Bossk crushed the disgusting fruits under his heel and went forward.
The juveniles didn’t appear to be armed or otherwise pose a threat, so he let them be. Harming Wookiee children, even with a stun bolt, might infuriate the adults, and Bossk had learned from experience that Wookiees were much easier to capture when they weren’t raving lunatics. But there was something else he could do that might tie up some of the gunship’s crew while he searched for its captain.
Bossk flipped a tiny lever on his Relby and launched a micro-grenade at the base of a wroshyr tree. It exploded, setting the bark on fire.
He exited through a portal sliced from a tree trunk and walked down another long corridor. A set of thick wood blast doors waited at the other end, where the hallway curved right and left. He was nearing the forward arc of the ship, the ostensible bow of the bowcaster. Behind those doors lay the gunship’s bridge and most likely its captain, Chainbreaker.
Before Bossk had made it midway down the corridor, six Wookiees stomped into the intersection ahead, three coming from the left branch, three from the right. They were all armed and they were all angry. Two were browncoats, two graycoats, one had yellow stripes, and one no hair at all. They didn’t ask any questions or demand his surrender—they just bellowed and charged.
Bossk switched his rifle back to stun and fired at the foremost Wookiee. His shot sent the browncoat female tumbling backward, and she dropped her plasma torch before she could turn it on. The male browncoat behind her leapt over her body and came at Bossk swinging a makeshift wood flail. Bossk crouched, allowing the flail’s spiked head to crash into the wall above him, and then decked its wielder under the chin with the butt of his rifle. The Wookiee collapsed onto the female with a thud.
With the browncoats down, the graycoats were next, a pair of twins slashing at Bossk with vicious swords curved like scythes. In the paws of a seasoned Wookiee warrior, these ryyk blades could cleave through durasteel armor and lop off limbs with ease. Nonetheless, as much as these twins plainly wanted to be seasoned warriors, they were far from it. Bossk lunged at their legs and toppled them. As the twins fell, their blades found each other while Bossk’s stun bolts found their chests.
Bossk rolled and raised his rifle just in time to block the blow of a bronzium pipe. The striped Wookiee who held it roared. She was a muscular creature, the biggest of the group, and abandoned the pipe to heave Bossk up by his shoulders. Bossk bent his head forward and bit her nose. Howling in pain, she hurled Bossk away from her, but he caught her with two blasts before he hit the floor. Spitting out Wookiee blood, he got to his knees and added a second pair of shots. She fell like a tree.
Bossk sleeved the blood off his lips and stood, kicking the bronzium pipe. It rattled along the corridor until it stopped at the gnarled feet of his final opponent.
The last Wookiee of the six was a gaunt older male, completely shorn from head to toe. His jaundiced flesh revealed numerous scars, and his left arm dangled limply from his shoulder. When he growled, he wheezed.
Bossk caught a whiff of the Wookiee’s odor beneath the stink of disease and instantly knew who the wretch was, as Bossk had been the one to apprehend him over a decade ago. This was the once august Rutallaroo, renowned war engineer of Torukiko, who had rigged a fleet of catamarans into assault craft and masterminded a three-year covert campaign to drive the Imperial invaders off Kashyyyk. After Bossk had turned the renegade over to the Imperials for a hefty fee, Rutallaroo had supposedly apologized for his crimes and “volunteered” to design equipment for the Empire’s ever-growing military presence on Kashyyyk. The Empire had plastered his image across the HoloNet as an example of a “good Wookiee” who was doing his duty for the peace and security of the galaxy. It was a lie well told. Bossk knew that Rutallaroo would never turn on his own people—few Wookiees did—and his scars showed that he’d been cruelly punished for his refusal. Yet with all the torture his Imperial taskmasters had inflicted, they had clearly not broken his fighting spirit. Rutallaroo bared his fangs at Bossk, lifted his right arm, and protracted his cracked, discolored claws.
Meeting Rutallaroo’s fierce stare, Bossk wished they could tussle like old times, Wookiee and Trandoshan, tooth and claw. Sadly, however, these weren’t old times. When Rutallaroo charged, Bossk shot him with a stun bolt.
The Wookiee didn’t stumble or even waver. He kept coming.
Bossk blasted him a second time, and a third. Rutallaroo absorbed the stun bolts as if they were nothing at all. His former captors must have electroshocked him so much they had fried his nerves. Stun bolts weren’t going to work on him.
Having no time to change his rifle’s settings, Bossk dropped it, readied his own claws, and bared his teeth with a menacing hiss of his tongue. If this Wookiee wanted to tussle, tussle they would.
Rutallaroo swung first, but Bossk ducked and came up to slash the Wookiee from behind. Black blood tainted the tips of Bossk’s claws, but Rutallaroo didn’t howl or cry in pain. He turned his head and gave Bossk a twisted smile.
Bossk read the expression as any skilled hunter would: Rutallaroo had been subjected to so much pain that pain was all he knew. This made him highly dangerous, for he had nothing to lose.
Rutallaroo attacked again, a swipe Bossk quickly sidestepped. What he didn’t anticipate was that the Wookiee’s dangling left arm would reach out, grapple Bossk’s elbow, and stab those cracked claws through his scales.
Bossk hissed. He’d been duped—Rutallaroo’s limp arm hadn’t been limp at all, just a ploy. But the deception came as no real surprise. Despite their reputation as creatures of the highest honor, Wookiees always played dirty. It was one of the thousand reasons why Trandoshans hated them.
Kneeing Rutallaroo in the abdomen, Bossk wriggled his arm loose from the Wookiee’s grip. With both hands freed, he seized the engineer’s neck and squeezed. Ending the creature’s misery would be the merciful thing to do, but mercy never applied to Wookiees, particularly when it impacted Bossk’s bottom line.
Bossk flung Rutallaroo against the corridor wall. There was a thud, and the Wookiee slid to the floor. This time he didn’t move, nor did his expression. It remained fixed in that same mad smile. Bossk returned one of his own, a toothy smirk of victory. Old times, indeed.
He picked up his rifle and looked at his defeated adversaries, lying unconscious or immobile across the corridor. He found it strange that none of the Wookiees he’d faced had been armed with a blaster or even a bowcaster. It almost seemed that they had put up just enough of a fight to mount a convincing defense, without having to risk gravely injuring or killing him.
And then, adding to the mystery, the blast doors at the end of the corridor opened, as if inviting him to enter.
Bossk stayed put, aiming his rifle at the doorway. No one stepped into view, but out drifted the most pungent of odors, the very rankness that had enraged him when he first came aboard. Whoever was behind that doorway was a member of Chewbacca’s clan.
There was also something else to the stench, a burnt musk, of dirt and sand and the hot sun. For some reason, Bossk was reminded of the Scorch, the sunbaked plains of his homeworld where Trandoshans enjoyed basking in the rays and mothers routinely laid their nest-eggs.
The Scorch was also the place where Bossk had scored his first kills, consuming the rest of the clutch. While he had no direct recollection of that first triumph—no hatchling did—he could imagine it in vivid detail, down to the smells and the tastes, since it was a story his father used to tell with pride—the only story Craddosk ever told about him with pride.
Bossk’s chrono dinged. He had less than two minutes left before the dungeon ship’s purported arrival, though given the extent of the last brawl, he wouldn’t be surprised if Chainbreaker had seen through his trap and was calculating a route to hyperspace. He had to secure his target before the gunship fled from the asteroid belt with him in it.
The bridge was like nothing he’d ever seen on a Wookiee vessel. Technology superseded carpentry. Computer consoles ringed the deck. Display screens covered the walls. Everything from security cam feeds and newsnet streams to sensor scans and telemetry readings was being monitored. Data even hung in the air, shimmering above projection tables as holographic maps, personnel profiles, and hyperspatial coordinates. Silhouetted in this ghostly light, his long-sought quarry sat on a mechno-chair.
“Chainbreaker,” Bossk growled.
“Bossk’wassak’Cradossk,” the figure replied in Bossk’s native tongue, leaning into the light.
Bossk didn’t question his instincts, but he did briefly question his senses. He blinked and took a breath to decipher whether or not the silhouette before him was an aberration or apparition. The figure did not disappear, nor did the stench evaporate. His senses had not led him astray.
This was Chainbreaker.
But it was not the Chainbreaker he—or anyone else in the galaxy—would have ever expected. For the infamous Wookiee outlaw wasn’t a Wookiee at all, but a female Trandoshan.
Bossk stood there, finger on the trigger, itching to pull it, itching to know more. One of his own ferrying fugitive Wookiees to freedom was outrageous, unimaginable, a profane violation of the collective beliefs of their culture. From the moment of hatching it was ingrained in Trandoshan broods that Wookiees were their mortal enemies, the perpetrators of countless crimes against their species over the centuries. That a fellow Trandoshan would actively aid their foes in escaping long-deserved retribution—never in a thousand molts could Bossk have conceived of such a sacrilege.
Yet the most formidable of hunts often revealed the most obvious of truths. Chainbreaker’s identity explained why there had never been a confirmed image of her. No hologram, no snapshot, not even a witness’s description. Every bounty hunter in the business had assumed Chainbreaker was a Wookiee while marveling at how this enigmatic outlaw knew the intricate details of Wookiee trafficking, the flight paths of dungeon ships, the points of sale and transfer, the Trandoshan hunters involved, and the secret locations of Imperial detention facilities. The truth was so plain, so simple, that no one could have seen it, not even Bossk. Chainbreaker knew those secrets because she herself was a Trandoshan and was communicating with other Trandoshan hunters. She had conned them all.
Bossk then did something he hadn’t done in many, many hunts. He laughed, a curt, throaty chortle at the sheer absurdity of it all.
“You do know that by laughing at me,” Chainbreaker said in lisping Dosh, “you laugh at yourself.”
His laugh died when she bent her head further into the light. Hers was a face with which he was eerily acquainted. She had the same yellow-green cast to her scales as he did, the same beady orange eyes, the same sharp-toothed underbite, even the same pattern of cranial ridges. Looking at her was like gazing into a mirror and seeing a reflection of himself. For two Trandoshans to share all these traits was highly unusual. There had to be a reason.
Bossk flared his nostrils and sniffed out that burnt musk from the stench. Once more he was reminded of his hatching place, the Scorch, and the smells and tastes his father used to conjure when describing how Bossk broke the leathery shells of the other eggs and ate what swirled inside. Were Bossk’s instincts tying Chainbreaker to that event? Might she be more than just one of his species? Could she possibly be one of his clutch?
“It’s good to finally meet you again, brother,” she said.
Bossk flicked out his tongue. “How can that be? I devoured you.”
“Not enough of me, fortunately.” She clattered forward on the spidery ambulators of her mechno-chair. The red light of a holographic projection illuminated the rest of her body—or what remained of it. Of her four limbs, three were stumps. The single arm she did possess was short and small, with three clawed digits on a tiny hand. An adult Trandoshan would have been able to regenerate lost limbs, so she must have lost hers as a juvenile, before she’d developed her full regenerative capabilities.
Her presence—her existence—unsettled Bossk. His father had always told him he’d consumed all the other eggs, but Cradossk was also an inveterate liar. Why should Bossk have believed this story when Cradossk had repeatedly deceived him throughout his life? How many times had Cradossk given Bossk false leads to push Bossk off a trail so he could bag the bounty for himself? Bossk shouldn’t allow one instance of paternal pride to cloud his judgment. The most accomplished hunters accepted reality—that’s how they caught their prey. Perhaps his sister’s egg had been the last in the nest he’d pecked, after he’d gorged on the others and his fetal hunger had been sated. He could have left just enough of her to grow and survive like this.
“If you are who you say you are, then you should be grateful to me for your life,” he said.
She scoffed at the suggestion. “I thank the Wookiees.”
It took him a moment to realize her answer was not in jest. “The Wookiees?”
“The Wookiees,” she repeated. “Kind old Liswarr’arindoo, who couldn’t have a cub of her own, exchanged a bottle of Kowakian rum for my puny cracked egg, and saved me and suckled me and raised me like a daughter in her clan. She even gave me a name, since I was never given one by those who conceived me. Doshanalawook I am called.”
“Doshanala—” Bossk laughed again, unable to finish saying the ridiculous name. “I might’ve left you a body and an arm, but I must’ve nibbled much of your brain. Everyone in the galaxy knows those brutes don’t raise ’Doshan hatchlings. They eat our eggs for dessert.”
She stared at him without blinking. “Have you ever seen a Wookiee eat a Trandoshan egg?”
Bossk hadn’t, but that was beside the point. “I know they find them more delicious than those rancid wasaka berries.”
“A lie. Like all the other lies Trandoshans tell about them. Distortions and fabrications to incite a war between our species. Excuses so you can commit genocide.”
“Jilt me a jagganath—you really did drink their milk, didn’t you?”
“I merely speak the truth and work to rescue those who rescued me.”
As if to lend legitimacy to her lies, a cloud of an all-too-familiar clan-stink wafted over Bossk. Unlike when he’d smelled it in the ship’s corridor, on the bridge here it was so potent he nearly gagged. “You,” he said and gasped, “you were with Chewbacca’s kind.”
“For many years. His father, the wise Attichitcuk himself, mentored me.”
Bossk wasn’t one who often had doubts or misgivings. Life for him was easy, and he liked it that way. It was hunt or be hunted, shoot first, and never, never ask questions. Yet now his head was full of questions—questions about his father and his supposed sister, questions about his place in all this mess. He found himself in a state he rarely experienced. He was totally and utterly confused.
Regaining his breath, Bossk suppressed his bewilderment and reverted to what always worked for him. He stepped toward her, rifle out. Whether she was really his sister or whether she was telling him truths or half-truths, he wasn’t going to indulge her treasonous fancies any longer. “Make this easy, for both of us. Put this ship on a course to Asteroid X342 in the outer ring.”
“I already have.”
“What?”
“I thought you would want a ride back to your vessel,” she said.
“How do you know where I hid my…” A beep interrupted him.
“Your chrono,” she said.
Bossk glanced at his wrist. The timer had zeroed. The fact that at this moment Chainbreaker wasn’t looking for the Imperial ship meant one thing. “You knew I’d be here.”
“I did. I wanted to meet you, and
this seemed like the best opportunity.”
“The Wookiee prison transport—”
“Appears on the timetable you sent, but not on the hundreds of other schedules and reports I receive,” she said. “A good trick, I’ll admit, better than anyone else who’s tried to stop me. But I’ve played this game for far too long to fall for something like that.”
Bossk eyed the consoles and projections around her. “Hundreds of schedules?”
“Sometimes thousands. It’s hard to keep track.” She gestured at her surroundings with her small hand. “Go. See for yourself.”
While keeping his Relby trained on her, Bossk toured the bridge, glancing at the monitors, screens, and holographic maps. Most of the consoles tracked Wookiee outlaws like Maromaka, Tossonnu, and Wullffwarro, who were part of the clandestine network that ferried fugitive Wookiees to freedom. All big names, all big bounties.
“This is impressive.”
“I’ll tell Rutallaroo,” she said. “He built most of it.”
Bossk snuffed. “Won’t be building much more after the beatdown I gave him.”
A projection table near the center caught Bossk’s notice. He walked over to examine miniature holograms of himself and his ship rotating above the table. “So you keep tabs on me too.”
“I watch all those who threaten the cause.”
“Hate to break it to you, but aiding Wookiees is no great cause—it’s treason of the worst kind.”
“According to you,” she said.
“According to any Trandoshan,” Bossk said, but he didn’t press the argument, so astonished was he by what he saw on the projector console. It displayed not only a log of his recent whereabouts, but a comprehensive personal history as well. There was record of him joining a Rodian posse on Goroth Prime, assisting a Quor’sav narcotics agent on Uaua, silencing the Mad Monks of Xo, collecting bounties on Taldorrah, Lothal, and the Silver Moon of Acomber, and even a reference to that disastrous incident on Gandolo IV.
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