It was actually fascinating. Fett could see from the length and emerging form of the metal bar that he was making a beskad, the traditional saber of the ancient Mandalorians. Beviin had one, an antique blade fashioned from

"There." Medrit Vasur cooled the rough form of the saber in a tub of hissing liquid and turned it this way and that to check the line. He took off his ear defenders, and his face cracked into a beatific smile of satisfaction as he wiped the sweat from his brow with his forearm. "Now, that's going to be a thing of beauty."

"Med'ika, I haven't told him yet," said Beviin.

"Shall I blurt it out, then?"

"You're the metallurgist . . ."

"Mand'alor," Medrit said stiffly, "you're looking at a test forging from a new lode of beskar."

It took Fett a slow second to grasp the importance of what Medrit had said. "But the Empire strip-mined Mandalore. They took all the iron."

"They missed a bit. A big bit."

"How? And how big?"

"This is a big planet with a tiny population, and even the Imperials didn't survey all of it. They stripped the shallow veins. This is a deeper lode, and we'd never have found it if the vongese hadn't left craters you could sink a small moon in." Medrit picked up a cloth and wiped his face. Fett couldn't feel the full impact of the temperature in the workshop, but Beviin had started sweating visibly; he left a mucky smear across his forehead as he wiped it. "There's a crew a hundred klicks north of Enceri still doing test drills, but it looks like a big, big lode that was exposed."

Enceri was remote even by Mandalore's standards; no wonder it had taken years to stumble across it. The Yuuzhan Vong had used singularity ordnance indiscriminately, smashing huge craters across the planet

because they wanted to annihilate Mandalore, not conquer it.

Fett enjoyed a rare moment of pleasure imagining the look on their vile, arrogant, disfigured faces if they'd known they were helping Mandalore find a new source of the metal that had once made it mighty.

Beskar was the toughest metal known to science. Even lightsabers had trouble with it. There had been a time when every army in the galaxy wanted a supply.

It was still the most valuable metal on the market, and there was a war raging around them.

"I feel a new economic era coming on," said Fett.

Beviin winked. "Oya manda."

"And it's not on anyone's land." Fett realized the reason he'd never quite got a handle on what Mandalorian government actually meant was because it was so nebulous. "This is a resource for Mandalore as a whole."

"If you say it is, then it is. That's the Mandalore's prerogative."

"Okay, I say it is. Time to gather the chieftains and do a little forward planning."

"Shab," said Medrit, underwhelmed by the Mand'alor's power to requisition resources. "You're sounding just like a proper head of state."

Fett would normally have found a family meal and a long explanation of the finer points of metallurgy worse than a spell in the Sarlacc. It was hard enough getting used to having a granddaughter without being besieged by Beviin's noisy, messy, demonstrative family. But that evening, he tolerated it.

"It's not just the ore," Medrit said, drawing an imaginary graph in midair with a nuna drumstick. "It's the processing. Part of the strength of the metal is in what's added during smelting and how it's worked. What you

saw was just a test batch."

"Have we got the facilities to do that anymore?" Fett wasn't used to eating in front of anyone else. Dinua's son and daughter, Shalk and Briila—seven and five, he estimated—stared at him, unimpressed, across the table. The scrutiny of small children was unnerving. "Do we have a windfall we can't exploit?"

"On a small scale—we can do it," Beviin said. "I've done a few rough calculations. If the lode produces the yield we think it will, we're going to need some help from mining right through to processing.

MandalMotors could process some of it, if they're willing to shift resources from combat craft. But the rest... we need droids."

"But what are you going to do with it?" Dinua asked.

"What?"

"Sell it for foreign currency, or use it to arm ourselves?"

Dinua, orphaned on the battlefield like Fett, was a savagely smart woman. Beviin had adopted her the moment her mother was killed, but Fett found that ability to turn strangers into family—that central part of Mandalorian culture—was beyond him. Even Medrit—impatient, critical, short-tempered —had accepted the unexpected addition to their household without a murmur. Adoption was what Mandalorians did, and always had.

If he can do it, why can't I? With my own flesh and blood, too.

"We do both," said Fett, trying to stay on the subject. "Some manufactured goods for export, some for our own rearmament."

"You'll find a lot of support for that," Beviin said. "Satisfies both camps."

What else can I do with the time I have left to me, except leave Mandalore in decent shape? "If we've got it, someone will want to take it."

"You think anyone's stupid enough to try invading like the Empire did?" Beviin said. "After we kicked Vong shebs like that?"

"Ba'buir's cussing," said Shalk gravely. "Can I say shebs, too?"

"No, you can't." Dinua clicked her teeth in annoyance. "Buir, please, not in front of the kids. Mand'alor, how are you going to announce the find? Other than the old-fashioned Mando way, by showing up at the border with an invading army?"

"Do we have to announce it?"

"If we want foreign revenue."

"We don't have a finance minister, but the job's yours."

"I'm serious."

"Commission a few starfighters and see who notices," Fett said.

"Maybe this Kad'ika has a point-—that we don't have to be on one side or the other. There's a third side, as . . . Goran says." It was only courtesy to address him by his first name in his own house. Fett had so little nonhostile interaction with anyone that basic etiquette felt like a minefield. "Our own."

"I could make sure the aruetiise notice," said Beviin. "But maybe a surprise is better."

"What kind of surprise?"

"The kind that makes you look up and run for a bomb shelter,"

Beviin said. "With a MandalMotors logo on the fuselage."

"We've got no territorial ambitions beyond the sector. We've got at least a dozen planets here to worry about."

"I know. But take a planet in postwar recovery, an ongoing civil war, and a new find of beskar, and we might have visitors. If not armed, then at least trying to do deals."

"Whatever. I don't lose sleep over what . . ."

Beviin filled the gap. "Aruetiise."

". . . aruetiise think of us. I'll talk to Yomaget in the morning.

See what MandalMotors can commit."

Medrit chewed thoughtfully, staring at Fett. "You could have a decent set of beskar'gam to replace that durasteel osik you're wearing, too. It'll last several lifetimes."

"It only has to last a year, then."

Medrit stared at Fett, got no response, and turned to Beviin. He shook his head: Later. Dinua took the hint, too. Her kids gazed from face to face, looking for an explanation of what had plunged the grown-ups into silence. Fett was past caring whether anyone knew he was dying. Most wouldn't believe it anyway. It was hard to imagine the mortality of someone whose face you couldn't see.