Sacrifice

And they never got close enough to see Mandalorians at peace. Come to that, not many Mandalorians did, either. It was a restless galaxy.

Fett resigned himself to existing in no-man's-land—too Mando for the outsider but not Mando enough for some of the clans—and made his way back to Slave I, which was still the haven in which he preferred to sleep. He hoped Beviin wasn't offended. Worrying about someone else's feelings was a novelty, and Fett knew what Beviin would say about the psychology of sleeping in a spacecraft when a perfectly comfortable home—any number of homes-—was available.

When Fett reached the ship and unlocked the hatch by remote, he found a message waiting for him. It could have been relayed straight to his HUD, but Jaing Skirata did things his own idiosyncratic way.

I SEE YOU DID RIGHT BY MANDALORE. I'LL DO RIGHT BY YOU.

Fett hadn't judged wrong, then. He dropped his dose of capsules into his palm and washed them down with a mix of water and the cocktail of liquid drugs that Beluine had prescribed. It was just slowing down his decline, not stopping it.

Jaing hadn't said he'd succeeded.

Death's a motivator, not a threat. You've still got things to achieve before you become fertilizer. You'll just have to do them sooner rather than later.

Fett switched on the monitor in his cramped quarters and sat back with a pack of dry rations to watch the news as Corellia went into meltdown, and the Verpine government of Roche announced talks with Mandalore to agree to a mutual aid and trade treaty.

Then he took out the black book his father had left him. He'd listened to every message recorded in it more than a hundred times, and studied his father's image in it. When he was afraid he was beginning to forget what Jango Fett once looked like, he'd take it out and run the messages again.

He hadn't forgotten: not a pore, not a hair, not a line. But he ran it again