by K. W. Jeter
damaged swoop.
What Dengar hadn't seen was the little creature that
inched its way down the metal support pillar of the
booth's table, then started a slow, laborious crawl
across the cantina's floor. Still no bigger in diameter
than Dengar's hand, it had been thin as paper when it had
surreptitiously emerged from the cloak of the Q'nithian's
feathers; by the time the mimbrane organism had finished
listening to the conversation between the two larger
creatures in the booth, it had swollen pillowlike, to the
thickness of a humanoid finger joint.
Its milkily translucent tissues shimmered with the
acoustic energy stored within as the tiny, rudimentary
legs around its edges helped it slither past the feet of
the cantina's paying customers. A row of primitive
sensory organs on its top surface gave the mimbrane just
enough ability to distinguish between light and shadow;
it navigated mainly by ingrained memory, taking the route
it had been taught between the Q'nithian and the other
creatures who were waiting for it.
High above the mimbrane's creeping progress, one of
the Tonnika sisters, her face all avaricious delicacy
framed between intricate braids, laughed at the joke her
identical-twin companion had just told her; the punch
line had something to do with a crude comparison between
Wookiee mating practices and the sour, pinched faces of
the Imper ial Navy's top admirals. The gray trail rising
from the smoking wand in Senni Tonnika's fine-boned hand
drew a wavering line in the cantina's muggy air as she
took a step backward, too quickly for the mimbrane to
scurry away from the sharp point of her boot heel. It
caught the mimbrane at one corner of its amorphous body,
with just enough force to squeeze out the last thing it
had absorbed while clinging to the underside of the
booth's table.
"Did you hear something?" Senni stopped laughing and
looked around herself in puzzlement.
"I hear a lot of things." Her sister, Brea, smiled
and leaned closer, drawing deep the smoke the other had
just exhaled. "All the time . . ."
"No-" She frowned and looked down toward the floor,
slick with spilled drinks and littered with the discarded
wrappings of small, unmarked packages. "I mean from down
there." She gave a shake of her head. "I very distinctly
heard a little voice, and it said, I'll be checking to
make sure that it gets there.' "
"You're imagining things."
The mimbrane had already crept away, hurrying as best
it could toward its destination. When it reached the
booth on the farthest side of the cantina, it didn't need
to climb up to the table. A greasy, black-nailed hand
reached down and picked it up.
"Fat little thing, ain't it?" Vol Hamame had once
been a member of Big Gizz's swoop gang. They had had a
parting of the ways, and not an amicable one. Since then,
Hamame had found other employment, equally criminal. But
a little more profitable. In a lot of ways, life had
improved since he had been able to get away from Spiker,
Gizz's obnoxious second in command. "Looks like the
Q'nithian seat it over here, all stuffed with
information."
"What else?" Hamame's partner was equally villainous-
looking; the mucus-lined pleats of his nasopharynx
fluttered wetly with each breath. "That's what these
things are for." The mimbrane's tiny legs wriggled
futilely as Phedroi flipped it onto its glistening back.
"Let's see what it's got for us."
Only one of the Q'nithian system's moons had its own
atmosphere; it was there, on deeply creviced fault lines,
grinding constantly against each other from the tidal
pull of the moon's captor planet, that the thick clusters
of the mimbrane creatures grew and multiplied like the
shelf fungi found on arboreal worlds. They lived on
acoustic energy, absorbing sound vibrations and
incorporating them layer by layer into their own simple
bodies. Millennia of seismic shifts and groans were
recorded in the oldest mimbranes, buried beneath the
weight of their overlapping offspring and grown into
undulating masses big enough to wrap around an Imperial
cruiser like a shining blanket.
Small, fresh mimbranes had more practical uses. They
were the perfect eavesdropping device, recording into
their gelatinous fibers any sounds that struck the
tympanic cells in which the creatures were sheathed.
Being totally organic, they couldn't be detected by the
usual antibugging sweep devices.
Hamame's jag-edged fingertip pressed down on the
bulging center of the mimbrane. The stored energy
converted back into sound.
"I heard you mention poor Santhananan's name." The
Q'nithian's familiar squawk spoke the words. "He met a
sad demise, I'm afraid."
"That's right." Phedroi gave a smirking nod. "You had
us murder him for you."
"Shut up," said Hamame. "Let's hear the rest." He
prodded the mimbrane again.
"Yeah, I'm sure it was tragic." The mimbrane emitted
Dengar's recorded voice. "What I want to know is, did
anybody pick up on his business?"
The two thugs listened to all of the deal that had
gone down between Dengar and the Q'nithian. "Now, that's
interesting." Hamame leaned back on his side of the
booth. "That Q'nithian is a sneaky type, but he's earned
his keep with this bit." On the table between him and
Phedroi, the mimbrane was now perfectly flat, all the
stored acoustic energy drained from its cells. "So Boba
Fett's still alive."
"That's one tough barve." Phedroi gave an admiring
shake of his head, the coarse and dirty ringlets of his
beard scraping across his tunic collar. "You just can't
kill him. If falling down a Sarlacc won't do the trick,
then what will?"
Hamame reached inside his jacket and pulled out his
blaster. He pointed the muzzle up toward the cantina's
ceiling. "This will."
19
It had taken a long time for him to come into his
own. To receive, to possess all that should have been his
from the beginning. To be known as the toughest, hardest,
most feared bounty hunter in the entire galaxy . . .
Bossk leaned back in the pilot's chair of the Hound's
Tooth, savoring the pleasures that came with success.
Mingled with a simmering anger that never completely
ebbed from the essence of a Trandoshan; he folded the
claws of both hands across the scales of his chest and
gazed slit-eyed at the stars visible through the
viewport. Too long, he brooded; too long a time. If all
the creatures on all those worlds had had any sense, they
would have recognized him as the best. The absolute best.
Instead-and this brought the fire inside him to a
hotter pitch-he'd had to wait until Boba Fett was dead.
&nb
sp; And that had been much too long in coming.
A thread of regret mingled with the other emotions.
He would have liked to have killed Fett himself, torn out
his competitor's throat with one roundhouse sweep of his
claws. Or to have focused the crosshairs of a blaster
rifle's sight upon that nar-row-visored helmet, then
pressed the firing stud and seen Boba Fett's masked
visage replaced by a quick explosion of blood and bone
splinters ...
Bossk slowly nodded. Now, that would have been a real
pleasure. And one that he would have deserved to savor,
just like the taste of Fett's blood leaking between his
fangs, after having suffered so many humiliations at the
hands of that sneaking, underhanded barve.
Some of the anger was replaced with self-pity. There
were so many things of which he had been cheated in this
life. The leadership of the Bounty Hunters Guild-that
should have been his as well. Now it could hardly be said
that the Guild existed at all. Granted, a lot of personal
satisfaction had come with killing old Cradossk, his
father-that was the sort of thing that really defined the
relationship between Trandoshan generations-but he hadn't
gotten much material benefit out of the act. Instead of
becoming the head of a galaxy-wide organization of
predators, skimming a cut off the bounties collected on
all the hard merchandise changing hands on any inhabited
world, he'd wound up on his own, a scrabbling independent
agent like all the other bounty hunters. That had all
been Boba Fett's doing; the breakup of the Bounty Hunters
Guild had been a long time ago, before Bossk had learned
one of the most important lessons in this business-
Don't trust your competition. Kill them.
That's true wisdom, Bossk assured himself. For a lot
of reasons. There had been other sources of anger, other
humiliations he had suffered at Boba Fett's hands. They
had just kept piling up, one after another. When Bossk
had stood within striking distance of Fett, back when
Darth Vader had been giving the job to all the best
bounty hunters in the galaxy, to track down and find Han
Solo's Millennium Falcon, it had taken all of his self-
control not to leap over and rip out Fett's throat. And
then that last infuriating maneuver, when Fett had
outsmarted both him and his partner, Zuckuss, delivering
the carbonite-encased form of Han Solo to Jabba's palace
right beneath Bossk's outstretched claws-that had driven
him almost insane with rage.
So when the word had reached him that Boba Fett was
dead, dissolved in the digestive secretions of the
Sarlacc beast, a combination of elation and frustration
had welled up inside him. If the universe was going to be
so obliging as to just give him that which he'd most
fervently longed for, he'd just have to accept that as
philosophically as he could. The fact that he was now
forever frustrated in taking care of the job himself, of
reaping the intense pleasure of personally separating
Boba Fett from the realm of the living-that just showed
that the universe wasn't really fair and just, after all.
But Bossk had set the Hound's Tooth at maximum speed for
the too-familiar planet of Tatooine, just to bask in the
atmosphere that had been the last to fill his enemy's
lungs.
He didn't get that far, though; Tatooine hung like a
dusky smudge in the aft viewport screen. Before he'd had
time to set landing coordinates for the Mos Eisley
spaceport, Bossk had found something just as familiar-and
even more intriguing-in auto-nomic orbit outside
Tatooine's atmosphere. When he'd first spotted the Slave
I in the cockpit's forward viewport, and recognized it as
Boba Fett's ship, his hands had immediately darted to the
targeting and firing controls of the Hound's blaster
cannons. The only thing that had kept him from blowing
Slave I into atoms floating in empty space was the
realization that the other ship hadn't trained any of its
weapons onto his own. That, and remembering Boba Fett was
already dead. A simple hailing call had returned the
information that Slave I was empty, but still under the
protection of its internal guard circuitry.
This is too good, Bossk had decided. It was one thing
to inherit-by default-the mantle of top bounty hunter in
the galaxy. But to also stumble upon the late Boba Fett's
personal ship, the repository of all his weaponry and
databases, all the painstakingly acquired secrets and
strategies that had put him at the top of this dangerous
trade-Bossk couldn't resist an opportunity like that.
He was smart enough to avoid trying to crack Slave
I's security measures himself. Other creatures had gotten
killed trying to do just that. Boba Fett had wired the
ship with enough traps and self-aiming firepower to wipe
out a small army, if it had attempted to enter without
the appropriate password authorization. But with Fett
being dead, there was no time pressure about getting past
the ship's circuits; Bossk had the credits and the
leisure that allowed for calling in professional
assistance.
That was one advantage to being this close to
Tatooine; services of that kind were exactly the sort
available in Mos Eisley. If one could afford to pay the
price.
A harsh electronic buzz sounded from the Hound's comm
unit. A message had been received; undoubtedly, the one
for which Bossk had been waiting. He pulled himself
closer to the cockpit's control panel and saw something
that puzzled him for a moment.
There were two messages waiting for him.
The first was from Slave I, just as he had expected.
The other had arrived almost simultaneously a messenger
pod, sent straight from the surface of Tatooine; the
small, self-propelled device was now sitting in the
receptor bay of the Hound's Tooth. Bossk prodded a few
more buttons with his foreclaw and got a readout from it.
The coded message unit was from a Q'nithian message
expediter down in Mos Eisley with whom Bossk had a long-
standing working arrangement. A business relationship
the Q'nithian had a general knowledge of the kinds of
things that Bossk was interested in. Any message that the
Q'nithian was hired to send across the galaxy, that fit
those criteria, would get routed first to Bossk before
continuing on the rest of its journey.
Bossk read the destination info off the unit. It was
headed to the distant engineering center of Kuat, to the
head of Kuat Drive Yards, Kuat of Kuat. Bossk nodded to
himself as he read the address data. The Q'nithian had
been correct in figuring that he would want to see this.
Anything, thought Bossk, that's being sent to someone as
rich and powerful as Kuat is something that I'm
interested in. A successful bounty hunter always had to
have his info sources open wideband so he could filter
through all the galaxy's secrets and rumors for the bits
that might turn out profitable.
He had already decided, though, to read the encoded
message unit later-after he had taken care of the other
business, for which he had been waiting so long. The tip
of his claw hit the next button on the cockpit's comm
controls.
"I'm all finished over here." The recorded voice, dry
and emotionless, was that of the lead technician for
D/Crypt Information Services, one of the many
semilegitimate businesses that abounded in Mos Eisley.
"The security codes have been sieved out, and you now
have full access to the ship designated as Slave I. After
you pay me, of course."
That detail was already taken care of. Bossk
transmitted an account transfer order to Mos Eisley's
black-market escrow exchange, then fired up the primary
navigation engines. In the time it would take for him to
maneuver the Hound's Tooth over to the other ship, the
D/Crypt tech would already have received the payment
confirmation.
"Good thing you didn't keep me waiting." The D/Crypt
technician was a wizened little humanoid, the top of his
bald head barely coming up to Bossk's chest. "I don't
like to be kept waiting. If you had kept me waiting, I
would have charged you triple overtime."
"Don't sweat it." Bossk let the transfer connection,
between his own Hound and the Slave I, seal shut behind
him. "I would've paid." He glanced around the bleakly
functional confines of Slave I's cargo hold; the bars of
the merchandise cages were uncomfortably familiar to him
from the last time he had been aboard the ship. The
hinges of the main cage's door had been repaired, but
still showed signs of the laser bolt that D'harhan had
unleashed upon them. That had been a long time ago, when
Boba Fett had still been alive and busily engaged upon
breaking up the old Bounty Hunters Guild. "Everything's
clear?"
"As far as I can determine, it is." With his high-
power trifocals slid up onto his pink, unsunned brow, the
D/Crypt tech busily packed up his equipment cases.
"What's that mean?"
The tech blinked myopically at Bossk. "Nothing's
perfect. Not in this galaxy, at least." He gave a shrug
with his thin shoulders. "Ninety-nine percent, though; I