Star Wars - The Bounty Hunter Wars - The Mandalorian Armor

by K. W. Jeter

  will be different."

  "I certainly expect so." More of the same, the

  Twi'lek told himself. He was careful to keep his thoughts

  from showing on his face. "In the meantime ..."

  "In the meantime there will be a nice little transfer

  of credits to your private account. For all your

  services." Bossk dismissed him with a simple gesture of

  his upraised claws. "You can go now."

  That fool is right about one thing. The Twi'lek felt

  a warm glow of satisfaction as he headed back to his own

  quarters. He was doing a good job-

  For himself.

  Boba Fett heard the door creak open. He had to work

  against his own ingrained habits, which had kept him

  alive in a hard universe, to keep his back turned toward

  a door. More bounty hunters had lost their lives from a

  blaster burning into their spines than had ever taken an

  opponent's shot face-to-face. Fett should know he had

  taken out more than his share, just that way.

  "Excuse me. ..." A cautious voice sounded from the

  doorway.

  That was why he'd kept his back toward it. So as to

  give anyone who came around to this dank chamber, to talk

  with him, a perceived psychological advantage. Some of

  the members of the Bounty Hunters Guild were a little

  short in the courage department. He found it hard to

  imagine why they might have thought they would have any

  aptitude for this business. If they had found themselves

  looking straight into the dark, narrow visor of his

  helmet, they might have fled before even opening their

  mouths.

  "Yes?" Boba Fett turned around-slowly, as

  nonthreateningly as possible for someone with his

  reputation. "What is it?"

  "I was wondering"-the short bounty hunter, with the

  large insectoid eyes and breathing hoses, stood in the

  doorway-"if I might have a word with you. . . ."

  What was this one's name? They all looked alike to

  Boba Fett. Zuckuss, he remembered. The partner of Bossk,

  at least as recently as that business where he had

  snatched the accountant Nil Posondum out from under their

  noses.

  "Of course, if you're busy-" Zuckuss clasped his

  gloved hands together in an obvious show of nervousness.

  "I can come back some other time-"

  "Not at all." Boba Fett had also seen this one at the

  Guild's banquet hall, close to the reptilian Bossk. So

  there was undoubtedly still some connection between the

  two of them. "No time like the present," said Fett. "For

  talking about important things."

  This one didn't take long. Zuckuss was hardly in

  Fett's quarters for more than a few minutes before he had

  scuttled back out into the corridor, disappearing before

  anyone from the Guild could spot him there. Small fry,

  thought Boba Fett. Not one of the major players in the

  Bounty Hunters Guild that Kud'ar Mub'at had briefed him

  on. But important enough, with a line straight to the ear

  of Bossk. Who, as the impatient heir apparent to the

  Guild leadership, would have a great deal to do with it

  being torn apart.

  The conversation went exactly as Boba Fett had

  expected, and just as Kud'ar Mub'at would have predicted.

  Zuckuss was like so many others in the Bounty Hunters

  Guild, down in the lower ranks a perfect combination of

  greed and naivete. Just smart enough to kill, mused Fett

  after Zuckuss had left. The short bounty hunter had

  glanced nervously out the doorway, to make sure no one

  was there to see him as he scurried down the torchlit

  corridor. Not smart enough to keep himself from getting

  killed. It might not happen this time-Zuckuss might, with

  the erratic luck of the feckless, survive the breakup of

  the Guild-but it would eventually.

  He supposed that was the big difference between

  himself and poor Zuckuss, between himself and Bossk and

  Bossk's vicious, aging father and all the rest of the

  Guild members. Boba Fett sat down on the stone bench for

  a moment; the armaments he carried with him, that were as

  much a part of him as his spine, prevented him from

  leaning back. He never wasted time thinking about

  himself, any more than an explosively lethal missile from

  the rocket launcher strapped to his back would have as it

  sped toward its doomed and pinpointed target. But he knew

  that the reason he was alive and that others were dead,

  or soon would be, was that he possessed the true and

  essential secret of being a bounty hunter-

  As good as he was at catching and, if need be,

  killing other sentient creatures, he was even better at

  surviving their attempts to kill him. Everything else was

  just a matter of superior firepower.

  Boba Fett stood up from the stone bench. If he stayed

  here any longer, there would be others coming to talk to

  him. Others who thought they could protect themselves the

  way he did, but who were already fatally enmeshed in the

  trap spun by Kud'ar Mub'at, so far away that he couldn't

  be seen or the tugs on the strands of his web even felt.

  Besides Bossk and Zuckuss, there had also been one of

  Cradossk's top advisers on the Guild council, and the

  Twi'lek major-domo, back for a longer talk than when he'd

  brought Fett to this dank chamber. All of them had been

  in pure deal-cutting mode, eager to help pull the Bounty

  Hunters Guild apart so they would get a bigger piece of

  whatever was left in the wreckage.

  Right now he didn't feel like talking to anyone else.

  Action meant more than words; that was one other thing

  Boba Fett was sure of. A man was killed by words, and

  saved by action. Spending so much time talking to other

  sentient creatures had been like wrapping himself in

  death. What he wanted to do right now was head back to

  the Slave I, his refuge docked at the edge of the Guild's

  main compound, lock himself behind its overlapping

  security layers, all systems primed to fry anyone who

  tried to breach them, and rest. If not the sleep of the

  virtuous-Fett had no illusions about that, or

  regrets-then at least the sleep of someone who had put in

  a good day's work. In his business, that meant helping

  others arrange their own destruction.

  The presence of those other sentient creatures,

  carrying their fates around with them, all unaware, laid

  -a cold hand on Boba Fett's heart, or whatever passed for

  it after all these years of death. It felt like some

  prophecy of his own death, though he was just as sure

  that that was a long way off, far from here in both time

  and space.

  Being back inside his own ship would be as much a

  relief as being out in the emptiness between the stars.

  He would be alone there, sealed off from all the others,

  living and dead. . . .

  That was what he needed. He pushed the rough wooden

  door shut behind himself and strode down the corridor,

  beneath the flickering light of the
torches. Anywhere but

  here, thought Boba Fett. The tunnel stretched out before

  him. Above him, the invisible weight of rock and stone

  pressed down, like the tomb he hadn't earned yet.

  12

  NOW

  "You were saying things." Dengar handed the figure on

  the pallet a metal cup filled with water. "In your

  sleep."

  Sleep was the wrong word, he knew. Dying would have

  been more accurate. Except that Boba Fett hadn't died,

  after all. After everything.

  "Is that so?" Even unhelmeted, Boba Fett had a gaze

  that was as cold and exterminating as anything that had

  looked out from the black, narrow visor. Lying on the

  improvised bed in the hiding place's smallest subchamber,

  Fett's lethal potential appeared undiminished, as though

  his ravaged flesh were only a temporary costume, less

  real than the ragged battle-gear stacked up in the

  corner. "What did I say?"

  "Nothing important," replied Dengar. He knew better

  than to have told the truth, if Fett's drugged,

  unconscious mutterings had amounted to anything. This

  barve lives by secrets, thought Dengar. To get inside any

  of those secrets would be like stealing something from

  him. And the consequences of that, Dengar was well aware,

  would not be pretty. "Something about not liking so many

  sentient creatures around you. Stuff like that."

  "Ah." Boba Fett raised his head and managed to sip

  the water he'd been given. His smile looked like a blade

  wound in the abraded skin of his face. "I still don't

  like it."

  "Please do not agitate the patient." The taller of

  the two medical droids scolded Dengar. The droid and its

  shorter partner were busily changing the dressings around

  Boba Fett's torso. Bloodied rags and sterile gel sheets

  were peeled away from the raw flesh beneath. Wounds such

  as Fett's took a long time to heal; the Sarlacc's gastric

  secretions were like acid creeping toward the bone, long

  after the beast itself was dead. "If I had the authority

  to do so," continued SHS1-B, "I would order you out of

  this area immediately."

  "But you don't." Dengar leaned back against the

  subchamber's crumbling rock wall. The air inside the

  hiding place was as hot and desiccating as the interior

  of one of the ancient burial mounds that studded the

  farther reaches of the Dune Sea, where Tatooine's double

  suns turned corpses into withered leather. "Besides,"

  said Dengar, "if you two haven't killed him by now,

  nothing will."

  "Sarcasm." le-XE spoke as it readied another

  combination of opiates and antiseptics.

  "Nonappreciation."

  "There's someone else in this place, isn't there?"

  Boba Fett had drawn his head back from the metal cup that

  Dengar had held out to him. The mere effort of his words

  sent his chest laboring, the dials and readouts on the

  surrounding equipment blipping into the red. "A female."

  Dengar said nothing. He placed the half-empty cup on

  top of one of the sighing machines that the two medical

  droids tended. He had other things to take care of, other

  things to do besides talk with the sinister figure lying

  on the pallet, a little farther away from death's shores

  than Fett had been even a couple of days ago. One of the

  hiding place's power generators had conked out, spewing

  white sparks and a dense cloud of greasy smoke. That had

  necessitated shutting down all but the minimum air

  recyclers, resulting in the hot, thick miasma bound

  inside the hiding place. Dengar could more profitably

  take care of the generator, getting it up and back on-

  line, rather than staying here at Boba Fett's bedside.

  But the other man's cold gaze held him as tight as the

  curved hook of a gaffstick.

  "There's no need to lie to me about it," said Boba

  Fett. His words were as cold and unemotional as the gaze

  from his eyes. "I saw her. She came in here. Yesterday, I

  suppose. It's still hard for me to tell about these

  things. But it was dark, and she must have thought I was

  asleep. Or that I had died, perhaps."

  "Please," said SHSl-B. It fussed with the tubes

  running between the machines and Boba Fett's body.

  "You're making our job considerably more difficult."

  Dengar ignored the medical droid. He was about to

  answer Fett, to tell the bounty hunter who the female

  was, when the bombs hit. Real bombs.

  Dust sifted from the subchamber's ceiling, speckling

  the lenses of SHZl-B's head unit swiveling up toward the

  sound of thunder. Windstorms infrequently lashed the Dune

  Sea, floods of sand churning down the stone gulleys and

  vanishing just as quickly beneath the twin suns. Dengar

  had always thought that the hiding place he'd dug for

  himself was too far beneath the planet's surface to take

  any damage from mere weather. It'll take something

  stronger, he'd decided, to get in here.

  His own words were still looping around inside his

  head when the rocks fell, with even louder thunder from

  above, onto his face.

  He'd looked up, along with the two medical droids. He

  had a memory flash, of a light sharp as blades against

  his eyes and brighter than Tatooine's suns combined into

  one. Then he was spitting out gravel and blood as he felt

  his arm being tugged by someone unseen.

  "Come on!" The voice was Neelah's; her hands gripped

  tight around his forearm and pulled. Rocks and sand

  poured off his chest as his scrabbling efforts, feeble at

  first and then made stronger by sudden desperation,

  combined with hers to extract him from the remains of the

  subchamber. "He's still in there!"

  She meant Boba Fett, of course. The hiding place's

  emergency lights flickered as the remaining generator

  came to life. Dengar could still hear thunder, receding

  into the distance up on the surface level. The thunder

  would return, he knew; he was familiar enough with

  saturation-bombing techniques to be aware that that was

  what was going on up there. One wave would be succeeded

  by another, crossing the ground at a right angle from the

  first sweep. There wouldn't be any stones left, no

  gulleys or eroded pillars; everything would be hammered

  into dust. And as for whatever might lie beneath the

  surface . . .

  Neelah was already digging at the rubble that blocked

  the doorway to the subchamber. Enough of the dust had

  settled that Dengar could see how the bombs' impact had

  knocked him back toward the hiding place's main area. If

  he had been any farther inside, where the medical droids

  had been taking care of their patient, the rockfall would

  have come straight down on him, crushing his skull.

  "Confusion." Neelah's bleeding fingers had already

  excavated the smaller of the droids. With its carapace

  dented, torso readouts cracked and blinking, le-XE

  crawled away from the rocks and
righted itself with

  difficulty. "Noise. Not-goodness."

  "What are you waiting for?" Neelah looked back around

  at him, her eyes blazing through the dust and sweat

  covering her face. "Help me!"

  "Are you crazy?" Dengar reached down and grabbed an

  arm, pulling Neelah to her feet. "There isn't time for

  that-whoever's laying down those bombs on the surface

  will be back in less than a minute. We've got to get out

  of here!"

  "I'm not going without him." Neelah yanked her arm

  from Dengar's grasp. "Save yourself, if you want to." She

  turned away and started tugging at one of the larger

  rocks, nearly as high as herself.

  There were tunnels underneath the hiding place,

  curving and smooth-sided, that ran deep into the planet's

  bedrock. Dengar had investigated them far enough to know

  that they connected with the Great Pit of Carkoon; with

  the Sarlacc beast dead now, they would make a safe refuge

  from the bombing. But only if they were reached in time,

  before the next destructive wave collapsed what remained

  of these spaces.

  He hesitated only a moment, before cursing himself as

  a fool and laying both his hands on the rock, just above

  Neelah's hands. The stone surface was already slick with

  her blood; Dengar dug his own fingertips into it and

  pulled, straining with his weight against the rock's

  resistance. From far off and above, he could hear the

  bombing of the surface come to a halt, like a storm that

  has spent its thunderous fury. That's only temporary, he

  knew. They'd be returning in this direction soon enough.

  Dengar put his shoulder against the rock, his hands

  clawing for a better grip. It struck him, between one

  gasp for breath and the next, that he didn't even know

  who it could be that was pounding the Dune Sea above his

  head into scorched powder. Forces of the Empire, maybe,

  or the Rebel Alliance, or the Hutts, or the Black Sun

  organization-at this point it wasn't as important as just

  surviving the hard, murderous rain. The only thing he

  knew for certain, down in his gut, was that it had

  something to do with Boba Fett. Getting involved with

  this barve was a sure ticket to disaster.

  The large rock suddenly shifted, spilling Neelah

  forward onto the main chamber's rubble-strewn floor.

  Dengar managed to keep his balance, shifting his hold and