Jedi Bounty

10

Nowhere.

For the moment, Zekk had decided to go nowhere.

After his brief encounter with Bornan Thul and the other two bounty hunters, Zekk had made a short hyperspace jump to the vicinity of a small and unremarkable star system. He let the Lightning Rod drift in the laser-sharp blackness of space. The dwarf star itself was the only bright spot of light anywhere near.

Zekk had no appointments, no known destination … and he needed time to think.

For now, this was the perfect spot. No distracting planets or spaceports, no ship traffic. No fields of asteroids littered the area about him.

No gaseous anomalies or nebulas lit the darkness with their multicolored glows. Even the Lightning Rod seemed strangely silent in its operation, as if it were holding its breath to give Zekk time for peaceful introspection.

He welcomed the solitude, since he had a great deal to think through.

Nothing was clear at the moment.

Dimming the lights inside the cockpit, Zekk leaned back in the pilot’s seat to organize his thoughts.

He was satisfied for now with what he had accomplished by planting a tracer on Bornan Thul’s ship. Zekk had been careful to ensure that the remote wouldn’t put Thul at risk. He had set its automated transmitter for delayed activation, to keep other bounty hunters from picking up and identifying the signal before Thul left the area. Also, if Bornan Thul himself became suspicious of the “dud” torpedo and ran an immediate check on his own ship, he would detect nothing. It would be a full two days before the tracer beacon would activate.

That was time enough for Zekk to figure out some way to make Bornan Thul trust him. But he knew it might not be very ‘easy. From what Thul had said, he trusted no one with the “information” he possessed.

Zekk shook his head in irritation. Didn’t Thul realize that holding the information back, that trying to keep it a secret, was more dangerous than simply sharing what he knew with the New Republic?

But what could Thul possibly know that Nolaa Tarkona wanted so desperately? And what kind of knowledge would Bornan Thul hide from both the Diversity Alliance and the New Republic?

Zekk tried hard to piece together what he knew.

Clearly, this whole situation made sense to Nolaa Tarkona and to Bornan Thul. Unfortunately, neither of them had been generous enough to let Zekk in on the secret. Between what he had learned from Fonterrat’s message cube, recorded just before the scavenger had died on the ill-fated colony Gammalin, and what Bornan Thul had let slip during Zekk’s conversations with him, there had to be an answer.

As his ship slowly rotated in the emptiness, a bright streak curved across the unrelenting blackness of space, just a few hundred kilometers in front of the Lightning Rod. A comet, Zekk realized, its long ghostly tail evaporated by the distant warmth of the small sun.

Intrigued, he decided to follow the glowing ball of ice that trailed a ribbon of sparkling vapor behind it.

Zekk watched it for a moment, then set a course in his navicomputer so that the Lightning Rod would parallel the beautiful comet and keep pace with it on its long, slow journey around this solar system. He grimaced at the irony: despite the technology Zekk had at his disposal, the comet seemed to have a stronger sense of direction than he did.

The evaporating ice ball sailed confidently along on its course, needing no one to direct it, no navicomputer to guide it or make course corrections—only the pull of gravity.

A frown wrinkled Zekk’s forehead as he tried to recall something that Fonterrat had mentioned about the navicomputer. Bornan Thul had claimed to have “information” that could put millions of lives at risk. Human lives.

Immediately after his secret meeting with Fonterrat on the isolated world of Kuar, Thul had decided to disappear.

Fonterrat had mentioned giving Thul a navicomputer module. And it seemed that the navicomputer was the one thing Nolaa Tarkona desperately wanted. But what information could it hold? The location of something?

What had Nolaa lost … or what did she need to find?

Because Nolaa had loosed the plague on Gammalin, Fonterrat had expressed his hope that the Diversity Alliance would never find Bornan Thul and his cargo. Could there be a connection, then, between the navicomputer and the plague?

The plague had killed every human on the colony, but then it had died out. Surely Nolaa Tarkona could make no further use of it.

But if Nolaa ever found the original source of the plague, it was possible that nothing would ever stop the spread of the disease.

Zekk shifted uncomfortably at the thought.

Fonterrat had said something about giving Nolaa Tarkona two samples.

Surely one more vial could do no worse than the first had—though that was bad enough. But what if Nolaa decided to unleash the plague on Coruscant, for example? Or what if she found a way to replicate it, and infect all human worlds?

No. Fonterrat had seemed fairly certain that this was not possible; otherwise Bornan Thul could never have thwarted Nolaa Tarkona’s plan just by hiding from her. What then, would the navicomputer tell her?

Something clicked in Zekk’s head. It was almost like one of those puzzles that Jaina’s younger brother Anakin loved to solve. Suddenly, a dozen snatches of conversation and stray bits of messages whirled together and resolved themselves into a logical pattern in his mind. Without understanding for certain how, he knew now what Bornan Thul had.

Fonterrat’s navicomputer must contain the location of the place where the scavenger had found the plague. The two small samples must have been Fonterrat’s bargaining tools, samples to show his good faith so that the Diversity Alliance would barter with him for more. But Fonterrat had not trusted Nolaa Tarkona enough—with good reason—to sell her the information directly. And in the end, something had caused Fonterrat to warn Bornan Thul about the danger he carried.

The scavenger had clearly wanted to profit from the information, but maybe he had hoped the Diversity Alliance would never use it. Nolaa, however, had used the sample he had given her.

Indiscriminately.

Yes, it was possible, Zekk thought. But where could such a horrible plague have come from? A planet with no human population? Somewhere in the Outer Rim? But surely a planet with a virus so deadly to humans would have been reported long ago.

Or the disease could be some substance that had been found by a mining company in an asteroid or a comet. It was even possible that some crazed alien on an uncharted world had actually developed the virus on purpose.

In any case, Zekk knew he’d have to gain Bornan Thul’s confidence, if he was to be of any help to the man. Thul couldn’t protect such an important secret forever. Zekk would be able to fend him as soon as the homing beacon activated.

And if he managed to get a lead on Bornan Thul, it wouldn’t be long before one of the other bounty hunters was successful as well … someone sly and skillful like Boba Fett.

Still staring at the glowing streak of comet in front of him, Zekk shook his head. He couldn’t allow that to happen. If anyone could get Bornan Thul to trust him at this point, it would be his son Raynar.

Zekk set his mouth in a grim line. He hoped Raynar would believe him when he explained the urgency of the situation. Zekk thought he had established a basis for trust with Raynar on Mechis III, but he’d have to convince the young man once and for all that he no longer wished to collect the bounty on his father.

Zekk now knew exactly where he wanted to go.

It was time to pay a visit to Yavin 4. With growing anticipation, he leaned forward and entered a new set of coordinates into his navicomputer.

Zekk turned the Lightning Rod in a quick arc and peeled away toward the Jedi academy, leaving the comet to streak onward alone in the darkness.