had often been deafened by their trade. "Record time."
"Only another half a million of these," Fett said, "and we'll be in business."
"It's never about numbers, Mand'alor. Never was."
There was something about the fighter—its effortless hover and tilt, combined with the distinct throbbing note of its propulsion—that made it exceptionally attractive. Fett doubted if it would have looked quite so pretty if it was pounding your city to molten slag. He planned to claim the offer of a test flight.
Mandalore was resurgent, as Beviin liked to say, and it was gathering pace. A steady stream of Mandalorians was returning from diaspora. A few hundred thousand in a week was nothing for a trillion-body city-planet like Coruscant, but Mandalore was now creaking with the influx.
"You'd think a big empty planet like this could cope with a few immigrants," Fett said.
"Poor infrastructure." Medrit craned his neck to watch another Bes'uliik take off. "Got to fix that. Four million was always a nice stable population until the crab-boys messed everything up."
"How many incomers, worst scenario?"
"Impossible to tell. But you asked for two million to come back, and I dare say we'll get that."
Fett still marveled at the ability of people to uproot themselves, but then Mando'ade were traditionally nomads—and even he was happier in Slave I than with a roof over his head. "I'm always touched when people do things without my needing to hang them out of windows."
"Sometimes," said Medrit, "you have only to ask. Go read the Resol'nare. The six basic tenets of being a Mando. One is to rally to the Mandalore when called."
"Handy," said Fett. "But it doesn't always happen."
Fett had begun to see the recurring parallels between Mandalore the world and Mandalore the leader, and why the two terms had become synonymous in the outside world. He'd always called himself a figurehead, a reminder of what Mandalorians seemed to think they should be, social template as well as someone to hang the blame on: but it came true. He was recovering, and so was the nation. Mandalore seemed to move inversely to the rest of the galaxy, which was busy going down the tubes and ripping itself apart yet again. But that was good for business if you sold arms and military skills, so the correlation was expected.
"Time to celebrate," Medrit said. "A little, anyway. Come on, everyone's heading to the tapcaf First round's on you."
As he walked, Fett reflected that he was as close to satisfied with life as he'd been in a long time, except for the few nagging loose ends that had loomed large when he was dying, and still hadn't gone away.
One of them was Jacen Solo.
It always came down to Jedi and their schisms in the end.
"It's true, I tell you. She's been murdered." Beviin was holding court in the Oyu'baat, a tapcaf that brewed a sweet, sticky net'ra gal and never ran out of narcolethe. "Big search going on in the Hapan Cluster. Serious trouble."
Fett visited the 'caf once a week partly because Mirta said it was good for morale, but mainly because Beviin asked him to. Fett wanted Beviin to succeed him, even if most expected him to groom Mirta.
"Cabinet in session, then?" he said.
The chieftains and neighbors who drank here had become Fett's cabinet,
and if there was any serious attempt at government going on—
Mando'ade regarded that as a deeply unhealthy and aruetyc thing—then it would only be tolerated over a buy'ce gal in the tapcaf.
"Welcome to the foreign affairs committee," said Beviin. "Mara Skywalker's missing, presumed dead."
"How do they know she's dead if the body disappears in a puff of smoke?" Carid muttered. He was playing a four-way board game with Medrit, Dinua, and Mirta that used short-handled stabbing blades. Fett watched from the sidelines, never able to work out the rules. "They do that, don't they?"
Fett thought of his lightsaber collection. "Sometimes."
Carid, using his helmet on the floor as a footrest, winked. "So where's the forensics?"
Dinua stabbed her blade into the board, and there was a murmur of
"Kandosii." "They sense it all in the Force."
"I'd joke, but I hear their son has gone missing, too." Carid tutted loudly. "What kind of parents are these Jedi?"
Fett wouldn't have traded places with any of the Solos or Skywalkers. They were a tragically unhappy dynasty, and even if sympathy was something nobody paid him to have, he understood the loss of a parent, and a child.
"Any mention of Jacen Solo?" he asked.
"That name has cropped up."
"There's a surprise."
"Mentions of a Lumiya, too. Alias Shira Brie."
Now, there was a name from Fett's past. Some things never went away. "It