Star Wars - The Bounty Hunter Wars - The Mandalorian Armor

by K. W. Jeter

  living out in the endless wastes of the Dune Sea, that

  Kud'ar Mub'at had heard of. ...

  Gloom permeated the meditations of Kud'ar Mub'at as

  the assembler reminded himself of just how much still lay

  beyond the strands of his web. Just as well, it

  philosophically decided, that all those things are

  Palpatine's concerns and not mine. True wisdom rested in

  knowing one's limitations.

  "Exactly so," chimed in Balancesheet. It had picked

  up its parent's thought over the spun-silk neural network

  that both connected and housed them. "That shows how wise

  you are. Would Emperor Palpatine ever have thought of

  such a thing?"

  For a moment Kud'ar Mub'at was annoyed that the

  little subassembler node had listened in to these private

  musings-it thought that it had inhibited the appropriate

  neurons to prevent just such two-way data flow. Then its

  mood softened. "Now you're the one who's wise," said

  Kud'ar Mub'at affectionately. It reached over another

  black, spiky leg and let the accountant node scramble

  onto its end. "I'll very much regret that day when I'll

  have to-" Kud'ar Mub'at cut off its words just in time.

  "Have to what?" At the end of Kud'ar Mub'at's leg,

  the accountant node peered back at its progenitor.

  "Nothing. Don't worry about it." Kud'ar Mub'at was

  sure that the little node hadn't picked up on that

  particular thought, the one that had to do with its

  inevitable-and imminent-death. "Let me do th e deep

  thinking."

  "Of course," said Balancesheet. "I would not have it

  otherwise. The only reason I asked about Boba Fett . . ."

  "Yes?"

  "I only asked," continued the subassembler node,

  "because we would have to anticipate the cost of his

  services to us rising as one of the results of the Bounty

  Hunters Guild being catastrophically disbanded. Since

  there would be a considerable diminishment in the number

  and quality of the competition for such operations. That

  should be factored into our calculations, regarding any

  further negotiations involving this individual. Unless of

  course"-Balancesheet spoke archly-"we were to make other

  arrangements about Boba Fett's future. ..."

  That was a good point; Kud'ar Mub'at realized he

  should have thought of it himself. Though it was also one

  of the advantages of having a well-developed, semi-

  independent node like Balancesheet around. Whatever

  slipped by Kud'ar Mub'at's attention would be caught by

  the subassembler's.

  "Thank you," said Kud'ar Mub'at to the little

  creature still tethered to it. "I'll give it some

  thought."

  "Actually," said Balancesheet, "I have suggestions

  along those lines."

  Deep in the heart of the web Kud'ar Mub'at had spun

  for itself, floating in the cold vacuum between the

  stars, the assembler listened. Just as though it were

  listening to its own wise and precise calculations,

  whispered into its ear from something outside; something

  almost separate.

  From the docking port at the edge of the compound,

  Boba Fett could hear the shouting and the sound of

  blaster fire. None of it was aimed his way, so he went on

  working, recalibrating and tuning Slave I's weapons

  systems.

  There hadn't been time, after he and the rest of the

  team had lifted off and rendezvoused with the autonomic

  storage unit in orbit above Circumtore, to get everything

  fully functional once more. Not if he was going to get

  Bossk back to the Bounty Hunters Guild in time to lead

  the breakaway faction's uprising against the elders.

  As he bolted down a recoil brace on one of the ship's

  exterior laser cannons, Fett supposed that old Cradossk

  was akeady dead by now. That was the first thing that

  Bossk had sworn to take care of, once the Trandoshan had

  fully comprehended how his father had set him up for

  getting killed on the Oph Nar Dinnid job. A few encrypted

  transmissions from Slave I, as it had journeyed back

  toward the Guild compound, had also arranged for

  Cradossk's death to be the start of the coup action.

  More blaster fire sounded as Boba Fett's tools spot-

  welded the wiring harness's main trunk connections. Slave

  I's armaments were extensive and not designed for easy

  removal; some of them had circuitry that reached right

  down to the innermost bowels of the ship. Putting all of

  that back together was a long job, and one that had to be

  done exactly right; more than once, Fett's life had

  depended on these weapons as much as the ones slung

  across the back of his uniform and fastened to his wrists

  and shins. With his attention thus focused, there was

  little chance of his being distracted by the violent

  internal politics of the Bounty Hunters Guild.

  Besides, thought Boba Fett, I've already done my

  part. He touched a probe to the bare join, read off the

  voltage, then withdrew it and let the replicating

  insulation swarm a thin yellow sheath over the wire. Or

  at least most of it, he corrected himself. The ship

  repair would be completed soon enough, but he knew there

  was still more to be taken care of before the job of

  destroying the Bounty Hunters Guild was finished. One

  great rift, between the old leadership and the upstarts,

  wasn't enough. By his calculations, there would be an

  even split between the two groups once the binding agent

  of Cradossk had been removed. Some of the elders, who had

  always chafed under the old Trandoshan's leadership,

  would throw in their lot with the young, impatient bounty

  hunters; some of the latter, reluctant to accept Bossk's

  leading the breakaway faction, would side with whatever

  was left of the Guild's elder council. But on both sides,

  Boba Fett would have his ringers and stoolies, feeding

  him useful information and helping to drive even more

  wedges of suspicion and greed between one bounty hunter

  and the next. There were two factions now; soon there

  would be dozens. And then, thought Fett with a cold lack

  of emotion, it'll be every bounty hunter for himself.

  That was something he was looking forward to.

  He closed the access panel on the Slave I's curved,

  glistening hull and looked up the craft's length. The

  muzzle of the laser cannon, a newer and sleeker

  instrument of destruction than D'harhan had ever carried,

  could just be seen as it pointed toward the wash of stars

  overhead. D'harhan was dead, another piece of the past

  erased as though it had never happened at all; eventually

  all the past would be gone, consumed as if by the

  annihilating energy at the heart of the darkest stars. .

  . .

  And that was fine with him as well.

  Boba Fett moved over to another panel, close to the

  ship's anterior maneuvering jets. With the code function

  embedded in his glove's fingertip, he opened the panel

&nb
sp; and got to work, tracing and reconfiguring the intricate

  circuits.

  The blaster fire from the compound continued, like

  the electrical discharge of a distant storm.

  Someday, Fett supposed, the destruction of the Bounty

  Hunters Guild would be nothing but memory. But not his;

  he had no use for memory.

  All remembering was in vain. . . .

  18

  NOW

  She watched him at work. Or getting ready for work.

  His kind of work, though Neelah. That was what was

  indicated by the weapons, all the various mechanisms of

  reducing the galaxy's inhabitants to scattered pieces of

  bleeding or charred tissue. Boba Fett had returned from

  the land of the dead, from its gray portal in which he'd

  slept, and was ready to fill his hands again with death.

  "Which one's that?" Neelah pointed to the brutally

  efficient-looking object, all matte-black metal and

  embedded electronics, in Boba Fett's grasp. An empty lens

  at the rear of the weapon's metal glittered in a curve of

  crosshaired glass. "What does it do?"

  "Rocket launcher." Boba Fett didn't look up from his

  painstaking labors. With a tool as delicate as a humanoid

  hair, improvised from one of the medical droids' IV

  syringes, he scraped a dried mucuslike substance, a

  remnant of the weapon's time in the Sarlacc's gut, out of

  its intricate circuits. "And what it does, if you know

  how to work it, is kill a lot of creatures. At once. At a

  nice long distance away."

  "Thanks." She felt one corner of her mouth twisting

  in an expression that would have been ugly if there had

  been an audience for it. "But I could figure that much

  out. Don't think you have to patronize me. I was just

  trying to pass a little time with something like

  conversation. But I guess that's not within your range of

  skills."

  He made no answer. The motions of the wire-stiff tool

  and its sharpened point were reflected in the visor of

  his helmet as he continued working.

  The warhead of the rocket launcher's missile appeared

  in Neelah's memory as well. She had seen it before, the

  tapered point rising above Fett's shoulder, on a

  trajectory parallel to his spine. Now, from where it lay

  on top of the bounty hunter's crossed legs, it seemed to

  be aimed at a dusty outcropping of the Dune Sea's

  fundamental rocks. The oppressive suns glazed the

  landscape with dry, shimmering heat, still visible in

  reversed colors when Neelah closed her eyes. Even in the

  shade of a sloping entrance to Boba Fett's underground

  cache, the hard radiation of the desert light cracked her

  dehydrated lips and baked her lungs with each fiery

  breath.

  "You should drink more fluids." The blurry shape of

  the taller medical droid rolled up in front of her. "To

  replace the ones constantly being extracted from your

  body." A jointed appendage held out a canister of water,

  part of the life-support supplies that Boba Fett had

  hidden here sometime after starting his short-lived

  employment with Jabba the Hutt, who hadn't lasted much

  longer than the job. "The results, physiologically

  speaking, could be severe otherwise."

  Neelah took the container from SHS1-B and drained it

  in one long swallow, head tossed back and thin rivulets

  leaking down both sides of her throat. She wiped her

  mouth with the back of her hand and set the can down in

  the gravel next to where she sat. SHS1-B trundled over to

  another part of the shade cast by the overhanging jut of

  rock, where it consulted with its shorter, less

  articulate colleague. Another canister stood slowly

  evaporating next to Boba Fett; he hadn't touched it since

  it had been brought out to him. Redonning his armor, a

  set that had been kept under a coded autodestruct lock to

  foil any thieves who might have stumbled upon their

  hiding place, had transformed him, from a raw-skinned in

  valid to the imposing specialist in death that he had

  been before falling down the Sarlacc's throat. Sealing

  the restored helmet's edge to the uniform's collar had

  completed the apotheosis he didn't drink the water,

  Neelah realized, because he had become a self-contained

  unit, sealed against the frailties of mortal creatures.

  Or at least, that was the impression he tried to give.

  She leaned back against the mouth of the cave; the

  rock's residual heat spread across her shoulder blades.

  The day was dead time, a matter of waiting until Dengar

  returned from Mos Eisley. When he made it back here-if he

  did, she reminded herself; she knew enough of the

  spaceport's notorious reputation to be aware that

  anything could happen in its various dives and back

  alleys-then further plans would be finalized among the

  three of them. All depending, of course, upon what Dengar

  managed to find out and arrange with his various

  contacts.

  Boba Fett, at least, had something to keep himself

  busy while the rocks' doubled shadows slid farther across

  the sands. After they had escaped from the bombing-

  shattered remnants of Dengar's subterranean hiding place,

  and the regenerated Sarlacc that had wound its tendrils

  through the broken stone, only a single night had been

  spent in the chill open, their bodies huddled against

  each other to keep from freezing. Even if there had been

  the means to build a fire, they wouldn't have dared, for

  fear of attracting the attention of some nocturnal Tusken

  raiding party, crossing the Dune Sea on bantha mounts,

  the beasts sniffing out pathways invisible even to daylit

  eyes. When the morning had finally come, breaking violet

  across the distant mountains ringing the desert, Boba

  Fett seemed the strongest of the three humans, as though

  in the dark he had absorbed some precious segment of the

  others' dwindling energies. He had led the way, stumbling

  at first, but then with greater sureness as the landmarks

  had grown more recognizable. Like the other mercenaries

  and hard types that had worked for the late Jabba-or at

  least the smart ones, smart enough not to trust the wily

  Hutt-Boba Fett had maintained a stash of crucial supplies

  in the wilderness beyond the squat, iron-doored palace.

  With that many schemers and back-stabbers all in one

  place, including Jabba himself, it had always been a

  possibility, if not a probability, that sooner or later

  any of the henchmen would find himself on the run,

  scrabbling for survival. The tools that Fett had hidden

  away-weapons, replacement armor, comm gear-went a long

  way to ensure that his surviving would be bought at the

  price of any pursuers' death.

  The bounty hunter's parsimonious streak, though, was

  apparent to Neelah as she sat in the cache's opening-it

  had been hollowed out of a sheer rock face, then

  camouflaged-and watched Boba Fett reassembling himself,

  piece b
y piece. None of the weapons or components of his

  battle armor that had been damaged by the Sarlacc's

  digestive secretions was discarded until Fett had

  examined and judged it beyond repair. He had already

  salvaged most of the personal armaments with which Neelah

  had seen him equipped back at Jabba's palace; a small

  blaster pistol had been reduced in the Sarlacc's gut to a

  fused lump of metal, and the propulsive charges for some

  of the larger ammunition had leaked away, rendering the

  shells useless. Those were replaced with exact duplicates

  from the sealed containers that Fett had dragged out from

  the cache's deep interior.

  Like watching a droid, thought Neelah, not for the

  first time. Or some piece of Imperial battle machinery,

  capable of making repairs to itself. She had wrapped her

  arms around her knees and continued to watch as the human

  elements of Boba Fett had been progressively submerged

  and hidden beneath the layers of armor and weaponry, the

  hard mechanicals seemingly replacing the soft, wounded

  tissue beneath. The narrow visor of his restored helmet

  took away the last vestiges of humanity, the gaze of eyes

  like any other man's, caught in acid-ravaged flesh, its

  fevered blood seeping through the pores. ...

  "He's pushing himself past all therapeutic limits."

  SHS1-B's high-pitched voice fussed from a place just

  outside Neelah's awareness. "Both le-XE and I have tried

  communicating with him, in an effort to make him aware of

  the necessity for rest. Otherwise, the potential for a

  serious physiological relapse will escalate to a life-

  threatening status."

  Neelah glanced over at the medical droid that had

  trundled up next to her. "Really?" The ends of the

  droid's jointed appendages clicked against each other, as

  though imitating a nervous reaction of living creatures.

  "That's what you're all in a stew about?"

  "Of course." SHSl-B turned the lenses of its di

  agnostician optics toward her. "That is our programmed

  function. If there was some way to initiate a change in

  our basic design, even by means of a complete memory

  wipe, you can be assured that le-XE and I would

  immediately submit to it, no matter now disorienting it

  might be. Patching up and mending supposedly sentient

  creatures, who continually insist upon placing themselves

  in dangerous situations, is a tiresome and never-ending