Текст книги "Sacrifice "

Автор книги: Karen Traviss

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"I need some credits for the fare. I'm fed up with stealing to get by."

"Of course." Ben had done the job, and proved he could survive on his wits. Jacen realized the art of building a man was to push him hard enough to toughen him without alienating him. It was a line he explored carefully. He fished in his pocket for a mix of denominations in untraceable credcoins. "Here you go. Now get something to eat, too."

With one last look at the sphere ship, Ben gave Jacen a casual salute before striding off in the direction of the stores turbolift.

Jacen waited. The ship watched him: he felt it, not alive, but aware.

Eventually he heard soft footsteps on the deck behind him, and the ship somehow seemed to ignore him and look elsewhere.

"A Sith meditation sphere," said Lumiya.

"An attack craft. A fighter."

"It's ancient, absolutely ancient." She walked up to it and placed her hand on the hull. It seemed to have melted down into a near hemisphere, the vanes and—Jacen assumed—systems masts on its keel tucked beneath it. Right then it reminded him of a pet crouching before its master, seeking approval. It actually seemed to glow like a fanned ember.

"What a magnificent piece of engineering." Lumiya's brow lifted, and her eyes creased at the corners; Jacen guessed that she was smiling, surprised. "It says it's found me."

It was an unguarded comment—rare for Lumiya—and almost an admission. Ben had been attacked on a test that Lumiya had set up; the ship came from Ziost. Circumstantially, it wasn't looking good. "It was searching for you?"

She paused again, listening to a voice he couldn't hear. "It says that Ben needed to find you, and when it found you, it also recognized me as Sith and came to me for instructions."

"How did it find me? I can't be sensed in the Force if I don't want to be, and I didn't let myself be detected until—"

A pause. Lumiya's eyes were remarkably expressive. She seemed very touched by the ship's attention. Jacen imagined that nobody—nothing —had shown any interest in her well-being for a long, long time.

"It says you created a Force disturbance in the Gilatter system, and that a combination of your . . . wake and the fact you were looking for the . . . redheaded child . . . and the impression that the crew of your ship left in the Force made you trackable before you magnified your presence."

"My, it's got a lot to say for itself."

"You can have it, if you wish."

"Quaint, but I'm not a collector." Jacen heard himself talking simply to fill the empty air, because his mind was racing. I can be tracked. I can be tracked by the way those around me react, even though I'm concealed. Yes, wake was the precise word. "It seems made for you."

Lumiya took a little audible breath, and the silky dark blue fabric across her face sucked in for a moment to reveal the outline of her mouth.

"The woman who's more machine, and the machine that's more creature." She put one boot on the ramp. "Very well, I'll find a use for this. I'll take it off your hands, and nobody need ever see it."

These days, Jacen was more interested by what Lumiya didn't say than what she did. There was no discussion of the test she'd set for Ben and why it had taken him to Ziost and into a trap. He teetered on the edge of asking her outright, but he didn't think he could listen to either the truth or a lie; both would rankle. He turned to go. Inside a day, the Anakin Solo would be back on Coruscant and he would have both a war and a personal battle to fight.

"Ask me," she called to his retreating back. "You know you want to."

Jacen turned. "What, whether you intended Ben to be killed, or who I have to kill to achieve full Sith Mastery?"

"I know the answer to one but not the other."

Jacen decided there was a fine line between a realistically demanding test of Ben's combat skills and deliberately trying to kill him. He wasn't sure if Lumiya's answer would tell him what he needed to know anyway.

"There's another question," he said. "And that's how long I have before I face my own test."

The Sith sphere ticked and creaked, flexing the upper section of its webbed wings. Lumiya stood on the edge of the hatch and looked around for a moment, as if she was nervous about entering the hull.

"If I knew when, I might also know who," she said. "But all I feel is soon, and close." Something seemed to reassure her, and she paused as if listening again. Perhaps the ship was offering its own opinion. "And you know that, too. Your impatience is burning you."

Of course it was: Jacen wanted an end to it all—to the fighting, the uncertainty, the chaos. The war beyond mirrored the struggle within.

Lumiya was telling the truth: soon.

MEETING OF THE CLANS, MANDALMOTORS HALL, KELDABE, CAPITAL OF

MANDALORE

A hundred or so of the hardest-looking males and females that Fett had ever seen were gathered in the stark charcoal-gray granite building that MandalMotors had donated to the community.

The hardest face of all was that of his granddaughter. Mirta Gev watched him from the side of the meeting hall with his father's eyes. My own eyes.

Fierfek, she really did have the Fett eyes. Maybe he was seeing what wasn't really there, but the look bored through into his soul anyway. It was a look that said: You failed. He didn't hear the murmur of voices around him, just the soundless accusations that his daughter Ailyn was dead, that he had never been there for her until it was too late, and that he might also be too late to start being a worthy Mandalore. His father had groomed him to be the best, and even if he'd never mentioned being Mandalore one day, it went with the legacy. Jaster's legacy.

Better be quick, then. I'm dying. I've got business to take care of. Priorities: a cure, then find out what happened to my wife, what happened to Sintas Vel.

It wasn't that Mirta wouldn't tell him.

She didn't know. She had the heart-of-fire gem he'd given Sintas as a wedding gift, but it had turned up at a dealer's shop. It was just bait. And he'd taken it.

But, Fett being Fett, it was more than bait. It was a motivator: it was another piece of evidence.

It's never too late to find out. I thought it was, but it's not.

The hubbub of the chieftains of the clans, heads of companies, and an assortment of veteran mercenaries faded voice by voice into silence.

They watched him warily. Not all of them were human, either: a Togorian and a Mandallian, both wearing impressive armor, leaned against the far wall, massive arms folded across their chests. Species didn't matter much to Mandalorians. Culture defined them. Fett wondered what that made him.

"Oya!" It was muttered at first, then shouted a few times. "Oya!"

It was a word with a hundred meanings for Mandalorians. This time it meant "Let's go, let's get on with it." They always started their gatherings this way, and this was the nearest Mandalorians ever came to a senate.

They didn't go in for procedural nicety.

A chieftain with an ornately shaved beard and an eye patch stood up to speak without ceremony. "So, Mand'alor? he said. "Are we going to fight or what?"

"Who do you want to fight?" Fett noted that they reverted to Basic when addressing him, in deference to his ignorance of Mando'a. "The Galactic Alliance? Corellia? Some Force-forsaken pit on the Rim?"

"There's never been a war we haven't fought in."

"There is now. This isn't our fight. Mandalore's got its own troubles."

"The war's escalating. Their troubles might come and find us."

Fett stood by the long, narrow window that ran the height of the west– facing wall. It was more like an arrow loop than a view on the city.

Mandalorians built for defense, and public buildings were expected to serve as citadels, even more so now. The Yuuzhan Vong had wreaked terrible vengeance on Mandalore for its covert work for the New Republic during the invasion, but the carnage had just made Mando'ade more ferociously determined to stay put. The nomadic habit was still there: it was more about a refusal to yield than love of the land. But they couldn't lose a third of the population and shrug it off, not while many still remembered the Imperial occupation.

Sore losers, the Vong. But it's not like I had any alternative.

Better the New Republic than the crab-boys.

Fett scanned the hall, aware of Mirta's fixed and almost baleful stare.

"What's the first rule of warfare?"

On seats, on benches, leaning in alcoves, or just standing with arms folded, the leaders of Mandalorian society—or as many as could get to

Keldabe—watched him carefully. Even the head of MandalMotors, Jir Yomaget, wore traditional armor. Most had taken off their helmets, but some hadn't. That was okay by Fett. He kept his on, too.

"What's in it for us," said a thickset human man leaning back in a chair that seemed to have been cobbled together from crates. "Second rule is how much is in it for us."

"So . . . what is in it for us this time?"

Us. Fett was Mand'alor, chieftain of chieftains, commander of supercommandos, and he couldn't avoid the us any longer. He didn't feel like us. He felt like an absent husband who'd sneaked home to find an angry wife demanding to know where he'd been all night, not sure how to head off the inevitable argument. They made him feel uncomfortable. He examined the feeling to see what was causing it.

Not up to the job.

He might have been the best bounty hunter, but he didn't think he was the best Mandalore, and that unsettled him because he had never been simply adequate. He expected to excel. He'd taken on the job; now he had to live up to the title, which was much, much easier in war than in peacetime.

Fenn Shysa must have thought he could do it, though. His dying wish was to have Fett assume the title, whether he wanted it or not. Crazy barve.

The thickset Mando shrugged. "Credits, Mand'alor. We need currency, in case you hadn't noticed."

"To spend on importing food."

"That's the idea."

"I suppose that's one way of balancing supply and demand."

"What is?"

"Back one side or the other in this war. That'll reduce the number of mouths to feed. Dead men don't eat."

There were snickers of laughter and comments in Mando'a this time.

Fett made a mental note to program his helmet translator to deal with it, and that felt like the ultimate admission of defeat for a leader: he couldn't speak the language of his own people. But they didn't seem to care.

"I'm with the Mand'alor on this," said a hoarse male voice at the back of the assembly. Fett recognized that one: Neth Bralor. He'd known a few Bralors in his time, but they weren't all from the same clan. It was a common name, sometimes simply an indication of roots in Norg Bral or another hill– fort town. "We lost nearly a million and a half people fighting the vongese. That might be small change for Coruscant, but it's a disaster for us. No more—not until we get Manda'yaim in order. We'll eat bas neral if we have to."

A murmur of rumbling agreement rippled around the hall. A few chieftains slapped their gauntlets on their armor in approval. One of them was the woman commando Fett had met in Zerria's on Drall, Isko Talgal. Her expression was still as grim, graying black hair scraped back from her wind-tanned face and braided with silver beads, but she banged her fist on her thigh plate in enthusiastic approval. Fett wondered what she looked like when she was unhappy.

"You wanted a decision from me. You got it." Fett felt time accelerating past him, and it eroded what little patience he had. Every bone

in his body ached right through to his spine. "Galactic Alliance or Confederation—you think it's going to make any difference to us?"

"No," said another voice, thick with a northern Concordian accent.

"Coruscant won't be asking us to disarm anytime soon. They might need us if they get another vongese war."

"Chakaare!" someone laughed. But the debate picked up pace, still mostly

"And what if the war comes too close to home? What if it spreads to a neighboring system or two?"

"Even if we side with the Alliance, what's to say they won't turn on us and expect us to toe their nice tidy disarmed line?"

"It's not disarmament they want, it's pooling every planet's assets into the GA Defense Force, and we all know how slick and efficient that's going to be . . ."

Fett stood back and watched. It was both uplifting and entertaining in its way. It was the kind of decision-making process that could happen only in a small population of ferociously independent people who knew immediately when it was time to stop being individuals and come together as a nation.

Funny, that's the last thing Mandalore is: a nation. Sometimes we fight on different sides. We're scattered around the galaxy. We're not even one species. But we know what we are and what we want, and that's not going to change anytime soon.

The arguments were all coming down to one thing. A lot of people needed the credits. Times were still tough.

Fett brought his fist down hard on the nearest solid surface—a small table —and the crack brought the hubbub of discussion to a halt.

"Mandalore has no position on the current war, and there'll be no divisions over it," he said. "Anyone who wants to sell their services individually to either side—that's your business. But not in Mandalore's name."

He braced for the eruption of argument from the sudden silence, thumbs hooked in his belt. His helmet's wide-angle vision caught a fully armored figure standing at the rear of the hall. It wasn't always possible to tell if a Mando in armor was male or female, but Fett was sure this was a man, medium height and with his hands clasped behind his back. The left

shoulder plate of his purple-black armor was a light metallic brown. It wasn't unusual to see odd-colored plates, because many Mandalorians kept a piece of a dead loved one's armor, but this was striking for a reason Fett couldn't work out. Something glittered in the central panel of the man's breastplate, a tiny point of light as the sun cut across the chamber in a shaft so sharp and white that it seemed solid.

I should do that. I should wear a piece of Dad's armor with my own, every day.

He felt bad that he didn't, but jerked his attention back to the meeting.

"That's okay, then," said a cheerful, white-haired man sitting a few paces from him. A dark blue tattoo of a vine emerged from the top of his armor and ended under his chin. Baltan Carid, that was his name. Fett had last seen him dispatching Yuuzhan Vong with a battered Imperial-era blaster at Caluula Station. "That's all we needed to know. That there's no ban on mercenary work."

"I'll make it clear to both sides that there's no official involvement in their dispute," Fett said. "But if any of you want to get yourselves killed, it's your call."

"So we might see Mando fighting Mando in this aruetiise's war."

Everyone looked around at the man in the purple armor. Fett saw no need to learn the language, but there were words he couldn't avoid: aruetiise.

Non-Mandalorians. Occasionally pejorative, but usually just a way of saying not one of us. "Hardly conducive to restoring the nation, is it?"

"But fighting's our number one export," said Carid. "What do you want, make Keldabe into a tourist spot or something?" He roared with laughter. "I can see it now. Visit Mandalore before Mandalore visits you.

Take home some souvenirs—a slab of uj cake and a smack in the mouth."

"Well, our economic policy right now seems to be to earn foreign credits . .

. get killed . . . and neglect the planet."

Carid had a magnificent sneer. He was far more intimidating without a helmet. "You got a better idea? Oh, wait—is this going to be the all-day diatribe on kadikla self-determination and statehood? 'Cos I ain't getting any younger, son, and I'd like to be home in time for dinner,

'cos my missus is making pea-flour dumplings."

That got a lot of laughs. Carid generally did. There were shouts and guffaws. "Yeah, we know about the dumplings, Carid . . ."

But . . . kadikla. So the Mandalore-first movement had a name now, even its own adjective, too. He hadn't come across Kad'ika yet, the man they said was driving the new nationalism. Fett thought that was remiss of the man, seeing as he'd done just what was asked of him and returned to lead Mandalore.

"Critical mass, ner vod." Purple Man ignored the howls of laughter.

His voice had the tone of someone who'd argued this many times before.

"We have a population of fewer than three million here, and maybe as many as three times that in diaspora. We lost a lot of our best troops, our farmland's been poisoned, and our industrial infrastructure is still shot to harem after ten years. So maybe this is the ideal time to bring some people home. Gather in the exiles while the rest of the galaxy is busy."

Carid was focused on the debate now, and Fett was temporarily forgotten. "Yeah, group up to make a nice easy target. All of us in one place."

"Nobody except the vongese has attacked us in a long time."

"The Empire gutted us. You've got a short memory. Or maybe you were still in diapers when Shysa had to kick some pride back into us."

"Okay, so let's abandon Mandalore. Go totally nomad again. Keep moving. Rely on the whim of every government except our own."

"Son, we are the shabla government," Carid said. "So what do you want to do about it?"

"Consolidate Mandalore and the sector. Bring our people home, and build something nobody's ever going to overrun again." Purple Man had a faint accent; a little Coruscanti, a little Keldabian. "A citadel. A power base. So we choose when we stay home and when we go expeditionary."

"Funny, I thought that was just what we were doing."

Fett watched the exchange, fascinated. Then he realized everyone was staring at him, waiting for him to respond—or at least to call a halt. So this was leadership off the battlefield. It was just like running his business, only more ... complex. More variables, more unknowns—he hated unknowns —and something that was utterly alien to him: responsibility for other people, millions of them, but people who could take care of themselves and ran the place well enough without any bureaucracy.

Or me. Do they need me at all?

"What's your name?" Fett asked.

Purple Man was leaning against the wall, but he pushed himself away from it with a shrug to stand upright. "Graad," he said.

"Okay, Graad, it's policy as of now. I'm asking for two million folks to return to Mandalore. How many you think we'll get?" It made sense: the planet needed a working population. It needed extra hands to clean up the soil that the vongese had poisoned and to cultivate the land left fallow by dead owners. But every Mandalorian in the galaxy didn't add up to a single town on many planets. "We're still short on credits until we become self– sufficient in food production again."

"We'll contribute half our profits," said the MandalMotors chief.

"As long as we can sell fighters and equipment to either side, of course."

"Business is business." Fett gave him an acknowledging nod. "I'll chip in a few million creds, too."

Carid looked around him as if to single out anyone mad enough to dissent, but everyone had what they wanted from the meeting. Mirta still managed to look baleful. The slice of her mother's heart-of-fire stone dangled on a leather cord around her neck. At least she had a decent helmet now, apparently her first, so that showed just how much of a Mandalorian her father had been—or how little she'd seen of him.

Maybe Mando fathers have been disappointing her all her life.

"One last thing," Fett said. "I'm going to be away from base for a few days. Uncontactable."

"How will we notice?" someone muttered.

It was a fair point. "So I'm not the governing kind. But I haven't let you down yet. While I'm away, Goran Beviin stands in for me."

There was no dissent. Beviin was solid and trustworthy, and he didn't want to be Mandalore. He was also a complete savage with a beskad, an ancient Mandalorian iron saber, as many Yuuzhan Vong had discovered the hard way. Any argument about the isolationist policy in Fett's absence wouldn't last long.

"We're done here," said Carid. "You give me the inventory of all the farmland lying fallow, and my clan will make sure it gets allocated to whoever returns to farm it." He hung back for a moment and made an exaggerated job of replacing his helmet. "I'm glad you brought Jango home, Mand'alor. It was the right thing to do."

Was it? Home for his father was Concord Dawn. It was right for Mandalore, maybe. They liked their figureheads where they could see them, even their dead ones.

"Nobody has to listen to me if they don't feel like it."