The Bounty Hunter Wars 1 The Mandalorian Armor

If you're ready to do business, then we have something to talk about. If you're not ready, then we don't."

"The same old Boba Fett." The Shell Hutt's head, its jowly neck bound by the floating cylinder's collar, managed an appreciative nod. "It's good to know that some things in this universe never cliange. Just what business is it you've come to Circumtore to discuss?"

"I think you've got a pretty good idea of that."

Gheeta's expression turned sly, the lids over his large eyes drawing halfway down. "It wouldn't be something to do with a certain Oph Nar Dinnid, would it?"

"Stop wasting time!" Bossk's angry shout broke in.

"You know damn well that's what we're here for!"

An amused glance from the corner of one eye, then Gheeta looked back at Fett. "Your associate has a charming directness about him."

Fett nodded. "Among other virtues."

"The others must be well concealed," said Gheeta dryly. One of the metal hands reached up to scratch between the wattles at the side of his neck. "You realize, of course, that the party under discussion-this Dinnid person-is a guest on Circumtore. You know how all Hutts are about hospitality. The happiness of a guest is a sacred obligation with our species."

Spare me, thought Zuckuss, watching the exchange between Boba Fett and the Shell Hutt. Throughout the galaxy, the treachery and outright malice that Hutts showed toward any who found themselves in one of their windowless palaces was proverbial. Zuckuss had heard things about how the infamous Jabba, the preeminent Huttese crime lord, went through so-called guests and the more disposable type of servants that made his flesh crawl. That was the difference, Zuckuss supposed, between Boba Fett and a creature like this Gheeta. Fett didn't go out of his way to hurt or even kill anyone-if it hap pened, it happened-whereas Hutts in general took an active delight in other creatures' suffering.

"There are some," said Boba Fett, "who would take an interest in Dinnid's happiness equal to your own."

"Ah, yes." The massive head at the forward end of the repulsor-borne cylinder nodded. "Dinnid's former employers. I take it that you're here on their behalf?"

"I'm here on no one's behalf but my own."

"But of course." Gheeta's smile expanded enough to reveal his wet, flickering tongue. "I really expected nothing else. Altruism is in short supply among the practitioners of your trade. I imagine it's the same for your friends here." One of the little crablike hands raised and gestured at the others in the Slave J's holding area. "Rather an intimidating crew, don't you think, Fett? It makes the heart inside my casing tremble just to look at them." Gheeta peered more closely at Bossk. "Let's see ... you're Cradossk's son, aren't you?"

Bossk's eyes were two razor slits, his voke a low snarl. "What's that matter to you?" "You really are his son." Gheeta widened his eyes in mock fright. "Give the old reptile my best regards the next time you see him. "Which shouldn't be too long from now." The Shell Hutt rotated himself back toward Boba Fett. "Because if you think I'm going to let an obviously vicious bunch like this come sailing down to Circumtore, then you've got a few circuits blown inside that helmet of yours, Fett."

The remark produced no reaction in its target. "We can hardly discuss the matter out here," said Boba Fett.

"I make it a rule to talk business only when the merchandise is on the table, so to speak."

"I have to warn you." The claws of the little mechanical hands clicked against each other again. "This is very expensive merchandise we're talking about."

"That makes it all the more profitable, then." Fett indicated the other bounty hunters. "And that's. why we've come here."

"I can believe that, well enough." Gheeta used one of the claws to scratch the almost boneless flesh of his chin. "I just don't know if you've really changed your ways, my dear Fett, regarding just how you acquire your profitable merchandise. I had heard, naturally, about your having joined the Bounty Hunters Guild-and I must admit that all of my clan on Circumtore were surprised by the news. Getting old and tired, are we, Fett?"

"Not tired." Boba Fett gave a slow shake of his head.

"Just smart."

"Smart for you, no doubt." The Shell Hutt broadcast his sly, insinuating smile around at the others. "I wonder, though ... just what your new-found friends here get out of the deal."

Zuckuss found himself gazing straight into the Shell Hutt's eyes as the floating cylinder turned his way. The same sensation came over him as when he had felt the tracking systems of D'harhan's laser cannon locking onto him, calculating the precise angle and force necessary for his destruction. The pupils of Gheeta's eyes were like narrow windows into a realm of avarice, the slow and certain calculus of insatiable appetites. Getting blown away-literally, into disconnected atoms-by a laser bolt would be mercifully quick by comparison.

Another feeling, even more disquieting, moved inside Zuckuss that the dark pupils regarding him with such amused contempt were not windows, but mirrors into his own heart. Little creature, he could hear Gheeta speaking inside his head, I am what you would like to be. All mouth and gut and hunger. In this cold galaxy, the commandment of Eat or Be Eaten prevailed, from the throne of Emperor Palpatine all the way down to the smallest carnivore, a Tatooinian womp rat, scuttling across an empty desert.

His heart dwindled within himself, from that moment of recognition in the Shell Hutt's eyes. There had been others who had lived and fought, their struggles guided by a different code; there had been a time when even he had listened to tales of the Jedi Knights defending the old Republic. But those are fust stories now, Zuckuss told himself. Those days, and the brave creatures that had lived in them, were never coming back. And without them, the Rebels fighting against the Empire were poor, pathetic fools, doomed to failure. Their bones would be picked clean and discarded on the battlefields of worlds without names. The hungry ones, with their greed and lust for dominion, would always win... .

Bleak, wordless meditation ended as the Shell Hutt's knowing, judging smile moved away from him. Pull yourself together, Zuckuss told himself. He had made his pact with the universe he'd found himself in; he was a bounty hunter now, and had been so long enough to be traveling in league with some of the toughest ones in the galaxy.

If he showed any signs of weakness at this point, he knew, he wouldn't have to worry about Emperor Palpatine or any of the Shell Hutts; his own colleagues would tear him apart. A carnivore like Bossk would very likely con sume him, in the exact and literal sense of the word.

That thought made Zuckuss feel at least a little better about having become part of old Cradossk's intricate scheming. Better you than me, he thought, glancing over at Bossk.

"Don't worry about us." That was Bossk's voice, giving a snarling reply to Gheeta. "We can take care of ourselves."

"I'm sure you can." The Shell Hutt didn't stop smiling. "After all ... you're learning from the master, aren't you? Boba Fett has always done very well for himself."

"I would be doing even better," said Fett, "if we could limit our discussion to that which we came here for. Specifically, that merchandise known as Oph Nar Dinnid."

"But that merchandise isn't on the table right now, is it?" Gheeta's large eyes emitted a spark of anger.

"And it's not going to be. Not out here, at least. You want to discuss the fate of our guest, you will indeed have to come down to Circumtore to do it-just as you wish. I'm only here to explain how things are in that regard. I'm giving you the conditions, not cutting the deal."

"Why not?" Zuckuss spoke up. "I don't get it. The other members of your clan wouldn't have sent you out here if you didn't have some kind of authority to speak for them. If they'd just wanted to send us some message, they could've comm'd it out here or sent some flunky of a different species, like a Twi'lek or something. So why mess around? If you're willing to talk about Dinnid at all, why not do it here?"

The smile on the broad, jowly face turned into a sneer. "Your colleague Boba Fett wouldn't ask such a stupid question. A question which has an equally simple answer. We're all aboard the Slave I right now, aren't we? The Slave I is Boba Fett's ship; he controls it. So as long as we're here, he controls the discussion as well. There have been times when discussions with Boba Fett have gotten ... a little ugly. Things start out nice and friendly, and then they just ... change somehow."

Gheeta feigned mulling over that statement. "Probably because the parties involved couldn't come to an agreement about the value and price of the merchandise being discussed." He glanced over at Fett. "You always like to get things as cheaply as possible, don't you?"

Boba Fett made no reply.

"Cheaply," continued Gheeta, "as far as credits are concerned. When it comes to violence ... well, that's another story, isn't it?" The floating cylinder turned, bringing the Shell Hutt's face back toward Zuckuss.

"That's when your colleague has rather a free hand.

Especially when other creatures' skins are involved. And the blood-that can also get a little thick to wade through, when Boba Fett's around." Another shift in angle brought Gheeta's face toward the bounty hunters in general. "So if you think I'm going to remain here, in the heart of Fett's traveling circus of destruction, surrounded by his friends-or if not his friends, then creatures with whom he's come to a certain business arrangement-and talk about the merchandise in question, let alone actually bring that merchandise here ..."

Gheeta's jowls wobbled against the cylinder's gleaming collar as he shook his head. "Then it's not just Boba Fett who's gone a little insane. You're all not in sync with reality if you think that's going to happen."

A low growl came from the doorless holding cage.

"You've said your piece?" Bossk folded his arms across his chest.

Gheeta looked over at the Trandoshan. "Yes, I have."

"And now you're going to be on your way?"

"As charming as your company is, I see no reason for wasting any more of your time or mine."

"What makes you think we're going to let you leave?"

A weary sigh escaped from the Shell Hutt as he rolled his eyes toward the top of the holding area, "I really expected better from any companions of yours, Fett. Do you want to tell him or should I?" "He leaves when he wants to," said Boba Fett. He turned the hard gaze of his visored helmet toward the holding cage. "First of all, the merchandise we came here for is still down on Circumtore. Anything unpleasant we do to the negotiator that the Shell Hutts sent out will just make it harder to accomplish anything later, when we actually go on-planet."

Bossk laid his hand on the grip of his blaster.

"Maybe we should just worry about that when we get down there. I don't see any big difference between taking care of one canned Hutt and a whole world full of them."

"There's more inside that can than one Hutt. I've dealt with their negotiators before. They never send one out that isn't packed with high-thermal explosives."

"You see?" One of the mechanical hands beneath Gheeta's floating cylinder gestured theatrically toward Boba Fett. "That's why he's at the top of the bounty- hunter profession. It's why he's lasted so long, while others have met tragically untimely deaths. Because he's learned that other creatures can be just as clever ...

and violent, if need be." The thin metal arm telescoped outward so that the crab-like hand could reach up to an access hatch at the midpoint of the cylinder's tapered length. One claw pried open the hatch, revealing a ticking mechanism wired into several flat bricks of a dull gray substance.

From where he stood, Zuckuss could see the emblem and coding symbols of one of the Imperial Navy's main armaments dumps. The explosive charges had obviously been stolen, or smuggled out by some enterprising accomplice-but they were still more than lethal. Just looking at that much destructive force made Zuckuss's breath catch in the tubes dangling from his face mask.

IG-88 had also scanned the explosives, from where it stood next to Bossk. "It would be advisable," announced the droid, "if no one made an attempt to forcibly defuse the triggering mechanism. It has obviously been wired with a detect-and-destruct subsystem to prevent just such an occurrence."

"Of course." Gheeta looked pleased with himself. "As Fett indicated to you, Shell Hutt negotiators don't come into this kind of situation unprepared. If any of you were so foolish as to lay a finger on me, or this little present I came with, then the consequences would be of astronomical significance." His lipless smile broadened.

"A glowing cloud of radioactive dust ... perhaps they'd even be able to see it back at the Bounty Hunters Guild.

So at least your friends would know what had become of you."

"I think ... we can all be reasonable about this."

Zuckuss hastened to spe ak; on the other side of the holding area, Bossk looked furious enough to fling himself at the Shell Hutt and start pulling wires on the explosives, no matter what the consequences might be.

"Nobody's going to prevent you from leaving whenever you want."

"Good." Gheeta gave an appreciative nod to Zuckuss.

"You, at least, show some intelligence. Keep it up, and someday you might reach the same lofty pinnacle in your trade that Boba Fett has." The crablike hand folded the little hatch back down and sealed it in place. "This thing itches abominably. I'll be glad to be rid of it."

The hand scratched at the metal door. "I'll take my departure now. Though I imagine it won't be very long until we all see each other again-down on Circumtore, of course."

The Shell Hutt's tapered casing rotated 180 degrees so that it was facing the transfer hatchway. Without being bidden, Zuckuss hurried to the controls at the side.

As the hatch irised open, Gheeta turned the floating cylinder just enough", that he could look back at Boba Fett and the other bounty hunters. "Of course," he said blandly, "that's up to you. About whether we do business or not. Because I have to tell you-we take a very dim view of creatures coming to visit us if they bring along the kind of firepower that you like to carry around."

The cylinder moved through the fully open hatchway.

It sealed shut with a hiss; a few seconds later the mechanical noises of the negotiator's ship disengaging were audible. In the small viewport, the craft could be seen as it began traveling back down to Circumtore.

Bossk, looking as angry as before, stepped out of the doorless holding cage. "What was that last bit supposed to mean?"

"It's simple." Boba Fett grasped one of the ladder's rungs. "Like everything with the Shell Hutts." He started up toward the Slave Fs cockpit. "We're going to go down and talk business, and we'll do it unarmed. They'll send a shuttle for us to go on-world, and we'll leave all our weapons right here."

"You're joking!" Bossk stared after him in amazement.

"I'm not going down there defenseless!"

"That's up to you." At the cockpit hatchway, Boba Fett halted and looked back down at the Trandoshan.

"There's an alternative, of course. We can eliminate you from the team right now." He drew his blaster from his hip and aimed it at Bossk. "You decide."

A few seconds passed before Bossk finally gave a slow nod. "All right," he said. "You win. That's how we'll play it." An ugly sneer formed on his face. "But there's a slight problem. What about him?"

Zuckuss and the others turned in the direction to which Bossk's gesture pointed. At the side of the Slave I's holding area, silent and waiting, stood the massive shape of D'harhan. The tracking systems of the laser cannon, bonded inseparably to his torso, looked toward Fett.

"Even him," Fett said quietly. "He's going with us as well."

D'harhan punched a string of words into his voice box and turned the device away from himself. "you would have to kill me," it spoke aloud. "to render me weaponless."

The voice had sounded like thunder beneath the roiling clouds of steam. The laser cannon's tracking systems gazed hard at Boba Fett as the next words were displayed.

there is no DIFFERENCE... BETWEEN ME AND MY WEAPONS.

"Maybe..." With growing unease, Zuckuss let his gaze move up the enormous figure. The yellow lights on the side of the laser-cannon housing were darkening, as though they were about to shift to the red of imminent destruction. "Maybe we don't really need to take him with us. I mean ... if we're just going down to Circumtore to talk ... that's not really his specialty, is it?"

"No one is being left behind," Fett stated with cold finality. "The whole team is going. That's the plan."

"Whose plan?" demanded Bossk.

"Mine." Another simple, flat statement. "That's the only one that matters." Boba Fett turned back toward D'harhan. "I know better than anyone that to remove your weapon would be the same as killing you; I haven't forgotten about these things. I was there when you became as you are now. So I also know other things that your weapon can be rendered nonfunctional, incapable of firing, by a relatively simple procedure. The removal of the light-mass core alone will do it. And then the Shell Hutts will have no basis for refusing you permission to enter their world."

Zuckuss flattened himself against the holding area's bulkhead as he watched D'harhan rising to his full height, the top of the laser-cannon housing scraping the durasteel ceiling. The light inside the space seemed to dim, as though the creature's expanding form were swallowing it up. D'harhan's chest, the remaining fleshand- blood part of it, swelled outward, thrusting forward the curved gearing of the weapon mount welded to his breastbone; his shoulders pulled back, arms tensing at his sides, one hand clenching into a fist, the other still holding the muted voice box. Through clouds of hissing steam, the oiled metal of the pistons gleamed like naked sword blades; the indicator lights along the laser cannon's barrel burned a fiery, nebulous red. Now it's going to happen-fear twisted sicken-ingly in Zuckuss's gut. We're all going to die. Mesmerized, he watched as Boba Fett stepped up in front of D'harhan, the red light blurring through the steam and silhouetting him as though by fire seen through ominous storm clouds.

"you're wrong." D'harhan raised the voice box toward Fett. "IT won't be easy at all."

"I am aware of his meaning." A trace of fear sounded in even the droid IG-88's voice. "The light-mass core is shielded behind a grid of protective interlocks-that is standard for weapons of the class he bears, to prevent just such tampering. Removal is ill-advised, even for a skilled armory technician. You could trigger an overload destruct sequence that would destroy this ship even more thoroughly than the Shell Hutt's explosive charges would have."

"Listen to it," pleaded Bossk. "You're going to kill us all-"

"I know what I'm doing." Boba Fett spoke with an unnervingly icy calm. "Do not interfere-if you value your lives."

"do you know?" Another cloud of steam hissed from the laser cannon's mounting as the tracking systems narrowed their focus on the man standing in front of them. "the weapon is my spirit. when you take THAT BY WHICH I KILL

OTHERS ... THEN YOU KILL ME."

"It will only seem that way," said Boba Fett.

"There's a difference between this death and true death."

Slowly, he reached up toward the glistening machinery whose coils were buried deep in D'harhan's chest. "Trust me."

"Fett ... don't ..."

Whether it was his own voice or one of the others, Zuckuss could no longer tell. Flinching from certain doom, he averted his face; the last thing he saw was Boba Fett shrouded in steam, one hand sinking into the coils and wires nested beneath the laser cannon's mounting, as though the bounty hunter were a battlefield surgeon performing a crude, septic heart transplant. With a screech of grinding metal from the geared wheel, the weapon's barrel convulsively angled upward, the tracking systems blindly defocusing, as though a pain voltage beyond the reach of mortal anesthesia had coursed through D'harhan's embedded circuitry. The indicator lights pulsed and flared even brighter than before; Zuckuss could hear someone, probably Bossk, diving to the gridded floor of the holding area, as though there were any chance of hiding from the firepower that would rip the Slave I apart.

With all muscles involuntarily tensed, crouching against the bulkhead, Zuckuss awaited the harsh, deafening noise that he knew would be the last thing he would ever hear.

Instead, there was silence, ended by a sighing emission of steam, as though from a dying machine, the source of its energy shut off by a single valve.

He looked up, bringing his eyes away from his own lowered forearm. The red lights that had burned through the steam mist were gone now; as Zuckuss watched, the inert metal of the laser cannon shifted angle, its dark barrel slowly inching down from its ceiling-high trajectory. The blank voice box swung on a cord from D'harhan's waist as his black-gloved hands trembled open, palms outward. His knees buckled, diminishing the massive form that had reared up inside the ship's holding area, turning him into something weaker and more human than ma chine. D'harhan collapsed onto the floor, rolling heavily onto one broad shoulder, the muzzle of the laser cannon scraping an arc across the floor, ending at the tip of Boba Fett's boot.

Zuckuss's gaze broke from the silenced weapon and turned toward the other bounty hunter. Boba Fett hadn't moved from where he had been standing, as though the fall of the laser cannon was an ocean tide that he knew would break harmlessly upon the shore, millimeters away from him. In Fett's hand, the one that had reached into the intricate lock and coil of D'harhan's chest, was a dull metal rod, less than half a meter long, thick enough to fill the grip fastened upon it. When Fett dropped it with a leaden clang, the residual heat from the weapon's reactor core brought a final sizzling puff of steam from the water vapor that had collected on the grid's surface.

The barrel of the laser cannon lifted, moving with crippled d ifficulty. D'harhan's tracking systems focused upon Boba Fett standing above him; one hand grasped the voice box and slowly thumbed in a few words.

you owe me. D'harhan raised the silent communication device. big time.

Boba Fett said nothing, but turned away and strode toward the ladder leading to the cockpit. He halted with one boot on the bottom rung and looked over at the others watching him. "They're already waiting for us," he said quietly. "Down on Circum-tore."

Then he was gone. Zuckuss looked over at Bossk, just now getting to his feet in the doorless holding cage.

"We're lucky," said Zuckuss, "to be alive."

Bossk glanced up, toward the empty hatchway of the cockpit, then back down. The thin smile he gave Zuckuss contained at least a small particle of admiration.

"I suppose we'll find out"-Bossk slowly nodded, his gaze narrowing-"just how lucky we are... ."

"What exactly is the history between you and the Shell Hutts?" Zuckuss wasn't asking just to pass the time. Sitting at last on the surface of Circumtore, surrounded by the durasteel-plated Hutts and, even worse, their various guards and mercenaries, he felt no less endangered than before. It just keeps getting worse, Zuckuss mused gloomily to himself. Pretty soon he'd be wishing that everyone on this intrepid little team had gotten blown to spiraling, whistling atoms. "I mean ...

the way that the negotiator talked ..."

Boba Fett stood with his arms crossed, watching the Shell Hutts' customs inspectors poking through the interior of the Slave I. They weren't looking for contraband-which was something that the Shell Hutts, like all the members of the species, had no aversion to, as long as they got their piece of the action-but were combing the ship and its passengers for undeclared weaponry. Without his usual panoply of rocket launchers and other means of destruction, Fett looked even more dangerous, oddly enough; as though his simmering anger were some newly aroused lethal force, provoked by the intrusion on his personal domain.

"Hutts say all sorts of things." Boba Fett didn't turn toward Zuckuss as he spoke. "There's a lot of it you can safely ignore. A lot of creatures in the galaxy believe that all the Huttese are efficient businessmen, with nothing but credits on their minds, but they're not.

They spend too much time brooding about the past, keeping old scores. Bearing grudges. That kind of emotion always gets in the way of true rationality."

Nobody would ever make that kind of assessment, Zuckuss figured, of Boba Fett. The more time he spent anywhere near Fett, the more he was impressed-and appalled by the cold calculations taking place inside that visored helmet. Even over something like the team disarming itself for its landing on the Shell Hutts'

world; if Boba Fett was willing to go along with that, it must mean his intricately worked-out plans included this factor, accounted for it in some way. We might make it back out of here alive, thought Zuckuss. Or at least some of us might. The plans that he had let himself become part of- Cradossk's plans-called for one death out here, if not more.

"It seemed kind of specific, though. What Gheeta said." Zuckuss tried again. "When he was talking about what happened before. Is there some kind of old score to settle between you and the Shell Hutts?"

The customs inspectors-multilegged droids, bristling with inspection probes and energy-level meters-continued their inspection of the Slave I. Their black, spidery forms could be seen through the ship's open hatches and up inside the transparent shielding of the cockpit. One of the inspectors lay crumpled in pieces, a few lights still forlornly blinking, on the thrust-scarred landing dock. That one had been a little too brusque in frisking the Trandoshan Bossk for any concealed weapons, and had paid the price in quick, bolt-snapping disassembly.

"Nothing you have to worry about," said Boba Fett.

"It's a personal thing. Actually, between me and Gheeta.

There was a time when he wasn't a mere negotiator, being sent out on those kinds of errands to ships seeking permission to land. He was very high up in the Shell Hutt hierarchy. That was why he was in charge of the design and construction of the on-planet terminal and diplomatic reception site- basically, everything you see around you here." Fett gestured with one raised hand; past the landing dock's archways could be seen a complex of inter linked spires and domes. "His budget allowed for a nearly unlimited expenditure of capital, including the hiring of one of the top freelance architects in the galaxy. A man named Emd Grahvess-"

"I've heard of him." Zuckuss actually had, though he couldn't remember from just where.

"There may be better ones, but if there are, they'd be working for Emperor Palpatine, or someone like Prince Xizor. Exclusively. So Grahvess was the top of the line for the Shell Hutts, and Gheeta knew it; that's why he hired him. The only problem was that Gheeta had other plans for Grahvess, once the project was completed; unfortunately for Gheeta, Grahvess was no fool. He knew how dangerous it can be, working for any kind of Hutt.

They don't like paying up, and they like having things that no one else can have. If they can't buy exclusivity, they have ... other ways of achieving it. And that's what Grahvess found out that when this job was done, he wouldn't be taking on any others." Fett glanced over at Zuckuss. "Ever."

"That's kind of cold," said Zuckuss. "Having somebody killed, right after he's done some great job for you."

"Get used to it. It happens to bounty hunters as well-if they're not careful." Boba Fett gave a slow nod.

"This galaxy is full of treachery. There's no one you can really trust... ."

Words to live by, thought Zuckuss. Or die. "So what happened to this architect, this Grahvess person? Did Gheeta manage to have him killed or not?"

"Not." Satisfaction was audible in that single word from Boba Fett. "Because Grahvess was just a little bit smarter than Gheeta. Smart enough to contact me and propose a mutually satisfactory business arrangement." "Like what?"

"You don't need to know all the details." Boba Fett continued to watch the customs inspectors stalking around inside the Slave I. "At least not yet. Let's just say that Grahvess and I had everything worked out well before his work here on Circumtore was completed. So that Gheeta and his hench creatures never had a shot at him.

Essentially, Grahvess put out a bounty on himself. A

nice, fat one, which I was only too happy to collect by making a quick raid here and snatching him away, right out from Gheeta's hands. That's the main reason why the Shell Hutts' security procedures are so tight now; they don't want a repeat of that kind of action. Makes them look foolish. Hutts can't stand that."

"Pretty clever." Zuckuss nodded in appreciation. "The only one that winds up screwed is this Gheeta. The architect gets to keep his life, and you get the credits.

Smart."

"I got more than that out of it."

Zuckuss studied the other bounty hunter in puz zlement. "What more would you want out of it than credits?" He couldn't imagine any other incentive for someone like Fett.

"An investment. So to speak." Boba Fett watched the Shell Hutts' customs-inspection droids emerging from the ship. "That pays off later. In a big way."

There wasn't time for Zuckuss to ask what that meant.

The inspectors spider-legged their way toward the waiting bounty hunters. A couple of the droids lagged behind and began picking up the scattered wreckage of their forcibly disassembled companion, the broken circuits of its main sensory input/ output box still buzzing and moaning.

"Thank you for your cooperation." The lead inspector droid halted in front of Boba Fett. "Our examination of your craft shows no hidden armaments of a force sufficient to disturb the peace and tranquillity of Circumtore."

Zuckuss would have been surprised if the inspector droids had found anything like that. He and IG-88-Bossk had still been unhelpfully sulking over having to lay down his own weapons-had assisted Boba Fett in removing either whole systems or essential parts of them from the Slave I's arsenal, and then packing and sealing them into the coded-access freight container that was now in orbit above the surface of Circumtore, awaiting Fett's return.

When that procedure had been completed, the ship had been rendered as defenseless-and more significantly for the Shell Hutts, offenseless-as any unarmed cargo shuttle plodding among the stars.

The bounty hunters' personal weapons had been another matter; those they had brought with them to Circumtore, handing them over directly to the customs-inspection droids. "Here is your receipt for the items we are holding in storage for you." One of the lead inspectors pried open a slender pouch beneath its multilensed eyes and extracted a miniature holoprojector. "If you'd care to check it over and make sure that we haven't forgotten anything ..."

Boba Fett took the device and thumbed it on. The shimmering visual field winked into existence in front of him and Zuckuss, with a scrolling depiction of the bounty hunters' various weapons. It was a long list. Boba Fett gave it no more than a cursory glance before extinguishing the hologra m. "Looks complete."

"Very well." The lead inspector extended one of its optic stalks straight up and swiveled its small lens around to see how the others were coming along with the bits and pieces of the one that Bossk had taken apart. A

few last segments were being tucked into an inert-mesh sack, from which the droid's muffled complaints were barely audible. The inspector returned its attention to Boba Fett. "If you'll hold on to that and present it to the landing master when you're ready to leave, all items will be returned to you." A dark oil stain and a couple of glittering, broken transistors were all that were left on the surface of the dock. "It's been a pleasure to serve you."

Canned formalities always sounded even more canned when they came from droids; Zuckuss was glad to see the customs-inspection droids leave, stalking their way delicately across the landing dock, dragging their bagged comrade behind themselves.

As the inspection squadron left the landing dock Bossk came striding over, followed by IG-88. The droid looked as unemotional as ever, but burning resentment showed in Bossk's eyes. "So this is your great plan?" He made a quick, dismissive gesture at the blaster holster hanging empty by his side. "Now we're stuck down here on the Shell Hutts' planet, and if they decide to send their thugs around to kill us, there won't be a thing we'll be able to do about it." He shook his head in disgust. "I don't see why you needed a team to go along with you. If you just wanted to get yourself knocked off, you could have done it on your own just as easily."

Boba Fett regarded the Trandoshan in silence. "You know," he said finally, "I'm going to give you something free. That doesn't happen very often. Even when it's just good advice-I usually let other creatures learn by just suffering the consequences of their actions."

"Yeah?" Bossk sneered at him. "So what's your good advice?"

"Stop whining. Before you really get me irritated." Fett turned toward the other bounty hunters. "Let's get going. Gheeta sent me a message while the ship was being inspected. The Shell Hutts have already prepared a reception for us."

"I just bet they have," grumbled Bossk under his breath. Fett ignored the remark, if he had heard it at all.

IG-88 crossed in front of Zuckuss, following after Boba Fett and toward the open-topped ground shuttle that would take them into the center of Circumtore's administrative complex. Zuckuss drew back even farther as the massive shape of D'harhan trod heavily forward, the barrel of the laser cannon, now rendered inert and harmless, slanting disconsolately, the tip of its muzzle almost scraping against the landing dock's surface. The stilled weapon's tracking systems were switched off, as though the half-humanoid, half-mechanical creature was some slow beast following the voice of the master that had blinded it.

"What do you think's going to happen?"

The voice startled Zuckuss; he snapped his head around and saw Bossk standing next to him, leaning down to speak close to his ear. Zuckuss had been immersed too deep in his thoughts, reflecting on how the altered D'harhan looked like the last survivor of some otherwise extinct saurian species, dragging its age-heavy bones and rusting metal armor to the burial ground of its kin.

Bossk had stepped beside him while he was still wondering what had been the point of bringing D'harhan along on this job, if Boba Fett had known all along that the laser cannon's core-D'harhan's spirit, or as much of one as he might have possessed-would need to be extracted. It struck Zuckuss as a needlessly cruel thing to have done to an old comrade; something that he would never have imagined Fett capable of doing.

"Don't ask me." Zuckuss glanced over at Bossk and gave a shrug, lifting his gloved hands to indicate his complete bafflement. "I haven't got a clue about what's going on." Things had seemed a lot simpler back at the Bounty Hunters Guild when he'd agreed to become part of Cradossk's plans-not that those were anything he felt like telling to Bossk. They'd only gotten more complicated since then. And dangerous; the confidence he'd felt at one time, that he'd survive all this just by sticking close to Boba Fett, had been seriously eroded.

Fett packing his personal arsenal of blasters and rocket launchers was one thing; a disarmed Fett leading all of the team right into the center of Fett's grudge-bearing enemies was another. Maybe Bossk is right, mused Zuckuss.

Maybe Fett is going to get us all killed. Another thought struck him Maybe that had been Cradossk's plan all along. The old Trandoshan hadn't been out just to get his own son eliminated, but a couple more of the Guild's young upstarts as well. Zuckuss could see why Cradossk and some of the other Guild elders would want to get rid of the coldly efficient droid IG-88, but he would have been surprised to find that anyone thought that he himself was at that level. And even if that were Cradossk's plan, where would Boba Fett hook up with it?

Was Fett just leading Bossk and the other bounty hunters into a prearranged trap-which would mean that somehow Cradossk had gotten the Shell Hutts in on the scheme; how likely was that?-or had the galaxy's smartest and toughest bounty hunter somehow been fooled as well, and Fett was about to get eliminated along with the rest of the team? Or ...

The brain behind the insectoid eyes started to throb painfully as more and more possibilities swirled within.

If he did get killed here on Circum-tore, Zuckuss hoped it wouldn't be before he had at least figured out part of what was going on. He was beginning to doubt the wisdom of having even wanted to become a bounty hunter.

"I suppose," growled Bossk, "we'll find out. One way or another."

"Maybe." The others of the team were waiting beside the ground shuttle; Zuckuss nodded toward them. "We better get going." He conquered his reluctance enough to start walking.

Even before the shuttle lifted on its repulsor beams and slid toward the Shell Hutts' spired buildings, Zuckuss had a revelation. He could see his face mask, air tubes dangling, reflected in the dark metal of D'harhan's silent, impotent laser cannon. It doesn't matter, realized Zuckuss suddenly. Whether we have weapons or not. Whatever was going to happen-which of them would die and which of them would live-would happen whether they were ready for it or not.

There was one of them who might be ready. Zuckuss looked toward Boba Fett, sitting in the front of the shuttle. If anybody was going to survive, it would be him.

That thought, even with all its embodied certainty, didn't make Zuckuss feel any better.

along. The old Trandoshan hadn't been out just to get his own son eliminated, but a couple more of the Guild's young upstarts as well. Zuckuss could see why Cradossk and some of the other Guild elders would want to get rid of the coldly efficient droid IG-88, but he would have been surprised to find that anyone thought that he himself was at that level. And even if that were Cradossk's plan, where would Boba Fett hook up with it?

Was Fett just leading Bossk and the other bounty hunters into a prearranged trap-which would mean that somehow Cradossk had gotten the Shell Hutts in on the scheme; how likely was that?-or had the galaxy's smartest and toughest bounty hunter somehow been fooled as well, and Fett was about to get eliminated along with the rest of the team? Or ...

The brain behind the insectoid eyes started to throb painfully as more and more possibilities swirled within.

If he did get killed here on Circum-tore, Zuckuss hoped it wouldn't be before he had at least figured out part of what was going on. He was beginning to doubt the wisdom of having even wanted to become a bounty hunter.

"I suppose," growled Bossk, "we'll find out. One way or another."

"Maybe." The others of the team were waiting beside the ground shuttle; Zuckuss nodded toward them. "We better get going." He conquered his reluctance enough to start walking.

Even before the shuttle lifted on its repulsor beams and slid toward the Shell Hutts' spired buildings, Zuckuss had a revelation. He could see his face mask, air tubes dangling, reflected in the dark metal of D'harhan's silent, impotent laser cannon. It doesn't matter, realized Zuckuss suddenly. Whether we have weapons or not. Whatever was going to happen-which of them would die and which of them would live-would happen whether they were ready for it or not.

There was one of them who might be ready. Zuckuss looked toward Boba Fett, sitting in the front of the shuttle. If anybody was going to survive, it would be him.

That thought, even with all its embodied certainty, didn't make Zuckuss feel any better.

is strictly business for us. I would appreciate it if we could get straight to it."

"All in good time, my dear Fett." The tapering end of the cylinder pointed toward the farther reaches of the hall, its high-vaulted roof interlaced with golden traceries and ornamental center bosses. "You are too dismissive of both pleasure and the past-the pleasures of the flesh, that we can enjoy now, and the memories of that past we share."

IG-88 and the shorter figure of Zuckuss came up on either side of Fett, the droid scanning the space with methodical thoroughness, the other bounty hunter glancing around with nervous apprehension. With a slower and more ponderous tread, D'harhan loomed up behind.

"The past is over," said Boba Fett. The Shell Hutt's wobbling face, protruding from the collar of the repulsorborne cylinder, evoked a cold revulsion inside him. "If not for you, then it is for me."

"I wonder about that." Gheeta raised one of the cylinder's mechanical hands, using the point of its claw to scratch a deep fold in his chin. "How much do creatures ever forget? I hope you'll excuse me for waxing philosophical-I know how impatient you become-but sometimes I feel that nothing is forgotten. Everything remains buried, deeply or just beneath the surface, just waiting for its certain resurrection, to be brought out into the light once more."

Boba Fett could decipher the meaning behind the Shell Hutt's words. What he's saying, thought Fett, is that he hasn't forgotten. The reminder about the past and what it contained, back aboard the Slave I, hadn't been enough to indicate how fiercely that humiliation burned in Gheeta's memory. If one looked past all his cloying and ingratiating manners, the show of welcome here on Circumtore, the desire for vengeance could be plainly seen.

And counted on. He's got his plans, thought Boba Fett, and I've got mine.

For a split second, as Fett gazed back into Gheeta's broad, half-lidded eyes, he wondered if there was another meaning to what the Shell Hutt had spoken. Resurrection

... brought out into the light ...

When one played a dangerous game, there was always the possibility that the opponent was one move ahead.

Fett knew that in this game, that would mean death. If he found out, mused Fett as he searched Gheeta's massive face for any clue. If he's figured out everything that happened here, in the past. Then the game was already over; there would be no more moves to play, just the sweeping of the broken pieces from the board. Those pieces would include himself and the other bounty hunters that he had brought here with him. And maybe one more...

Whatever happens, decided Boba Pert as he gazed unflinching into the dark centers of Gheeta's eyes.

Whatever happens-he's going with me.

"But enough of all that." The floating cylinder that encased Gheeta rotated slightly, so that one of the mechanical hands could gesture toward the center of the reception hall. "As you have so forcefully reminded me, this is-alas!-more a business occasion than a social one.

Let us proceed; there are others here who are more than eager to meet with you and your companions."

"After you," said Boba Fett. "They're your species, not mine."

Years ago he had picked up some profitable mer chandise on a backwater world where the dominant form of long-distance transportation had been lighter-than-air freighters-slow and immense, tapered ovoid dirigibles, filled with helium and other buoyant gases. The planet's skies had been filled with the craft, like elongated silvery moons, their crew gondolas and cargo containers slung underneath their curved and shaded bellies. That was what Cir-cumtore's great reception hall reminded Fett of; there were a dozen Shell Hutts besides Gheeta, the riveted cylinders floating on their repulsor beams, turning and bumping into each other with graceless sloth.

At the front end of each cylinder protruded another bejowled Huttese face, like a wad of some unpleasant organic substance that had been inserted in the circular metal collar. Some of the Shell Hutt faces appeared younger than Gheeta, their large eyes glittering with avarice, slit nostrils flared by the trace scents on which their constant appetites fastened. The younger ones' encasing cylinders were smaller as that he had brought here with him. And maybe one more...

Whatever happens, decided Boba Pert as he gazed unflinching into the dark centers of Gheeta's eyes.

Whatever happens-he's going with me.

"But enough of all that." The floating cylinder that encased Gheeta rotated slightly, so that one of the mechanical hands could gesture toward the center of the reception hall. "As you have so forcefully reminded me, this is-alas!-more a business occasion than a social one.

Let us proceed; there are others here who are more than eager to meet with you and your companions."

"After you," said Boba Fett. "They're your species, not mine."

Years ago he had picked up some profitable mer chandise on a backwater world where the dominant form of long-distance transportation had been lighter-than-air freighters-slow and immense, tapered ovoid dirigibles, filled with helium and other buoyant gases. The planet's skies had been filled with the craft, like elongated silvery moons, their crew gondolas and cargo containers slung underneath their curved and shaded bellies. That was what Cir-cumtore's great reception hall reminded Fett of; there were a dozen Shell Hutts besides Gheeta, the riveted cylinders floating on their repulsor beams, turning and bumping into each other with graceless sloth.

At the front end of each cylinder protruded another bejowled Huttese face, like a wad of some unpleasant organic substance that had been inserted in the circular metal collar. Some of the Shell Hutt faces appeared younger than Gheeta, their large eyes glittering with avarice, slit nostrils flared by the trace scents on which their constant appetites fastened. The younger ones' encasing cylinders were smaller as metal bits connected to a web of thin, high-tension strands fastened to the top edge of the cylinder. If not for that support, the old Shell Hutts' eyes and nostrils would have been buried beneath avalanches of their own slack flesh.

As Boba Fett and the other bounty hunters approached, the largest of the repulsor-borne cylinders turned majestically, like an interstellar luxury ship being maneuvered into an off-planet berth. A low voice rumbled from the gargantuan Hutt bound by the riveted durasteel plates "I grow weary, Gheeta." The larger Shell Hutt fastened the irritable gaze of its yellowed eyes upon its clan member. "You keep us waiting ... and for what?

Some of us may still be amused, but I assure you that I am not."

Gheeta bobbed forward, the little crablike hands rising from underneath his cylinder and making fluttery gestures of mollification. "Patience will yet be rewarded, Your Magnitude. Our-ahem-guests have arrived at last. The show will begin in a moment."

" 'Show'?" Bossk scowled. "What show are you talking about? We came here on business."

"Of course, of course-just as your leader Boba Fett keeps reminding me." Gheeta turned his wide, wet-edged smile toward the Trandoshan. "Your patience will be rewarded as well, I assure you. But you've traveled so far-all of you have." The mechanical hands' gesture took in all of the bounty hunters. "And through some of the emptiest and least rewarding stretches of the galaxy. I'd hate for you to go away from here, after our business is concluded, and tell the sentient creatures of all the worlds that the Shell Hutts put out a mean and scanty table for their visitors. We have a reputation for hospitality to maintain, don't we? What would our fellow Hutts, our cousin Jabba for instance, say if he heard that we had not provided for others' famished appetites?"

"We're not hungry," said Boba Fett. "Not for anything that you're likely to serve."

"Ah-I think otherwise, my dear Fett. This meal is one that I've been preparing for a long time; a very long time. Since the last time you were here on Circumtore, and things went less than graciously... for some of us."

"More complaints." The immense Shell Hutt- his name, Fett remembered, was Nullada-rolled his yellow eyes beneath his brow's folded and sagging pouches. "Nothing but complaints," he rumbled ole-aginously. "You've been obsessed for too long a time, Gheeta. Perhaps you should be relieved of even those duties that you've retained this far so that you could take a long rest to clear your mind."

A flash of anger showed in Gheeta's face, like a lightning stroke in storm-heavy clouds. The crablike mechanical hands locked their claws together, as though preventing themselves from slashing a set of parallel bloodied furrows down the older and larger Shell Hutt's face.

"I've had time enough." Gheeta's voice was a snarling whine. "But let's not waste any more of it. Come along, then." Even with just his own jowl-wrapped face protruding from the collar of his floating cylinder, the effort required to regain control was visible. The cylinder turned slightly, angling toward the center of the great reception hall, where more of the Shell Hutts'

encased forms jostled around a rectangular dais, surrounded on all sides by low, concentric steps.

"Everything has been placed in readiness for you." The claws unclasped, allowing one of them to make a sweeping gesture toward the dais. "Shall we?"

Boba Fett didn't feel like making any further conversation with their host. He led the way toward the dais, letting the other members of the bounty-hunter team fall in behind. There were enough reflective surfaces scattered throughout the space, beams of polished durasteel supporting the domed roof above, that he could see Bossk and the droid IG-88 following his quick stride, with the Trandoshan glaring with suspicion and enmity at every one of the bobbing and floating Shell Hutts. Behind that pair, the massive shape of D'harhan trod heavily, the inert laser cannon still impressive in its glistening darkness, like an emblem of latent destruction wrapped in trails of hissing steam.

At Fett's elbow, Zuckuss trotted to keep up with him.

"I don't like the looks of this," panted the shorter bounty hunter. "I don't like the looks of this one bit-"

He knew just what Zuckuss was talking about. Around the sides of the great reception hall, from alcoves and corridors branching off the central space, other figures had appeared, ones that weren't Shell Hutts.

"Mercenaries," said Boba Fett quietly. In black, insignialess uniforms, armed and watching; if he'd wanted to, he could very likely have identified more than a few of them from past encounters. There was always a loose assemblage of thugs and venal murderers, varying in number and quality, depending mainly upon who had been killed recently and to a lesser degree upon who was rotting away in the galaxy's various penal institutions, shifting back and forth among the less civilized worlds, finding employment as enforcers and private hit men. The Shell Hutts' distant species relation, the notorious Jabba on backwater Tatooine, usually paid the highest wages and got the pick of the lot, the quickest with their chosen weapons and the least encumbered by scruples about what kind of jobs they took care of for their employer. "What else," Fett asked Zuckuss, "did you expect?"

"This many?" Still at Boba Fett's side, Zuckuss quickly scanned the perimeter of the great reception hall. "There must be a couple dozen of them. At least."

He took another count, looking past the raised dais in the middle of the space. "Maybe fifty of 'em-"

"Gheeta told us that he'd been preparing for this for a long time." Without turning his visored helmet, Boba Fett had taken his own estimate of the forces arrayed along the hall's perimeter. "He's obviously called in a lot of favors." This much firepower didn't come cheap; most of the mercenaries cradled late-model blaster rifles against their chests; Gheeta must have provided the weapons, as they were obviously more expensive than the usual cheap and nasty-if lethally efficient-gear with which mercenaries usually kitted themselves. These types disgusted Fett; they took no real pride in their equipment, the tools of their trade; if they did, they wouldn't spend s o much of their ill-gotten pay on their own bad habits. "He couldn't pay for all this himself," continued Boba Fett aloud. "Gheeta must've gone into major hock with his other clan members."

"But what for?" Zuckuss's curved eyes reflected the ominous black-clad figures. "We're unarmed-"

"I know how Gheeta's mind works. Let's just say he's not given to taking chances. Or at least," said Fett,

"not after the last time I did business with him."

Bossk had overhead the comment. "I'm ready to do business with him," the Trandoshan growled from behind Boba Fett. "Right now." His clawed hand hung close to the empty blaster holster at his side. Even without a weapon, Bossk looked ready to take on whatever army the Shell Hutts had assembled, as though he could pull each of the mercenaries apart, limb from limb, with nothing but his own brute strength. "Let's get it over with."

"It seems apparent," commented IG-88, "that your desire in that regard is about to be fulfilled."

Pushed along by his riveted casing's repulsor beams, the Shell Hutt Gheeta had floated ahead of the bounty hunters. As they reached the bottom of the steps surrounding the dais, Gheeta had already risen to the top section, where the cylinder bobbed beside a rectangular construction a little over two meters long and a quarter of that dimension in width; its surface was draped with a heavy cloth embroidered with golden thread, the corner tassels loosely knotted and flowing down the steps. On top of the cloth were towering arrangements of exotic, off-planet florals, their brilliant petals thick and heavy as flayed Tatooinian dewback hide; from their stickily wet confluence exuded cloying, opiatelike perfumes. Even through his helmet's filtration units, Boba Pert could taste the acrid molecules collecting on his tongue; they had no effect on the clarity of his own thoughts, but he saw how some of the Shell Hutts gathered closer to the dais, the pupils of their eyes narrowing as their slit nostrils widened, deeply inhaling the laden air. Their lipless mouths curved into all-encompassing pleasure.

Behind him, Boba Fett heard Bossk snort in disgust.

He knew that the Trandoshan nervous system lacked any receptor sites for the flowers' narcotic fragrance; any scent less subtle than rotting meat was wasted on him.

"Lovely." Bossk sneered. "Looks like you've got the place ready for a funeral."

"How perceptive of you!" Gheeta had perhaps inhaled too deeply, though the scent appeared to have a stimulant rather than a soporific effect on him. "Exactly so!" The floating cylinder spun about, bringing the Shell Hutt's face, luminous with toxic sweat, toward the bounty hunters. Ramping up the strength of the repulsor beams, Gheeta floated above the rank-smelling blossoms, the thick petals quivering with the unseen force. "How often, though, that we fail to understand-" The crablike mechanical hands reached down and scooped through the floral mass, gathering the bright colors and pulpy tissues to the underside of the cylinder. For a moment the crushed blossoms obscured the lower half of Gheeta's face; then his ecstatic expression was revealed again as the gleaming metal appendages flung themselves wide, scattering the flowers across the steps of the dais. "We fail to appreciate what a joyous occasion a funeral can be!"

The overripe stench of the flowers filled the inside of Boba Fett's helmet as the petals, bruised and crushed by Gheeta's mechanical arms, fell across the toes of his boots. He looked down at them for a moment, then kicked the flowers away; the heaviest of them left wet, bleeding trails across the inlaid floor of the great reception hall.

"I don't have much of a feeling for funerals," said Fett evenly. He looked up across the dais steps toward Gheeta. "One way or the other."

"Oh, but you should! You will!" Gheeta's manner became even more frenetic and excited. The cylinder vibrated as it hovered in place, as though the fever of the creature inside had somehow been transmitted to the enclosing metal. Some of the other Shell Hutts edged away from the central dais, as though fearful of an explosion; Gheeta's agitation had even pierced the stupor of those who had fallen furthest beneath the blooms' heavy fragrance. "I guarantee it!"

"Watch out," said Zuckuss in a low voice. From the corner of his sight, behind the dark visor of his helmet, Boba Fett saw Zuckuss's warning nod toward the edges of the space. But Fett was already conscious of what was happening there Some of the black-uniformed mercenaries had stepped forward from the alcoves and adjoining corridors where they had first appeared. There were other motions, of weapons being raised, the shoulder straps of the blaster rifles slackening as the barrels were swung up into firing position, the rifle butts braced against the mercenaries' hips. He could see Bossk and IG-88 turning their heads, scanning the details of the trap closing tighter around them. Zuckuss's voice sounded tight with apprehension "I think they're going to make their move... ."

Fett knew that nothing was going to happen, at least not for another few seconds; the cylindrical shapes of the Shell Hutts were still bobbing and floating around, too close to the dais and the team of off-planet bounty hunters. Even as trigger-happy as this bunch of thugs was likely to be, they would still know better than to start shooting while their employers were in the line of fire.

And besides, there was one more thing that he was absolutely sure of. Gheeta's little show wasn't over yet....

"You wanted to talk business?" The Shell Hutt's voice had spiraled up into a screech, loud enough to flutter the wattles at his pallid throat. "Fine! Let us do just that! But as you said, there's no point unless the merchandise in question is there on the table, right in front of us!"

"Gheeta ..." The elder Nullada grabbed hold of the collar of Gheeta's cylinder with a metal-clawed hand.

"Don't make more of a fool of yourself than you already have-"

"Silence!" One of Gheeta's crablike hands furiously knocked away the larger Shell Hutt's grasp. "You'll see as well! All of you!" The faces of the other Shell Hutts, protruding from the collars of the floating cylinders, turned toward Gheeta, some with expressions of muddled astonishment, others cruelly relishing the spectacle that was being played out before them. "You were all pleased enough when this scoundrel"-the claw point of one of Gheeta's hands shot out, gesturing toward Boba Fett-"when this thief stole from me that which was to be my crowning glory!" Both of the crablike mechanical hands flung upward, indicating the great reception hall's vaulted roof and all that it contained. Gheeta's maddened gaze crossed over Nullada and the other Shell Hutts. "Don't think I didn't hear your sniggering jeers and laughter! You were happy to see me fallen and disgraced, weren't you?"

Boba Fett discerned now that Gheeta's escalating shrillness was due to more than the intoxicants released by the mounds of flowers and their viscous, oozing centers. Enough of Gheeta's thick neck had protruded from his floating cylinder that a thin tube could be seen, almost buried in the folds of his gray skin; the tube ended in a surgically implanted IV tap, a needle plunged and sealed into Gheeta's bloodstream. The tube's other end was concealed inside the cylinder; Fett could surmise that it was hooked up to a time-metered dispensary module, leaking some rage-provoking stimulant through the Shell Hutt's central nervous system. Just as Boba Fett had already suspected, the sight of the pharmaceutical tube confirmed that Gheeta had prepared for this confrontation by chemically stripping out any sense of caution that might still have been lingering inside his brain. Suicidally so; with his having gone this far out of control, there would be no way that the other Shell Hutts would let him continue living and operating in their midst. There was a line beyond which honor and the desire for vengeance interfered with business, and Gheeta was now obviously well past it.

The others were getting there as well; a sense of panic tinged the air inside the great reception hall as the Shell Hutts' floating cylinders collided with each other, reversing away from the central dais, then turning and perceiving the armed and ready mercenaries stationed around the perimeter. Some of the Hutts were obviously fuddled enough by the heavy opiatelike scent of the scattered florals to have lost all reasoning ability.

That was the main reason that Boba Fett had programmed the air filters in his helmet to catch and expunge those intoxicating molecules; more than that, he had paid hefty amounts to the galaxy's finest black-market microsurgeons to have the corresponding receptor sites stripped away from the branching ends of his own nervous system.

Whatever stimulation to the pleasure centers of his brain that might have been lost thereby was more than compensated for by the control he retained in situations like this; in his business, he couldn't afford the simpleminded hysteria to which the Shell Hutts were already succumbing. From the corners of his vision, as he continued focusing on Gheeta at the top of the dais, he could discern the repulsor-borne cylinders slamming harder into each ot her, the riveted durasteel plates clanging like an atonal percussion section; the crablike mechanical hands tangled with each other and clawed at the wide-eyed, panting faces of the Shell Hutts as they twisted and spun about, rebounding in fear from the exits, blocked by the blaster-toting mercenaries.

Gheeta was caught up in a spiraling feedback loop, his own overexcited state mounting as it absorbed the frightened, lunatic pulse from the other Shell Hutts.

"And you were laughing, too! I know you were!" One of the mechanical hands slung beneath his floating cylinder suddenly jabbed toward Boba Fett, the metal shimmering with the fury of his accusation. "All the way back to whatever hole that scummy architect paid you to hide him in-" Gheeta's lipless mouth had stretched into a frenzied grimace, far enough that a trickle of blood seeped into the milky salivation leaking from its corners. "That was a good joke, Fett! But the best jokes always come with a price attached to them, don't they?"

"Ancient history," said Boba Fett. He could almost feel sorry for the Shell Hutt, locked inside an account that he could never settle to his profit. Almost, but not quite; sympathy was something else that he'd stripped from his nervous system, using the scalpel of his own transforming will. "We came here to talk about other merchandise. We're here for Oph Nar Dinnid."

"Ah, yes!" Gheeta's eyes grew wider and more maniacal as the IV tube pulsed like an artificial vein at the wattles of his neck. "And the merchandise should always be on the table, shouldn't it, before we can start dealing-that's how you want things, isn't it? Then by all means-"

The dangling mechanical hands suddenly shot forward from beneath Gheeta's encasing shell and seized hold of the edge of the dais's central platform. The remaining florals, oozing sap from their broken petals, slid from the top surface and landed wetly across the steps as the thin metal arms tensed, lifting one side of the rectangular shape. From the floating cylinder came a high- pitched whine as the repulsor-beam engines strained against the additional load. That was followed by the grinding, tearing noise of decorative masonry being ripped apart as the rectangular platform came loose from the dais and tilted toward one side. Gheeta gave a final, convulsive push, and the platform tore free and toppled down the dais's encircling steps.

For a moment the panicked motion in the great reception hall ebbed; the crash of the platform at the feet of Boba Fett and the other bounty hunters had been loud enough to distract the fleeing Shell Hutts from their attempts at escape. At the exits, still blocked by the insignialess mercenaries, the floating cylinders turned, their wide-faced occupants looking back toward the figures at the center of the vaulted space.

Plaster dust floated up from the wreckage of the platform; it now looked like a coffin that had been shattered open in a clumsy attempt at excavation, the thin plastoid sides forced apart from each other by the repeated impact of the steps. In the midst of the debris, draped shroudlike by the embroidered cloth, with a single broken-stemmed floral lying on its chest like a bad joke, was a humanoid form, empty eye sockets gazing up at the reception hall's distant ceiling. Without even looking at the man's face, Boba Fett knew who it was.

"There's your Oph Nar Dinnid." Gheeta's voice came from the top of the dais, gloating at the rubble strewn across the floor. "Not such valuable merchandise now, is he?"

From behind Boba Fett, the elder Shell Hutt Nullada pushed forward, hard enough to shove Bossk and IG-88 to one side; the riveted cylinder scraped sparks from the unmoving armor of D'harhan. Fett looked over at the massive figure hovering next to him and saw that Nullada's face was quivering with rage. The silken lines holding up the rolls of fat above the eyes and mouth were shimmering like the bowstrings of an ancient projectile weapon.

"This is madness!" As Nullada shouted at Gheeta he shook one of his mechanical hands, clenched into a compact fist. "Vengeance is one thing-we all desire that-but now ..." The old Shell Hutt sputtered with incoherent anger. "Now you're interfering with business!

That creature was valuable to us. He was credits ...

and now he's dead meat."

"Calm yourself." Gheeta sneered at the other Shell Hutt. " 'Business' has been taken care of. Perhaps not to your satisfaction, but to mine. And to the satisfaction of the Narrant-system clan whose trade secrets our late guest had stolen and was busily selling to us. I have been in direct communication with the unfortunate victims of Oph Nar Dinnid's larceny, and I encouraged them to set a price on those trade secrets-not on what it would cost to get those secrets back, but on what it would cost to make sure that no one else would be privy to them. In other words, the price of Oph Nar Dinnid's immediate death. The clan made their calculations, named their price, and I accepted on behalf of the Shell Hutts."

"You ... you had no right to do that... ."

"That shows how old and senile you've become."

Gheeta's sneer turned even more withering. "You've forgotten that there are no rights, except those that you take unto yourself." The mechanical hands rose, claws curling into sharp-edged fists. "Our treasury is richer now for the dealing that I have done on my own initiative."

"Idiot!" Thick drops of spittle flew from Nullada's mouth. "There's no way that you could have gotten a price from the Narrant system anywhere close to what the information inside Dinnid's head was worth."

"Perhaps not." Gheeta's hands spread apart in a gesture of unconcern. "But the price I got is paid now, and not doled out over some twenty years to come. Credits in one's pocket are worth more than the credits that might be sprinkled someday over your grave." An ugly smile welled up on his wide face, like inscribed driftwood surfacing in rubbish-clogged waters. "A grave that I think you'll be in sooner than I will be."

"Silence!" The roar was deafening; it came from Bossk, thrusting himself to the foot of the steps that surrounded the dais. One of his clawed hands shoved aside the floating cylinder of the elder Shell Hutt Nullada.

With his other hand, Bossk stepped forward and grabbed the front of the sprawled corpse's jacket, singed with laser fire and stiff with dried blood. "I've heard enough of your endless bickering-" He held the lifeless figure of Oph Nar Dinnid up in front of himself, the corpse's feet dangling inches above the tessellated floor. "This is what we came here for?" The corpse danced like a loose- limbed puppet as Bossk angrily shook it. No answer came from Dinnid's slack mouth, the skin of his face turned as pallid and gray as that of the surrounding Hutts. With an inarticulate growl, Bossk flung the corpse back down into the rubble of the dais's broken platform. "That creature's been dead for weeks! I can smell his death on him!" Bossk's nostrils flared back, showing his involuntary disgust. Just as with Hutts, Trandoshans were the type of carnivore that preferred its meat fresh. He turned his slit-eyed glare toward Boba Fett. "He was dead before we ever left the Bounty Hunters Guild. This is a fool's errand you've brought us on!" The corner of one scaly lip curled in a sneer. "The great Boba Fett, the master of bounty hunters, and he didn't even know that the merchandise was already worthless."

Boba Fett had known that that accusation would come before long, and he had briefly debated with himself about how to answer it. / could say nothing-he was not given to explaining his actions and strategies to anyone, let alone a crude, rapacious thug like Bossk. Or he could lie to Bossk, tell him that he hadn't known, or even suspected, that Oph Nar Dinnid had already been killed, long before he'd assembled this team of bounty hunters to come here to Circumtore. Or ...

"I knew," said Boba Fett quietly. "Why wouldn't I?

I've dealt with these creatures before, and I know how their minds work. Especially"-he gestured toward Gheeta, still floating at the top of the dais- "when what's left of one's mind is eaten away with the desire for vengeance."

"Wait a second." At Fett's other side, Zuckuss stared at him, astonishment detectable even through the curved lenses of the smaller bounty hunter's face mask. "You knew all along? But if you knew that Oph Nar Dinnid had already been killed ... then there was no point in coming here. ..."

"No point," growled Bossk, "unless Fett wanted to get us all killed as well." He tilted his head toward the perimeter of the great reception hall. The armed mercenaries had stepped farther from the alcoves and exits, herding the other Shell Hutts before them. "Is that it?" Bossk turned his hard gaze back toward Boba Fett. "Maybe you were feeling suicidal-maybe you're tired of being a bounty hunter-so you decided to take some of us with you. That's why you were so willing to hand over our weapons and render us defenseless."

"Don't be an idiot." Fett returned the other's gaze.

"Or at least not any more of one than you have to be. You may be without weapons-for the time being-but we were never without defenses. No one walks naked into the midst of creatures like thes e."

"No one ... except somebody who's ready to die."

"I'll let you know," said Boba Fett, "when that time comes. But right now I have other business to take care of." He raised one arm, turning it so that the inside of his wrist faced him; between that and his elbow was a relay-linked control pad. With the forefinger of his other gloved hand, Fett began punching out a command sequence.

"Calling up your ship, are you?" Gheeta had caught sight of what Boba Fett was doing. "Do you really believe that your precious Slave I can get out of our landing docks? It's sealed down tight with tractor beams. And even if it could break away, what good would it do you?

It's as stripped of armaments as your pathetic selves."

Boba Fett ignored him. It was a long series of digits to get past the control pad's encryption circuits, and then another one to initiate the program he desired. That one was buried years deep in his memory, but on matters such as this, his memory was infallible. It had to be; in circumstances such as this, he wasn't likely to be given another chance.

"Is it a bluff, then?" The taunting voice of the Shell Hutt came from atop the dais. "How sad for you to think I'd fall for something as simpleminded as that. If you want me to believe that you have some secret plan that will save your skins, you'll have to do a lot better than punching a few meaningless control buttons."

Standing next to Boba Fett, Zuckuss fidgeted and gazed with alarm around the great reception hall. "Is there a plan?" His eyes were like curved mirrors, showing the distorted images of the dark-uniformed mercenaries.

"You have one, don't you?"

One of the other bounty hunters gave up waiting. With a guttural curse in his native Trandoshan tongue, Bossk reached down and snatched up a long, jagged-ended piece of the wreckage from the dais's top platform. As he lifted it shoulder-high, gripping one end with both his clawed fists, a tiny strip of 1 bloodstained cloth fluttered pennantlike, a scrap from the Dinnid corpse's torn and charred clothing. "They're not taking me down without a-"

Bossk's words were lost in the sudden roar of an explosion. Its force struck Boba Fett, a surge of heat and durasteel-hard pressure full against his chest. He remained upright in the storm, his own weight already braced against its impact. The visor of his helmet flashed darker for a microsecond, to protect his sight from the blinding glare. Sharp-edged pieces of debris struck his shoulders, then were swept on by the billows of smoke that poured out from where the dais and its surrounding steps had been.

As the smoke began to thin, restoring visibility to the center of the great reception hall, Boba Fett took his gloved hand away from the control pad on his opposite forearm. The command sequence, keyed to the long-dormant receptor buried in the hall's foundation, had done its job. Perfectly, just as it had been designed and he had expected it to.

The explosion had caught Gheeta unawares- also as Fett had expected-and its force had sent the Shell Hutt's cylinder tumbling and crashing against one of the hall's supporting pillars, hard enough to dent one of the riveted plates and bend the column, its top wrenching loose from the vaulted ceiling above. Gheeta's eyes were dazed, bordering on unconsciousness; a rivulet of blood seeped through the rolls and crevices of his broad face from where the pharmaceutical IV line had been torn out from the vein. The plastoid tube now lay on the rubble- strewn ground like a dead serpent, its single fang weeping drop after drop of a clear liquid.

Some distance behind Boba Fett, the larger cylinder encasing the elder Nullada slowly righted itself, like a planetary oceangoing vessel that had been swamped by a tidal wave. The cylinder rolled from side to side as Nullada groaned in dizzied confusion. The silken lines holding up his face's obscuring rolls of blubbery tissue had all snapped; his repulsive Hut-tese features, the large yellowed eyes and slavering lipless mouth, appeared and disappeared as gravity shifted the gray wattles back and forth.

"What ... what was ..." A gloved hand rose from the tangled, still-smoking rubble directly in front of Boba Fett. The explosion had knocked Zuckuss backward, his breath mask covered with dust and gray flecks of ash. A

few broken scraps of construction material, the charred remains of the dais's top platform, tumbled down his chest as he struggled to raise himself up on his elbows.

"I can't ..."

Right now Boba Fett couldn't give the fallen Zuckuss any assistance. The chaos into which the explosion had plunged the great reception hall was still at a peak-past the settling billows of smoke could be heard the cursing and shouts of the armed mercenaries as the frightened Shell Hutts gibbered and collided with each other and their floating cylinders pushed toward the building's exits. That wouldn't last long, Fett knew; even security guards as ill-trained and poorly paid as these would eventually be able to sort things out. He stepped over the struggling body in front of him-one of Zuckuss's gloved hands reached, but failed to catch hold of Fett's boot-and strode quickly into the center of the dais's smoldering wreckage.

As he reached down for the shock-protected container of hardened durasteel that he knew would be there, a bolt from a laser rifle shot a fraction of an inch to one side of Boba Fett's head, then struck and sparked against a pillar farther on. Fett quickly turned, his muscles tensing to dive away from the angle of the following shot- There wasn't one. The dark-uniformed mercenary that had come sprinting into the hall's center, rifle lifted, was felled by a long section of rubble swung level into his gilt. His momentum folded him around the improvised weapon; the mercenary then collapsed onto his face as Bossk's clawed fist struck him with a vertebra-cracking blow to the back of the neck. Bossk threw away the piece of scrap and scooped up the mercenary's blaster rifle.

Fett saw a look of fierce delight in the Trandoshan's eyes as Bossk whipped the rifle around, a level arc of bright fire cutting through the smoke and across the other mercenaries who had been foolish enough to move away from the security of the perimeter alcoves.

That'll hold them for a while, thought Boba Fett as he tugged at the end handle of the tube-shaped container, caught tight by the rubble collapsed around it. More laser bolts stitched the air around him with their burning tracery; he glanced over his shoulder and saw Bossk, standing with legs braced wide apart, squeeze the blaster rifle's trigger stud with wild disregard for the counterfire now coming from all directions. IG-88, with the cold rationality typical of droids, had grabbed the weapon of another dark-uniformed figure, that had been cut nearly in half by one of Bossk's initial shots; crouching down behind the corpse and a jagged sheet of bent plastoid construction material, IG-88 carefully aimed and picked off its targets.

Another sight had caught Boba Fett's eye even as he wrapped both hands around the durasteel tube's molded grip, braced his boot sole against the singed remnants of one of the platform's side panels, and tugged harder; as he tilted back, arms locked straight down to the tube, a laser shot sizzled through the exact space in which his head had just been. The streak of light temporarily set his helmet visor blind and opaque, so that it was only behind his eyelids that Boba Fett could still see the image of D'harhan, roused from his silent torpor by the sounds of combat echoing inside the great reception hall's spaces. As the mercenaries' fire streaked past D'harhan like a giant spiderweb set aflame, the barrel of the laser cannon, inert and silenced, rose upward, as though it were the neck and head of some primeval beast, taunted to madness by its captors. The optics of the cannon's tracking systems pulsed red through the clouds of hissing steam emitted from the apertures of the black metal housing; as the reptilelike balancing tail thrashed behind him D'harhan's arms spread wide, black-gloved hands clawing into themselves, trembling with their thwarted desire for destruction. A keening, wordless howl sounded from deep within the machinery curving into the creature's heart.

The visor of Boba Fett's helmet cleared as he looked back down at the container trapped in the dais's wreckage. Another tug, putting all of his weight and force into it, and the metal tube finally scraped through the debris, shedding flakes of rust. A dot of green light beside the handle told Fett that the container's seal was still intact, the object inside still as primed and ready to go as it had been when first hidden here, during the construction of the great reception hall.

With a last dragging rasp of metal against metal, the tubular container came free. Boba Fett caught himself from toppling backward, then cradled the heavy object in his arms. As he turned he saw Zuckuss pulling himself upright, a few meters away. The disorienting effects of the explosion had obviously faded from inside the smaller bounty hunter's head; Fett could see the enlightenment behind the other's insectoid eyes, the sudden understanding of all that Zuckuss had been told before.

Surrounded by the nois e and quick glare of laser bolts, he even managed a slight nod of acknowledgment, to show that he had just now realized what Boba Fett had meant when he had told him those few fragments of the deal that had been struck between a bounty hunter and an architect. An investment, that pays off later. In a big way ...

"Here!" That was Bossk's shout, from a few meters away. Another mercenary, braver or stupider than the rest, had come charging head down toward the Trandoshan, and had actually gotten close enough that Bossk had taken him out with a single blow to the chin, swinging the butt of the blaster rifle around in an upward arc. Another jab of the rifle butt, right between the mercenary's eyes, had made sure he'd be no further trouble. "Get busy!"

Bossk had reached down and grabbed a blaster pistol from the holster slung at the fallen mercenary's hip, and now tossed it underhand to Zuckuss. "We could use a little help!"

Zuckuss caught the blaster in both hands and continued holding it that way as he pressed the trigger stud, sending a wild spray of fire across the reception hall as he rolled onto his shoulder, dodging the bolt that dug a molten gash through the floor where he had been kneeling.

The added fire gave Boba Fett enough cover that he could turn with the durasteel tube in his arms and sprint toward D'harhan, still howling in impotent rage at the glaring blaster streaks that laced through the reddened clouds of steam. Before he had taken more than a couple of steps away from the dais wreckage, a pair of thin mechanical arms wrapped themselves around Boba Fett's neck, their crablike claws scrabbling at the visor of his helmet.

Eyes starting from their fat-swaddled sockets, the Shell Hutt Gheeta squealed in maddened rage; blood webbed his broad face as the force of his encasing cylinder's repulsors knocked Boba Fett off balance. Fett managed to remain standing; for a split second he was lifted almost clear of the red-spattered floor as Gheeta dragged him upward by the neck. Then he twisted around in the Shell Hutt's sharp-edged grasp and swung the length of the tube- shaped container around into the side of Gheeta's skull.

The impact left a trenchlike dent in the gray, wobbling flesh; Gheeta's eyes went unfocused as the crablike me chanical hands flopped apart, dropping Boba Fett.

There wasn't time, as much as Fett might have wanted, to finish off Gheeta. From the other side of the great reception hall, beyond the erect, howling figure of D'harhan, a volley of blaster fire singed past Fett. With the container tucked under one arm, he grabbed the bolted seams of Gheeta's floating cylinder, gloved fingertips digging a hold on to the metal. Gheeta's dazed eyes rolled as Boba Fett shoved the cylinder ahead of himself as a shield. A frightened scream escaped from the Shell Hutt's mouth as the mercenaries' laser bolts stung and sparked against the cylinder's curved flank. When he reached D'harhan, he shoved Gheeta aside; with enough force to send him bobbing and twisting into the cross fire that filled the center of the reception hall. The immense form of D'harhan reared above Boba Fett, the inert laser cannon shrouded by hissing steam, the heavy arms crucified against the glare of the mercenaries' rifle fire. Above the cannon's barrel, the optics of D'harhan's tracking systems focused upon the helmeted figure stepping within range of the tearing hands.

Boba Fett halted; with one quick motion, he unscrewed the end cap of the tube-shaped container. The seal hissed, higher-pitched than the steam escaping from the laser cannon's black metal housing, as air rushed into the vacuum. Tilting the container, Fett slid out a fully charged reactor core. He lifted one end of the core in his hands as though he were aiming a rifle, then stepped forward and thrust it into the gaping hole of the receptor site in D'harhan's chest.

When they had been aboard the Slave I, D'harhan had howled with the pain of an essence-deep violation as Boba Fett had drawn out a core just like this one. Now a sharp intake of breath sounded inside the throat hidden beneath the laser cannon's barrel; D'harhan's back arched, his segmented tail thrashing convulsively across the broken rubble around him. Every neuron and sinew of D'harhan's frame tensed and surged in sync with his accelerating pulse as the bounty hunter's fist turned inside the exposed chest, locking the reactor core into place.

The pulse of D'harhan's blood seemed to shatter the barrier between flesh and machine as the indicator lights along the laser cannon's housing flashed in a microsecond from yellow to a fiery red. As Boba Fett slammed the locking armature into its socket, then spun and dived for the floor, the cannon barrel swung down from nearly vertical to aiming level. The heat from D'harhan's first shot scorched Fett's spine and shoulder blades as he used the corpse of another dead mercenary to pull himself to a safe distance.

He found the mercenary's blaster rifle and held it to his chest as he rolled onto his back. Pushing himself up with one hand, Fett saw another cannon bolt, a hundred times wider and more destructive than the other shots cutting across the great reception hall's space, enough to rip a hole through the light armor of an Imperial cruiser. And more than enough to reduce one entire wing of the building to charred splinters. Through the rising dust of fractured stone, Boba Fett could hear the screams and shouts of the Shell Hutts and their hired thugs as one pillar and then another toppled into the center of the hall, bringing down a section of roof and exposing the dark sky of Circumtore.

D'harhan turned where he stood, segmented metal tail bracing himself against the recoil of the laser cannon borne by his shoulders and torso. The cannon's barrel rocked back in its housing as another white-hot bolt coursed across the hall, scattering a knot of mercenaries. The screams of the Shell Hutts actually diminished, their panic having increased to the point where all notion of escape had been abandoned.

Tortoiselike, each one drew his head back into the safety of his floating cylinder; when the last throat wattle was past the circular metal collar at the front of the cylinder, a ring of crescent blades irised toward the opening's center, sealing off the Shell Hutt inside. The blind cylinders bobbed and collided with each other, pushed and spun by the blaster fire striking their riveted plates.

A few meters away from Boba Fett, a blaster shot went straight toward the reception hall's ceiling; a quick glance to the side showed him that a shot from one of the mercenaries had struck Bossk at one side of his chest, knocking the Trandoshan off his feet and sending him splayed out on the dais's smoldering rubble. Fett swiveled the rifle in his hands and blew away the mercenary, a broken corpse even before he hit the floor.

Another one of the mercenaries had taken command of the remaining dark-uniformed figures; Boba Fett could see the man at the hall's perimeter, signaling to the others and directing their fire. The aim of their blaster rifles turned away from Fett, as well as IG-88 and Zuckuss. A

concentrated volley singed the air past the three bounty hunters. Crouching down, Boba Fett turned and saw D'harhan standing in the middle of the fusillade, like a watchtower braced against the onslaught of a storm; the blaster fire sowed hot sparks across the black metal, as though each hit was a lightning strike seen through illuminated clouds.

D'harhan managed to get off one more shot of his own before he was cut down. The laser cannon roared, its massive bolt ripping open another section of the flame- scorched walls and scattering one wing of the mercenaries. Metal could have stood up to their fire even longer, but D'harhan's flesh was weaker than that; the torso beneath the laser cannon's housing was now wrapped in bloodied rags. His knees slowly gave way, and he toppled forward. The cannon's barrel struck the floor as though it had been one of the roof pillars giving way, gouging out a meter-long trench.

He was still alive; Boba Fett could see the laboring of D'harhan's heart and lungs, the rise of the blood- smeared chest forcing itself against the curved mount of the laser-cannon housing. The black-gloved hands rose and tore feebly at the wounds, as though death were something that could be plucked from the torn flesh and exposed fragments of breastbone and rib.

The cannon was alive as well; the indicators along the barrel showed an unblinking red, bright through the hissing steam. All it needed was a hand on the triggering mechanism, and the will to fire. ...

Boba Fett threw away the blaster rifle he had taken from one of the dead mercenaries. Ducking beneath the fiery bolts crisscrossing the reception hall, he stepped behind the massive bulk of the fallen D'harhan; with his own adrenaline-charged strength, he gripped the semiconscious figure beneath the arms and half dragged, half lifted him up against the base of a broken pillar. A

sudden gasp sounded from within the other's body as Fett grabbed and yanked loose the thick neural-feed cables that had been connected to D'harhan's spine, the hard- spliced socket just between his shoulder blades. The laser cannon's aiming systems automatically went into manual override status; Boba Fett crouched behind the black metal housing as the barrel swung upward.

And into firing position. A small screen tucked underneath the rear of the housing lit up, with a crosshair grid zeroing in on the mercenaries positioned at the far side of the great reception hall. The barrel turned slightly as Boba Fett's hand jabbed at the controls, seeking a specific target; the grid's lines narrowed in and locked on the one dark-uniformed figure who had taken command of the others. Long-range thermal sensors in the laser cannon's tracking systems gave a clear outline of the mercenary behind a shield of bent and torn plastoid construction material. Enough to hide behind ... but not enough to protect him. Fett hit the cannon's firing stud. The weapon's recoil trembled the black metal housing, its shock traveling all the way up his arms and into his own chest.

The single bolt from the laser cannon took out most of the remaining mercenaries. When Boba Fett raised his head from behind the housing, he sighted through the clouds of steam, hissing louder now to dissipate the heat from the metal. The far side of the hall was gone now; the violet-tinged light of Circum-tore's skies was framed by twisted structural beams, their ends glowing molten.

Across the open plaza beyond the reception hall, the bodies of the mercenary commander and the ones who had died with him were scattered like broken toys. Inside the hall, the few that were left alive had ceased firing, pointing the muzzles of their weapons up toward the ceiling; the brutal effectiveness of the laser cannon had set them to reconsidering their ill-paid devotion to the cause for which Gheeta had hired them. A couple of the mercenaries-the smartest of them, Boba Fett figured-made a show of tossing their blaster rifles onto the debris- covered floor in front of them, then raising their hands above their heads.

"Cowards! Traitors!" A hysterical cry came from behind Boba Fett. With his hands still on the controls of the laser cannon, he turned his head and saw the repulsorborne cylinder of the Shell Hutt Gheeta come darting forward into the center of the reception hall's ruins. "I paid you for results," shouted Gheeta, "not for you to run away and hide!" The crablike mechanical arms shook in impotent fury. "Get him! Now!" The floating cylinder turned as Gheeta jabbed a claw in Boba Fett's direction.

"I order you cause for which Gheeta had hired them. A couple of the mercenaries-the smartest of them, Boba Fett figured-made a show of tossing their blaster rifles onto the debris- covered floor in front of them, then raising their hands above their heads.

"I order you thunder of a storm broken by daylight. Lightning had flashed, contained with the cylinder caught at the end of the cannon's barrel; it had burst through the seams of the bolted durasteel plates, sending a rain of white-hot rivets arcing across the space and landing like sizzling hail on the rubble left by the battle. When the light of the laser-cannon bolt was gone, as quickly as it had flashed into being, the plates of the Shell Hutt's cylinder were singed around their edges; they rattled dully against each other as the cylinder contracted again, the surge of energy that had forced it larger now only an afterimage burned into the observers' eyes.

Boba Fett lowered the laser cannon's barrel, and the cylinder slid off the end of its muzzle. The cylinder fell to the great reception hall's floor with a lifeless clang. Slowly, a red pool formed around it as Gheeta's liquefied corpse seeped through the joins between the plates and out the empty rivet holes.

"Just as well," wheezed another Shell Hutt's voice.

The elder Nullada floated toward the dead cylinder; it looked like a mechanical egg, cracked but not yet peeled of its metal shell. The claws of one of Nullada's crablike arms held back the roll of blubbery tissue over his eyes; with the other he prodded the side of what had been Gheeta's metal casing. Silently, the cylinder rolled back and forth in the red mire. "He had already made more of a nuisance of himself than he had any right to."

That statement, Boba Fett figured, would probably be the extent of Gheeta's obituary. Hutts of any variety were not given to sentimentality. If the late Gheeta had left any estate after having paid off the Narrant-system liege-holder clan and hiring this band of mercenaries-though he had probably gotten them fairly cheap-the remaining assets would be quickly picked apart and swallowed up by the other Shell Hutts. Nullada himself would no doubt take the largest bite.

At the elder Shell Hutt's direction, a couple of the dark-uniformed mercenaries had come over and dragged Oph Nar Dinnid's body out from under the wreckage of the central dais. "Most distressing," said Nullada, with genuine if predacious regret. "This is what happens when someone lets their emotions get in the way of business.

We could have gotten a lot more from those parties with an interest in this matter."

Boba Fett wasn't listening to the old Shell Hutt.

With Zuckuss and IG-88 watching him, the weapons in their hands lowered, he laid D'harhan's body down upon the floor. The laser-cannon barrel turned and slowly came to rest, its muzzle scraping through the charred debris.

D'harhan's black-gloved hands fumbled for the voice box clipped to his waist. The rise and fall of his chest, pinned by the cannon's curved mount, was quick and labored as a single fingertip punched out a message.

Kneeling beside him, Boba Fett looked at the words glowing on the box's screen.

I SHOULD NOT HAVE TRUSTED YOU.

"That's right," said Fett, with a single nod. "That was your mistake." you're wrong. The fingertip moved with agonizing slowness. it was ... my decision... .

Fett said nothing. He waited for the rest of D'harhan's silent words.

i can stop now ... but you . .. The black-gloved fingertip moved from letter to letter on the voice box's keypad. you still must go on. ...

The hand fell away from the box. D'harhan's forearm struck the ground beside his body. There was no more breath or pulse lifting his chest; after a moment Boba Fett reached over and switched off the last of the laser cannon's red-lit controls.

He stood up and turned toward the other bounty hunters. "We're done here," said Fett. "Now we can go." pinned by the cannon's curved mount, was quick and labored as a single fingertip punched out a message.

The tubes of his face mask's breathing apparatus swung back and forth as he shook his head. "No one. Those were your orders. When ... you know ... when you gave me the job."

He was still sorry he'd agreed to it. Even though he'd come back from Circumtore with his own skin relatively intact, if somewhat bruised and battered from the action in the Shell Hutts' great reception hall.

Going along with someone who'd been making arrangements to get his own son killed-which was what the whole futile journey to acquire an already dead piece of merchandise had been about-still turned him somewhat queasy. Maybe Boba Fett's right, he mused bleakly. Maybe I'm not really cut out for the bounty-hunter trade.

"I'm glad to see that you can follow orders."

Cradossk held the rib bone up close to his aging eyes.

The name of the vanquished foe to which it had once belonged was incised along its length, the marks scratched there by one of his own foreclaws. "I'm impressed with your ... loyalty. And your intelligence.

Both of those attributes will stand you in good stead in the difficult times before us." He sighed, lowering the memento of past glories, his gaze focusing on some far- off horizon. "How I wish that my son had possessed similar qualities. Or to put it another way-" He turned his head just enough to cast a sidelong glance at the younger bounty hunter. "If only someone such as yourself had been my offspring."

Sure, thought Zuckuss. He kept himself from showing any other reaction. And wind up dead, the first time you started feeling paranoid? No thanks.

"Mark my words." Cradossk's gnarled claws gripped the bone as though it were a club suitable for thrashing miscreants. His voice rumbled lower, matching the heavy scowl on his scaly face. "If the other bounty hunters of your generation were as smart as you-and respectful of their elders' wisdom-then a great deal of trouble could be avoided. But they have ... ideas of their own." He spoke the word with loathing. "Just as my son did. That's why it was so important that he be eliminated, and in a way that would not appear to have been from my conniving at that result. This way ... to have it happen on a world far from here, and among clever, greedy creatures such as the Shell Hutts ... it makes his death seem the inevitable consequence of his own stupidity and incompetence. So much for his new ideas." Cradossk sneered. "The old ways are the best ways. Especially when it comes to killing other creatures." "You'd know," muttered Zuckuss under his breath.

"Did you say something?" Cradossk glanced over at him.

Zuckuss shook his head. "It was a bubble." He pointed to the dangling air tubes. "In my gear."

"Ah." Cradossk resumed his contemplation of his long- dead enemy's rib, letting it evoke deep, musing thoughts.

"It's good to remember these things. To be wise. More than wise; cunning. Because"-he nodded slowly-"there's going to be a lot more killing before everything's straightened out around here."

"What do you mean?" He already knew what the old Trandoshan meant, but asked anyway. The creaky old carnivore wants to talk, Zuckuss told himself, / should let him talk. It was only polite, and it didn't cost him anything. Besides-other things were going to happen that Cradossk probably didn't know about. And those things took time to get ready.

He heard a slight noise from the doorway. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Cradossk's majordomo, the Twi'lek that was always sneaking around the place, on his own and others' shadowy errands. Ob Fortuna held one of his elongated forefingers to his lips, signaling Zuckuss to remain silent himself. From the corner of one large eye, Zuckuss looked over at the leader of the Bounty Hunters Guild; the old reptilian was still sunk deep in his brooding meditations. Zuckuss and the Twi'lek ex changed a quick nod, and the Twi'lek scurried away, down the Guild's dark corridors.

"Now's not the time to start playing stupid." The ancient rib cracked in two, with a splintered fragment in each of Cradossk's tightly squeezed fists. He looked in angry surprise at what he'd just done, then tossed the relic's pieces away. He shot a hard-eyed gaze over his shoulder at Zuckuss. "Don't try telling me you're not smart enough to know what's going on around here."

"Well ..."

"Bossk was only the first one. The first that had to be eliminated." A bone shard had been left on the back of Cradossk's hand, caught underneath one of his rough-edged scales. He extracted it and used it to pick his fangs, nodding in grim thought all the while. "There will be others; I've got a list."

I bet you do, thought Zuckuss.

"Not all of them young and foolish, either." Cradossk examined a still-wriggling fragment of food on the end of the improvised toothpick, then resumed his meditative work with it. "Some of my oldest and most trusted advisers ... bounty hunters that I've known and supped blood with for decades ... so to speak ..." He ruefully shook his head. "I should've anticipated it-but then again, how could I? I loved these killers."

"Anticipated what?" Zuckuss knew that as well, but figured the question would keep Cradossk going awhile longer. By his calculations, the Twi'lek major-domo would need a little while longer to finish up his conspiratorial rounds.

"Traitors ... backstabbers ..." Cradossk's voice was a low, muttering growl. "That's what you get in this galaxy for being nice to creatures. Taking them in when they were runny-nosed little scavengers who wouldn't have known how to get their claws on a piece of merchandise if it'd been given to them with a ribbon tied around it. I taught most of these Guild members everything there is to know about this business."

"I imagine that's quite a lot."

"You better believe it," Cradossk said fiercely.

"There's parts of the bounty-hunter trade that I in vented. And if these scum think they can get it all away from me ..." He chomped down on the bone toothpick, grinding it between his back fangs. "They'd better think again."

"What particular scum are you talking about?"

Cradossk's mention of a list still had Zuckuss worried.

The old Trandoshan might have gone senile, perhaps forgetting just who he was talking to. Just my luck, thought Zuckuss glumly, to find my own name on there.

"They know who they are. The same as I know. Though maybe ..." Cradossk gave another slow nod. "Maybe I shouldn't take any chances. Maybe I should just have everyone killed. Wipe clean the whole roster of the Bounty Hunters Guild. Start fresh ..."

Great, thought Zuckuss. He had been warned about this, by Boba Fett on the way back from Circumtore. Up in the Slave I's cockpit area, Fett had given him another insight into the way Cradossk's mind worked. The Trandoshan had always been paranoid, long before he had clawed to the top of the Bounty Hunters Guild. Arguably, a personality trait like that was what had enabled him to do it, or had at least helped. Hard on his associates, though, figured Zuckuss.

"But first," said Cradossk, "we'll get rid of the obvious targets. The ones who have already announced their intentions, to either take over the Guild or split from it and set up a new bounty-hunters organization of their own. As if I'd ever let that happen."

Zuckuss and the others returning from Circum-tore had already heard about these developments over the Slave I's comm unit. The breakaway faction was eager to get as many Guild members onto its side as possible-especially the great Boba Fett and anyone associated with him. Just having been on the team Fett had assembled for the Oph Nar Dinnid job meant that Zuckuss and IG-88 were now being heavily courted by the bounty hunters who wanted to go out on their own, with an organization that wasn't controlled by the elders such as Cradossk. Always pleasant to be wanted, he supposed-as long as Cradossk and his loyalists didn't get the notion that he had switched allegiances.

"All of them?" It would be better, Zuckuss figured, if he kept the old Trandoshan brooding about creatures who weren't here in his chamber with him. "I mean-like you said-some of them have been with the Bounty Hunters Guild for a long time. Since the beginning; or at least, since you took over."

"Those are the ones I'm going to enjoy getting rid of." An ugly smile showed on Cradossk's face, as though he were already relishing the details of that process.

"The younger bounty hunters could almost be excused for being stupid. They haven't been around long enough to know any better. But the others, the veteran bounty hunters, who've thrown in their lot with them-they could have predicted how I'd react to their treachery, their assault upon the sanctity of our brotherhood."

Zuckuss rolled his eyes upward; it was just as well that Cradossk couldn't see that reaction. He'd found out that brotherhood with carnivores, at least of the Trandoshan variety, was a negotiable concept.

"There's big changes coming," said Cradossk.

"Everybody who's said that has been right-and will continue to be so. The Bounty Hunters Gui ld will be different from what it was before; this galaxy belongs to Emperor Palpatine now, and we'll just have to deal with that. If this breakaway faction had just bided" their time and remained loyal to the Guild, they very likely would have gotten everything they want."

"Except," Zuckuss pointed out, "for getting rid of you."

Cradossk shot him a glance of venomous fury, enough to push him back a step with its intangible force.

"That's right," he growled. "That's the one thing that's not going to happen. Count on it. The Bounty Hunters Guild is going to be a lot smaller than it was before-a lot of dead wood is going to be cleared away. I admit I should've seen it sooner, myself; that some of the elders in the organization have lost their edge. Well, they'll be gone before very much longer, whether they made the mistake of going with the breakaway faction or whether they're still sucking up to me. There's going to be a lot of blank spaces in the organizational chart; that means room for advancement. Room for someone ... like you."

He reached over and tapped a claw against Zuckuss's chest, right below the dangling tubes of the breathing apparatus. "A smart, young bounty hunter such as yourself could do pretty well. If you play your cards right."

"I'll ... try to do my best."

"Ah, don't worry about it." Cradossk pulled the claw back and scratched his scaly chin. "The main thing you have to do is-be careful who you choose to follow, and who you choose as your associates. You've made a good start by letting yourself become a tool of my intentions.

Don't screw it all up by thinking you can also be friends with ... certain other parties."

"Like who?"

Cradossk didn't answer him for a moment. The old Trandoshan's gaze drifted again to some inner point of contemplation. "You know," he said finally, "as inevitable as I suppose this all is, it had to be brought to this crisis by one individual. If it hadn't been for him-the Bounty Hunters Guild might have continued as it was for quite a while, Emperor or no Emperor."

Zuckuss knew the individual to whom he referred. "You mean Boba Fett?"

"Who else?" Cradossk gave a slow nod, as though in admiration of that absent other. "It's all because of him. Everything that has happened, and that is going to happen; all the changes, and all the deaths. Well ...

most of them, at any rate. He is the unaccountable factor that has been entered into the equation. It makes you wonder ... what were his real reasons for journeying here."

"But he told us," said Zuckuss. "When he first arrived. Because of all the changes, with the Empire and everything else-"

"And you believed him?" Cradossk shook his head.

"Time for another lesson, child. There is no one you can trust-least of all someone who trades in the deaths and defeats of others. You can trust Boba Fett now, if you wish, but I promise you The day will come when you'll regret it."

A chill ran through Zuckuss's spirit, or whatever was left of it after having become a bounty hunter. Part of him knew that the old Trandoshan had spoken truly; another part hoped that the day he had foretold was still a long way off.

"Well ... I better be going." Zuckuss gestured toward the door of the private quarters. "There's still a lot I have to take care of." He was pretty sure that the Twi'lek majordomo would have had enough time by now to contact everyone that needed to be. "You know ... since coming back from the job ..."

"Of course." Cradossk bent down and picked up the pieces of the shattered rib bone. "I've got to learn to control my temper." Clutching the white splinters in one clawed hand, he smiled at Zuckuss. "Or do you think it's just too late for that?"

Zuckuss had stepped back toward the door. "To be truthful ..." He reached behind himself and grasped the door's edge. "It's too late."

"I suppose you're right." Cradossk looked suddenly older, as though weighed down with the burdens of leadership. Carrying the broken trophy from his younger days, he shuffled toward the entrance of the bone chamber, the repository of all his precious memories.

"It's always too late... ."

The door to the private quarters creaked as Zuckuss pulled it farther open, but he didn't step out to the corridor beyond. He stayed where he was so he could watch what he knew was about to happen.

Which took place within seconds Cradossk found his way blocked by his offspring Bossk. The younger Traridoshan stood with his arms folded across his chest; a wide smile split his face as he gazed down into his father's startled eyes.

"But ..." Cradossk gaped at his son. "You ...

you're supposed to be dead. ..."

"I know that was the plan," said Bossk, with feigned mildness. "But I made some changes to it."

Cradossk whirled about, looking back toward the private-quarters door and Zuckuss. "You lied!"

"Not entirely." Zuckuss gave a small shrug. "Just the bit about him not getting up again after he was shot."

With a single foreclaw, Bossk pointed to the sterile bandage running diagonally across his chest, from one shoulder and under the opposite arm. "It really hurt," he said, still smiling. "But it didn't kill me. You should know how hard our species is to get rid of. And also-whatever doesn't destroy one of us just makes us that much more pissed off."

A look of panic appeared in Cradossk's yellowed eyes; he took a step backward from the figure looming in front of him. "Now wait a minute... ." The bone shards fell on the floor as he raised his scaly hands, palms outward.

"I think you might be making some ... rash assumptions here... ."

One of Bossk's hands shot out, grabbing his father by the throat. "No, I'm not." The smile was gone from his face. On the other side of the private quarters, Zuckuss could see the red anger tingeing the younger Trandoshan's eyes. "I'm making the same assumption I made a long time ago, before I ever left for Circumtore. And you know what that is? It's that there isn't room in the Bounty Hunters Guild for both you and me."

"I ... I don't know what you're talking about... ."

Cradossk grabbed the other's wrist, in a futile attempt to ease his hold and get another breath into his own lungs. "The Guild... the Guild is for all of us. ..."

"I'm talking about the same thing you were talking about, just now." With his other hand, Bossk pointed a clawed thumb back toward the unlit depths of the bone chamber behind him. "I was in there the whole time the two of you have been blabbing away. And I heard everything you said. All that stuff about clearing out the undesirables from the Bounty Hunters Guild. And you know what?" Bossk tightened his hold, his fist at Cradossk's throat lifting the older Trandoshan up onto the claws of his toes. "I agree with you about all that.

You're absolutely right The Guild is going to be a lot smaller. Real soon.'"

"Don't... don't be an idiot...." Cradossk managed to summon up a reserve of courage. "You can't kill me ...

and get away with it...." His claws dug deeper into Bossk's wrist, enough to let a trickle of blood seep down his son's forearm. "I've got ... connections ...

friends... ." His voice became weaker and more fragmented as the hold at this throat constricted tighter. "All the ... council of elders..."

"Those old fools?" Bossk sneered at his father. "I'm afraid you're a little behind the times; there have been things happening already that you just don't know about.

Maybe if you didn't waste so many hours in here, mumbling and fondling your moldy reminders of past glories, these things wouldn't have sneaked up on you quite so fast."

Still holding Cradossk upright, he turned and slammed the older reptilian against the table outside the bone chamber's entrance; the impact against his spine visibly dazed Cradossk. "Some of your old friends, your beloved elders, have already seen the light; they've come over to my side. In fact, some of them have been on my side for quite a while, just waiting for the right moment to-shall we say?-force your retirement. One way or another." The elaborate wording, so much different from Bossk's usual blunt speech, was a cruel way of toying with his father.

"Of course, some of the elders weren't so smart; they per sisted in their folly. Right up to the end."

"What ..." Cradossk could barely squeeze any words out at all. "What do you mean ... ?"

"Oh, come on. What do you think I mean?" Bossk looked disgusted. "Let's just say there are going to be some fresh acquisitions in my little trophy chamber. The skulls of some of your old friends will look very nice mounted on its walls-"

"Watch out!" Zuckuss shouted a warning to Bossk.

As Cradossk had fallen back against the table one of his hands had reached back and grasped an ornate ceremonial dagger; the gems embedded in its hilt flashed as he swung his arm around, the point of the blade aiming straight for Bossk's throat.

There was no way for Bossk to avoid the blade; if he had leaned back, the movement would only have presented a wider target for the blade to slash across. Instead, he lowered his head, catching the razor-sharp edge with the corner of his brow. The impact of flesh and bone against metal was enough to knock the weapon out of his father's hand and send it spinning off into a far corner of the room.

Ta king a hand from his father's throat, Bossk wiped away the blood seeping down through his face scales and into his eyes. "Now that," he said with eerie self- possession, "didn't hurt at all." With a shake of his head, he sent blood spattering across Cradossk's face, as though sealing the bright ideogram of a death sentence there. "But I promise you- this will."

From the doorway, Zuckuss could hear shouts and blaster fire coming from somewhere else in the Guild compound. That didn't surprise him; it had been pretty much what he'd been expecting since the Twi'lek majordomo had gone off to notify the others in the breakaway faction.

He turned back toward Cradossk's private quarters and watched the rest of what happened in there. For as long as he could. Then he stepped out into the corridor, shaking his head.

Bossk was certainly right about one thing, he had to admit. It did take a lot to kill a Trandoshan.

as he swung his arm around, the point of the blade aiming straight for Bossk's throat.

Perhaps even a little too excited; ostentatiously so, it seemed to Kud'ar Mub'at. Sometimes he detected a certain false note to Balancesheet's displays of enthusiasm. For a simple number-crunching node, Kud'ar Mub'at found himself thinking, that's a bit much. He made a mental note, one that was carefully shielded from the synaptic connections that would have let the subassembler nodes in on it, to reabsorb this balancesheet and begin growing a new one. Just as soon as this business with Boba Fett and the Bounty Hunters Guild was finished ...

It didn't seem like that would be much longer, from what the identifier node had just told Kud'ar Mub'at.

Ignoring the jabbering of the nodes surrounding itself, the assembler adjusted its soft, globular abdomen into a more comfortable position in the self-generated nest; when it was done making adjustments, it contemplated the news with a calmer, more tranquil attitude. No sense getting agitated, it admonished itself, over something I knew was going to happen. Empires might rise and fall-they had before-and the galaxy might even collapse upon itself in one dark ball of relentless gravity. But until then, Kud'ar Mub'at, or some creature very much like it, would still be trading in the folly of other sentient creatures. That was its nature, just as it was the nature of those less wise to find themselves enmeshed in the traps spun for them... .

"Sometimes," mused Kud'ar Mub'at aloud, "they don't even know until it's too late. And sometimes they never know."

"Know what?" Balancesheet, a little calmer after its initial burst of enthusiasm, dangled itself close to the spiky mandibles of its parent's face. "What do you mean?"

That kind of curiosity on a subassembler's part indicated the degree of independence that Kud'ar Mub'at had let develop in the node. There hadn't even been a mention of numbers, and still this tethered offspring wanted to know. A sharp paternal feeling twinged inside Kud'ar Mub'at; it would be a shame, however necessary, to pluck the node's legs one by one and crack its shell to extract the recyclable proteins and cellular matter inside.

Kud'ar Mub'at reached out one thin black leg and stroked the ridges of Balancesheet's small head.

"Creatures are dying," said Kud'ar Mub'at, "even as we speak." That had been the gist of the message transmitted through the web by the listener and identifier team of nodes. With the transport engines that had been salvaged decades ago and incorporated into the web's external structure, Kud'ar Mub'at had slowly brought its drifting home-and-body within communication range of the Bounty Hunters Guild. It had wanted to be close to where the action was happening, the pulling shut of the snare he had woven, with no delay in getting word sent out by an encrypted tight-beam signal from his contacts in the Guild compound. "Of course," it said, "there will be other deaths after these; that's all part of the plan."

One snare led to another, a universe of entangling strands, as though the contents of Kud'ar Mub'at's web had been turned inside out and transmogrified into something big enough to loop whole planets into its grasp. It spoke matter-of-factly, without sympathy or remorse. "Even the ones who think they're on my side, who believe they are still free-they'll find out the truth soon enough. No one escapes forever."

Balancesheet folded a couple of its own legs across its smaller abdomen. "Not even Boba Fett?"

That question surprised Kud'ar Mub'at. Not that the answer wasn't known to it, but that the question had come from a source such as one of his subassembler nodes. Even from a developed one such as Balancesheet; that indicated a level of strategic thinking that Kud'ar Mub'at hadn't expected.

"Not even Boba Fett," answered Kud'ar Mub'at slowly.

It kept a set of eyes on the accountant node, dangling from the intricately woven ceiling of the throne space.

It watched for any expression in the narrow-angled face, so much like a miniature version of its own. "How could he? Escape, that is. For him to do so, he would have to be wiser than I am." Kud'ar Mub'at peered closer at Balancesheet. "Do you really believe that such a thing is possible?"

The eyes studding Balancesheet's face were like sets of black pearls, darkly shining but revealing no depths beyond their surfaces. "Of course not," said the subassembler. A chorus of other nodes, bobbing or scurrying around the space like the embodiments of Kud'ar Mub'at's own thoughts, echoed the sentiment. "No one is even as wise as you are. Not even Emperor Palpatine."

"True," said Kud'ar Mub'at. Though the assembler had to admit that Palpatine operated on a grander scale. But that's just megalomania, brooded Kud'ar Mub'at. For Palpatine to think that he could control the entire galaxy, to lay his cold hand upon the neck of every sentient creature on all the worlds ... even those who didn't have necks, properly speaking ... that was madness, sheer madness. And worse, in Kud'ar Mub'at's estimation it was folly. To become absorbed in the big picture, the sweep of history on a cosmic scale, and overlook the little details, was to risk the complete and utter ruination of one's plans. There were things going on underneath Emperor Palpatine's nose that he knew nothing of; not just the hidden errands of the Rebellion and its sympathizers, but connections between beings that were yet so faint that even it, the wise Kud'ar Mub'at, couldn't trace them out. Bits and pieces of rumors, stories of long-vanquished Jedi Knights, and its own wordless guesses were all that Kud'ar Mub'at had to go on. Something to do with the planet Tatooine, and a few humans who lived thereon, innocent and unaware of exactly how important they were. Or did they know? Perhaps one of them had a notion of these secrets, perhaps that old man living out in the endless wastes of the Dune Sea, that Kud'ar Mub'at had heard of. ...

Gloom permeated the meditations of Kud'ar Mub'at as the assembler reminded himself of just how much still lay beyond the strands of his web. Just as well, it philosophically decided, that all those things are Palpatine's concerns and not mine. True wisdom rested in knowing one's limitations.

"Exactly so," chimed in Balancesheet. It had picked up its parent's thought over the spun-silk neural network that both connected and housed them. "That shows how wise you are. Would Emperor Palpatine ever have thought of such a thing?"

For a moment Kud'ar Mub'at was annoyed that the little subassembler node had listened in to these private musings-it thought that it had inhibited the appropriate neurons to prevent just such two-way data flow. Then its mood softened. "Now you're the one who's wise," said Kud'ar Mub'at affectionately. It reached over another black, spiky leg and let the accountant node scramble onto its end. "I'll very much regret that day when I'll have to-" Kud'ar Mub'at cut off its words just in time.

"Have to what?" At the end of Kud'ar Mub'at's leg, the accountant node peered back at its progenitor.

"Nothing. Don't worry about it." Kud'ar Mub'at was sure that the little node hadn't picked up on that particular thought, the one that had to do with its inevitable-and imminent-death. "Let me do th e deep thinking."

"Of course," said Balancesheet. "I would not have it otherwise. The only reason I asked about Boba Fett ..."

"Yes?"

"I only asked," continued the subassembler node,

"because we would have to anticipate the cost of his services to us rising as one of the results of the Bounty Hunters Guild being catastrophically disbanded. Since there would be a considerable diminishment in the number and quality of the competition for such operations. That should be factored into our calculations, regarding any further negotiations involving this individual. Unless of course"-Balancesheet spoke archly-"we were to make other arrangements about Boba Fett's future. ..."

That was a good point; Kud'ar Mub'at realized he should have thought of it himself. Though it was also one of the advantages of having a well-developed, semi- independent node like Balancesheet around. Whatever slipped by Kud'ar Mub'at's attention would be caught by the subassembler's.

"Thank you," said Kud'ar Mub'at to the little creature still tethered to it. "I'll give it some thought."

"Actually," said Balancesheet, "I have suggestions along those lines."

Deep in the heart of the web Kud'ar Mub'at had spun for itself, floating in the cold vacuum between the stars, the assembler listened. Just as though it were listening to its own wise and precise calculations, whispered into its ear from something outside; something almost separate.

part. He touched a probe to the bare join, read off the voltage, then withdrew it and let the replicating insulation swarm a thin yellow sheath over the wire. Or at least most of it, he corrected himself. The ship repair would be completed soon enough, but he knew there was still more to be taken care of before the job of destroying the Bounty Hunters Guild was finished. One great rift, between the old leadership and the upstarts, wasn't enough. By his calculations, there would be an even split between the two groups once the binding agent of Cradossk had been removed. Some of the elders, who had always chafed under the old Trandoshan's leadership, would throw in their lot with the young, impatient bounty hunters; some of the latter, reluctant to accept Bossk's leading the breakaway faction, would side with whatever was left of the Guild's elder council. But on both sides, Boba Fett would have his ringers and stoolies, feeding him useful information and helping to drive even more wedges of suspicion and greed between one bounty hunter and the next. There were two factions now; soon there would be dozens. And then, thought Fett with a cold lack of emotion, it'll be every bounty hunter for himself.

That was something he was looking forward to.

He closed the access panel on the Slave I's curved, glistening hull and looked up the craft's length. The muzzle of the laser cannon, a newer and sleeker instrument of destruction than D'harhan had ever carried, could just be seen as it pointed toward the wash of stars overhead. D'harhan was dead, another piece of the past erased as though it had never happened at all; eventually all the past would be gone, consumed as if by the annihilating energy at the heart of the darkest stars. .

. .

And that was fine with him as well.

Boba Fett moved over to another panel, close to the ship's anterior maneuvering jets. With the code function embedded in his glove's fingertip, he opened the panel and got to work, tracing and reconfiguring the intricate circuits.

The blaster fire from the compound continued, like the electrical discharge of a distant storm.

Someday, Fett supposed, the destruction of the Bounty Hunters Guild would be nothing but memory. But not his; he had no use for memory.

All remembering was in vain... .

part. He touched a probe to the bare join, read off the voltage, then withdrew it and let the replicating insulation swarm a thin yellow sheath over the wire. Or at least most of it, he corrected himself. The ship repair would be completed soon enough, but he knew there was still more to be taken care of before the job of destroying the Bounty Hunters Guild was finished. One great rift, between the old leadership and the upstarts, wasn't enough. By his calculations, there would be an even split between the two groups once the binding agent of Cradossk had been removed. Some of the elders, who had always chafed under the old Trandoshan's leadership, would throw in their lot with the young, impatient bounty hunters; some of the latter, reluctant to accept Bossk's leading the breakaway faction, would side with whatever was left of the Guild's elder council. But on both sides, Boba Fett would have his ringers and stoolies, feeding him useful information and helping to drive even more wedges of suspicion and greed between one bounty hunter and the next. There were two factions now; soon there would be dozens. And then, thought Fett with a cold lack of emotion, it'll be every bounty hunter for himself.

That was something he was looking forward to.

She watched him at work. Or getting ready for work.

His kind of work, though Neelah. That was what was indicated by the weapons, all the various mechanisms of reducing the galaxy's inhabitants to scattered pieces of bleeding or charred tissue. Boba Fett had returned from the land of the dead, from its gray portal in which he'd slept, and was ready to fill his hands again with death.

"Which one's that?" Neelah pointed to the brutally efficient-looking object, all matte-black metal and embedded electronics, in Boba Fett's grasp. An empty lens at the rear of the weapon's metal glittered in a curve of crosshaired glass. "What does it do?"

"Rocket launcher." Boba Fett didn't look up from his painstaking labors. With a tool as delicate as a humanoid hair, improvised from one of the medical droids' IV

syringes, he scraped a dried mucuslike substance, a remnant of the weapon's time in the Sarlacc's gut, out of its intricate circuits. "And what it does, if you know how to work it, is kill a lot of creatures. At once. At a nice long distance away."

"Thanks." She felt one corner of her mouth twisting in an expression that would have been ugly if there had been an audience for it. "But I could figure that much out. Don't think you have to patronize me. I was just trying to pass a little time with something like conversation. But I guess that's not within your range of skills."

He made no answer. The motions of the wire-stiff tool and its sharpened point were reflected in the visor of his helmet as he continued working.

The warhead of the rocket launcher's missile appeared in Neelah's memory as well. She had seen it before, the tapered point rising above Fett's shoulder, on a trajectory parallel to his spine. Now, from where it lay on top of the bounty hunter's crossed legs, it seemed to be aimed at a dusty outcropping of the Dune Sea's fundamental rocks. The oppressive suns glazed the landscape with dry, shimmering heat, still visible in reversed colors when Neelah closed her eyes. Even in the shade of a sloping entrance to Boba Fett's underground cache, the hard radiation of the desert light cracked her dehydrated lips and baked her lungs with each fiery breath.

"You should drink more fluids." The blurry shape of the taller medical droid rolled up in front of her. "To replace the ones constantly being extracted from your body." A jointed appendage held out a canister of water, part of the life-support supplies that Boba Fett had hidden here sometime after starting his short-lived employment with Jabba the Hutt, who hadn't lasted much longer than the job. "The results, physiologically speaking, could be severe otherwise." Neelah took the container from SHS1-B and drained it in one long swallow, head tossed back and thin rivulets leaking down both sides of her throat. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and set the can down in the gravel next to where she sat. SHS1-B trundled over to another part of the shade cast by the overhanging jut of rock, where it consulted with its shorter, less articulate colleague. Another canister stood slowly evaporating next to Boba Fett; he hadn't touched it since it had been brought out to him. Redonning his armor, a set that had been kept under a coded autodestruct lock to foil any thieves who might have stumbled upon their hiding place, had transformed him, from a raw-skinned in valid to the imposing specialist in death that he had been before falling down the Sarlacc's throat. Sealing the restored helmet's edge to the uniform's collar had completed the apotheosis he didn't drink the water, Neelah realized, because he had become a self-contained unit, sealed against the frailties of mortal creatures.

Or at least, that was the impression he tried to give.

She leaned back against the mouth of the cave; the rock's residual heat spread across her shoulder blades.

The day was dead time, a matter of waiting until Dengar returned from Mos Eisley. When he made it back here-if he did, she reminded herself; she knew enough of the spaceport's notorious reputation to be aware that anything could happen in its various dives and back alleys-then further plans would be finalized among the three of them. All depending, of course, upon what Dengar managed to find out and arrange with his various contacts.

Boba Fett, at least, had something to keep himself busy while the rocks' doubled shadows slid farther across the sands. After they had escaped from the bombing- shattered remnants of Dengar's subterranean hiding place, and the regenerated Sarlacc that had wound its tendrils through the broken stone, only a single night had been spent in the chill open, their bodies huddled against each other to keep from freezing. Even if there had been the means to build a fire, they wouldn't have dared, for fear of attracting the attention of some nocturnal Tusken raiding party, crossing the Dune Sea on bantha mounts, the beasts sniffing out pathways invisible even to daylit eyes. When the morning had finally come, breaking violet across the distant mountains ringing the desert, Boba Fett seemed the strongest of the three humans, as though in the dark he had absorbed some precious segment of the others' dwindling energies. He had led the way, stumbling at first, but then with greater sureness as the landmarks had grown more recognizable. Like the other mercenaries and hard types that had worked for the late Jabba-or at least the smart ones, smart enough not to trust the wily Hutt-Boba Fett had maintained a stash of crucial supplies in the wilderness beyond the squat, iron-doored palace.

With that many schemers and back-stabbers all in one place, including Jabba himself, it had always been a possibility, if not a probability, that sooner or later any of the henchmen would find himself on the run, scrabbling for survival. The tools that Fett had hidden away-weapons, replacement armor, comm gear-went a long way to ensure that his surviving would be bought at the price of any pursuers' death.

The bounty hunter's parsimonious streak, though, was apparent to Neelah as she sat in the cache's opening-it had been hollowed out of a sheer rock face, then camouflaged-and watched Boba Fett reassembling himself, piece by piece. None of the weapons or components of his battle armor that had been damaged by the Sarlacc's digestive secretions was discarded until Fett had examined and judged it beyond repair. He had already salvaged most of the personal armaments with which Neelah had seen him equipped back at Jabba's palace; a small blaster pistol had been reduced in the Sarlacc's gut to a fused lump of metal, and the propulsive charges for some of the larger ammunition had leaked away, rendering the shells useless. Those were replaced with exact duplicates from the sealed containers that Fett had dragged out from the cache's deep interior.

Like watching a droid, thought Neelah, not for the first time. Or some piece of Imperial battle machinery, capable of making repairs to itself. She had wrapped her arms around her knees and continued to watch as the human elements of Boba Fett had been progressively submerged and hidden beneath the layers of armor and weaponry, the hard mechanicals seemingly replacing the soft, wounded tissue beneath. The narrow visor of his restored helmet took away the last vestiges of humanity, the gaze of eyes like any other man's, caught in acid-ravaged flesh, its fevered blood seeping through the pores. ...

"He's pushing himself past all therapeutic limits."

SHS1-B's high-pitched voice fussed from a place just outside Neelah's awareness. "Both le-XE and I have tried communicating with him, in an effort to make him aware of the necessity for rest. Otherwise, the potential for a serious physiological relapse will escalate to a life- threatening status."

Neelah glanced over at the medical droid that had trundled up next to her. "Really?" The ends of the droid's jointed appendages clicked against each other, as though imitating a nervous reaction of living creatures.

"That's what you're all in a stew about?"

"Of course." SHSl-B turned the lenses of its di agnostician optics toward her. "That is our programmed function. If there was some way to initiate a change in our basic design, even by means of a complete memory wipe, you can be assured that le-XE and I would immediately submit to it, no matter now disorienting it might be. Patching up and mending supposedly sentient creatures, who continually insist upon placing themselves in dangerous situations, is a tiresome and never-ending occupation."

"Eternity," chimed in le-XE. The other droid had rolled up behind its companion. "Fatigue."

"Concisely put." SHSl-B'shead unit gave a nod. "I expect we will be applying sterile bandages and administering anesthetics until the teeth of our gears are worn to nubs."

"Deal with it," said Neelah. "As for our Boba Fett"-she tilted her head toward the bounty hunter, still working at cleaning the rocket launcher's innards-"I wouldn't worry about him. You took care of what was needed at the time. But now ..." Her nod was one of reluctant but genuine admiration. "Now he's way beyond all your medicine."

"That is a diagnosis to which it is difficult to give credence." The medical droid's tone turned huffy. "The individual being discussed is made of flesh and bone like other creatures-"

"Is he?" Neelah knew that was true, even though, when she looked at Boba Fett, she couldn't help but wonder.

"Of course he is," replied the nettled SHS1-B. "And as such, there are limits to his endurance and capabilities."

"That's where you're wrong." Neelah leaned back against the stone of the cache's entrance. She hoped it wouldn't be too much longer before Dengar returned. For a lot of reasons. If the parties responsible for the bombing raid decided to come back and do a more thorough job on their targets, she was sure Boba Fett would survive, but her own chances would be considerably fewer.

Fett had plans for getting her and Dengar, as well as himself, off Tatooine and out to interstellar space, where they would be safe for at least a little while. And long enough to set further plans into motion. The only obstacle lay in getting the comm equipment that Fett needed. He couldn't go into Mos Eisley to buy or steal it, not without raising a general alert that he was still alive; that was why Dengar had gone into the spaceport instead. But if he screws up, thought Neelah, then what?

She and Fett would still be stuck out here, waiting not for Dengar, but for whatever the next attempt to elimi nate them would be.

In the meantime the medical droid persisted in its arguments. "How could I be wrong? I have been extensively programmed in the nature of humanoid physiology-"

"Then you're a slow learner." Neelah closed her eyes and tilted her head back against a pillow of rock. "When you're dealing with someone like Boba Fett, it's not the human parts that make the difference. It's the other parts."

The droid fell mercifully silent. It either knew when it was defeated or when further discussion was pointless.

arguments. "How could I be wrong? I have been extensively programmed in the nature of humanoid physiology-"

"Then you're a slow learner." Neelah closed her eyes and tilted her head back against a pillow of rock. "When you're dealing with someone like Boba Fett, it's not the human parts that make the difference. It's the other parts."

The droid fell mercifully silent. It either knew when it was defeated or when further discussion was pointless.

being pecked at by the Dune Sea's scavengers.

Tatooine's twin suns were smearing the sky dusky orange as Dengar approached the spaceport's ragged perimeter. Digging the swoop out from the bombing raid's aftermath, the tumbled rocks and displaced sand dunes, had taken a little while longer than he'd expected it to; the swoop had been buried nearly two meters deep, and he found it only because he'd had the foresight to tag it with a short-distance location beacon. Just my luck, he had thought sourly, when he'd finally managed to drag the swoop to the surface and start it up. The forward stabilizer blades had been bent almost double by the largest boulder that had crashed onto the minimal vehicle; any movement speedier than a relative crawl sent a spine-jarring shudder through the frame, quickly es calating to a rolling spin that would have crashed him to the ground if he hadn't backed off the throttle. The swoop's damaged condition had necessitated a more circuitous route across the Dune Sea wastes than he would have taken otherwise; he might have been able to outrun a Tusken Raider's bantha mount, but not a shot from one of their ancient but effective rifles.

"Looking for anything ... special?" A hood-shrouded figure, with a distinctive crescent-shaped proboscis, sidled up to Dengar as soon as he'd made his way between the first of the low, featureless buildings. "There are creatures in this district ... who can accommodate . .

. all interests."

"Yeah, I bet." Dengar brushed past the meddlesome creature. "Look, just take a hike, why don't you? I know my way around."

"My apologies." The hem of the creature's rough- cloth robe swept across the alley dust as it made a small bow. "I mistakenly thought ... that you were a ...

newcomer here."

Dengar kept walking, quickening his strides. That had been an unfortunate encounter; he had been hoping to make it to the cantina at the center of Mos Eisley without being noticed. The spaceport abounded with snitches and informers, creatures who made a living selling out others either to the Empire's security forces or to whichever criminals and assorted marginal dealers might have a financial interest in someone else's comings and goings.

That was what had always made Mos Eisley, an otherwise dilapidated port on a backwater planet, one of the galaxy's prime hangouts for those practicing the bounty- hunter trade. If you stuck around long enough, you eventually heard something that could be turned to profit. The downside, as Dengar was well aware, was that it was hard to keep one's business a secret around here.

A couple of whispers in the right ear holes, and you wound up becoming someone else's merchandise.

Right now he wasn't aware of anyone looking for him; he wasn't that important. Though that might change all too rapidly, when word got out of his being hooked up with Boba Fett. An alliance with the galaxy's top bounty hunter brought a lot of less-than-desirable baggage with it other creatures' schemes and grudges, all of which they might figure could be advanced by either going through or eliminating anyone as close to Fett as Dengar had become. The bombing raid had proved that Boba Fett had some determined enemies. If those parties found out that a minor-rank bounty hunter had made himself useful to the object of their furious wrath, they might eliminate the individual in question just on general principle.

Those and other disquieting speculations scurried around inside Dengar's skull as he made his way through Mos Eisley's less pleasant-and less frequented-byways. A

pack of sleek, glittering-eyed garbage rats scurried at his approach, diving into their warrens among the alley's noisome strata of decaying rubbish, then chattering shrill abuse and brandishing their primitive, sharp-edged digging tools at his back. The rats, at least, wouldn't report his presence in the spaceport to anyone; they kept to themselves for the most part, with a supercilious atti tude toward larger creatures' affairs.

Dengar halted his steps, in order to peer around a corner. From this point, he had a clear view of Mos Eisley's central open space. He saw nothing more ominous than a couple of Imperial stormtroopers on low-level security patrol, prodding the muzzles of their blaster rifles through an incensed Jawa's merchandise bales. Bits of salvaged droids-disconnected limbs and head units with optical sensors still blinking and vocal units moaning from the shock of disconnected circuits-bounced out of the cart and clattered on the ground as the Jawa shook its fist, hidden in the bulky sleeve of its robe, and yammered its grievances against the white-helmeted figures.

No one crossing or idling in the plaza regarded the confrontation with more than mild curiosity, except for a pair of empty-saddled dewbacks tethered nearby; they grizzled and snarled, drawing away from the noisy Jawa with instinctive aversion. The stormtroopers caused no concern for Dengar, either. He was more worried about those who might be on the other side of the law, the various scoundrels and sharpies who would be more likely to have heard the latest scuttlebutt and be looking to profit from it.

Dengar drew his head back from the building's corner.

There was a fine line between being too paranoid and being just paranoid enough. Too paranoid slowed you down, but not enough got you killed. He'd already decided to err, if necessary, on the side of caution.

Keeping close to the building's crumbling white walls, Dengar found the rear entrance to the cantina.

With a quick glance over his shoulder, he slid into the familiar darkness and threaded his way among the establishment's patrons. A few eyes and other sensory organs turned in his direction, then swung back to discreetly murmured business conversations.

He rested both elbows on the bar. "I'm looking for Codeq Santhananan. He been in lately?"

The same ugly bartender, familiar from all of Dengar's previous visits, shook his head. "That barve got drilled a coupla months ago. Right outside the door. I had a pair of rehab droids scrubbing the burn mark for two whole standard time periods, and it still didn't come out." The bartender remembered Dengar's usual, a tall water-and-isothane, heavy on the water, and set it down in front of him. The scars on the bartender's face shifted formation as one eye narrowed, peering at Dengar.

"He owe you credits?"

Dengar let himself take a sip; he had gotten seri ously dehydrated, riding the damaged swoop across the Dune Sea. "He might."

"Well, he owed me," growled the bartender. "I don't appreciate it when my customers get themselves killed and I'm the one that gets stiffed." He furiously swabbed out a glass with a stained towel. "Creatures in these parts oughta think of somebody besides themselves for a change."

Listening to the bartender's complaints wasn't accomplishing anything. Dengar drained half the glass and pushed it away. "Put it on my tab."

He worked his way into the shadow-filled center of the cantina's space, gazing around as best he could without making direct eye contact with anyone. Some of the more hot-tempered cantina habitues were known to take violent offense over such indiscretions; even if he didn't wind up being the one laid out on the damp floor, Dengar didn't want to draw that kind of attention to himself.

"Excuse the lamentable discourtesy"-a hand with bifurcate talons tugged at Dengar's sleeve- "but I couldn't help overhearing... ."

Glancing to his side, Dengar found himself looking into the black bead eyes, no more than a couple of centimeters in diameter, of a Q'nithian aer-opteryx. One of the beads swelled larger as the creature's other set of claws held a magnifying lens on a jeweled handle in front of it. Dengar had been expecting something like this; one's business didn't stay secret for very long in the cantina, if spoken in anything louder than a whisper.

"Let's go over to one of the booths," said Dengar.

Those were far enough away from the cantina's crowded main area for a measure of privacy. "Come on."

The Q'nithian flopped after him on the flattened tips of its shabby gray wings, useless for any kind of flight.

It struggled into the seat on the booth's opposite side, then settled down as though wrapped in a feathered cloak.

"I heard you mention poor Santhananan's name." The taloned hand protruded from under the wings so that the Q'nithian could scratch itself with the magnifying-lens handle. "He met a sad demise, I'm afraid."

"Yeah, I'm sure it was tragic." Dengar set his arms on the table and leaned forward. He wanted to wrap up his errand here before the bartender had a chance to pressure him into settling his account. "What I want to know is, did anybody pick up on his business?"

The lens shifted to the other beady eye. "The late Santhananan had various enterprises." The Q'nithian's voice was a grating squawk. "A creature of many interests, some of them even legal. To which of them do you refer?"

"Keep it down. You know what I'm talking about."

Dengar glanced across t he cantina, then turned back to the Q'nithian. "The message service he used to run.

That's what I'm interested in."

"Ah." The Q'nithian made a few thoughtful clacking noises with its rudimentary beak. "What great good fortune for you. It just so happens that that is an enterprise ... over which I now exercise control."

Great good fortune-that was one way of putting it.

Dengar wondered for a moment just how the late Santhananan had met his end, and how much this Q'nithian had had to do with it. But that was none of his business.

"Whatever communication you require," continued the Q'nithian, words and voice all mild bland-ness, "I think I can assist you with it."

"I bet you can." Dengar looked hard into the magnifiying lens and the mercenary intelligence behind it. "Here's the deal. I need to send a hyperspace messenger pod-"

"Really?" The feathers above one beady eye rose in apparent surprise. "That's an expensive proposition. I'm not saying it can't be done. Just that-since I haven't done business with you before-it would have to be done on a strictly credits-up-front basis."

Dengar reached inside his jacket and pulled out a small pouch. He loosened its drawstring and poured the contents out on the table. "Will that do?"

Even without the magnifying lens, the Q'nithian's eyes grew larger. "I think"-the bifurcate talons reached out for the little hoard of hard credits-"we may be in business here. ..."

"Not so fast," Dengar grabbed the other creature's thin, light-boned wrist and pinned it to the tabletop.

"You get half now, half when I hear that the message reached its destination."

"Very well." The Q'nithian watched as Dengar divided the credits into two piles, one of which went back into the pouch, and then inside Dengar's jacket again. "That's a regrettably standard arrangement. But I can live with it." The talons picked up the rest of the credits and drew it someplace under the cloak-like wings. "So-what's the message you want to send?"

Dengar hesitated. He'd known how far he could trust Codeq Santhananan-he'd dealt with him before-but this Q'nithian was an unknown quantity. Still ... right now there was no alternative. And if the Q'nithian wanted the other half of the payment for his services, there was a limit to any double-dealing he might be contemplating.

"All right." Dengar leaned even farther across the table, until he could see himself reflected in the Q'nithian's darkly shining eyes. "Just four words."

"Which are?"

" 'Boba Fett,' " said Dengar, " 'is alive.' "

Both of the Q'nithian's feathered brows rose. "That's the message? That's it?" The wings lifted and fell in a rudimentary shrug. "Seems to me ... that you're spending an awful lot of credits ... on some odd kind of hoax." The Q'nithian studied Den-gar through the lens.

"Not that anyone is going to believe it, anyway.

Everybody knows ... that Boba Fett got eaten by the Sarlacc. Some of Jabba the Hutt's ex-employees ... came right here into the cantina ... and told all about it."

"Good for them. I hope somebody bought 'em a drink."

"You appear to be ... a serious person. And you're paying ... serious credits." The eye behind the magnifying lens blinked. "Are you telling me ... that the renowned Boba Fett is alive?"

"That's none of your business," said Dengar. "I'm just paying you to get the message to where it needs to go."

"As you wish," replied the Q'nithian. "And just where is that?"

"The planet Kuat. I want Kuat of Kuat to receive it."

"Well, well." The Q'nithian's feathers rustled as he shifted position on the seat opposite Dengar. "Now, that is interesting. What makes you think a creature as important as the CEO of Kuat Drive Yards ... would be interested ... in hearing something like that? Whether it's true or not." "I told you already." Dengar spoke between gritted teeth. He was about ready to reach over and crush the magnifying lens in his fist. "That's not your business."

"Ah. But I think ... it is." The beak opened in a crude simulation of a humanoid smile. "We are something like partners now ... you and I. If Boba Fett is alive

... there are others who would be interested in knowing that ... rather intriguing fact."

Dengar glared at the Q'nithian. "When Santhananan ran this business, he knew that his customers weren't just buying a message being transmitted. They were also buying him keeping his mouth shut."

"You're not dealing ... with Santhananan now." The bright gaze behind the magnifying lens was unperturbed.

"You're dealing with me. And my backers; I'm not a completely independent agent the way Santhananan was . .

. but then, that may be why he's dead and I'm not. Let's just say ... that I have certain additional expenses .

. . that I need to cover." The tip of the lens pointed toward Dengar. "For which you should be grateful."

"Yeah, I'm grateful, all right." Dengar shook his head in disgust. That was the problem with doing business in Mos Eisley; there were always payoffs that had to be made, bribes in either the form of credits or information. And disregarding what he was holding back for the on-delivery payment for the message, he was effectively tapped out of credits. That left only one thing to barter. "You want to know why Kuat would be interested? I'll tell you. It's because he just made one hell of an effort to make sure that Boba Fett was dead.

Did word of that bombing raid out on the Dune Sea reach here?"

"Of course it did," said the Q'nithian. "The seismic shocks had structural beams cracking ... all over Mos Eisley. Really-the Imperial Navy cannot engage in a routine practice operation such as that ... and not have sentient creatures notice it."

"It wasn't the Imperial Navy. It was a private operation."

"Oh? And what proof do you have of that?"

Dengar reached inside his jacket, past the drawstring pouch with the rest of the credits and to the larger, heavier object he'd found when digging up the damaged swoop. Back there, he'd brushed the sand off the device, a dully gleaming sphere that had filled his hand with its weight and potentiality, and had read the words and serial numbers incised upon its thick, armored shell.

Reading those words, and realizing what they meant, had changed all his plans in an instant; they were why he was here in the Mos Eisley cantina, talking to a message expediter like this Q'nithian. That hadn't been part of Boba Fett's plans for this little errand into the spaceport. Dengar was operating on his own now.

He handed the sphere, with its two off-enter cy lindrical protrusions, to the Q'nithian. "Take a look."

The sphere was cradled in the taloned hand before the Q'nithian realized what it was. He almost dropped it, then his twin claws gripped it desperately tighter and kept it from bouncing on the tabletop. A dismayed, wordless squawk sounded from deep within the feather- wrapped body as he thrust it back toward Dengar.

"What's the matter?" Dengar let his own smile turn cruel, savoring the other creature's discomfiture.

"Something frighten you?"

"Are you mad?" The Q'nithian gaped at him without benefit of the magnifying lens. "Do you know what this is?"

"Sure," answered Dengar easily. "It's an atmospheric phase-change detonator for an Imperial-class M-12 sweep bomb. If it's the same as the others I've come across, it'd be set to ignite an attached charge at a perceived twenty-millibar differential." His smile widened. "Good thing it's not hooked up to one, huh?"

"You idiot!" The sphere trembled in the Q'nithian's talons. "There's still enough explosive in this fuse to take out half of Mos Eisley!"

"Relax." Dengar took the sphere back from the Q'nithian. "It's cold. Safely inert. Look-" He turned the object so a thumbnail-sized data readout showed. "Do you see those three illuminated red LEDs?"

The Q'nithian shook his head. "No." He raised the magnifying lens and peered closer. "I don't see any lights at all."

"Exactly." Dengar set the sphere down between them.

"This one's a dud. These particular detonation devices have a failure rate in the field approaching almost ten percent. That's why the Imperial Navy doesn't use them anymore; they've upgraded to a more reliable gravity-wave system that's integrated into the main explosive's casing. It's not removable like this thing. That should've been your first clue that it wasn't the Empire doing a practice bombing run out there in the desert."

"Hmm." The Q'nithian's ruffled feathers smoothed back down. "You seem to possess ... an unusual degree of expertise in these matters."

"I've worked at other things besides bounty hunting."

"I admire your versatility," said the Q'nithian.

"That's a useful trait in a sentient creature." He gin gerly prodded the sphere with the tip of the magnifying lens. "I'll grant you ... for the sake of your exposition ... that this is not an Imperial device. But I fail to see the connection between it and Kuat of Kuat."

"Check it out." Dengar held the sphere up to the lens. "Serial numbers. All these devices were manu factured at one armory subcontractor, which has ties to the Kuat Drive Yards engineering facilities on the planet Kuat. The devices were numbered sequentiall y, in production runs of a quarter million. All the ones numbered below the twelve-million mark were reserved for KDY's own use, for designing and testing the munitions storage chambers aboard the heavy cruisers and destroyers that were being built for the Imperial fleet." Dengar tapped the tiny incised number with his fingertip. "This is one of those devices. Obviously, KDY decided there would be a use someday for some major bombing action-the company didn't get to be the leading shipbuilder for the Empire by just underbidding its competition, you know. So it held some bombs and fuses back, after f all the testing on the Imperial ships was finished. If this one had gone off like the others, nobody would have known who had made that bombing run out on the Dune Sea."

"Interesting." The Q'nithian's beady gaze flicked from the sphere to Dengar's face. "Perhaps there is reason to believe that Kuat of Kuat wishes Boba Fett dead-if Fett is alive at all. But that leaves many other questions unanswered."

"They'll have to remain unasked, too. For the time being." Dengar leaned back on his side of the booth, tucking the metal sphere back inside his jacket. "I don't have time to give you a full rundown on everything that's happened out there. Some things you're just going to have to take on trust,"

"Trust?" The gray feathers rose again in a shrug.

"That ... is a variable commodity, my friend. Like so many other things. And it has its price."

"Which I've already paid," said Dengar. "With more to come into your pocket. If everything goes as planned. You can puzzle over the answers to your unasked questions later, if you'd rather do that than count your credits."

"Counting my credits," said the Q'nithian, "is a favorite avocation of mine. But there's one question that I still must ask now. You wish to inform the rich and powerful Kuat of Kuat that, despite all his efforts to the contrary, Boba Fett yet lives. When Kuat comes and finds you, as he undoubtedly will ... and as I presume is your intention that he should ... then what?"

Dengar remained silent. That's a good question, he thought to himself. One that he'd been working on during the whole long ride from the Dune Sea into Mos Eisley. A

dangerous question as well, since he was now sneaking around behind the back of one of the deadliest individuals in the galaxy. If Boba Fett were to find out that he was being two-timed-which was what contacting Kuat of Kuat amounted to- then Dengar's life wasn't worth the smallest coin in the pouch inside his jacket. Still, mused Dengar, I've got to look out for myself. If not for his own sake, then for that of Manaroo as well; he was still betrothed to her. His decision to send her away, to keep her at a safe distance from this unsavory business into which he had fallen, was something that still produced mixed feelings in his heart. Dengar missed her terribly, as though a living part of himself had been excised without the benefit of anesthesia, a wound that could never heal. But I had to do it, Dengar told himself again. Getting involved with the fate of Boba Fett in any way was too dangerous- and the life expectancy of those who had put their trust in him was on the short side.

Fett's offer of a partnership between the two of them still worried Dengar. Now that Boba Fett had just about recovered completely from his time in the Sarlacc's gut- and had gotten nearly all of his old strength and skills back-how long would he have any use for another bounty hunter cutting in on his action? He's always been a lone operator-the suspicion that that hadn't changed for Boba Fett was sharp and nettlesome in Dengar's mind. Fett could be playing him for a fool, the way he had done to others; a lot of those had survived only long enough to regret trusting a barve like that, and then they'd been the merchandise that Boba Fett dealt in. Or ashes, or even less.

None of those were fates that Dengar wanted for himself. So it's all a matter, he told himself again, of who sells out the other first. And as a purchaser, somebody as rich and powerful as Kuat of Kuat had some definite advantages. Not only in terms of the price that could be paid, but also in the protection he could give.

It had only been a fluke that the bombing raid hadn't reduced Boba Fett to dust and disconnected atoms; the next effort that Kuat made would be even more severe. I could get the credits, though Dengar, and there would be nothing that Boba Fett could do about it. Because he'd be dead.

The shining bead eyes of the Q'nithian seemed to have read his thoughts. "It's a dangerous game you're playing," the Q'nithian remarked.

"I know that." Dengar slowly nodded his head. "But it's the only one I've got."

There were a few more details to settle, and he and the Q'nithian took care of them. Dengar knew that Boba Fett was planning on getting off Tatooine; that would make it difficult, if not impossible, for Kuat of Kuat to get back in touch with the sender of the message about Fett's still being alive. So the Q'nithian would also act as the contact point; that meant he would also get a cut of whatever payment Kuat made for the necessary information of Boba Fett's whereabouts.

"So when will you be sending off the messenger pod?"

Dengar worked at securing the fastenings of his gear.

Even from inside the windowless cantina, he knew that night had settled in on the Dune Sea. It would be a long cold journey on the exposed saddle of the swoop to get back to where he had left Boba Fett and the girl Neelah.

"The sooner you send it, the better."

"Don't worry," soothed the Q'nithian. He folded his bifurcate talons on top of each other, with the magnifying lens laid flat on the table. "It will be on its way to Kuat, both the planet and the man himself, within a matter of hours."

"Great." Dengar slid out from the booth. "I'll be checking to make sure that it gets there."

He stopped inside the same arched doorway by which he had entered the cantina. The place was packed now; it had taken some effort to squeeze his way among the various off-planet anatomies that frequented this dive. At the side of the cantina's central area, the jizz-wailer band had set up on the little stage they always used; their clattering, wailing racket had already added another layer of noise above the mingled conversations. Nobody ever actually listened to the music, but it provided a useful acoustic cover for the various business dealings that the cantina's patrons wished to keep private.

Dengar moved up the short flight of steps that led to the street level outside. From the doorway's arch, he could see across the heads of the crowd, all the way back to the booth where he had left the Q'nithian. Even if he hadn't been in shadow, the Q'nithian's weak eyesight would have ruled out his being spotted as he watched and waited. Several minutes passed, and he didn't see the Q'nithian get up from the booth, and none of the other creatures in the cantina joined him there, either. Dengar figured that was a good sign; if the Q'nithian was going to sell him out, stab him in the back by passing on the information about Boba Fett to some other interested party in the cantina, the creature would have done so immediately. That way, some bunch of thugs could have jumped him before he'd had a chance to get out of Mos Eisley, then painfully extracted the other bounty hunter's location from him.

He was jostled a few times by other creatures entering the cantina before he finally decided that the Q'nithian was staying on the up-and-up with him- or at least as much as he could reasonably expect from one of Mos Eisley's shadier denizens. Dengar turned and headed up the rest of the steps. A few seconds later he was threading his way through the spaceport's dark alleys. He had one more errand to take care of-the one on which Boba Fett had sent him here-before he could return to the hills on Mos Eisley's outskirts, where he had left the damaged swoop.

threading his way through the spaceport's dark alleys. He had one more errand to take care of-the one on which Boba Fett had sent him here-before he could return to the hills on Mos Eisley's outskirts, where he had left the damaged swoop.

"You're imagining things."

The mimbrane had already crept away, hurrying as best it could toward its destination. When it reached the booth on the farthest side of the cantina, it didn't need to climb up to the table. A greasy, black-nailed hand reached down and picked it up.

"Fat little thing, ain't it?" Vol Hamame had once been a member of Big Gizz's swoop gang. They had had a parting of the ways, and not an amicable one. Since then, Hamame had found other employment, equally criminal. But a little more profitable. In a lot of ways, life had improved since he had been able to get away from Spiker, Gizz's obnoxious second in command. "Looks like the Q'nithian seat it over here, all stuffed with information."

"What else?" Hamame's partner was equally villainous- looking; the mucus-lined pleats of his nasopharynx fluttered wetly with each breath. "That's what these things are for." The mimbrane's tiny legs wriggled futilely as Phedroi flipped it onto its glistening back.

"Let's see what it's got for us."

Only one of the Q'nithian system's moons had its own atmosphere; it was there, on deeply creviced fault lines, grinding constantly against each other from the tidal pull of the moon's captor planet, that the thick clusters of the mimbrane creatures grew and multiplied like the shelf fungi found on arboreal worlds. They lived on acoustic energy, absorbing sound vibrations and incorporating them layer by layer into their own simple bodies. Millennia of seismic shifts and groans were recorded in the oldest mimbranes, buried beneath the weight of their overlapping offspring and grown into undulating masses big enough to wrap around an Imperial cruiser like a shining blanket.

Small, fresh mimbranes had more practical uses. They were the perfect eavesdropping device, recording into their gelatinous fibers any sounds that struck the tympanic cells in which the creatures were sheathed.

Being totally organic, they couldn't be detected by the usual antibugging sweep devices.

Hamame's jag-edged fingertip pressed down on the bulging center of the mimbrane. The stored energy converted back into sound.

"I heard you mention poor Santhananan's name." The Q'nithian's familiar squawk spoke the words. "He met a sad demise, I'm afraid."

"That's right." Phedroi gave a smirking nod. "You had us murder him for you."

"Shut up," said Hamame. "Let's hear the rest." He prodded the mimbrane again.

"Yeah, I'm sure it was tragic." The mimbrane emitted Dengar's recorded voice. "What I want to know is, did anybody pick up on his business?"

The two thugs listened to all of the deal that had gone down between Dengar and the Q'nithian. "Now, that's interesting." Hamame leaned back on his side of the booth. "That Q'nithian is a sneaky type, but he's earned his keep with this bit." On the table between him and Phedroi, the mimbrane was now perfectly flat, all the stored acoustic energy drained from its cells. "So Boba Fett's still alive."

"That's one tough barve." Phedroi gave an admiring shake of his head, the coarse and dirty ringlets of his beard scraping across his tunic collar. "You just can't kill him. If falling down a Sarlacc won't do the trick, then what will?"

Hamame reached inside his jacket and pulled out his blaster. He pointed the muzzle up toward the cantina's ceiling. "This will."

Dengar's recorded voice. "What I want to know is, did anybody pick up on his business?"

The two thugs listened to all of the deal that had gone down between Dengar and the Q'nithian. "Now, that's interesting." Hamame leaned back on his side of the booth. "That Q'nithian is a sneaky type, but he's earned his keep with this bit." On the table between him and Phedroi, the mimbrane was now perfectly flat, all the stored acoustic energy drained from its cells. "So Boba Fett's still alive."

"That's one tough barve." Phedroi gave an admiring shake of his head, the coarse and dirty ringlets of his beard scraping across his tunic collar. "You just can't kill him. If falling down a Sarlacc won't do the trick, then what will?"

Hamame reached inside his jacket and pulled out his blaster. He pointed the muzzle up toward the cantina's ceiling. "This will." were so many things of which he had been cheated in this life. The leadership of the Bounty Hunters Guild-that should have been his as well. Now it could hardly be said that the Guild existed at all. Granted, a lot of personal satisfaction had come with killing old Cradossk, his father-that was the sort of thing that really defined the relationship between Trandoshan generations-but he hadn't gotten much material benefit out of the act. Instead of becoming the head of a galaxy-wide organization of predators, skimming a cut off the bounties collected on all the hard merchandise changing hands on any inhabited world, he'd wound up on his own, a scrabbling independent agent like all the other bounty hunters. That had all been Boba Fett's doing; the breakup of the Bounty Hunters Guild had been a long time ago, before Bossk had learned one of the most important lessons in this businessDon't trust your competition. Kill them.

That's true wisdom, Bossk assured himself. For a lot of reasons. There had been other sources of anger, other humiliations he had suffered at Boba Fett's hands. They had just kept piling up, one after another. When Bossk had stood within striking distance of Fett, back when Darth Vader had been giving the job to all the best bounty hunters in the galaxy, to track down and find Han Solo's Millennium Falcon, it had taken all of his self- control not to leap over and rip out Fett's throat. And then that last infuriating maneuver, when Fett had outsmarted both him and his partner, Zuckuss, delivering the carbonite-encased form of Han Solo to Jabba's palace right beneath Bossk's outstretched claws-that had driven him almost insane with rage.

So when the word had reached him that Boba Fett was dead, dissolved in the digestive secretions of the Sarlacc beast, a combination of elation and frustration had welled up inside him. If the universe was going to be so obliging as to just give him that which he'd most fervently longed for, he'd just have to accept that as philosophically as he could. The fact that he was now forever frustrated in taking care of the job himself, of reaping the intense pleasure of personally separating Boba Fett from the realm of the living-that just showed that the universe wasn't really fair and just, after all.

But Bossk had set the Hound's Tooth at maximum speed for the too-familiar planet of Tatooine, just to bask in the atmosphere that had been the last to fill his enemy's lungs.

He didn't get that far, though; Tatooine hung like a dusky smudge in the aft viewport screen. Before he'd had time to set landing coordinates for the Mos Eisley spaceport, Bossk had found something just as familiar-and even more intriguing-in auto-nomic orbit outside Tatooine's atmosphere. When he'd first spotted the Slave I in the cockpit's forward viewport, and recognized it as Boba Fett's ship, his hands had immediately darted to the targeting and firing controls of the Hound's blaster cannons. The only thing that had kept him from blowing Slave I into atoms floating in empty space was the realization that the other ship hadn't trained any of its weapons onto his own. That, and remembering Boba Fett was already dead. A simple hailing call had returned the information that Slave I was empty, but still under the protection of its internal guard circuitry.

This is too good, Bossk had decided. It was one thing to inherit-by default-the mantle of top bounty hunter in the galaxy. But to also stumble upon the late Boba Fett's personal ship, the repository of all his weaponry and databases, all the painstakingly acquired secrets and strategies that had put him at the top of this dangerous trade-Bossk couldn't resist an opportunity like that.

He was smart enough to avoid trying to crack Slave I's security measures himself. Other creatures had gotten killed trying to do just that. Boba Fett had wired the ship with enough traps and self-aiming firepower to wipe out a small army, if it had attempted to enter without the appropriate password authorization. But with Fett being dead, there was no time pressure about getting past the ship's circuits; Bossk had the credits and the leisure that allowed for calling in professional assistance.

That was one advantage to being this close to Tatooine; services of that kind were exactly the sort available in Mos Eisley. If one could afford to pay the price.

A harsh electronic buzz sounded from the Hound's comm unit. A message had been received; undoubtedly, the one for which Bossk had been waiting. He pulled himself closer to the cockpit's control panel and saw something that puzzled him for a moment.

There were two messages waiting for him.

The first was from Slave I, just as he had expected.

The other had arrived almost simultaneously a messenger pod, sent straight from the surface of Tatooine; the small, self-propelled device was now sitting in the receptor bay of the Hound's Tooth. Bossk prodded a few more buttons with his foreclaw and got a readout from it.

The coded message unit was from a Q'nithian message expediter down in Mos Eisley with whom Bossk had a long- standing working arrangement. A business relationship the Q'nithian had a general knowledge of the kinds of things that Bossk was interested in. Any message that the Q'nithian was hired to send across the galaxy, that fit those criteria, would get routed first to Bossk before continuing on the rest of its journey.

Bossk read the destination info off the unit. It was headed to the distant engineering center of Kuat, to the head of Kuat Drive Yards, Kuat of Kuat. Bossk nodded to himself as he read the address data. The Q'nithian had been correct in figuring that he would want to see this.

Anything, thought Bossk, that's being sent to someone as rich and powerful as Kuat is something that I'm interested in. A successful bounty hunter always had to have his info sources open wideband so he could filter through all the galaxy's secrets and rumors for the bits that might turn out profitable.

He had already decided, though, to read the encoded message unit later-after he had taken care of the other business, for which he had been waiting so long. The tip of his claw hit the next button on the cockpit's comm controls.

"I'm all finished over here." The recorded voice, dry and emotionless, was that of the lead technician for D/Crypt Information Services, one of the many semilegitimate businesses that abounded in Mos Eisley.

"The security codes have been sieved out, and you now have full access to the ship designated as Slave I. After you pay me, of course."

That detail was already taken care of. Bossk transmitted an account transfer order to Mos Eisley's black-market escrow exchange, then fired up the primary navigation engines. In the time it would take for him to maneuver the Hound's Tooth over to the other ship, the D/Crypt tech would already have received the payment confirmation.

"Good thing you didn't keep me waiting." The D/Crypt technician was a wizened little humanoid, the top of his bald head barely coming up to Bossk's chest. "I don't like to be kept waiting. If you had kept me waiting, I would have charged you triple overtime."

"Don't sweat it." Bossk let the transfer connection, between his own Hound and the Slave I, seal shut behind him. "I would've paid." He glanced around the bleakly functional confines of Slave I's cargo hold; the bars of the merchandise cages were uncomfortably familiar to him from the last time he had been aboard the ship. The hinges of the main cage's door had been repaired, but still showed signs of the laser bolt that D'harhan had unleashed upon them. That had been a long time ago, when Boba Fett had still been alive and busily engaged upon breaking up the old Bounty Hunters Guild. "Everything's clear?"

"As far as I can determine, it is." With his high- power trifocals slid up onto his pink, unsunned brow, the D/Crypt tech busily packed up his equipment cases.

"What's that mean?"

The tech blinked myopically at Bossk. "Nothing's perfect. Not in this galaxy, at least." He gave a shrug with his thin shoulders. "Ninety-nine percent, though; I can guarantee you that much. A less than one-percent chance that there's any security device aboard this ship that I wasn't able to locate and deactivate."

"Yeah?" Bossk looked back at him sourly. "And what's the payoff on the guarantee? Some booby trap takes my head off-you're going to refund my credits?"

"I'll put a flower on your grave." The D/Crypt tech clicked shut the last of the case latches and straightened up. "If there's enough of you left to put in one."

When the technician had boarded his minuscule shuttlecraft, then disconnected it from Slave I and headed back down to Tatooine, Bossk turned from the transfer port and drew his blaster from its holster. Even a one-percent chance of something going wrong was enough to make him nervous. Warily, he stepped forward into the ship's cargo hold. He doubted if there would be anything of value to be found here. Grasping one of the rungs with his free hand, he climbed up into the cockpit.

From the forward viewport, Bossk could see his own ship and the landing claw tethering it to Slave I. The urge to abandon his investigation and return to that known safety was almost overwhelming; every particle of this craft, including the recycled air seeping into his lungs, was imbued with its departed owner's invisible presence. Boba Fett might be dead, but the memory of him was still intimidating. The grip of the blaster sweated in Bossk's hand; he half expected to glance over his shoulder and see that narrow-visored gaze watching him from the hatchway.

He didn't sit down in the pilot's chair. Instead, he leaned over it and punched out a few quick commands on the ship's computer. Those were credits well spent, decided Bossk, when he saw the file directory appear on the screen in front of him. The D/Crypt technician had cracked and stripped out the password protection; all of Boba Fett's secrets lay there exposed, ready for his careful examination.

Some of the nervousness drained from Bossk's spine and muscles. If there had been a trap remaining, he would have instinctively expected it to be here, guarding all that was most precious to Fett, the essence of his devious mind and hard-won experience. Bossk reached out and blanked the computer screen; going through all those files would take a long time. He'd have to bring over a mem device from the Hound's Tooth so he could do a core dump and take everything back to his own ship, to be sorted out at his leisure. It might take years. But then-Bossk smiled to himself-I've got the time. And Boba Fett doesn't. Not anymore.

The blaster went back into its holster. Bossk turned away from the cockpit controls, feeling genuinely relaxed. The barve was dead. In a business where sheer survival was the biggest part of winning, Boba Fett had finally come up a loser. The warm glow of victory, like a blood-rich meal slowly dissolving in his gut, filled Bossk and radiated through every fiber of his being.

Just outside the cockpit hatchway, Bossk saw a door partly ajar, one that he didn't remember from his previous time aboard Slave I. He saw now that it was cleverly constructed, the hinges concealed and the door's edges the same dimensions as the surrounding bulkhead panel; anyone who hadn't known of it would have had a hard time locating it. When the D/Crypt technician had scoured out the security systems, Bossk figured, the door's powered lock must have sprung it open.

Or-Bossk's hand froze on the door as he started to pull it open. Or maybe this is the trap.

He pulled his hand back, automatically reaching for the blaster slung at his hip. The space he could see on the other side of the door was unlit. But only for a moment longer; a quick shot from the blaster lit up everything inside.

The door now dangled loose; Bossk kicked it farther open. Light from the cockpit spilled past him and through the doorway. There was only one object in the enclosed space; a featureless, almost cubical shape, it stood nearly as tall as Bossk. For a moment he thought it was some kind of storage locker, until he spotted the pair of short, stubby legs upon which it balanced. A droid, an inert-screen load shifter; Bossk recognized the variety as one used in engineering facilities and interstellar shipyards. The large shape was essentially a shielded container for transporting quantities of lethal fissionable materials. This droid showed signs of use-its metal sides were dented and scraped-but it had obviously been decontaminated; the radiation detector that Bossk kept clippe d to his belt would have gone off otherwise.

None of the droid's sensor circuits lit up as Bossk stepped closer to it. The simple electronic brain had been removed as well. Bossk wondered why Boba Fett would have bothered to do something like that-or why a droid of this dull, uninteresting type was even here aboard the Slave I.

The access hatch on the side of the droid was unlatched; Bossk pulled it open, bending his head to see inside. He undipped a small electric torch from his belt and shone it around the container's interior. Something was wrong. Bossk could tell that immediately; there was no shielding material lining the droid's cargo space. Not much room for fissionables, either; the interior was crowded with various pieces of linked equipment. Spy equipment; discreet surveillance gear was a familiar category in the bounty-hunter trade.

Some of the stuff inside the droid was pretty sophisticated; Bossk recognized a full array of optical and auditory pickups, wired to micropinhole elements studding the droid's battered carcass.

Or supposedly battered. Working from a hunch, Bossk scraped a claw across the droid's exterior rust streaks; the orangish-red color came right off. This was faked, decided Bossk. Somebody had worked on this droid to make it look decrepit and falling apart.

He spotted another fake. Wiring from a remote-signal receiver led to a tiny radiation emitter mounted at the edge of the droid's cargo hatch. An old trick when the emitter was activated-at a distance, with somebody's thumb on a transmitter button-there would be just enough radiation to trigger the alarms on any detection devices nearby. That would usually be enough to get even hard- core scavengers like the Jawas to abandon the machinery, for fear of contamination.

Bossk poked around some more, inside the deactivated droid. If Boba Fett had been doing the same a while back-maybe before he'd gone down to Tatooine and hired on at Jabba the Hutt's palace-he must have been interrupted before he'd gotten very far. Most of the seals were still in place on the various bits of enclosed gear. When Bossk snapped one and peeled it off a circuit module, he made an interesting discovery the corporate emblem of Kuat Drive Yards was embossed on the silvery metal ribbon dan gling in his hands.

There's a coincidence, mused Bossk. He knew it was more than that. The messenger pod that the Q'nithian in Mos Eisley had routed his way had an intended destination at the planet Kuat, the headquarters of Kuat Drive Yards; it was supposed to go right into Kuat of Kuat's hands.

Bossk's mercenary instincts were aroused by these overlapping signs of interest on the part of one of the galaxy's richest and most powerful creatures.

The big question right now was what Kuat had been using this pseudo-dilapidated droid to spy on. Bossk poked some more in the droid's innards and found at last what he was looking for, what he had known would be there. He pulled his head back out of the droid's hollow space, holding in one hand the multitrack recording unit that had been connected to the various sensors.

That must have been what Boba Fett had been looking for as well, before he'd been called away, leaving this investigation unfinished. The only other object in the concealed chamber was a tripod-mounted holographic playback unit with a full assortment of auto-adaptive connectors and data channels. Bossk sorted through the connectors until he found the one that matched up with the recorder. Both units lit up; after a few seconds of format scanning, a miniaturized, fuzzy-edged landscape formed in front of Bossk.

Someplace on Tatooine; Bossk could tell that much just from the quality of light, the mingled shadows that came with the planet's twin suns. Bossk leaned in closer to the holo image, trying to make out the details. It looked like one of those miserable, dreary moisture farms that eked out a low-profit existence on the edges of the Dune Sea.

Parallel lines from the segmented treads of a ground transport were embedded in the gravelly terrain. Even at the holo image's low resolution, Bossk could tell that they dated from at least a day before the recording had been made; the tracks were blurred by windblown sand. He figured they were from the sandcrawler of the Jawas who had dumped off this droid when they had been tricked into believing that it was contaminated with lethal radiation.

Probably some farther distance away from the moisture farm so its autonomic spy circuits could kick in and it could find a surreptitious vantage point by which it could observe and record whatever happened.

And whatever happened hadn't been good. Bossk could see ugly black smoke rising to the top of the holo image as the shot's point of view moved in closer. The spy circuits in the droid must have felt it was all right to come out in the open-since every creature at the moisture farm was obviously dead. With clinical detachment, Bossk studied the charred, skeletal remains strewn in front of what was left of the farm's low, rounded structures.

Looks like a standard stormtrooper hit, he judged. All the markings, unsubtle even by Bossk's standards, were there. The Empire's white-uniformed killers always left a clear signature on their grisly work, to intimidate anyone who stumbled upon it later.

The silence of the recorded image was broken by the rising whir of a speeder approaching from somewhere in the distance. For a moment the image's point of view tilted and bounced; obviously, the spying droid had scrambled back to someplace in the surrounding dunes where it wouldn't have been spotted.

The shot steadied at long distance, then zoomed forward as the spy circuits switched to a powerful telephoto lens. That enabled Bossk to recognize at least the figure that had scrambled out of the speeder when it had come to a bobbing halt. That's Luke Skywalker, he thought; there was no mistaking that youthful human face and tousled blond hair.

He leaned closer to the image, suddenly fascinated by it. This must be the stortntrooper raid- Bossk slowly nodded. On that moisture farm, where Skywalker grew up.

He knew more about it than most creatures in the galaxy did; in a spaceport watering hole considerably grungier and more disreputable than even the Mos Eisley cantina, B6ssk had bought drinks for and pried information out of a twitching human wreck, a former stormtrooper cashiered from the Imperial Navy for various psychological problems. Guilt, Bossk had supposed at the time; it wasn't an emotion he'd ever personally experienced. The ex-stormtrooper hadn't been involved in any action on Tatooine, but had heard grisly bits and pieces from some of his barracks mates. In typical bounty-hunter fashion, Bossk had filed away the data-and the Luke Skywalker connection-inside his head, against the day when it might prove useful. Now he wondered if that time might have come at last.

Bossk drew back from the floating image, watching as the image of Skywalker discovered the charred skeletons of the aunt and uncle who had raised him from childhood.

He knew how much tighter those bonds of sentiment were for other species. He also knew about Luke Skywalker's ties to the Rebel Alliance; rumors and stories had already spread throughout the galaxy, along with ID holos and other tracking data. This mere youngster, from an obscure backwater planet, had somehow become overwhelmingly important to Emperor Palpatine and-perhaps even more so-to Lord Vader, the Empire's black-gloved fist. Vader's creatures, his personal legions of spies and informers, were still scouring all the inhabited worlds for leads on Skywalker. Why, though, was still a carefully guarded secret.

The deactivated droid and its contents were now even more intriguing to Bossk. It might not provide Skywalker's current location-which would've been worth credits; Vader would pay for that kind of data-but there might be some kind of clue as to just why both the Emperor and the Dark Lord of the Sith were so interested in him. And to a smart barve like Bossk, that could be worth even more.

Others might pay even more than Vader or Palpatine.

Bossk mulled over the possibilities. After all, the droid with its carefully concealed surveillance equipment had all the appearances of having been put together by Kuat Drive Yards. Why would Kuat of Kuat have been interested in Skywalker? That would be something worth finding out as well.

In front of Bossk, the holographic image froze, having reached the end of the recording. The black smoke from the stormtroopers' raid on the moisture farm hung motionless in the small segment of the past, like the scrawled emblem of the dark forces that controlled the universe. ...

Part of Bossk's brain, the most evolved and cautious part, told him that this was nothing with which he should get involved. The closer one got to those circles of intrigue and deceit, with Darth Vader at their center, the closer drew one's own death. Look at what happened to Boba Fett, he reminded himself. Fett might have suffered his final, terminal defeat because of Luke Skywalker, but he wouldn't have even been there on Jabba's sail barge, up above the Great Pit of Carkoon, if it hadn't been for Vader's endless manipulations of other sentient creatures.

The caution s voiced inside Bossk's head fell silent, consumed by the other, hungrier elements that made up a Trandoshan's nature. Boba Fett had died because he was a fool; his death proved that he was a fool. That was all the logic that Bossk needed. He's dead and I'm alive-that also proved he was smarter than Fett had ever been. So what was there to be afraid of?

It's this ship, Bossk thought. / can't get any work done here. He'd have a better chance of figuring out what the holographic recording meant if he took it back over to the Hound's Tooth and puzzled over it. The holographic image blinked out of existence as he reached inside the droid's cargo space and started disconnecting the circuits.

One of the data leads surprised him. It was hooked up to an olfactory sensor on the droid's exterior. He could understand wanting to get a high-resolution visual and auditory record of the event, but why collect scent molecules in the air? Corpses and stormtroopers smelled like death, if anything.

The data cable was routed to an analyzer unit rather than the recording device. The small readout panel on its angled top showed that it was set to detect organic anomalies, anything of a biological nature that shouldn't have been at the scene that the droid had spied upon.

Bossk pulled out the analyzer and peered closer at the screen. It had picked up something from the recording; numbers and symbols flickered by as the device sorted out the possibilities.

After a moment the numbers slowed, then turned to letters, then words. pheromones detected. Another second passed before the rest appeared. subtype sexual, gender male. Then the last species match-fal-leen. The words remained until Bossk blanked the screen with a press of his clawed thumb.

That was even more interesting. Bossk nodded slowly to himself, the analyzer device resting silent in his hands. Falleens didn't serve in the Imperial storm- troopers; the whole species was too congenitally arrogant to submit to military discipline. They were fearsome enemies, but strictly solo fighters. And schemers, given to intrigues matched only by those of Emperor Palpatine himself.

And there was one Falleen in particular, who had risen almost to the top in Palpatine's court. Prince Xizor had been perhaps the only one there who could get away with defying Lord Vader's commands, and Xizor was dead now. There had been even more to Xizor's defiance than the Emperor had been aware of, though rumors told of Vader having suspected the truth. That Prince Xizor had been in fact the secret head of the infamous Black Sun, the criminal organization that spanned the galaxy, an empire in its own right.

Speculations raced inside Bossk's skull. Had Prince Xizor also been there on Tatooine when Vader's stormtroopers had raided the moisture farm at the edge of the Dune Sea? When Luke Skywalker's aunt and uncle had been killed? That was what the olfactory record in the droid's spy circuits would indicate. But it didn't tell why Xizor would have been there-or why Kuat of Kuat would have planted a surveillance system that would detect the evidence of Xizor's involvement. Or how Boba Fett had come to possess the spy recording ...