So people think we're rearming. We are, but not for the reasons they think. This could be . . . interesting.

He secured Slave I, out of habit rather than mistrust of his own people, and took the speeder bike up to the woodland where he'd re-buried his father's remains after exhuming them on Geonosis.

Ailyn was laid to rest there, too, but Mirta was clearly still uneasy about not returning her to Kiffu. She seemed to see the interment as a temporary stopover. He'd marked the graves with simple stones because it mattered to him to be able to find them again, although he had never been one for visiting graves.

Not even yours, Dad.

Now he was going to put that right. He had no excuse. He wasn't a galaxy away.

All the times I've traveled from world to world, all the light-years I've covered, and I never called in at Geonosis to pay my respects.

Fett grasped briefly at an excuse in his Mandalorian roots. Beviin had always told him it was the armor that mattered to Mandalorians, not the decayed sh.e.l.l abandoned by the spirit. I did that, didn't I? I recovered my Dad's armor and left his body. I did that much, at least.

Nomadic mercenaries couldn't have cemeteries, and they couldn't carry corpses with them. It was probably based on pragmatism, but Mandalorians-with few exceptions, like the Mandalores-still didn't have elaborate shrines and graves even here.

The clearing in the woods was a peaceful, unspoiled spot, somewhere the Yuuzhan Vong hadn't managed to destroy. Tall silver-leaved galek trees, centuries old, fringed an area of spongy moss and short yellow gra.s.s, giving the spot an air of permanent sunlit calm even on an overcast day. Even before Fett set down the speeder bike, he could see Mirta kneeling by her mother's grave, staring down at it, with Ghes Orade, Novoc Vevut's son, staring at her. Their helmets were placed to one side.

She had a funny idea of romance, that girl, but Orade seemed close to besotted, so maybe he didn't care where he had to follow her. They both looked around and watched Fett as he approached. He tried to avoid crushing clumps of fragile amber ferns.

"Tell me if I'm interrupting," Fett said. Orade looked up at him and got to his feet. "Here's the deal. You break her heart, I break your legs."

"Deal," said Orade. He had a sharp-featured pale face and a sc.r.a.p of bright, blond beard. "See you later, Mirta."

Mirta looked past Fett to watch Orade leave, and then glared at him. "I suppose that's your idea of protective concern, Ba'buir."

"Meant it," Fett said. "You're no use to me when you're emotional."

"So . . . what did you want me for?"

"Didn't. Just came to visit Dad's grave."

Her nerf-frying stare softened, probably from embarra.s.sment.

Weeping together over Ailyn just that one time hadn't opened the emotional floodgates and given them a blood-bound relationship cemented by shared grief. It was, and probably always would be, wary and restrained.

"I'll come back later," Fett said.

"No, I was just leaving anyway."

"Okay, let's both stand around in awkward silence for a while and I'll give you a ride back to town."

For some reason, the one thing that never embarra.s.sed Fett was admitting his love for his father. He didn't care if that made him look soft. People said it didn't, especially if they wanted to carry on breathing. He hooked both thumbs in his belt and contemplated the slight depression in the soft mossy ground, realizing he should have filled the grave with more soil to allow for settling.

I'm not doing too bad, Dud. Did you ever have to make domestic - policy when you were Mandalore, or did you just fight? I suppose you know I'm dying.

The last thought caught him unawares. Fett believed in decomposition and eternal oblivion: he'd dealt them out so many times, he knew what awaited him. It was Beviin and his talk of the manda that had him falling into those stupid thoughts about eternity.

"I knew you were basically okay when you split the heart-of-fire to bury half with Mama," Mirta said quietly.

"I'm not sentimental."

"A real sc.u.mbag would have kept the stone intact and sold it."

Fett resented the interruption of his one-sided conversation with his father. "Maybe if I'd left it whole, somebody could have read the information in it." He straightened up, arms at his side. "Are you done here?"

Mirta shrugged, collected her helmet, and began walking toward the speeder. It was an answer of sorts. They set off for Keldabe. There were no straight roads; it made ambushing and pinning down would-be invaders a lot easier.

"What does everyone else do with bodies?" Fett asked.

"Turn left when we get to the river and I'll show you."

Mirta seemed to have taken this born-again Mando thing seriously.

Fett had expected her to kick over the traces and turn wholly Kiffar, like her mother, but she'd jumped to the other extreme. If he hadn't known she wasn't motivated by wealth, he'd have thought she was positioning herself to inherit his fortune. That would have been easier.

Right now, he had no idea what her motive was.

"Gejjen's been a.s.sa.s.sinated, by the way," he said, banking the speeder to turn along the course of the Kelita River. "Heard it on the news."

"Good," she said. She was definitely his granddaughter. "Slimy shabuir!"

"I put the full fee for Sal-Solo in a trust fund for you."

"Thanks. You didn't have to."

"No. I didn't."

"There it is."

"What?"

"The grave."

Fett couldn't see anything, just lush water meadows flanked by rich pasture, vibrantly green even after harvesttime. They said the area had beaten the Yuuzhan Vong's attempts at environmental destruction because the fast-flowing water in the meadow and the river carried the poisons away downstream. Even to Fett's urban and unagricultural eye, it looked like rich soil. "Where?"

"Try your terahertz GPR."

Fett blinked his ground-penetrating radar into life. When he looked at the land now, he saw the variations in density and the pockets of less compacted soil. He also saw cl.u.s.ters of lines and debris so tangled together that he couldn't make out what they were.

"It's a ma.s.s grave," Mirta said.

Fett stopped the speeder and they got off to look. His boots squelched in the sodden gra.s.s, and while it was far from the first time he'd walked on a carpet of the dead, this felt vaguely uncomfortable.

"Lost a lot of people," he said. More than a million. Nearly one in three Mandalorians had died defending the planet. Mirta seemed to be expecting some statesman-like behavior, so he tried. "And no memorial."

"This isn't a war grave," Mirta said. "Mando'ade usually bury in ma.s.s graves anyway. We all become part of the manda. We don't need a headstone."

The exceptional fertility of the soil suddenly made sense. There was no point wasting organic material.

"Manda."

"Collective consciousness. Oversoul. We don't do heaven."

Fett winced. "I know what it is."

"And it gives back to the living. You'll get a marked grave, of course, being Mand'alor. Unless you choose not to."

"Probably just to make sure they know the old Mandalore won't show up again to reclaim the t.i.tle."

"Maybe just to show respect."

"Has it occurred to you," Fett asked, "that all this is a rationalization of the fact that Mandalorians were always on the move, couldn't maintain graves, and needed to dispose of lots of corpses? And that it's free fertilizer?"

Mirta took off her helmet, probably to let him see the full thundercloud of her disapproval. "There's nothing profound that you can't reduce to ba.n.a.lity, is there?"

"I'm a practical man."

"We're a practical people." We. Kiffu had ceased to exist for her.

"But there's nothing wrong with seeing the bigger picture."

"Can I opt out of the manda? I'm not spending eternity with Montross or Vizsla. Or do we take guests from other species? If we adopt them in life, makes sense we take them afterward, so what about the rest of the galaxy?"

Mirta seemed about to spit something vitriolic at him but instead sighed, jammed her helmet back in place, and went back to the speeder.

Fett pondered how tedious it would be if there really were some existence after death, especially if it weren't ticket-only. The one person he wanted to see again was his father. The rest of the dead-loved and hated, but mostly just unloved and dismissed-could stay dead.

He resolved to keep his mouth shut in the future. It had always been the best policy in the past, and meaningful conversation was one of the few things he couldn't seem to master. He took her into the center of Keldabe following the twisting course of the Kelita, skimming above its meanders and river cliffs. The ancient river had gradually kinked back on itself as it ground away patiently at the banks, and it looked as if one good flood would break the narrow necks of land and straighten the course again. A quick inspection with his helmet GPR showed dried-up oxbow lakes pressed like hoofprints into the land on either side. Until the crab-boys had showed up, most of Mandalore had been as it had since before humans arrived: primeval, wild, and still full of the undiscovered. Fett hated the Yuuzhan Vong afresh for ruining that.

Novoc Vevut, Orade's father, built and repaired weapons. He was in the yard of the workshop that also served as his house, machining blaster parts. Fett shut the speeder down at the entrance and Mirta slid off the saddle.

Vevut pushed his transparent protective visor back onto the top of his head and gave them both a big grin.

"Aw, nice to see you two doing stuff together," he said. "Osi'kyr, Fett, are we going to be related?"

Mirta looked at him with a warmth she didn't direct at her own grandfather. Fett hadn't picked up on how far the relationship with Vevut's son had progressed, then. "If beskar is such a good defense, how come you've got so many scars, Buir?" she teased. "Forgot to wear your helmet?"

She'd called him Papa. Vevut grinned. "I cut myself shaving."

"With a Trandoshan."

"Marry Ghes, and I'll make you a blaster that can take the head off a dozen Trandoshans with one shot."

"You know how to turn a girl's head," she said, and removed her helmet and boots before disappearing into the house.

Vevut brushed shiny coils of swarf from the grinding bench. His long woolly black braids were tied back with a piece of string while he worked, but the gold clips strung along them like trophies still rattled and c.h.i.n.ked as he moved. Combined with the striking scars in his ebony skin, they made him look formidably battle-hardened. Beviin said the gold had come from his kills over the years, and that he'd melted it down to make the ornate clips. They made Fett's braided Wookiee scalps look low-key.

"When I adopted Ghes," Vevut said, not raising his eyes from the workbench, "we had a hard time accepting each other at first, too." He rasped glittering shavings from the metal he was shaping and held it up to check the edge. "And I'd known him all his life. His parents were my neighbors. Just because Mirta's your own blood doesn't mean it's automatic."

"I'll bear that in mind."

"Any objections to Orade?"

"Mirta's well over thirteen. She can make her own choices."

"He's a good lad."

"I know." Fett's own inability to cope with partners was no reason for him to have any opinion on his granddaughter's life. But he meant it about breaking Orade's legs. It was a paternal reflex that came out of nowhere. "I did a deal with the Verpine government today. We now have a nonaggression pact with Roche provided they share tech with us."

Vevut stopped rasping sharp edges. "Hey, I didn't even hear us fire any shots . . ."

"They heard the word beskar."

"I do believe good times are on their way again, Mand'alor."

"If you feel like sitting in when we talk weapons with them, your views would be useful."

"Okay. I'll leave my bug spray at home as a mark of respect."

"I'd better tell the clans. In case anyone's thinking of signing up for Kem Stor Ai. The Verpine would be upset about that."

It was a good relaxed way to run a nation. Fett sent word out via his datapad and waited for objections, not expecting any. Apart from questions like the discounts that might now be available on custom Verpine weapons, the chieftains took the news in their stride.

It was as if Mandalorians saved all their pa.s.sions for two things: their families and their wars. Fett returned to Beviin's farm via the river and paused to look at the vast ma.s.s grave again.

Most species found the words unmarked ma.s.s grave the stuff of horror, the worst possible end to life. And yet Mandalorians chose it.

Fett, on the cusp between Mando and aruetii despite his t.i.tle, tried to see his people as the aruetiise saw them, to fully understand the fear just a few million of them could cause simply by existing. Detached, he saw an invading army wiping out whole species, fighting galactic wars, destroying everything in its path; and he saw mercenaries and bounty hunters, unemotional masked dealers in death. The image burned into the collective galactic psyche was one of violent savages, thieves, and looters, whose temporary loyalty to anyone but their own could be bought but never guaranteed.

It happened to be almost completely true-except the bit about loyalty. Most people didn't understand the nature of a contract.

And they never got close enough to see Mandalorians at peace. Come to that, not many Mandalorians did, either. It was a restless galaxy.

Fett resigned himself to existing in no-man's-land-too Mando for the outsider but not Mando enough for some of the clans-and made his way back to Slave I, which was still the haven in which he preferred to sleep. He hoped Beviin wasn't offended. Worrying about someone else's feelings was a novelty, and Fett knew what Beviin would say about the psychology of sleeping in a s.p.a.cecraft when a perfectly comfortable home- any number of homes--was available.

When Fett reached the ship and unlocked the hatch by remote, he found a message waiting for him. It could have been relayed straight to his HUD, but Jaing Skirata did things his own idiosyncratic way.

I SEE YOU DID RIGHT BY MANDALORE. I'LL DO RIGHT BY YOU.

Fett hadn't judged wrong, then. He dropped his dose of capsules into his palm and washed them down with a mix of water and the c.o.c.ktail of liquid drugs that Beluine had prescribed. It was just slowing down his decline, not stopping it.

Jaing hadn't said he'd succeeded.

Death's a motivator, not a threat. You've still got things to achieve before you become fertilizer. You'll just have to do them sooner rather than later.

Fett switched on the monitor in his cramped quarters and sat back with a pack of dry rations to watch the news as Corellia went into meltdown, and the Verpine government of Roche announced talks with Mandalore to agree to a mutual aid and trade treaty.

Then he took out the black book his father had left him. He'd listened to every message recorded in it more than a hundred times, and studied his father's image in it. When he was afraid he was beginning to forget what Jango Fett once looked like, he'd take it out and run the messages again.