I'm not doing too bad, Dud. Did you ever have to make domestic -

policy when you were Mandalore, or did you just fight? I suppose you know I'm dying.

The last thought caught him unawares. Fett believed in decomposition and eternal oblivion: he'd dealt them out so many times, he knew what awaited him. It was Beviin and his talk of the manda that had him falling into those

stupid thoughts about eternity.

"I knew you were basically okay when you split the heart-of-fire to bury half with Mama," Mirta said quietly.

"I'm not sentimental."

"A real scumbag would have kept the stone intact and sold it."

Fett resented the interruption of his one-sided conversation with his father. "Maybe if I'd left it whole, somebody could have read the information in it." He straightened up, arms at his side. "Are you done here?"

Mirta shrugged, collected her helmet, and began walking toward the speeder. It was an answer of sorts. They set off for Keldabe. There were no straight roads; it made ambushing and pinning down would-be invaders a lot easier.

"What does everyone else do with bodies?" Fett asked.

"Turn left when we get to the river and I'll show you."

Mirta seemed to have taken this born-again Mando thing seriously.

Fett had expected her to kick over the traces and turn wholly Kiffar, like her mother, but she'd jumped to the other extreme. If he hadn't known she wasn't motivated by wealth, he'd have thought she was positioning herself to inherit his fortune. That would have been easier.

Right now, he had no idea what her motive was.

"Gejjen's been assassinated, by the way," he said, banking the speeder to turn along the course of the Kelita River. "Heard it on the news."

"Good," she said. She was definitely his granddaughter. "Slimy shabuir!"

"I put the full fee for Sal-Solo in a trust fund for you."

"Thanks. You didn't have to."

"No. I didn't."

"There it is."

"What?"

"The grave."

Fett couldn't see anything, just lush water meadows flanked by rich pasture, vibrantly green even after harvesttime. They said the area had beaten the Yuuzhan Vong's attempts at environmental destruction because the fast-flowing water in the meadow and the river carried the poisons away downstream. Even to Fett's urban and unagricultural eye, it looked like rich soil. "Where?"

"Try your terahertz GPR."

Fett blinked his ground-penetrating radar into life. When he looked at the land now, he saw the variations in density and the pockets of less compacted soil. He also saw clusters of lines and debris so tangled together that he couldn't make out what they were.

"It's a mass grave," Mirta said.

Fett stopped the speeder and they got off to look. His boots squelched in the sodden grass, and while it was far from the first time he'd walked on a carpet of the dead, this felt vaguely uncomfortable.

"Lost a lot of people," he said. More than a million. Nearly one in three Mandalorians had died defending the planet. Mirta seemed to be expecting some statesman-like behavior, so he tried. "And no memorial."

"This isn't a war grave," Mirta said. "Mando'ade usually bury in mass graves anyway. We all become part of the manda. We don't need a headstone."

The exceptional fertility of the soil suddenly made sense. There was no point wasting organic material.

"Manda."

"Collective consciousness. Oversoul. We don't do heaven."

Fett winced. "I know what it is."

"And it gives back to the living. You'll get a marked grave, of course, being Mand'alor. Unless you choose not to."

"Probably just to make sure they know the old Mandalore won't show up again to reclaim the title."

"Maybe just to show respect."

"Has it occurred to you," Fett asked, "that all this is a rationalization of the fact that Mandalorians were always on the move, couldn't maintain graves, and needed to dispose of lots of corpses? And that it's free fertilizer?"

Mirta took off her helmet, probably to let him see the full thundercloud of her disapproval. "There's nothing profound that you can't reduce to banality, is there?"

"I'm a practical man."

"We're a practical people." We. Kiffu had ceased to exist for her.

"But there's nothing wrong with seeing the bigger picture."

"Can I opt out of the manda? I'm not spending eternity with Montross or Vizsla. Or do we take guests from other species? If we adopt them in life, makes sense we take them afterward, so what about the rest of the galaxy?"

Mirta seemed about to spit something vitriolic at him but instead sighed, jammed her helmet back in place, and went back to the speeder.

Fett pondered how tedious it would be if there really were some existence after death, especially if it weren't ticket-only. The one person he wanted to see again was his father. The rest of the dead—loved and hated, but mostly just unloved and dismissed—could stay dead.

He resolved to keep his mouth shut in the future. It had always been the best policy in the past, and meaningful conversation was one of the few things he couldn't seem to master. He took her into the center of Keldabe following the twisting course of the Kelita, skimming above its meanders and river cliffs. The ancient river had gradually kinked back on itself as it ground away patiently at the banks, and it looked as if one good flood would break the narrow necks of land and straighten the course again. A quick inspection with his helmet GPR showed dried-up oxbow lakes pressed like hoofprints into the land on either side. Until the crab-boys had showed up, most of Mandalore had been as it had since before humans arrived: primeval, wild, and still full of the undiscovered. Fett hated the Yuuzhan Vong afresh for ruining that.

Novoc Vevut, Orade's father, built and repaired weapons. He was in the yard of the workshop that also served as his house, machining blaster parts. Fett shut the speeder down at the entrance and Mirta slid off the saddle.

Vevut pushed his transparent protective visor back onto the top of his head and gave them both a big grin.

"Aw, nice to see you two doing stuff together," he said. "Osi'kyr, Fett, are we going to be related?"

Mirta looked at him with a warmth she didn't direct at her own grandfather. Fett hadn't picked up on how far the relationship with Vevut's son had progressed, then. "If beskar is such a good defense, how come you've got so many scars, Buir?" she teased. "Forgot to wear your helmet?"

She'd called him Papa. Vevut grinned. "I cut myself shaving."

"With a Trandoshan."

"Marry Ghes, and I'll make you a blaster that can take the head off a dozen Trandoshans with one shot."

"You know how to turn a girl's head," she said, and removed her helmet and boots before disappearing into the house.

Vevut brushed shiny coils of swarf from the grinding bench. His long woolly black braids were tied back with a piece of string while he worked, but the gold clips strung along them like trophies still rattled and chinked as he moved. Combined with the striking scars in his ebony skin, they made him look formidably battle-hardened. Beviin said the gold had come from his kills over the years, and that he'd melted it down to make the ornate clips. They made Fett's braided Wookiee scalps look low-key.

"When I adopted Ghes," Vevut said, not raising his eyes from the workbench, "we had a hard time accepting each other at first, too." He rasped glittering shavings from the metal he was shaping and held it up to check the edge. "And I'd known him all his life. His parents were my neighbors. Just because Mirta's your own blood doesn't mean it's automatic."