Star Wars - The Bounty Hunter Wars - The Mandalorian Armor

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