Sacrifice

"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