“Can I help with anything?”
“Are you any good at finding dead bodies?”
“Well—”
“Sorry, Ben.” Shevu dismissed the droid with a sharp look. “We appear to have lost a dead prisoner, and seeing as they don’t stroll out of here unaided, I’m trying to find them. You can’t file an incident report without a body.”
Ben’s stomach sank. “Ailyn Habuur, right?”
“Right. Nobody signed out the body. But it’s gone.”
And so is Jacen. But he was going to see Uncle Han. Ben tried to think of an answer that would take away the nagging dread he felt about Jacen and Ailyn Habuur. “Does it matter?”
Shevu had a way of dropping his chin and staring unblinking at you that made it clear he thought you were an idiot. “Yes, Ben, prisoners who die in custody always matter and you don’t just dump them like garbage. What do you know about her?”
Ben shrugged. “She was angry and scared.”
“I hear from my CSF colleagues that someone was asking questions about her.”
“Is she someone important?”
“I don’t know. Do you?”
Ben shook his head. He got the feeling that Shevu was being cautious about what he said to him and—obvious, this—that he didn’t like Jacen very much.
“Why don’t you go and visit your parents?” Shevu made it sound like an order. “If Colonel Solo comes back in the meantime, I’ll tell him I sent you home.”
It was good to have the decision made for him. Ben wondered if the events of recent days would show on his face so clearly that his father could read them. He hoped so. He wasn’t sure that he could bottle them up much longer.
Mom would understand better. She’d told him a few stories about being the Emperor’s Hand. She’d done some bad things, she said. But it hadn’t made her a bad person, so perhaps Jacen was like that: perhaps he just did a few things that were terrible but he could learn from them and never do them again.
Ben called first and got an automated answer. The Jedi council was in session, so he went to the Temple and waited in the archives for an hour. The meeting went on, and he knew better than to even try to interrupt. So he occupied himself looking for data on Ailyn Habuur.
The Jedi archives were vast, an odd mix of ancient texts and hard data. They said that between the archives and the meditation areas, Jedi could discover anything about the outer and inner worlds that they wanted to if they put their minds to it.
He didn’t find an Ailyn Habuur in any public records—not even in the Kiffar records—but he found a lot of Ailyns and Habuurs. He found thousands. The size of the task daunted him, and he wondered if it mattered whether he found out or not.
Then he found himself looking for the names Nelani and Brisha.
He’d made a deal with himself not to ask any more questions about that missing chunk of time out at Bimmiel that had somehow ended with the Jedi Knight Nelani Dinn and a weird woman called Brisha both getting killed. He accepted that a lot of things had happened that he didn’t fully understand, but they still puzzled him, and Jacen wasn’t telling him.
How had they died?
How did Brisha and Nelani die?
He had to know. The feeling inside him said that what had happened to Ailyn Habuur meant he had to ask, because it changed everything. They were connected somehow.
Nelani was easy to find, because he knew she was a Jedi and that narrowed his search. But there were thousands of Brishas, too—some names, some places—and he didn’t have the time to go through them all. He wasn’t even sure what he was looking for, or if he would even recognize it if he saw it. He made up his mind to ask Jacen when the time seemed right.
Ben took the turbolift to the council chamber floor and waited in the lobby until the meeting broke up. His parents, deep in conversation, walked down the corridor as if they hadn’t spotted him, and he wondered if he had accidentally mastered the art of disguising his presence. Funny; he’d resented being invisible to grown-ups until only a few weeks ago, always ignored like a kid. Now he wanted that invisibility in the Force.
But not right then. At that moment he really wanted his mother and father to know exactly where he was, and to help him find out where he was going.
He wanted to tell them how bad he felt about Ailyn Habuur and Jacen.
But that was wrong. If he had a problem with Jacen, he ought to do things like a grown-up and have it out with him like a man before whining to his mom and dad.
Besides, there were other things he wanted to talk about.
“Hi, honey,” said Mara. She looked him up and down and he wished he had changed out of his uniform. “What’s wrong? Have you been waiting long?”
Ben hugged her and then turned to his father to give him an awkward embrace. He wasn’t sure how he had to behave with him now. Most of the time he’d wanted not to be just Luke and Mara Skywalker’s kid, but at that moment he was almost relieved that he was.
“Can we go have lunch, Dad?”
“Sure. Something really is wrong, isn’t it?”
Ben should have told them right away, but he’d thought about it a little more and he was ready now. He needed to talk.
“I killed someone,” he said. “And I feel really bad about it.”
chapter twenty-two
I regret to announce that the Corellian government has declined our offer of talks unless the Galactic Alliance undertakes to recognize the right of Corellia to maintain its own independent defense force and deterrents. As the Alliance is unable to accept a refusal to disarm, we are now in a state of war with Corellia and her allies.
—Chief of State Cal Omas,
in a brief statement to the Senate
MILLENNIUM FALCON EN ROUTE TO CORONET.
Even sitting at the Falcon’s controls again couldn’t make Han feel any better. He wanted events of the last few days to wind back like a holorecording so he could erase them and do things right this time.
Corellia loomed larger in the viewscreen. At least they could land openly now and the worst thing that would happen would be a few jeers about being a traitor—if anyone remembered that far back. A few weeks was a very long time in a war. And he didn’t care any longer if the Solos were a political embarrassment to Luke. Luke had made his choice.
And my son is turning into a monster.
Leia reached across and put her hand on top of his as he gripped the forward thruster controls.
“It’s eighty kilos per square centimeter.”
“What is?” asked Han, distracted.
“The yield stress of durasteel. You look like you’re testing it.”
Han let go of the controls. The autopilot was active anyway. He had been gripping the yoke for comfort because he felt it was about all he did have a grip on at that moment in his life. “Is it us? Did we raise him like that? How did we do it? How come Jaina isn’t like that?”
“I don’t know what’s happening either.”
“I thought I understood all this dark- and light-side stuff. So it’s all part of the one Force. So what did I meet back there that used to be our Jacen?”
“Honey, you have to calm down.”
“Jacen tortures prisoners to death. How can I calm down? Is he going crazy? Does he feel different to you?”
Leia was always the sensible one with the cool nerves and the ability to make everything sound as if it were under control. He was the one who did the physical stuff. That was the way their marriage worked, and it had withstood some pretty terrible tests. Now she looked as if she couldn’t make things right again.
“Okay,” she said. “Jacen feels … changed to me. Maybe this is what’s getting to Jaina. She’s very unhappy. I can sense it.”
“At least she’s not flying missions. She saw sense.”
“But she hasn’t contacted us, which usually means there’s something she thinks we’d be better off not knowing.”
“You think you could maybe trade Force telekinesis for t
elepathy if you get the chance? That would really come in handy.”
Han rubbed his hands over his face and then checked the control console. They’d land in an hour. But Thrackan was gone forever. That was something. And the Falcon was airworthy again, which was another plus.
“When Fett sees the state of the body, he’s going to work it out for himself,” said Leia.
“Maybe he won’t look.”
“He doesn’t strike me as the squeamish sort, honey.”
“He never saw her for fifty years. It’s not like he cares about her. What sort of father doesn’t see his kid for years?”
“Well, we didn’t see Jacen for five,” Leia pointed out.
“That was different. Are you scared of Fett?”
“I like to give him a wide berth.”
“I’d like to say I can take him anytime, but I have my doubts.”
Leia closed her eyes for a moment as if marshaling her thoughts. “We’ll deal with it if and when it happens. It might not be our biggest problem.”
“What, that our son ticks off the galaxy’s most lethal bounty hunter? What’s higher than that on the list?”
Leia got up from the copilot’s seat and made her way aft to the hatch linking the cockpit to the cargo bays. Han knew she was going to take another look at Ailyn Vel’s body; maybe she was going to make her look a little more presentable for her father, or somehow gather information from her last moments in those Jedi ways. He didn’t ask.
“I’ll tell you what’s a bigger problem than having a feud with Boba Fett,” she said. “Having a son who kills when he doesn’t have to.”
Han wondered if it was the first time Jacen had done that, and felt ashamed for even thinking it.
Then he wondered when Jacen would do it again.
CORONET CITY SPACEPORT, CORELLIA.
Mirta was waiting for Fett when he opened Slave I’s forward hatch. She didn’t have a blaster in her hand, so he gave her the benefit of the doubt.
He was feeling both his age and his illness right then. Dull pain gnawed at him. He ignored it. “The Solos are bringing back Ailyn’s body,” he told her.
“I know. I want it.”
Here we go. “You don’t have a ship and you don’t have any credits. What are you going to do with her?”
“What are you planning to do with her?”
“Bury her.”
“Little late to take care of your daughter now.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Fett noted that she was wearing the heart-of-fire around her neck. “So she gave you the necklace as a lure for me.”
Mirta clasped her hand around the stone. “No, I really did recover it.”
“So what happened to Sintas?”
“Why do you care?”
“Because I loved her. And not even Ailyn could possibly know what happened to us and why I left. So don’t judge me.”
Mirta’s face was set in a snarl. “You never made any attempt to contact them.”
“You want to know what my life was like?”
“Yeah, it must have been tough building that fortune.”
“My dad was killed in front of me when I was ten. I was on the run for three years. I married Sintas at sixteen because I thought I could make my life right by doing what normal people did, but I was wrong. I tried to be a Journeyman Protector but I killed a superior officer and I was jailed and exiled from Concord Dawn. And that was the end of trying to be a regular man. After that, I settled on being Boba Fett, because I just didn’t know how to do anything else.”
Mirta looked at him as if she was debating whether to put a couple of bolts in his head or try a chest shot. He didn’t want her sympathy. He wanted her to understand why he would have made Sintas and Ailyn a lot more miserable by coming back to them after his sentence than by leaving.
And he’d killed an officer who had once been his mentor, his friend. They hadn’t really needed to exile him. He’d wanted to get as far from his pain as he could.
But why did he want Mirta to understand at all? She was just a stranger he’d met a few weeks ago. She’s nothing to me. Maybe she isn’t even my own flesh and blood, just a chancer trying to make a few credits out of me.
There was one way of settling this once and for all. He took out his datapad and accessed his accounts. “Got a bank?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“You put the first round into Sal-Solo. Take the million credits and get lost.”
Her face was a mask of contempt. “You know what you can do with your credits.”
She was family all right. He knew it at a gut level, anyway. “Got any brothers or sisters?”
“No. And no kids, either.”
He never thought to ask that. “You’re too young anyway.”
“I was married. We marry young, don’t we?”
Oh, how we repeat history. I don’t need this trouble. I’ve got enough of my own.
Fett didn’t ask why she wasn’t married any longer. Her sour manner might have had something to do with that. But he’d started to respect her; and she was his granddaughter. She was all the family he had.
No, you need her to find the clone, and she knows what happened to Sintas …
He was playing games with himself, justifying his sentimentality with bogus pragmatism. He could find the clone on his own. He didn’t need to know what happened to his wife. No, he was driven by the same craving that had made his father ask Dooku for a cloned son as part of his fee for being the progenitor of the clone army: he badly wanted family. It would have been simpler to find a wife and settle down, but Boba Fett was no more capable of that than his father had been.
“So we’re going to fight over a corpse.”
“You just want to win,” said Mirta. “Doesn’t matter what you win.”
Fett couldn’t even be angry with her. He leaned against Slave I’s hull and gazed up at the sky through his helmet’s macrobinocular visor, waiting for the Millennium Falcon to appear as a speck in the sky and drop onto the landing strip. Mirta waited beside him—but not with him. He could almost feel the invisible wall she had placed between them.
It was a long half hour.
The Falcon swept across the strip and then looped back to land fifty meters away. Fett straightened up and went to meet her, Mirta at his heels.
Leia Solo was first off the ship and walked toward him as if barring his way. “I’m truly sorry about this, Fett. You, too, Mirta.”
Fett walked past her and climbed the open ramp into the cargo hold. Han was maneuvering a repulsor gurney into the main bay, and he glanced over his shoulder at the two of them.
“Are you going to put us back on your hit list?” Han asked. “If you’re thinking of going after Jacen, he’s too tough a quarry, even for you.”
Fett shook his head in slow, measured contempt. “I don’t have to punish anyone, Solo. Your son orders his own sister to fire on civilians and then suspends her from duty when she refuses. No, I think I’ll leave you to your happy family. I’ve got more pressing business.”
He watched Han look at Leia, and Leia look at Han, and knew that he’d dropped a thermal detonator on them.
So they didn’t know.
Fierfek, that’s my daughter in that body bag.
The silence was that heavy moment before a thunderstorm, pressing down on all of them. Leia—yes, his predecessor Fenn Shysa had been very sweet on Leia, way back before she married the space bum—made a helpless gesture toward the hatch.
“I can get someone to arrange a funeral for you, Fett.”
“No,” he said. “She’s mine.” Time for a gesture. “She’s ours.”
“Okay.” Leia’s voice was low and careful. “Take it easy.”
“I want to see her body.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Princess Leia, I said I want to see my daughter’s body.”
Mirta took hold of his arm. Is that for her comfort or mine? Fett was once
again glad of his helmet, because he didn’t want Han Solo to see his grief. His voice gave nothing away.
“And I want to see my mother,” said Mirta.
Leia stepped back, but Han hovered. Fett couldn’t stop his voice hardening. “Leave us for a few minutes, Solo.”
“Fett—”
“I said leave us.”
Han looked embarrassed and Leia steered him toward the hatch. Fett and Mirta were now alone in the cargo bay anteroom with the trolley.
They both hesitated and made a move for it at the same time. Fett stood back for Mirta, and she eased open the cover, eyes fixed and staring.
It was only the slight jerk of her chin that told him she was shocked. He stood beside her and saw a stranger. Ailyn Vel’s face was bruised and cut but surprisingly peaceful: she wore a Kiffar tattoo, three black lines from her left brow to cheekbone, like her mother Sintas had done. Her dark hair was heavily streaked with gray.
That’s my little girl.
He tried very hard to feel that the body of a middle-aged woman he didn’t recognize was the child he had once held. They said that your kids never stopped being your babies, however old they were, but Fett couldn’t make that connection.
But I want to. I want to feel that.
You missed her whole life. Everything. Did she ever call me Dada? No, I don’t recall that she did.
Mirta leaned over, placed the heart-of-fire around her mother’s neck, and laid her cheek against hers. Then she straightened up and stood back, as if to give him space to take his leave of Ailyn as well. And that was hard. He hesitated, because he could feel another memory, one that he hadn’t suppressed and didn’t want to, crowding in on him. He was in a dusty arena on Geonosis sixty years before, picking up his father’s helmet.
Jedi always take everything from me.
Fett would have to remove his helmet to kiss her goodbye and he wasn’t ready for that, not here. He tidied Ailyn’s hair with gloved fingers and was about to close the body bag when the urge not to lose the heart-of-fire overcame him. It was all he had of a happier time. He unfastened it and found Mirta staring at him, grim and unblinking. She wanted it to rest with Ailyn’s body.
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