by K. W. Jeter
STAR WARS
THE BOUNTY HUNTER WARS 1 THE MANDALORIAN ARMOR
K.W.Jeter
Scan/OCR - Demilich ([email protected])
1
NOW . . .
during the events of
star wars return of the Jedi
live ones are worth more than the dead ones.
That was the general rule of digital appendage for
bounty hunters. Dengar hardly had to remind himself of it
as he scanned the bleak and eye-stinging bright wastes of
the Dune Sea. Right now he'd spotted a lot more dead
things than living, which all added up to a big zero for
his own credit accounts. I'd have done better, he told
himself, getting off this miserable planet. Tatooine had
never been any luckier for him than it'd been for any
other sentient creature. Some worlds were like that.
His luck wasn't as bad as some others' had
been-Dengar had to admit that. Especially when, as his
plastoid-sheathed boots had trudged up another sloping
flank of sand, a gloved fist had seized on his ankle,
toppling him heavily onto his shoulder.
"What the-" His surprised outcry vanished echoless
across the dunes as he rolled onto his back, scrabbling
his blaster from its holster. He held his fire, seeing
now just what it was that had grabbed on to him. His fall
had pulled a hand and arm free from the drifting sands
that formed the shallow grave for one of Jabba the Hurt's
personal corps of bodyguards. Some reflex wired into the
dead warrior's battle-glove had snapped the dead hand
tight as a womp-rat trap.
Dengar reholstered his blaster, then sat up and began
peeling the fingers away from his boot. "You should've
stayed out of it," he said aloud. The Dune Sea's scouring
wind revealed the corpse's empty eye sockets. "Like I
did." Getting into other creatures' fights was always a
bad idea. A whole batch of the galaxy's toughest
mercenaries, bounty hunters included, had gone down with
the wreckage of Jabba the Hutt's sail barge. If they'd
been as smart as they'd been tough, Dengar himself
wouldn't have been out here right now, searching for
their weapons and military gear and any other salvageable
debris.
He got his boot free and stood up. "Better luck next
time," he told the dead man.
His advice was too late to do that one any good. In
his own memory bank, Dengar filed away the image of the
corpse, with its clawing fingers and mouth full of sand,
as further proof of what he'd already known The guy who
comes along after the battle's over is the one who cleans
up.
In more ways than one. He stood at the top of the
dune, shielding his eyes from the glare of Tatooine's
double suns, and scanned across the wide declivity in
front of him. The forms of other warriors and bodyguards,
sprawled across the rocky wastes or half-buried like the
one left a few meters behind, showed that he'd found the
still and silent epicenter of all that fatal action he
had so wisely avoided.
More evidence Bits and pieces of debris, the
wreckage of the repulsorlift sail barge that had served
as Jabba's floating throne room, lay scattered across the
farther dunes. Scraps of the canopy that had shaded
Jabba's massive bulk from the midday suns now fluttered
in the scalding breezes, blaster fire and the impact of
the crash having torn the expensive Sorderian weftfabric
to rags. Dengar could see a few more of Jabba's
bodyguards, facedown on the hot sand, their weapons
stolen by scavenging Jawas. They wouldn't be fighting
anymore to protect their boss's wobbling bulk. Even in
this desiccating heat, Dengar could smell the sickly
aftermath of death. It wasn't unfamiliar to him-he'd been
working as a bounty hunter and general-purpose mercenary
long enough to get used to it-but the other scent he'd
hoped to catch, that of profit, was still missing. He
started down the slope of the dune toward the distant
wreckage.
There was no sign of Jabba's corpse, once Dengar
reached the spot. That didn't surprise him as he used a
broken-shanked scythe-staff to poke around the rubble.
Soon after the battle, he'd seen a Huttese transport
lifting into the sky; that'd been what had guided him to
this remote spot. The ship undoubtedly had had Jabba's
body aboard. Hutts might be greedy, credit-hungry slugs-a
trait Dengar actually admired in them-but they did have a
certain feeling toward the members of their own species.
Kill one, he knew, and you were in deep nerf waste. It
wasn't sentimentality on the part of the other Hutts, so
much as a wound to their notorious megalomania, mixed
with a practical self-interest.
So much for Luke Skywalker and the rest of them,
thought Dengar as the point of the staff revealed sticky
and distasteful evidence of Jabba's death. As if that
little band of Rebels didn't have enough trouble, with
the whole Empire gunning for them; now they'd have the
late Jabba's extended clan after them as well. Dengar
shook his head-he would've thought that Skywalker and his
pal Han Solo would have, at the least, an appreciation of
the Hutt capacity for bearing grudges.
Even without Jabba's obese form rotting under the
thermal weight of the suns, the debris zone stank. Dengar
lifted a length of chain, the broken metal at its end
twisted by blaster fire. The last time he'd seen this
hand-forged tether, back at Jabba's palace, it'd been
fastened to an iron collar around Princess Leia Organa's
neck. Now the links were crusted with the dried
exudations from Jabba's slobbering mouth. The Hutt
must've died hard, thought Dengar, dropping the chain. A
lot to kill there. He'd gotten an account of the fight
from a couple of surviving bodyguards that had managed to
drag themselves back to the palace. When Dengar had left,
to come out here to the Dune Sea wastes, most of the
remaining thugs and louts were busily smashing open the
casks of off-planet claret in the cool, dank cellars
beneath the palace, and getting obliterated in a orgy of
relief and self-pity at no longer being in Jabba the
Hurt's employ.
"Yeah, you're free, too." Dengar picked up an
unsmashed foodpot that the toe of his boot had uncovered.
The still-living delicacy inside, one of Jabba's favorite
trufflites, scrabbled against the ceramic lid embossed
with the distinctive oval seal of Fhnark & Co., Exotic
Foodstuffs-we cater to the galaxy's degenerate appetites.
"For w
hat it's worth." His own tastes didn't run to the
likes of the pot's spidery, gel-mired contents; he hooked
a gloved finger in the lid's airhole and pried it open.
The nutrient gases hissed out; they had sustained the
delicacy's freshness, all the way from whatever distant
planet had spawned it. "See how long you last out there."
The trufflite dropped to the sand, scrabbled over
Dengar's boot, and vanished over the nearest dune. He
imagined some Tusken Raider finding the little appetizer
out there and being completely perplexed by it.
One substantial piece of wreckage remained, too big
for the Jawas to have carted away. The hardened durasteel
keelbeam of the sail barge, blackened by explosions that
had destroyed the rest of the craft, rose at an angle
from where the stern end was buried beneath a fall of
rocks. Dengar scrabbled aboard the curved metal, nearly a
meter in width, and climbed the rest of the way up to
where the barge's bow had been, and now only the exposed
beam was left, tilted into the cloudless sky. He wrapped
one arm around the end, then with his other hand unslung
the elec-trobinoculars from his belt and brought them up
to his eyes. The rangefinder numbers skittered at the
bottom of his field of vision as he scanned across the
horizon.
This was a pointless trip, Dengar thought dis
gustedly. He leaned out farther from the keelbeam, still
examining the wasteland through the 'binocs. His bounty-
hunting career had never been such a raging success that
he'd been able to refrain from any other kind of
scrabbling hustle that chanced to come his way. It was a
hard trade for a human to get ahead in, considering the
number of other species in the galaxy that worked in it,
all of them uglier and tougher; droids, too. So a little
bit of scavenger work was nothing he was unused to. The
best would've been if he had found any survivors out here
that could either pay him for their rescue or that he
could ransom off to whatever connections they might have.
The late Jabba's court had been opulent-and
lucrative-enough to attract more than the usual lowlifes
that one encountered on Tatooine.
But the bunch of rubble Dengar had found out here-the
few scattered and pawed-over bits of the sail barge and
the smaller skiffs that'd hovered alongside as outriders,
the dead bodyguards and warriors-wasn't worth two lead
ingots to him. Anything of value was already trundling
away in the Jawas' slow, tank-treaded sandcrawlers,
leaving nothing but bones and worthless scrap behind.
Might as well just stay here, he thought. And wait.
He'd sent his bride-to-be, Manaroo, aloft in his ship,
the Punishing One, to do a high-altitude reconnaissance
of the area. Soon enough she'd be finished with the task,
and would come back to fetch him.
The knot of frustration in Dengar's gut was instantly
replaced with surprise as the keelbeam suddenly tilted
al most vertical. The strap of the electrobinoculars cut
across his throat as they flew away from his eyes. He
held on with both hands as the beam pitched skyward, as
though it were on a storm-tossed ocean of water rather
than sand.
Charred metal scraped tight against the ammo pouches
on his chest as the keelbeam rotated. As the beam twisted
about, Dengar could see the surrounding dunes heaving in
a slow, seismic counterpoint to the wrecked barge's
motion, cliff faces of rock and sand shearing away and
tumbling downward, slower clouds of dust stacking across
the suns' smoldering
faces.
At the center of the dunes, the slope grew deeper,
like a funnel with a black hole at its center. Another
shudder ran beneath the planet's surface, and the
keelbeam rolled almost sideways, nearly dislodging Dengar
from his grasp upon it. His feet swung out from beneath
him; Dengar looked down, past his own boots, and saw that
the hole at the bottom of the sand funnel was lined with
teeth.
Jaws clenched, Dengar muttered an obscenity from his
homeworld. You gnurling idiot-he cursed his own
stupidity, getting himself stuck here in the middle of
the air, with no escape route. He hadn't considered what
his presence might awaken, and how hungry it would be.
The Great Pit of Carkoon gaped wider, sand and rubble
swirling around the blind, all-devouring Sarlacc creature
at the center of the vortex. A sour stench hit Dengar
like a wind hotter than any that crossed the desert's
reaches.
A glance around him revealed to Dengar that the
keelbeam had slid partway down the funnel, then snagged
on a solid rock outcropping. He turned his face against
his shoulder as the sail barge's scattered debris rained
past him, the larger pieces hitting the Pit's sloping
sides and pitching end over end into the Sarlacc's gaping
maw. The keelbeam gave a sudden lurch in Dengar's
sweating grasp as the end below him shattered part of the
outcropping. Suddenly the beam swayed backward, leaving
him dangling precariously, only a couple of meters from
the Sarlacc's throat.
A pumping kick enabled him to get first one, then the
other of his boot soles up onto the beam. He squatted
into a deep knee bend on the narrow metal surface, then
jumped, fingertips clawing for the funnel's edge above
him. His belly hit the slope; sand slid maddeningly under
his hands as he thrashed and kicked, struggling toward
the bright and empty sky. With a gasp of effort, Dengar
managed to get his chest across the shifting edge of the
funnel, then scrabble the rest of his body over and
tumble down the other side.
Too bad for the Jawas-that was all that Dengar could
think of as he wrapped his arms around himself and waited
for the animate disturbance in Tatooine's crust to
subside. There might have been something of worth brought
to the surface; but unless the little scroungers wanted
to dive down the Sarlacc's throat to get it, that load of
valuable salvage was lost to them now.
The Dune Sea grew silent again. Dengar let a minute
pass, measured by his heartbeat gradually slowing to
normal, then scrambled to his feet. The Sarlacc had most
likely pulled its head back underground and was busy
digesting the bits of wreckage it'd just been fed, or
trying to. He figured that would give him time enough to
get a safe distance away, if he hurried. Brushing sand
from his gear, Dengar started trudging up the slope of
the nearest dune.
Three dunes later he stopped to catch his breath. To
his amazement, he saw that the scraps of debris, the
barely distinguishable pieces of Jabba the Hutt's sail
barge, still filled the center of the pit. The truth
dawned on him. It's dead, thought Dengar. Something-or
someone-had managed to kill the Sarla
cc. The rotting
stench had been from the creature's own torn-apart flesh,
visible beneath the wreckage.
Now the sense of life, however malignant, beneath the
desert's surface was extinguished. Only bits of wreckage,
no longer recognizable as to form and function, and a few
facedown bodies lay scattered around the empty zone.
The stink from the slope-sided hole motivated Dengar
in the opposite direction, toward Jabba's palace. This
was as good a time as any for him to verify the rumors
about what the palace had become since the death of the
Hutt. The orgiastic celebration of Jabba's liberated
underlings had been just beginning, the last time Dengar
had been inside the forbidding, windowless pile. If the
palace was empty now-reports differed on that score-then
the thick walls of the interior chambers would give him a
safe place to hang out while night and its attendant
hazards took possession of the Dune Sea, and he waited
for Manaroo's return. His own private hideout, which he'd
previously carved into a desert ridge of stone and
stocked with supplies, would have done the same-but at
the palace, there might be some remnants of Jabba's
court, like the Hutt's majordomo, Bib Fortuna, and others
who would be looking for ways to profit by the employer's
death. Great minds think alike, Dengar noted wryly. Or at
least the greedy ones do.
He gave the area one more scan, sweeping the horizon
with the electrobinoculars. One of the suns had already
begun to set, pushing his own shadow ahead across the
wasteland. He was just about to power off the 'binocs
when he spotted something nearly fifty meters away. That
one looks like he took the worst of it-another corpse lay
on a stretch of rough gravel. Faceup; Dengar could make
out the front of a narrow-apertured helmet. That was
about all of the corpse's gear that was intact. The rest
of the dead man's gear looked as if it hadn't been burned
away so much as dissolved, some kind of acid bath
reducing uniform and armaments to rags and corroded,
pitted shapes of useless metal and plastoid. Dengar
thumbwheeled the 'binocs into closer focus, trying to
figure out what could've happened to create that kind of
lethal effect.
Wait a minute. The sprawled form filled the elec
trobinoculars' lenses. Maybe not exactly lethal, Dengar