Star Wars - Tales Of The Bounty Hunters

by Tales of the Bounty Hunters (edited by Kevin J Anderson)

  Leia Organa worked hard at keeping the smile off her face. "All right, I'll take him with me, too."

  Han Solo looked up at her and grinned. "Deal."

  She leaned in on him and whispered, "You better not be in jail when I come back."

  "Hey, hey," he objected. "This is me."

  He called Luke.

  When Luke's image appeared in the hologram, Han said, "Hey, buddy. You busy tonight?"

  A smile lit Luke's features. "Han! How are you?"

  "Fine. Look, Chewie's gone home and won't be back for another few weeks, my wife and kids are off-"

  "-the Shalamite trip," Luke nodded. "Right. Why didn't you go?"

  "-and I was thinking," said Han doggedly, refusing to get sidetracked, "we might go and see if we could dig up some trouble tonight."

  Luke shook his head. "I can't, Han. I've invited a group of the Senators to dinner. you are welcome to join us, though."

  "Trouble sounds more attractive," Han growled.

  Luke grinned. "C'mon, Han. You know I can't can-cel my own dinner. Besides, this is Coruscant. We're two of the best known people on the whole planet. Where are we going to find trouble?"

  "I've managed it before."

  "And you sat in jail for two days before you con-vinced them you were really you. Leia was worried sick."

  "Yeah," Han pointed out, "but Leia's off-planet right now. By the time she gets back, this stay in jail will be nothing but a pleasant memory."

  Luke laughed. "Han, come to dinner with me. You'll enjoy yourself."

  "With half a dozen Senators? I'd rather have a tooth pulled."

  "You know," said Luke quietly, "you might think about joining the Senate."

  "Without anesthetic Vd rather-"

  "They'd elect you in a heartbeat."

  "And impeach me in a month."

  "Why?"

  Han thought about it. "Bribe taking," he said finally.

  "You wouldn't take bribes," said Luke calmly.

  "Well, I admit it would depend on the bribe."

  "Han, what's bothering you?"

  The question startled Han. "Nothing."

  The steadiness of Luke's gaze was unsettling. "You're not telling me the truth, Han. Or you're not telling yourself the truth, I'm not sure which-"

  That look was making Han uncomfortable. "I don't know. Maybe it's just Chewie being gone-"

  "That's not it."

  Han stared at Luke. "No. not really. You know. I don't know where I'm going anymore, kid. I have a wife and children who love me, and who I love. But that's the problem. I'm Daddy. I'm Leia's consort, ftell amusing stories at state dinners-"

  "You're very good at it," Luke said gently. "There's a place for those sorts of-"

  ''-and somebody asked me at one of those blasted dinners a while back what it was like, smuggling I mean, back in the old days. I started to answer and suddenly I couldn't remember. I couldn't remember the last time I'd run an Imperial barricade, or what the cargo was, or how it felt."

  Luke grinned at him. "It was me and Ben and the droids."

  Han looked startled. "You're right-it was, wasn't it?" He smiled almost unwillingly. "Yeah. All right, let's say I couldn't remember the last time I made any money at it-"

  Luke turned his head, looked off-pickup, and turned back. "Han, my guests are arriving. Are you sure you won't join us?"

  Despite himself Han felt tempted. ". nah. Not tonight."

  Luke nodded. "I'll come by tomorrow. All right?"

  "All right. I'll talk to you later, kid."

  Luke's lips quirked in a small smile. "Han-"

  "Yeah?"

  "Han, I'm older than you were when we met." The smile did not fade, but it changed quality subtly, in a way Han Solo did not quite understand. "The world changes, Han. You can't stop it and you can't fight it, and you can't ever, ever turn it back." Han had the oddest impression Luke was studying him; and then Luke nodded and said, "I'll talk to you tomorrow. Hang in there."

  His image vanished.

  Han Solo thought, The kid's turning into Obi-Wan right in front of my eyes.

  He got a recording when he tried to reach Calrissian.

  "I'm sorry, but I can't be reached right now. Busi-ness has taken me on an extended trip; I'll respond to any messages if I return.

  "If this is Han, buddy, you owe me four hundred credits if I get back."

  Well, blast it, Han thought. Lando had found some trouble.

  Late that evening he found himself down at the launch-ing bay where he kept the Falcon.

  It was dark, except for the bay lights high above him, and quiet except for the distant sounds of cargo being unloaded, in the commercial bays a good ways down.

  Nobody questioned Han when he arrived; nobody asked him what he was doing there; he walked through the darkened bay as though he owned the place.

  He very nearly did.

  Han Solo stood at the edge of the bay, and laid one hand against the control for the overheads; and four banks of floods came to life.

  Beneath the wash of light, the Millennium Falcon glowed white. She had never been so clean, in all the years Han had owned her; she had never been so care-fully painted and beautifully detailed. Her engines had been rebuilt-the new hyperdrive engines never so much as blinked. The weapons emplacements were al-most all new equipment.

  There were even spare parts for everything.

  Han had ceased to wonder about how much it had all cost; the New Republic had paid for it all. He'd never even seen a bill.

  Sitting in the pilot's seat, in the cockpit, he initiated a launch sequence. He didn't really intend to take the ship up; he just wanted to look at the sky.

  The dome above the Falcon split in two, slid slowly apart as the platform the Falcon rested on raised itself up, and the sky came out.

  Han Solo stared out at the world.

  It was amazing how much better it made him feel, just to be sitting here, in the closest thing to a home that he'd ever had. The seat next to him was empty, and that wasn't right-but it wasn't entirely wrong, ei-ther. He hadn't met Chewbacca until well into his adult years; and there'd been a time, before that-before Chewie, after the death of his parents-when there had been nobody.

  No one except himself.

  Han wondered sometimes-rarely, to be sure-what his family would have thought about him, if they could have seen what he had grown into. He'd never had to wonder about it, when he was younger; his family had loved him, but he knew he had been a disappointment to them, and they had not lived to see him grow into anything better.

  You can pinpoint moments when change occurs. Not always; some changes are like the tide, slow and barely perceptible until they have come, or gone.

  Sometimes, though-

  Han did think about this, and with, oddly, increasing frequency, as the event itself grew more distant in time: the Death Star was coming; and it was going to destroy the Rebel base, the Rebels themselves, and their plainly doomed Rebellion. Han had taken Chewie and the Fal-con, and had gotten out with time to spare-

  Chewie was furious; Han could tell. Chewie wanted to fight. They'd sat here, together, in the Falcons con-trol room, with Chewie not talking to him. Han had made not one, but two errors, calculating the jump to hyperspace. Finally he had his trajectory-and he hadn't been able to run it.

  "All right, all right, let's go fight," he'd yelled at

  Chewie finally, almost twenty years ago, convinced they were both heading to their deaths-

  He sat in the cockpit of the Falcon, almost twenty years later, and wondered what might have been: Leia would have been dead; and so would Luke. His chil-dren would never have been born. The Empire would still rule the galaxy, and he and Chewie would be travel-ing from world to world, one step ahead of the Imperi-als, one step ahead of the bounty hunters.

  No, thought Han. Not 'one step.' Someone would have caught me. Boba Fett, IG-88-someone-and I'd have had no friends to come and rescue me from Jabba.

  Twenty y
ears.

  To this day Han could remember with perfect clarity. how close he had come to punching in that trajec-tory, and leaving Leia and Luke behind. He woke up at night, sometimes, in cold sweats, thinking about it.

  How very close.

  If his parents were still alive, Han thought, they'd be impressed by die man he'd grown into-and not the least bit surprised at how close it had come to not hap-pening.

  Mari'ha Andona tapped a stud when the hail came.

  "This is Control."

  "This is General Solo. "Mari'ha grimaced at the use of the title; Solo was certainly entided to it, but Mari'ha had been running flight control over this sector of Co-ruscant long enough that she knew Solo only used it when he was going to be pushy about something.

  "I'm going to take the Falcon up for a bit. Any chance I could get you to pipe me a flight path?"

  "Yes, sir. What's your destination?"

  "Haven't got one. "

  Mari'ha said calmly, "Excuse me? Sir?"

  "/ don't have one. I don't know where I'm going yet."

  Mari'ha sighed, looking across the screens that showed all the flights in her sector. There were so many of them that it was hard for a human to pick out any single blip as belonging to an individual ship.

  She thought, The flight droid is going to pitch a fit. The flight droid always pitched a fit; it had acquired a dis-like for General Solo many years ago now, when-

  "Which part of this are you having difficulty with, Con-trol?"

  "I'm going to need a couple minutes," she muttered into the comm unit. "The flight droid doesn't like you."

  "You need," said Solo, "to clear a corridor and give me a flight path and do it right now before I have to go down to the tower personally and charm you to death. Do you copy that?"

  "I copy you, General." She finished composing his request for clearance, punched it in, and then sat there punching Override, over and over again, at the flight droid's objections. "And. here you go. Have a nice trip, General. Don't hurry back."

  "Try not to miss me too much, sweetheart. A pleasure as usual. Solo out."

  Not long after that, her supervisor's holo sprung into existence, one-sixth sized, in the viewing area off to her right.

  "This is most irregular," he said severely. "Did Gen-eral Solo give you a flight plan?"

  "Nope."

  "Estimated time of return?"

  "Nope."

  It was almost a shriek. "Destination?"

  "Couldn't tell you. Nowhere in-system, though. He entered hyperspace about twenty minutes ago."

  Strange things happen in the course of a lifetime: When he had started out in his career as a bounty hunter, Boba Fett had never even heard of the place- Tatooine. But that small and meaningless desert planet, as it turned out, became a part of Fett's life, and over the course of the years kept intruding back into it. Jabba the Hutt had established headquarters there; Luke Skywalker, Fett learned many years later, had ac-tually grown up on Tatooine.

  The worst disaster of his life had taken place there, his fall into the Great Pit of Carkoon, into the maw of the Sarlacc.

  Two years ago, Tatooine had intruded into Fett's life again. Four meres, two of them Devaronian, had walked into a bar in Mos Eisley. One of the Devaronian meres recognized, or thought he had recognized, the Butcher of Montellian Serat. The identification might not have been accurate; the old Devaronian he pointed to had promptly killed all four of the meres, and no one was able to question him about it.

  The old Devaronian had vanished, clean off Tatooine. and Fett had tracked him. Here, to Pep-pel, a world almost as far away from Coruscant as Tatooine.

  The target. Kardue'sai'Malloc, the Butcher of Montellian Serat. There was a five million credit bounty on the Butcher, five million credits of retirement money.

  Boba Fett was not the man he had once been. His right leg, from the knee down, was artificial. Only con-stant medical treatment kept him from developing a cancer; the days he'd spent in the belly of the Sarlacc had altered his metabolism permanently, had damaged him genetically to such a degree that he could not have had children had he wanted them; his cellular struc-tures did not always regenerate the way they were meant to.

  To say nothing of the memories he had carried away from the Sarlacc and the Sarlacc's genetic soup, memo-ries that were not always his own.

  Fett waited, on his belly in the cold, in the mud, nude except for the shorts that kept his privates decently covered, with arrows in a quiver slung across his back, and a bow in one hand, and a crystal knife inside a leather sheath. Malloc-or Labria, the name he'd been going by for the last couple of decades now-was trick-ier and more dangerous than anyone had ever dreamed. He'd had a reputation in Mos Eisley, Fett had learned; Labria, the worst spy in the city. He was a drunk, and nobody had respected him, or feared him, until the day he had killed four meres in the prime of their lives.

  Darkness gathered. Fett waited, shivering, worrying. Artificial light of some sort glimmered in the hut's sole window. The metal content of his artificial leg was low, but Fett did not know how good the Butcher's security system was; all he knew was that it was there. He'd slipped tripwires, light traps; had crawled, centimeter by centimeter, past blinking motion sensors.

  If there were not some sort of sensor sweeping the clearing, Fett would have been surprised. It was the reason he had not worn his armor, nor brought more modern weapons.

  The lights in the hut went out. The hut had no plumbing; the previous night at this time Malloc had waited for several minutes after the extinguishing of his light, letting his eyes acclimate to the darkness, Fett assumed, before coming outside.

  Fett reached over his back, pulled an arrow free, and strung the bow. It was a compound bow, that required the least exertion after it had been pulled back; Fett pulled it and waited.

  Last night at this time Malloc had come outside to relieve himself. Fett didn't know as much about Devaronians as he might have (though he had studied an anatomy chart for Devaronians; he didn't want to shoot the fellow in the wrong place). Conceivably they only relieved themselves once a week. If so, he was go-ing to have to think of some other approach-

  The door swung open, and the bounty stood in the doorway, assault rifle cradled in both hands, took a quick step outside, onto the porch, and then stepped off the porch and walked around to the side of the house nearer Fett's hiding place. Fett tracked Malloc as he moved over to the open-air toilet the Devaronian had dug for himself, ten meters outside the hut. He waited for Malloc to disrobe and relieve himself-and then waited until he was done, and pulling his clothing back together again.

  He needed to keep this one alive, and Fett had shot too many individuals, of all species, to shoot anyone before he, she, or it, had emptied itself. Someone al-ways had to clean up after it, and usually that was the person who wasn't in chains.

  Fett let the fellow stand up from his toilet, turning away from Fett, and shot Malloc high in the back. He was on his feet and running, in a half stagger himself, running on legs that shrieked with pain, as Malloc stumbled forward, giving voice to something that man-aged to mix a scream and roar. Fett closed on Malloc and Fett rolled to get down low, and with the knife slashed Malloc across the hamstring of his right leg. Malloc fell forward, to his knees, still reaching up to try to pull the arrow free from his shoulder.

  Fett pushed him forward, up against the hut's wall, grabbed Malloc by one of his horns and pulled his head back, and got the knife against his throat. "Move and you die," he whispered harshly.

  The hut reeked.

  The Butcher of Montellian Serat, Kardue'sai'Malloc, sat propped up against the wall, the arrow pulled from his back, but the wound still bleeding, and strained against the bonds that kept his hands pulled behind his back.

  The hut was spacious; the hut's size was one of the things that had given Fett pause. He'd wondered what the Butcher was hiding inside it-mostly, wondered what weapons might be tucked away inside there, wait-ing for the wrong perso
n.

  There were no weapons, though, except for the rifle the Butcher had carried with him.

  Fett had known the Devaronians were carnivores; had he not known it, the contents of the hut would have confirmed it. The slaughtered carcasses of half a dozen animals hung along the far wall. A corner of the room had a pile of bones and shells in it, stripped almost clean of flesh. Dozens of empty bottles were scattered among them.

  In the opposite corner was the pit where Malloc had slept; and another several dozen bottles, still full of Merenzane Gold, lined up along the floorboards next to the pit.