by K. W. Jeter
occupation."
"Eternity," chimed in le-XE. The other droid had
rolled up behind its companion. "Fatigue."
"Concisely put." SHSl-B'shead unit gave a nod. "I
expect we will be applying sterile bandages and
administering anesthetics until the teeth of our gears
are worn to nubs."
"Deal with it," said Neelah. "As for our Boba
Fett"-she tilted her head toward the bounty hunter, still
working at cleaning the rocket launcher's innards-"I
wouldn't worry about him. You took care of what was
needed at the time. But now . . ." Her nod was one of
reluctant but genuine admiration. "Now he's way beyond
all your medicine."
"That is a diagnosis to which it is difficult to give
credence." The medical droid's tone turned huffy. "The
individual being discussed is made of flesh and bone like
other creatures-"
"Is he?" Neelah knew that was true, even though, when
she looked at Boba Fett, she couldn't help but wonder.
"Of course he is," replied the nettled SHS1-B. "And
as such, there are limits to his endurance and
capabilities."
"That's where you're wrong." Neelah leaned back
against the stone of the cache's entrance. She hoped it
wouldn't be too much longer before Dengar returned. For a
lot of reasons. If the parties responsible for the
bombing raid decided to come back and do a more thorough
job on their targets, she was sure Boba Fett would
survive, but her own chances would be considerably fewer.
Fett had plans for getting her and Dengar, as well as
himself, off Tatooine and out to interstellar space,
where they would be safe for at least a little while. And
long enough to set further plans into motion. The only
obstacle lay in getting the comm equipment that Fett
needed. He couldn't go into Mos Eisley to buy or steal
it, not without raising a general alert that he was still
alive; that was why Dengar had gone into the spaceport
instead. But if he screws up, thought Neelah, then what?
She and Fett would still be stuck out here, waiting not
for Dengar, but for whatever the next attempt to elimi
nate them would be.
In the meantime the medical droid persisted in its
arguments. "How could I be wrong? I have been extensively
programmed in the nature of humanoid physiology-"
"Then you're a slow learner." Neelah closed her eyes
and tilted her head back against a pillow of rock. "When
you're dealing with someone like Boba Fett, it's not the
human parts that make the difference. It's the other
parts."
The droid fell mercifully silent. It either knew when
it was defeated or when further discussion was pointless.
He left the swoop bike in the dry, dusty hills
outside Mos Eisley, then walked the rest of the way into
the spaceport. Dengar figured he'd draw less attention to
himself that way. And right now creatures noticing
him-the wrong creatures, at least-was the last thing he
wanted.
Before heading in, along one of the old foot trails
that led to Mos Eisley's back alleys, Dengar uprooted
some dead scruff brush and hastily camouflaged the swoop
with it. The stripped-down, one-person repulsorlift
vehicle belonged to somebody else. Or used to-Big Gizz,
the leader of one of Tatooine's toughest swoop gangs, had
crashed and burned on this machine. Gizz had been hard
and mean enough to have been one of Jabba the Hutt's most
valuable employees, but that hadn't been enough to keep
his leathery hide intact; creatures who worked for Jabba
just naturally seemed to end up with short life expec
tancies. If the work itself didn't wind up getting them
killed, then their own violent natures brought about
their fates. Dengar had never thought that the pay scale
that Jabba offered was worth the risk. Big Gizz had been
luckier than most; there had been enough of him left to
scrape up and patch back together. Whatever he was up to
these days, he had presumably gotten himself some new
transportation to do it with.
The squat, indifferently maintained shapes of Mos
Eisley came slowly into view as Dengar worked his way
down the last, loose-graveled hillside. His on-foot
progress wasn't much slower than the swoop had been,
crossing the Dune Sea from where he had left Neelah and
Boba Fett. The swoop had been unusable wreckage when
Dengar had first found it, the bent and scattered pieces
testifying to the way in which Big Gizz had ended that
particular run. Dengar had pieced the vehicle back
together, even buying and grafting on the bits of the
repulsor-engine circuitry that were too burned out to be
made functional again, then stashed it away near his main
hiding place in the desert. A bounty hunter's life was
one in which a working form of transport, no matter how
banged up and slow, could be the difference between
cashing in on valuable merchandise or winding up as bones
being pecked at by the Dune Sea's scavengers.
Tatooine's twin suns were smearing the sky dusky
orange as Dengar approached the spaceport's ragged
perimeter. Digging the swoop out from the bombing raid's
aftermath, the tumbled rocks and displaced sand dunes,
had taken a little while longer than he'd expected it to;
the swoop had been buried nearly two meters deep, and he
found it only because he'd had the foresight to tag it
with a short-distance location beacon. Just my luck, he
had thought sourly, when he'd finally managed to drag the
swoop to the surface and start it up. The forward
stabilizer blades had been bent almost double by the
largest boulder that had crashed onto the minimal
vehicle; any movement speedier than a relative crawl sent
a spine-jarring shudder through the frame, quickly es
calating to a rolling spin that would have crashed him to
the ground if he hadn't backed off the throttle. The
swoop's damaged condition had necessitated a more
circuitous route across the Dune Sea wastes than he would
have taken otherwise; he might have been able to outrun a
Tusken Raider's bantha mount, but not a shot from one of
their ancient but effective rifles.
"Looking for anything . . . special?" A hood-shrouded
figure, with a distinctive crescent-shaped proboscis,
sidled up to Dengar as soon as he'd made his way between
the first of the low, featureless buildings. "There are
creatures in this district . . . who can accommodate . .
. all interests."
"Yeah, I bet." Dengar brushed past the meddlesome
creature. "Look, just take a hike, why don't you? I know
my way around."
"My apologies." The hem of the creature's rough-
cloth robe swept across the alley dust as it made a small
bow. "I mistakenly thought . . . that you were a ...
newcomer here."
Dengar kept walking, quickening his strides. That had
&nb
sp; been an unfortunate encounter; he had been hoping to make
it to the cantina at the center of Mos Eisley without
being noticed. The spaceport abounded with snitches and
informers, creatures who made a living selling out others
either to the Empire's security forces or to whichever
criminals and assorted marginal dealers might have a
financial interest in someone else's comings and goings.
That was what had always made Mos Eisley, an otherwise
dilapidated port on a backwater planet, one of the
galaxy's prime hangouts for those practicing the bounty-
hunter trade. If you stuck around long enough, you
eventually heard something that could be turned to
profit. The downside, as Dengar was well aware, was that
it was hard to keep one's business a secret around here.
A couple of whispers in the right ear holes, and you
wound up becoming someone else's merchandise.
Right now he wasn't aware of anyone looking for him;
he wasn't that important. Though that might change all
too rapidly, when word got out of his being hooked up
with Boba Fett. An alliance with the galaxy's top bounty
hunter brought a lot of less-than-desirable baggage with
it other creatures' schemes and grudges, all of which
they might figure could be advanced by either going
through or eliminating anyone as close to Fett as Dengar
had become. The bombing raid had proved that Boba Fett
had some determined enemies. If those parties found out
that a minor-rank bounty hunter had made himself useful
to the object of their furious wrath, they might
eliminate the individual in question just on general
principle.
Those and other disquieting speculations scurried
around inside Dengar's skull as he made his way through
Mos Eisley's less pleasant-and less frequented-byways. A
pack of sleek, glittering-eyed garbage rats scurried at
his approach, diving into their warrens among the alley's
noisome strata of decaying rubbish, then chattering
shrill abuse and brandishing their primitive, sharp-edged
digging tools at his back. The rats, at least, wouldn't
report his presence in the spaceport to anyone; they kept
to themselves for the most part, with a supercilious atti
tude toward larger creatures' affairs.
Dengar halted his steps, in order to peer around a
corner. From this point, he had a clear view of Mos
Eisley's central open space. He saw nothing more ominous
than a couple of Imperial stormtroopers on low-level
security patrol, prodding the muzzles of their blaster
rifles through an incensed Jawa's merchandise bales. Bits
of salvaged droids-disconnected limbs and head units with
optical sensors still blinking and vocal units moaning
from the shock of disconnected circuits-bounced out of
the cart and clattered on the ground as the Jawa shook
its fist, hidden in the bulky sleeve of its robe, and
yammered its grievances against the white-helmeted
figures.
No one crossing or idling in the plaza regarded the
confrontation with more than mild curiosity, except for a
pair of empty-saddled dewbacks tethered nearby; they
grizzled and snarled, drawing away from the noisy Jawa
with instinctive aversion. The stormtroopers caused no
concern for Dengar, either. He was more worried about
those who might be on the other side of the law, the
various scoundrels and sharpies who would be more likely
to have heard the latest scuttlebutt and be looking to
profit from it.
Dengar drew his head back from the building's corner.
There was a fine line between being too paranoid and
being just paranoid enough. Too paranoid slowed you down,
but not enough got you killed. He'd already decided to
err, if necessary, on the side of caution.
Keeping close to the building's crumbling white
walls, Dengar found the rear entrance to the cantina.
With a quick glance over his shoulder, he slid into the
familiar darkness and threaded his way among the
establishment's patrons. A few eyes and other sensory
organs turned in his direction, then swung back to
discreetly murmured business conversations.
He rested both elbows on the bar. "I'm looking for
Codeq Santhananan. He been in lately?"
The same ugly bartender, familiar from all of
Dengar's previous visits, shook his head. "That barve got
drilled a coupla months ago. Right outside the door. I
had a pair of rehab droids scrubbing the burn mark for
two whole standard time periods, and it still didn't come
out." The bartender remembered Dengar's usual, a tall
water-and-isothane, heavy on the water, and set it down
in front of him. The scars on the bartender's face
shifted formation as one eye narrowed, peering at Dengar.
"He owe you credits?"
Dengar let himself take a sip; he had gotten seri
ously dehydrated, riding the damaged swoop across the
Dune Sea. "He might."
"Well, he owed me," growled the bartender. "I don't
appreciate it when my customers get themselves killed and
I'm the one that gets stiffed." He furiously swabbed out
a glass with a stained towel. "Creatures in these parts
oughta think of somebody besides themselves for a
change."
Listening to the bartender's complaints wasn't
accomplishing anything. Dengar drained half the glass and
pushed it away. "Put it on my tab."
He worked his way into the shadow-filled center of
the cantina's space, gazing around as best he could
without making direct eye contact with anyone. Some of
the more hot-tempered cantina habitues were known to take
violent offense over such indiscretions; even if he
didn't wind up being the one laid out on the damp floor,
Dengar didn't want to draw that kind of attention to
himself.
"Excuse the lamentable discourtesy"-a hand with
bifurcate talons tugged at Dengar's sleeve- "but I
couldn't help overhearing. . . ."
Glancing to his side, Dengar found himself looking
into the black bead eyes, no more than a couple of
centimeters in diameter, of a Q'nithian aer-opteryx. One
of the beads swelled larger as the creature's other set
of claws held a magnifying lens on a jeweled handle in
front of it. Dengar had been expecting something like
this; one's business didn't stay secret for very long in
the cantina, if spoken in anything louder than a whisper.
"Let's go over to one of the booths," said Dengar.
Those were far enough away from the cantina's crowded
main area for a measure of privacy. "Come on."
The Q'nithian flopped after him on the flattened tips
of its shabby gray wings, useless for any kind of flight.
It struggled into the seat on the booth's opposite side,
then settled down as though wrapped in a feathered cloak.
"I heard you mention poor Santhananan's name." The
taloned hand protruded from under the wings so that the
> Q'nithian could scratch itself with the magnifying-lens
handle. "He met a sad demise, I'm afraid."
"Yeah, I'm sure it was tragic." Dengar set his arms
on the table and leaned forward. He wanted to wrap up his
errand here before the bartender had a chance to pressure
him into settling his account. "What I want to know is,
did anybody pick up on his business?"
The lens shifted to the other beady eye. "The late
Santhananan had various enterprises." The Q'nithian's
voice was a grating squawk. "A creature of many
interests, some of them even legal. To which of them do
you refer?"
"Keep it down. You know what I'm talking about."
Dengar glanced across t he cantina, then turned back to
the Q'nithian. "The message service he used to run.
That's what I'm interested in."
"Ah." The Q'nithian made a few thoughtful clacking
noises with its rudimentary beak. "What great good
fortune for you. It just so happens that that is an
enterprise . . . over which I now exercise control."
Great good fortune-that was one way of putting it.
Dengar wondered for a moment just how the late
Santhananan had met his end, and how much this Q'nithian
had had to do with it. But that was none of his business.
"Whatever communication you require," continued the
Q'nithian, words and voice all mild bland-ness, "I think
I can assist you with it."
"I bet you can." Dengar looked hard into the
magnifiying lens and the mercenary intelligence behind
it. "Here's the deal. I need to send a hyperspace
messenger pod-"
"Really?" The feathers above one beady eye rose in
apparent surprise. "That's an expensive proposition. I'm
not saying it can't be done. Just that-since I haven't
done business with you before-it would have to be done on
a strictly credits-up-front basis."
Dengar reached inside his jacket and pulled out a
small pouch. He loosened its drawstring and poured the
contents out on the table. "Will that do?"
Even without the magnifying lens, the Q'nithian's
eyes grew larger. "I think"-the bifurcate talons reached
out for the little hoard of hard credits-"we may be in
business here. ..."
"Not so fast," Dengar grabbed the other creature's
thin, light-boned wrist and pinned it to the tabletop.
"You get half now, half when I hear that the message
reached its destination."
"Very well." The Q'nithian watched as Dengar divided