by K. W. Jeter
you?"
SHS1-B appeared to mull over her statement for only a
few seconds. "That certainly overrides the truthfulness
programming."
"Silence," interjected le-XE hastily. "Completeness."
"Good." She glanced around the chamber to see if
she'd left any telltale sign of her visit. Against the
base of the rough-surfaced wall was something she hadn't
spotted before. She stepped closer to it and saw that it
was a pile of rags, the tattered shreds that she'd found
still clinging, wet with the Sarlacc's digestive fluids,
to the injured man's torso. On top of the pile was
another object, not rags but metal, etched by its time in
the beast's gut, but still recognizable. Neelah leaned
down and picked up the helmet with its unmistakably
narrow, T-shaped visor.
That was what she had seen before. In Jabba's
palace-the helmet's mask was a cruel, implacable face in
itself, the gaze hidden inside as sharp as any cutting
blade. Neelah grasped the helmet in both hands, holding
it before her, like a skull or part of a dead machine.
Even empty, it looked back at her in silence-and she was
afraid.
Boba Fett . . .
The name sounded in her thoughts, though not spoken
by her. That was what he'd been called. She knew that
much; she'd heard the name whispered, by those who'd both
hated and dreaded him.
"You'd better go now." The medical droid's voice
broke into her thoughts. "It won't be long before Dengar
returns."
Her hands trembled as she set the helmet back down on
the pile of rags. At the chamber's entrance, she stopped
and looked back at the figure on the bed. A thread of
something almost like pity crept into the knot of fear
inside her.
She turned and hurried away, toward the slanting
tunnel that would lead her to the more comforting
darkness outside.
There had been voices. He'd heard them, from some
where on the other side of a blind sea.
He supposed, in a still-functioning area of his
brain, that that was part of dying. In a cortical nexus
lying under the weight of pain and blurry not-pain, the
remains of his mind and spirit picked over the few scraps
of sensory data that impinged upon the living corpse that
his body had become. They were like messages from another
world, frustratingly incomplete and mysterious.
Of all the voices he'd heard, only one had been a
woman's. Not the same one as before, which he could
remember being addressed as Manaroo; he had still been
lying out on the desert, vomited up by the Sarlacc, when
he had heard that one.
But that had been the past; now he heard another
woman's voice. That was the one that tormented him, that
made the sleep of his dying a place where memories rose
out of the darkness.
His eyelids had fluttered open, or had tried to; they
were mired in some pliable substance clinging tightly to
his face. As weak as he was, the stuff bound him as
tightly as Han Solo had been in the block of carbonite
he'd delivered to Jabba the Hutt. But he'd managed to
raise his eyelids just enough, a fraction of a
centimeter, that he'd been able to catch an unfocused
glimpse of the female. She had been there in Jabba's
palace, a simple dancing girl-but he knew she was
something more than that. Much more. Jabba had called her
. . . Neelah. That w as it; he could remember that much.
But that wasn't her real name. Her real name . . .
Fragments of memory touched, then drifted apart, as
the effort of vision took him back beneath the lightless
weight pressing upon him.
There, he dreamed without sleeping, died yet still
lived.
And remembered.
4
. . . AND THEN
JUST AFTER THE EVENTS OF
star wars A new hope
"Stick with me," Bossk told the new Guild member.
"And I'll show you how it's done."
He could feel the other's rising anger, like the
radiation from a reactor-core meltdown. That was exactly
the response he wanted, that his comments were designed
to evoke. There wasn't the tiniest segment of a standard
time cycle that Bossk wasn't angry to some degree. He
even slept angry, the way all Trandoshans did, dreaming
of their razor fangs locked on the throats of their
reptilian species' ancient enemies. Rage and blood lust
were good things in the Trandoshan galaxy-view. That was
how things got done.
"You needn't act wise and superior with me." The
close-range audio unit built into Zuckuss's breathing
apparatus had enough bandwidth to let his irritation
sound through. "I've collected nearly as many bounties as
you have. Your family connections are the only reason for
your rank in the Guild."
Bossk displayed an ugly, lipless smile toward the
partner he'd been assigned. The urge to reach over and
pull the other's head off, air hoses and comlink wires
dangling like the tendrils of swamp weed surrounding the
birth pits back on Trandosha, was almost irresistible.
Maybe later, Bossk told himself, when this job's over.
He pointed a talon down the corridor in front of
them. Both he and Zuckuss had their spines flat against
the wall of a side passage; from behind sealed doors some
twenty meters away, the brittle music of a jizz-wailer
band sounded, mixed with the high-pitched babble of the
casino's customers blowing their credits on rows of
rigged jubilee wheels. Gambling held no attraction for
Bossk; he preferred surer things. Another sentient
creature's death was the best, especially if there was
profit involved. Sometimes, though-as with this job-the
quarry had to be taken alive, if there was going to be
any payoff. That complicated things.
"The thermal charges are already in place." The point
of Bossk's claw indicated a pair of tiny bumps on the
doors of the casino's main accounting office. A
chameleonoid visual sheath on the charges' casings
prevented the security optics from detecting them. "When
I blow them, I want you straight through those doors.
Don't bother scanning for guards, just dive in-"
"Why me?" Zuckuss turned his large-eyed gaze toward
him. "Why don't you do that bit?"
"Because," said Bossk, grating out an unconvincing
show of patience, "I'll be covering you from behind." He
held up his blaster rifle, its stock and grip controls
modified for his talons, large even by Trandoshan
standards. "I'll draw off any fire while you're securing
the counting room. It's a standard two-prong attack,
straight out of the Guild manual for this kind of
situation."
"Oh." Leaning his head out from the passage, Zuckuss
studied the doors. "That makes sense . . . I suppose. . .
."
Idiot, thought Bossk. The actual reason was that the
into bleeding pieces by the guards' tight-focus lasers.
Better you than me-especially since his partner's death
would mean he'd get to keep all of the bounty for
himself, or at least the part that was left after the
Guild took its share.
"Let's go." He shoved Zuckuss out ahead of himself,
at the same time as he hit the trigger device mounted on
the sleeve of his stalking gear. The faint sounds of
music and frenetic pleasure were drowned out by the bass-
heavy rumble of the thermal charges ripping open the
sealed doors.
Bossk planted himself in the middle of the corridor,
clawed feet spread wide, blaster rifle raised to his slit-
pupiled eye. One talon squeezed onto the rifle's trigger
stud in anticipation; the cold heart in his chest sped up
with excitement as he peered through the coiling smoke. .
. .
No fire came from beyond the ripped, heat-distorted
metal.
"Zuckuss!" He shouted into the comlink mike mounted
near the leathery scales of his throat. "What's going
on?"
A moment passed before the other bounty hunter's
reply came. "Well," said Zuckuss's voice, "the good news
is that we don't have to worry about the guards. . . ."
Bossk charged down the corridor, rifle clutched in
both sets of talons, and into the casino's accounting
room. Or what was left of it the smoke from the thermal
charges' explosion had lifted enough that the scattered
taliputer and vidlink terminals could be seen. Along with
the bodies of a half-dozen casino guards-each one had had
a laser hole drilled through the chest plate of his
uniform with impressive accuracy. And speed, Bossk
managed to note. None of the guards had even managed to
get his weapon unslung and up into firing position;
whoever had taken them out had done so in a matter of sec
onds.
"Look," said Zuckuss. He bent down and touched the
hole in one guard's chest plate. "I'm getting a thermal
reading here. The plastoid hasn't cooled-they were all
lasered while we were still standing out in the
corridor!" The bounty hunter stood and pointed to the
room's far wall. A jagged hole, big enough for Bossk
himself to have walked through without stooping, revealed
the stacked cylinders of the power converters behind the
main casino building. "Somebody beat us to it-"
"That's impossible," snapped Bossk. "That wall's
monocrystal-chained; we'd have heard any blast powerful
enough to get through it. Unless ..." A sudden suspicion
hit him; he glanced over his shoulder to the opposite
wall. A sonic dis-sipator, the dials on its silvery ovoid
surface trembling at the overload point, hung overhead by
its automatically extruded gripfeet. The indicators
slowly backed away from their red zones as the impact of
the wall-breaching explosion was converted into a
harmless sibilant whisper.
The rage inside Bossk leaped up, as though it could
blow out another hole, even bigger and hotter. That
crossbred spawn of a . . . The curse died between his
gritting fangs. There was only one bounty hunter who used
that kind of sophisticated-and expensive-equipment.
Either it had been smuggled into the counting room
somehow, or-more likely- an access hole just big enough
for the device had been drilled through the wall,
followed by the explosive charge itself when the
dissipator had been activated to soak up the noise.
There was no point in looking around for the quarry
for whom he and Zuckuss had come here. Bossk gripped the
edge of the hole torn in the casino's exterior and
scanned the planet's pockmarked horizon. In the distance,
the infuriatingly familiar shape of a high-speed
interstellar craft lifted into the deepening violet of
the sky. The ship's engines trailed fire as it headed off-
world.
"Come on!" Bossk grabbed Zuckuss by one arm and
pulled him toward the gap in the wall. Shrieking alarms
sounded from the corridor, triggered by the charges that
had taken out the doors; it would only be a few seconds
more before guards from other sections of the casino got
here. He slung his rifle behind his shoulder and prepared
to jump.
"But-" Zuckuss drew back. "But we must be ten meters
up! At least!"
"So?" He growled at his partner. "Can you think of a
quicker way out of here?"
A few seconds later he and Zuckuss were scrambling to
their feet. The urge to murder filled Bossk again as
Zuckuss groaned in pain.
"I think I broke something. . . ."
'As laser shots from the casino guards above sizzled
the ground, melting the planet's silicate-heavy ground
into patches of glass, he started running, aware that
Zuckuss was right behind him.
They caught up with their adversary out beyond the
planet's atmosphere.
Bossk jammed the point of his talon down on the comm
button as Zuckuss, beside him in the navigator's seat of
the Hound's Tooth, fussed with a broken connector to one
of his air hoses. "Shut off your engines," he barked into
the link. There was no need for formalities; in this
remote zone of the starways, no other ship was within
hailing range. "You have merchandise onboard that belongs
to us. Specifically, one sentient individual by the
designation of Nil Posondum, formerly employed by the
Trans-Galactic Gaming Enterprises Corporation-"
"Your property?" A cold, uninflected voice sounded
from the speaker mounted above the Hound's controls. "And
why would this said individual-if he were aboard my
ship-why would he belong to you?"
"Maybe," whispered Zuckuss, "we shouldn't get this
barve angry. He can be a tough customer."
"Shut up." Bossk pressed the comm button again. "By
authority of the Bounty Hunters Guild. That's what makes
him ours. Hand him over now, and you won't get into
trouble."
"That's very amusing." No emotion, amused or
otherwise, was discernible in the other's words. "But you
seem to be laboring under a severe misapprehension."
"Yeah?" Bossk glared at the Hound's forward viewport.
The other ship showed no sign of cutting its speed. "What
am I mistaken about?"
"I'm not restricted by the authority of your so-
called Bounty Hunters Guild. I answer to a higher law."
"Which is?"
"Mine." The temperature of the scattered atoms
between the ships couldn't have been closer to absolute
zero. "Specifically, what's mine I keep. Until I get paid
for it."
Bossk's words grated through his fangs. "Look, you
conniving, diseased gnathgrg-"
The comm indicator blinked off, the connection broken
by the other ship.
"There he goes." Zuckuss gazed up at the viewport.
The flaring trail
s from the engines of the Slave I,
the transport of the galaxy's most ruthlessly efficient
bounty hunter, blurred and disappeared into hyper-space.
Cold and mocking stars filled the sector where it had
been.
Bossk's slit pupils narrowed as he glared at empty
space. The other ship, and its pilot and his captured
prize, might be gone-but the seething fury in Bossk's
scaled breast wasn't.
The figure in the cage cowered back from the bars as
Boba Fett approached.
"There's no need for that." The Slave I's minimal
galley had ejected a tray of some nondescript edible
substance, a lumpish gray gel that was unappetizing but
adequate for a standard humanoid life-form. Fett placed
the tray on the metal-grated flooring and pushed it
through an opening in the cage with the toe of his boot.
"I'm not being paid to hurt you. Therefore you won't be
hurt."
"And if you were being paid to do that?" The former
head accountant for the Trans-Galactic Gaming Enterprises
Corporation gazed sulkily from the holding pen, the only
one presently occupied aboard the Slave I. "What then?"
"You'd be in a world of pain." Boba Fett pointed to
the tray; a little of its glistening contents had slopped
onto the pen's floor. "As merchandise, you are more
valuable alive than dead. In fact, you would be worthless
to me as a corpse. To deliver you unharmed-relatively
so-is the primary requirement for collecting the bounty
that was posted on you. If you try starving yourself, you
will be force-fed. I'm not known for being gentle about
that sort of thing. If you were to be so foolish as to
try to injure yourself in any other manner, you'll find
yourself in restraints considerably less comfortable than
your present situation."
The accountant named Nil Posondum looked around the
bare cage. A thin pale hand gripped one of the bars. "I'd
hardly call this comfortable."
"It can get worse." The shoulders of Boba Fett's
armored combat gear lifted in a shrug. "My ship is built
for speed, not luxury accommodations." He'd left the
Slave I's controls set on autopilot; a small datapad
clipped to his forearm monitored the craft's
uninterrupted course through hyperspace. "You should take
what pleasure you can from your time here. Things won't
be any better for you where you're going."
In fact, Boba Fett knew they would be much worse for