GA STARFIGHTER COMMAND, CORUSCANT.

"Y' know, this always works on the crime holovids . . " Mara added another illuminated marker to the holochart of the galaxy and stepped back to see if a pattern of Lumiya's movements emerged. It was a big galaxy, and Lumiya seemed to cover a lot of s.p.a.ce, which now included Mara's own front doors.

Keep it up, cyborg girl. You're just focusing me better.

"Might as well use the time productively." Jaina leaned over the desk and tapped in more coordinates. Now that she was a civilian again, she was here in her capacity as a Jedi working for Luke Sky-walker and the Council, but she slipped back into fleet ways fast. "So let's add in Alema's known whereabouts . . ."

"Well, there's no pattern there, either . . . Do you think it's a case of Alema stalking Lumiya, looking for sc.r.a.ps from her table? Why do'

those two seem to hang out together?"

"They both need a lot of spare parts?"

Mara stifled a laugh. "That's not nice, Jaina . . ."

"Seriously They haven't got enough functioning parts to make one decent humanoid between them."

"They're both good at hiding, whether by disguising their presence or erasing the memory of being seen." Mara was feeling around her in the Force, just waiting for Lumiya to spring from nowhere. She could sense her, but not near. "Lumiya's broken her cover, and she's not stupid, so she wants to be seen."

Jaina kept checking the chrono on the wall and then looking at her own timepiece. "Did you go to see Jacen?"

"Yes."

"And?"

"You want the truth, Jaina?"

"Don't I always?"

"Lumiya's bending him somehow. Okay, no need to tell me I was the last person to notice that."

"I wasn't going to. Did you . . . mention that?"

"Yes. I thought it was time someone dropped a hint that we'd noticed our Jacen had turned into a monster." Mara was getting angry, and her honest inner voice told her that the only person who deserved that anger was herself, for defending Jacen while the fact that things were going disastrously wrong was staring her in the face. But Mara was human, and scared for Ben, and it boiled over onto Jaina. "Forgive me for asking, but being his twin, have you never had this out with him?"

"I tried. He responded with a court-martial charge, remember?"

"I can't help thinking that you might have tried slugging him."

"Suddenly he's my responsibility? I'm the one who said he was going dark, way back."

"Okay, okay, I'm sorry." Mara put her hands up in mock submission.

She could apologize, but she couldn't retract her acid tone, and she regretted that. "I just-okay, none of my business."

"Spit it out, Mara."

"I just don't get how you can be so caught up in worrying whether you want Jag or Zekk when your own brother's going to pieces and taking others with him."

"Whoa "Sorry. I said it was none of my business."

"Well, you said it, so-yes, I want to be distracted by personal issues, because otherwise I'd go nuts trying to understand why Jacen's doing what he's doing to our parents."

"Maybe it's time we all faced that. Together."

There was an awkward silence. Mara wanted to tell Jaina that she was a grown woman now and it was time to stop messing around like a teenager, and that Ben was more adult at fourteen than she was at thirty-one. It was spiteful, partly true, and partly fueled by Mara's incomprehension of anyone who wasn't as totally focused on the mission as she was, to the exclusion of all else.

She kept her thoughts to herself. It was a sign of weary middle age, along with gray hairs and fading stretch marks.

I spent my whole youth on duty for the Emperor. I never had the freedom that Jaina's always had. And a little bit of me . . . resents that now.

It wasn't Jaina's fault. She was headstrong and pa.s.sionate like her father, but she hadn't quite found the silent, hidden durasteel of her mother yet.

She'll rise to the challenge when it comes. But if this isn't it, I don't know what is.

Jaina had her head down, hair forming a dark curtain as she leaned over the desk, pretending to be absorbed in the chart, but Mara could feel she was hurt. It wasn't the first time in recent weeks.

Mara would make it up to her when she calmed down. Families had spats all the time. The storms blew over.

"Change of plan," said Luke, stepping out of the turbolift with his hair disheveled and a bag in one hand. Sometimes he had that Don't-stop-me look, and he had it now. It always made Mara want to stop him. "I'm going after Lumiya. Enough."

"No, you're not," Mara said. "You're too close to this. She's baiting you."

Luke dumped the bag on the desk, disrupting the holochart. Jaina stepped back.

"Ben's boots," said Luke.

"And the point is . . . ?"

"Deposited at our apartment by Lumiya."

Mara put her hand on the boots and felt the remnants of dark energy. Now she was mad: cold, clear, icy mad. "She's been into GAG HQ.

Or Jacen's apartment. I don't know which idea I like less."

"/need to settle this with her."

"It is, as some admiral once said, a trap-"

"For her. Biting off more than she can chew."

Jaina glanced at them both, still looking a little wounded. "Uncle Luke, I'll stick my nose in here and say it's better if we go after Lumiya now, because she's clearly playing a game, and . . . I've never seen you angry like this before."

"Luke, the question to ask yourself is this," Mara said, pulling on her jacket and checking her personal weapons. "What will you do when you catch her?"

Luke swallowed hard. "I know what I have to do."

"And what was that conversation we had the other day, about being fit for the role? Me trained killer, you honest guardian of right?"

Lightsaber, vibroblades, hold-out blaster, flechette launcher, and the last of my transponders. Check. "Here's the plan. You keep an eye on Jacen while I go after her."

"I'm coming, too," Jaina said. "I'd hate to miss Alema if she shows up."

Things were getting back to normal, then. Mara would apologize when they were on their way and Luke was making sure that he knew what Jacen was up to-in case Lumiya was staging an elaborate diversion to draw them all away from Coruscant.

Luke looked at his hands. "I know you're right. It doesn't feel right, but I know I shouldn't be going after her bent on vengeance, and I don't know what it's going to take to make me kill her. And nothing short of that makes sense now."

Mara nodded and hit the comm to the hangar ground crew. "Stand by an X-wing, please." She pulled on her gloves, the fingerless ones that gave her a good grip but still let her feel the weapon. "I'm going back, starting from the apartment, and tracking her from there. She wants to leave a nice trail? She's found just the right person to follow it."

I'll sort this out, because it's my fault it got this far.

"I should have gone straight after her, and then you wouldn't have talked me out of this," said Luke.

"Jaina's dead right. You have too much history with Lumiya, and you're too stoked up. You have to kill cold."

Luke looked heartbroken for a moment. It wasn't disappointment that he was losing the argument to her, because there was no argument. It was common sense. l.u.s.t because they were family didn't mean that military best practice went out the window. But something had struck him that he didn't like, something more than Lumiya's constant threats to Ben.

"I hate it when you're right," he said, and managed a smile. "Jacen says Ben's asleep, and it seems that way. So he's okay."

"There you go," said Mara. She still hadn't told Luke that Ben could shut down in the Force. She'd have a little chat with her son about that first. "We're off now. Keep tabs on Jacen. Go and have a concerned avuncular chat with him over caf if you have to. But be around in case that's where your ex is heading." She patted Luke's cheek and winked, wanting to make light of it so he didn't see how much Lumiya was getting to her. "I might be going gray, farmboy, and I don't have her dramatic dress sense, but at least what I've got is all flesh and blood . . ."

Luke almost laughed. Mara tapped her forefinger to her brow in a mock salute and walked off with Jaina. When she got in the turbo-lift, she checked her datapad to see where Ben's transponder had gotten to.

If you've left that blade in your locker, Ben . . .

A little earlier, it had shown up on the datapad's small screen as a static blip in Galactic City, in GAG HQ. Now-it didn't.

Mara never panicked, but she reserved the right to professional apprehension. She switched the scale of the chart.

"What's wrong?" Jaina asked.

"Nothing." Where are you? "Nothing at all."

Mara flicked through ever-larger scales of screen until she picked up the transponder blip again, and the coordinates didn't make sense.

Ben appeared to be on Vulpter.

What takes you there, Ben? Vulpter's not in the war.

If she told Luke, with the head of steam he'd built up, she knew he'd go in with all cannons blazing.

So she simply smiled at Jaina, ready to let Lumiya play her game of tag before Mara finally separated her smug head from her metal body, ending her feud with the Skywalkers once and for all.

I'm coming, cyborg. It's time.

chapter nine.

I don't want to worry, you, sir, but I've just heard something on the metal commodities market that might concern us. Someone's talking about offering futures in Mandalorian iron. And MandalMotors shares are being snapped up for the first time in years.

-Investment a.n.a.lyst, Galactic Alliance Treasury MANDALMOTORS RESEARCH WING, KELDABE, MANDALORE "What do you think then Fett?" Jir Yomaget was the kind of man who probably had to be anesthetized to get him into a business suit. He stood with his arms folded, gazing rapt at an airframe that Fett hadn't seen before, an incongruously scruffy and disturbingly young man in dark green coveralls and partial armor. "Prototype?" Yomaget nodded. "Started life as the Kyr'galaar. Up to three crew, or two with extra payload, atmosphere-capable, configurable for anything from planet pounding to hunter-killer roles, and fast. Now tell me it's not gorgeous."

Research wing was a flattering term for the collection of scruffy sheds and hangars. But the ramshackle appearance of the exterior belied the technology within. MandalMotors had struggled to get back on its feet under a Galactic Alliance that wasn't handing out reconstruction grants to Mandalore. Now it had an edge it could exploit.

"How fast?" asked Fett.

Yomaget probably didn't look at his wife and kids with as much adoration as he was lavishing on the a.s.sault fighter. "Point four hyperdrive. The ultimate shock weapon."

"And you never offered me the chance to purchase." Fett had modified Slave I to a point-seven. "That beats an X-wing."

"Unfinished prototype."

It was about fifteen meters nose-to-tail with an eight-meter span, a faceted charcoal-gray wedge of a ship that had none of the insectoid lines of the StarViper. Fett walked around it, noting empty racks and housings, and took a guess that it would pack four laser cannons and maybe a couple of other weapons. The tail ended in a flat section with grilles and vents that looked like the ports on a datapad.

The skin was totally plain, its angled surfaces unbroken except for the mythosaur logo picked out in a lighter gray on the side hatches: no brightwork, no sharp-edged recesses, and the tinted transparisteel canopy seemed to merge into the superstructure. Fett would have ducked underneath it to take a look at the blaster pods and store pylons, but the fighter sat too low for him to do it comfortably. He couldn't face being gripped by pain and having to crawl out like an idiot.

"So it's fast. And pretty."

"Deflective stealth hull, cooled vents, scanner-absorbent coating."

Yomaget flourished a forearm plate attachment, tapped it, and the canopy popped. It parted into two top-hinged hatches, and he swung himself into the c.o.c.kpit. "Also hinges from the lower edge, in case the pilot has to bang out. Now, the avionics . . . synthetic vision, panoramic c.o.c.kpit display, eye-controlled switch selection, aiming, the works."

"Sounds like you had a contest to see how many gizmos you could cram into one lighter."

"All we've been able to do since the Vong war ended is reestablish our basic production models and work up some better ideas." Yomaget leaned over the side of the fighter. "They all ended up in here."

"So . . ."

"Well, you wanted to know what we might manufacture with the new beskar. Personally, I'd be inclined to incorporate it into the air-frame.

Micronized beskar skin, or laminate beskar armor."

"Beviin would call that over-egging the cake."

"Think of this as the demonstrator."

"That would make it the fastest, least vulnerable fighter on the market. The weapons load might be a compromise." Fett wasn't sure if he had the power or right to tell MandalMotors what to do with their product. This wasn't Coruscant, where national security overrode commercial concerns by law. "Add the top-end armaments, though, and I wouldn't want that sold to anyone else."

"Don't worry, we'll de-enrich the spec for export. We live here, remember. We all lost family to the Vong." Yomaget jumped down from the c.o.c.kpit with an agility Fett envied. Then he pressed the forearm plate attachment, and the fighter made a faint grinding sound before tilting back on its tail section and lifting through a full ninety degrees to sit upright, a mechanism not dissimilar to Slave I's. "It can land vertically in a footprint of a little over thirty-two square meters."

Fett walked a few meters away to get a better idea of the shape. It didn't look like any other vessel he'd seen. "I bet it does tricks, too."

"Our shares have rocketed and we haven't even unveiled this."