Sacrifice

"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.

And there was Slave I, sitting on a makeshift landing pad. That was home. His ship, his father's ship, the cockpit where he had spent literally years of his life.

"So am I coming with you or not?"

Mirta was more trouble left to her own devices. Besides, he didn't want to let that heart-of-fire necklace stray too far. It was the one link he had to finding out how Sintas had died.

"Okay," he said. She was his grandchild, even if she had tried to kill him. He didn't care about that, but he struggled to find that protective devotion he'd seen in his own father. Something just didn't click. So he acted it out, because that was how he'd learned everything that became second nature to him—he went through the motions until it was part of him. He could learn to be a good grandfather, too. He could excel at it. "What's the best way to find another bounty hunter?"