by K. W. Jeter
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
