by K. W. Jeter
replaced by silence as he glanced over his shoulder and
saw the court of Jabba the Hutt rendered motionless. He
turned away from the bench and walked into the center of
the hologram. The forms were insubstantial as ghosts-he
could have passed his hand through any one of the
sycophants and hangers-on surrounding the Hutt's
thronelike hover platform-but detailed in such perfection
that he could almost smell the sweat and rank odors of de
cay rising from the grates in the synthesized floors.
"You're dead, aren't you?" With a thin smile, he
brought his face close to the stilled image of Jabba the
Hutt. "That's such a shame. I hate to lose a good
customer." Over the years Jabba had commissioned several
large orders, lethal equipment for his thugs and
hirelings from KDY's personal armaments division, plus
elaborate palace furnishings and a superbly appointed
sail barge, with military retrofits, from one of the Kuat
subsidiaries devoted to luxury vessels. There had been
extras thrown in that Jabba had known nothing about
hidden recording devices that had captured nearly
everything that took place in the palace on Tatooine and
aboard the floating barge. A good contractor, thought
Kuat of Kuat, knows his accounts. Better than they even
know themselves.
Word of the Hutt's death had already seeped through
the galaxy, gladdening many, setting off an acquisitive
scramble among others. Of all of his species, Jabba had
been the most active-if that word could be applied to
something so obese and slow- and with the farthest reach
in his shady enterprises. They're already at each other's
throats-the late Hutt's associates, including Jabba's own
supposedly grieving relations, struggling for control of
his intricate and criminal legacy. That would be good for
business; Kuat of Kuat already had appointments scheduled
with some of the worst and most ambitious of the lot. New
plans always called for new weapons.
The notion of throats mordantly amused him. What he'd
already heard about Jabba the Hutt's death was confirmed
by the holographic image. One of Jabba's ineffectual
little hands held a length of chain, its other end
fastened to a collar around the neck of a human form;
standing at the edge of the recreated platform, Kuat of
Kuat appraised with a connoisseur's eye the revealed
attractiveness of Princess Leia Organa. His own wealth
and power had brought many varieties of feminine beauty
through his private quarters, even from the highest ranks
of the nobility. The princess, however . . .
He made a mental note to seek this woman's ac
quaintance, if he ever had the opportunity. If it hap
pened, he wouldn't be such an idiot as to leave something
as simple and deadly as an iron chain lying about. "Never
hand your enemy"-Kuat of Kuat spoke aloud to the dead
Hutt's image-"the means by which she can kill you."
Jabba's death was a minor concern at the moment,
though. Even the presence of Leia Organa at the late
Hutt's court was, at this moment, of no great
significance to Kuat. There were others that he sought,
faces to be found in the past. He returned to his
workbench and, with a few delicate adjustments to the
playback unit, ran the recording back toward its
beginning, before Leia Organa had ever entered Jabba's
palace, disguised as an Ubese bounty hunter with captured
Wookiee in tow. That should do it, thought Kuat as he
glanced over his shoulder; he lifted the probe's tip from
the device, freezing the image once again.
Stepping past Jabba's thronelike platform, Kuat of
Kuat looked around the hologram of the Hutt's court. The
assembled faces were a rogues' gallery of interstellar
villainy, ranging from petty theft to murder-and beyond.
Hutts tended to attract these types, the way small fur-
bearing animals attracted fleas. Though in a certain
sense, it was a symbiotic rather than parasitic
relationship At home in his palace, Jabba had been able
to look around himself and at least see sentient
creatures whose morals were on a par with, or even below,
his own.
Kuat of Kuat walked slowly through the re-created
court, looking for one face in particular. Not even a
face, but a mask. He paused before the frozen image of
Jabba's majordomo, a glittering-eyed, evilly smiling
Twi'lek named Bib Fortuna. The males of the planet
Ryloth, even with all the extra cognitive abilities
packed into the heavy, tapering appendages hanging from
their bare skulls onto their shoulders, had no capacity
for generating wealth and no courage to steal it, even
though they were nearly as avaricious as Hurts. This
particular one had tried to worm his way into the Kuat
Drive Yards' corporate bureaucracy, before a noteworthy
display of untrustworthi-ness had gotten him booted from
the headquarters on the planet Kuat. Hurts, however, had
more of a taste for flattery and tail kissing; Kuat of
Kuat wasn't surprised that Fortuna had wound up in
Jabba's palace.
He didn't spot what he was looking for until he
raised his eyes toward the holographic court's encircling
gallery. There he is, thought Kuat of Kuat. The
distinctive helmeted visage of Boba Fett, the galaxy's
most feared bounty hunter, gazed down at the mingled
courtiers below like a totem of some planet's primordial
deity, contemplating a justice Colder than the spaces
between the stars. Arrayed along Fett's arms and slung at
his back were his working tools, the wrist lasers and
miniaturized flamethrower, and all the other weapons that
were as precise in his hands as the tiny probes were in
Kuat of Kuat's. The helmet, with its dark T-shaped visor,
hid the bounty hunter's eyes and the measured
calculations going on behind them.
Satisfied for the moment, Kuat of Kuat walked back to
the edge of the hologram. Even being in a three-
dimensional simulation of Jabba's court, with its miasma
of avarice and bad hygiene, brought a twinge of nausea to
his gut. Better to watch from the outside of the
hologram, from the pristine and mathematic angles of his
own office. At the workbench, he adjusted the probe's
angle in the holoprojector's circuits. Without even
glancing over his shoulder, he could sense Jabba's image
and the others in the Hurt's dimly lit court restored to
motion, acting out their parts in this little segment of
the past.
Another adjustment muted the audio portion of the
playback; Kuat of Kuat didn't need to hear Jabba's
slobbering voice and the cruel laughter of his sycophants
to discern what was happening. Another Twi'lek, a
female-on Ryloth, the females were nowhere as repulsive
as their male counterparts-had become the source for
Jabba's amusement. A pretty slave, a pantaloo
ned dancing
girl with her distinctive Twi'lek head appendages
decorated to resemble an ancient court jester's cap of
bells-but her childlike appeal and grace wasn't enough to
satisfy her master's appetites. A look of apprehension,
close to panic, had moved across her face as she had sat
decorously at one side of the court, as though she'd had
a prescient glimpse of her fate. Which was being played
out again as the image of Jabba the Hutt, wattled bulk
jiggling and eyes widening with delight, reeled in the
chain fastened to the Twi'lek dancing girl's iron collar,
dragging her toward the thronelike platform. The poor
girl must have seen the same thing happen to others
before her; beautiful creatures had been a disposable
commodity for Jabba.
Just as Kuat of Kuat expected, the next few moments
of the playback showed the trapdoor sliding open in front
of Jabba's platform. The dancing girl's fall snapped the
links of the chain; the court's motley denizens clustered
around the grates, straining to watch her death at the
claws and teeth of the rancor, Jabba's favorite pet, in
the darkness below. The nausea returned to Kuat of Kuat's
stomach, sharpened to disgust. A waste, he thought. The
dancing girl had been beautiful enough to be useful to
someone; the destruction of such a pretty device angered
him more than anything else.
He'd seen enough, at least at this level of detail.
If the fat slug was as dead as had been reported, he now
didn't regret the loss of trade. There'd be others,
moving up the ranks of the Huttese species' galaxy-wide
hierarchy. Kuat of Kuat reached over and froze the
playback, the better to scan the images for the one in
whom he had the most interest.
And who was no longer there in the hologram. The
helmeted visage of the bounty hunter was missing from
where Kuat of Kuat had spotted it before, up on the
gallery overlooking the central area of Jabba's court.
Kuat of Kuat stepped away from the workbench and across
the nearest edge of the hologram, looking up toward the
simulation of the rough-domed ceiling, then around to the
openings of low, tunnellike passages branching off to
other parts of the palace. The image of Boba Fett was
nowhere to be seen.
Kuat of Kuat ran the recording unit back to the point
where the bounty hunter, face hidden behind the visored
mask of his uniform, could be seen watching the court
below him. This time, he didn't let himself be distracted
by the fate of the Twi'lek dancing girl; starting up the
playback again, he saw where Boba Fett had slipped
unnoticed from the gallery and out of the court, even
before Jabba had started pulling on the chain and
dragging the girl over the trapdoor.
Interesting. Kuat of Kuat let the holographic re
cording play on. Our friend, he thought, had another
agenda. Not surprising; Boba Fett had not reached the top
of the bounty-hunter trade without building up a network
of business interests and contacts, some of them-if not
most-completely unaware of each other. Jabba the Hutt
might have been stupid enough to believe that by paying
Fett a generous retainer, he had thereby secured the
bounty hunter's exclusive services. If so, that indicated
how much Jabba had been slipping, making the kind of mis
takes that had led to his death.
Always a mistake to completely trust a bounty hunter.
Kuat of Kuat didn't commit mistakes like that.
Kuat ran the hologram playback forward. There was no
sign of Boba Fett until much farther on in the recording.
He spotted the bounty hunter's image then, snapping a
blaster rifle up into firing position as the disguised
Leia Organa held up an activated thermal detonator and
demanded payment for the captive Wookiee she had brought.
That potentially lethal confrontation had ended with the
Hutt's guttural laughter and admiration for his
resourceful opponent; the bounty for Chewbacca had been
paid and Boba Fett had lowered his weapon.
So he did return there, mused Kuat as he watched the
hologram. Whatever mysterious appointments Boba Fett
might have kept in Jabba's palace, they hadn't prevented
him from attending to his duties as the Hutt's freelance
bodyguard. It was a safe assumption that the reports
gathered by Kuat's corporate intelligence division were
accurate they had described Jabba's death, out on his
sail barge, hovering at the edge of the Great Pit of
Carkoon in Tatooine's Dune Sea, and had mentioned Boba
Fett being there at the struggle.
More than that, the reports had also described Boba
Fett's death. What Kuat of Kuat wanted was proof of that.
Operating without that proof was like building a machine
with a critical component left untested. A machine, he
thought, that could kill its master if it broke down.
Someone like Boba Fett had a disquieting habit of
survival; Kuat of Kuat would have to see the bounty
hunter's death before he would believe it.
He looked at the pieces of the messenger pod and its
curved, reflective casing scattered on the workbench. The
next pod to drop out of hyperspace and penetrate the
planet Kuat's atmosphere would very likely carry the
necessary information inside it. All the units had been
designed to carry only partial segments of what had been
recorded at Jabba's palace and aboard the Hutt's sail
barge. There was less likelihood that way of any of KDY's
powerful enemies intercepting the units and, if they
managed to get past the security procedures, figuring out
Kuat of Kuat's own concerns.
One last thing to do with this message He reached
into the device and extracted the micro-probe. The
breaking of the circuit initiated the self-destruct
program; the metal grew white-hot, twisting in upon
itself as it was consumed. From underneath the bench, the
felinx fled in terror, streaking toward the office
suite's farthest recesses. A few more seconds passed,
then the holoprojector and its contents had been reduced
to blackened slag on the workbench's surface, cooling
into a single indecipherable hieroglyph.
The contents of the message, that had come so far to
reach him, was safely locked away in Kuat of Kuat's
memory. When proof of Boba Fett's death came, he might
allow himself to forget the smallest particle of
information. When it's safe, Kuat of Kuat had already
decided. Not until then.
And if that proof didn't come ... he would have to
make other plans. Plans that would include more than one
death as part of their internal workings. Meshing gears
often had cruelly sharp teeth.
He turned away from the workbench and walked slowly
through the empty spaces of the office suite, looking for
the felinx. So that he could pick it up and cradle it in
his arms, and soothe it of the fright it had received.
3
It took some doing, but she found him. For the second
time.
The girl crouched behind one of the Dune Sea's rocky
outcroppings as she watched the barely noticeable hole
dug into the barren ground below. The twin suns bled into
the horizon, the chill Tatooine night already unfolding
across the sands. Around her bare shoulders, she pulled
tighter a salvaged scrap of sail-barge canopy-blackened
by fire and explosion along one ragged edge, stiff with
dried blood along another. The delicate fabrics with
which her body had been adorned in Jabba's palace were
little protection against the cold. A shiver touched her
flesh as she continued to watch and wait.
She'd known that the bounty hunter, the one called
Dengar, would have some hiding place away from Jabba the
Hutt's palace. What used to be his palace, she corrected
herself. The monstrous slug was dead now, that had held
the end of her chain and the chains of the other dancers.
But when Jabba had been alive, most of the thugs and
bodyguards in his employ had had little warrens out in
the rocky wastes, where they could seal themselves in for
a few hours' sleep, safe from being murdered by each
other-or by their boss. Jabba's court hadn't been easy to
survive in; she knew that better than anyone. But it's
not me who died, she thought with a bitter satisfaction.
Jabba got what he deserved.
In the dimming light, she put away her brooding, the
little vengeful spark that kept her warm inside. She'd
spotted, down below, the approaching figures for which
she'd been waiting.
Two medic droids trundled across the sand; their
parallel tracks headed toward the warren hole in the
rocky wasteland. They were probably refugees from Jabba's
palace, just as she was; all of the medic droids there
had been modified with wheels in place of the original
stumpy legs so they could get around in the desert
terrain. Neelah watched them for a few seconds more, then
eased out of her hiding place and carefully worked her
way down the farther side of the dune, where the droids
wouldn't be able to see her.
"Hold it right there." She caught the droids just as
they were transmitting the security code that would
unseal the subsurface warren; a row of numbers, softly