Sacrifice

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