Fett adjusted the controls of his jet pack and soared over the fence, landing carefully within the bypassed zone. He memorized the section, visible only by looking for the gription clips. The palm-sized disrupter itself nestled unobtrusively in the grass beyond.
Fett sprinted to the cover of the wall and jetted to the flat roof. Normally he would have fired his grappling hook and climbed, but speed mattered now. It was worth the extra jet pack fuel. He lay on his belly and crept across the roof, his visor almost touching the gravelly surface as the penetrating radar scanned for people within.
It was a huge area to cover. He pressed a medical sound sensor, more sensitive than the military ones, to the roof to pick up what signal he could. From the sound of the conversation immediately below him—a woman recording someone’s educational details—he had landed over the personnel department. And he was still crawling across offices that had external windows. Taun We would be somewhere far from daylight, right at the center.
It took him more than two hours to edge his way across what seemed to him a featureless charcoal-gray cinder plain, listening for clues to what lay beneath and watching the radar outlines of bodies moving. He hoped that the disrupter would still be there when it came time to leave, but if it wasn’t, it would be far easier to make a run for it on the way out than on the way in.
This is really hurting my hips. And my chest.
Fett lifted his body slightly and took his weight on his knees and elbows. He heard the clink of glass dishes and the wusshh and umppp of chiller cabinets opening and closing. He saw people sitting, probably at a long bench and others clustered around a table. The outlines of the inorganic objects were almost impossible to make out, but he was used to assembling a mental image from the scant cues provided by the movement and shape of bodies.
He’d seen a few labs in his time. He knew how Taun We liked hers laid out. When she’d had a leg cloned for him a few years before, her Tipoca laboratory had still been just like it was when he was a kid and she had first shown him around.
He heard the occasional word that sounded like a conversation about a scanning microscope. Could mean anything. But I’m over the labs, that’s for sure. Next vent I find, next point of entry, I’m going down there.
He checked the chrono readout in his helmet, shifting his focus and feeling the beginning of a headache. Three hours. Too slow. The longer he took, the more vulnerable he was to discovery.
You don’t quit now, Fett.
And then he heard it: just a couple of words. It wasn’t even anything from which he could derive meaning. But he knew that tone, that pitch, so very well that it was like hearing his own name whispered in a crowded, noisy room; everything else fell silent as his brain filtered out all irrelevance.
It was Taun We’s fluting, gentle voice. He forgot the raw ache in his sternum and felt the adrenaline course through his body, erasing every pain.
Gotcha…
He frame-grabbed the coordinates in his HUD, got to his knees, and scouted around for an air vent. There was a biohazard containment opening fifty meters across the roof, the kind of hatch that a hazmat team would use to enter the building if it was ever contaminated and sealed. And he knew it would yield to the lock overrides on his wristband. He hadn’t met a lock, seal, or panel that didn’t.
And it was designed to take someone wearing a full hazmat suit. For once, his jet pack wasn’t an encumbrance as he took a security blade from his shin pocket to bypass the breach alarm and opened the hatch.
He slid down the vent and found himself standing in a chamber with two doors leading off it. Both were locked. When he switched to his HUD’s normal vision, the glow around him was that dull amber emergency lighting, and a safety notice on the wall read: LAST INSPECTED 6/8/1/36.
He adjusted his helmet’s sound sensors and listened. The corridor outside was clear. A quick flick back to the terahertz radar scan confirmed it. He made his way down the corridor, checking as he went, following the occasional sound of Taun We’s voice until he found himself outside an office with two shapes visible inside on his helmet scanner: one dense human body and a Kaminoan one with its characteristic abdominal spaces.
Fett ducked into the nearest alcove—a fire control station—and waited for the human to leave. Eventually the doors opened and a woman left. The lock panel at the side of the doors flashed again, but Fett slid a blade from his override system into the slot and the doors parted with a whisper.
He took the precaution of locking them behind him. Leaning over the desk, a tall creature with a long graceful neck and small, round gray head was engrossed in work at a data screen.
Taun We didn’t turn around. “Please leave the file in the tray.”
“Nice place you got here.”
Kaminoans never showed emotion, but the speed with which Taun We whipped around and the way her head jerked back on seeing him told him she was surprised.
“Boba?”
“Oddly, there’s only one.”
“How … did you find me?”
“It’s my job, remember?” Fett walked slowly across the room and propped his backside on the edge of her desk. He lifted his helmet. “Let’s say I followed the money.”
“Koa Ne sent you to—”
“No. He wants the data back, but that’s not why I’m here.”
Taun We stared into his face, blinking slowly. She knew him about as well as anyone alive, and that wasn’t a long list. She looked … old, very old.
“Are you all right, Boba? Is your leg functioning properly?”
“No. In fact, my whole body is giving me a few problems.”
“Can I be of help?”
“I’m suffering from tissue degeneration. Liver problems. Autoimmune diseases. Tumors. My doctor says I have a year or so to live if I’m lucky.” He reached in his belt for a datachip. “Take a look at the tests.”
Taun We took the chip with long, thin fingers and slid it into her dataport. “Ah,” she said. “I see.”
She got up and went to a cabinet, and Fett’s natural mistrust of the galaxy kicked in. If she could run out on her own government, she could betray him. He clicked his blaster just as a warning.
Taun We turned slowly and glanced at the blaster. “Do you think I would wish to draw attention to the fact that you tracked me down and gained access to my secure office?”
“You stole data and defected. Never had you down for that kind, either.”
Did I ever care about Taun We? I think I did.
Fett thought that it was funny how you never truly recalled how you felt as a child, except for the defining moments: and he was defined by his love of his father, and he knew it, and he was proud of it. When the idea occurred to him that it was all he was, he shook it off.
I miss Dad, every single day, every single minute. I want to live up to him.
Fett motioned Taun We to sit down with the barrel of his blaster. She settled in the chair, hands clasped, and didn’t react at all: no fear, no surprise, no affection. She was ice, control, indifference.
You brought me up—more or less.
“Boba,” she said. She still had that soothing, musical voice. He wasn’t sure how long Kaminoans lived, but she had to be coming to the end of her life. “I regret that I don’t have the skills to help you.”
You’re the nearest I ever had to a mother. And that scares me sometimes.
“I guessed as much,” said Fett. “I just want your data. And some information.”
She’s completely cold. I was just another experiment she was pleased with.
“My data belongs to Arkanian Micro.”
“The data belongs to the Kaminoan government, but seeing as they aren’t paying me, I’ll take it to cover my expenses.”
“I can’t hand it over.”
“So I’ll take it.” Fett slipped the data breaker from a pouch on his belt and flipped it over in his left hand. He selected the docking interface that fit Arkanian Micro’s computer system; the device h
ad a dozen different plugs that rotated into position on a wheel. “Or copy it, anyway. I don’t plan to sell it—yet.”
Taun We blinked slowly. She had the eyes of the Kaminoan ruling class: gray, not yellow, not low-caste blue. “It will ruin Arkanian Micro.”
“Tough.”
“And it will ruin me. Do you feel no compassion for me, Boba?”
“No. I don’t believe I do. Not now.”
Taun We appeared to be considering the revelation, head tilting slowly from side to side on the long column of her slender neck like a tree swaying in a breeze. He wondered if that reaction was just her expertise in human psychology taking a knock: she didn’t know his mind as well as she thought. She still reminded him of a nahra artist, a Kaminoan mime-dancer. He’d always been baffled by nahra as a kid, because Kaminoans didn’t feel a thing and yet they loved a kind of ballet that mimed emotions they didn’t appear to have.
That summed up their lives—and his, he realized.
Time for analysis later. Get to work.
Still holding his blaster on the scientist, Fett took three paces to the computer console and slid the data breaker into the port. The device sparkled with blue and green status lights to show that it was searching and downloading, and he let it gather a lot more data than he needed. He wasn’t a thief, but other Arkanian Micro data might come in handy—and even save his life. He was just taking custody of a copy of it.
“I don’t make deals,” he said. The status bar indicated that five thousand exabytes of data had been swallowed whole. Complete genomes took a lot of memory. “But here’s a promise. Tell me all you know about Ko Sai, and I won’t hand this data over to the highest bidder. That’ll make sure you’re still of use to Arkanian Micro.”
“She’s dead.”
“I still want to know everything.”
Taun We paused for a moment, blinking slowly at the blaster. “Are you going to take me back to Kamino by force?”
“No. I don’t need the credits.”
“But would you kill me, Boba?”
He paused. For this, I would. “Yes.”
She still seemed puzzled, not hurt, or afraid, or betrayed. “Very well. Ko Sai thought the cloning program would be destroyed, so she defected to the Separatists during the Battle of Kamino to save her life’s work.”
“And her own skin.”
“We are not materialisic, Boba. It was not about payment. It was about pride. About excellence.”
Fett slipped the data breaker back in his belt. “Get on with it. Where did she go?”
“I have no idea where her journey took her next.”
“What happened to her?”
“She was … traced.”
“By who?”
Another pause. Whatever it was, it was giving Taun We problems. “Clone intelligence units. And one of your father’s commando instructors.”
Fett swallowed hard. He hadn’t expected that. “And?”
She indicated the braided Wookiee pelts strung from his right shoulder plate. “She fell prey to the Mandalorian penchant for souvenirs.”
“Interesting,” said Fett. No, it’s astonishing, it’s terrifying, it’s hope, it’s everything. “So the clones got their revenge.”
“We assumed so. Packages arrived. Parts of a Kaminoan body whose genetic profile was Ko Sai’s.”
Fett found that unnecessarily brutal. Kill a prisoner if you were paid to, kill them if you needed to; even retrieve parts if you had to. But mailing Ko Sai home a piece at a time sounded like a vengeful, elaborate message. “And her data?”
“We can only assume they took that, too. It has never been recovered.”
“What was special about it?”
“Ko Sai’s triumph was controlling the aging process. She knew how to manipulate it better than any other biologist. We were interested only in accelerating it to mature clones faster, but I can see how many would find slowing the process and its therapeutic potential an attractive commodity. She claimed she was able to achieve it in the laboratory.”
Mirta had met an original Kamino clone, she claimed. A clone who couldn’t, shouldn’t be alive today. Fett found a slew of puzzle pieces dumped in his lap, all fitting together. Impossible clones, dismembered Kaminoan scientist, missing cloning data. “You got any names?”
Taun We stiffened. “Do you remember that aggressive little human called Skirata? The one who … threatened my colleagues with a knife so frequently?”
Yes, he remembered Kal Skirata, all right. Sometimes his father swore he was the best of the bunch; sometimes he just swore at him and lashed out. Jango Fett rarely lost his temper, but Skirata had a talent for making that happen. He was ferociously and uncompromisingly Mandalorian.
As a lonely kid on Kamino, Fett had narrowly escaped being forced to learn Mando’a from Skirata’s wildly unpredictable special forces trainees, six cloned ARC troopers who answered only to him. They were intelligence units; the Nulls, as everyone called them, the first batch of clones, and they had turned out crazy, hypersmart, and dangerous. They had disappeared when the war ended.
Yes, this was a neat pattern. Skirata lived for his clones. He’d want them to live out full lives like ordinary men. He would have wanted Ko Sai’s data and expertise very badly. Butchering her to get the genetic technology he needed to stop the accelerated aging would have been nothing to him, just a means to an end.
And if one of Skirata’s clone troops was still alive and fully active today when he should have been the equivalent of a 140-year-old, it meant that they’d found a way to stop the accelerated aging process—Ko Sai’s way.
That’s what I need. That will save my life.
Fett was suddenly enveloped in a sensation of vivid awareness, like a pleasantly cool shower on a hot day; the colors around him seemed instantly vibrant, the sounds crystal clear, the smells sharp. Adrenaline coursed through him. He’d found what he was looking for—or the route to it, at least.
He’d never failed to track a bounty. Never. Even if a few had escaped in the end, he had always found them.
I’ll find you, too.
“Useful,” said Fett. Holding the blaster level was making his forearm ache. He’d never felt that before. “You keep quiet about this and I’ll keep this data to myself. Got it?”
“Agreed,” said Taun We. “And if—when you find Ko Sai’s data, we would give you an excellent fee for its return.”
He suddenly thought of Sintas, her eyes brimming with tears of joy as she held baby Ailyn. No, Taun We couldn’t possibly care about him like a real mother.
Taun We’s first thought was for her science.
“Maybe I don’t want to sell it,” said Fett.
“What do you plan to do with your legacy?”
“What?”
“You’re dying. And even if you succeed in finding Ko Sai’s data and it can help you, then you still face the question of what legacy you will leave behind.”
“Why does that worry you?”
“I believe it was a concern to your father. He told Count Dooku that he did not want a son—he wanted an apprentice to be Jaster’s legacy.”
That stung. Maybe Taun We didn’t mean it the way it sounded. He remained deadpan and wished he had kept his helmet on. “Jaster Mereel was more than Dad’s mentor. He was a father.”
That seemed to mean nothing to Taun We. “And what is that legacy?”
“To be Mandalore. To make sure Mandalorians survive, whatever happens. And I’ll live up to my father’s pledge just as he did before me.”
Taun We remained glacial. “We will exceed any offer.”
Dad was always looking back at Jaster Mereel, feeling he had to live up to him. Maybe I was a second chance to do that.
“I’ll let you know.”
Jaster’s legacy. Beviin’s got a point. More Mandalore, less business.
Maybe she said it to wound him. No, Kaminoans didn’t care about anything, even if they were almost your mother.
; He put on his helmet and turned to leave. Would she raise the alarm? She wouldn’t want anyone to know that her data had been compromised. All she cared about was her work, as she always had, and that would buy her silence. If Arkanian Micro ran any security checks, they would find nothing missing and no botched attempts at slicing their system. It was between him and Taun We.
“I would like to know if you find Ko Sai’s research, and if it cures you,” she said.
Fett resisted the urge to ask if that was personal or professional concern. “If I’m still around in a couple of years, you will.”
He left the way he had come in, crawling back up the hazmat access hatch with the aid of his grappling hook and covering the distance to the edge of the roof in a rapid crawl. The disrupter clips were still in place. Checking around him, he jetted over the fence, released the clips—and as far as the fence sensors were concerned he had never been there.
Slave I’s ramp lowered via his remote helmet link and he stepped up it, wondering why he clung so fiercely to his father’s ship. It was a wonderful vessel, but it meant more to him than just the best his fortune could buy.
I’m in my seventies now, and I’ve only just started to be more than someone’s son. Doesn’t mean I love you any less, Dad, but I can’t look back forever.
Boba Fett wasn’t certain what would fill that void and show him his purpose in life, but he knew now that it lay ahead of him, and not behind him frozen in memories.
He stood in front of Slave I, an icon of his childhood, and wondered where the line between trademark and trap was drawn.
“So you didn’t trash the cockpit,” he said, opening the conversation for once.
Mirta was wiping the console. It looked remarkably shiny: Fett kept a clean, well-maintained ship, but this time it looked polished. “Did you get what you came for?” she asked.
He kicked Slave I into life and lifted her clear, looping under the monorail that snaked two kilometers above Vohai’s surface. “I did.”
“What now?”
Fett took refuge behind his visor. He was torn now. He needed to find that impossibly old clone, and he wanted to see Ailyn, and he wanted to know how Sintas had died.
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