by K. W. Jeter
He'd seen enough, at least at this level of detail. If the fat slug was as dead as had been reported, he now didn't regret the loss of trade. There'd be others, moving up the ranks of the Huttese species' galaxy-wide hierarchy. Kuat of Kuat reached over and froze the playback, the better to scan the images for the one in whom he had the most interest.
And who was no longer there in the hologram. The helmeted visage of the bounty hunter was missing from where Kuat of Kuat had spotted it before, up on the gallery overlooking the central area of Jabba's court. Kuat of Kuat stepped away from the workbench and across the nearest edge of the hologram, looking up toward the simulation of the rough-domed ceiling, then around to the openings of low, tunnellike passages branching off to other parts of the palace. The image of Boba Fett was nowhere to be seen.
Kuat of Kuat ran the recording unit back to the point where the bounty hunter, face hidden behind the visored mask of his uniform, could be seen watching the court below him. This time, he didn't let himself be distracted by the fate of the Twi'lek dancing girl; starting up the playback again, he saw where Boba Fett had slipped unnoticed from the gallery and out of the court, even before Jabba had started pulling on the chain and dragging the girl over the trapdoor.
Interesting. Kuat of Kuat let the holographic re cording play on. Our friend, he thought, had another agenda. Not surprising; Boba Fett had not reached the top of the bounty-hunter trade without building up a network of business interests and contacts, some of them-if not most-completely unaware of each other. Jabba the Hutt might have been stupid enough to believe that by paying Fett a generous retainer, he had thereby secured the bounty hunter's exclusive services. If so, that indicated how much Jabba had been slipping, making the kind of mis takes that had led to his death.
Always a mistake to completely trust a bounty hunter. Kuat of Kuat didn't commit mistakes like that. Kuat ran the hologram playback forward. There was no sign of Boba Fett until much farther on in the recording. He spotted the bounty hunter's image then, snapping a blaster rifle up into firing position as the disguised Leia Organa held up an activated thermal detonator and demanded payment for the captive Wookiee she had brought. That potentially lethal confrontation had ended with the Hutt's guttural laughter and admiration for his resourceful opponent; the bounty for Chewbacca had been paid and Boba Fett had lowered his weapon.
So he did return there, mused Kuat as he watched the hologram. Whatever mysterious appointments Boba Fett might have kept in Jabba's palace, they hadn't prevented him from attending to his duties as the Hutt's freelance bodyguard. It was a safe assumption that the reports gathered by Kuat's corporate intelligence division were accurate they had described Jabba's death, out on his sail barge, hovering at the edge of the Great Pit of Carkoon in Tatooine's Dune Sea, and had mentioned Boba Fett being there at the struggle.
More than that, the reports had also described Boba Fett's death. What Kuat of Kuat wanted was proof of that. Operating without that proof was like building a machine with a critical component left untested. A machine, he thought, that could kill its master if it broke down. Someone like Boba Fett had a disquieting habit of survival; Kuat of Kuat would have to see the bounty hunter's death before he would believe it.
He looked at the pieces of the messenger pod and its curved, reflective casing scattered on the workbench. The next pod to drop out of hyperspace and penetrate the planet Kuat's atmosphere would very likely carry the necessary information inside it. All the units had been designed to carry only partial segments of what had been recorded at Jabba's palace and aboard the Hutt's sail barge. There was less likelihood that way of any of KDY's powerful enemies intercepting the units and, if they managed to get past the security procedures, figuring out Kuat of Kuat's own concerns.
One last thing to do with this message He reached into the device and extracted the micro-probe. The breaking of the circuit initiated the self-destruct program; the metal grew white-hot, twisting in upon itself as it was consumed. From underneath the bench, the felinx fled in terror, streaking toward the office suite's farthest recesses. A few more seconds passed, then the holoprojector and its contents had been reduced to blackened slag on the workbench's surface, cooling into a single indecipherable hieroglyph.
The contents of the message, that had come so far to reach him, was safely locked away in Kuat of Kuat's memory. When proof of Boba Fett's death came, he might allow himself to forget the smallest particle of information. When it's safe, Kuat of Kuat had already decided. Not until then.
And if that proof didn't come ... he would have to make other plans. Plans that would include more than one death as part of their internal workings. Meshing gears often had cruelly sharp teeth.
He turned away from the workbench and walked slowly through the empty spaces of the office suite, looking for the felinx. So that he could pick it up and cradle it in his arms, and soothe it of the fright it had received.
3
It took some doing, but she found him. For the second time.
The girl crouched behind one of the Dune Sea's rocky outcroppings as she watched the barely noticeable hole dug into the barren ground below. The twin suns bled into the horizon, the chill Tatooine night already unfolding across the sands. Around her bare shoulders, she pulled tighter a salvaged scrap of sail-barge canopy-blackened by fire and explosion along one ragged edge, stiff with dried blood along another. The delicate fabrics with which her body had been adorned in Jabba's palace were little protection against the cold. A shiver touched her flesh as she continued to watch and wait.
She'd known that the bounty hunter, the one called Dengar, would have some hiding place away from Jabba the Hutt's palace. What used to be his palace, she corrected herself. The monstrous slug was dead now, that had held the end of her chain and the chains of the other dancers. But when Jabba had been alive, most of the thugs and bodyguards in his employ had had little warrens out in the rocky wastes, where they could seal themselves in for a few hours' sleep, safe from being murdered by each other-or by their boss. Jabba's court hadn't been easy to survive in; she knew that better than anyone. But it's not me who died, she thought with a bitter satisfaction. Jabba got what he deserved.
In the dimming light, she put away her brooding, the little vengeful spark that kept her warm inside. She'd spotted, down below, the approaching figures for which she'd been waiting.
Two medic droids trundled across the sand; their parallel tracks headed toward the warren hole in the rocky wasteland. They were probably refugees from Jabba's palace, just as she was; all of the medic droids there had been modified with wheels in place of the original stumpy legs so they could get around in the desert terrain. Neelah watched them for a few seconds more, then eased out of her hiding place and carefully worked her way down the farther side of the dune, where the droids wouldn't be able to see her.
"Hold it right there." She caught the droids just as they were transmitting the security code that would unseal the subsurface warren; a row of numbers, softly glowing red, showed on the panel embedded in the magnetically reinforced durasteel. "Don't move. I promise I won't hurt you-but do n't move."
"Are you frightened?" The taller of the two medical droids, a basic MD5 general-practitioner model, scanned her against the hole's rough circle of evening sky. "Your pulse is quite elevated for a standard hu-manoid form. Plus"-a tiny grid irised open on the droid's darkenameled head, drawing in an air sample-"your perspiration contains significant levels of hormones indicating an emotionally agitated state."
"Shut up. I also want you to do that." Rocks slid loose beneath her as she scrambled down toward the droids. "Just shut up."
"Did you hear that?" The taller droid swiveled its multilensed gaze toward its companion, a white-banded MD3 pharmaceutical model. "She's telling us to be quiet."
"Rudeness." Dust sifted from the shorter one as it tucked its syringes and dispensing appendages closer to itself. "Foresight of difficulties."
"Great-" Anger spurred her heart
even faster. "Then you can't say you didn't know this was coming." She grabbed a vital-signs monitor sticking out antennalike from the taller one's head and slammed the droid against the dirt wall of the warren entrance, hard enough to send the lights dancing across its front display panel. Another pull in the opposite direction sent it crashing into the other droid; that one squealed as it toppled over, exposing the wheeled traction devices below the lower rim of its cylindrical body. "Now, how about shutting up?"
"It seems like a very good idea." The taller droid retreated, flattening itself against the unopened secu rity hatch.
She gulped down a deep breath, trying through sheer willpower to slow down her heartbeat and still the trembling in her hands. Few violent acts had been required in her life-as far as she knew; she had no memories of any life before finding herself at Jabba's palace-and even as something as minor as banging a little sense into the medical droids' heads was enough to dizzy her. Get used to it, she sternly told herself. The realization had already come to her that a lot more scary things were going to happen. That was all right; at least she was alive. Others in her position hadn't been so fortunate. The memory was still vivid inside her, of seeing the other dancing girl falling into the pit beneath Jabba's palace. That memory ended with screams, and the slavering growls of Jabba's pet rancor.
"Excuse me, your ladyship…"
That puzzled her. Neither Jabba the Hutt nor any of the others at his court had ever called her anything like that.
"But you require medical attention." The taller droid kept its speech mechanism at minimal volume. A handlike examination module, with a fiber-optic light source mounted at the wrist, reached tentatively toward her face. "That's a very bad wound …." She slapped away the droid's hand, before it could touch the edges of the jagged line running down one side of her face. "It'll heal."
"With a scar." The taller droid shone the beam of its handlight lower, down to where the wound, the physical memory of a Gamorrean pikestaff, ended below her throat.
"We could do something about that. To make it better."
"Why bother?" Other memories, nearly as unpleasant as those from the pit, flooded her thoughts. Whatever her life might have been before, the time in Jabba's palace had been enough to convince her that beauty was a dangerous thing to possess. It'd been just enough to entice Jabba's sticky hands-and the hands of those underlings who had been his current favorites-but not enough to protect her when the Hutt grew bored with her charms. "I can do without it," she said bitterly.
"Anger," noted the other medical droid. Need lessly-the scent of negative emotion was almost palpable in the warren hole's entrance. "Treatment inadvisability."
"I remember seeing you." The taller droid's low, soothing voice continued. "At Jabba's palace." The handlight beam moved across her face. "You were part of the entertainment."
"I was-" She glanced over her shoulder toward the warren's darkening entrance, to make sure no one was approaching, then turned back toward the droids. "But not now."
"Oh?" An inquiring gaze seemed to move behind the droid's optic receptors. "Then what are you?"
"I ... I don't know …."
"Name," spoke the shorter of the two droids.
"Designation."
"They called me ... Jabba called me Neelah." She frowned. Something-the absence of memory, rather than anything she could actually recall-told her that wasn't right. That name's a lie, she thought. "But…that's what they called me …."
"There's worse names." Voice brightening, the taller droid tried to comfort her. "Consider my own subidentity coding-" Its complicated hand pointed to a data readout on the front of its dark metallic body. "SHS1-B. Most sentient creatures can't even pronounce it. This one's luckier."
"1e-XE." The shorter droid extruded a pill-dispensing module and gently tapped the back of her hand with it.
"Acquaintance; pleasure."
They're working on me, thought Neelah. She knew enough about medical droids-from where?-to be aware of the soothing effects they were designed to provoke in their patients. Anesthetic radiation; she could feel a low-level electromagnetic field locking into sync with the neurons inside her head, drawing out the lulling endorphins ….
"Knock it off," she growled. She shook her head, snapping herself free of the droids' influence. "I don't need that, either. Not now." Neelah drew one hand back in a small but effective fist. "If I have to whack you again, I will."
Like extinguishing a torch, the field abruptly cut out. "As you wish," said SHS1-B. "We're only trying to help."
"You can do that by telling me where he is." The wound across her face stung once more, but she ignored it.
"Who?"
She nodded toward the security hatch. "The bounty hunter. The one whose hiding place this is."
"Dengar?" One of SHS1-B's metallic hands pointed toward the warren opening behind her. "He's back at Jabba's palace."
"Supplies," noted le-XE. "Various."
"That's right." SHS1-B opened a small cargo pod bolted to the side of its body. "He sent us back here with what we required. As you see-antibiotics, metabolic accelerators, sterile gel dressings-"
"Fine." Neelah interrupted the droid's inventory of its contents. "But Dengar-he's still back at the palace?" SHS1-B's head unit gave a nod. "He said he wanted to find one of Jabba's caches of off-planet edibles. That might take some time, though-the palace has been very badly looted by the Hutt's former employees."
"Mess." le-XE rotated the top dome of its cylinder back and forth. "Disgust."
There wasn't time to consider her decision. "Open the hatch," said Neelah, pointing to the magnetically sealed disk, the coded digits still blinking in its readout panel. "I want to go inside."
"Dengar told us not to let-" The taller of the two droids caught the look in Neelah's eyes. "All right, all right; I'm opening it."
The tunnel on the other side of the hatch descended at close to a forty-five-degree angle. Heading down it, with the droids clunking behind her, Neelah felt a claustrophobic panic crawling along her spine. The darkness and the close, scarcely ventilated air felt like the tunnel through which she'd crawled to escape from Jabba's palace. After what had happened to her poor friend Oola, any risk had seemed preferable to winding up as rancor food.
Though her own death had almost found her, before she had gotten away. The scything blade of a Gamorrean perimeter guard's pikestaff had slashed the raw-edged wound on her face. She'd left the blade buried halfway through the guard's throat; Jabba had always made the mistake of hiring thugs who were bigger than they were fast. She'd only felt fear afterward, as she'd stepped over the widening pool of blood, then ran into the desert.
In this dimly lit space, she was finally able to stand upright in a central chamber. "Where's the other one?" She glanced over her shoulder at the two medical droids as they emerged from the tunnel and clicked back into their normal positions. "The one you're taking care of?"
"Dengar told us-" SHS1-B's voice snapped silent.
"Over here," it said grudgingly. The taller droid led Neelah past disorganized stacks of weapons and ammunition modules, mixed with the discarded wrappings of autothermal field-ration containers. "It's not really suitable-this patient should've been medevac'd to a hospital immediately-but we've done the best we can…
."
Neelah tuned out the droid's words. At the low, rounded entrance to the side chamber, she halted and peered inside. "Is he ... is he awake?" A dim glow filled the space; a black cable ran from a shielded worklight to a fuel-cell power generator in the middle of the main chamber's clutter. "Can he see me?"
"Not with what we gave him." SHSl-B stood just behind her. "I prescribed a five-percent obliviane solution from le-XE's anesthetic stocks. On a constant basis, too; the patient's injuries are unusually severe. That was one of the reasons we had to go back to the palace, to try and find more. But if we didn't, the pain from this kind of trauma could go into a feedback loop and completely burn out th e patient's c
entral nervous system." She stepped into the chamber, ducking under the doorway. An improvised bed, polyfoam stuffed inside flexible freight sheathing, left only a small space between the unconscious man and the medical droids' intravenous units and monitoring equipment. She squeezed past the humming machines, dials, and tiny screens ticking with slow pulses of light, and stood looking down at someone whose face she had never seen before. One of her hands reached to touch him, but stopped a few centimeters away from his brow. He looks worse than I do, thought Neelah. The man's flesh looked as raw as it had when she'd found him the first time, out in the desert; the skin that he had lost in the Sarlacc's digestive tract was replaced now with a transparent membrane, linked to tubes trickling fluids from the wall of machines alongside the bed. "What's this?" She touched the clear substance; it felt cold and slick.
"Sterile nutrient casing." SHS1-B reached out and made a slight adjustment to one of the equipment controls. "It's what we normally use on severe burn victims, when there has been major epidermal loss. When we were in the service of the late Jabba the Hutt, we saw and treated a lot of burns."
"Explosions," said le-XE.
"Just so." SHSl-B lifted part of its carapace in an approximation of a humanoid shrug. "The kind of persons who worked for Jabba-the rougher sort of his employees-they were always blowing themselves up, one way or another."
"Turnover. High rate."
"That's true; there were always some we just couldn't put back together. But le-XE did get rather skilled at burn-treatment protocols. This individual's somatic trauma, however, is a little different." SHS1-B scanned over the unconscious figure. "No one, as far as can be recalled from our memory banks, has ever survived even temporary ingestion by a Sarlacc. So we're doing the best we can, with what we've got."
