Chapter Text
The older Jango got, the more impatient he became with the everlasting tedium of waiting for a rude client to show up. It didn’t happen all that often these days - Jango had made enough money that he could pick and choose what jobs he wanted to do, and which clients he preferred to take on. But every so often, a client (sometimes new, and sometimes established, because of course these were the people Jango was cursed to work with) decided to test him, and when that happened, Jango inevitably found himself sitting at an empty table in a tapcaf, resisting the urge to shoot the offending party right between the eyes once they deigned to appear.
At least it was a quiet tapcaf. Outland Station was a place for professionals. There were booths with privacy screens all around the room, and even the tables in the center had noise-canceling equipment available - for a fee, of course. More than a few customers were taking advantage of them for personal calls as they waited. The ambient light was even set at a level and wavelength comfortable for most humanoid species - not that Jango really cared. He wore his helmet here, as he always did on a job, and viewed the bar through his visor. His HUD fed him a constant stream of information from the sensors on his armor and from his own ship, currently berthed five levels down, on the space dock.
And he was still waiting.
“Your guest still in transit, hon?” Rozatta’s sympathetic tone rankled a little bit, even though Jango knew she meant well. The Toydarian flew closer to the booth Jango had reserved for his meeting. She’d just finished speaking with the IG-82 model behind the bar in the middle of the room, who could sling drinks and toss out drunk bounty hunters in equal measure. “It’s only been ten minutes since you arrived, maybe give them a little grace before you storm off in a tiff?”
Jango absolutely did not want to give the customer any grace. Jango hadn’t been late to an appointment in nearly ten years, and felt that if he could arrange to be on time (if not a little early) to an appointment set up at the client’s leisure, the client could damn well do the same. This specific client was a Kuati business magnate who paid Jango a retainer fee to keep him on her payroll, and off of her competitors’ - usually she didn’t waste his time, but there was a first time to everything.
“I’m giving this client some time, Roz,” Jango finally ground out. “If they don’t show by the time my reservation ends, I’m outta here.”
“That’s all I ask, hon - a little patience does wonders! Maybe take the time to socialize a little? Lotta familiar faces on the station today, might be nice to catch up,” she said with a cheery aerial spin.
There were, in fact, a lot of familiar faces on Outland station this time, but given that bounty hunters were a competitive, solitary lot, Jango didn’t see much purpose in socializing. But Roz had always been a romantic. She’d been holding out hope for Jango to find a nice sentient to settle down with for the last twenty years, and wasn’t going to stop now.
“You’re right,” Jango replied. “Cad Bane still owes me a few drinks.”
Rozatta just sighed heavily, twitched her shoulders in an approximation of a shrug, and flew away. Jango got up from his table and started strolling towards Bane. The Duros bounty hunter had clocked Jango as soon as he had arrived at Outland Station’s tapcaf, and was even now warily watching him out of the corner of his eyes. Jango smiled, just a little, and the Duros visibly recoiled. Hassling Cad never, ever got old - and he was one of the rare non-Mandalorians who could recognize Jango’s mood from his body language instead of his face.
There were other familiar figures in the tapcaf - that idiot Bossk was lurking in the far corner, and Sugi’s crew was all lined up at the bar, probably celebrating a successful hunt. Jango nodded at her as he passed, and she nodded back. Tough lady - Jango had gone up against her in a hunt on Circumtore’s dead planets for a live capture, and even though he’d gotten the target in the end, she’d put up a good fight. But otherwise, it was a bunch of nonentities around the bar and at the tables.
That was bounty hunting, though. Either you were good… or you were dead.
“So when are you going to pay me back my favors-” Jango started to say to Cad, but was cut off by the screech of audio feedback emitting from the holoproj set up at the back of the room. Some twitchy Bothan with cream and black fur was fiddling with the settings. A group of Gand nearby were protesting the channel change with irritated buzzes. They’d been paying avid attention to the meshgeroya game that had been playing before, and Jango idly gave them maybe ninety seconds before one of them pulled out their shockprods and-
“-from Geonosis, where the first videos of pitched battle between a Republic Expeditionary Force and the Confederacy’s droid armies are spreading. Chancellor Palpatine has called an emergency session of the Senate, but Shu Mai of the Commerce Guild has stated that it was an unprovoked attack on a peaceful trade meeting-“
The newscaster blathered on, but Jango wasn’t listening any more. He watched the footage from Geonosis - shaky comm footage from attendees of the CIS “trade meeting”, or CCTV footage from various sites around Geonosis. The Republic had somehow managed to pull a whole fucking division out of somewhere, tall, lanky bipedal sentients wearing armor Jango didn’t recognize and carrying shitty Blastech DC model rifles, and Jango would think about that later, but for now, he was focusing on their leaders: Jedi. Hundreds of them, more than Jango had ever seen in one place, all fighting at the head of the column.
All dying at the head of the column. Jango saw three separate Jedi fall in just one clip, and well - you couldn’t blame a man for enjoying himself, could you? Jango had a long list of people he hated. He had hunted Tor Viszla and Death Watch to the bitter end, torn them out root and branch wherever he’d found them, but he couldn’t do a damn thing about the Jedi - not the few who had survived Galidraan, and not the Order as a whole.
The Republic was too strong for one system, one man, to upend, and the Jedi were the Republic. But a civil war-
“Fett, stop smiling,” Bane said. The Duros was gritting his teeth, and Jango could see his hands clenched on the butt of his blaster. “It’s creepy as fuck, and nobody likes it.”
“I’m wearing my helmet, so how would you know if I’m grinning, Cad?”
“We don’t need to see your face to know when you’re happy, Fett,” The Duros bounty hunter replied irritably. “We just know.”
At least no one was fool enough to ask why Jango was happy. Galidraan was two decades in the past, but people still heard about it. Jango had never hidden his past. He just didn’t want to talk about it. He’d made that amply clear on more than one occasion in this very tapcaf, and if it hadn’t ended in blood, that was only out of respect for their host, Roz.
“I’m off,” Jango said cheerfully. “You be good, Cad - I still intend to collect on those favors.”
And with Cad protesting behind him, Jango left the tapcaf for his ship. The Kuati was definitely never going to make this meeting, not if war was imminent. Business was going to be very, very good in the future - and not just for her.
By the time he got back to Jaster’s Legacy, there were multiple messages waiting on his secure hard-comm, and more were coming all the time- an almost surefire sign that key HoloNet transmitters had been throttled or blocked altogether. The first message was, indeed, a quick message from his Kuati patron, dated from two days ago, apologizing for the last minute cancellation and informing him that a token of her respect had been deposited into his usual account. She’d probably sent it as soon as she’d heard the news from her own contacts in both the Republic and the CIS navies. Jango checked that payment account to confirm the money had been transferred before sending a perfunctory reply confirming receipt. He almost skipped the next message, which was a bombastic holo from Hondo Ohnaka that Jango cut off halfway through anyway.
The rest of the messages were more of the same - comms from clients, trying to confirm Jango’s status and willingness to work in the coming days, or comms from the few colleagues or comrades Jango still had, checking in on him. There were more than a few from the paltry remains of the True Mandalorians - and all of them had sent the same historical image: the insignia of the Jedi Order on the doors of the First Temple, defaced by Mandalore the Avenger during the last invasion of Coruscant.
Jango wasn’t the only person enjoying the Jedi getting their well-deserved comeuppance.
The final message to arrive was… strange. Jango didn’t give out his comm code freely. The only people who knew the direct line to Jaster's Legacy were people who had known the ship back when it had been called the Kirena Noon, Roz, and Ohnaka, who'd assisted Jango in "liberating" it after he'd freed himself from slavery, and wormed the hard comm out of Jango while he'd experienced a brief moment of gratitude. Everything else came through various burner comms Jango set up through his shell accounts.
The Kuati, for instance, had sent her message to the comm address Jango used for his corporate Clients in the Mid Rim, used by a holding company incorporated on Commenor. She'd transferred her courtesy fee to a bank account held by that same company in a bank branch on Fondor. Most of Jango's other clients were using the same forwarding system he’d built up as he worked.
So Jango knew the comm numbers that could contact his ship directly, and he didn't recognize this one at all. Who was it? Jango hesitated for a minute before exporting the message off the system to a spare datapad he always kept around. No point risking his ship’s navcomm or general computer on a virus or worm. Jaster - and then later Kal Skirata - had drilled basic comm safety into Jango’s skull at much length in his childhood and early adulthood. He ran a clean-up program to run through the Legacy’s system after that, and initiated a separate tracking program to find the source of the message for good measure.
All that done, Jango opened the message.
"Hey, Fett. Long time no see.”
Jango’s eyes widened. He hadn’t heard that specific low, husky voice greeting him in many, many years.
“If you’re getting this message, I’m dead. For real, this time,” Aurra Sing said with a feral grin. Her hair was longer than Jango had ever seen it, and drawn up into a high tail at the crown of her head and cascading down her back. There were no wrinkles, but Aurra’s people didn’t show their age that way, unlike other humanoid species. Nonetheless, she looked older than the last time Jango had seen her, some decade and more in the past.
“I took a job some time ago - one you would have wanted, hunting prey you desperately yearned to capture and kill,” Aurra continued, that wild grin not dissipating in the least. “I found her, and I killed her.”
Yeah. Jango remembered this too. He’d been on a hunt for some no-name accountant who’d been skimming off Gardulla’s books, and the final chase had stranded him out in empty space with a barely functioning hyperdrive. By the time he’d limped back to Outland Station, bounty safely frozen in carbonite and Jango already tallying the cost of ship repairs against the bounty reward, it was three weeks after a mysterious figure had offered a private bounty on Komari Vosa - and in the sort of high-stakes hunts private bounties tended to be, that was far, far too late.
He had eventually made his way to Kohlma, where he’d found carbon scoring from a massive firefight, the bodies of dozens of Bando Goro cultists, and a lot of blood Jango’s usual forensics lab had tentatively identified as a human with a high midi-chlorian count. No Aurra, though - not then and not later. Jango had honestly thought she’d completed the hunt, and then succumbed to injuries in a secret hideout. The money was good, but Aurra had been just like Jango.
An easy retirement was never the cards for people like them.
He’d cursed her and himself in the privacy of his own mind. Aurra was good, but Jango had fought Vosa, and Vosa had been better, faster, and stronger in all the ways trained Jedi usually were. A frontal assault on a fortified position was just asking to get killed. But Aurra was convinced of her own immortality, and Jango hadn’t been there to talk her out of it - or at least take the lead. Instead, she’d gone out in a blaze of glory. At least, that’s what everyone thought. But apparently, she hadn’t. And wasn’t that a surprise?
Jango hated surprises.
“Success on that mission led to another, far more lucrative contract - enough to allow me to retire for the rest of my days,” the woman in question said. She propped her chin on one long-fingered fist. “But we both know I’ve made enemies. One of them has killed me - which means my last will and testament takes effect, and I am charging you, my oldest friend, as its executor.”
“Are you fucking kidding me, Aurra?” It was a rhetorical question. Any thought that the holo was a fake of some kind had been discarded. Only Aurra could be this damn annoying, even in death.
“Find where this message originated, and you’ll find both my will, and a personal bequest to you,” Aurra said, still smirking as she leaned her head against one palm. “And just in case you’re considering ignoring this - you owe me, Jango. I killed Komari Vosa. I didn’t do it for you, but I still killed her, and you owe me a debt for her death. I’m calling it in.”
At that, the holo abruptly cut off. Jango thought for a minute, and then just sighed.
“That’s not even remotely close to how Mando debts work, Aurra,” he told her ghost. “But sure. Let’s see what you’ve left me now that you’re finally dead. Knowing you, I’m guessing it’s the sort of detonator that will blow up in my face.”
The first tracking program he ran on the message back-tracked it to a system labeled Besh-873 in Republic star maps, but Jango already knew that wasn’t the primary location. That system was called Junction in Hutt stellar maps, and it was an empty part of space a few lightyears from anything interesting in terms of stellar cartography. It had one dim red giant of a star, but no planets, no nebulas, no asteroid field, and no weird anomalies in the fabric of reality. Just vacuum for five lightyears in every direction, and a whole bunch of high-speed holocomm transmitters pointing coreward, Rimward, and up and down the Axis. It was the primary communications conduit in and out of Hutt Space, and usually only nobodies with nothing to hide and fools with no expectation of privacy used it - the Hutts monitored everything that passed through it, and information about the messages could be obtained, if you had the cash.
Jango had the cash, and he’d shelled out for a permanent access subscription seven years ago, when he’d finally established himself as a force in the field of corporate espionage. The message packet had been sent from Kafane, off the section of the Dead Road that was open to the public - at least that’s what the meta-data told him. The level of access even told him which planetary satellite had transmitted the packet off Kafane. For more information, he’d have to actually go to Kafane and investigate further.
“Well, be careful,” Roz warned him when he finally departed from Outland Station, two days after he received the message. “Aurra had a nasty sense of humor. It would just be like her for this to be another fake-out.”
“Maybe,” Jango agreed. “That was her style. But it probably won’t be fatal-”
“-and you’re curious,” Roz finished with a sigh. Roz had never cared for Aurra, although Jango had never gotten a firm explanation why. “Well, stop by Dex’s before you leave, I have a little something waiting for you there.”
Jango didn’t bother protesting the order. She and him had gone far past employment contracts over the past twenty years they’d known each other. She had a direct line to his ship, and Jango had a permanent berth on her station. That was as close as Jango got to friendship these days, and she knew it.
Dex was as he ever was: friendly, gregarious, and a cursed menace to secrets everywhere. His public front was an exotic weapons store, and Jango had used his services in that field more than once to source parts for repair. Dex couldn’t help with the armor or the specialized support gear that went into it - he didn’t have a line into Mandalorian space, but very few people did. Traditional armorers had been targeted during the Civil War by both sides, and the profession still hadn’t recovered the numbers from a generation before. Kryze Glassworks was willing to export, as was MandalTech, but they had a million proprietary agreements for their vendors. It wasn’t worth it for an independent shop to pay the licensing fees, which was just how Clan Kryze and Clan Ordo liked it.
Concordian Crescent Tech was the exception, but CCT only sold four products at any given time, and they were finicky beasts. Jango loved his WESTAR-34s, but they were a pain in the shebs to keep in proper alignment, and CCT’s board believed it was a poor user who couldn’t do it themselves, especially when the information to do so was available in the instruction manuals on their public HoloNet site.
But aside from the armor and the pistols, most of Jango’s tools were sourced from non-Mandalorian sources, and there was no better supplier than Dex in this part of Hutt Space. But Dex’s real business was information, and in that field he was an unparalleled master in both Hutt Space and beyond. He had informants in every living kajidic, and half the dead ones, plus “friends” from every sector of space the galaxy over - including the Core. There were other brokers with more in-depth knowledge or better spies in one place or another, but no one could beat Dex for the sheer breadth of his network - and he did it all with a cheerful smile and a backslap, to boot.
“Jango! Roz ordered a lil’ something for you,” Dex called out from the back of his shop. He was showing a display of poison needles to a group of Echani mercenaries, and was making a pretty good attempt of selling them on it. “My boy Talon will hand it over - see him in the back office!”
Jango walked past a Devaronian browsing rifle sights, and avoided a corner where a very industrious clerk droid was showing cord upgrades to a manumitted assassin unit. Past the register was a narrow hallway where Dex had his office, and inside the office was the boy of the hour: Talon Karrde.
Talon had showed up in Dex’s shop about a year ago, a skinny little reed of a kid sporting a mop of black hair and an absolutely ferocious scowl. Dex had muttered something about poaching him from Jorj Car’das, and the kid had just stayed with him ever since, working in the shop, selling weapons, and doing whatever it was kids did on Outland Station when they weren’t with their guardians. In Talon’s case, that seemed to encompass spying on people from the vents and creeping below tables at the tapcaf until he was inevitably caught and tossed out.
Jango had once been a ten-year-old boy in a strange place. He understood the impulse. That did not mean he condoned it. One day Talon was going to get caught by someone less good-natured than Jango, and there would be a helluva lot of trouble to sort out to save his skin.
“Hey kid, I’m here for a pick-up,” Jango stated as he knocked on the door lintel with his knuckled
Talon looked up from the datapad he was reading, and smiled. "You’re here for Roz’s present? Catch!”
Talon, the little rancor shit, threw a datacard card high - probably higher than he thought Jango could jump in the armor. Without the jetpack, that was true for most human or near-human Mandalorians. Jango could jump that high in armor, but he wasn’t going to give the little brat the satisfaction. Instead, he watched Talon’s face lose its smug expression as he realized he wouldn’t get more information about Jango’s physical capabilities today as the chip sailed overhead.
“You’re going to have to try harder than that if you want to know the limits of my performance in this armor,” Jango said irritably and held out his hand. “The real chip, now.”
Talon made a horrible face at Jango before begrudgingly holding out another datachip and dropping it into Jango’s palm. “I wouldn’t have to take these measures if you’d just compete in the tournament like the other hunters do.”
“Those other hunters fight because they can’t make a living on the hunt,” Jango said derisively. “And you should focus on your coursework, I’m sure Dex has more than enough educational units scheduled for you when the shop is slow.”
The kid just leaned back on his chair legs, crossed his arms behind his head, and smirked as Jango walked back through the narrow corridor towards the front of the shop. “You are my coursework!”
Great. Just what Jango wanted to hear. He’d talk to Dex about that later, not that it would do much good. Dex, like Rozatta, had an inflated view of Jango’s moral scruples - namely, that they existed at all, and nothing Jango said or did would convince him otherwise.
The safest route from Outland Transit Station to Kafane was via the Triellus Trade Route to the terminus of the Pabol Sleheyron at Formos, and then travel along the Pabol Sleheyron to the crossroads at Ulmatra. That took a long time, though - longer than Jango was comfortable with. If a pilot was canny and bold and (more importantly) familiar with the part of Hutt Space known as the Cairns, a ship could jump from Ylesia on the Shag Pabol to M’Hanna on the Dead Road, and then just follow the Dead Road up to Kafane in one long jump.
Jango was canny, bold, and very, very familiar with Hutt Space. He arrived at his destination forty-two hours after departing from Outland Station.
Kafane was fairly average as planets in Hutt space went, even the little ones off the major hyperspace routes. The area around the main space port was a middling hive of villainy, but most of the developed area was just… boring. Kafane was an older world in Hutt Space, but despite its antiquity, no kadijic had claimed it as a throne world - or if any had, they had lost so much influence no one remembered their name. It was a chilly world, with a brief winter and a long, cool dry season. The Hutts despised cold, dry worlds above all else - Jango suspected that the drop in temperature made them more likely to hibernate. But it was still a profitable world - Kafane’s main export was commodity grain and processed foodstuffs for the various species that lived in Hutt Space. Jango particularly liked their emergency rations - it was damn hard to find a competitor with a better calorie/mass ratio this side of the galaxy.
In Jango’s experience, places like Kafane were the rule, not the exception. The shadow ports and night cities were what most outsiders saw of Hutt Space, but they weren’t all of Hutt Space.
Once he dropped out of hyperspace, it was a quick drop into one of the smaller spaceports of the second continent. From there he could backtrace the message out of the specific satellite to a specific data center in a suburb of that town. The datacenter itself was trivially easy to gain access to - he walked in on a rest day and bribed the security guard for access. From there he traced the message to a specific room in a particular hotel near the main spaceport. Per the security guard, it was the most expensive room in the nicest hotel in the area.
“How do you know it’s the most expensive room in that hotel?” Jango asked flatly. That was the sort of detail that was too specific for the average citizen to know.
The security guard just shrugged with hands outstretched. “Booked it for my honeymoon four years ago. I have some fond memories of that room; pretty sure my oldest was a souvenir of our stay, if you know what I mean…”
Yeah, Jango knew what the guard meant, and he wished he didn’t.
Jango scoped it out for a day and confirmed the room had a tenant. Per the hotel’s reservation software, the room itself had been booked in person a week ago, and reserved for an entire month. That matched the approximate time period the message had been sent. When Jango sliced into the security desk footage, the figure who rented it had made the reservation in Huttese sign language and paid for it in cash. They were short and slight, wore robes that covered them from head to toe, and definitely weren’t Aurra Sing.
But then again, it wouldn’t be her, would it? Not after being decapitated by that Jedi bastard on Geonosis. The footage Dex had obtained had been pretty clear, given the angle of the camera.
So whoever it was, they weren’t Aurra. Probably an assistant she’d contracted to do a job, and they wouldn’t get the money until he took delivery. They hadn’t checked out, and they hadn’t left the room, either - probably bought their own supplies. Jango weighed the costs and benefits of waiting them out versus just going in and seeing what they wanted, and decided that the latter choice was not the safest, but was certainly the most expeditious.
And Jango really was quite curious at this point. What message could Aurra possibly pass down from beyond the grave?
“Ah, sir!” a sallow-faced human wearing the hotel's uniform called out to Jango when he entered the lobby. “Are you here for your meeting with the gentle-being in Room 745?”
That was, in fact, the room the message had come from. Jango nodded curtly.
“Excellent! The gentle-being did state a Mandalorian would be meeting them here before they checked out,” the clerk chattered. “Please follow my colleague Lisye, she’ll show you to the appointed meeting place.”
The clerk called a concierge to guide him to the room; he was no doubt alerting Aurra’s lackey of his arrival even as Jango walked away. It was all very theatrical in a way Jango didn’t enjoy, and even though he’d seen the undoctored video footage of Aurra’s death, he still felt his heart rate pick up as he rode the lift to the 7th floor. The whole thing felt like a classic Aurra ambush scenario.
The concierge was a gray-skinned Twi’lek woman wearing the same hotel uniform as the lobby clerk. She brought him promptly to the door of Room #745, bowed slightly, and left him there with no further instructions. Once she was out of sight, the door opened. Jango put a hand on the butt of his right pistol and walked through the threshold. Nobody tried to shoot him - that was a good sign. He took three further steps inside, and stopped short.
Aurra was sitting on the couch.
Not Aurra as she had been in the recording, a woman grown and sure of herself. And not the Aurra Jango remembered best, a young punk who thought she was invincible and would never die. Not even the Aurra Jango had first met all those years ago when he’d come back to the work when all else had been lost. That Aurra had been a mean, spiteful teenager who had screamed at Jango more than once when he’d offered her a credit chit for a warm meal.
This Aurra was younger than he had ever seen her. She was a literal child, with pale round cheeks and wide green eyes. Her head had been buzzed very short, almost bald - that more than anything else shook Jango out of his fugue. Aurra had never kept her hair shorter than shoulder-length in all the time he had known her.
“Who are you?” he asked, glad the vocoder smoothed over the rough edges of his voice.
“Aurra called me Lucky,” the girl replied, eyes cool and evaluating as she looked him up and down. “I’m her student. She told me that you would be training me from now on."