by K. W. Jeter
remained until Bossk blanked the screen with a press of
his clawed thumb.
That was even more interesting. Bossk nodded slowly
to himself, the analyzer device resting silent in his
hands. Falleens didn't serve in the Imperial storm-
troopers; the whole species was too congenitally arrogant
to submit to military discipline. They were fearsome
enemies, but strictly solo fighters. And schemers, given
to intrigues matched only by those of Emperor Palpatine
himself.
And there was one Falleen in particular, who had
risen almost to the top in Palpatine's court. Prince
Xizor had been perhaps the only one there who could get
away with defying Lord Vader's commands, and Xizor was
dead now. There had been even more to Xizor's defiance
than the Emperor had been aware of, though rumors told of
Vader having suspected the truth. That Prince Xizor had
been in fact the secret head of the infamous Black Sun,
the criminal organization that spanned the galaxy, an
empire in its own right.
Speculations raced inside Bossk's skull. Had Prince
Xizor also been there on Tatooine when Vader's
stormtroopers had raided the moisture farm at the edge of
the Dune Sea? When Luke Skywalker's aunt and uncle had
been killed? That was what the olfactory record in the
droid's spy circuits would indicate. But it didn't tell
why Xizor would have been there-or why Kuat of Kuat would
have planted a surveillance system that would detect the
evidence of Xizor's involvement. Or how Boba Fett had
come to possess the spy recording . . .
That many questions without answers made Bossk's head
hurt, as though it might explode from the pressure
building within. This is going to take some time, he
thought grimly, to figure out. He extracted the rest of
the recording devices from the droid, stacked the metal
boxes up in his hands, and turned back toward the secret
chamber's doorway.
Back aboard the Hound's Tooth, Bossk set the spy
devices down beside a corner of the cockpit's main
control panel. His head ached, the scales of his brow
almost visibly flexing from the pounding of his thoughts.
He decided it would be better if he waited awhile-maybe
even slept a bit, in the lowered respiration and nearly
stilled heartbeat mode of the coldblooded
Trandoshans-before tackling the mysteries of the recorded
hit on the moisture farm. Go at it fresh, Bossk told
himself.
In the meantime there was the other matter to check
out, the encoded message unit that the Q'nithian down in
Mos Eisley had routed his way. Bossk was already
wondering if there might be some connection between it
and what he had just discovered aboard Boba Fett's Slave
I ship. The name of Kuat was popping up in a suspicious
number of connections right now-the encoded message unit
was addressed to Kuat of Kuat, and the deactivated spy
droid was an obvious Kuat Drive Yards construction.
He sat down at the cockpit controls of his own
Hound's Tooth and pulled the encoded message unit over to
himself. The Q'nithian had provided him with a simple
bypass key and decryption protocol, with which he'd be
able to read the enclosed information, then seal up the
message unit and send it on its way without the eventual
recipient being able to tell that- its security had been
breached.
Bossk extracted a single slip of paper from the unit.
That's it? he thought, feeling slightly disappointed.
When this much attempted secrecy was involved, there were
usually items of obvious significance to be found-entire
Imperial code manuals, battle plans, that sort of thing.
As he turned the slip over he couldn't imagine that he'd
find anything important on it. ...
A moment later Bossk came to; he found himself lying
on the floor, a befuddled consciousness slowly seeping
back into his brain. The pilot's chair was tilted
backward, from where he had toppled from it.
With trembling claws, he plucked the slip of paper
from his chest. He held it up in front of his unwilling
gaze. The same four words were still there. Words that
changed everything, that turned the universe inside out,
expelling Bossk from its bright center-
BOBA FETT IS ALIVE.
He couldn't believe it. But at the same time . . . he
knew it was true.
It was always true.
20
"There they are." Phedroi used the muzzle of his
blaster rifle to point over the top of the dune. "We
could probably take 'em all out, right now."
Beside him, lying belly-down in the sand, Hamame
shook his head. "Naw-" His rifle lay parallel to his
partner's, aimed toward the three distant figures. Five,
if the two medical droids were counted. "They're worth
more alive than dead. Or at least Boba Fett is."
"Are you kidding?" Phedroi looked over at him in
amazement. "You're going to try and take Boba Fett alive?
That's crazy. The barve's too dangerous for that. Why
push our luck? We should just be glad to get the chance
to kill him."
Heat radiated up from the dune, though Tatooine's
suns had set long ago. But it was more than the
temperature differential between the ground and the star-
swept night that kept both men sweating. One thing,
Hamame knew now, to have followed the other bounty hunter
Dengar all the way from Mos Eisley to here, keeping a
safe distance so they wouldn't be detected; it was
something entirely different to have ditched their swoops
and crept within firing distance of a tough customer like
this. There was a history of bad things happening to crea
tures who thought they had the drop on Boba Fett.
Hamame kept watching what was going on at the mouth
of the tunnel slanting beneath a low crest of hills.
"There's Dengar to take care of as well," he said, voice
barely more than a whisper. "Plus there's some female
there-I suppose you want to off her, too."
"Well, sure." That was how Phedroi's mind worked. It
probably seemed obvious enough to him. Dengar had never
had much of a reputation, but if he and this woman were
hanging around with Boba Fett, it would be better to err
on the side of caution. And he didn't know of any safer
way of handling things, other than just wiping out
everyone as long as there was the chance to do so. "Isn't
that what you were planning on doing?"
"Not until I've had a chance to find out some more."
Hamame nodded toward Fett and his companions. "Dengar
picked up a sublight relay modulator back in Mos Eisley;
that's what Fett's working on right now, getting it
sync'd in with his comm equipment. So, obviously, he's
going to be making some kind of contact just outside the
planet's atmosphere. The question is, who with?"
"How should I know?"
"Exactly," s
aid Hamame. "You don't know. And you're
going to off Boba Fett without discovering who it is he
wants to talk to? Maybe there's someone out there that
wants to keep him alive, would pay big credits if we had
him and didn't
him."
Phedroi thought it over. "I suppose that could be the
case."
"Yeah, well, you suppose and I know." Hamame squinted
at the scene in question, lit by Dengar holding up a
small portable worklight. His and the female's shadows
stretched away and merged with the surrounding darkness
as they watched Boba Fett applying the sizzling point of
a miniature torch to exposed circuitry. "There's a lot
more going on here than what it looks like. I can tell
that right down in my gut."
"I'm getting a bad feeling about this. . . ." Phedroi
shook his head. "Maybe we should go back and get some
more people in on this action. You know, like safety in
numbers." If he could have arranged for a whole Imperial
battalion to help them out, his nervousness would have
been only slightly diminished. "I mean, especially if
we're going to take on Boba Fett . . ."
"What, and w ind up splitting the profits with every
scrabbling little thief in Mos Eisley?" Hamame looked
over at him in disgust. "Look. From what we can get for
Boba Fett-from somebody-we'll be able to retire from this
game. One big score, and we're golden."
Of course, he had laid that kind of talk before on
his partner. That was how they had both wound up on a
forsaken dump of a planet like Tatooine. But this time,
vowed Hamame, it'll be different. They just had to see it
through.
"All right." Phedroi looked along his blaster rifle's
barrel at the other figures in the night, then back to
his partner. "So just what is it you're going to do?'J
Hamame stood up, his boots digging into the slope of
the dune. "Simple." He smiled as he slung his blaster
rifle's leather strap across his shoulder. "I'm going to
go down there and talk to them."
"That does it," muttered Phedroi aloud as he watched
his partner go striding toward the distant pool of light.
"This is definitely the hardest merchandise you've ever
gotten me mixed up with."
She watched him tighten and seal the last connectors.
"Is that thing ready to go?" Neelah pointed to the comm
unit on the pebble-strewn ground, its interior filled
with the hard shadows cast by the worklight in Dengar's
upraised hand.
"It has to run through its logic checks," said Boba
Fett, "before it can sync up with the database of
transmission codes." He set down the handheld servodriver
he had been using, then picked up a circuit probe; he
tapped its point against the side of his helmet. "We were
real lucky-none of the onboard memory in here got
corrupted, in spite of all the banging around it's gone
through. If I'd had to build the comm protocols up from
scratch, it would've taken a couple of days. At least."
For a moment she thought he had been talking about
the contents of his head, the brain tissue encased in
bone, and all its memories and hard, unfeeling
personality. The true Boba Fett, thought Neelah. Back
from the dead. Then she realized he was talking about the
elaborate circuits inside the helmet itself, the comlink
between him and his ship orbiting above the planet's
atmosphere. What was it called? He'd told her; something
sinister and cold, stripped of even the minimal affection
that could exist between a sentient creature and his
tools. Slave, Neelah remembered. Slave I; that was it.
Something to be used and discarded, when its pure
functionality was at an end. She supposed that human
beings and all other sentient creatures were that way for
him as well. That was how things had been in the palace
of Jabba the Hutt as well; when there had been more
amusement to be gained from tossing poor Oola into the
rancor pit, nothing else mattered to the master holding
the other end of the chain.
She had been there, and she had been lucky to escape.
Not just luck; she had fought and schemed her way out of
the palace and the inevitable death it had held. Better
to die out in the wastes of the Dune Sea, bones cracked
by the desert's scavengers, than be the victim of a fat
slug's idle boredom. But where did I wind up instead?
That was the question that circled in Neelah's mind as
she watched the two bounty hunters. It had been one thing
to get hooked up with a mercenary creature like Boba Fett
when he had represented nothing more than a mystery to
her, the black hole of her own hidden past. It was
another thing entirely now that he had recovered from his
wounds and was pursuing his own agenda again. Revenge and
credits, supposed Neelah, in varying proportions; that
was all that any bounty hunter was concerned with. Even
this Dengar, though he had given some indication of a
human nature developed beyond those two fundamental
desires. She knew that she could trust either one of them
just about as far as she pitch them both across the dunes
with one hand. Creatures who trusted any bounty hunter
usually wound up as merchandise or corpses, depending
upon what was best for business.
The questions inside her head were going to be
answered soon. Neelah didn't know yet what those answers
were going to be, but she had already started preparing
herself for them. Whatever happens, she told herself
again, I'm not going to be left behind. The bigger
questions were all tied up with Boba Fett; if she was
going to uncover both her past and her fate, she couldn't
let the bounty hunter slip away from her. Even if it
meant risking her life to follow after him. Or losing her
life, to find out those things.
Neelah turned and walked away from the pool of light
toward the desert's surrounding darkness. The answers
might not be anywhere on this planet, but the night
provided enough emptiness to hold her thoughts.
"Stay right there." A man's voice. "Don't
move."
She found herself gazing into a scruff-bearded face,
pockmarks and scars underneath the grime of hard, exposed
traveling. One corner of his mouth lifted in a smile,
exposing yellow teeth. Before she could react, the man
had raised the muzzle of a blaster rifle, slung by a
leather strap from his shoulder. At waist height, the
weapon pointed straight at her.
"Nothing to worry about," said the man. "This is just
to show you that I'm serious. You be serious, too-no
messing around-and nothing bad is gonna happen."
"What do you want?" Neelah kept her voice low. She
wasn't sure which would be worse, alarming this person or
the two bounty hunters somewhere behind her. Any one of
them might start firing, just to quickly settle matters.
/> If she was standing between the blasters and their
targets, that would be just too bad. For her.
"Not you. At least, not right now." The other corner
of the man's mouth lifted, slowly, as though dragged
upward by an invisible hook. "Later maybe we can discuss
some off-time interests. But right now I gotta go talk to
your friends."
Both Boba Fett and Dengar glanced over as Neelah
walked back into the worklight's circle. When they saw
the man close behind her, Fett stood up, leaving the comm
unit's last bolt untightened. Den-gar reached for the
blaster pistol in his holster, then stayed his hand
without drawing the weapon.
"Well, here's a happy little gathering." The man
lowered the barrel of his blaster rifle from where it had
been pressing into the small of Neelah's back. "Old
friends like us really oughta try to get together more
often."
"Vol Hamame," said Dengar with a sour grimace and a
nod. "I thought I spotted you back there in Mos Eisley."
"You should've said hello. Then I wouldn't have had
to come all the way out to this place. Not that it
doesn't have its charms." The man looked around at the
sloping hillsides, barely visible at the edge of the
worklight's glow. Then he turned back to the two bounty
hunters. "But I'm more of a city kind of guy, if you know
what I mean."
"Then that's where you should stay." Boba Fett spoke
up, his voice level and emotionless. "So you can mind
your own business, instead of interfering with anyone
else's."
Looking over her shoulder, Neelah saw the man called
Hamame shake his head, feigning regret.
"Actually, this is my business." Hamame used his free
hand to point toward the bounty hunters. "That's why I
followed Dengar out here. Pretty easy, actually, what
with that frapped-out swoop bike he was on. Just about
fell asleep, it went so slow. But it was worth it, just
to get here and find out that you really are alive, after
all."
Boba Fett looked over at Dengar. "Seems as though you
didn't do a very good job of keeping things secret."
"Don't blame him," said Hamame. "Let's just say I've
got my contacts pretty well lined up in Mos Eisley. There
isn't much that I don't hear about. I get the news on all
the little stuff, so it wouldn't have been very likely
that I'd miss out on something big like this. There's a