Legacy Of The Force_ Bloodlines Part 7

He took out a credit chip. "I'll take fifty thousand shares in SteriPac."

"They make battlefield dressings," said the a.s.sistant. His fixed stare told Fett he rarely sold a hundred thousand credits' worth of shares in one deal, and his hand folded around the chip as if he thought it would escape. "Expecting a war?"

"Always. And I'm never disappointed."

Fett made his way to the spa.r.s.ely furnished apartment he'd bought a year before that would not, for once in his life, become an a.s.set that made a quick profit. Tanis wasn't a fast-moving property market, but it was worth paying for the relative privacy.

So someone sent Ko Sai home a piece at a time.

His helmet sensors told him a human was walking behind him, maintaining a constant distance.

Kaminoans could easily have done a little forensics work on that and figured out where the packages came from.

It was a young woman-eighteen, maybe-with dark curly hair cut close to her head. He could see the image in the HUD of his helmet, relayed from the range finder's rear view. And while she had a blaster holstered on one hip-who didn't go around armed these days?-she looked neither local nor hostile. She was wearing gray body armor, basic chest and back plates like a Mandalorian, but without colors or markings.

But she's following me. I know it.

So . . . if the Kaminoans knew who had grabbed Ko Sai, they had a very good reason for not going after them. And her research had never resurfaced.

Fett was troubled when he couldn't spot motives. Everyone had a motive.

Tomorrow, he'd set off for Roonadan and give Puth a call. He needed to get his fortune in order in case he lost his race against time.

What am I going to do with it?

He always thought he'd know one day, until that one day was overtaken by bad news. Behind him, the girl quickened her pace and caught up with him, close enough now to reach out, take two quick steps, and touch him.

He turned before she could do it, and stood blocking her path, irritated. She didn't seem startled. She stared into his visor much as Beviin had, which was unusual in itself.

"You're Boba Fett," she said.

"You pa.s.sed your eyesight test."

"I need to talk to you."

"Whatever it is, you can't afford me."

"But can you afford me?"

Fett thought for a moment that he'd really read her completely wrong, but she held out her clenched fist, palm up, and parted her fingers to reveal a flat disc of opalescent stone, gold shot with red, blue, and violet. A leather strip was threaded through a hole drilled on one edge.

It was a heart-of-fire gemstone. He knew, because he had given one like it to Sintas Vel when they were married: it was from her home, from Kiffu. He'd been just sixteen, Sintas not much older.

No: he had given this very stone to her. This was the same gem. He could see the carved edge, like rope.

Four lines of a Mandalorian marriage vow that we didn't understand. A stone that she said had some part of my spirit and hers held in it forever.

Forever amounted to three years. They'd split up before Ailyn was two. Sintas had gone bounty hunting when Ailyn was sixteen and never returned.

That's why my own daughter was ready to kill me.

"Where did you get this?" he asked as calmly as he could. It was clear that the girl knew he would recognize it. There was no point bluffing. He didn't need to.

"From the man who killed your wife," she said. "Your daughter owes me a bounty. And I know exactly where she is."

CARD'S TAPCAF, BLUE SKY BOULEVARD, CORONET.

It was how you behaved that made the difference, Han decided.

He sat in the tapcaf facing the window and watched for Leia through the rain-streaked transparisteel. He'd thought he'd be recognized at last, but once he'd got used to not striding purposefully and drawing attention to himself, and started to move like a regular person-matching everyone else's pace, shoulders relaxed-n.o.body seemed to notice him.

He became just another Coronet citizen having a caf and whiling away the time on the boulevard. There was a holoscreen on the wall behind him, and NewsNet was running.

Normally it washed over him as part of the background noise, but even over the hiss of steam from the caf machine at the bar, he heard very clearly the words bomb and Corellian.

So did everyone else in the tapcaf. Silence fell. The staff even shut down the hissing caf pressure filter, and everyone turned in their seats or on their stools to watch the bulletin.

The scenes from Coruscant were terrible: one hovercam shot tracked down from a shattered hotel frontage where the remnants of a sign, just the letters ELI, hung from a dangling section of permacrete clinging to the tower by a thin strand of durasteel reinforcing wire. The cam dropped level after level to the bottom of the urban canyon, showing less damage as it descended, but then settling on a shocking image of what had fallen finally to the ground level: speeders, masonry, and bodies. Han, a man used to war, looked away and shut his eyes.

The stunned silence gave way to debate among strangers brought together by common outrage.

"We didn't do that," said a woman.

"We fight clean."

"If we wanted to bomb Coruscant, we'd use the fleet."

"They're blaming us. Why? Don't they know us by now?"

No, terrorism wasn't Corellia's way of doing things. There was military sabotage, but Corellians tended to be pretty clear-cut about who was a legitimate target and who wasn't.

Han wondered if the blast was a slick bit of black ops by Coruscant and the Alliance in general to polarize positions by bombing their own people.

I'm going crazy. This is Luke I'm talking about. The Jedi council wouldn't let the Senate get away with it.

But there were all kinds of murky agencies that the Senate probably bankrolled and didn't keep too close an eye on for pragmatic, plausibly deniable reasons. Luke wouldn't even know. He was just the same decent, idealistic kid at heart that he'd always been.

They're going to use this so-called bomb outrage to up the ante, to take a crack at us.

Han put his head in his hands and sat there for a moment, wondering what he could possibly do now to help Corellia when he wasn't even welcome here. Eyes shut, he reached for the cup, and it wasn't quite where he thought he'd left it.

Someone put a hand on his arm.

"Han ..."

It was a man, and Han's instinct was to jerk his arm back and draw a blaster; but he stopped dead, hand a split second from his holster. The man was about twenty-five: dark skin, black hair cut almost military-short. A stranger.

"Do you know me?" Han was ready to drop him where he stood. "Because I don't know you, pal."

"But your wife knew my father."

Ah, Gejjen. No, play it cool. You have no idea who this guy is at all. "Prove it." Han saw familiar movement outside the window and Leia, the hood of her tunic pulled up against light rain. "How did you find us?"

Gejjen-if that was who he was-dropped his voice almost to a whisper. "When you rented the apartment, you paid in untrackable credits. That's a lot of hard currency-unusual enough to draw attention right now."

"From who?"

"From our own security forces."

"So CorSec knows we're here and Thrackan doesn't?" Han nearly spat out the name. Luckily it was a common enough first name not to draw the same attention that snarling Sal-Solo would have done. "Right. Try again."

"You're a.s.suming that everyone in CorSec would want to tell Thrackan."

Han shook his head slowly. "Why do I get the feeling that I don't want to know that?"

"Well, there's Corellia, and there's Thrackan, and they're not the same thing in many people's eyes. People who'd like to do something about it."

"Call me cynical, but I think you're talking about a change of administration without an election. I'm trying to remember the word for that."

Gejjen-he could be n.o.body else-sat down next to him. As Leia came into the tapcaf, she stared at Han, and then at Gejjen, and her lips parted as if she had realized something that quite pleased her.

"You're the image of your father," she said.

"Dur Gejjen," said the young man very quietly. He held out his hand for shaking, and their voices were lost in the chatter that had swamped the tapcaf again. "At your service, ma'am."

"Hi, honey," said Han. "This nice young man is about to ask me to take part in a coup." He smiled theatrically at Gejjen. "Did I get the right word?"

"I asked him to meet us here," Leia said quietly. "But he's early . . ."

"Apologies. It's a habit, just in case messages are ever intercepted. Shall we move on?"

Gejjen indicated the door. "You can choose the location. Just to rea.s.sure you in case you think I'm setting you up."

"Good idea," said Leia. "I know just the place."

She beckoned to Han. He rolled his eyes, but gulped down the remains of his caf and followed her out into the rain, staying to one side of Gejjen so he could keep an eye on him. Leia led them to a women's fashion store.

"There goes my tough-guy image," said Han, hesitating at the ornately gilded doors.

"Turbolift," said Leia, gesturing both men inside with an expression of narrow-eyed mock impatience. Under the circ.u.mstances, she seemed in a good mood. "There's a caf bar on the top floor. Nice and public with several exits if anything happens that we're not expecting."

Gejjen took the suspicion aimed at him pretty well. "Sensible precaution," he said.

Han knew he'd never enjoy caf again in quite the same way, because the taste was starting to become inextricably linked in his subconscious with bad news. They huddled around a table, surrounded by chattering shoppers and noisy children, and tried to look unremarkable. The ubiquitous holoscreen murmured away on one wall: Corellians were addicted to news. There was no getting away from that bomb blast.

"Okay, where were we?" said Han. "Ah, I remember. Removing the elected government. Go ahead and amaze me, kid." He offered Gejjen a small jug. "Cream? Sugar?"

"Han ..." Leia fixed him with a stare.

"Sorry, honey." He leaned back and folded his arms. "Go on, Gejjen."

The young man was still totally unperturbed. "You're at risk, and so is Corellia. From the same source."

"Power-crazed galactic government?"

"Power-crazed individuals."

"That's half the galaxy on a good day"

"Sir, your cousin isn't doing anybody any favors."

"I didn't choose my family."

"Well, he's going to kill yours, because he's put out a contract on you, your wife, and your children. And if he carries on the way he's going, he's also going to get a lot of Corellians killed in a war we can't win."

Han still didn't know what use they were to Gejjen, but he took an instant dislike to phrases like can't win. "So you want us to do something? See, I have this hunch that you do."

"If Thrackan is removed, would you consider taking his place?"

Oh boy. "No."

Even Leia looked taken aback. "Absolutely not," she said.

"Yeah, I already said that, honey."

Gejjen managed a nervous smile. "I didn't mean to embarra.s.s you, sir."

"I'll do anything for Corellia," said Han. "And I agree that Thrackan's conducting his own war for his own ends, like he always does. But there's a real threat out there from the Alliance and it's going to take a united Corellia to stand up to it. Just give me a blaster. Not an office."

"You're not going to go back to Coruscant, then?"

"Why should I? We're not running from Thrackan." Han slipped his hand under the table and caught Leia's hand. She gave it a squeeze that threatened to numb his fingers. "And we're not going to live in hiding on Coruscant, either. Might as well be here."

"I understand."

"Fine."

"The good news is that Thrackan seems to think you're on Coruscant."

"Well, that's another good reason for staying put, isn't it?"

"When we find out who's taken the contract, we'll warn you." Gejjen stood up and shook their hands. He had a mature, solid air about him, an elder statesman in a young man's body. "If you'd like help to relocate, you know where to find me. If we could track you, so might others."

"I think I already know who'll find me." Han watched Gejjen leave. When he was sure the man had disappeared into the turbolift, he turned to Leia. "Well, you didn't say much for a hotshot diplomat ..."

"It's not appropriate for a Jedi to discuss political coups."

"Yeah, I can understand how that might be a sensitive area. How did you trace him?"