by K. W. Jeter
will be different."
"I certainly expect so." More of the same, the
Twi'lek told himself. He was careful to keep his thoughts
from showing on his face. "In the meantime ..."
"In the meantime there will be a nice little transfer
of credits to your private account. For all your
services." Bossk dismissed him with a simple gesture of
his upraised claws. "You can go now."
That fool is right about one thing. The Twi'lek felt
a warm glow of satisfaction as he headed back to his own
quarters. He was doing a good job-
For himself.
Boba Fett heard the door creak open. He had to work
against his own ingrained habits, which had kept him
alive in a hard universe, to keep his back turned toward
a door. More bounty hunters had lost their lives from a
blaster burning into their spines than had ever taken an
opponent's shot face-to-face. Fett should know he had
taken out more than his share, just that way.
"Excuse me. ..." A cautious voice sounded from the
doorway.
That was why he'd kept his back toward it. So as to
give anyone who came around to this dank chamber, to talk
with him, a perceived psychological advantage. Some of
the members of the Bounty Hunters Guild were a little
short in the courage department. He found it hard to
imagine why they might have thought they would have any
aptitude for this business. If they had found themselves
looking straight into the dark, narrow visor of his
helmet, they might have fled before even opening their
mouths.
"Yes?" Boba Fett turned around-slowly, as
nonthreateningly as possible for someone with his
reputation. "What is it?"
"I was wondering"-the short bounty hunter, with the
large insectoid eyes and breathing hoses, stood in the
doorway-"if I might have a word with you. . . ."
What was this one's name? They all looked alike to
Boba Fett. Zuckuss, he remembered. The partner of Bossk,
at least as recently as that business where he had
snatched the accountant Nil Posondum out from under their
noses.
"Of course, if you're busy-" Zuckuss clasped his
gloved hands together in an obvious show of nervousness.
"I can come back some other time-"
"Not at all." Boba Fett had also seen this one at the
Guild's banquet hall, close to the reptilian Bossk. So
there was undoubtedly still some connection between the
two of them. "No time like the present," said Fett. "For
talking about important things."
This one didn't take long. Zuckuss was hardly in
Fett's quarters for more than a few minutes before he had
scuttled back out into the corridor, disappearing before
anyone from the Guild could spot him there. Small fry,
thought Boba Fett. Not one of the major players in the
Bounty Hunters Guild that Kud'ar Mub'at had briefed him
on. But important enough, with a line straight to the ear
of Bossk. Who, as the impatient heir apparent to the
Guild leadership, would have a great deal to do with it
being torn apart.
The conversation went exactly as Boba Fett had
expected, and just as Kud'ar Mub'at would have predicted.
Zuckuss was like so many others in the Bounty Hunters
Guild, down in the lower ranks a perfect combination of
greed and naivete. Just smart enough to kill, mused Fett
after Zuckuss had left. The short bounty hunter had
glanced nervously out the doorway, to make sure no one
was there to see him as he scurried down the torchlit
corridor. Not smart enough to keep himself from getting
killed. It might not happen this time-Zuckuss might, with
the erratic luck of the feckless, survive the breakup of
the Guild-but it would eventually.
He supposed that was the big difference between
himself and poor Zuckuss, between himself and Bossk and
Bossk's vicious, aging father and all the rest of the
Guild members. Boba Fett sat down on the stone bench for
a moment; the armaments he carried with him, that were as
much a part of him as his spine, prevented him from
leaning back. He never wasted time thinking about
himself, any more than an explosively lethal missile from
the rocket launcher strapped to his back would have as it
sped toward its doomed and pinpointed target. But he knew
that the reason he was alive and that others were dead,
or soon would be, was that he possessed the true and
essential secret of being a bounty hunter-
As good as he was at catching and, if need be,
killing other sentient creatures, he was even better at
surviving their attempts to kill him. Everything else was
just a matter of superior firepower.
Boba Fett stood up from the stone bench. If he stayed
here any longer, there would be others coming to talk to
him. Others who thought they could protect themselves the
way he did, but who were already fatally enmeshed in the
trap spun by Kud'ar Mub'at, so far away that he couldn't
be seen or the tugs on the strands of his web even felt.
Besides Bossk and Zuckuss, there had also been one of
Cradossk's top advisers on the Guild council, and the
Twi'lek major-domo, back for a longer talk than when he'd
brought Fett to this dank chamber. All of them had been
in pure deal-cutting mode, eager to help pull the Bounty
Hunters Guild apart so they would get a bigger piece of
whatever was left in the wreckage.
Right now he didn't feel like talking to anyone else.
Action meant more than words; that was one other thing
Boba Fett was sure of. A man was killed by words, and
saved by action. Spending so much time talking to other
sentient creatures had been like wrapping himself in
death. What he wanted to do right now was head back to
the Slave I, his refuge docked at the edge of the Guild's
main compound, lock himself behind its overlapping
security layers, all systems primed to fry anyone who
tried to breach them, and rest. If not the sleep of the
virtuous-Fett had no illusions about that, or
regrets-then at least the sleep of someone who had put in
a good day's work. In his business, that meant helping
others arrange their own destruction.
The presence of those other sentient creatures,
carrying their fates around with them, all unaware, laid
-a cold hand on Boba Fett's heart, or whatever passed for
it after all these years of death. It felt like some
prophecy of his own death, though he was just as sure
that that was a long way off, far from here in both time
and space.
Being back inside his own ship would be as much a
relief as being out in the emptiness between the stars.
He would be alone there, sealed off from all the others,
living and dead. . . .
That was what he needed. He pushed the rough wooden
door shut behind himself and strode down the corridor,
beneath the flickering light of the
torches. Anywhere but
here, thought Boba Fett. The tunnel stretched out before
him. Above him, the invisible weight of rock and stone
pressed down, like the tomb he hadn't earned yet.
12
NOW
"You were saying things." Dengar handed the figure on
the pallet a metal cup filled with water. "In your
sleep."
Sleep was the wrong word, he knew. Dying would have
been more accurate. Except that Boba Fett hadn't died,
after all. After everything.
"Is that so?" Even unhelmeted, Boba Fett had a gaze
that was as cold and exterminating as anything that had
looked out from the black, narrow visor. Lying on the
improvised bed in the hiding place's smallest subchamber,
Fett's lethal potential appeared undiminished, as though
his ravaged flesh were only a temporary costume, less
real than the ragged battle-gear stacked up in the
corner. "What did I say?"
"Nothing important," replied Dengar. He knew better
than to have told the truth, if Fett's drugged,
unconscious mutterings had amounted to anything. This
barve lives by secrets, thought Dengar. To get inside any
of those secrets would be like stealing something from
him. And the consequences of that, Dengar was well aware,
would not be pretty. "Something about not liking so many
sentient creatures around you. Stuff like that."
"Ah." Boba Fett raised his head and managed to sip
the water he'd been given. His smile looked like a blade
wound in the abraded skin of his face. "I still don't
like it."
"Please do not agitate the patient." The taller of
the two medical droids scolded Dengar. The droid and its
shorter partner were busily changing the dressings around
Boba Fett's torso. Bloodied rags and sterile gel sheets
were peeled away from the raw flesh beneath. Wounds such
as Fett's took a long time to heal; the Sarlacc's gastric
secretions were like acid creeping toward the bone, long
after the beast itself was dead. "If I had the authority
to do so," continued SHS1-B, "I would order you out of
this area immediately."
"But you don't." Dengar leaned back against the
subchamber's crumbling rock wall. The air inside the
hiding place was as hot and desiccating as the interior
of one of the ancient burial mounds that studded the
farther reaches of the Dune Sea, where Tatooine's double
suns turned corpses into withered leather. "Besides,"
said Dengar, "if you two haven't killed him by now,
nothing will."
"Sarcasm." le-XE spoke as it readied another
combination of opiates and antiseptics.
"Nonappreciation."
"There's someone else in this place, isn't there?"
Boba Fett had drawn his head back from the metal cup that
Dengar had held out to him. The mere effort of his words
sent his chest laboring, the dials and readouts on the
surrounding equipment blipping into the red. "A female."
Dengar said nothing. He placed the half-empty cup on
top of one of the sighing machines that the two medical
droids tended. He had other things to take care of, other
things to do besides talk with the sinister figure lying
on the pallet, a little farther away from death's shores
than Fett had been even a couple of days ago. One of the
hiding place's power generators had conked out, spewing
white sparks and a dense cloud of greasy smoke. That had
necessitated shutting down all but the minimum air
recyclers, resulting in the hot, thick miasma bound
inside the hiding place. Dengar could more profitably
take care of the generator, getting it up and back on-
line, rather than staying here at Boba Fett's bedside.
But the other man's cold gaze held him as tight as the
curved hook of a gaffstick.
"There's no need to lie to me about it," said Boba
Fett. His words were as cold and unemotional as the gaze
from his eyes. "I saw her. She came in here. Yesterday, I
suppose. It's still hard for me to tell about these
things. But it was dark, and she must have thought I was
asleep. Or that I had died, perhaps."
"Please," said SHSl-B. It fussed with the tubes
running between the machines and Boba Fett's body.
"You're making our job considerably more difficult."
Dengar ignored the medical droid. He was about to
answer Fett, to tell the bounty hunter who the female
was, when the bombs hit. Real bombs.
Dust sifted from the subchamber's ceiling, speckling
the lenses of SHZl-B's head unit swiveling up toward the
sound of thunder. Windstorms infrequently lashed the Dune
Sea, floods of sand churning down the stone gulleys and
vanishing just as quickly beneath the twin suns. Dengar
had always thought that the hiding place he'd dug for
himself was too far beneath the planet's surface to take
any damage from mere weather. It'll take something
stronger, he'd decided, to get in here.
His own words were still looping around inside his
head when the rocks fell, with even louder thunder from
above, onto his face.
He'd looked up, along with the two medical droids. He
had a memory flash, of a light sharp as blades against
his eyes and brighter than Tatooine's suns combined into
one. Then he was spitting out gravel and blood as he felt
his arm being tugged by someone unseen.
"Come on!" The voice was Neelah's; her hands gripped
tight around his forearm and pulled. Rocks and sand
poured off his chest as his scrabbling efforts, feeble at
first and then made stronger by sudden desperation,
combined with hers to extract him from the remains of the
subchamber. "He's still in there!"
She meant Boba Fett, of course. The hiding place's
emergency lights flickered as the remaining generator
came to life. Dengar could still hear thunder, receding
into the distance up on the surface level. The thunder
would return, he knew; he was familiar enough with
saturation-bombing techniques to be aware that that was
what was going on up there. One wave would be succeeded
by another, crossing the ground at a right angle from the
first sweep. There wouldn't be any stones left, no
gulleys or eroded pillars; everything would be hammered
into dust. And as for whatever might lie beneath the
surface . . .
Neelah was already digging at the rubble that blocked
the doorway to the subchamber. Enough of the dust had
settled that Dengar could see how the bombs' impact had
knocked him back toward the hiding place's main area. If
he had been any farther inside, where the medical droids
had been taking care of their patient, the rockfall would
have come straight down on him, crushing his skull.
"Confusion." Neelah's bleeding fingers had already
excavated the smaller of the droids. With its carapace
dented, torso readouts cracked and blinking, le-XE
crawled away from the rocks and
righted itself with
difficulty. "Noise. Not-goodness."
"What are you waiting for?" Neelah looked back around
at him, her eyes blazing through the dust and sweat
covering her face. "Help me!"
"Are you crazy?" Dengar reached down and grabbed an
arm, pulling Neelah to her feet. "There isn't time for
that-whoever's laying down those bombs on the surface
will be back in less than a minute. We've got to get out
of here!"
"I'm not going without him." Neelah yanked her arm
from Dengar's grasp. "Save yourself, if you want to." She
turned away and started tugging at one of the larger
rocks, nearly as high as herself.
There were tunnels underneath the hiding place,
curving and smooth-sided, that ran deep into the planet's
bedrock. Dengar had investigated them far enough to know
that they connected with the Great Pit of Carkoon; with
the Sarlacc beast dead now, they would make a safe refuge
from the bombing. But only if they were reached in time,
before the next destructive wave collapsed what remained
of these spaces.
He hesitated only a moment, before cursing himself as
a fool and laying both his hands on the rock, just above
Neelah's hands. The stone surface was already slick with
her blood; Dengar dug his own fingertips into it and
pulled, straining with his weight against the rock's
resistance. From far off and above, he could hear the
bombing of the surface come to a halt, like a storm that
has spent its thunderous fury. That's only temporary, he
knew. They'd be returning in this direction soon enough.
Dengar put his shoulder against the rock, his hands
clawing for a better grip. It struck him, between one
gasp for breath and the next, that he didn't even know
who it could be that was pounding the Dune Sea above his
head into scorched powder. Forces of the Empire, maybe,
or the Rebel Alliance, or the Hutts, or the Black Sun
organization-at this point it wasn't as important as just
surviving the hard, murderous rain. The only thing he
knew for certain, down in his gut, was that it had
something to do with Boba Fett. Getting involved with
this barve was a sure ticket to disaster.
The large rock suddenly shifted, spilling Neelah
forward onto the main chamber's rubble-strewn floor.
Dengar managed to keep his balance, shifting his hold and