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  “Tell him he can always be replaced by a med droid,” he said.

  When Fett banked the speeder around the last stand of trees, he could see Mirta leaning against the aft hull plates of Slave I, arms folded across her chest, and Goran Beviin waiting beside her in his slate-gray farm overalls.

  “No good acting like you don’t care,” Beviin said as Fett opened the cargo hatch from the remote on his forearm plate and steered the speeder onto the ramp. “You might have left her, but she’s still your wife.”

  Fett secured the speeder. “Ex-wife.”

  “The rooms and med droids are ready, anyway.”

  Fett didn’t mean to sound ungrateful. Beviin was a good man, Fett’s chosen successor if anything went wrong—like death, like illness, like just plain old age—and he’d put up with a lot of demands since they’d located Sintas Vel’s body.

  Fett’s wife wasn’t dead.

  Dead would have been hard after she’d been missing for more than thirty years. Dead would have been easier than finding her encased in carbonite, stored like junk among some dead gangster’s forgotten possessions, and then working out what he’d say to her.

  How do I tell her that our daughter Ailyn’s dead?

  How do I tell her everything that’s happened since she went missing? That’s she’s got a granddaughter?

  At least Mirta could do her own telling. Fett released the hatch and she climbed into the cockpit, a battered bag over one shoulder. She was in her midtwenties, although she had a scrubbed look that made her look like a kid, and that meant she wouldn’t be that much younger than her grandmother when she was revived.

  But I don’t know that. Sintas could have been captive for years, and only carbonited recently. She could be nearer my age. She was a few years older than me …

  Either way, it was going to be a very hard reunion. The last time he saw her, he’d left her injured in an alley. It was an ignominious exit to add to abandoning her and their baby daughter. And now all the pain was going to come erupting to the surface again, all the memories he’d locked in his past as surely as carboniting them so he never had to look at them.

  “The med droid’s got full psychiatric programming, too, Bob’ika,” Beviin said quietly.

  People usually came out of carbonite in a bad way, anything from blind and disoriented to totally and permanently insane. She’d really thank him for that. If he only knew what her chances were.

  “Thanks, Goran,” said Fett. “Tell Medrit I’m grateful.”

  “Ah, we’ve always got room for guests. Kih’parjai. It’s nothing.”

  “Okay, look after the shop while I’m gone.”

  The war between the Galactic Alliance and the Confederation was forgotten for the time being. Fett settled into the pilot’s seat and waited until he saw Beviin walk clear of the downdraft before he flicked the controls, and Slave I throbbed into life. The north Mandalorian countryside receded below into a patchwork, and the sky through the viewport darkened to violet and then black as they left the atmosphere. There was no going back now.

  “What if she ends up insane?” asked Mirta.

  “Han Solo was carbonited and he’s strutting around just fine.”

  “I’ll look after her,” she said.

  “I can take care of her.”

  “Pay someone else to do it, you mean.”

  So Mirta was in one of her combative moods today. That meant she was scared. He understood why, but he had his own problems to deal with when it came to facing Sintas again.

  How old was I when I walked out? Nineteen? And then Mirta will want to drag up the reasons why I left. It’s going to be rough.

  “Whatever,” he said. “She’ll be taken care of.”

  Fett wanted to blot the past out of his mind. He set course for Phaeda manually just to keep his hands busy, to stop thinking, and to avoid a conversation with Mirta; he even kept his helmet on in the cabin, his hint to her these days that he didn’t want to talk. But it was never that easy to fend off her scrutiny. She seemed to hate gaps in a story, and for her, Fett had a lot more gaps than story in his life.

  “Where did you go this morning?” she asked.

  Not telling her would just stoke the fire. And maybe he wanted to give in to the interrogation now, maybe it was time she knew, even though nobody else did, maybe … did he want her to think better of him?

  Fett paused. “Shysa’s memorial.”

  “Why?”

  Here we go. “Hadn’t been there since he died.”

  “Your brother said you deposed him …”

  Brother? Brother. Jaing, Jaing Skirata, that stanging smart-aleck clone who was still around all these years later. “He’s not my brother. We just share a genome, more or less. And I told him he didn’t know what went on between me and Shysa.”

  “But you came back, and Shysa didn’t.”

  “Long story.”

  “Got plenty of time. What happened?”

  It gave Fett the occasional twinge of regret. It didn’t haunt him, because he’d done what he had to do, and the alternative would have gnawed away even at his durasteel conscience. He debated whether to tell her, worried about his reasons for resurrecting another grim episode of his life at a time like this.

  “I killed him,” Fett said at last. “I killed Fenn Shysa.”

  FLEET HQ, GALACTIC CITY

  Admiral Cha Niathal could sense the mood of a ship—or shore establishment—the moment she stepped on board. And the mood of this one was shocked fear.

  It was impossible to keep some things quiet, and killing a junior officer on the bridge of the Anakin Solo was about as hard to hide as it got.

  It can’t be true.

  But the Anakin’s captain, Kral Nevil, a Quarren with a solid reputation both as a pilot and a commander, had witnessed it. He wasn’t the only one who’d seen the incident: it wasn’t just “buzz,” the fast-flowing river of gossip that circulated through both wardroom and lower deck throughout the fleet. Colonel Jacen Solo, joint Chief of State of the Galactic Alliance, had snapped Lieutenant Tebut’s neck without even touching her, on the bridge of his flagship, in full view of the crew. The reason didn’t matter. The enormity of the act made any reason irrelevant.

  The news had leaked. It would go around the fleet like a flash signal. Even the absolute loyalty of the Star Destroyer’s rigorously vetted crew didn’t stop talk about something that serious. Tebut had been loyal, too, they would say to one another, and look what had happened to her.

  It was just as well Niathal had reliable witnesses, because without them she would have dismissed it as wild rumor. Jacen had done plenty of dirty things on his rise to power, but this wasn’t just dirty. It was deranged.

  He’s lost it. He’s becoming a megalomaniac. What do I do now?

  She strode along the corridors of the HQ building toward the wardroom. On any other day, even in the middle of a war, the atmosphere in the building was busy and purposeful; the cumulative hum of voices had a certain pitch. If a ship had been lost in action, the hum dropped in volume and pitch and the sorrow was tangible, but the pulse, the very heartbeat of the navy, was still there.

  Today, the beating had stopped. The whole building seemed to be holding its breath, scared to exhale. When Niathal passed personnel, they saluted automatically as normal, but they looked at her with expressions she could read all too well: What’s happening? How is he getting away with this? Surely you’re going to do something about him?

  Those looks, mute pleas, were agonizing. But they weren’t as bad as the ones that said: You’re joint Chief of State. You’re letting him do this.

  Niathal walked into the low rumbling of subdued conversation in the warrant officers’ mess and hit a wall of sudden silence. Then everyone scrambled to snap to attention. She could taste the dread.

  “At ease,” she said, and tried to act as if she was doing normal Admiral’s Rounds to check on routine matters like tidiness and morale. “Any complaints?”

&nb
sp; “No, ma’am.” It was a chorus of voices. If anyone had raised the most obvious concern that the GA had a maniac at the helm, she would have had no answer. She couldn’t take Jacen on yet. And if she dismissed their worries, she would lose respect and trust. “Nothing wrong with the food, ma’am.”

  Niathal nodded and carried on to her office. Captain Nevil was waiting for her. She closed the doors and swept the room for bugs with her hand scanner, but even when it came up clean, she still whispered.

  “All I can hope,” she said, not waiting for him to speak, “is that when the news spreads, the crews believe it as much as I did, or think that the poor woman deserved it for some reason. Because if they do reach the conclusion that he’s a monster, morale will collapse, and we’ve lost.”

  Nevil didn’t respond. The Quarren usually kept his counsel, but he seemed to be even more tight-lipped today.

  “What is it, Captain? I’ve swept for surveillance devices. You can speak freely.”

  His mouth-tentacles rippled as if he was measuring his words carefully. “What are you going to do about Solo?”

  Niathal’s instinct and training said to call in the military police immediately, invoke emergency powers and have Jacen arrested. But her common sense said that Jacen’s loyal Galactic Alliance Guard trumped the MPs, that the rest of the fleet was loyal to him, and that she would end up as sole Chief of State, which—whatever she might have thought she wanted a couple of years ago—was now a poison chalice.

  And she was effectively Luke Skywalker’s spy. She needed to stay on the inside to arm him with intelligence. Jacen was too strong for her to confront and depose alone.

  “For the moment, there’s very little I can do,” she said.

  “Ma’am, you can put me on a charge for saying this if you like, but he needs to be relieved of duty.”

  “Do you trust me, Captain?”

  Nevil’s tentacles became still. He was wary now. “I think I still do.”

  “Then if I say that I’m as appalled by this monstrous act as you are, but that I have to make sure I’m actually in a position to do something conclusive, will you accept that without further explanation?”

  Niathal hoped he understood. If she told him more, he’d be compromised, too. It was the oblique talk of coups and plots; not that she was any stranger to that kind of coded conversation, having helped oust Cal Omas. Perhaps she was now getting her just desserts.

  “I believe I get the general meaning, Admiral,” said Nevil.

  Niathal wasn’t sure he had. “When you fire on a target like Jacen Solo, you daren’t miss or just wound him. You have to make sure he can’t return fire. Ever.”

  Nevil froze, then nodded. It was a human gesture, picked up from serving alongside humans, just as they adopted expressions from other species.

  “I’d expected instant mutiny,” he said. “But our tendency—all of us—is to maintain discipline and try to carry on as if nothing untoward is happening, as if that’ll make it go away.”

  “There’s a war on, Nevil. Our people are too busy staying alive.” Niathal went to the window and looked out across the city, somehow expecting to see the view radically changed just as her world had been. But life went on. Coruscant was a long way from the front, and Jacen was still the heroic colonel, crusher of terrorists and son of two heroes of the old Rebellion. Well fed and defended, with distracting shows on the HoloNet, the average Coruscant citizen wasn’t about to rush to the barricades and storm the Senate, even if Tebut’s fate was plastered all over HNE bulletins. It wouldn’t be, of course. “And it hasn’t impacted the lives of civilians here—yet.”

  Nevil seemed a little more reassured that he was still talking to the officer and not the politician. “I won’t ask what you’ll say to him when you meet. But he realizes you’ll know, and you’ll have to take some position on it.”

  “I shall openly question his methods, as I usually do,” she said, wondering if she had already confided too much in Nevil. “And he’ll think nothing has changed.”

  “So you don’t share a philosophy.”

  “I’m disappointed that you might ever have thought I did.”

  Nevil waited a couple of beats as if to make his point, that he wasn’t so sure an ambitious admiral wouldn’t do whatever it took to achieve high office, including selling her honor. “My son didn’t die to put a sadistic despot in power,” he said at last. “I look to you to ensure his life wasn’t wasted.”

  It was a gut-punch. Niathal rode it. “I’m sorry about Turl. I truly am.”

  Nevil just inclined his head politely and left. Niathal had just had some of her worst fears confirmed. While she knew that she couldn’t always be liked, and that becoming Chief of State always meant treading on a few toes, she was wounded by not being trusted—or believed.

  Ironically, the man who was so convinced he could end chaos and conflict with his shock tactics was sowing more of his own. Jacen was making everyone wary and suspicious, even old friends and allies.

  She needed to broker a discreet meeting with Luke Skywalker. But first, she had to be true to form and confront Jacen Solo indignantly about his latest lapse of judgment. She summoned her chauffeur. On the journey through the unconcerned, orderly skylanes of Coruscant to the Senate, she concentrated on being angry and indignant rather than working out her next covert moves. Jedi could sense these things. She thought of Nevil’s dead son, and the outrage came naturally.

  Coruscant really was very peaceful. It was hard to square what she saw from the speeder window with what was happening offworld on the battlefield, almost as if there were a portal she had passed through and back again into another dimension. But it hadn’t been that long since the Yuuzhan Vong invasion; that had made the Galactic capital much more nervous than planets that had suffered far worse and far more frequently over the centuries, and so it was willing to embrace Jacen’s extremes. Coruscant was scared and wanted to be protected. Niathal wondered how Jacen would have fared trying to pull his hard-line savior act on more battle-hardened, less innocent worlds.

  He was in his office, watching an intelligence holovid, a recording of a fleet engagement. There were so many brush fires breaking out across the galaxy now that she couldn’t say where it was taking place without checking the images carefully to identify ships and terrain.

  Just another theater of war. The only positive thing I can see is that we’ve been saved from collapsing through overstretch by systems kind enough to stage their own local wars and excuse our attendance.

  “What have I done this time?” Jacen said, not looking away from the screen. “I could feel the little black cloud of reprimand coming …”

  Stay angry. Don’t let him sense anything beyond that.

  Niathal took a deep breath disguised as an exasperated human sigh. “Jacen, I know you’re very new to the military, but here’s a tip to help you fit into the culture of the wardroom. We don’t kill junior officers on the bridge in front of everyone. It’s bad form. At least try to do it somewhere less public in the future.”

  He looked up that time. She wondered if he was feeling the strain, because he looked more different by the day, a little older and less luminously youthful. It was especially noticeable in his eyes. “Ah. Word gets around.”

  She didn’t sit down. She couldn’t stay angry sitting down. “Word gets around the fleet, and fast. You’re a fool.”

  “Really? I thought I was doing quite well.”

  “Morale, Jacen. It’s an asset every bit as much as a Star Destroyer. We ask those we command to be ready to die for us, not because of us, and the moment we lose their confidence, we start to lose the war. We need them.”

  “Oh, and they need me.” He let out a snort of contempt. “The pact works both ways. Tebut was careless. It’s not an exercise, Admiral, it’s a real war, and mistakes get you killed. We could have lost the war thanks to Tebut. I think what happened to her brought home to everyone what that means.”

  “Did you mean to
make an example of her, or did you just lose control and it all got out of hand?”

  That got a reaction, all right. She watched his eyes flicker, but not a muscle on his face moved for a second or two. “I think we’ll see an improvement in security procedures after this.”

  “Good,” she said. Ah, he’s either worried he’ll burn out, or he’s already snapped and he doesn’t want me to know he’s falling apart. “I’ll spend some of my very limited time repairing the damage you’ve done to morale, then, because if a ship’s company is terrified of getting something wrong, pretty soon they stop using their initiative and don’t do anything at all. Do I need to explain?”

  “You care too much about being popular.”

  Niathal had to bite back a retort. She knew her reputation on the mess decks as a humorless iceberg. “Yes, I must keep my party-girl image in check.”

  “Anyway, Fondor. Time to pick them off.”

  “I would prefer to hit their industrial capacity first. Shut down their shipyards.”

  “We need those assets in one piece.”

  “If we want them as a going concern, then we’ll probably have to occupy the planet to enforce that, because the government isn’t about to capitulate. And we don’t have the resources to do it.”

  “We might.”

  “Oh, do share.”

  “The Imperial Remnant. I’m opening negotiations.”

  “How good of you to involve me in this …”

  “I haven’t committed us to anything.”

  So it’s us again. “If you think Pellaeon is going to kiss and make up after I took his job, you’re really not paying attention.”

  “Well, just to give the Moffs an incentive to persuade him to forgive and forget, I was thinking of offering them some extra turf in return for joining us—Borleias and Bilbringi.”

  It was certainly an incentive, and would have been excessively generous if either world had been the GA’s gift to give. Neither was a full member of the Alliance. “So what does the gift amount to? Turning a blind eye to the Moffs invading? Helping them do it? Helping them costs resources, and we’d never have gone to their aid had those planets been attacked anyway. So how do we give?”