Before the ship left hyperspace Fett brought the Butcher up to the control room and put him in the chair nearest the airlock. Malloc was sweating heavily, fighting with his fear. He’d drunk his first five bottles early in the trip; Fett had held back the sixth bottle for this moment. Fett restrained Malloc at the ankles, and by his right hand; he left the Devorian’s left hand unchained, so that Malloc might drink. Once he was satisfied with Malloc’s bonds Fett unsealed and handed Malloc the last bottle of Merenzane Gold. It wasn’t a matter of kindness on Fett’s part; if it kept Malloc from struggling during the transfer to the Devaronian authorities, better to let him drink.
They’d barely spoken to one another the entire trip. Malloc lifted the bottle to his lips and swallowed three, four times, before speaking. “How much longer?”
Fett glanced at his controls. “Six minutes until breakout. At least twenty before we dock with the shuttle that’ll take you downside.” He paused. “Time enough for you to finish the bottle, if you work at it.”
“Do you know what they’re going to do to me?”
“They will feed you, still alive, to a pack of starved quarra.” Fett paused. “Domesticated hunting animals—this practice is one of the things that’s kept Devaron out of the New Republic, I’ve heard.”
Malloc nodded a little convulsively and took another drink. “It’s a bad way to die. I saw it done once, when I was a boy. You were right, Fett, we Devaronians don’t die easy. The quarra go at the belly first, the soft flesh. But the condemned doesn’t die of that. They may nibble on your ears, or your eyes or horns, but that won’t kill you, either. If you’re lucky the quarra tear your throat out quickly. You arch your head back and expose your throat, and if you’re lucky—”
“The time you saw it done,” said Fett curiously, “What had the condemned done?”
Malloc stared at the golden liquid in his free hand, and took another quick drink. “I don’t think there’s a word for it, exactly, in Basic. He went hunting, during famine, and caught his prey—and fed himself, and his quarra. He didn’t bring it back to the tribe.” He looked up at Fett. “Do you know what I did?”
Fett glanced over at his instruments. Several minutes left until breakout; best let him talk. He looked back at Malloc. “Yes.”
“I was a good servant to the Empire,” the Butcher said. “My own people rose in rebellion. They sent my command out to Hunt them down. And I did it, Fett. I Hunted them across the northlands, and I caught them in the city of Montellian Serat. We shelled them until they surrendered—”
Fett nodded. “And after taking their surrender, you executed them. Seven hundred of them.”
“The Empire ordered us to move on. To reinforce loyal troops, fighting just south of us. We were not to leave any troops behind as guards for the prisoners … and certainly we were not to leave any of them living.”
“They didn’t tell you to execute the prisoners.”
“They didn’t have to.” Malloc drank again, a huge belt, lowering the level of the bottle noticeably. “It took almost five minutes, Fett. We put them in a holding pen and started shooting at them. They screamed and screamed and screamed. We just kept shooting until the screaming had stopped.” He said almost pleadingly, “I was following orders.”
“I know.”
“They say you were Darth Vader’s favorite bounty hunter.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you have any loyalty to what you were?” A touch of real anger glittered through Malloc’s despair. “I did the Empire’s work, man! Doesn’t that count for anything?”
Fett thought about it. “I wish,” he said finally, “that the Empire had not fallen.” He nodded, remembering, and then said softly, “Yes. I used to enjoy my work more.”
Hopelessness settled on the Butcher—he sagged, looking as though someone had just doubled the artificial gravity in the Slave IV. They always thought they could bargain, or plead, right up to the last moment. Malloc hadn’t had a chance to ask the next question; he asked it now. Virtually all of Fett’s bounties, given the chance, did—
“How did you catch me?”
A minute left to breakout. Fett nodded toward the bottle Malloc held. “I traced sales of Merenzane Gold across the entire sector Tatooine is in. They said, at the bar you frequented on Tatooine, that it was your favorite drink.”
Malloc stared at him. “That crap I drank on Tatooine? That wasn’t Merenzane Gold, you idiot, they don’t serve Merenzane Gold in bars like that, they just pour it out of bottles that once, eons ago, were looked at hard by a man who heard of Merenzane! Don’t you know anything about liquor?” he asked in despair. “Haven’t you a single civilized vice?”
Fett shook his head. “No. I do not drink, nor indulge in other drugs. They are an insult to the flesh.”
“So you Hunted me down because you thought I was drinking Merenzane Gold, all those years on Tatooine. Fett, I had one glass of real Gold the entire time I was on that miserable excuse for a world.” Malloc shook his head in disbelief, took another swig from the bottle. “By the Cold. I can’t believe I got caught by a nerf herder like you.”
The hyperspace tunnel fragmented around them; Fett turned away from Malloc, to his controls.
“Reality,” said Fett, “doesn’t care if you believe it.”
Malloc threw the bottle, of course. The security system shot it out of the air with a single blaster bolt. The bottle blew apart into shards that rattled against the back of Fett’s helmet; the liquid splashed against Fett’s armor.
“You should have drunk it,” Fett said. He did not have to look at Malloc to know the gray despair that crossed his features. He’d seen it before, a thousand times.
• • •
Fett docked with the shuttle, in orbit about Devaron.
The Guild representative came across first. Fett stood in the main entryway, rifle in hand, pointing it at the representative as he entered.
The representative was Bilman Dowd, a human, tall and thin and elderly, with a severe bearing and no discernible sense of humor; he had been in the Guild even longer than Fett, which was a remarkable accomplishment in this day and age. “Hunter Fett,” he said, courteously enough.
“Dowd.”
Dowd looked the Butcher over. Kardue’sai’Malloc sat motionlessly, staring straight ahead. He did not seem to be aware of Dowd’s presence. “This is the Butcher, is it?”
“I believe so.”
Dowd nodded. He carried with him a small slate, with various controls on it; he touched one now, and spoke. “Come across.”
The Slave IV’s lock cycled again; four Devaronians entered, two of them in military dress, bearing rifles that they carried pointed at the Slave IV’s deck. The third was a female Devaronian, young, in gold robes and a gold headdress; the fourth, wearing robes of a cut similar to the woman’s, except in black, was an older Devaronian, perhaps the Butcher’s age.
All four hesitated at the sight of Fett, aiming his rifle at them—
Dowd gestured to the woman and said something in Devaronian. Fett had never actually heard the language spoken before; it was low and guttural and full of snarling consonants. It sounded like an invitation to a fight.
The woman’s expression did not change. She crossed to the spot where Malloc sat—Fett had restrained his left hand prior to allowing anyone else on board. She kneeled in front of Malloc, looking the shivering prisoner over as though she were inspecting a carcass in the marketplace. Malloc’s skin had acquired a blue tinge; Fett supposed it was something that happened to Devaronians when they were deathly afraid.
The woman stood up and nodded abruptly. She spoke in Devaronian—
Dowd said, “She says it’s her father.”
Fett nodded; it was the reason the bounty had been “Alive,” rather than “Dead or Alive.” It had only changed a few years back; the Devaronians had no longer been certain that the Butcher would be recognizable, dead.
The older Devaronian said grimly, in rather po
or Basic, “We pay him now.”
Dowd handed his tablet over to the Devaronian. The Devaronian laid his hand flat against the tablet, and spoke several words in Devaronian. Dowd took the panel back, tapped two of the controls in succession, and turned to Fett.
“You’ve been paid.”
It was not the sort of thing Fett took anyone’s word for; he took several steps backward, rifle still pointed at the group, and glanced slightly to the side. In a holofield at the edge of the control panel, a live link to the Guild Bank showed the current balance in Fett’s numbered account—
C:4,507,303.
Five million credits, less the Guild’s handling fee of 10%, plus the seven thousand, three hundred and three credits Fett had had in the account—business had been bad, recent years.
The relief that washed over Fett at the sight was the strongest emotion other than anger that he’d felt in at least a decade. He could afford to have a replacement clone for his lower right leg; he could afford the cancer treatments that had been bankrupting him. Fett barely heard himself say, “Take him. He’s yours.”
They hauled the Butcher up out of the chair he was restrained in, being none too gentle with him. As they pulled him to his feet, he yelled at Fett, in Basic: “You do what you promised!” The glare in his eyes was perfectly mad, as they dragged him toward the airlock. “You take care of my music!”
After the Devaronians had gone, Dowd stood with his tablet, looking at Fett with plain curiosity. Fett sat in the pilot’s seat, still holding his rifle, pointed rather generally in Dowd’s direction.
Dowd said, “You’ll be retiring, I presume.”
Fett shrugged. “I haven’t thought about it.”
Dowd nodded. “What did he mean—about the music?”
“He had a music collection. Music the Empire suppressed, apparently. He asked me to deliver it to a woman who would see that the music was published.”
Dowd lifted an eyebrow. “Are you going to?”
“I said I would.”
Dowd nodded. “You’re a strange one.” The comment didn’t offend Fett; Dowd had made the observation before, and more than once, over the course of the decades they had known one another. Dowd reached into the pocket of his coat, and Fett stirred, bringing the rifle up slightly.
Dowd’s smile was thin. “I’ve a message chip for you. Message that arrived at Guild headquarters. Do you want it?”
“Leave it on the deck,” said Fett, “and leave. I’m very tired.”
The message was amazing.
The encryption code was so old that Fett had to dig into his computer’s archives to find the key for it. He’d made the practice, over the years, of giving his informants encryption codes in a numbered sequence; the first five digits of this message were 00802, which made it at least twenty-five years old—Fett’s current encryption identification numbers started well upwards of 12,000.
He unarchived the encryption key for the 802 protocol, and decoded the message.
It was short. It said:
Han Solo is on Jubilar—Incavi Larado.
In a lifetime of bounty hunting, Boba Fett had rarely, in conversation with others, said two words when one would do. He didn’t talk to himself, not ever—
Boba Fett said out loud, “One from the vaults.”
On his way to Jubilar, Boba Fett played the music that the Butcher of Montellian Serat had thought more important than his own life.
There were over five hundred infochips in the carrying case the Butcher had buried; each chip had the capacity to hold almost a day’s worth of music Fett opened the case, pulled one free at random, and plugged it in.
The sounds that surrounded him were—different, he had to admit. Atonal, crashing, and thoroughly unpleasant to the ear. He shook his head, pulled the chip free, and decided to try one more.
A long silence after the chip was inserted. Fett waited, and finally, impatiently, reached for it—
The sound tugged at the limits of audibility. Fett froze in the motion of reaching for the chip, straining to hear. The whisper grew into the faintest sound of a woodwind, and then a high horn joined it, playing counterpoint—
Fett’s hand dropped, and he leaned back in his chair, listening.
A voice that sounded female to Fett, but might have been a human male or an alien of any of a dozen sexes, for all Fett would have sworn to, joined in, weaving in and among the instruments, singing beautifully in a language that meant nothing to Fett, a language he had never heard before.
After a bit he reached up and pulled his helmet off.
“Lights off,” he said a while later.
He sat there in the cool cabin, on his way to Jubilar to kill Han Solo, listening in the darkness to the only copy, anywhere in the galaxy, of the legendary Brullian Dyll’s last concert.
In the icy Devaronian northlands, beneath the dark blue skies that had haunted Kardue’sai’Malloc’s dreams for over two decades, some ten thousand Devaronians had converged in the Judgment Field outside the ruins of the ancient holy city of Montellian Serat, the city Malloc had shelled into its current state.
It was a beautiful day late in the cold season, with a chill breeze out of the north, and high pale clouds skidding across the darkened skies. The suns hung low on the southern horizon; the Blue Mountains lifted away up to the north. Malloc barely noticed the Devaronians surrounding him, the members of his family dressed in their robes of mourning, as they pushed him through the crowds, to the pit where the quarra waited.
He heard the quarra growl, heard the growl rising as he grew closer to the pit.
His daughter and brother walked a bare few steps behind him. Malloc recalled he had once had a wife; he wondered why she was not there.
Perhaps she had died.
A dozen quarra in the pit, lean and hungry, leaping up toward the spot where Malloc’s guards brought him to a halt.
Devaronians are not creatures of ceremony; a herald cried out, “The Butcher of Montellian Serat!”—and the screams of the crowd raised up and surrounded Malloc, an immense roar that drowned out the noise of the snarling quarra; the bonds that held him were released and strong young hands shoved him forward, and into the pit where the starving quarra waited.
The quarra leapt, and had their teeth in him before he reached the ground.
He could see the Blue Mountains from where he fell.
He had almost forgotten the mountains, the forests, all those years on that desert world.
Oh, but the trees were beautiful.
Arch your head back.
They made Han buy the speeder—Jubilar wasn’t big on rentals. Too frequently the rentals, and/or the renters, didn’t come back.
In early twilight Han pulled the speeder to a stop at the address they’d given him, and got out to look around.
Almost thirty years.
He felt so odd: everything had changed. Places that he remembered as well-kept buildings had grown run-down, places that used to be run-down had been torn down and new buildings built in their steads. Slums had spread everywhere—the planet’s never-ending battles had razed entire neighborhoods.
The neighborhood surrounding the Victory Forum, where Han had fought in Regional Sector Number Four’s All-Human Free-For-All extravaganza, was a blasted ruin. It looked like the remains of some ancient civilization, worn down by the eons. The small buildings surrounding the Forum had their windows broken out and boarded up; flame and shells and blaster fire had scored them.
All that remained of the Forum itself was broken rubble strewn across a huge empty lot. Han stepped off the sidewalk, into the lot. Glass and gravel crunched beneath his feet as he walked across it, toward the main entrance.
He stood in the empty lot, staring at the desolation, with a cool wind tugging at him—and suddenly it struck him as though he were there, that moment, all those years ago:
… standing in the ring. Facing the opponents, with the screams and cheers and taunts of the crowd in his ears. His heart pou
nding and his breath coming short, as the match flag fluttered down toward the ground, and the other three fighters came at him.
Han took a running leap at the nearest. He got up two meters off the ground and landed a flying kick into the face of the onrushing first fighter. The man’s nose broke, his head snapped back—
To this day Han had no clear memory of the next several minutes. They’d recorded the fights, and he’d seen the recording; but the knowledge of what had happened did not connect to his blurred memories of the events themselves. The boy had been hurt, and hurt badly, walking off the mat with a broken arm and a broken jaw, two broken ribs and a concussion and bruises across half his body; the bruises turned purple the next day. The woman who’d cared for Han the next several days, he couldn’t even remember what she’d looked like, she was a strange one and he did remember her running her fingers over the bruises, plainly fascinated—
Here. Here. Right about … here.
Han stood on the spot. This empty place … this was the spot. The ring. And when all was done, he’d been the last one left on his feet—
Thirty years. Over half his life had passed since that day.
Han took a slow step … stopped and took one last look around at the devastation, a ruin stretching to the horizon; and turned away and walked back to the speeder, and sat motionlessly in the speeder, leaning back with his hands clasped behind his head, staring up at the sky as darkness fell around him, remembering.
“Mayor Baker,” Han said. “A real pleasure.”
He’d met her in a brightly lit hydroponics warehouse, in a complex of warehouses at the edge of Death, in the part of Death they had used to call Executioner’s Row. He’d come prepared; he was visibly armed with a blaster, had a couple of holdout blasters tucked inside his coat, and a third down in his boot.
Not that he expected any trouble; this was business, a business he’d been in for a long time before the Rebellion, and he knew what he was doing. But no point in taking chances, on a planet like Jubilar, in a city like Death.
Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters Page 31