by K. W. Jeter
the bounty hunters themselves, had been getting
progressively more devious since Boba Fett's arrival in
their midst. He could sense it, like being inside an
infinitely replicating maze, branching through fractal
progressions of paranoia and deceit. That was fine by
him it was what his plans, and those of the arachnoid
assembler Kud'ar Mub'at, called for. The bounty hunters
were already getting lost in that maze; some of them
wouldn't survive to find their way out.
It's different for me, thought Fett. He was un
concerned about the maze's exponential complexity. It
didn't matter whether he had a map, or a thread leading
his way out. When the time came, he would break his way
through the encircling walls, as though they were made of
flimsiplast rather than the stone of other sentient
creatures' greed and malice. Soon enough ...
"A big job," said Bossk. His claws tightened re-
flexively, as though upon either the neck of some
merchandise or the credits to be gotten for it. "The kind
you like."
Fett kept any trace of emotion out of his voice,
words blank as the visor of his helmet. "How big?"
Leaning even closer, Bossk whispered hoarsely into
the audio receptor at the side of Fett's helmet. The
Trandoshan's fang-lined smile was even bigger when he
drew away, the number recited.
"I see." Boba Fe tt wasn't surprised by the amount of
the bounty being offered; he had his own sources of
information, so much sharper and beyond those of any
Guild member. "That's an enticing sum." He wasn't
surprised, either, that Bossk had shaved a quarter
million credits off the price. Like most bounty hunters,
Bossk had a flexible notion of what constituted a fair
division of profits. "Very enticing, indeed."
"Yeah, ain't it?" The contemplation of that kind of
credits flow seemed to inspire a new level of glittering-
eyed avarice in Bossk. "I knew you'd go for it."
"And what is the exact nature of this merchandise?"
Boba Fett already knew, but he had to ask in order to
keep up the masquerade; Bossk had to believe that he was
revealing the details rather than just confirming them.
"Somebody must want it pretty badly to put that kind of
price on it."
"You can say that again." Bossk held up one claw.
"Here's the scoop. Seems a certain Lyunesi comm handler
named Oph Nar Dinnid managed to work himself up a real
case of hyper-eros." The toothy smile shifted into a
leer. "You know how it goes-the same old story."
Fett knew what the Trandoshan was talking about. The
Lyunesi were one of six sentient species on Ryoone, a
planet down-spiral from one of the remoter sectors of the
Outer Rim Territories. Unusually dismal conditions had
been brought about millennia ago by a seemingly permanent
suspension of volcanic ash in the upper atmosphere,
resulting in a ruthless competition for survival. The
other inhabitants of Ryoone would have wiped out the
Lyunesi long ago if the fragile creatures hadn't mastered
the arts of interspecies communication. Their skills went
far beyond mere translation of words and meaning;
surrounded by enemies, with the continuation of their own
breed dependent upon every nuance of language and
gesture, the Lyunesi bought their lives with interpretive
skills far beyond even the most highly developed protocol
droid. On Ryoone, that meant they made possible all the
fluid and rapidly shifting diplomacy between the planet's
other species, the madly dissolving and re-forming
alliances, the declarations of war and swiftly terminated
peace treaties between sentient creatures who didn't even
share the same metabolic basis, let alone language. In
the galaxy beyond Ryoone, the Lyunesi were found at every
communication nexus, sorting out and fine-tuning the
messages and negotiations between one wildly dissimilar
sector of the Empire and another.
All that expertise at reading other species' inten
tions and secrets had its downside, though. From time to
time various Lyunesi fell prey to their own sensitivity.
An all-consuming passion seized them; worse, it was
nearly always reciprocated by the object of their desire.
Unlike members of the reptilian Falleen species, whose
conquests were achieved with a notable coldness and lack
of feeling, Lyunesi and their hypererotic targets rapidly
found themselves in situations where neither partner was
left with a shred of self-preserving intelligence. Given
the high-level diplomatic stations where Lyunesi were so
often found, the results were usually catastrophic.
And fatal.
"I know the story," said Boba Fett. Both in general
and in the specific case of Oph Nar Dinnid, which his own
sources had told him about. "Better that a high-ranking
female should get involved with someone like Prince
Xizor. The experience is reputedly more intense and
pleasurable, and after it's over, the female might still
be alive. If she keeps her wits about her." Fett supposed
that with someone like his sometime employer Xizor, that
was what passed as chivalry. "The problem with Lyunesi is
that they're not smart enough to be heartless."
"Yeah, well, this Dinnid person managed to get
himself into a large-capacity vat of nerf waste." Bossk
sneered; he had been born without those wasteful,
sentimental emotions. "He was working for one of the
major liege-holder clans out in the Narrant system; I
won't say which one-"
"You don't have to. They're all alike." Boba Fett was
well acquainted with those clans; they were really more
loose confederations of genetically linked species, with
deep layers of ritual obeisance and internal blood oaths
patching over their differences. It didn't work; they
needed the ultradiplomatic Lyunesi around just to keep
from killing each other off. A good gig for the natives
of a backwater world like Ryoone-as long as they didn't
screw up.
But they always did.
"Let me guess," said Boba Fett. "Dinnid's employers
found him in a, let's say, compromising position with a
wife or daughter from one of the top clan houses."
"Got that one right." Bossk's eyes glittered as sharp
as his fangs. A Trandoshan's enjoyment of another
creature's troubles went far beyond the mere anticipation
of profit to be gained thereby. "All the way to the top.
Right up to the supreme liege-lord himself. And just like
these Lyunesi-they've got no sense at all-the revelation
of the affair was in public. At one of the formal clan-
oath ceremonies, couple thousand sublieges and their
retinues all in their lord's great hall. Somebody
accidentally struck the curtain behind the dais, it
collapses, and there's our Oph Nar Dinnid and the liege-
lord's alpha concubine, for all the galaxy to see. Li
ke I
said no sense at all."
Bossk's description of events matched what Fett's
sources had told him. "It's remarkable that this Dinnid
person got out alive."
"I take it back the guy had some sense." Bossk
shrugged. "Not enough to keep himself out of trouble, but
at least enough to have already planned his escape route
when the nerf droppings hit the ventilation system. There
was a lot of confusion in the great hall-you can
imagine-and Dinnid hightailed it out to a speeder he'd
kept fueled and waiting, with its destination coordinates
already programmed in."
"Where could he go? Where he'd be safe, that is."
Boba Fett already knew the answer, but continued with his
pretense. "The Narrant liege-lords have a sense of honor
that doesn't easily accept embarrassment. They'll stop at
nothing to get someone who has publicly humiliated them
back in their grasp."
"True." Bossk gave a quick nod. "That's why this
particular lord has put up such a killer bounty for the
merchandise he wants. He can't just take his own troops
out and hunt down the little idiot, haul him back, and
get whatever satisfaction he can out of Dinnid's hide-at
least, not without spreading the story even farther
afield. So, naturally, the lord wants the bounty hunters
to do his dirty work for him."
Silence was always a desired commodity in the bounty-
hunter trade. Boba Fett had made a specialty of quick,
efficient-and quiet-work. "With that kind of credits
being put up, I expect every bounty hunter in the Guild
will be going after Oph Nar Dinnid."
"It's not that easy," said Bossk. "The sneak not only
had his escape means planned, he had the perfect place to
hole up figured out as well. He's with the Shell Hutts."
Boba Fett had heard that much as well. Of all the
Huttese clans, the Shell Hutts were the least numerous,
and the most removed from the various alliances and
interconnected dealings that bonded the other Hutts
together. The Shell Hutts didn't even look like their
distant brethren, except in bulk and physiognomy; they
had the same basic body mass and large-eyed, slit-mouthed
faces, perfect for greedily stuffing assorted wriggling
tidbits into. In that sense, of wanting to control
everything on which their immense eyes fastened, they
were identical to the rest of the Hutts.
Identical in anatomic toughness as well, with thick
leathery skins impervious to blaster shots and acids, and
vital organs so deeply buried under layers of blubber
that they couldn't be even nicked with a vibroblade-the
only physical threat that Hutts feared was specific bands
of hard unshielded radiation, the kind whose toxic
effects built up in their bodies' shielding fat rather
than being dissipated through normal excretion processes.
That had kept the Hutts from extending their criminal
enterprises to certain areas of the galaxy. Until one of
the Huttese clans, sometime in the hazy millennia of the
past, had given themselves what their own genetics had
failed to protective armored casings, bolted and welded
together from heavy durasteel plates, supported and
maneuvered about by built-in repulsor fields. All that
showed of the Shell Hutts' soft, gelatinous flesh were
their jowly faces, protruding tortoiselike from iris-
collared ports at the front of the floating ovoid cases.
Even the Shell Hutts' delicate little hands were hidden
inside, manipulating the controls for the externally
mounted grasping devices. Those seemed to work just as
well at grabbing onto and holding big chunks of ill-
gotten wealth.
"Why would the Shell Hutts be interested in a comm
handler on the run?" Boba Fett had had dealings with
various members of the Shell Hutts; he knew they didn't
do anything without a credits-related reason, just like
the other Huttese. "If they need that level of
translation and diplomacy skills, they can just buy
whoever's on the market. Someone who doesn't have a price
on his head."
"Oph Nar Dinnid made himself valuable to them." A
trace of grudging admiration sounded in Bossk's harsh
voice. "Seems he had memory aug-mentors surgically
implanted in his cortical areas, and stuffed them full of
the Narrant system's top-secret business information,
dealings, and records that he had access to from working
as the supreme liege-lord's protocol intermediary.
There's a lot of data inside Dinnid's head that the Shell
Hutts have found to be pretty interesting. And
profitable."
"So? That's not something that would keep Dinnid safe
for long. The Shell Hutts aren't exactly reticent about
stripping data out of somebody's memory and then tossing
the remains out like an empty husk."
Bossk leaned closer, close enough that Boba Fett
could smell blood and meat through his helmet's air
filters. "Dinnid may be an idiot, all right, but he's not
that kind of idiot. The memory augmentors he had
installed inside his skull have a time-based readout
function wired into them. All the secret business data
from the Narrant system that he's carrying is released a
few bits at a time-plus it's under an autodestruct
encryption. The Shell Hutts try to crack his head open to
get at the data, everything gets wiped. But that's not
even the best part. They can't even tell how much data is
inside Dinnid. Basically, he's valuable to the Shell
Hutts for an indefinite period of time; it could be
decades before the information is done spooling out of
him."
"That was clever of him." As with the rest of the
story that Bossk had just related, Boba Fett feigned
hearing it for the first time. "But it also means that
the Shell Hutts aren't going to let go of him for a good
long time."
"Damn straight," agreed Bossk. He tapped a single
claw against Boba Fett's chest. "It's not going to be
easy, prying him out of their hands. That's why the
bounty hunters aren't going out one by one to try and
pull off this job. It's going to take a team to nail down
this piece of merchandise."
Fett had been expecting this as well. "Are you making
me an offer?"
"Maybe." Bossk pulled back, taking another scan
around the chamber and toward the rough-hewn door. "Let's
face it things have been pretty tense around here since
you showed up." The Trandoshan's slitted eyes bored
fiercely into the dark visor of Fett's helmet. "There's a
lot of talk going on, from the old guard like my father
and the rest of the Guild council, all the way down to
the rawest bounty hunter on the membership list."
"What kind of talk?"
"Don't mess with me," growled Bossk. "You're valuable
to me right now, but if you start getting funny, I'll eat
your brains out of you
r helmet like a soup bowl. If I'm
making you an offer, then it isn't just about catching
hold of this Oph Nar Dinnid guy-though that should be
reason enough for you to be interested. But it's about
the future of the whole Bounty Hunters Guild. There's
going to be some big changes coming down here, and people
are lining up on one side or another, depending on which
way they think it's going to go. Frankly, I'd rather have
you on my side than not-but whatever side you're on, I'm
still going to win. It'll just be easier with you than
without. And it'll be easier if you and I and a couple
other handpicked barves pull off this Dinnid job. The
bounty we'll get from it will buy us a lot of friends.
But more than that, it'll show some of the fence-sitters
around here just who's got what it takes to snag the hard
merchandise. The ones who can do this job are the ones
who should be running the Guild."
"You've thought a great deal about this." Boba Fett
kept his own voice level and free of emotion. "Again-I'm
impressed."
"Cut the flattery." The point of Bossk's claw dug a
little deeper into Fett's chest. "All I want to know is,
are you with me on this one?"
Bossk's eyes widened in surprise as Boba Fett's hand
suddenly grabbed the other's fist, squeezing the bones
hard enough to grate them together beneath the
overlapping scales. Fett slowly and deliberately moved
Bossk's captured hand away from himself, like setting a
peculiar and unlovely art object at a distance.
"All right." Fett released his durasteel-hard grip.
"I'm with you."
Sulkily, Bossk rubbed the joints of his hand. "Good,"
he said .after a moment. "I'll talk to some of the
others. The ones who'll make the kind of team we need."
He stood up from the stone bench. "I'll let you know how
it's going."
Boba Fett watched the Trandoshan pull the chamber's
door shut behind himself, then listened to the sound of
his footsteps fading down the corridor outside. It's
almost sad, thought Fett. The poor barve didn't know just
how well things were already going.
But he'd find out. Soon enough . . .
"Your son has just concluded his visit." The major-
domo for the Bounty Hunters Guild headquarters bowed his
head, an obsequious grin on his face. "And his
conversation with the unsavory individual known as Boba
Fett proceeded just as you, in your ever-present wisdom,