"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."

"Never known you to stay out of a fight. You've got your reasons.

That's why we're listening." Carid paused. "I'm sorry about your daughter."

"Yeah." So everyone knew about Ailyn. Fett didn't remember telling anyone that she was dead, let alone that Jacen Solo had killed her.

Mandalore wasn't her home, either; she wouldn't have appreciated ending up buried here. "And I bet you're all wondering why that Jedi isn't a pile of smoking charcoal by now."

"Like I said, you have your reasons. Anything we can do—just say the word."

"His time will come. Leave him to me." But not now, Fett thought.

He had to get back to the hunt for a clone with gray gloves and his best chance of a cure for his terminal illness.

As the hall cleared, Mirta was left standing alone, arms folded, leaning against the wall. "I wonder if Cal Omas has such an easy time in the Senate," she said.

"You can't rule Mandalorians. You just make sensible suggestions they want to follow." Fett walked outside and swung his leg over the seat of the speeder that Beviin had lent him, wincing behind his visor. He was close to giving in to daily painkillers. "And since when have Mandalorians needed to be told what makes sense?"

"Since they got in the habit of ba'slan shev'la when situations didn't look winnable."

Fett remembered that phrase. Beviin had used it a lot in the Yuuzhan Vong war. It translated as "strategic disappearance"—scattering and going to ground in uncertain times. It was hard to wipe out a people that fragmented like mercury droplets and waited for the right time to coalesce again. It wasn't retreat. It was lying in wait.

"Come on," he said. "I've got some leads to follow up on the clone."

Mirta scrambled onto the pillion seat. Her armor clanked against his. She had the full set now, even a jet pack, courtesy of Beviin. "Has it ever taken you this long to track somebody? It's been months."

Don't push it. "I make it about sixty-five days."

"You believe he exists, then."

"You wouldn't lie to me again, and you wouldn't make up the name Skirata."

"No. You want me to come with you?"

"You think I need a nurse?"

"I said I wouldn't lie to you again."

Fett almost wished he hadn't told her. He really should have told Beviin first. That was a man he could trust. As the speeder swooped over Keldabe and out into the countryside beyond, the scale of the Yuuzhan Vong's retribution became all too clear again. The course of the winding Kelita River was visible for kilometers now because most of the woodland surrounding it had been flattened. Keldabe stood on a bend in the river, a defiant flat-topped hill glittering with granite, and MandalMotors's hundred- meter tower had somehow survived the war despite the damage it had sustained. The shattered stone and scorch marks were still there as a reminder that Mandalore could be battered, bruised, and temporarily subdued, but never completely conquered.

The small settlements of tree-homes in the branches of the slow-growing, ancient veshok forest had been wiped off the face of the map.

Beneath the speeder there were no longer patches of crops in clearings.

There was blackened soil and charcoal stumps of trees, and still nothing grew, not even the seedlings that usually emerged after fires.

"Scum," Fett cursed. He banked the speeder sharply and heard Mirta hold her breath. "They didn't even try to plant their Vong weeds here.

They just poisoned the soil."

It was a high price to pay for double-crossing the invaders. But the alternative would have been much, much worse.

"No help from the New Republic or the GA?" Mirta said. "No reconstruction funding like everyone else?"

"We didn't expect anything. And we didn't get it."

Fett gunned the speeder's drives and headed out over the countryside, mindful of the fact that he'd have taken on the Yuuzhan Vong even if they'd been the New Republic's best buddies. The Beviin-Vasur farm appeared in the distance almost on cue as a kind of reassurance that the devastation wasn't global.