The Bounty Hunter Wars 1 The Mandalorian Armor

NOW ...

during the events of star wars return of the Jedi live ones are worth more than the dead ones.

That was the general rule of digital appendage for bounty hunters. Dengar hardly had to remind himself of it as he scanned the bleak and eye-stinging bright wastes of the Dune Sea. Right now he'd spotted a lot more dead things than living, which all added up to a big zero for his own credit accounts. I'd have done better, he told himself, getting off this miserable planet. Tatooine had never been any luckier for him than it'd been for any other sentient creature. Some worlds were like that.

His luck wasn't as bad as some others' had been-Dengar had to admit that. Especially when, as his plastoid-sheathed boots had trudged up another sloping flank of sand, a gloved fist had seized on his ankle, toppling him heavily onto his shoulder.

"What the-" His surprised outcry vanished echoless across the dunes as he rolled onto his back, scrabbling his blaster from its holster. He held his fire, seeing now just what it was that had grabbed on to him. His fall had pulled a hand and arm free from the drifting sands that formed the shallow grave for one of Jabba the Hurt's personal corps of bodyguards. Some reflex wired into the dead warrior's battle-glove had snapped the dead hand tight as a womp-rat trap.

Dengar reholstered his blaster, then sat up and began peeling the fingers away from his boot. "You should've stayed out of it," he said aloud. The Dune Sea's scouring wind revealed the corpse's empty eye sockets. "Like I did." Getting into other creatures' fights was always a bad idea. A whole batch of the galaxy's toughest mercenaries, bounty hunters included, had gone down with the wreckage of Jabba the Hutt's sail barge. If they'd been as smart as they'd been tough, Dengar himself wouldn't have been out here right now, searching for their weapons and military gear and any other salvageable debris.

He got his boot free and stood up. "Better luck next time," he told the dead man.

His advice was too late to do that one any good. In his own memory bank, Dengar filed away the image of the corpse, with its clawing fingers and mouth full of sand, as further proof of what he'd already known The guy who comes along after the battle's over is the one who cleans up.

In more ways than one. He stood at the top of the dune, shielding his eyes from the glare of Tatooine's double suns, and scanned across the wide declivity in front of him. The forms of other warriors and bodyguards, sprawled across the rocky wastes or half-buried like the one left a few meters behind, showed that he'd found the still and silent epicenter of all that fatal action he had so wisely avoided.

More evidence Bits and pieces of debris, the wreckage of the repulsorlift sail barge that had served as Jabba's floating throne room, lay scattered across the farther dunes. Scraps of the canopy that had shaded Jabba's massive bulk from the midday suns now fluttered in the scalding breezes, blaster fire and the impact of the crash having torn the expensive Sorderian weftfabric to rags. Dengar could see a few more of Jabba's bodyguards, facedown on the hot sand, their weapons stolen by scavenging Jawas. They wouldn't be fighting anymore to protect their boss's wobbling bulk. Even in this desiccating heat, Dengar could smell the sickly aftermath of death. It wasn't unfamiliar to him-he'd been working as a bounty hunter and general-purpose mercenary long enough to get used to it-but the other scent he'd hoped to catch, that of profit, was still missing. He started down the slope of the dune toward the distant wreckage.

There was no sign of Jabba's corpse, once Dengar reached the spot. That didn't surprise him as he used a broken-shanked scythe-staff to poke around the rubble.

Soon after the battle, he'd seen a Huttese transport lifting into the sky; that'd been what had guided him to this remote spot. The ship undoubtedly had had Jabba's body aboard. Hutts might be greedy, credit-hungry slugs-a trait Dengar actually admired in them-but they did have a certain feeling toward the members of their own species.

Kill one, he knew, and you were in deep nerf waste. It wasn't sentimentality on the part of the other Hutts, so much as a wound to their notorious megalomania, mixed with a practical self-interest.

So much for Luke Skywalker and the rest of them, thought Dengar as the point of the staff revealed sticky and distasteful evidence of Jabba's death. As if that little band of Rebels didn't have enough trouble, with the whole Empire gunning for them; now they'd have the late Jabba's extended clan after them as well. Dengar shook his head-he would've thought that Skywalker and his pal Han Solo would have, at the least, an appreciation of the Hutt capacity for bearing grudges.

Even without Jabba's obese form rotting under the thermal weight of the suns, the debris zone stank. Dengar lifted a length of chain, the broken metal at its end twisted by blaster fire. The last time he'd seen this hand-forged tether, back at Jabba's palace, it'd been fastened to an iron collar around Princess Leia Organa's neck. Now the links were crusted with the dried exudations from Jabba's slobbering mouth. The Hutt must've died hard, thought Dengar, dropping the chain. A

lot to kill there. He'd gotten an account of the fight from a couple of surviving bodyguards that had managed to drag themselves back to the palace. When Dengar had left, to come out here to the Dune Sea wastes, most of the remaining thugs and louts were busily smashing open the casks of off-planet claret in the cool, dank cellars beneath the palace, and getting obliterated in a orgy of relief and self-pity at no longer being in Jabba the Hurt's employ.

"Yeah, you're free, too." Dengar picked up an unsmashed foodpot that the toe of his boot had uncovered.

The still-living delicacy inside, one of Jabba's favorite trufflites, scrabbled against the ceramic lid embossed with the distinctive oval seal of Fhnark & Co., Exotic Foodstuffs-we cater to the galaxy's degenerate appetites.

"For what it's worth." His own tastes didn't run to the likes of the pot's spidery, gel-mired contents; he hooked a gloved finger in the lid's airhole and pried it open.

The nutrient gases hissed out; they had sustained the delicacy's freshness, all the way from whatever distant planet had spawned it. "See how long you last out there."

The trufflite dropped to the sand, scrabbled over Dengar's boot, and vanished over the nearest dune. He imagined some Tusken Raider finding the little appetizer out there and being completely perplexed by it.

One substantial piece of wreckage remained, too big for the Jawas to have carted away. The hardened durasteel keelbeam of the sail barge, blackened by explosions that had destroyed the rest of the craft, rose at an angle from where the stern end was buried beneath a fall of rocks. Dengar scrabbled aboard the curved metal, nearly a meter in width, and climbed the rest of the way up to where the barge's bow had been, and now only the exposed beam was left, tilted into the cloudless sky. He wrapped one arm around the end, then with his other hand unslung the elec-trobinoculars from his belt and brought them up to his eyes. The rangefinder numbers skittered at the bottom of his field of vision as he scanned across the horizon. This was a pointless trip, Dengar thought dis gustedly. He leaned out farther from the keelbeam, still examining the wasteland through the 'binocs. His bounty- hunting career had never been such a raging success that he'd been able to refrain from any other kind of scrabbling hustle that chanced to come his way. It was a hard trade for a human to get ahead in, considering the number of other species in the galaxy that worked in it, all of them uglier and tougher; droids, too. So a little bit of scavenger work was nothing he was unused to. The best would've been if he had found any survivors out here that could either pay him for their rescue or that he could ransom off to whatever connections they might have.

The late Jabba's court had been opulent-and lucrative-enough to attract more than the usual lowlifes that one encountered on Tatooine.

But the bunch of rubble Dengar had found out here-the few scattered and pawed-over bits of the sail barge and the smaller skiffs that'd hovered alongside as outriders, the dead bodyguards and warriors-wasn't worth two lead ingots to him. Anything of value was already trundling away in the Jawas' slow, tank-treaded sandcrawlers, leaving nothing but bones and worthless scrap behind.

Might as well just stay here, he thought. And wait.

He'd sent his bride-to-be, Manaroo, aloft in his ship, the Punishing One, to do a high-altitude reconnaissance of the area. Soon enough she'd be finished with the task, and would come back to fetch him.

The knot of frustration in Dengar's gut was instantly replaced with surprise as the keelbeam suddenly tilted al most vertical. The strap of the electrobinoculars cut across his throat as they flew away from his eyes. He held on with both hands as the beam pitched skyward, as though it were on a storm-tossed ocean of water rather than sand.

Charred metal scraped tight against the ammo pouches on his chest as the keelbeam rotated. As the beam twisted about, Dengar could see the surrounding dunes heaving in a slow, seismic counterpoint to the wrecked barge's motion, cliff faces of rock and sand shearing away and tumbling downward, slower clouds of dust stacking across the suns' smoldering faces.

At the center of the dunes, the slope grew deeper, like a funnel with a black hole at its center. Another shudder ran beneath the planet's surface, and the keelbeam rolled almost sideways, nearly dislodging Dengar from his grasp upon it. His feet swung out from beneath him; Dengar looked down, past his own boots, and saw that the hole at the bottom of the sand funnel was lined with teeth.

Jaws clenched, Dengar muttered an obscenity from his homeworld. You gnurling idiot-he cursed his own stupidity, getting himself stuck here in the middle of the air, with no escape route. He hadn't considered what his presence might awaken, and how hungry it would be.

The Great Pit of Carkoon gaped wider, sand and rubble swirling around the blind, all-devouring Sarlacc creature at the center of the vortex. A sour stench hit Dengar like a wind hotter than any that crossed the desert's reaches.

A glance around him revealed to Dengar that the keelbeam had slid partway down the funnel, then snagged on a solid rock outcropping. He turned his face against his shoulder as the sail barge's scattered debris rained past him, the larger pieces hitting the Pit's sloping sides and pitching end over end into the Sarlacc's gaping maw. The keelbeam gave a sudden lurch in Dengar's sweating grasp as the end below him shattered part of the outcropping. Suddenly the beam swayed backward, leaving him dangling precariously, only a couple of meters from the Sarlacc's throat.

A pumping kick enabled him to get first one, then the other of his boot soles up onto the beam. He squatted into a deep knee bend on the narrow metal surface, then jumped, fingertips clawing for the funnel's edge above him. His belly hit the slope; sand slid maddeningly under his hands as he thrashed and kicked, struggling toward the bright and empty sky. With a gasp of effort, Dengar managed to get his chest across the shifting edge of the funnel, then scrabble the rest of his body over and tumble down the other side.

Too bad for the Jawas-that was all that Dengar could think of as he wrapped his arms around himself and waited for the animate disturbance in Tatooine's crust to subside. There might have been something of worth brought to the surface; but unless the little scroungers wanted to dive down the Sarlacc's throat to get it, that load of valuable salvage was lost to them now.

The Dune Sea grew silent again. Dengar let a minute pass, measured by his heartbeat gradually slowing to normal, then scrambled to his feet. The Sarlacc had most likely pulled its head back underground and was busy digesting the bits of wreckage it'd just been fed, or trying to. He figured that would give him time enough to get a safe distance away, if he hurried. Brushing sand from his gear, Dengar started trudging up the slope of the nearest dune.

Three dunes later he stopped to catch his breath. To his amazement, he saw that the scraps of debris, the barely distinguishable pieces of Jabba the Hutt's sail barge, still filled the center of the pit. The truth dawned on him. It's dead, thought Dengar. Something-or someone-had managed to kill the Sarlacc. The rotting stench had been from the creature's own torn-apart flesh, visible beneath the wreckage.

Now the sense of life, however malignant, beneath the desert's surface was extinguished. Only bits of wreckage, no longer recognizable as to form and function, and a few facedown bodies lay scattered around the empty zone.

The stink from the slope-sided hole motivated Dengar in the opposite direction, toward Jabba's palace. This was as good a time as any for him to verify the rumors about what the palace had become since the death of the Hutt. The orgiastic celebration of Jabba's liberated underlings had been just beginning, the last time Dengar had been inside the forbidding, windowless pile. If the palace was empty now-reports differed on that score-then the thick walls of the interior chambers would give him a safe place to hang out while night and its attendant hazards took possession of the Dune Sea, and he waited for Manaroo's return. His own private hideout, which he'd previously carved into a desert ridge of stone and stocked with supplies, would have done the same-but at the palace, there might be some remnants of Jabba's court, like the Hutt's majordomo, Bib Fortuna, and others who would be looking for ways to profit by the employer's death. Great minds think alike, Dengar noted wryly. Or at least the greedy ones do.

He gave the area one more scan, sweeping the horizon with the electrobinoculars. One of the suns had already begun to set, pushing his own shadow ahead across the wasteland. He was just about to power off the 'binocs when he spotted something nearly fifty meters away. That one looks like he took the worst of it-another corpse lay on a stretch of rough gravel. Faceup; Dengar could make out the front of a narrow-apertured helmet. That was about all of the corpse's gear that was intact. The rest of the dead man's gear looked as if it hadn't been burned away so much as dissolved, some kind of acid bath reducing uniform and armaments to rags and corroded, pitted shapes of useless metal and plastoid. Dengar thumbwheeled the 'binocs into closer focus, trying to figure out what could've happened to create that kind of lethal effect.

Wait a minute. The sprawled form filled the elec trobinoculars' lenses. Maybe not exactly lethal, Dengar corrected himself. He could see the figure's chest moving, a slight rise and fall, right on the edge of survival. The half-naked combatant, whoever it might be, was still alive. Or at least for the time being.

Now, that was worth checking out. Dengar slung the

'binocs back onto his equipment belt. If only to satisfy his own curiosity-the distant figure looked as if he'd discovered a whole new way of getting killed. As a bounty hunter and general purveyor of violence, Dengar felt a professional interest in the matter.

He glanced over his shoulder and saw his own ship, the Punishing One, descending a few kilometers away, its landing gear extended. His bride-to-be, Manaroo, was at the ship's controls. Good, thought Dengar. He'd be able to use her help, now that he had determined that there would be no immediate danger to her. He didn't mind risking his own life, but hers was another matter.

Balancing himself with one hand held back against the slope of the dune, Dengar worked his way toward the humanoid-shaped mystery he'd spotted. He hoped the other man would still be alive by the time he got there.

his own curiosity-the distant figure looked as if he'd discovered a whole new way of getting killed. As a bounty hunter and general purveyor of violence, Dengar felt a professional interest in the matter.

He glanced over his shoulder and saw his own ship, the Punishing One, descending a few kilometers away, its landing gear extended. His bride-to-be, Manaroo, was at the ship's controls. Good, thought Dengar. He'd be able to use her help, now that he had determined that there would be no immediate danger to her. He didn't mind risking his own life, but hers was another matter.

Balancing himself with one hand held back against the slope of the dune, Dengar worked his way toward the humanoid-shaped mystery he'd spotted. He hoped the other man would still be alive by the time he got there.

when he'd fallen down its ranks of razor teeth, had seemed that big.

But now he felt gravel and sand beneath his spine, and his own blood miring him to the ground. That had to be some kind of a tactile hallucination. He had no gods to thank, but was grateful anyway for the blessings of madness...

The light on his face dimmed; the differential in temperature was enough that he could just make out the blurred edges of shadow falling upon him. He wondered what new vision his agony-fractured brain was about to conjure up. There were others, he knew, here in the belly of the beast; he had seen them fall and be swallowed up.

A little company, the dying man decided. He might as well hallucinate voices, from those about to be digested; it would help pass the long endless hours before his own body's atoms floated free from one another.

One of the voices he heard was his own. "Help... ."

"What happened?"

He could almost have laughed, if any twitch of his raw muscles hadn't hurt so much, pushing him toward unconscious oblivion. Shouldn't hallucinations know these things?

"Sarlacc ... swallowed me." The words seemed to come of their own volition. "I killed it ... blew it up... ."

He heard another voice, a female's. "He's dying."

The man's voice spoke again, in hushed tones.

"Manaroo-do you know who this is?"

"I don't care. Help me get him inside." The female's shadow fell across him.

Suddenly he felt himself rising, dirt and grit fall ing from his mangled form. The next sensation was that of being thrown across someone's broad shoulder, an arm encircling his waist to steady him. A sense of shame filled the dying man. There had been so many times when he had faced his own extinction-painful or otherwise-the contemplation of his death, and the dismissal of it as being of no concern, had given him strength. And now some weak part of him had summoned up this pitiful fantasy of rescue. Better to die, he thought, than to fear dying.

"Hang on," came the hallucinated voice. "I'll get you someplace safe."

The man called Boba Fett felt the jostle of the other's footsteps, the motion of being carried across the stony ground. For a moment his vision cleared, the blindness dissipating enough that he could see his own hand flopping limp and disjointed, leaving a trail of spattered blood on the sand... .

That was when he knew that what he saw and felt was real. And that he was still alive. A small object, moving by its own power through the cold expanses between the stars, had finally breached a planet's sensory perimeter. Kuat of Kuat had felt the hyperspace messenger pod's approach even before his own corporate security chief came to tell him that it had been intercepted. He had a fine-tuned awareness of machines, from the smallest nano-sporoids to constructions capable of annihilating worlds. It was a family trait, something encoded deep within the Kuat blood for generations.

"Excuse me, Technician"-an obsequious voice came from behind him-"but you asked to be notified as the outer comm units picked up any traces. Of your ... package."

Kuat of Kuat turned away from the great domed viewport and its vistas of emptiness studded with light.

Far beyond the expanded orbit of the planet that bore the name identical to his, the hazy arm of one of the galaxy's more aesthetically pleasing spiral nebulae was about to rise into sight. He tried not to miss things like that; they served to remind him that the universe and all its interconnected workings was, in its essence, a machine like other machines. Even its constituent atoms, beyond the confusion of uncertainty principles and observer effects, ticked like ancient, primitive chrono gears. And finer things than that, Kuat of Kuat told himself, not for the first time. Such as men's spirits.

Those were machines as well, however ineffable their substance.

"Very well." He stroked the silky fur of the felinx cradled in his arms; the animal made a deep, barely audible sound of contentment as his long, precise fingers found a specific zone behind the triangular ears. "That's just what I've been expecting." Machines, even the ones built in the Kuat Drive Yards, did not always function as intended; there were random variables that sometimes deposited metaphorical sand in the gears. It was a pleasure- frequent, but still undiminished-when things did work according to plan. "Has there been any readout on the contents?"

"Not yet." Fenald, the security chief, was dressed in the standard Kuat Drive Yards worksuit, devoid of any emblem of rank except for the variable-dispersion blaster slung conspicuously at his hip. "There's a full crew working on it, but"-a wry smile lifted a corner of his mouth-"the encryption codes are rather tight."

"They're meant to be." Kuat of Kuat would not be disappointed if the KDY employees weren't able to crack them; he had designed and implemented them himself. Setting Security's info-analysis division to work on them was a mere test, to see how well he'd done. "I don't care for anyone else reading my mail."

"Of course not." A slight nod in acknowledgment; despite the importance of Kuat Drive Yards as the elite and most powerful contractor of engineering and construction services to the Empire, the formalities of KDY headquarters were minimal, and had been for generations. Pomp and show and courtly flourishes were for those who didn't understand where true power came from. Fenald gestured toward the viewport, its hexagonal strutwork curving three times higher than his boss's imposing two-meter height. "I doubt if anyone has."

The felinx purred louder in Kuat of Kuat's arms; he'd found the exact spot wired into its pleasure centers.

Born that way; a good amount of the minimal brain mass in the animal's excessively narrow skull- a trait of its inbred species-he'd had to replace with biosimulation circuits, to keep it from bumping into walls and gnawing raw the flesh beneath its fur. His fingertips felt the edge of the cut into the animal's skull as he stroked it.

Transmuted even this far into a true machine, the animal was much more satisfactory, and-in ways Kuat of Kuat appreciated-even more beautiful.

A single bell note sounded in the spacious office suite of KDY's hereditary CEO. Kuat of Kuat turned back to gaze at the viewport's limitless vista as his security chief leaned the side of his head against the small transponder embedded in his palm. The felinx had closed its eyes in ecstasy; it didn't see the rising edge of the far-distant nebula, like luminous smoke against black.

"They're bringing it in now," said Fenald.

"Excellent." Outside, in vacuum, an ion engine streaked fiery red, moving past the seemingly chaotic maze of construction platforms and grav-dock bays at a navigable sublight speed. The small utility shuttle, with its precious cargo aboard, was heading for the core of KDY's industrial complex. Perhaps a quarter of a standard time part before the shuttle arrived; Kuat of Kuat glanced over his shoulder at the other man. "You don't need to wait." He smiled. "I'll take care of it myself."

Security chiefs were paid to be curious about ev erything that happened within their sphere of operations.

"As you please, Technician." The words were spoken with a stiffened spine and a nod just bordering on curtness. He was also paid to obey orders. "Let me know if there's anything else you require, in regard to this matter."

The felinx protested as Kuat of Kuat bent down, depositing it on the intricately tessellated floor. Tail demandingly erect, the creature rubbed itself against a trouser leg cut of the same utilitarian dark green as all the other work uniforms worn by KDY employees. The concerns of the most powerful beings in the galaxy-perhaps the most powerful beyond Emperor Palpatine's inner circle-didn't matter to the animal. A

heat source and continued stroking were the limits of its desires.

As Kuat of Kuat straightened back up, the office suite's doors slid shut behind the departing chief of security. The felinx bumped its head more insistently against his shin. "Not now," Kuat told it. "I've got work to do."

Persistence was a trait he admired; he couldn't be angry at the animal when it jumped up on his workbench.

He let it march back and forth, level with his chest, as he assembled the necessary tools. Only when the pilot of the shuttle team, whose flight he had spotted from the viewport, entered and placed an elongated silver ovoid on the bench, then withdrew from his presence, did Kuat of Kuat shoo the animal away.

A pair of hovering worklights drew closer, erasing all shadow, as he leaned over the mirror-finished torpedo. This messenger pod was not just wired with, but actually built of, self-destruct modules, to prevent unauthorized access-or access by anyone except Kuat of Kuat himself. And even that was intended to be difficult; if he erred now, KDY would have a new hereditary owner and chief designer.

Held between thumb and forefinger, an identity probe bit almost painlessly into his flesh, drawing samples of fluid and tissue. The microcircuitry inside the slender needlelike device ran through its programming, matching both genetic information and the automutating radioactive tracers that had been injected into his bloodstream. The probe gave no sign, audible or visible, whether everything checked out. The only indication would be when he held the inoxide tip to the messenger pod; if his charred remains weren't embedded in the wall behind him, then all was as it should be.

The probe tip clicked against the curved, reflective surface. No explosion resulted, except for the slight one of his held breath being released.

A hairline fissure opened along the side of the pod.

The work went faster now as Kuat of Kuat pried open the silvery ovoid, dismantling the pieces of its shell in a precise order. A misstep, a segment taken out of turn, would also result in a fatal explosion, but he wasn't concerned about that happening. The only place where the proper sequence had been put down was in his memory, but no more accurate record could be imagined. When he admired machines, he admired himself.

The one on the workbench functioned just as perfectly the last of the encasing shell separated into its component parts and fell away from the core. "You've come a long way, little one." He laid a tender, possessive hand on the holoprojector unit that had been revealed, "Just what do you have to tell me?"

A fading heat radiated into Kuat of Kuat's palm. The messenger pod's energy cell was an accelerated-decay module, producing enough power for a onetime jump in and out of hyperspace. The navigational coordinates were hardwired; a matter of a few days ago it'd left the distant world of Tatooine. It could have reached the Kuat Drive Yards headquarters even sooner if a randomizing sublight process hadn't been programmed, to evade detection. Kuat of Kuat's own security men weren't the only ones watching the perimeter. A matter of business paranoia was one of the operating costs that came with being of service to the Emperor.

Hands sheathed in insulated gloves, Kuat of Kuat lifted out the holoprojector. A standard playback unit, similar to ones found throughout the galaxy, but with tweaks and modifications far beyond the ordinary.

Palpatine himself couldn't get this kind of detail in communications with his various underlings. But then . .

. he doesn't need it, Kuat of Kuat reminded himself. Not the way I do. The Emperor could always get what he wanted through fear and death. In the engineering business, one had to be a little more careful, not to eliminate one's market.

"Go away," he said to the felinx winding between his ankles. "You won't like this."

The felinx didn't heed the warning. When Kuat of Kuat used the rest of his precise tools to complete the circuits inside the holoprojector, the images and sounds of another great room were laid over the office suite.

The oppressive darkness generated by the recording and its chaos of noises, from the rattling of subsurface chains to cruel cross-species laughter, brought the silken fur straight up along the animal's spine; it hissed at what it saw, particularly the holoform of one grossly elephantine individual with tiny hands and immense, greedy eyes. When that image's lipless mouth opened to emit wetly glottal laughter, the felinx scrambled to safety beneath the farthest corner of the workbench.

Kuat of Kuat used the magnetically fastened tip of the probe to freeze the playback; the cacophony was replaced by silence as he glanced over his shoulder and saw the court of Jabba the Hutt rendered motionless. He turned away from the bench and walked into the center of the hologram. The forms were insubstantial as ghosts-he could have passed his hand through any one of the sycophants and hangers-on surrounding the Hutt's thronelike hover platform-but detailed in such perfection that he could almost smell the sweat and rank odors of de cay rising from the grates in the synthesized floors.

"You're dead, aren't you?" With a thin smile, he brought his face close to the stilled image of Jabba the Hutt. "That's such a shame. I hate to lose a good customer." Over the years Jabba had commissioned several large orders, lethal equipment for his thugs and hirelings from KDY's personal armaments division, plus elaborate palace furnishings and a superbly appointed sail barge, with military retrofits, from one of the Kuat subsidiaries devoted to luxury vessels. There had been extras thrown in that Jabba had known nothing about hidden recording devices that had captured nearly everything that took place in the palace on Tatooine and aboard the floating barge. A good contractor, thought Kuat of Kuat, knows his accounts. Better than they even know themselves.

Word of the Hutt's death had already seeped through the galaxy, gladdening many, setting off an acquisitive scramble among others. Of all of his species, Jabba had been the most active-if that word could be applied to something so obese and slow- and with the farthest reach in his shady enterprises. They're already at each other's throats-the late Hutt's associates, including Jabba's own supposedly grieving relations, struggling for control of his intricate and criminal legacy. That would be good for business; Kuat of Kuat already had appointments scheduled with some of the worst and most ambitious of the lot. New plans always called for new weapons.

The notion of throats mordantly amused him. What he'd already heard about Jabba the Hutt's death was confirmed by the holographic image. One of Jabba's ineffectual little hands held a length of chain, its other end fastened to a collar around the neck of a human form; standing at the edge of the recreated platform, Kuat of Kuat appraised with a connoisseur's eye the revealed attractiveness of Princess Leia Organa. His own wealth and power had brought many varieties of feminine beauty through his private quarters, even from the highest ranks of the nobility. The princess, however ...

He made a mental note to seek this woman's ac quaintance, if he ever had the opportunity. If it hap pened, he wouldn't be such an idiot as to leave something as simple and deadly as an iron chain lying about. "Never hand your enemy"-Kuat of Kuat spoke aloud to the dead Hutt's image-"the means by which she can kill you."

Jabba's death was a minor concern at the moment, though. Even the presence of Leia Organa at the late Hutt's court was, at this moment, of no great significance to Kuat. There were others that he sought, faces to be found in the past. He returned to his workbench and, with a few delicate adjustments to the playback unit, ran the recording back toward its beginning, before Leia Organa had ever entered Jabba's palace, disguised as an Ubese bounty hunter with captured Wookiee in tow. That should do it, thought Kuat as he glanced over his shoulder; he lifted the probe's tip from the device, freezing the image once again.

Stepping past Jabba's thronelike platform, Kuat of Kuat looked around the hologram of the Hutt's court. The assembled faces were a rogues' gallery of interstellar villainy, ranging from petty theft to murder-and beyond.

Hutts tended to attract these types, the way small fur- bearing animals attracted fleas. Though in a certain sense, it was a symbiotic rather than parasitic relationship At home in his palace, Jabba had been able to look around himself and at least see sentient creatures whose morals were on a par with, or even below, his own.

Kuat of Kuat walked slowly through the re-created court, looking for one face in particular. Not even a face, but a mask. He paused before the frozen image of Jabba's majordomo, a glittering-eyed, evilly smiling Twi'lek named Bib Fortuna. The males of the planet Ryloth, even with all the extra cognitive abilities packed into the heavy, tapering appendages hanging from their bare skulls onto their shoulders, had no capacity for generating wealth and no courage to steal it, even though they were nearly as avaricious as Hurts. This particular one had tried to worm his way into the Kuat Drive Yards' corporate bureaucracy, before a noteworthy display of untrustworthi-ness had gotten him booted from the headquarters on the planet Kuat. Hurts, however, had more of a taste for flattery and tail kissing; Kuat of Kuat wasn't surprised that Fortuna had wound up in Jabba's palace.

calculations going on behind them.

Satisfied for the moment, Kuat of Kuat walked back to the edge of the hologram. Even being in a three- dimensional simulation of Jabba's court, with its miasma of avarice and bad hygiene, brought a twinge of nausea to his gut. Better to watch from the outside of the hologram, from the pristine and mathematic angles of his own office. At the workbench, he adjusted the probe's angle in the holoprojector's circuits. Without even glancing over his shoulder, he could sense Jabba's image and the others in the Hurt's dimly lit court restored to motion, acting out their parts in this little segment of the past.

Another adjustment muted the audio portion of the playback; Kuat of Kuat didn't need to hear Jabba's slobbering voice and the cruel laughter of his sycophants to discern what was happening. Another Twi'lek, a female-on Ryloth, the females were nowhere as repulsive as their male counterparts-had become the source for Jabba's amusement. A pretty slave, a pantalooned dancing girl with her distinctive Twi'lek head appendages decorated to resemble an ancient court jester's cap of bells-but her childlike appeal and grace wasn't enough to satisfy her master's appetites. A look of apprehension, close to panic, had moved across her face as she had sat decorously at one side of the court, as though she'd had a prescient glimpse of her fate. Which was being played out again as the image of Jabba the Hutt, wattled bulk jiggling and eyes widening with delight, reeled in the chain fastened to the Twi'lek dancing girl's iron collar, dragging her toward the thronelike platform. The poor girl must have seen the same thing happen to others before her; beautiful creatures had been a disposable commodity for Jabba.

Just as Kuat of Kuat expected, the next few moments of the playback showed the trapdoor sliding open in front of Jabba's platform. The dancing girl's fall snapped the links of the chain; the court's motley denizens clustered around the grates, straining to watch her death at the claws and teeth of the rancor, Jabba's favorite pet, in the darkness below. The nausea returned to Kuat of Kuat's stomach, sharpened to disgust. A waste, he thought. The dancing girl had been beautiful enough to be useful to someone; the destruction of such a pretty device angered him more than anything else.

He'd seen enough, at least at this level of detail.

If the fat slug was as dead as had been reported, he now didn't regret the loss of trade. There'd be others, moving up the ranks of the Huttese species' galaxy-wide hierarchy. Kuat of Kuat reached over and froze the playback, the better to scan the images for the one in whom he had the most interest.

And who was no longer there in the hologram. The helmeted visage of the bounty hunter was missing from where Kuat of Kuat had spotted it before, up on the gallery overlooking the central area of Jabba's court.

Kuat of Kuat stepped away from the workbench and across the nearest edge of the hologram, looking up toward the simulation of the rough-domed ceiling, then around to the openings of low, tunnellike passages branching off to other parts of the palace. The image of Boba Fett was nowhere to be seen.

Kuat of Kuat ran the recording unit back to the point where the bounty hunter, face hidden behind the visored mask of his uniform, could be seen watching the court below him. This time, he didn't let himself be distracted by the fate of the Twi'lek dancing girl; starting up the playback again, he saw where Boba Fett had slipped unnoticed from the gallery and out of the court, even before Jabba had started pulling on the chain and dragging the girl over the trapdoor.

Interesting. Kuat of Kuat let the holographic re cording play on. Our friend, he thought, had another agenda. Not surprising; Boba Fett had not reached the top of the bounty-hunter trade without building up a network of business interests and contacts, some of them-if not most-completely unaware of each other. Jabba the Hutt might have been stupid enough to believe that by paying Fett a generous retainer, he had thereby secured the bounty hunter's exclusive services. If so, that indicated how much Jabba had been slipping, making the kind of mis takes that had led to his death.

Always a mistake to completely trust a bounty hunter.

Kuat of Kuat didn't commit mistakes like that.

Kuat ran the hologram playback forward. There was no sign of Boba Fett until much farther on in the recording.

He spotted the bounty hunter's image then, snapping a blaster rifle up into firing position as the disguised Leia Organa held up an activated thermal detonator and demanded payment for the captive Wookiee she had brought.

That potentially lethal confrontation had ended with the Hutt's guttural laughter and admiration for his resourceful opponent; the bounty for Chewbacca had been paid and Boba Fett had lowered his weapon.

So he did return there, mused Kuat as he watched the hologram. Whatever mysterious appointments Boba Fett might have kept in Jabba's palace, they hadn't prevented him from attending to his duties as the Hutt's freelance bodyguard. It was a safe assumption that the reports gathered by Kuat's corporate intelligence division were accurate they had described Jabba's death, out on his sail barge, hovering at the edge of the Great Pit of Carkoon in Tatooine's Dune Sea, and had mentioned Boba Fett being there at the struggle.

More than that, the reports had also described Boba Fett's death. What Kuat of Kuat wanted was proof of that.

Operating without that proof was like building a machine with a critical component left untested. A machine, he thought, that could kill its master if it broke down.

Someone like Boba Fett had a disquieting habit of survival; Kuat of Kuat would have to see the bounty hunter's death before he would believe it.

He looked at the pieces of the messenger pod and its curved, reflective casing scattered on the workbench. The next pod to drop out of hyperspace and penetrate the planet Kuat's atmosphere would very likely carry the necessary information inside it. All the units had been designed to carry only partial segments of what had been recorded at Jabba's palace and aboard the Hutt's sail barge. There was less likelihood that way of any of KDY's powerful enemies intercepting the units and, if they managed to get past the security procedures, figuring out Kuat of Kuat's own concerns.

One last thing to do with this message He reached into the device and extracted the micro-probe. The breaking of the circuit initiated the self-destruct program; the metal grew white-hot, twisting in upon itself as it was consumed. From underneath the bench, the felinx fled in terror, streaking toward the office suite's farthest recesses. A few more seconds passed, then the holoprojector and its contents had been reduced to blackened slag on the workbench's surface, cooling into a single indecipherable hieroglyph.

The contents of the message, that had come so far to reach him, was safely locked away in Kuat of Kuat's memory. When proof of Boba Fett's death came, he might allow himself to forget the smallest particle of information. When it's safe, Kuat of Kuat had already decided. Not until then.

And if that proof didn't come ... he would have to make other plans. Plans that would include more than one death as part of their internal workings. Meshing gears often had cruelly sharp teeth.

He turned away from the workbench and walked slowly through the empty spaces of the office suite, looking for the felinx. So that he could pick it up and cradle it in his arms, and soothe it of the fright it had received.

Carkoon in Tatooine's Dune Sea, and had mentioned Boba Fett being there at the struggle.

More than that, the reports had also described Boba Fett's death. What Kuat of Kuat wanted was proof of that.

Operating without that proof was like building a machine with a critical component left untested. A machine, he thought, that could kill its master if it broke down.

Someone like Boba Fett had a disquieting habit of survival; Kuat of Kuat would have to see the bounty hunter's death before he would believe it.

He looked at the pieces of the messenger pod and its curved, reflective casing scattered on the workbench. The next pod to drop out of hyperspace and penetrate the planet Kuat's atmosphere would very likely carry the necessary information inside it. All the units had been designed to carry only partial segments of what had been recorded at Jabba's palace and aboard the Hutt's sail barge. There was less likelihood that way of any of KDY's powerful enemies intercepting the units and, if they managed to get past the security procedures, figuring out Kuat of Kuat's own concerns.

One last thing to do with this message He reached into the device and extracted the micro-probe. The breaking of the circuit initiated the self-destruct program; the metal grew white-hot, twisting in upon itself as it was consumed. From underneath the bench, the felinx fled in terror, streaking toward the office suite's farthest recesses. A few more seconds passed, then the holoprojector and its contents had been reduced to blackened slag on the workbench's surface, cooling into a single indecipherable hieroglyph.

The contents of the message, that had come so far to reach him, was safely locked away in Kuat of Kuat's memory. When proof of Boba Fett's death came, he might allow himself to forget the smallest particle of information. When it's safe, Kuat of Kuat had already decided. Not until then.

And if that proof didn't come ... he would have to make other plans. Plans that would include more than one death as part of their internal workings. Meshing gears often had cruelly sharp teeth.

He turned away from the workbench and walked slowly through the empty spaces of the office suite, looking for the felinx. So that he could pick it up and cradle it in his arms, and soothe it of the fright it had received.

outcroppings as she watched the barely noticeable hole dug into the barren ground below. The twin suns bled into the horizon, the chill Tatooine night already unfolding across the sands. Around her bare shoulders, she pulled tighter a salvaged scrap of sail-barge canopy-blackened by fire and explosion along one ragged edge, stiff with dried blood along another. The delicate fabrics with which her body had been adorned in Jabba's palace were little protection against the cold. A shiver touched her flesh as she continued to watch and wait.

She'd known that the bounty hunter, the one called Dengar, would have some hiding place away from Jabba the Hutt's palace. What used to be his palace, she corrected herself. The monstrous slug was dead now, that had held the end of her chain and the chains of the other dancers.

But when Jabba had been alive, most of the thugs and bodyguards in his employ had had little warrens out in the rocky wastes, where they could seal themselves in for a few hours' sleep, safe from being murdered by each other-or by their boss. Jabba's court hadn't been easy to survive in; she knew that better than anyone. But it's not me who died, she thought with a bitter satisfaction.

Jabba got what he deserved.

In the dimming light, she put away her brooding, the little vengeful spark that kept her warm inside. She'd spotted, down below, the approaching figures for which she'd been waiting.

Two medic droids trundled across the sand; their parallel tracks headed toward the warren hole in the rocky wasteland. They were probably refugees from Jabba's palace, just as she was; all of the medic droids there had been modified with wheels in place of the original stumpy legs so they could get around in the desert terrain. Neelah watched them for a few seconds more, then eased out of her hiding place and carefully worked her way down the farther side of the dune, where the droids wouldn't be able to see her.

"Hold it right there." She caught the droids just as they were transmitting the security code that would unseal the subsurface warren; a row of numbers, softly glowing red, showed on the panel embedded in the magnetically reinforced durasteel. "Don't move. I promise I won't hurt you-but do n't move."

"Are you frightened?" The taller of the two medical droids, a basic MD5 general-practitioner model, scanned her against the hole's rough circle of evening sky. "Your pulse is quite elevated for a standard hu-manoid form.

Plus"-a tiny grid irised open on the droid's dark- enameled head, drawing in an air sample-"your perspiration contains significant levels of hormones indicating an emotionally agitated state." "Shut up. I also want you to do that." Rocks slid loose beneath her as she scrambled down toward the droids. "Just shut up."

"Did you hear that?" The taller droid swiveled its multilensed gaze toward its companion, a white-banded MD3 pharmaceutical model. "She's telling us to be quiet."

"Rudeness." Dust sifted from the shorter one as it tucked its syringes and dispensing appendages closer to itself. "Foresight of difficulties."

"Great-" Anger spurred her heart even faster. "Then you can't say you didn't know this was coming." She grabbed a vital-signs monitor sticking out antennalike from the taller one's head and slammed the droid against the dirt wall of the warren entrance, hard enough to send the lights dancing across its front display panel.

Another pull in the opposite direction sent it crashing into the other droid; that one squealed as it toppled over, exposing the wheeled traction devices below the lower rim of its cylindrical body. "Now, how about shutting up?"

"It seems like a very good idea." The taller droid retreated, flattening itself against the unopened secu rity hatch.

She gulped down a deep breath, trying through sheer willpower to slow down her heartbeat and still the trembling in her hands. Few violent acts had been required in her life-as far as she knew; she had no memories of any life before finding herself at Jabba's palace-and even as something as minor as banging a little sense into the medical droids' heads was enough to dizzy her. Get used to it, she sternly told herself. The realization had already come to her that a lot more scary things were going to happen. That was all right; at least she was alive. Others in her position hadn't been so fortunate. The memory was still vivid inside her, of seeing the other dancing girl falling into the pit beneath Jabba's palace. That memory ended with screams, and the slavering growls of Jabba's pet rancor.

"Excuse me, your ladyship ..."

That puzzled her. Neither Jabba the Hutt nor any of the others at his court had ever called her anything like that.

"But you require medical attention." The taller droid kept its speech mechanism at minimal volume. A handlike examination module, with a fiber-optic light source mounted at the wrist, reached tentatively toward her face. "That's a very bad wound... ."

She slapped away the droid's hand, before it could touch the edges of the jagged line running down one side of her face. "It'll heal."

"With a scar." The taller droid shone the beam of its handlight lower, down to where the wound, the physical memory of a Gamorrean pikestaff, ended below her throat.

"We could do something about that. To make it better."

"Why bother?" Other memories, nearly as unpleasant as those from the pit, flooded her thoughts. Whatever her life might have been before, the time in Jabba's palace had been enough to convince her that beauty was a dangerous thing to possess. It'd been just enough to entice Jabba's sticky hands-and the hands of those underlings who had been his current favorites-but not enough to protect her when the Hutt grew bored with her charms. "I can do without it," she said bitterly.

"Anger," noted the other medical droid. Need lessly-the scent of negative emotion was almost palpable in the warren hole's entrance. "Treatment inadvisability."

"I remember seeing you." The taller droid's low, soothing voice continued. "At Jabba's palace." The handlight beam moved across her face. "You were part of the entertainment."

"I was-" She glanced over her shoulder toward the warren's darkening entrance, to make sure no one was approaching, then turned back toward the droids. "But not now."

"Oh?" An inquiring gaze seemed to move behind the droid's optic receptors. "Then what are you?"

"I ... I don't know... ."

"Name," spoke the shorter of the two droids.

"Designation."

"They called me ... Jabba called me Neelah." She frowned. Something-the absence of memory, rather than anything she could actually recall-told her that wasn't right. That name's a lie, she thought. "But ... that's what they called me... ."

"There's worse names." Voice brightening, the taller droid tried to comfort her. "Consider my own subidentity coding-" Its complicated hand pointed to a data readout on the front of its dark metallic body. "SHS1-B. Most sentient creatures can't even pronounce it. This one's luckier."

"1e-XE." The shorter droid extruded a pill-dispensing module and gently tapped the back of her hand with it.

"Acquaintance; pleasure."

They're working on me, thought Neelah. She knew enough about medical droids-from where?- to be aware of the soothing effects they were designed to provoke in their patients. Anesthetic radiation; she could feel a low-level electromagnetic field locking into sync with the neurons inside her head, drawing out the lulling endorphins... .

"Knock it off," she growled. She shook her head, snapping herself free of the droids' influence. "I don't need that, either. Not now." Neelah drew one hand back in a small but effective fist. "If I have to whack you again, I will."

Like extinguishing a torch, the field abruptly cut out. "As you wish," said SHS1-B. "We're only trying to help."

"You can do that by telling me where he is." The wound across her face stung once more, but she ignored it.

"Who?"

She nodded toward the security hatch. "The bounty hunter. The one whose hiding place this is."

"Dengar?" One of SHS1-B's metallic hands pointed toward the warren opening behind her. "He's back at Jabba's palace."

"Supplies," noted le-XE. "Various."

"That's right." SHS1-B opened a small cargo pod bolted to the side of its body. "He sent us back here with what we required. As you see-antibiotics, metabolic accelerators, sterile gel dressings-"

"Fine." Neelah interrupted the droid's inventory of its contents. "But Dengar-he's still back at the palace?"

SHS1-B's head unit gave a nod. "He said he wanted to find one of Jabba's caches of off-planet edibles. That might take some time, though-the palace has been very badly looted by the Hutt's former employees."

"Mess." le-XE rotated the top dome of its cylinder back and forth. "Disgust."

There wasn't time to consider her decision. "Open the hatch," said Neelah, pointing to the magnetically sealed disk, the coded digits still blinking in its readout panel. "I want to go inside."

"Dengar told us not to let-" The taller of the two droids caught the look in Neelah's eyes. "All right, all right; I'm opening it."

The tunnel on the other side of the hatch descended at close to a forty-five-degree angle. Heading down it, with the droids clunking behind her, Neelah felt a claustrophobic panic crawling along her spine. The darkness and the close, scarcely ventilated air felt like the tunnel through which she'd crawled to escape from Jabba's palace. After what had happened to her poor friend Oola, any risk had seemed preferable to winding up as rancor food.

Though her own death had almost found her, before she had gotten away. The scything blade of a Gamorrean perimeter guard's pikestaff had slashed the raw-edged wound on her face. She'd left the blade buried halfway through the guard's throat; Jabba had always made the mistake of hiring thugs who were bigger than they were fast. She'd only felt fear afterward, as she'd stepped over the widening pool of blood, then ran into the desert.

In this dimly lit space, she was finally able to stand upright in a central chamber. "Where's the other one?" She glanced over her shoulder at the two medical droids as they emerged from the tunnel and clicked back into their normal positions. "The one you're taking care of?"

"Dengar told us-" SHS1-B's voice snapped silent.

"Over here," it said grudgingly. The taller droid led Neelah past disorganized stacks of weapons and ammunition modules, mixed with the discarded wrappings of autothermal field-ration containers. "It's not really suitable-this patient should've been medevac'd to a hospital immediately-but we've done the best we can...

."

Neelah tuned out the droid's words. At the low, rounded entrance to the side chamber, she halted and peered inside. "Is he ... is he awake?" A dim glow filled the space; a black cable ran from a shielded worklight to a fuel-cell power generator in the middle of the main chamber's clutter. "Can he see me?"

"Not with what we gave him." SHSl-B stood just behind her. "I prescribed a five-percent obliviane solution from le-XE's anesthetic stocks. On a constant basis, too; the patient's injuries are unusually severe. That was one of the reasons we had to go back to the palace, to try and find more. But if we didn't, the pain from this kind of trauma could go into a feedback loop and completely burn out th e patient's central nervous system."

She stepped into the chamber, ducking under the doorway. An improvised bed, polyfoam stuffed inside flexible freight sheathing, left only a small space between the unconscious man and the medical droids'

intravenous units and monitoring equipment. She squeezed past the humming machines, dials, and tiny screens ticking with slow pulses of light, and stood looking down at someone whose face she had never seen before.

One of her hands reached to touch him, but stopped a few centimeters away from his brow. He looks worse than I do, thought Neelah. The man's flesh looked as raw as it had when she'd found him the first time, out in the desert; the skin that he had lost in the Sarlacc's digestive tract was replaced now with a transparent membrane, linked to tubes trickling fluids from the wall of machines alongside the bed. "What's this?" She touched the clear substance; it felt cold and slick.

"Sterile nutrient casing." SHS1-B reached out and made a slight adjustment to one of the equipment controls. "It's what we normally use on severe burn victims, when there has been major epidermal loss. When we were in the service of the late Jabba the Hutt, we saw and treated a lot of burns."

"Explosions," said le-XE.

"Just so." SHSl-B lifted part of its carapace in an approximation of a humanoid shrug. "The kind of persons who worked for Jabba-the rougher sort of his employees-they were always blowing themselves up, one way or another."

"Turnover. High rate."

"That's true; there were always some we just couldn't put back together. But le-XE did get rather skilled at burn-treatment protocols. This individual's somatic trauma, however, is a little different." SHS1-B scanned over the unconscious figure. "No one, as far as can be recalled from our memory banks, has ever survived even temporary ingestion by a Sarlacc. So we're doing the best we can, with what we've got."

Neelah glanced over at the medical droid. "Is he going to live?"

"Hard to tell. An exact prognosis for this patient is difficult to make, due to both the severity and the unusual nature of his injuries. It's not just the epider mal loss; le-XE and I have determined that there was also exposure to unknown toxins while he was in the Sarlacc's gut. We've attempted to counteract the effects of those substances, but the results are uncertain. If we had access to records of other such humanoid-Sarlacc encounters, the probability of his survival could be calculated. But we don't. Though just on a personal basis"-SHSl-B's voice lowered, a simulation of confidentiality-"I'm surprised that this individual is still alive at all. Something else must be keeping him going. Something inside him."

The droid's words puzzled her. "Like what?"

"I don't know," replied SHS1-B. "Some things are not a matter of medical knowledge. Not the kind I have, at any rate."

She looked back at the figure on the bed. Even like, this, with his mere human face exposed and unconscious beneath the machines' care, his presence brought a chilling unease around her own heart. There's something, thought Neelah, between us. Some invisible connection, that she had caught the tiniest glimpse of back in Jabba's palace. When she had looked up to the gallery and she had seen this man, unmistakable even when masked; seen him and felt the touch of fear. Not because of what she'd remembered at that moment, but because of what she couldn't remember. If this man stood somewhere in her past, he stood in shadows, stretching back farther and deeper than any mere rancor pit.

"What about Dengar?" With another effort of will, Neelah brought herself back to the present. "Why's he doing this? Taking care of him?"

"I have no idea." SHS1-B's optic receptors gazed at her blankly. "He didn't tell us, when he came to the palace and found us. And frankly, that's not a matter of concern to us."

"Unimportance," said le-XE.

"We're programmed to provide medical care. After Jabba the Hutt's death, we were just glad to be provided with an opportunity to do that."

That left the other bounty hunter's agenda as a mystery to her. She'd taken a chance when she left this one out on the desert sands, where Dengar would find him.

She'd been horrified by the extent of his injuries; there would have been no way she could have taken care of the rawly bleeding man. In Jabba's palace, she had seen enough to be aware of the enmity, the professional rivalry and personal hatred, that existed among all bounty hunters-but then, this one would have been no more dead if Dengar had found him, then gone ahead and stood on his throat until he'd stopped moving. Instead, a certain strange sense of relief had stirred in her as she'd crouched behind an outcropping and had witnessed Dengar examining the injured man. That same inexplicable emotion had risen when she'd followed the medical droids to this hiding place and had found the man still alive. .

. .

There wasn't time to ponder what that meant. You've been here long enough, she warned herself. Whatever Dengar's motives might be for keeping his rival alive, he might not be so charitably inclined toward her. Bounty hunters were secretive creatures; they had to be, in their trade. Dengar might not be happy to find that someone else was aware of not only his hiding place, but what-and who-was inside it.

"I'm going to leave now," Neelah told the droids.

"You carry on with your work. This man must stay alive-do you understand that?"

"We'll do our best. That's what we were created for."

"And-you're not to tell Dengar anything about me.

About my being here at all."

"But he might ask," said SHSl-B. "Whether somebody had been here or not. We're programmed to be truthful."

"Let's put it this way." Neelah leaned her scarred face closer to the droid's optics. "If you tell Dengar about me, I'll come back here and take you apart, and I'll scatter your pieces all across the Dune Sea. Both of you. And then you won't be able to do your jobs, will you?"

SHS1-B appeared to mull over her statement for only a few seconds. "That certainly overrides the truthfulness programming."

"Silence," interjected le-XE hastily. "Completeness."

"Good." She glanced around the chamber to see if she'd left any telltale sign of her visit. Against the base of the rough-surfaced wall was something she hadn't spotted before. She stepped closer to it and saw that it was a pile of rags, the tattered shreds that she'd found still clinging, wet with the Sarlacc's digestive fluids, to the injured man's torso. On top of the pile was another object, not rags but metal, etched by its time in the beast's gut, but still recognizable. Neelah leaned down and picked up the helmet with its unmistakably narrow, T-shaped visor.

That was what she had seen before. In Jabba's palace-the helmet's mask was a cruel, implacable face in itself, the gaze hidden inside as sharp as any cutting blade. Neelah grasped the helmet in both hands, holding it before her, like a skull or part of a dead machine.

Even empty, it looked back at her in silence-and she was afraid.

Boba Fett ...

The name sounded in her thoughts, though not spoken by her. That was what he'd been called. She knew that much; she'd heard the name whispered, by those who'd both hated and dreaded him.

"You'd better go now." The medical droid's voice broke into her thoughts. "It won't be long before Dengar returns."

Her hands trembled as she set the helmet back down on the pile of rags. At the chamber's entrance, she stopped and looked back at the figure on the bed. A thread of something almost like pity crept into the knot of fear inside her.

She turned and hurried away, toward the slanting tunnel that would lead her to the more comforting darkness outside.

few seconds. "That certainly overrides the truthfulness programming."

"Silence," interjected le-XE hastily. "Completeness."

"Good." She glanced around the chamber to see if she'd left any telltale sign of her visit. Against the base of the rough-surfaced wall was something she hadn't spotted before. She stepped closer to it and saw that it was a pile of rags, the tattered shreds that she'd found still clinging, wet with the Sarlacc's digestive fluids, to the injured man's torso. On top of the pile was another object, not rags but metal, etched by its time in the beast's gut, but still recognizable. Neelah leaned down and picked up the helmet with its unmistakably narrow, T-shaped visor.

That was what she had seen before. In Jabba's palace-the helmet's mask was a cruel, implacable face in itself, the gaze hidden inside as sharp as any cutting blade. Neelah grasped the helmet in both hands, holding it before her, like a skull or part of a dead machine.

Even empty, it looked back at her in silence-and she was afraid.

Boba Fett ...

The name sounded in her thoughts, though not spoken by her. That was what he'd been called. She knew that much; she'd heard the name whispered, by those who'd both hated and dreaded him.

"You'd better go now." The medical droid's voice broke into her thoughts. "It won't be long before Dengar returns."

Her hands trembled as she set the helmet back down on the pile of rags. At the chamber's entrance, she stopped and looked back at the figure on the bed. A thread of something almost like pity crept into the knot of fear inside her.

She turned and hurried away, toward the slanting tunnel that would lead her to the more comforting darkness outside.

he had heard that one.

But that had been the past; now he heard another woman's voice. That was the one that tormented him, that made the sleep of his dying a place where memories rose out of the darkness.

His eyelids had fluttered open, or had tried to; they were mired in some pliable substance clinging tightly to his face. As weak as he was, the stuff bound him as tightly as Han Solo had been in the block of carbonite he'd delivered to Jabba the Hutt. But he'd managed to raise his eyelids just enough, a fraction of a centimeter, that he'd been able to catch an unfocused glimpse of the female. She had been there in Jabba's palace, a simple dancing girl-but he knew she was something more than that. Much more. Jabba had called her

... Neelah. That w as it; he could remember that much.

But that wasn't her real name. Her real name ...

Fragments of memory touched, then drifted apart, as the effort of vision took him back beneath the lightless weight pressing upon him.

There, he dreamed without sleeping, died yet still lived.

And remembered.

"Stick with me," Bossk told the new Guild member.

"And I'll show you how it's done."

He could feel the other's rising anger, like the radiation from a reactor-core meltdown. That was exactly the response he wanted, that his comments were designed to evoke. There wasn't the tiniest segment of a standard time cycle that Bossk wasn't angry to some degree. He even slept angry, the way all Trandoshans did, dreaming of their razor fangs locked on the throats of their reptilian species' ancient enemies. Rage and blood lust were good things in the Trandoshan galaxy-view. That was how things got done.

"You needn't act wise and superior with me." The close-range audio unit built into Zuckuss's breathing apparatus had enough bandwidth to let his irritation sound through. "I've collected nearly as many bounties as you have. Your family connections are the only reason for your rank in the Guild."

Bossk displayed an ugly, lipless smile toward the partner he'd been assigned. The urge to reach over and pull the other's head off, air hoses and comlink wires dangling like the tendrils of swamp weed surrounding the birth pits back on Trandosha, was almost irresistible.

Maybe later, Bossk told himself, when this job's over.

He pointed a talon down the corridor in front of them. Both he and Zuckuss had their spines flat against the wall of a side passage; from behind sealed doors some twenty meters away, the brittle music of a jizz-wailer band sounded, mixed with the high-pitched babble of the casino's customers blowing their credits on rows of rigged jubilee wheels. Gambling held no attraction for Bossk; he preferred surer things. Another sentient creature's death was the best, especially if there was profit involved. Sometimes, though-as with this job-the quarry had to be taken alive, if there was going to be any payoff. That complicated things.

"The thermal charges are already in place." The point of Bossk's claw indicated a pair of tiny bumps on the doors of the casino's main accounting office. A

chameleonoid visual sheath on the charges' casings prevented the security optics from detecting them. "When I blow them, I want you straight through those doors.

Don't bother scanning for guards, just dive in-"

"Why me?" Zuckuss turned his large-eyed gaze toward him. "Why don't you do that bit?"

"Because," said Bossk, grating out an unconvincing show of patience, "I'll be covering you from behind." He held up his blaster rifle, its stock and grip controls modified for his talons, large even by Trandoshan standards. "I'll draw off any fire while you're securing the counting room. It's a standard two-prong attack, straight out of the Guild manual for this kind of situation."

"Oh." Leaning his head out from the passage, Zuckuss studied the doors. "That makes sense ... I suppose..."

Idiot, thought Bossk. The actual reason was that the first one into the room was more likely to get sliced into bleeding pieces by the guards' tight-focus lasers.

Better you than me-especially since his partner's death would mean he'd get to keep all of the bounty for himself, or at least the part that was left after the Guild took its share.

"Let's go." He shoved Zuckuss out ahead of himself, at the same time as he hit the trigger device mounted on the sleeve of his stalking gear. The faint sounds of music and frenetic pleasure were drowned out by the bass- heavy rumble of the thermal charges ripping open the sealed doors.

Bossk planted himself in the middle of the corridor, clawed feet spread wide, blaster rifle raised to his slitpupiled eye. One talon squeezed onto the rifle's trigger stud in anticipation; the cold heart in his chest sped up with excitement as he peered through the coiling smoke...

No fire came from beyond the ripped, heat-distorted metal.

"Zuckuss!" He shouted into the comlink mike mounted near the leathery scales of his throat. "What's going on?"

A moment passed before the other bounty hunter's reply came. "Well," said Zuckuss's voice, "the good news is that we don't have to worry about the guards... ."

Bossk charged down the corridor, rifle clutched in both sets of talons, and into the casino's accounting room. Or what was left of it the smoke from the thermal charges' explosion had lifted enough that the scattered taliputer and vidlink terminals could be seen. Along with the bodies of a half-dozen casino guards-each one had had a laser hole drilled through the chest plate of his uniform with impressive accuracy. And speed, Bossk managed to note. None of the guards had even managed to get his weapon unslung and up into firing position; whoever had taken them out had done so in a matter of sec onds.

"Look," said Zuckuss. He bent down and touched the hole in one guard's chest plate. "I'm getting a thermal reading here. The plastoid hasn't cooled-they were all lasered while we were still standing out in the corridor!" The bounty hunter stood and pointed to the room's far wall. A jagged hole, big enough for Bossk himself to have walked through without stooping, revealed the stacked cylinders of the power converters behind the main casino building. "Somebody beat us to it-"

"That's impossible," snapped Bossk. "That wall's monocrystal-chained; we'd have heard any blast powerful enough to get through it. Unless ..." A sudden suspicion hit him; he glanced over his shoulder to the opposite wall. A sonic dis-sipator, the dials on its silvery ovoid surface trembling at the overload point, hung overhead by its automatically extruded gripfeet. The indicators slowly backed away from their red zones as the impact of the wall-breaching explosion was converted into a harmless sibilant whisper.

The rage inside Bossk leaped up, as though it could blow out another hole, even bigger and hotter. That crossbred spawn of a ... The curse died between his gritting fangs. There was only one bounty hunter who used that kind of sophisticated-and expensive-equipment.

Either it had been smuggled into the counting room somehow, or-more likely- an access hole just big enough for the device had been drilled through the wall, followed by the explosive charge itself when the dissipator had been activated to soak up the noise. There was no point in looking around for the quarry for whom he and Zuckuss had come here. Bossk gripped the edge of the hole torn in the casino's exterior and scanned the planet's pockmarked horizon. In the distance, the infuriatingly familiar shape of a high-speed interstellar craft lifted into the deepening violet of the sky. The ship's engines trailed fire as it headed off- world.

"Come on!" Bossk grabbed Zuckuss by one arm and pulled him toward the gap in the wall. Shrieking alarms sounded from the corridor, triggered by the charges that had taken out the doors; it would only be a few seconds more before guards from other sections of the casino got here. He slung his rifle behind his shoulder and prepared to jump.

"But-" Zuckuss drew back. "But we must be ten meters up! At least!"

"So?" He growled at his partner. "Can you think of a quicker way out of here?"

A few seconds later he and Zuckuss were scrambling to their feet. The urge to murder filled Bossk again as Zuckuss groaned in pain.

"I think I broke something... ."

'As laser shots from the casino guards above sizzled the ground, melting the planet's silicate-heavy ground into patches of glass, he started running, aware that Zuckuss was right behind him.

They caught up with their adversary out beyond the planet's atmosphere.

Bossk jammed the point of his talon down on the comm button as Zuckuss, beside him in the navigator's seat of the Hound's Tooth, fussed with a broken connector to one of his air hoses. "Shut off your engines," he barked into the link. There was no need for formalities; in this remote zone of the starways, no other ship was within hailing range. "You have merchandise onboard that belongs to us. Specifically, one sentient individual by the designation of Nil Posondum, formerly employed by the Trans-Galactic Gaming Enterprises Corporation-"

"Your property?" A cold, uninflected voice sounded from the speaker mounted above the Hound's controls. "And why would this said individual-if he were aboard my ship-why would he belong to you?"

"Maybe," whispered Zuckuss, "we shouldn't get this barve angry. He can be a tough customer."

"Shut up." Bossk pressed the comm button again. "By authority of the Bounty Hunters Guild. That's what makes him ours. Hand him over now, and you won't get into trouble."

"That's very amusing." No emotion, amused or otherwise, was discernible in the other's words. "But you seem to be laboring under a severe misapprehension."

"Yeah?" Bossk glared at the Hound's forward viewport.

The other ship showed no sign of cutting its speed. "What am I mistaken about?"

"I'm not restricted by the authority of your so- called Bounty Hunters Guild. I answer to a higher law."

"Which is?"

"Mine." The temperature of the scattered atoms between the ships couldn't have been closer to absolute zero. "Specifically, what's mine I keep. Until I get paid for it."

Bossk's words grated through his fangs. "Look, you conniving, diseased gnathgrg-"

The comm indicator blinked off, the connection broken by the other ship.

"There he goes." Zuckuss gazed up at the viewport.

The flaring trails from the engines of the Slave I, the transport of the galaxy's most ruthlessly efficient bounty hunter, blurred and disappeared into hyper-space.

Cold and mocking stars filled the sector where it had been.

Bossk's slit pupils narrowed as he glared at empty space. The other ship, and its pilot and his captured prize, might be gone-but the seething fury in Bossk's scaled breast wasn't. The figure in the cage cowered back from the bars as Boba Fett approached.

"There's no need for that." The Slave I's minimal galley had ejected a tray of some nondescript edible substance, a lumpish gray gel that was unappetizing but adequate for a standard humanoid life-form. Fett placed the tray on the metal-grated flooring and pushed it through an opening in the cage with the toe of his boot.

"I'm not being paid to hurt you. Therefore you won't be hurt."

"And if you were being paid to do that?" The former head accountant for the Trans-Galactic Gaming Enterprises Corporation gazed sulkily from the holding pen, the only one presently occupied aboard the Slave I. "What then?"

"You'd be in a world of pain." Boba Fett pointed to the tray; a little of its glistening contents had slopped onto the pen's floor. "As merchandise, you are more valuable alive than dead. In fact, you would be worthless to me as a corpse. To deliver you unharmed-relatively so-is the primary requirement for collecting the bounty that was posted on you. If you try starving yourself, you will be force-fed. I'm not known for being gentle about that sort of thing. If you were to be so foolish as to try to injure yourself in any other manner, you'll find yourself in restraints considerably less comfortable than your present situation."

The accountant named Nil Posondum looked around the bare cage. A thin pale hand gripped one of the bars. "I'd hardly call this comfortable."

"It can get worse." The shoulders of Boba Fett's armored combat gear lifted in a shrug. "My ship is built for speed, not luxury accommodations." He'd left the Slave I's controls set on autopilot; a small datapad clipped to his forearm monitored the craft's uninterrupted course through hyperspace. "You should take what pleasure you can from your time here. Things won't be any better for you where you're going."

In fact, Boba Fett knew they would be much worse for the accountant. Posondum had made the grievous error of shifting allegiances, changing jobs in an industry where loyalty was prized-and disloyalty punished. Worse, the accountant had been keeping the financial records for a chain of illicit skefta dens in the Outer Rim Territories that were controlled by a Huttese syndicate. Hutts tended to view their employees as possessions-one of the reasons that Boba Fett had always kept a freelancer's independent relationship with his frequent client Jabba. The accountant Posondum hadn't been so smart; he'd been even stupider when he'd gone over to his former employers'

competition with a cortical data-splint loaded with the Hutts' odds-rigging systems and gray-market transfer shuffles. Hutts were even more secretive than possessive; Boba Fett had sometimes wondered if they grew so huge by greedily ingesting everything that came into reach of their little hands and huge mouths, and letting nothing go. Not even one frightened accountant with a computer- enhanced brain full of numbers.

"Why don't you just kill me now?" Posondum hunkered on the floor of the cage, his back against its bars. He'd tasted the tray and pushed it away in disgust. "You'd do a quicker job of it than the Hutts will."

"Likely so." He felt no pity for the man, who'd brought his troubles upon himself. You hang out with Hutts, he thought, you'd better be careful not to get rolled over on. "But as I said. I do what I get paid for.

No more, no less."

"You'd do anything for credits, wouldn't you?" Boba Fett could see his own reflection, doubled in the small mirrors of the accountant's resentfully burning eyes. The image he saw was of a full helmet, battered and discolored, yet completely functional; his face was concealed by the narrow, T-shaped visor. His combat gear bristled with armaments, from shin to wrist; the tapered nose of a directional rocket protruded from behind one shoulder. A walking arsenal, a humanoid figure built out of machines. The lethal kind.

The reflected image nodded slowly. "That's right," said Boba Fett. "I do the things I'm good at, and for which I get paid the best." He glanced down at the data readout. "It's nothing personal."

"Then we could make a deal." Posondum looked up hopefully at his captor. "Couldn't we?" "What kind of deal?" "What do you think?" The accountant stood up I and gripped the bars nearest to Fett. "You like getting paid-I know the kind of outrageous fees you charge for your services-and I like remaining alive. I'm probably as fond of that as you are of credits." Boba Fett let his masked gaze rest upon the other's sweating face. "You should have considered how precious your life is to you before you incurred the wrath of the Hutts. It's a little late for regrets now.

"But it's not too late for you to make some credits.

More credits than the Hutts can pay you." Posondum pressed his face into the bars, as though he could somehow squeeze out between them through the sheer force of his desperation. "You let me go and I'll make it worth your while."

"I doubt it," said Fett coldly. "The Hutts pay excellent bounties. That's why I like taking on their jobs."

"And why do you think they want to get me back so badly?" Posondum's knuckles turned white and bloodless as his fists tightened. "Just for the old ledgers I've got stowed away inside my head? Or just so the competition won't find out a few little trade secrets?"

"It's not my business as to why my clients desire certain things. Things such as yourself." A small in dicator light pulsed on his wrist-mounted data readout; he'd have to return to the Slave I's controls soon. "I'm just pleased that they do want them. And that they'll pay."

"Just like I will." Posondum lowered his voice, though there was no one to overhear. "I took more than information when I left the Hutts. I took credits-a lot of 'em."

"That was foolish of you." Fett knew how tight the Huttese were with credits; it was a characteristic of their species. There had been times when he'd needed to take extreme measures to get paid for the completion of a job, even when the terms had been agreed upon beforehand.

So to steal from a Hutt, and to think that one could get away with it, was the height of idiocy.

"Maybe so-but there was so much of it. And I thought I could get away, that I could hide. And my new bosses would protect me... ."

"They did the best they could." Boba Fett shrugged. "It just wasn't good enough. It never is, when I'm involved."

"Look, I'll give you the credits. All of them."

Posondum trembled with the fervor of his plea. "Every credit I stole from the Hurts-it's all yours. Just let me go."

"And just where are these credits?"

Posondum drew back from the cage's bars.

"They're hidden."

"I could very easily find out the location." Fett kept his voice as level and emotionless as before. "The extracting of useful information is a specialty of mine."

"It's memory-encrypted," said the accountant. I

"Below the conscious level. And with a trauma sen-sor implanted." He pointed to a small scar just above his left ear. "You try to dig the info out of me, it'll trip and wipe the cortical segment clean. Then nobody will ever find where I put the credits."

"There's ways around those things." Boba Fett had seen them before. "Bypasses and shunts-they're not pleasant. But they work." He supposed the Hutts were already preparing a deep neurosurgical dissection room for Posondum upon his return. "It doesn't matter to me, though. Since I'm not making a deal with you, anyway."

"But why not?" The accountant had reached one of his skinny arms through the bars, trying to grab hold of Boba Fett's sleeve. "It's a fortune-it's more than the Hutts have offered you-"

"It very well might be." He had stepped away from the cage, back to the unadorned and functional metal treads that would return him to the Slave I's cockpit. "You might be as good a thief as you are a number cruncher.

And if you're going to steal even one credit from a Hutt, you might as well steal a billion. The consequences are the same. But even if you do have that kind of credits hidden away, I'm not interested in them. Or not interested enough. I have my reputation to think of."

"Your ..." Posondum gaped at him in amazement and dismay. "Your what?"

"The Hutts and all my other clients-they pay me the kind of bounties they do because of one thing. I deliver.

Once I've caught my prey, nothing stops me from bringing it in. Nothing. If I take on a job, I complete it. And everyone in the galaxy knows that."

"But ... but I've heard of other bounty hunters ... who'll cut a deal... ."

"Other bounty hunters may conduct their business as they please." Fett barely managed to keep from his voice the contempt with which he held the so-called Bounty Hunters Guild's members. That kind of shortsighted greed was one of the reasons he had no desire to associate himself with the Guild. "They have their standards ... and I have mine." One of his gloved hands grasped the ladder's side rail; he looked back over his shoulder at the cage. "And I've got the merchandise, and they don't.

There's a connection."

Posondum's knees visibly weakened, his hands sliding down the bars as he sank limply toward the cage's floor.

Whatever glint of hope had been in his face was now extinguished.

"I suggest you go ahead and eat." Boba Fett nodded his helmet toward the tray and its congealed contents.

"You'll need to keep up your strength."

He didn't wait for an answer. He climbed up from the ship's holding pens and back toward its waiting controls. "Here he comes." Lookout had spotted the approaching ship. That was its job. "I can see him."

"Of course you can," said Kud'ar Mub'at. "That's a good node." With the tip of one multijointed, chitinous leg, the assembler stroked the little semicreature's head. The exterior-observation node was one of the more simpleminded subassem-blies scurrying about the web.

Kud'ar Mub'at had let just about enough cerebral tissue develop inside so that it could focus its immense light- gathering lens on the surrounding stars and anything that moved among them. "Tell Calculator just what you saw."

The necessary data zapped along the web's tangled neurons. Another subassembly, with useless vestigial legs and a softly fragile shell encasing its specific-function cortex, mulled over what it had received, converting raw visuals to useful numbers. "Thyip thyoud arrive ..."

Calculator's tiny lisping mouth moved beneath the wobbling lump of neural matter. "In leth thyan thuh-ree thtandard time part-th."

"I know who it is!" Identifier scrambled up onto Kud'ar Mub'at's shoulder-if arachnoids could be said to have shoulders-and excitedly chattered into its earhole.

The little database subassembly had listened in to what Lookout had told Calculator. "I know, I know! It's the Slave I! Positive identification made-"

"Of course it is." With another leg, Kud'ar Mub'at plucked Identifier from its body-the childlike subassemblies would swarm all over it, if it let them-and set the node down on one of the web's structural strands.

"Now just settle down, little one."

"Boba Fett must be aboard!" Identifier, with its own miniature versions of its parent's stiff-spined legs, skittered back and forth on the taut silken fiber. "Boba Fett!" The subassembly had no particular liking for the bounty hunter; it just got excited over any visitors to the web. "It's Boba Fett's ship!"

Kud'ar Mub'at sighed wearily, someplace deep inside his near-spherical abdomen. His own mannerisms were slow and somewhat languid, or as much so as the latter term could be applied to a chitin-encased arachnoid. The constant chatter of Identifier ^nnoyed him on occasion.

Perhaps, mused Kud'ar Mub'at, I should reabsorb that node. And design and develop another one. A quieter one.

But right now the problem wasn't so much that of raw materials- Kud'ar Mub'at could always extrude more subas sembly fiber-as of time. Time lag, to be precise; even a node as relatively uncomplicated as that took hundreds of time units to develop to an operational standard. With as much business as Kud'ar Mub'at was handling right now, it couldn't afford to be without a functioning identifier.

Maybe later, thought the assembler as it hung suspended in a nexus of the web's thicker strands. When this business with Boba Fett is over. Kud'ar Mub'at figured that its credit accounts would be fat enough then, so that it could afford to take a little time off.

It would have to talk to Balancesheet about that.

"Go tell Docker and the Handler twins." Kud'ar Mub'at gave the little chore to Identifier, rather than just plugging back into the web's communication neurons. "Tell them to get ready for company."

The little subassembly jumped and scurried away, down the dark, fibrous corridors to the web's distant landing snare. That'll keep it out of my leg hairs for a while, thought Kud'ar Mub'at. It gently moved Lookout aside and applied one of its own compound eyes to the view hole, scanning the stars for any visible indication of his enemy and business associate.

viewport, gradually growing closer. It didn't even look like a constructed artifact, as much as it resembled some accidental conglomeration of glue and wire, strung together with a Corellian scavenge rat's idiot thrift. As Fett's ship approached, and Kud'ar Mub'at's web blotted out more of the stars in the viewport, various bits of machinery could be seen, sharper-edged than the clotted fibers in which they were embedded. Boba Fett had been dealing with the arachnoid assembler long enough to know that it couldn't resist a bargain, no matter what kind of worthless junk was involved; portions of the web were a museum of defunct interstellar transports and other dead castoffs. Even Jawas pursued their trade in junk and used droids as a way of turning a profit; Kud'ar Mub'at apparently just liked accumulating stuff, incorporating it into the space-drifting home the assembler had spun out from its own guts.

Though it wasn't all just junk, Boba Fett knew; that was merely what Kud'ar Mub'at let show on the surface of the web, perhaps as a matter of protective camouflage.

Not everyone had done as well in their encounters with the assembler as he had; the few times that Fett had actually gone into the web, he'd spotted some not inconsiderable treasures, bits and pieces that the less fortunate had been obliged to leave behind, to discharge their debts to Kud'ar Mub'at. It would probably be better to leave one's skin behind than try to cheat the spidery entity.

Faint greenish lights showed in a rough circle, indicating the docking section of the web. One of Kud'ar Mub'at's subassemblies-Signaler was what it was called, if Fett remembered correctly-was a phosphorescent herpetoid node, long enough to encircle one end of the web with its glowing, snakelike form. Kud'ar Mub'at had let enough intelligence develop in the node so that it could blink out a simple directional landing pattern for any ship making a rendezvous with the web. Another group of subassemblies, arrayed just inside the pulsing circle, were devoid of even that much brainpower; they could sense the proximity of a spacecraft and, like the ten tacles of a Threndrian snareflower, grab hold and bring it in tight and secure to the web's entry port. Boba Fett loathed the idiot appendages, with their flexing vacuum- resistant scales like rust-pitted armor plate. He'd told Kud'ar Mub'at before, that if he ever found any scraps from the tentacles still clinging to the Slave I after he'd left the web, he'd turn around and pluck the nodes one by one from the web with a short-range tractor beam.

That'd be a painful process for Kud'ar Mub'at; every piece of the living web was connected to the assembler by a skein of neurofibers.

He cut the Slave I's approach engines, leaving the craft with enough momentum to keep it on a slow and steady course toward the web's dock. Inside the ring of light, the tips of the grappling nodes had already begun to ease into position as the subassemblies woke from their dreaming half sleep.

"Ah, my dear Fett." A high-pitched voice greeted him as he clambered down from the docking port into the narrow confines of the web's interior. "How truly a delight it is to see you once more. After how horribly such a long time it has been-"

"Stow it." Boba Fett looked up and saw by the top of his helmet one of Kud'ar Mub'at's mobile vocal appendages, a subassembly that was little more than a rudimentary mouth tethered by a glistening cord. This one must have been just recently extruded by the assembler, the neural silk was still white and unmarked by the web's centuries of accumulated filth. "I'm here for business, not conversation."

The little voice box scurried along the tunnel's fibrous ceiling, a pair of tiny claws reeling in its con necting line as it kept pace with Fett. "Ah , that is truly indeed the bounty hunter of my long acquaintance, so bold and vivid he is in my remembering! How sadly long I have been without the pleasure of your succinct and charming wit."

Fett made no reply as he clambered through the tunnel, its interwoven tissues yielding beneath the weight of his boots. Wherever his thick gloves grabbed hold, ripples of firing synapses sparked in fading concentric circles, as though from a stone dropped in an ocean filled with phosphorescent plankton. A few light nodes, the smaller brethren of Signaler on the web's exterior, glowed before him and dropped back into darkness after he had passed by. Fett supposed that when Kud'ar Mub'at had no visitor, the web remained unlit. The assembler required no light to move around inside an artifact constructed of its own spun-out cortex.

"There you are in your entirety!" The same voice, like sheet metal being torn in half, sounded from in front of Boba Fett as he ducked beneath a ridge of hardened silk. "I knew you'd return, crowned with the eminence of success." The words were louder, coming from Kud'ar Mub'at's own mouth rather than the little voice- box node. "And of undeniable punctuality you are as well, indeed."

Boba Fett stepped into the web's central chamber, a space large enough for him to stand upright in. It was more than a matter of simile that it seemed to Fett as though he had walked into the center of the assembler's brain. That was the reality of Kud'ar Mub'at's nest and body, an interconnected unity, one and the same thing. It lives inside its armor, thought Fett, as I live inside mine.

"I returned here when I said I would." Fett turned his masked gaze upon the assembler. "It was a simple enough job."

"Ah, for one of your exceedingly multifarious talents, yes, I imagine it was." Kud'ar Mub'at's compound eyes focused on his visitor. One of its jointed, spike- haired forelegs inscribed a graceful acknowledging gesture in the chamber's thick air. "No complications, I take it?"

"The usual." He folded his arms across the front of his battle-gear. "There were a couple of other bounty hunters who were hoping to nab him before I did."

"Ooh." The eyes, like dark black cabochons, glittered with anticipation. "And you took care of them?"

"I didn't have to." Fett knew how much the assembler enjoyed war stories, the more violence-filled the better.

He didn't feel like indulging the arachnoid creature's taste. "They were just the usual feckless types that the Bounty Hunters Guild sends out. It's easier to walk around a pile of nerf dung than step right into it."

"How very droll! You amuse me greatly!" Kud'ar Mub'at reached up to the chamber's ceiling with several of its hind legs, lifting itself up from where it had been resting its pale abdomen. "It is a savory bonus of our relationship that I am privileged to hear your scintillating repartee." The bed node wheezed as it reinflated its cushiony pneumatic bladders. Kud'ar Mub'at worked his way across the chamber's ceiling, finally dangling its mandibled face directly in front of the bounty hunter. "Have we not more than a mere business relationship, my dear Fett? Please say yes. Say that we are friends, you and I."

"Friends," said Boba Fett coldly, "are a liability in my trade." He drew the visor of his helmet back from the assembler's glittering eyes and V-shaped smile. "I'm not here to amuse you. Pay me the bounty you're holding in escrow, I'll hand the merchandise over to you, and I'll go."

"Until the next time." Kud'ar Mub'at turned its head, regarding him with another set of gemlike eyes. "Which cannot be anytime too soon, for my preference."

Maybe it's this part of the job, Boba Fett thought to himself, that's the worst. Tracking someone down, pursuing him the width of the galaxy, capturing, transporting, killing anyone who had to be killed in order to get the job done-those things were all cold pleasures, to be savored as tests and confirmations of his own skills. Dealing with any of the clients, whether it was a matter of direct negotiation such as with the Empire's Lord Vader or a sleaze mountain such as Jabba the Hutt, or a third-party negotiation with a middle entity such as Kud'ar Mub'at, was more repellent than satisfying. It always turned out to be the same thing, every time. They never want to pay up, brooded Fett. They always want the merchandise; they just never want to pan with their credits in exchange. With Hutts, it was always an emotional issue, at least at the start. Their megalomaniacal rages at any perceived sign of disloyalty led them to post huge, eye-popping bounties; later, when they had simmered down a bit, the Hutts' natural cold-blooded greed kicked in and they tried to take the prices down.

The members of the so-called Bounty Hunters Guild would accept a fraction of an original bounty, sometimes as low as ten percent. That was one of the reasons that Boba Fett despised them he had never taken a credit less than the agreed-upon sum, and had no intention of starting.

"I have other business to take care of," said Boba Fett. That was true. The galaxy was wide, with lots of dark nooks and crannies, remote worlds and even entire planetary systems that could serve as hiding places. And there were always those entities with reasons to hide, either to save their epidermis from Emperor Palpatine's coruscating wrath or to clutch in their sweating hands the meager piles of credits they had managed to pry out of Jabba's coffers. Even with as much "business" as Boba Fett handled, there were still plenty of scraps left for the Guild to dole out to its members, the small stuff that he couldn't be bothered with. But the longer that Kud'ar Mub'at needlessly detained him here, cackling and wheezing at him inside the tangled corridors of its own expanded brain, the greater the chance that some hustling Guild member would be able to snatch some prize bounty away from him. That notion would have infuriated Fett, if any such word of passion could have been applied to the coldly unfeeling logic that dictated his actions. As it was, he let his masked gaze rest upon Kud'ar Mub'at's insectile face like the sharp point of a bladed weapon.

"Pay me, and I won't detain you from your own ...

business."

Everyone in the galaxy knew what Kud'ar Mub'at's business was. There was no other entity among the stars quite like the notorious assembler. If there were other members of its species on some distant planet, covered with skeins and nets of their extruded neural silk, that world hadn't been discovered yet. Perhaps Kud'ar Mub'at was the only existing assembler; Fett had heard rumors, dating back to a time before he'd become the galaxy's most-feared bounty hunter, of Kud'ar Mub'at's predecessor, another assembler of whom Kud'ar Mub'at itself had been a node, a semi-independent creature like the ones that scuttled around this web, dragging their neurofiber tethers behind them. That parent assembler had made the mistake of letting one of its offspring become a little too developed and independent, and had paid the price death and ingestion by the web's new owner, the usurper Kud'ar Mub'at. The assembler is dead, thought Boba Fett with distaste, long live the assembler. Even Hutts, with their monstrous appetites and vicious family rivalries, drew the line at actually eating one of their own clan that they might have beaten out for control of some typically shady enterprise.

With the web, drifting through interstellar space, and its contents had come the assembler's business. Some entity had to act as the universe's go-between and intermediary, especially among all the worlds' criminal elements and those who did business with criminals. If there had ever been a time when there had been honor among thieves, it was long over in this galaxy. Boba Fett had never cheated any of his clients, though he had been forced to kill quite a few. If everybody had held to his standards of business morality, there wouldn't have been any need for an operator like Kud'ar Mub'at. As it was, the assembler took a justifiable percentage for the services he provided, the setting up of deals between murderously inclined entities, the holding in escrow of bounty payments, the transfer of captives to those who had put up the credits for them. The Bounty Hunters Guild worked almost all their jobs through Kud'ar Mub'at; Boba Fett used the assembler when that was the client's preference and the percentage was raked off from the other side and not his own.

"But my highly esteemed Fett-" As Kud'ar Mub'at dangled from the web's ceiling, it rubbed its tiniest and most agile forelimbs together. "It is not entirely a matter of such highly enjoyable socialization that causes me to desire the extending of your visit to my abode. You speak of your own business, which you are naturally in such a haste to attend to. Very well; let us speak of business together. You know me-" The assembler's compound eyes twinkled. "I'm as delightedly happy to talk about that as any other subject. And right now your business and mine once again coincide. Is that not a pleasing hap penstance?"

Boba Fett studied the assembler's narrow face, looking for any clue that would reveal the creature's true intentions, always hidden beneath its oily chatter.

" What business are you talking about?" Usually, any news of a bounty being posted was caught directly by the Slave I's programmed comm scanners. "A private job?"

"Ah, you are so astute." The assembler's forelimbs made little scraping noises, like thin and cheap plastoid shells. "Little wonder that you are such a success in your chosen field of endeavor. Yes, my dear Fett, a very private job indeed."

That interested Fett. Of all the things that Kud'ar Mub'at could have said, that caught his attention more than any other. Private jobs were the cream of the bounty- hunter trade. There were times when clients, for reasons of their own, wanted some fugitive entity caught and delivered with a maximum of discretion. Posting a bounty galaxy-wide effectively eliminated any chance of maintaining secrecy; for the client to get what it wanted, arrangements would have to be made with one particular bounty hunter. More often than not, that would be Boba Fett himself; over the decades he'd built up a reputation for confidentiality as well as effectiveness.

"Who's the client?" It wasn't essential for Boba Fett to know, though it sometimes made the job easier. If it was all being arranged through Kud'ar Mub'at, the client's desire for secrecy might be absolute, without even the hunter knowing who was putting up the bounty.

"Is it one of the Hutts?"

"Not this time." Kud'ar Mub'at displayed his approximation of a smile again. "You and I have done so much business for Jabba and his brethren lately. After I turn over our little friend Posondum to them, I would not be greatly surprised if they decided to tighten their purse strings for a while. No, no; don't say a word-" The forelimbs waved about. "You don't need to remind me that I can hardly deliver anything to anybody until you've been paid. Balancesheet!" The assembler's screech rang down the length of the web. "Get in here! Immediately!"

Kud'ar Mub'at's accountant node carefully picked its way along the fibers and entered the central chamber. Of all of the subassemblies, this was the one that Boba Fett had always found most to his liking-and not just because it was the one that actually handed over the bounties that its parent would be holding in escrow. The crablike Balancesheet, as Kud'ar Mub'at had named its extruded creation, had a laconic, no-nonsense approach to its duties that Fett found similar to his own. He would be sorry- or as much so as he ever was-when Kud'ar Mub'at would determine that the little accountant node had developed as much intelligence as could be allowed.

Balancesheet, like other nodes before it, would be eaten by its parent before there was any danger of independence and mutiny of the kind that had made Kud'ar Mub'at master of the assembler web.

"Boba Fett, current account; balance due ..." The accountant node maneuvered its pliable shell close to his shoulder, extending its eyestalks parallel to the chamber's floor as it made an ID scan of the bounty hunter's distinctive helmet. "Just a moment, please."

"Take your time," said Fett. "Accuracy is a virtue."

Balancesheet said nothing, but a brief flicker in its gaze acknowledged that it and Boba Fett were kindred entities, in spirit if not species.

"Previous balance zero." Balancesheet had finished its show of calculation. "Due upon delivery of one humanoid, designation Nil Posondum, client being the Huttese business front Trans-Zone Development and Exploitation Consortium, the sum of twelve thousand five hundred credits." The accountant node swiveled its eyestalks toward its parent. "Our fee has already been paid by the Hutts. The entire bounty being held is now payable to Boba Fett."

"But of course," crooned Kud'ar Mub'at softly. "Who would deny it?"

The eyestalks turned back toward Fett. "And the individual Nil Posondum is in a living and desirable condition, certain nonessential injuries excepted, as per standard bounty-hunting practice?"

Boba Fett raised his wrist-mounted comm unit to the front of his helmet. A tiny red spark indicated that the link to Slave I's cockpit controls was unbroken. "Open inspection port Gamma Eight." That port allowed visual access to the cages in his ship's cargo hold. "Perimeter defenses on standby."

A moment later Balancesheet looked over at its parent. "Designated merchandise appears to be in good condition." The announcement was more for Boba Fett's hearing than the assembler's; the sensory data from the remote optical node had traveled down the neural network linking Kud'ar Mub'at with the accountant and all the other subassemblies in the web. "Initiating transfer."

That was the kind of thing that would get the little accountant eaten; it hadn't waited for Kud'ar Mub'at's order. Boba Fett supposed that the next time he came to the web, a newly extruded node would be maintaining Kud'ar Mub'at's intricate finances.

"I most sincerely hope that you enjoy the well-earned possession of those credits." Kud'ar Mub'at watched as Fett tucked the amount-sealed credit packet into one of his gear's carrying pouches. Balancesheet had made the payment and picked its way over to another section of the chamber. "I often wonder-" The assembler extended its smiling face toward him. "Just what is it that you do with all the credits you get paid? Granted, you have considerable expenditures, to keep going such a level of operation. The equipment, the intelligence sources, all of those things. But you make so much more than that; I know you do." A few of Kud'ar Mub'at's eyes peered more closely at him. "But what do you spend it on?"

One of Boba Fett's rare flashes of anger rose inside him. "That's none of your business." Slave I had signaled that the captive had been removed from the cargo hold and into one of the web's dismal sub-chambers; all ports had been resealed. The temptation to stalk out of this place, to get back into his ship and tear himself into the cold, clean depths of space, was almost overwhelming. "Let's talk about the business that you and I do have with each other."

"Ah, yes! Most certainly!" Kud'ar Mub'at flexed its main limbs, causing its segmented torso to bob up and down in front of its visitor. "It's not really the usual sort of thing you do; it's not a matter of tracking down someone and delivering them, all wrapped up in a neat little package. But you're so versatile- aren't you?-that I'm sure it's something you can handle with your characteristic dispatch."

Fett's suspicions were always aroused when a job was described as being out of the ordinary. That usually meant that the danger to him would be greater, or that getting paid would be more difficult, or both. Jabba the Hutt was always coming up with numbers like that, where Fett was expected to risk his life on some flaky errand.

"I asked you before," he growled. "Who's the client?"

"There isn't one." Kud'ar Mub'at seemed delighted to make that announcement. "Or at least, not in the usual sense. I'm not acting on behalf of a third party. This job would be for me."

The suspicions heightened. Kud'ar Mub'at had always been the perfect intermediary, keeping his role scrupulously separate from his clients' interests. That go-between function was valued so highly that even the most ruthless connivers such as Jabba had never tried to cheat the assembler. It was hard to imagine who could have incurred Kud'ar Mub'at's enmity, to the point of the assembler requiring Fett's lethal skills.

At the same time, though-Boba Fett's calculations clicked over inside his helmeted skull-there was no doubt that Kud'ar Mub'at could pay for whatever it wanted. Fett wasn't in the habit of questioning his various employers'

desires-but just delivering them. Not every job required a living piece of merchandise; leaving a dead body on the blood-soaked soil of a remote planet was also within his range of expertise.

"So just what is it that you want me to do for you?"

Kud'ar Mub'at pointed one of its jointed fore-limbs toward him. "Tell me first-or tell me again- what you think of the Guild. You know; the Bounty Hunters Guild."

"I don't," said Fett. He gave a slight shrug. "It's not worth thinking about. If any of its members were at all proficient, they wouldn't be in it. An organization like that is for the weak and harmless, who think that by combining their forces they might become deadly. They're wrong."

"Harsh words, my dear Fett! Harsh words, indeed!

There are some accomplished hunters in the Guild, with achievements nearly equaling your own. The Guild has been headed for many years now by the Trandoshan Cradossk; he was a legend among the stars when you were first starting out."

"So he was." Fett nodded once. "And now he is old and feeble, if still cunning. His offspring Bossk was one of those who got in my way as I was capturing Nil Posondum.

If the son were one tenth the bounty hunter that the father had been, I might have some competition. But he's not, and I don't. The Bounty Hunters Guild's glory days are long in the past."

"Ah, my dear Fett, I see that your opinions have not changed." Kud'ar Mub'at shook its dust-speckled head.

"You wield them like something that you've taken from that arsenal you carry on your back. I'll have to make it very much worth your while; expensively thus, to entice you into accepting this little job of mine."

Fett kept his helmet's featureless gaze on the as sembler. "Which is?"

"It's really very simple." Kud'ar Mub'at clicked the points of his forelimbs together. "I want you to join the Bounty Hunters Guild."

The assembler's compound eyes were not the only ones watching him. Boba Fett could sense the tiny crablike accountant and all the rest of the web's interconnected nodes, their overlapping vision feeding into the central cortex of their master and parent. They were all watching-and waiting for his answer.

"You're right about one thing," said Boba Fett.

Kud'ar Mub'at's eyes glittered even more brightly.

"Yes? What's that?"

His suspicions hadn't gone away; if anything, they were even sharper and harder. The simple jobs, he said to himself. Those are the ones you get killed on.

"This job of yours..."

"Yes?" The tethered subassemblies crept closer to Kud'ar Mub'at, as though the web itself were narrowing tighter.

Boba Fett gave a slow nod of his helmet. "It'll cost you." all proficient, they wouldn't be in it. An organization like that is for the weak and harmless, who think that by combining their forces they might become deadly. They're wrong."

"Harsh words, my dear Fett! Harsh words, indeed!

There are some accomplished hunters in the Guild, with achievements nearly equaling your own. The Guild has been headed for many years now by the Trandoshan Cradossk; he was a legend among the stars when you were first starting out."

"So he was." Fett nodded once. "And now he is old and feeble, if still cunning. His offspring Bossk was one of those who got in my way as I was capturing Nil Posondum.

If the son were one tenth the bounty hunter that the father had been, I might have some competition. But he's not, and I don't. The Bounty Hunters Guild's glory days are long in the past."

"Ah, my dear Fett, I see that your opinions have not changed." Kud'ar Mub'at shook its dust-speckled head.

"You wield them like something that you've taken from that arsenal you carry on your back. I'll have to make it very much worth your while; expensively thus, to entice you into accepting this little job of mine."

Fett kept his helmet's featureless gaze on the as sembler. "Which is?"

"It's really very simple." Kud'ar Mub'at clicked the points of his forelimbs together. "I want you to join the Bounty Hunters Guild."

The assembler's compound eyes were not the only ones watching him. Boba Fett could sense the tiny crablike accountant and all the rest of the web's interconnected nodes, their overlapping vision feeding into the central cortex of their master and parent. They were all watching-and waiting for his answer.

"You're right about one thing," said Boba Fett.

Kud'ar Mub'at's eyes glittered even more brightly.

"Yes? What's that?"

His suspicions hadn't gone away; if anything, they were even sharper and harder. The simple jobs, he said to himself. Those are the ones you get killed on.

"This job of yours..."

"Yes?" The tethered subassemblies crept closer to Kud'ar Mub'at, as though the web itself were narrowing tighter.

Boba Fett gave a slow nod of his helmet. "It'll cost you." bright trail of an interstellar craft, dwindling among the wide-flung stars. A moment later the engine flare blinked out of sight, as the Slave I leaped into hyperspace and was gone.

"Your Excellency-" One of Kud'ar Mub'at's household nodes hesitated, then skittered closer and tugged at the hem of the ornate, heavy robes brushing the observation chamber's matted floor. "Your presence is now desired by your host."

Prince Xizor turned away from the viewport. His cold reptilian glance took in the trembling subassem-bly.

Perhaps, if he were to crush it beneath the sole of his boot, a shock of pain would flash along the web's neurofibers, straight into Kud'ar Mub'at's chitinous skull. It would be an experiment worth making; he had an interest in whatever might produce fear inside any of the galaxy's inhabitants. Someday, Xizor told himself. But not right now. "Tell your master," he said in a smooth, unthreatening voice, "that I'll be there directly."

When he entered the web's main chamber, he saw that Kud'ar Mub'at had settled its globular abdomen back into its padded nest. "Ah, my highly esteemed Xizor!" It used the same obsequious voice that he had overheard it lavishing on the departed bounty hunter. "I so very much hope that you weren't uncomfortable in that wretched space! Great is my mortification, my embarrassment that I should offer such-"

"It was more than adequate," said Xizor. "Don't fret yourself about it." He folded his heavily corded forearms across his chest. "I'm not always surrounded by the luxuries of the Emperor's court. Sometimes ..." He let the corner of his mouth lift in a partial smile.

"Sometimes my accommodations-and my companions-are of a rougher sort."

"Ah." Kud'ar Mub'at nodded quickly. "Just so."

The assembler knew better than to speak anything aloud of what his noble guest had just referred to. Even the two words "Black Sun," in as private a place as this, were forbidden. To make silence a general rule was to ensure that no one would discover the other side of Xizor's double existence. In one universe, he was Emperor Palpatine's loyal servant; in that universe's shadowed twin, he was the leader of a criminal organization whose reach, if not power, was as galaxy spanning as the Empire's.

"He took the job." Xizor said the words as a statement of fact, not a question.

"Yes, of course he did." Kud'ar Mub'at fussed nervously with the pneumatic bladders of his nest. "Boba Fett is a reasonable entity. In his way. Very businesslike; I find that to be of the utmost charm in him."

"When you use the word 'businesslike,' " noted Xizor,

"you mean ... 'can be bought.' "

"What other possible definition is there?" As Kud'ar Mub'at gazed at him, the assembler's eyes filled with innocence. "My so dear Xizor-we're all businessmen. We can all be bought."

"Speak for yourself." The partial smile on his face turned into a full sneer. "I prefer to be the one who's doing the buying."

"Ah, and so happy am I to be one of those whose services you have purchased." Kud'ar Mub'at settled itself more comfortably into its nest. "I hope this grand scheme of yours, of which I am so small yet hopefully an essential part, will turn out exactly as you, in your ineffable wisdom, wish it to."

"It will," said Xizor, "if you perform the rest of your role as well as you did with hoodwinking Boba Fett."

"You flatter me." Kud'ar Mub'at bowed its head low.

"My thespic abilities are regrettably crude, but perhaps they sufficed in this instance."

The assembler had had to be no more than its usual conniving self to set the trap in which the bounty hunter was already ensnared. One of the nodes in the central chamber was a simple auditory unit, a tympanic membrane with legs, tied like all the rest of the nodes into the web's expanded nervous system. From his hiding place, Prince Xizor had been able to listen in, another one of Kud'ar Mub'at's attached offspring whispering into his ear all the words passing between the assembler and Boba Fett. The web surrounding them wasn't the only one that Kud'ar Mub'at could spin. Fett was not aware of it yet, but strands too fine to be detected were already tangling about his boots, drawing him into a trap without escape.

Xizor almost felt sorry for the bounty hunter. The reptilian Falleen species was even more coldblooded than Trandoshans such as the aging Cradossk and his rage- driven offspring Bossk; pity was not an emotion that Xizor had ever experienced. Whether he was operating on behalf of Emperor Palpatine or secretly advancing the Black Sun's criminal agenda, Xizor manipulated all who came into his reach with the same nonemotion he'd display for pieces on a gaming board. They were to be positioned and used as necessity dictated, sacrificed and discarded when strategy required. Still, thought Xizor, an entity such as Boba Fett ... The bounty hunter merited his respect, at least. To look into that helmet's concealing visor was to meet a gaze as ruthless and unsentimental as his own. He'll fight to survive. And he'll fight well...

But that was part of the trap that had already seized hold of Boba Fett. The cruel irony-and one that Xizor savored-was that Fett was now doomed by his own fierce nature. All that had kept him alive before, in so many deadly situations, would now bring about his destruction.

Too bad, thought Prince Xizor to himself. In another game, a piece as powerful as that would have had it uses.

Only a master player would dare a strategic sacrifice such as this. To lose, however necessarily, such an efficient hunter and killer was his only regret.

"Pardon my admittedly clumsy intrusion." Kud'ar Mub'at's high-pitched voice broke into his musing. "But there are some other tiny, almost insignificant matters to be taken care of. To ensure the complete success of your endeavors, which are as always of such brilliance and-"

"Of course." Xizor regarded the assembler sitting in its animate nest. "You want to be paid."

"Only for the sake of keeping our records straight. A

mere formality." With an upraised forelimb, Kud'ar Mub'at directed his accountant node toward the prince. "I'm sure one of your keen perception understands."

"All too well." He watched as the subassembly named Balancesheet picked its way toward him. Nothing happened with Kud'ar Mub'at except on a pay-as-you-go basis.

"We've done business together enough times for me to remember without prompting."

A few moments later, when the transfer of credits had been completed, Balancesheet swiveled its eyestalks toward its parent. "The prince's account is once again current, with no outstanding sums due. Per your existing agreement, final payment will be made upon a satisfactory resolution of the Bounty Hunters Guild situation."

Balancesheet gave a small nod to Xizor and returned to its perch on the central chamber's wall.

"Affairs are going well," said Xizor. "So far." He had already summoned his ship, the Virago, from inside the detection shadow of one of the moons of the nearest planetary system. "I'll be watching to make sure they continue that way."

"But of course." Waving all its sticklike fore-limbs, Kud'ar Mub'at dispatched a scuttling flock of nodes to ready the web's docking area. Boba Fett's Slave I had departed only a little while before, leaving behind a captive in the darkest subchamber. "You. have nothing to fear in that regard." Xizor knew that as soon as he was gone, Kud'ar Mub'at would be in contact with the Hutts, to hand over the bounty hunter's merchandise and collect its middle-entity fee. "All will be well... ."

The screech of the assembler's words followed Prince Xizor as he stalked down the tunnel toward the docking area. He'd already decided that as soon as he got back to the Emperor's court, he'd spend a few soothing hours listening to the dulcet croon of his own personal troupe of Falleen altos, to flush any residue of that drilling and defiling voice from his ears.

business affairs were at a crucial point; much inconvenience would be suffered if it didn't have a fully functioning accountant on claw.

Kud'ar Mub'at decided to think about that later. It closed its several pairs of eyes and happily contemplated all that would soon be added to the web's coffers.

business affairs were at a crucial point; much inconvenience would be suffered if it didn't have a fully functioning accountant on claw.

Kud'ar Mub'at decided to think about that later. It closed its several pairs of eyes and happily contemplated all that would soon be added to the web's coffers.

inside the little accountant.

An odd notion moved in Boba Fett's thoughts, one that he'd turned over and examined like a precious Gerinian star-stone many times before. Perhaps ... I became more human than human. Not by adding anything to himself, but through a process of reduction, of stripping away the flawed and rotten parts of his species. The antiseptic rag in his glove slid over one of the cold-forged bars, leaving no microbe behind. The ancient Mandalorian warriors had had their secrets, which had died with them.

And I have mine.

Fett dipped the rag in the bucket again. He could have left these chores to one of Slave I's maintenance droids, but he preferred doing it himself. It gave him time to think, of just such matters as this.

The soapy liquid trickled from the battle-gear's elbow as Fett checked the forearm-mounted data-screen patched into the Slave I's cockpit. Rendezvous with the Bounty Hunters Guild's forward base was not far off. He was ready for that-he was never not ready, for anything that might happen-but he would still regret the termination of this little slice of nontime, the lull and peace that came between jobs. Other sentient creatures were allowed to enjoy a longer rest, the ultimate peace that came with death. Sometimes he envied them.

He unlocked the empty cage and stepped inside. The fear scent was already diminished, barely detectable through the mask's filters. Posondum hadn't left much of a mess, for which he was grateful; some merchandise let their panic devolve them well past the point of maintaining control of their bodily functions.

The floor of the cage was scratched, though. Bright metallic lines glinted through the darker layer of plastoid beneath Boba Fett's boot soles. He wondered what could have caused that. He was always careful to take any hard, sharp objects away from the merchandise, with which they might damage themselves. Some captives preferred suicide to the attentions they were scheduled to receive from those who had put up the bounties for them.

Fett glanced over to the corner of the Slave Fs cargo area, where he had tossed the food tray. None of the gray slop had been touched by Nil Posondum, but one of the tray's corners had been bent into a dull-pointed angle.

Just enough to scrape out the markings on the cage's floor-the accountant must have been working on it right up until Kud'ar Mub'at's subassemblies had crept in through the access portal. The spiderlike minions had looped restraining silk around him, then carried him from one prison to another. He might have had time enough to finish whatever message he'd wanted to leave behind.

But there wasn't time now to read it. A red light pulsed on the data readout, alerting him that a return to the craft's piloting area was necessary. The jump out of hyperspace couldn't be accomplished by means of a remote; the Slave I's maneuvering thrust-ers were too finely gauged, set for zero lag time, in case any of Fett's many enemies and rivals might be waiting for his appearance.

And right now he would be sailing straight into the nest of all those who bore him a grudge. He supposed that lizard-faced bumbler Bossk would already have returned to Guild headquarters, licking his wounds and complaining to his spawn-sire Cradossk about the impossible assignment he'd been given. What Bossk wouldn't mention would be why it had been impossible, and just who had beaten him to the goods. Cradossk was a wilier old reptile, though-Boba Fett even had a grudging respect for the head of the Bounty Hunters Guild, from some long-ago encounters with him-and would know just what the score was with his feckless underlings.

The Mandalorian battle-gear had a built-in optical recorder, its tiny lens mounted at one corner of the helmet's visor. Boba Fett leaned over the scratches left by the captive accountant, not even bothering with an effort to decipher them. A second later he had scanned the marks and inserted them into the helmet's long-term data-storage unit. He could deal with them later, if he grew curious about what pathetic epitaph the accountant might have devised for himself. Maudlin self-pity held little interest for Boba Fett. Right now an additional beeping tone was sounding in sync with the red dot; Slave I, his only true companion, demanded his attention.

He left the bucket of cold, dirty water on the cage's floor. If it spilled and slopped across the plas-toidclad metal, if the feet of all the captives to come scuffed out the scratched message, whatever it was, there would be no great loss. Memory was like that the leavings of the dead, best forgotten and erased after payment for their sweat-damp carcasses was made. The moment when his hand was about to seize the neck of the merchandise was the only time that mattered. Readiness was all.

Boba Fett climbed the ladder to the interstellar craft's cockpit, his own boots ringing on the treads. The new job that he had taken on, this scheme of the assembler Kud'ar Mub'at, was about to commence. Soon there would be more payments to add to his account... .

And more deaths to be forgotten.

pulsed on the data readout, alerting him that a return to the craft's piloting area was necessary. The jump out of hyperspace couldn't be accomplished by means of a remote; the Slave I's maneuvering thrust-ers were too finely gauged, set for zero lag time, in case any of Fett's many enemies and rivals might be waiting for his appearance.

And right now he would be sailing straight into the nest of all those who bore him a grudge. He supposed that lizard-faced bumbler Bossk would already have returned to Guild headquarters, licking his wounds and complaining to his spawn-sire Cradossk about the impossible assignment he'd been given. What Bossk wouldn't mention would be why it had been impossible, and just who had beaten him to the goods. Cradossk was a wilier old reptile, though-Boba Fett even had a grudging respect for the head of the Bounty Hunters Guild, from some long-ago encounters with him-and would know just what the score was with his feckless underlings.

The Mandalorian battle-gear had a built-in optical recorder, its tiny lens mounted at one corner of the helmet's visor. Boba Fett leaned over the scratches left by the captive accountant, not even bothering with an effort to decipher them. A second later he had scanned the marks and inserted them into the helmet's long-term data-storage unit. He could deal with them later, if he grew curious about what pathetic epitaph the accountant might have devised for himself. Maudlin self-pity held little interest for Boba Fett. Right now an additional beeping tone was sounding in sync with the red dot; Slave I, his only true companion, demanded his attention.

He left the bucket of cold, dirty water on the cage's floor. If it spilled and slopped across the plas-toidclad metal, if the feet of all the captives to come scuffed out the scratched message, whatever it was, there would be no great loss. Memory was like that the leavings of the dead, best forgotten and erased after payment for their sweat-damp carcasses was made. The moment when his hand was about to seize the neck of the merchandise was the only time that mattered. Readiness was all.

Boba Fett climbed the ladder to the interstellar craft's cockpit, his own boots ringing on the treads. The new job that he had taken on, this scheme of the assembler Kud'ar Mub'at, was about to commence. Soon there would be more payments to add to his account... .

And more deaths to be forgotten.

"I want to see him." The female had a gaze as sharp and cold as a bladed weapon. "And to talk to him."

Dengar could barely recognize her. He remembered her from Jabba's palace; she had been one of the obese Hutt's troupe of dancing girls. Jabba had liked pretty things, regarding them as exquisite delicacies for his senses, like the wriggling food he'd stuffed down his capacious gullet. And just as with those squirming tidbits, Jabba had savored the death of the young and beautiful. The pet rancor, in its bone-lined cavern beneath the palace, had merely been an extension of Jabba's appetites. Dengar had witnessed one of the other dancing girls, a frightened little Twi'lek named Oola, being ripped apart by the claws of the beast. That had been before Luke Skywalker had killed the rancor, followed sometime later by its owner's death. No great loss, thought Dengar. With either one of them.

"Why?" Leaning against the rocky wall of his hiding place's main chamber, he kept a safe distance from the female. "He's not exactly a brilliant conversationalist at the moment."

Her name was Neelah; she had told him that much when he had caught her sneaking down the sloping tunnel from the surface. He had gotten the drop on her, catching her off guard from behind a stack of empty supply crates.

With her throat in the crook of his arm, as Dengar's other hand had painfully bent her wrist up toward her shoulder blades, she'd answered a few questions for him.

And then she had caught him in the shin with a hard, fast back kick, followed by a knee to the groin that had sent a small constellation of stars to the top of his skull.

"That's personal." They were in a standoff now, glaring at each other from across the cramped space. "I have my own business with him."

What business would an ex-dancing girl have with a bounty hunter? Especially one as close to death as Boba Fett was right now. Maybe, mused Dengar, she thinks she can get a discount from him, since he's so messed up.

Though who would she want him to track down?

He glanced over to the doorway of the hiding place's other chamber. "What condition is our guest in today?"

The taller medical droid tilted its head unit to study the display of vital signs mounted on its own cylindrical body. "The patient's condition is stable," announced SHS1-B. "The prognosis is unchanged from its previous trauma-scan indices of point zero zero twelve."

"Which means?" "He's dying."

That was another question Why couldn't these fnarling droids just say what they meant? He'd had to bang this one around until the solenoids had rattled inside its carapace just to get it to speak this much of a plain Basic.

"Wounds," added SHSl-B's shorter companion.

"Severity." le-XE gave a slow back-and-forth rotation of its top dome. "Not-goodness."

"Whatever." Dengar was looking forward to being rid of this irritating pair. That would come with either Boba Fett's death-or his recovery. Which was looking increasingly less likely.

"If that's the case," said Neelah, "then you're wasting my time. I need to talk to him right now."

"Well, that's sweet of you." Arms folded across his chest, Dengar nodded as he regarded her. "You're not really concerned with whether some bounty hunter pitches it or not. You just want to pump him for some kind of information. Right?"

She made no reply, but Dengar could tell that his words had struck home. The look the female gave him was even more murderous than before. A lot had changed since she'd been one of Jabba's fetching playthings; even in this little time the harsh winds of Tatooine's Dune Sea had scoured her flesh leaner and tauter, the heat of the double suns darkening her skin. What had been soft, nubile flesh, revealed by gossamer silks, was now concealed by the coarse, bloodstained trousers and sleeveless jacket that she must have scavenged from the corpse of one of Jabba's bodyguards; a thick leather belt, its attached holster empty, cinched the uniform tight to her waist and hunger-carved belly.

Starving, thought Dengar. She had to be; the Dune Sea didn't exactly abound with protein sources. "Here-"

Keeping an eye on her, Dengar reached into one of the crates and dug out a bar of compressed military rations, salvage from an Imperial scoutship that had crash-landed years before. He tossed the bar to the female. "You look like you need it."

Appetite widened her eyes, showing their deep violet color. Her fingers quickly tore open the thin metallic wrappings; she raised the slab, already softening as it absorbed what moisture it could from the air, to her mouth, but stopped herself before taking a bite.

"Go ahead," said Dengar. "I'm not in the habit of poisoning people." He reached behind himself to one of the niches concealed in the chamber's stones. "If I wanted to get rid of you"-his fist came out with a blaster in it; he raised the weapon and pointed it at Neelah's forehead-"I could do it easier than that."

Her gaze fastened on the blaster, as though its muzzle were doing the talking.

"Good," said Dengar. His groin still ached from the blow he'd received. "Now I think we understand each other." A few seconds passed, then the female nodded slowly.

She took a bite of the rations bar, chewed and swallowed.

"I must inform you," came SHSl-B's voice from the subchamber doorway. "That any further casualties will have a deleterious impact on our ability to perform our functions in a manner consistent with an appropriate level of therapeutic practice."

Dengar swiveled the blaster toward the droid. "If there's any more 'casualties' around here, I'll be sweeping them up with a magnet. Got me?"

SHSl-B leaned back, bumping against his companion.

"Understanding," said le-XE, speaking for both of them.

"Completeness."

"That's nice. Go take care of your patient," said Dengar, slipping the blaster inside his own belt. He glanced back over at Neelah. "You enjoying that?"

She had virtually inhaled the rations bar. Her pale fingernails plucked out a few last crumbs from the wrappings.

"Give me some answers," said Dengar, "and you can have another one."

She crumpled the foil into a shining ball inside her small fist.

I'm getting soft, thought Dengar. There had been a time when he wouldn't have bothered asking questions. He wouldn't have lowered the blaster, either, until there had been a corpse lying in front of him, with a hole burned through its brain. That was what letting himself fall in love-not with this female, but with his betrothed, Manaroo-had done for him. That was always a fatal mistake for a bounty hunter. Somebody like Boba Fett survived at this game for as long as he had by stripping those useless emotions out of his heart. To look at Fett, even when he was unconscious on the pallet in the other chamber, was to look at a weapon, an assault rifle fully primed and charged for maximum destruction.

Peel away that Mandalorian battle armor of his, and something equally hard and deadly was found beneath. And that, Dengar knew, was the difference-one of them, at least-between himself and the galaxy's most feared bounty hunter. There was still something human inside Dengar, despite his having worked the bounty-hunter trade, with all its spirit-eroding capabilities. That was the part that had looked upon Manaroo, and had decided, despite all the rest of his scrabbling, callused nature, to twine his fate with hers. Manaroo had asked him to marry her, and he had said yes; that human part had wanted to stay human, like a dwindling flame that struggles to keep from being snuffed out. He didn't want to wind up like Boba Fett, a killing machine with a blind, unfathomable mask for a face.

It was that human part that had also decided to send Manaroo away, once she had helped him get Boba Fett into this hiding place. Their separation from each other would continue at least until this business with Boba Fett was over. Dengar knew the risks in getting involved with someone who had as many grudge-bearing enemies as Fett; there were plenty of diehards from the old Bounty Hunters Guild who had good reason to hate his guts. If they found out that Boba Fett was still alive, they'd be swooping down on Tatooine en masse to finish him off. And me, Dengar had told himself. That hot-tempered Trandoshan Bossk would naturally assume that anyone befriending his longtime rival Boba Fett was an enemy to be killed with quick dispatch. This little hiding place would get filled up with corpses pretty quickly.

Risks meant profits, though, in the bounty-hunter trade. And profits were what Dengar needed if he was going to have any chance of paying off the massive debt load he was carrying and then have any kind of life with Manaroo. He wanted out of this game, and the only way to accomplish that was to keep on playing it, for at least a few more rounds. And the best way to do that, he'd decided, was with a partner like Boba Fett. And that's what he offered me-when Dengar had discovered him, half- digested by the gullet of the Sarlacc, lying in the suns- baked wasteland, Fett had had enough remaining strength to speak, but not to protect himself. Dengar could have put him out of his misery right then and there, but had stayed his hand when Fett had spoken of a partnership between the two of them. The only card he'd had left to play ...

And a good one. We could clean up, Dengar had decided. Him and me. A real good team. It all depended on just one thing.

Whether Fett had been lying to him.

He could have been just playing for time. Time enough for his wounds to heal, and for him to get his act back together. Dengar had been mulling it over ever since he had carried Fett down here. There was no history of Boba Fett ever working with a partner before; he had always been a lone operator. Why should he want a partnership now? What there was a history of was playing it fast and loose with the truth. In that, Boba Fett was no different from any other bounty hunter; it was that kind of a business. Fett was just better at it, was all. What had happened to the Bounty Hunters Guild was proof of that.

Things might be different, Dengar knew, when Boba Fett got his strength back. Fett might not want to repay Dengar with a partnership, for all that he'd done to keep him alive and safe. Dengar's reward might be a blaster charge right into his chest, leaving a scorched hole big enough to put a humanoid's fist through. Fett's obsession with secrecy was notorious in all the scummy dives and watering holes across the galaxy; his past was largely unknown, and was likely to stay that way, given how those who poked into his affairs had a way of turning up dead.

That was the real reason Dengar had sent Manaroo away. It was one thing for him to risk Fett's lethal treachery; he didn't want the female he loved to wind up facing a blaster muzzle.

"So what did you want to know?"

Dengar pulled himself back from his grim meditations to the hard-eyed female regarding him from the other side of the chamber.

"Same thing I wanted to know before." He nodded toward the entrance to the subchamber. "What's your connection with Boba Fett?"

Neelah shook her head. "I don't know."

"Oh, that's a good one." Dengar gave a quick, derisive laugh. "You come sneaking in here-not exactly the smartest thing to do-and you don't even know why."

"That's what I came here to find out. That's why I wanted to talk to him." Neelah glanced toward the subchamber, then back toward Dengar. "That's why I left him where you would be sure to find him-"

"Wait a minute," said Dengar. "You left him?"

She nodded. "I found him before you did. But I knew there was nothing I could do for him, not with what the Sarlacc had done. He needed medical attention-more than anything I could do. I took a chance that you'd take care of him. That you'd keep him alive."

"And why's that so important to you? He's a bounty hunter, and you were a dancing girl in Jabba's palace."

Dengar peered more closely at her. "What's he got to do with you?"

"I told you before-" Neelah's voice rose to a fierce shout. "I don't know! I just know that there is a connection-some kind of connection-between the two of us.

I knew that back when I first saw him. In the palace, in Jabba's court. When that fat slug had poor Oola killed... when she was tugging against the chain, and the trapdoor in front of the throne was opening ..." Both of Neelah's fists were trembling and white-knuckled. "All of the other girls were watching from the passageway... and there was nothing any of us could do... ."

"There never is," said Dengar. He could taste his own bitterness in his mouth. "That's how things happen in this universe."

She wasn't here in this chamber with him; she was lost in her own memory. "And then we could hear her screaming ... and I couldn't look anymore. That was when I saw him. Just standing there at the side of the court ... and watching. ..."

"Bounty hunters," said Dengar dryly, "make it a habit to stay out of other creatures' business. Unless they're paid to do something about it."

"And when the screaming was over, and Jabba and the others were still laughing ... he was still there. Just as before. And still watching." Neelah closed her eyes for a moment as a shudder ran through her slight body.

"And then ... the strangest thing ... he turned and looked at me. Right into my eyes." Her voice filled with both fear and wonder. "All the way across Jabba's court .

. . and it was like there was nobody else there at all.

That was how it felt. And that was when I knew. That there was something between the two of us." She refocused her gaze on Dengar. " 'Connection' isn't the right word.

It's something else. Something from the past. I even knew his name, without asking anyone else." Neelah slowly shook her head. "But that was all I knew."

"All right." The story intrigued Dengar. A matter of practical interest as well If this female meant something to Boba Fett, then knowing just what it was might give him an additional bargaining chip. "You said it was something from the past. Your past?"

She nodded.

"Well, that's a start. But nothing you can remember, I take it?"

Another nod.

"So how did you wind up at Jabba's palace?"

"I don't know that, either." Neelah's fists uncurled, empty and trembling. "I don't know how I got there. All I remember is Oola ... and the other girls. They helped me. They showed me ..." Her voice ebbed softer. "What I was to do ..."

Her memory had been wiped; Dengar recognized the signs. The confusion and welling fear, and the little bits and pieces, scraps of another existence, leaking through. No wipe was ever complete; memory was stored in too many places throughout the humanoid brain. To go after every bit, eradicating them all, would probably be fatal, a reduction beyond basic life-maintenance processes. There were easier, and less expensive, ways of killing a sentient being. So someone, thought Dengar, wanted her alive. Fett?

"What about your name?" Dengar nodded toward her. "

'Neelah'-was that something you remembered?"

"No; Jabba called me that. I don't know why. But I knew ..." Her brow furrowed with concentration. "I knew it wasn't my real name. My true name. Somebody took that from me ... and I couldn't get it back. No matter how hard I tried ..."

What she told Dengar coincided with his own suspicions. Neelah was a slave name-it didn't fit her.

The aristocratic bearing she possessed was too obvious, even in the ill-fitting, scavenged outfit she wore now.

She wouldn't be alive now-the Dune Sea's loping predators would be cracking her bones-if there weren't some tough fighting spirit inside her. Things would have gone differently if Jabba had tried to throw her, instead of the other girl, Oola, to his pet rancor. It would've been Neelah rather than Princess Leia wrapping the chain around Jabba's immense throat and choking the life out of him.

Dengar had more suspicions, which he didn't feel like voicing right at the moment. Fett must've done it. The other bounty hunter must've brought her to Jabba's palace; he'd probably also been the one who'd performed the memory wipe on her. The big question was why. Dengar couldn't believe it had been done on Jabba's orders; the Hutt had enjoyed young and beautiful objects, but he'd also been too tight with his credits to have commissioned the kidnapping of the daughter of one of the galaxy's noble houses. The only reason Leia Organa had wound up on the end of one of Jabba's chains was that she had come into Jabba's lair of her own accord, seeking to rescue the carbonite-encased Han Solo. A captured noblewoman, with a blanked-out memory, wasn't exactly the same kind of a bargain.

So Fett must have been working for someone else while he had ostensibly been in Jabba's employ. That wouldn't have been unusual; Dengar knew from his own experience that bounty hunters nearly always had more than one gig going on at a time, with no particular loyalty to any creature whose payroll they might be on. Or-the other possibility-Boba Fett might have had his own reasons for wiping the memory of this female, whoever she really was, and bringing her to Jabba's palace, disguised as a simple dancing girl.

The puzzle rotated inside Dengar's mind. Maybe Fett had been stashing her away, in some place where she wouldn't be likely to be found. That was one of the sleazier bounty-hunter tricks finding someone with a price on his or her or its head, then keeping the merchandise hidden until the price for it was raised higher. Dengar had never done it, and he hadn't heard of Boba Fett doing it, either. Fett didn't have to; he already commanded astronomical prices for his services.

"Is there anything else you remember?" Dengar rubbed the coarse stubble on his chin as he studied the female.

"Even the littlest thing."

"No-" Neelah shook her head. "There's nothing. It's all gone. Except ..."

"Except what?" "Another name. I mean ... another name besides his." She tilted her head to one side, as though trying to catch the whisper of a distant voice. "I think it's a name that belongs to a man."

"Yeah?" Dengar unfolded his arms and hooked his thumbs into his belt. "What's the name?"

"Nil something. Wait a minute." She rubbed the corner of her brow. "Now I remember ... it was Nil Posondum. Or something like that." Neelah's expression turned hopeful.

"Is that somebody important? Somebody I should know about?"

Dengar shook his head. "Never heard of anybody like that."

"Still ..." Neelah looked a little crestfallen.

"It's something to go on."

"Maybe." He had his doubts about whether it was anything useful. He had even bigger doubts about Neelah herself. Or whatever her real name is, thought Dengar.

Keeping one's contacts primed for information was an essential part of the bounty-hunter trade; he had been in and out of Mos Eisley and other scumholes on a regular basis, listening and asking the right questions, and he hadn't heard anything fitting her description. If anybody was looking for her, they were doing it on the quiet.

That might make getting paid for finding her somewhat difficult.

Or else-another possibility rose in Dengar's thoughts-somebody doesn't want her to be found. Boba Fett might have been working for someone who had wanted this Neelah to be disposed of, maybe in some way that left her still alive. What better way than to strip out her memory and stick her on a backwater planet like Tatooine? Though how long she would've stayed alive in Jabba's palace was debatable, given the Hutt's murderous amusements. Whoever had sent her there couldn't have been too concerned about her survival. Then why not just kill her quick and fast, for whatever reasons they had, rather than leave her where any number of the galaxy's hustling scoundrels, the criminal dregs that had found employment with Jabba, might have spotted her?

His brain felt weighted down with all these questions stacking up on top of each other. Mysteries and skulduggery were what one dealt with in the bounty-hunter trade; all this reminded Dengar of why he had wanted to get out of it. There must be an easier way to make a living.

Or a safer one. Now he had two potential bombs on his hands, either one of which could result in a quick death for him, if he was lucky, or a messy one, if his luck ran true to form. It hadn't been bad enough getting involved with Boba Fett's fortunes; now he had to deal with the enigmatic Neelah as well. She was a loose laser cannon by herself-if she'd had a blaster, Dengar supposed he would've been crisped by now-plus there were those unseen figures from her past, who'd put her here. They might not be too happy about her turning up again. If they were the kind of people who hired Boba Fett to do their dirty work for them, they wouldn't be likely to have too many scruples about eliminating everyone hooked up with her.

None of it looked good. Which had its own upside The more risk, Dengar reminded himself, the more profit.

That, more than anything in the so-called Hunter's Creed, was what governed the actions of bounty hunters, from Boba Fett down to himself. If there was a chance of being partners with Fett, and reaping the rewards from that, he would have to ramp up his courage to a new level.

"All right," said Dengar aloud. He unfolded his arms and pointed to the female on the other side of the hiding place's main chamber. "Let's work out an arrangement, you and me. Stipulation number one Don't try to kill me. If we're going to get anything accomplished around here, that's a basic requirement."

Neelah appeared to think it over, then nodded.

"Okay."

"And if you try, I'm going to make sure it's your corpse that gets thrown out of here. Got me?"

She nodded again, with just a trace of impatience.

"Number two I'm in charge here. I'm running the show-"

Neelah's anger flared. "Wait a minute-"

"Shut up," said Dengar. "It's for your own good. And it's just for the time being. You get back to wherever you came from, you get your real name and everything that comes with it returned to you, then you can do whatever you want. But right now you don't even know who you are, you don't know who might be gunning for you, you don't know anything about what the galaxy's like once you get off this little rock heap's surface. Even if you could find some way out of here without my help, you might poke your nose into some place like Mos Eisley and get your whole head detached from your neck. There's plenty of types who'd do that for you, even without knowing who you might be."

His lecture had a visible effect on her. "Very well," said Neelah sullenly. "You're in charge. For now."

The things I put up with, thought Dengar to himself.

It was all for Manaroo's sake; he had to keep that in mind. On the other side of all this, there was her, and a life together with the female he loved. If I get that far.

"I'm glad we understand each other." Dengar pointed to a larger, open niche at the farthest end of the chamber. "You might as well make yourself comfortable down here. I don't want you wandering around topside.

There's food and supplies; anything else you need, just let me know. I'll have those two medical droids give you a quick scan, to make sure you're all right. Tatooine's got some nasty bugs you can pick up."

Neelah looked straight back at him. "What about Boba Fett? That's why I came here."

"That's number three. You don't see him, you don't talk to him, you don't have anything to do with him, unless I'm right there with you."

"Why?"

"Like I told you before. For your own good." Dengar indicated the subchamber with a tilt of his head. "That guy's one dangerous barve. If there's some kind of connection between you and him, it might not be one that's to your benefit. When he's got his strength back, he might kill you just as easily as look at you. And you won't be asking any more questions then, believe me."

The message seemed to sink in. "All right," said Neelah. "Whatever you say."

There was more that he hadn't said. His precautions weren't just for her sake. I don't want the two of them conspiring against me, thought Dengar. Even before Boba Fett got his full strength back, that razor-sharp mind of his would be working and scheming away. Fett would be fully capable of making his own deals with Neelah that she wouldn't be able to resist falling in with. A bounty hunter didn't get the drop on people just with weapons that someone could see and feel burning through one's gut; the history of what Boba Fett had pulled off with the old Bounty Hunters Guild indicated that he was a master at ensnaring sentient creatures in subtler traps.

Though you wind up just as dead, thought Dengar, either way. And if Boba Fett had been lying and playing for time, back when Dengar had found him out there in the Dune Sea's wastes, the quickest way to dissolve any partnership would be to use Neelah as his cat's-paw.

Now I've got two that I've got to watch out for. That was another reason Dengar had wanted the female down here, rather than wandering around on the surface. He had his hands full as it was; he didn't need anyone else hooking up with Neelah, for whatever agenda they might have.

She might as well have read his thoughts. A thin smile appeared as Neelah regarded him. "You trust me?"

"Of course not." On that point, Dengar could afford to be honest with her. "I don't trust anyone." That was almost true; there was always Manaroo. But that was something different. "Nobody survives in this business by going around trusting creatures. Let's just say that I've got an idea of what to expect from you now. And if you're smart enough to play along with me, maybe you'll get what you want."

Neelah signaled her understanding with a quick nod.

"I still want to see him."

"That's easy enough," said Dengar. "But if you were planning on having any kind of talk with Fett, I don't think that's going to happen anytime real soon. He's still unconscious."

"Just as well." The thin smile faded from Nee-lah's face. "I changed my mind about that part. For now. I've begun to see the wisdom of your cautious attitude. Maybe it's better if he doesn't know about me. That I found him out in the Dune Sea, and that I'm here, waiting. As you pointed out ... whatever our connection is, it might not be exactly safe for me."

"Suit yourself." Dengar's caution went up a notch.

She's a fast learner, he thought. All the more reason to be careful. "Come on." He pushed himself away from the wall of the main chamber. "Let's go pay our guest of honor a visit."

The tall medical droid's appendages raised in warning as Dengar and Neelah entered the sub-chamber. "Please observe the necessary hygienic protocols." The chart of vital signs scrolled down the display on SHSl-B's cylindrical torso. "The patient's condition remains very critical-"

"Yeah, right." Dengar pushed the droid aside, away from the pallet in the center of the space. "This barve's survived worse things than your attentions. If you haven't managed to kill him, then nothing will."

Neelah stepped close to the side of the pallet and looked down at the unconscious form. "That's him?" She sounded almost disappointed. "That's Boba Fett?"

"No-" From the pile of gear in the sub-chamber's corner, Dengar picked up a battered helmet, etched with the digestive fluids of the Sarlacc's gullet. He turned the helmet's narrow-visored gaze toward Neelah. "This is Boba Fett."

She shrank back from the empty helmet, a sudden fear showing in her widened eyes. One hand tentatively reached out to touch the pitted metal, then jerked back as though scorched. She slowly nodded. "That's what I saw." Her voice was a barely audible whisper. "And I knew ... I knew it was him. ..."

"That's how everybody knows him." Dengar turned the helmet's blank visage toward himself. He could guess how the female felt; a little apprehensive chill ran down his own spine. "All through the galaxy." He nodded toward the figure on the pallet. "Not very many creatures have seen him like that. Or if they have, they didn't live to tell about it."

For a moment the only sound in the subchamber was the clicking and sighing of the cardiopulmonary assists that the medical droids had set in place. Then Neelah turned a somber gaze toward Dengar. "I did," she said quietly.

Dengar was unable to make a reply. The dark spaces in her eyes, and what might lie beyond them, unnerved him as much as the empty helmet. He turned away, to set it back down on the rest of Boba Fett's gear.

"Remember," said Neelah. "Don't tell him. Don't tell him anything about me."

By the time Dengar turned back around, the female had slipped out of the subchamber. He was alone with the other bounty hunter. The presence of the medical droids barely registered on Dengar's senses.

He stood looking down at Boba Fett for a while longer. The little trace of fear hadn't gone away; it was still there, inching along his spine. Even unconscious, this man was enough to spook ordinary creatures.

There's too much past, thought Dengar. Inside Boba Fett's skull; a whole galaxy full of it. Who could tell what was going on in there as he slept and dreamed his dark dreams?

about it."

For a moment the only sound in the subchamber was the clicking and sighing of the cardiopulmonary assists that the medical droids had set in place. Then Neelah turned a somber gaze toward Dengar. "I did," she said quietly.

Dengar was unable to make a reply. The dark spaces in her eyes, and what might lie beyond them, unnerved him as much as the empty helmet. He turned away, to set it back down on the rest of Boba Fett's gear.

"Remember," said Neelah. "Don't tell him. Don't tell him anything about me."

By the time Dengar turned back around, the female had slipped out of the subchamber. He was alone with the other bounty hunter. The presence of the medical droids barely registered on Dengar's senses.

He stood looking down at Boba Fett for a while longer. The little trace of fear hadn't gone away; it was still there, inching along his spine. Even unconscious, this man was enough to spook ordinary creatures.

There's too much past, thought Dengar. Inside Boba Fett's skull; a whole galaxy full of it. Who could tell what was going on in there as he slept and dreamed his dark dreams?

He couldn't believe his good luck.

"I've got him this time," said Bossk. He had upgraded both the firepower and the tracking abilities of the Hound's Tooth since his last unfortunate encounter with Boba Fett. The other bounty hunter snatching the accountant Nil Posondum away from him had been the final irritant underneath his scales; he had sworn to himself that if he ever got the chance, he would put his rival out of commission for good. And nothing will do that, thought Bossk, savoring the words, like blowing Fett to atoms. "When I get done, there won't be enough of him left to find without an electron microscope."

Beside him, Zuckuss leaned the hoses of his face mask toward the cockpit's target-acquisition screen. "I don't know. ..."

"What, you can't tell that it's Boba Fett ap proaching? Are you blind?" Bossk rapped a claw against the screen, hard enough to leave a permanent mark amid the glowing vector lines. "Of course it's him! There's all the identification data on the Slave I." A tiny column of numbers scrolled down from the triangular icon swiftly moving across the screen. "That's his ship, so he's aboard it."

"Oh, it's Boba Fett, all right." Zuckuss nodded slowly. "There's no doubt about that. I'm just not sure if you should-what's the phrase you always use?-'blow him away' right now."

Bossk angrily glared at the shorter bounty hunter.

"When's there going to be a better time?"

"Well, maybe when he's not traveling under an assurance of safe passage from your father." Zuckuss sounded even more doubtful and nervous. The breath in his air tubes rasped quicker and louder. "Boba Fett already contacted the Guild council-you know that-and Cradossk and the others gave him their word that he could dock at the perimeter station without anyone taking a shot at him."

"They gave him their word." The slits in Bossk's eyes narrowed. "They didn't give him mine."

"Still ..."

You little insect, thought Bossk. When he inherited the leadership of the Bounty Hunters Guild-he had already killed, as was Trandoshan custom, all of his father Cradossk's younger spawn-he intended to review the requirements for membership. A certain amount of guts, he figured, should be a prerequisite. Which meant that this sniveling partner that had been foisted on him would be out the air lock like the gnawed bones of yesterday's lunch.

"Maybe," whined Zuckuss, "you should think about-this a little more... ."

"Thinking takes too long." Bossk's claws moved across the control of the Hound's weapons systems. "Action gets things done."

"Your father isn't going to like this."

"That remains to be seen." The same blood ran in his and the old reptilian's veins; he had the comfort of knowing that his spawn-father was just as mean and vicious as himself. "For all you know, this is exactly what he and the rest of the Guild council are expecting me to do."

"Destroy another bounty hunter without warning?"

Incredulity pitched Zuckuss's voice higher. "That's hardly in line with the Hunter's Creed!"

Bossk always felt a simmering impatience when someone mentioned the Creed to him. "Boba Fett has violated the Creed enough times," he growled, "that he deserves no protection from it."

"But he's never been bound by the Creed! He's never been a member of the Guild!"

"Spare me your tedious legal analysis." Bossk had locked the concentric rings of the tracker sight onto the distant craft. "If Boba Fett wants to lodge a complaint against me, he'll have to do it from the other side of the grave. If enough of him can be scraped up to put into one."

He ignored the rest of Zuckuss's tiresome fretting.

His index claw hit the main fire button, and a quick rumble rolled through the Hound's frame. On the screen, a brilliant white tracer shot toward the icon representing Boba Fett's ship.

"Got him!" The shot must have caught Fett completely by surprise; he'd taken no evasive action at all. What a fool, thought Bossk with contempt. That's what you get for trusting other bounty hunters. The advantage of being considered lowlife scum by most of the galaxy's inhabitants was that maintaining one's reputation was never an issue. "You know," said Bossk, "I'm almost disappointed... ."

"Why?" Zuckuss turned his large-lensed gaze away from the screen. "Because he didn't put up more of a fight?"

"No." Bossk peered at the red numbers that had flashed on. "Because there's anything left of him." He clawed in the command for a damage assessment on the laser cannon's most recent target, then studied the result. "That ship of Fett's had some serious armor on it. It's still holding together." The glowing triangle had stopped in the middle of the screen, but hadn't disappeared. To have taken that kind of a hit, enough to punch a hole through the main deck of an Imperial battle cruiser, and still be in one piece, however badly damaged, was amazing. It didn't correspond with the velocities that the Slave I's engines- high-thrust but low-mass-capable units from Mandal Motors-could attain.

Like most bounty hunters, Boba Fett had always prized speed and maneuverability over protection. Right now, though, Bossk didn't have time to puzzle over the discrepancy. "Let's go finish him off."

The distinctive half-rounded shape of the Slave I filled the viewports as Bossk piloted his own craft toward it. He kept his claws on the controls for the emergency reverse thrusters in case Boba Fett, like the devious scoundrel he was known to be, was lying low inside the other ship, waiting for his own chance to take a shot at his attacker.

"Looks like a clean kill to me." Zuckuss pointed to the cockpit's forward viewport. "Right through the center and out the other side. There couldn't be anyone left alive on that ship."

"I'll believe that," said Bossk, "when I see Boba Fett's .charred corpse." He started moving the Hound's Tooth in toward the drifting wreckage. "I'm going inside."

"Well, if you need that kind of proof ..." Zuckuss gave a shrug. "I suppose you'll have to." He didn't even glance over at Zuckuss. "You're going, too."

"Oh."

They managed to establish a transfer connection between the Hound's Tooth and what was left of the Slave I. No atmosphere support was needed; enough of the Slave I's systems were still operating to have sealed off the central interior sections.

"Something's wrong," said Zuckuss as he looked about the Slave I's empty hold.

"Something's always wrong, as far as you're con cerned." This time, though, Bossk wondered whether his partner might be right. A sense of unease crawled across his scales; he drew his blaster and slowly scanned across the open hatchways.

Zuckuss reached over and poked a gloved finger at one of the bulkheads. The thin material wobbled back and forth; another poke, and Zuckuss's finger went right through it.

"It's a decoy." Zuckuss gave a few more exploratory proddings to the hold's confines, with similar results.

"That's why there's nothing here-it's just a shell!" He turned toward Bossk. "No wonder your shot went right through. There's no real mass to have taken the hit. It's like shooting through flimsiplast."

Rage boiled up inside Bossk, nearly blinding him.

"That slimy ..." Words failed him. He stomped toward the dummy ship's aft section, shoulders smashing apart the sides of the flimsy hatches.

"This is why we got a positive identification."

Zuckuss had followed behind, into what would have been the cockpit if they had been aboard a real ship. He pointed to a beacon transmitter mounted to one of the space's curved walls. "Look-you can see that it's been programmed with the Slave I's ID profile." Zuckuss nodded in admiration. "Setting up something like this takes a lot of work; you have to force through overrides almost down to the subatomic level. And then to build it back up with the false data ..." He stepped back from the unit.

"Fett must have had this decoy already prepared, just keeping it for sometime when he'd need it." Even behind Zuckuss's face mask, there was a hint of amusement as he glanced over at Bossk. "Like when he might be heading into some territory where creatures might have a grudge against him."

"I'll kill him." The words seethed out through Bossk's clenched fangs. "I swear it. I'll find him and I'll kill him so hard ..."

"Chances are pretty good, I'd say, that Fett's al ready slipped by us. We're wasting our time here."

Zuckuss peered at another device, a cylinder of black metal studded with biosensors. "Now, this is interesting.

I wouldn't have expected something like this aboard a simple decoy vessel."

Bossk knew his partner had more of an interest in technological matters; right now all that moved inside his own head were grim fantasies of cracking bone and spurting blood. He didn't even bother to look around, but kept on brooding at the mocking stars visible through the port. "What is it?"

"Offhand ... I'd say it's a bomb... ."

"You fool!" Bossk whirled on his clawed heel, in time to see a row of lights flash into fiery life along the cylinder's casing. The device emitted a faint hum, already gaining in pitch and volume. "We've triggered'it!

The thing's going to blow!"

He dived for the false cockpit's hatchway; a fraction of a second later Zuckuss landed on top of him. Both bounty hunters scrambled to their feet. Through the hatch, Bossk could see the bomb detach itself from its mountings on the flimsy bulkhead; with slow, ominous grace, the bomb's miniaturized antigrav repulsors swiveled it about, bringing the scrutiny of its blind gaze toward them.

"Get out of my way!" Bossk shoved his partner aside and sprinted for the transfer port fastened to the decoy ship's central hold. He could hear Zuckuss right behind him as he furiously grappled his way through the tube's flexing pleats and back aboard the Hound's Tooth.

The first explosion ripped the transfer away from both ships, sending ragged strips of plastex spiraling across the Hound's midsection viewports. With his stomach across the back of the pilot's chair, Bossk slapped at the hull integrity controls, sealing off his own ship before any significant amount of ak could escape.

"We ... we should be okay now... ." Panting, Zuckuss supported himself against the cockpit's naviputer displays. "That wasn't ... much of a bomb... ."

There wasn't even time for Bossk to tell the other bounty hunter not to be an idiot. The second explosion, larger than the first, struck the Hound's Tooth. Roiling thermic fire filled the viewports as the impact of Bossk's spine with the bulkhead above stunned him into barely conscious silence. Blood swirled across the scales of his face as the ship's artificial-gravity generators struggled to catch up with its end-over-end tumbling.

Bossk smashed his fist against as many of the thruster controls as he could reach; the resulting force had him digging a hold into the pilot's chair to keep from being flung through the open hatchway behind him.

A stern-mounted scanner showed the bomb, smaller now but even deadlier, trailing in the erratic wake of the Hound's Tooth. "It's ... it's locked onto us... ."

Zuckuss clawed his way up beside Bossk. He pointed to the screen above the controls. "Here it comes... ."

Bossk knew how incremental-sequence bombs functioned.

The first two charges work you over, he told himself. The third one kills you. His voice grated in his throat "Not ... this time ..."

He hit the rest of the thrusters, at the same time throwing the Hound into a suicide arc. Stars blurred across the viewport as the angle of the ship's turn deepened. A deep basso groan sounded as increasing vectors tore in different directions across the hull.

Sharper cracking noises signaled the navigation modules ripping away from the exterior.

The third and final explosion completed the partial disassembly of the Hound's Tooth. Bossk's desperate maneuver had put enough distance between the ship and the bomb; the hull shook with the impact but remained intact.

Zuckuss was knocked onto his face mask by the bulkhead deforming behind him, the blast's force warping the section from concave to convex. The pilot's chair broke in two, sending Bossk sprawling across the cockpit's floor, claws holding the padded back of the seat tight against his chest. A rain of sparks, bursting out of the access ports, sizzled across both bounty hunters.

A few seconds later silence filled the Hound's Tooth.

The smell of burning circuitry hung acrid in the air, mixed with the steam of the ship's automatic fire-dousing units. A few last sparks stung Zuckuss, and he slapped at them with his heavily gloved hands.

"We'll be here awhile." Bossk didn't need to do a preliminary damage assessment on the Hound to know that.

Until the navigation modules were rigged back into some kind of operating order, he and Zuckuss were stuck in this remote sector of space. If Trandoshans had any capacity for the emotion of gratitude, he would have been glad that the sequential bomb hadn't torn the Hound's Tooth into bits. He and Zuckuss would have been dead instead of merely adrift. As it was, he just felt a deep irritation over how much work it was going to take to put his ship back together again, with the tools and probes that were now undoubtedly scattered all over the en gineering lockers.

"Look there-" Zuckuss pointed to the one viewport still functioning, set at an angle from the Hound's midsection.

Sitting in the middle of the cockpit floor, Bossk looked over his shoulder at the screen. A fiery course of light, with a too-familiar shape at its head, shot across the field of stars.

"That's the Slave I," said Zuckuss. Unnecessarily-any fool would have known that much. "The real ship."

"Of course it is, you idiot." If Bossk had had a wrench in his claws, he would have been torn between throwing it at his partner or at the screen, as though he could somehow hit Boba Fett's ship with it. "That was the whole point, with the decoy and the bomb." The Slave I was already dwindling away, heading for the perimeter station of the Bounty Hunters Guild. "Fett knew somebody would be waiting for him."

"Apparently so." Zuckuss gave a slow nod of his head.

"Somebody like him ... he's got a lot of enemies."

"He doesn't have any fewer now." Bossk glared at the empty screen. You made one mistake, he told the vanished Boba Fett. You should've used a bigger bomb. One that would have killed instead of merely humiliated. Bossk-and his hunger for revenge-was still alive.

Another quick burst of sparks shot from behind the screen. A knot of tangled circuits, welded together and emitting smoke, dangled bobbing from one of the overhead panels. The image of the stars blanked out and was gone.

"Come on," said Bossk. He stood up, then reached down to pull Zuckuss to his feet. "We've got work to do." fool would have known that much. "The real ship."

"Of course it is, you idiot." If Bossk had had a wrench in his claws, he would have been torn between throwing it at his partner or at the screen, as though he could somehow hit Boba Fett's ship with it. "That was the whole point, with the decoy and the bomb." The Slave I was already dwindling away, heading for the perimeter station of the Bounty Hunters Guild. "Fett knew somebody would be waiting for him."

"Apparently so." Zuckuss gave a slow nod of his head.

"Somebody like him ... he's got a lot of enemies."

"He doesn't have any fewer now." Bossk glared at the empty screen. You made one mistake, he told the vanished Boba Fett. You should've used a bigger bomb. One that would have killed instead of merely humiliated. Bossk-and his hunger for revenge-was still alive.

Another quick burst of sparks shot from behind the screen. A knot of tangled circuits, welded together and emitting smoke, dangled bobbing from one of the overhead panels. The image of the stars blanked out and was gone.

"Come on," said Bossk. He stood up, then reached down to pull Zuckuss to his feet. "We've got work to do."

He watched as the tall, arched doors of the council chamber were shoved open, the gilded and gem-encrusted panels flying to either side as Bossk stormed in.

Servants bearing flagons and laden platters scattered in all directions; anger-ridden Trandoshans were notoriously rough on the hired help.

"Ah, my son and heir!" Cradossk was already well on the way to inebriation. His age-blu nted fangs were mottled with wine stains, and his yellow-slitted eyes gazed with blurry affection at his spawn. "I was hoping you'd be here for the festivities." More wine slopped down Cradossk's scaled arm and from his elbow as he lifted his own goblet high. "We'll tell the musicians to strike up the old songs, the ones our spawn-fathers knew, and we'll do the lizard dance all around the courtyard-"

The goblet went clattering across the chamber's terrazzo floor, the wine a ragged pennant on the inlaid tiles, as Bossk knocked it from his sire's hand with one swing of his clawed hand. Across the high-ceilinged space of the chamber, hung with the empty combat gear and other trophies taken off the Guild's long-ago enemies, silence fell. The collective gaze of the council members turned toward their chief and his enraged offspring.

"Your manners," said Cradossk softly, "are severely lacking. As usual."

Boba Fett had had enough experience with Trandoshans over the years to know what a bad sign it was when their voices went low and ominous like that. When they shouted and snarled, they were ready to kill. When they whispered, they were ready to kill everything. He carefully shifted away from Cradossk's side so as not to be in the way if the old reptilian decided to leap over the table and tear out his only son's throat.

"As is your understanding." Bossk spoke with a cold control, through which his anger still managed to appear.

"What kind of brain-withered old fool shares wine with his enemy?" He flung a gesture toward Boba Fett. "Have you forgotten so much, has every day faded from your memory, that the Guild's history is a blank slate to you?

This man has made fools of us more times than we can count." Bossk turned to either side, making sure that everyone in the chamber could hear his words. "You all know who it is that sits with you now. He's taken the credits out of our pockets and the food out of our mouths." He looked back at his sire. "If you weren't drunk"-Bossk's voice sounded like dry gravel scraping across rusted metal-"you'd take what's fallen into your grasp and sink your teeth into Boba Fett's heart."

"I wasn't drunk when he arrived here." Cradossk's response was both mild and somewhat amused. "But I intend to get very drunk-and very happy-now that we've all had a chance to listen to Fett. What he came here to say has pleased me a great deal." He raised his goblet and took a long draft that left wet lines trickling down the sides of his throat, then slammed the goblet down. "That's one of the differences between him ... and you."

Barely suppressed laughter ran along the arms of the crescent table. Without turning his head, Boba Fett could see the other council members and their lackeys whispering back and forth, their sardonic glances taking in the young bounty hunter standing before them. Be sure you know who your friends are, he wanted to warn Bossk.

This lot will carve you up anytime it suits them.

"What're you talking about?" Bossk gripped the edge of the table in his claws and leaned toward his father.

"What's this sneaking scum told you?"

"Boba Fett has made us an offer." From an ornately enameled tray held behind him, Cradossk plucked another empty goblet, holding it out to be filled by one of the other attendants. He held the wine out toward his son. "A

very good one; that's why we're celebrating." Cradossk's mottled smile widened. "As you should be."

"Offer?" Bossk didn't take the goblet from the older Trandoshan. "What kind of offer?"

"The kind that only a fool would refuse. The kind of offer that solves a great many problems. For all of us."

Confusion showed in Bossk's gaze as he looked over at Boba Fett, then back to his father. "I don't understand...."

"Of course you don't." Boba Fett spoke this time, leaning back against the leatherwork of the chair that had been given him. "There's so much you don't understand." He might as well start working Bossk into an irrational fury now as later. "That's why your father is still head of the Bounty Hunters Guild. You have a lot of wisdom to acquire before you'll have your chance."

"Explain it to him." With a single crooked claw, Cradossk motioned one of the other council members over.

"I tire so easily nowadays... ."

"Then take a nap, old man." Bossk turned angrily toward the robed figure that had approached. "Spit it out."

"So simple, is it not?" The watery pupils at the ends of the council member's eyestalks regarded Bossk with kindly forbearance. "And so indicative- yes?-of both your father's and our guest's foresight. Though Boba Fett is not to be called our guest anymore, is he?"

"All I know," growled Bossk, "is what I call him."

"Perhaps so, but should you not call him 'brother'

now?"

Those words struck Bossk speechless.

"For is that not what Boba Fett has offered the Guild?" The council member folded his hooked, mantislike forearms together. "To be one of us? Our brother and fellow hunter-has he not offered to join his not inconsiderable forces and cunning with ours, and thus become a member of the august Bounty Hunters Guild?"

"Damn straight he has." Cradossk drained his goblet and slammed it back down on the table. "Let's hear it for him."

"It's true." Another one of the Guild's younger bounty hunters had sidled up to Bossk's elbow; Fett remembered this one's name as Zuckuss. "I just heard about it outside." The shorter bounty hunter pointed a thumb toward the chamber's tall doors. "That's what the word is-that Boba Fett has asked for membership in the Guild."

"That's impossible!" Bossk's claws tightened into fists, as though he were about to swing on either his partner or the elder from the council, or both. "Why would he do something like that?"

Fett regarded the reptilian with no show of emotion.

"I have my reasons."

"I bet you do... ."

"And are they not good reasons?" The elder swiveled its eyestalks toward Bossk. "Should not all propositions make such excellent sense? For all of us-do we not gain the benefit of the esteemed Boba Fett's skills? Known throughout the galaxy!" A saw-edged forelimb gestured toward Fett on the other side of the table. "And does not he acquire thereby the many advantages that come with membership in our Guild? The warmth of our regard, the comradely fellowship, the excellent weapons maintenance facilities, the medical benefits-that alone is not to be lightly considered in our hazardous line of work."

"He's lying to you!" Bossk looked across the faces of the other council members. His straining fists rose alongside his head, nearly knocking over the smaller Zuckuss. "Can't you see that? It's some plan of his-like all his other plans--"

"What you don't see," said Boba Fett, "is how the times have changed. The galaxy is not as it was, when your father was as newly hatched as you. The fields upon which we pursue our quarry are shrinking, just as the strength of Emperor Palpatine increases." He could see the council members around the crescent nodding their acknowledgment of his wisdom. "The Bounty Hunters Guild must change as well, or face its extinction. And so must I change my ways as well."

"The old days," murmured Cradossk, slumped down and gazing wistfully into his empty goblet. "The old days are gone... ."

"Anyone with eyes and a brain can tell that the bounty-hunting trade is being squeezed into a tighter and tighter corner." Some of the words Fett used were straight from what Kud'ar Mub'at, back at its web drifting in space, had told him. They were true enough, or at least to the point where they would be believed by these fools on the Guild council. "Not just by the Empire; there are others. Black Sun ..." He merely had to mention the name of the criminal organization for that point to be made. The whispers turned into guarded silence. "Bounty hunters such as ourselves have always operated on both sides of the law, as need be; that's the nature of the game. But when both sides turn against us, then we must band together to survive. There's no room for an independent agent such as myself. We either join forces, you and I, or we go our separate ways. And await our separate destruction."

A strange, raw ache tightened Boba Fett's throat. It had been a long time since he had spoken that many words all at one go. He didn't live by making speeches, but by performing deeds the more danger, the greater the profit. But the job he'd accepted from Kud'ar Mub'at was, in some sense, a job like any other. Whatever it takes, thought Fett. If it required getting a bunch of aging, dull-fanged mercenaries like Cradossk and the rest of the Bounty Hunters Guild council to swallow a well-oiled line, then so be it. If anything, it was just proof that words could trap and kill as well as any other weapon.

"Should you not thank Boba Fett?" The elder standing near Bossk made a sweeping gesture with his serrated forearm. "For your sake, has he not repeated what he already has so eloquently stated to us?"

"And you fell for it." Bossk sneered at all the council members, his father included. "You don't have the guts to fight him, so you'd rather believe that he's on your side now."

Boba Fett raised his inner estimation of the Trandoshan bounty hunter. He's going to be trouble, thought Fett. Not just another dumb carnivore. If the time ever did come when Bossk inherited the leadership of the Bounty Hunters Guild, it might in fact become serious competition for him. But right now Bossk's smarts and his fierce temper were weapons to be turned against him and the others.

"You'll see, my little one." Cradossk roused himself into an approximation of sobriety. "If I didn't love you the way I do, I'd have your scaly hide peeled off and tanned into a wall hanging for our new member's quarters." He extended a wobbling claw toward Bossk. "But because I want there to be something someday for my spawn to possess and lead, the way I lead the Guild now-and because I'm not dead yet, so there's still time for you to gain both some manners and some knowledge of how the galaxy works-that's why I'm not asking you to be brothers with Boba Fett. I'm telling you to do it."

"Very well." The slits in Bossk's eyes narrowed into apertures a honed razor might have cut. "As you wish.

Maybe there is something I can learn from an ... old one like you." He smiled the ugly smile characteristic of his species. "After all-you murdered your way to control of the Guild. I have but to wait, and it's mine."

"Is not patience a virtue, even among the assassins?"

Bossk pushed the other council member aside, knocking him against the smaller figure of Zuckuss. The Trandoshan stepped up to the crescent-shaped table, directly in front of Boba Fett. One clawed hand grasped the goblet by its stem. "To your health." Bossk drained the contents, then threw the goblet against the wall behind; it clanged like a bell, then rolled clattering across the hard stone tiles of the floor. "However long it lasts."

"I suppose"-Fett returned the other's gaze- "it'll last long enough."

Dark wine seeped around Bossk's fangs as he leaned toward Fett. "You might fool the others," he whispered,

"but you're not fooling me. I don't know what your game is-but I don't worry about you knowing mine." His voice dropped lower and more guttural as he brought his snout almost against the visor of Fett's helmet. "I'll be a brother to you, all right. And I know how, believe me. I had brothers when I was spawned. And you know what?"

Bossk's breath smelled of wine and blood. "I ate them."

He turned and strode away, toward the council chamber's doors. One of Bossk's clawed feet connected with the empty goblet he had thrown, sending it skittering against the wall like a tiny droid whose circuits had been scooped out. The other bounty hunter, Zuckuss, glanced around at the watching faces, then ran after Bossk.

Sitting next to Boba Fett, Cradossk heaved a sigh.

"Don't judge us too harshly, my friend." Cradossk took the flagon from the tray being held near him and refilled his own goblet. He knocked that back and filled it again.

"Sometimes our get-togethers go a little better than this... ." to gain both some manners and some knowledge of how the galaxy works-that's why I'm not asking you to be brothers with Boba Fett. I'm telling you to do it."

"Very well." The slits in Bossk's eyes narrowed into apertures a honed razor might have cut. "As you wish.

Maybe there is something I can learn from an ... old one like you." He smiled the ugly smile characteristic of his species. "After all-you murdered your way to control of the Guild. I have but to wait, and it's mine."

"Is not patience a virtue, even among the assassins?"

Bossk pushed the other council member aside, knocking him against the smaller figure of Zuckuss. The Trandoshan stepped up to the crescent-shaped table, directly in front of Boba Fett. One clawed hand grasped the goblet by its stem. "To your health." Bossk drained the contents, then threw the goblet against the wall behind; it clanged like a bell, then rolled clattering across the hard stone tiles of the floor. "However long it lasts."

"I suppose"-Fett returned the other's gaze- "it'll last long enough."

Dark wine seeped around Bossk's fangs as he leaned toward Fett. "You might fool the others," he whispered,

"but you're not fooling me. I don't know what your game is-but I don't worry about you knowing mine." His voice dropped lower and more guttural as he brought his snout almost against the visor of Fett's helmet. "I'll be a brother to you, all right. And I know how, believe me. I had brothers when I was spawned. And you know what?"

Bossk's breath smelled of wine and blood. "I ate them."

He turned and strode away, toward the council chamber's doors. One of Bossk's clawed feet connected with the empty goblet he had thrown, sending it skittering against the wall like a tiny droid whose circuits had been scooped out. The other bounty hunter, Zuckuss, glanced around at the watching faces, then ran after Bossk.

Sitting next to Boba Fett, Cradossk heaved a sigh.

"Don't judge us too harshly, my friend." Cradossk took the flagon from the tray being held near him and refilled his own goblet. He knocked that back and filled it again.

"Sometimes our get-togethers go a little better than this... ."

"And to the glory of the Empire."

"Well spoken, as always." Emperor Palpatine swiveled his throne toward another section of the immense room.

"Whatever else might be said of him, you must agree that the prince has a way with words. Don't you think so, Vader?"

Xizor turned toward the hologram of the dark-caped figure-an intimidatingly life-sized image, transmitted from the Devastator, Lord Vader's personal flagship.

Don't try it on this one, Xizor warned himself. He had witnessed too many examples of what happened to those whose words caused the Dark Lord of the Sith to lose patience. The Emperor might be keeping him on a short leash. But one long enough, thought Xizor, to reach my throat.

"Your judgment, my lord, exceeds mine." Vader kept his own words as diplomatically inscrutable as the mask that concealed his face. "You know best where to place your trust."

"Sometimes, Vader, I think you'd prefer it if I trusted no one but you." The Emperor put his fingertips together. Behind him, framed in the towering windows of the throne room, the curved arms of the galaxy extended, like shoals of gems in an ink-black sea. Below the stars, the towers and massive shapes of Imperial City rolled like the crests of a frozen sea across the hidden surface of Coruscant, a monument in durasteel to both the ambition and the grasp of Palpatine. "I see into so many creatures' hearts, and all I find there is fear. Which is as it should be." The deep-set eyes contemplated the empty cage formed by his hands, as though envisioning the worlds bound by the Empire's power. "But when I look into yours, Vader, I see ... something else." Like a hooded mendicant rather than the ruler of worlds, Emperor Palpatine peered through the angles of his fingers.

"Something almost like ... desire."

Prince Xizor managed to keep his own smile from showing. Desire among the Falleen, his species, meant only one thing. His cruel beauty, the sharply chiseled planes of his face, and his regal bearing, combined with a pheromone-rich musk that evaded all conscious senses, were what put a female of any world under his command.

Humanoid female, of a type pleasing to his own sense of aesthetics; if the members of the more repulsive of the galaxy's species were similarly affected, that was not something he had yet felt the need to put to the test.

"It is only the desire to serve you," said Lord Vader. "And the Empire."

"Of course; what else could it be?" Palpatine smiled indulgently, an effect no less intimidating than any other expression that moved across his age-creased face. "But I am surrounded by those who wish to serve me.

Xizor, for one-" The Emperor's hand gestured toward him.

"He says all the same things as you do. If you are closer to what's left of my heart, Vader, if for the moment I place more trust in you than I do in others, it's because of something beyond words."

"Actions," said Xizor with cold hauteur, "indicate more than words. Judge my loyalty by what I achieve for the Empire."

"And what is that?" Vader's image turned the force of his penetrating gaze upon Xizor. "You scurry about on your mysterious, self-appointed errands, your rounds of those whose devotion to our cause is somewhat less than ideal. Fear motivates many creatures, but there are still those who believe their meager cunning can line their pockets. Criminals, conspirators, thieves, and builders of their own little empires-you know too many of those types, Xizor. I sometimes wonder what their attraction is for you."