Tales of the Bounty Hunters

by Kevin Anderson

  Chenlambec answered gruffly, but his blue eyes twinkled over his makeshift mask.

  “Will do,” Flirt purred. “Next stop, Aida System and Governor Io Desnand. I hear there’s a nice reward offered for a certain scaly passenger of ours.”

  Bossk thrashed. “I will destroy this ship! I will take all of you with me to the Scorekeeper!”

  He couldn’t, from in there … could he?

  “I have failsafes everywhere!” He reached overhead and hooked two claws into an overhead panel.

  Tinian’s chest constricted. “Flirt,” she shouted, “be sure the Hound heard that! Bossk wants to blow it up!”

  “Oh, he did,” crooned Flirt. “He just let me remove Bossk from all command circuits.”

  The Trandoshan villain flung the overhead panel at the energy field. Instantly, he vanished behind an opaque shower of sparks.

  “Don’t worry,” Flirt purred. “We shut down that destruct circuit.”

  “We?” asked Tinian.

  “Hound and I. Who else?”

  “Chen,” Tinian murmured, rubbing her bare arms, “we have an acquisition to deliver.”

  • • •

  It took three of Governor Desnand’s stormtroopers wearing power gloves to wrestle Bossk out of the locker. An Imperial in khaki fatigues and a slouch cap handed Tinian a credit chit. “There you are, Madam Hellenika. Forty thousand credits, minus three thousand for our stormtroopers’ services.”

  That sounded like a bargain to Tinian. They stood on a huge, crowded landing platform where Chenlambec had landed the Hound. This’d seemed the only way to transfer Bossk into custody. “Three thousand?” she protested for form’s sake. “That’s robbery! It’s—”

  “I suggest you leave Aida immediately,” answered the Imperial, “before we run a background check on you and your partner. Only Peacekeeping regulations keep you low characters under control. I suspect—”

  “Very good, sir.” Tinian backed away from the man. “Thank you, sir. Good day.” She spun on one heel and sprinted toward the Hound’s landing ramp.

  Bossk crouched on a prison-cell bench. His claws twitched. He’d tried gouging stripes in these walls, but they were coated with transparisteel.

  The stormtrooper outside snapped to attention. Imperial Governor Io Desnand, a tall, plump marsh mallow of a human who would not have dared challenge Bossk on equal footing, strode up and stopped outside the force-shielded opening.

  An even plumper woman stood beside him. She hung on his arm like a growth, batting false eyelashes full of delicate veins (Bossk half expected them to flutter off and join some swarm of winged insects). “Ooh,” she exclaimed. “You were right, Io. He’s enormous.”

  Bossk glowered.

  “You ruined my chances for promotion, Bounty Hunter,” Desnand said darkly. “Any last requests?”

  “Promotion?” Bossk shouted. “What are you talking about? Those Wookiees—”

  “Were bait in a trap, Bounty Hunter. Instead of the Rebel fleet, I caught one miserable lizard. At least now I can make good on a promise I made Feebee two years ago.” He encircled the woman’s shoulders with one arm.

  Her bloodthirsty smile chilled Bossk; it made him picture the Scorekeeper wearing a human mask. “I’ve always wanted a lizard-skin gown,” she cooed. “Full length, and only seamless will do, or it’s not authentic. Yes, Io.” She tilted her head and pressed one fleshy cheek against his hand. “This will be lovely.”

  Bossk charged the force field. It blew him toes-over-topside against the back wall. “I’m innocent,” he cried, springing up to stagger forward. “I had nothing to do with your plan, Desnand! I knew nothing about it. I still know nothing!”

  Arm in arm, the pair strolled out of sight.

  Bossk stared after them, disbelieving. He was to be … skinned? Zeroed? To grace that creature’s wardrobe, instead of the Scorekeeper’s altar?

  He plunged to his knees and started digging. He’d find a way out, retrieve his ship, and continue the Hunt … Somehow.…

  Tinian stretched out in the Hound’s port sleeping cabin. The Hound was temporarily grounded back on Lomabu III, inside the prison compound. Chen had claimed the starboard cabin, formerly Bossk’s. Its bunk was longer and broader than either port bunk. Flirt had transferred command capability to both sleeping cabins. To Chen’s surprise (but not Tinian’s), Flirt had wailed every time they tried disengaging her from the Hound. Finally Chen plugged her in on X10-D’s power point and left her there.

  She was one happy droid now, with a large, strong body. All it needed, she claimed, was a soft blue detail job.…

  Flirt had spent most of the jump back to Lomabu inside the Hound’s programming, emerging occasionally to announce that she’d found some amazing new capability: “This ship can change course in the middle of a hyperspace jump! Hound, you’re magnificent.” “Hound has an armament circuit with built-in function echoes. I’m not sure how they work, but you could fire both quad guns on full power … simultaneously!” “Listen, Tinian. Hound knows how to hover suborbital, with full shields to the ventral surface.…”

  And that was how they had finished off the compound’s Imperial overseers. The Hound had dropped, hovering, fully shielded, as Chen and Tinian doubled up as gunners. They’d landed inside the new crater, ready to take on prisoners.

  But the Wookiees hadn’t left any Imperials whole. The sands feasted that day.

  This evening, Chenlambec was celebrating offship with his liberated kinfolk. Tinian had solemnly sprinkled a ritual handful of dirt over the pelts Chen buried, then she’d danced three rounds of the circle, gripping his enormous hand on one side and a friendly stranger’s on the other; but after that, she simply hadn’t been able to keep up with reveling Wookiees.

  Tomorrow—or maybe the next day, Tinian guessed from the noise outside—they would squeeze everyone on board and hit hyperspace before Io Desnand could send troops. The Hound could only manage a short jump carrying 593 Wookiees, which would be a tremendous burden on life support, but Flirt insisted Hound could reach Aida. From there, Chen’s Alliance contacts could shuttle passengers to other systems.

  He had taken her aside and laid both hands on her head, declaring her apprenticeship fulfilled, asking her to stay on as his partner and friend. She had half a ship now, eighteen thousand credits, and full Hunt status. For the first time in two years, she felt wealthy.

  Chenlambec gave away most of his acquisition money. Maybe she should, too.…

  On the other hand, that Imperial stuffed shirt had called her a low character. She sniffed her second-best black shipsuit, the best one that still had sleeves. Maybe she ought to think about buying some new clothes.

  She yawned luxuriously.

  She’d decide later.

  Winded, Chenlambec dropped out of the circle dance and sat down on an empty stormtrooper helmet. The Hound filled the prison yard’s center, shining like a smooth, brilliant ice floe under white prison lights. He felt vaguely disloyal about admiring it so keenly. He would miss the Wroshyr.

  He extended his claws and ran them through feathery fur that dangled from his left forearm.

  He didn’t think of himself as vain, but he liked his pelt. Right where it was.

  Of Possible Futures:

  The Tale of Zuckuss and 4-LOM

  by M. Shayne Bell

  “Does Darth Vader know?” the droid 4-LOM asked Zuckuss, his Gand bounty hunter partner. 4-LOM had asked that same question every 8.37 Standard minutes from the start of Zuckuss’s meditation. In two hours they would dock at Darth Vader’s flagship to accept an Imperial contract, and they had to know if they were heading into a trap.

  Zuckuss did not answer. Evidently he had not yet received intuitive knowledge about Vader and the contract Zuckuss breathed through the respirator and held his breath in. Then he breathed out, and held his breath out for a moment 4-LOM noted that it was the 1,057th breath of this meditation. The Gand did not need to breathe often, but deep thinking seemed to
require regular respiration.

  He had observed that Zuckuss usually received intuitive knowledge between the 1,323rd breath and the 4,369th. Once it had come on the fifty-third: 8.37 minutes into the meditation, but 4-LOM calculated that that was a statistical anomaly. Still, unlike most Gands, Zuckuss maintained a 91.33725 percent chance of being correct in whatever knowledge he gained through meditation: knowledge about where an acquisition might hide, the exact numbers of a group, the intentions of others toward them.

  They needed to know, now, Darth Vader’s intentions toward them.

  If Vader had somehow learned that it was 4-LOM and Zuckuss who had hunted Sector Governor Nardix for the Rebellion, Vader would want revenge. The Rebellion had tried Nardix for crimes against sentients, and the trial had been a great embarrassment to the Empire. The Rebels, for their part, paid a princely sum for Nardix—and that was what 4-LOM and Zuckuss needed more of: credits.

  To buy medical care for Zuckuss.

  Illegal medical care. Zuckuss was not an old Gand, but he moved like one if he went off the drugs that controlled his pain, and during his respiration cycle he breathed like one: short, fitful breaths that drew air into lungs and esophogeal tissue burned by contact with oxygen after a female human acquisition, stupidly struggling after Zuckuss had hunted her into a dark alley with no exit, pulled off his helmet. 4-LOM secured the acquisition, then tried to help Zuckuss put his helmet back on, but before they could Zuckuss had taken three reflexive breaths of poisonous oxygen.

  This was cause for significant embarrassment to Zuckuss, because had he retained sufficient presence of mind, he could have ceased his respiration until a more convenient time.

  Parts of his lungs had burned away that day, and what was left functioned poorly. Zuckuss needed new lungs. New lungs could be grown only in illegal—hence, expensive—cloning vats.

  So the Empire’s credits tempted 4-LOM and Zuckuss with the hope of new lungs.

  Another 8.37 minutes passed.

  “Does Darth Vader know?” 4-LOM asked.

  Again, Zuckuss did not answer.

  Zuckuss, deep in meditation, found it difficult to sense Darth Vader’s intentions. A swirl of possible galactic futures masked them. Zuckuss always sensed galactic futures when he meditated in hyperspace. It was the ideal place to meditate on the probable course of events in the galaxy. Meditate in a city, and you sense where the actions of its millions of citizens lead it. Meditate in orbit above a planet, and you sense where the cultures of an entire world are heading. But meditate in hyperspace and, no matter what knowledge you meditate for, you first sense the underlying feelings that motivate the majority of sentients and through them glimpse the destiny of the galaxy.

  Those feelings, and the futures they could create, had changed. The fabric of the galaxy felt different to Zuckuss.

  There was less hope in it, now.

  Zuckuss had felt hope ebbing away for many years, but in this meditation Zuckuss sensed, on all the worlds in all the systems he passed, an overwhelming sense of hopelessness. From one world rose the realization of having no place to run; from another, the ache of endless separation; from many worlds the intense pain victims of Imperial torturers felt moments before death.

  Yet with this growing lack of hope rose another feeling, constant now in the galaxy. It quickened the Gand’s pulse.

  He felt the movement of wealth.

  The Empire was taxing, extorting, confiscating, and stealing the wealth of its countless citizens on their numberless worlds, creating an unlimited, glittering flow that enriched the Empire’s coffers and showered its officials with luxury.

  It was this flow Zuckuss and 4-LOM would tap into.

  If they were not heading into a trap. Zuckuss still could not intuit Darth Vader’s intentions. They lay clouded before him, carefully guarded.

  Zuckuss breathed in again, and held his breath in.

  The 1,088th breath, 4-LOM noted.

  Toryn Farr was the last person to leave the Rebel command center in Echo Base on Hoth. She was Chief Controller there, responsible for communicating orders to the Rebel troops. Princess Leia’s final orders had been the ones Toryn had dreaded hearing: “Give the evacuation code,” Leia said, “and get to the transport!”

  Han pulled Leia down the hallway, and the remaining staff ran after them, carrying any movable piece of equipment they could, while Toryn broadcast the evacuation code: “Disengage! Disengage!” she said. “Begin retreat action!”

  She jerked her console free from its connections and rushed with it down the icy passageway toward the transport. Echo Base was collapsing on them. Ice shards pummeled her head and back with each concussive explosion on the surface—explosions that came one after the other. Lights in the passageway flickered and went out. They did not come back on. After a moment of darkness, dim emergency lights glowed to life. Their light was barely enough to run by. She passed a branch of the main tunnel completely choked with tons of collapsed ice.

  “The princess went that way!” someone ahead of her said.

  Toryn tapped her headset to actívate it and accessed the retreat channel just in time to hear Han say he and Leia were still alive. “Han and the princess are alive and heading for the Falcon,” she called out to everyone ahead of her.

  They hurried on and came to the hangar with its last transport, the Bright Hope: their only hope for escape in this rush of retreat—and Toryn stopped in horror at the sight there.

  The flight deck around the Bright Hope was filled with wounded soldiers. Medical droids moved among them, trying to stop the most seriously wounded from bleeding to death.

  And more wounded were being carried in.

  We will all die here, Toryn thought, or worse: the Empire will capture us alive. She never once thought that any able-bodied Rebel would desert wounded comrades, and she saw no way to load all the wounded onto the transport before snowtroopers would be upon them. They were already reported in the ice fortress itself.

  A blaster shot slammed into the back of the man who stood next to Toryn. He fell dead on the ice, and Toryn and everyone near the tunnel scrambled for cover behind crates stacked by the door.

  Snowtroopers—behind them in the corridor!

  Toryn returned fire. Only then did she realize she had taken cover behind crates of thermal detonators. Her first thought was to run for safer cover.

  But she did not run.

  She tore open a crate, activated three grenades, and threw them up the tunnel. The grenades emitted clouds of smoke, and for a few brief seconds she saw the feet of snowtroopers kicking the grenades around the tunnel-floor ice—trying to boot them back out into the hangar.

  But they did not have time. The grenades exploded and brought down tons of ice in the tunnel, choking it shut.

  And buying the Rebels precious minutes to save their wounded.

  “Get these soldiers on board!” she shouted, and she rushed to help carry the wounded to safety and escape.

  “Does Darth Vader know?” 4-LOM asked Zuckuss after another 8.37 minutes.

  “Yes,” Zuckuss said. He straightened his legs and opened his eyes.

  4-LOM immediately began programming the ship for a second, desperate jump away from their destination. They could not change course in hyperspace, but their ship could execute a second jump so quickly it would appear for only a brief moment on the Imperial’s screens. He calculated that it would be a brief enough appearance for them to escape.

  Zuckuss put a hand on the droid’s forearm. “This is not necessary,” he said.

  4-LOM continued his programming. The last four words Zuckuss spoke made no sense—the “logic” of nonmechanical sentients often made no sense to 4-LOM: of course they had to flee to safety.

  “Darth Vader knows what Zuckuss and 4-LOM have done, but he does not care,” Zuckuss said, as usual referring to himself in third person. “The acquisitions he sends us to hunt matter more to him—to the Empire—than one hundred Governors Nardix: and the Empire need
s our help. They know that. Zuckuss and 4-LOM are safe in accepting this contract and the Empire’s credits, for now. But if success is not achieved …”

  Zuckuss did not finish his sentence—an annoying habit of most nonmechanical sentients. It made accurate communication difficult. 4-LOM quickly computed seventy-six variant endings to that sentence, all with a probability of better than 92.78363 percent of being what Zuckuss might have gone on to say, all predicting the Empire’s wrath and their doom.

  Our probable futures have shrunk to this, Zuckuss thought: he and 4-LOM had this one chance to redeem themselves. If they succeeded, the Empire would forget their involvement with Governor Nardix. If they failed, the Empire would stop at nothing to exact its revenge. He and 4-LOM would have to use all their combined skills to hide for a time, create new identities, and survive.

  Zuckuss smiled. Days lived under threats like these were days worth living.

  Among the last soldiers waiting to be carried aboard the transport, Toryn found Samoc, her younger sister. Samoc was one of the Rebel’s best snowspeeder pilots. That her ship had gone down meant the fight outside was truly horrific. Samoc’s red hair was mostly burned away. Her face and hands were burned. No one had treated her or helped her at all, except to bring her here.

  She was conscious. She blinked up at Toryn, through lids that now had no eyelashes, and she tried to reach a hand to Toryn.

  “Imperial walker shot me down—” she whispered.

  A blaster shot slammed into the ceiling and showered them with ice: snowtroopers, rushing into the docking bay itself from across the ice fields outside the fortress.

  Toryn picked up her sister and ran with her to board the transport. “It must hurt to move you like this,” she said. “But there’s no other way!”

  Shots echoed around them.

  They were among the last to board. The docking bay now lay empty of wounded Rebels, but scattered with tons of vital equipment abandoned to make room for the unanticipated casualties.