The Bounty Hunter Wars_ The Mandalorian Armor Part 1

Star Wars.

The Bounty Hunter Wars.

The Mandalorian Armor.

by K.W.Jeter.

1.

NOW . . .

during the events of star wars: return of the Jedi Live ones are worth more than the dead ones.

That was the general rule of digital appendage for bounty hunters. Dengar hardly had to remind himself of it as he scanned the bleak and eye-stinging bright wastes of the Dune Sea. Right now he'd spotted a lot more dead things than living, which all added up to a big zero for his own credit accounts. I'd have done better, he told himself, getting off this miserable planet. Tatooine had never been any luckier for him than it'd been for any other sentient creature. Some worlds were like that.

His luck wasn't as bad as some others' had been-Dengar had to admit that. Especially when, as his plastoid-sheathed boots had trudged up another sloping flank of sand, a gloved fist had seized on his ankle, toppling him heavily onto his shoulder.

"What the-" His surprised outcry vanished echoless across the dunes as he rolled onto his back, scrabbling his blaster from its holster. He held his fire, seeing now just what it was that had grabbed on to him. His fall had pulled a hand and arm free from the drifting sands that formed the shallow grave for one of Jabba the Hurt's personal corps of bodyguards. Some reflex wired into the dead warrior's battle-glove had snapped the dead hand tight as a womp-rat trap.

Dengar reholstered his blaster, then sat up and began peeling the fingers away from his boot. "You should've stayed out of it," he said aloud. The Dune Sea's scouring wind revealed the corpse's empty eye sockets. "Like I did." Getting into other creatures' fights was always a bad idea. A whole batch of the galaxy's toughest mercenaries, bounty hunters included, had gone down with the wreckage of Jabba the Hutt's sail barge. If they'd been as smart as they'd been tough, Dengar himself wouldn't have been out here right now, searching for their weapons and military gear and any other salvageable debris.

He got his boot free and stood up. "Better luck next time," he told the dead man.

His advice was too late to do that one any good. In his own memory bank, Dengar filed away the image of the corpse, with its clawing fingers and mouth full of sand, as further proof of what he'd already known: The guy who comes along after the battle's over is the one who cleans up.

In more ways than one. He stood at the top of the dune, shielding his eyes from the glare of Tatooine's double suns, and scanned across the wide declivity in front of him. The forms of other warriors and bodyguards, sprawled across the rocky wastes or half-buried like the one left a few meters behind, showed that he'd found the still and silent epicenter of all that fatal action he had so wisely avoided.

More evidence: Bits and pieces of debris, the wreckage of the repulsorlift sail barge that had served as Jabba's floating throne room, lay scattered across the farther dunes. Sc.r.a.ps of the canopy that had shaded Jabba's ma.s.sive bulk from the midday suns now fluttered in the scalding breezes, blaster fire and the impact of the crash having torn the expensive Sorderian weftfabric to rags. Dengar could see a few more of Jabba's bodyguards, facedown on the hot sand, their weapons stolen by scavenging Jawas. They wouldn't be fighting anymore to protect their boss's wobbling bulk. Even in this desiccating heat, Dengar could smell the sickly aftermath of death. It wasn't unfamiliar to him-he'd been working as a bounty hunter and general-purpose mercenary long enough to get used to it-but the other scent he'd hoped to catch, that of profit, was still missing. He started down the slope of the dune toward the distant wreckage.

There was no sign of Jabba's corpse, once Dengar reached the spot. That didn't surprise him as he used a broken-shanked scythe-staff to poke around the rubble. Soon after the battle, he'd seen a Huttese transport lifting into the sky; that'd been what had guided him to this remote spot. The ship undoubtedly had had Jabba's body aboard. Hutts might be greedy, credit-hungry slugs-a trait Dengar actually admired in them-but they did have a certain feeling toward the members of their own species. Kill one, he knew, and you were in deep nerf waste. It wasn't sentimentality on the part of the other Hutts, so much as a wound to their notorious megalomania, mixed with a practical self-interest.

So much for Luke Skywalker and the rest of them, thought Dengar as the point of the staff revealed sticky and distasteful evidence of Jabba's death. As if that little band of Rebels didn't have enough trouble, with the whole Empire gunning for them; now they'd have the late Jabba's extended clan after them as well. Dengar shook his head-he would've thought that Skywalker and his pal Han Solo would have, at the least, an appreciation of the Hutt capacity for bearing grudges.

Even without Jabba's obese form rotting under the thermal weight of the suns, the debris zone stank. Dengar lifted a length of chain, the broken metal at its end twisted by blaster fire. The last time he'd seen this hand-forged tether, back at Jabba's palace, it'd been fastened to an iron collar around Princess Leia Organa's neck. Now the links were crusted with the dried exudations from Jabba's s...o...b..ring mouth. The Hutt must've died hard, thought Dengar, dropping the chain. A lot to kill there. He'd gotten an account of the fight from a couple of surviving bodyguards that had managed to drag themselves back to the palace. When Dengar had left, to come out here to the Dune Sea wastes, most of the remaining thugs and louts were busily smashing open the casks of off-planet claret in the cool, dank cellars beneath the palace, and getting obliterated in a orgy of relief and self-pity at no longer being in Jabba the Hurt's employ.

"Yeah, you're free, too." Dengar picked up an unsmashed foodpot that the toe of his boot had uncovered. The still-living delicacy inside, one of Jabba's favorite trufflites, scrabbled against the ceramic lid embossed with the distinctive oval seal of Fhnark & Co., Exotic Foodstuffs-we cater to the galaxy's degenerate appet.i.tes. "For what it's worth." His own tastes didn't run to the likes of the pot's spidery, gel-mired contents; he hooked a gloved finger in the lid's airhole and pried it open. The nutrient gases hissed out; they had sustained the delicacy's freshness, all the way from whatever distant planet had sp.a.w.ned it. "See how long you last out there." The trufflite dropped to the sand, scrabbled over Dengar's boot, and vanished over the nearest dune. He imagined some Tusken Raider finding the little appetizer out there and being completely perplexed by it.

One substantial piece of wreckage remained, too big for the Jawas to have carted away. The hardened durasteel keelbeam of the sail barge, blackened by explosions that had destroyed the rest of the craft, rose at an angle from where the stern end was buried beneath a fall of rocks. Dengar scrabbled aboard the curved metal, nearly a meter in width, and climbed the rest of the way up to where the barge's bow had been, and now only the exposed beam was left, tilted into the cloudless sky. He wrapped one arm around the end, then with his other hand unslung the elec-trobinoculars from his belt and brought them up to his eyes. The rangefinder numbers skittered at the bottom of his field of vision as he scanned across the horizon.

This was a pointless trip, Dengar thought dis gustedly. He leaned out farther from the keelbeam, still examining the wasteland through the 'binocs. His bounty-hunting career had never been such a raging success that he'd been able to refrain from any other kind of scrabbling hustle that chanced to come his way. It was a hard trade for a human to get ahead in, considering the number of other species in the galaxy that worked in it, all of them uglier and tougher; droids, too. So a little bit of scavenger work was nothing he was unused to. The best would've been if he had found any survivors out here that could either pay him for their rescue or that he could ransom off to whatever connections they might have. The late Jabba's court had been opulent-and lucrative-enough to attract more than the usual lowlifes that one encountered on Tatooine.

But the bunch of rubble Dengar had found out here-the few scattered and pawed-over bits of the sail barge and the smaller skiffs that'd hovered alongside as outriders, the dead bodyguards and warriors-wasn't worth two lead ingots to him. Anything of value was already trundling away in the Jawas' slow, tank-treaded sandcrawlers, leaving nothing but bones and worthless sc.r.a.p behind.

Might as well just stay here, he thought. And wait. He'd sent his bride-to-be, Manaroo, aloft in his ship, the Punishing One, to do a high-alt.i.tude reconnaissance of the area. Soon enough she'd be finished with the task, and would come back to fetch him.

The knot of frustration in Dengar's gut was instantly replaced with surprise as the keelbeam suddenly tilted almost vertical. The strap of the electrobinoculars cut across his throat as they flew away from his eyes. He held on with both hands as the beam pitched skyward, as though it were on a storm-tossed ocean of water rather than sand.

Charred metal sc.r.a.ped tight against the ammo pouches on his chest as the keelbeam rotated. As the beam twisted about, Dengar could see the surrounding dunes heaving in a slow, seismic counterpoint to the wrecked barge's motion, cliff faces of rock and sand shearing away and tumbling downward, slower clouds of dust stacking across the suns' smoldering faces.

At the center of the dunes, the slope grew deeper, like a funnel with a black hole at its center. Another shudder ran beneath the planet's surface, and the keelbeam rolled almost sideways, nearly dislodging Dengar from his grasp upon it. His feet swung out from beneath him; Dengar looked down, past his own boots, and saw that the hole at the bottom of the sand funnel was lined with teeth.

Jaws clenched, Dengar muttered an obscenity from his homeworld. You gnurling idiot-he cursed his own stupidity, getting himself stuck here in the middle of the air, with no escape route. He hadn't considered what his presence might awaken, and how hungry it would be.

The Great Pit of Carkoon gaped wider, sand and rubble swirling around the blind, all-devouring Sarlacc creature at the center of the vortex. A sour stench hit Dengar like a wind hotter than any that crossed the desert's reaches.

A glance around him revealed to Dengar that the keelbeam had slid partway down the funnel, then snagged on a solid rock outcropping. He turned his face against his shoulder as the sail barge's scattered debris rained past him, the larger pieces. .h.i.tting the Pit's sloping sides and pitching end over end into the Sarlacc's gaping maw. The keelbeam gave a sudden lurch in Dengar's sweating grasp as the end below him shattered part of the outcropping. Suddenly the beam swayed backward, leaving him dangling precariously, only a couple of meters from the Sarlacc's throat.

A pumping kick enabled him to get first one, then the other of his boot soles up onto the beam. He squatted into a deep knee bend on the narrow metal surface, then jumped, fingertips clawing for the funnel's edge above him. His belly hit the slope; sand slid maddeningly under his hands as he thrashed and kicked, struggling toward the bright and empty sky. With a gasp of effort, Dengar managed to get his chest across the shifting edge of the funnel, then scrabble the rest of his body over and tumble down the other side.

Too bad for the Jawas-that was all that Dengar could think of as he wrapped his arms around himself and waited for the animate disturbance in Tatooine's crust to subside. There might have been something of worth brought to the surface; but unless the little scroungers wanted to dive down the Sarlacc's throat to get it, that load of valuable salvage was lost to them now.

The Dune Sea grew silent again. Dengar let a minute pa.s.s, measured by his heartbeat gradually slowing to normal, then scrambled to his feet. The Sarlacc had most likely pulled its head back underground and was busy digesting the bits of wreckage it'd just been fed, or trying to. He figured that would give him time enough to get a safe distance away, if he hurried. Brushing sand from his gear, Dengar started trudging up the slope of the nearest dune.

Three dunes later he stopped to catch his breath. To his amazement, he saw that the sc.r.a.ps of debris, the barely distinguishable pieces of Jabba the Hutt's sail barge, still filled the center of the pit. The truth dawned on him. It's dead, thought Dengar. Something-or someone-had managed to kill the Sarlacc. The rotting stench had been from the creature's own torn-apart flesh, visible beneath the wreckage.

Now the sense of life, however malignant, beneath the desert's surface was extinguished. Only bits of wreckage, no longer recognizable as to form and function, and a few facedown bodies lay scattered around the empty zone.

The stink from the slope-sided hole motivated Dengar in the opposite direction, toward Jabba's palace. This was as good a time as any for him to verify the rumors about what the palace had become since the death of the Hutt. The orgiastic celebration of Jabba's liberated underlings had been just beginning, the last time Dengar had been inside the forbidding, windowless pile. If the palace was empty now-reports differed on that score-then the thick walls of the interior chambers would give him a safe place to hang out while night and its attendant hazards took possession of the Dune Sea, and he waited for Manaroo's return. His own private hideout, which he'd previously carved into a desert ridge of stone and stocked with supplies, would have done the same-but at the palace, there might be some remnants of Jabba's court, like the Hutt's majordomo, Bib Fortuna, and others who would be looking for ways to profit by the employer's death. Great minds think alike, Dengar noted wryly. Or at least the greedy ones do.

He gave the area one more scan, sweeping the horizon with the electrobinoculars. One of the suns had already begun to set, pushing his own shadow ahead across the wasteland. He was just about to power off the 'binocs when he spotted something nearly fifty meters away. That one looks like he took the worst of it-another corpse lay on a stretch of rough gravel. Faceup; Dengar could make out the front of a narrow-apertured helmet. That was about all of the corpse's gear that was intact. The rest of the dead man's gear looked as if it hadn't been burned away so much as dissolved, some kind of acid bath reducing uniform and armaments to rags and corroded, pitted shapes of useless metal and plastoid. Dengar thumbwheeled the 'binocs into closer focus, trying to figure out what could've happened to create that kind of lethal effect.

Wait a minute. The sprawled form filled the elec trobinoculars' lenses. Maybe not exactly lethal, Dengar corrected himself. He could see the figure's chest moving, a slight rise and fall, right on the edge of survival. The half-naked combatant, whoever it might be, was still alive. Or at least for the time being.

Now, that was worth checking out. Dengar slung the 'binocs back onto his equipment belt. If only to satisfy his own curiosity-the distant figure looked as if he'd discovered a whole new way of getting killed. As a bounty hunter and general purveyor of violence, Dengar felt a professional interest in the matter.

He glanced over his shoulder and saw his own ship, the Punishing One, descending a few kilometers away, its landing gear extended. His bride-to-be, Manaroo, was at the ship's controls. Good, thought Dengar. He'd be able to use her help, now that he had determined that there would be no immediate danger to her. He didn't mind risking his own life, but hers was another matter.

Balancing himself with one hand held back against the slope of the dune, Dengar worked his way toward the humanoid-shaped mystery he'd spotted. He hoped the other man would still be alive by the time he got there.

This way of dying's not so bad. . . .

Somewhere, past a jumble of disjointed thoughts and images, the oleaginous voice of Jabba the Hutt could be heard in memory, promising a new definition of pain, one that would last thousands of years, excruciating and never-ending.

The fat slug had been correct about that, to a degree; the dying man had to admit it. Or was he already dead?-he couldn't tell. This fate, the infinitely slow etching away, molecule by molecule, of epidermis and nerve endings, had been intended for someone else. It struck the dying man as no more unjust than all the rest of the universe's workings that he should suffer it instead.

Or have suffered it. Because the Hutt seemed to have been misinformed about how long the dissolution and torment would last. A few seconds had been more than adequate for pain's new meaning to have become clear, as the enfolding darkness's acids had seeped through uniform and armament, touching skin like the fire of a thousand commingled suns. And those few seconds, and the minutes and hours-days, years?-that followed had indeed seemed to stretch out to eternity...

But they had ended. That pain, beyond anything he had ever endured or inflicted, had come to a stop, replaced by the simpler and duller ebbing away of life force. By comparison, that was a comfort like drifting asleep on pillows of satin filled with downy feathers. Even the blindness, the perfect acidic night, had been broken by a muted dawn. The dying man still could not see, but he could sense, through the T-shaped visor of his helmet and the wet rags swaddling him, the unmistakable photonic warmth of suns against his face and the eroded skin of his chest. Perhaps, the dying man thought, it reached up into the sky and swallowed them, too. The giant mouth, when he'd fallen down its ranks of razor teeth, had seemed that big.

But now he felt gravel and sand beneath his spine, and his own blood miring him to the ground. That had to be some kind of a tactile hallucination. He had no G.o.ds to thank, but was grateful anyway for the blessings of madness. . .

The light on his face dimmed; the differential in temperature was enough that he could just make out the blurred edges of shadow falling upon him. He wondered what new vision his agony-fractured brain was about to conjure up. There were others, he knew, here in the belly of the beast; he had seen them fall and be swallowed up. A little company, the dying man decided. He might as well hallucinate voices, from those about to be digested; it would help pa.s.s the long endless hours before his own body's atoms floated free from one another.

One of the voices he heard was his own. "Help. . . ."

"What happened?"

He could almost have laughed, if any twitch of his raw muscles hadn't hurt so much, pushing him toward unconscious oblivion. Shouldn't hallucinations know these things?

"Sarlacc . . . swallowed me." The words seemed to come of their own volition. "I killed it . . . blew it up. . . ."

He heard another voice, a female's. "He's dying."

The man's voice spoke again, in hushed tones. "Manaroo-do you know who this is?"

"I don't care. Help me get him inside." The female's shadow fell across him.

Suddenly he felt himself rising, dirt and grit fall ing from his mangled form. The next sensation was that of being thrown across someone's broad shoulder, an arm encircling his waist to steady him. A sense of shame filled the dying man. There had been so many times when he had faced his own extinction-painful or otherwise-the contemplation of his death, and the dismissal of it as being of no concern, had given him strength. And now some weak part of him had summoned up this pitiful fantasy of rescue. Better to die, he thought, than to fear dying.

"Hang on," came the hallucinated voice. "I'll get you someplace safe."

The man called Boba Fett felt the jostle of the other's footsteps, the motion of being carried across the stony ground. For a moment his vision cleared, the blindness dissipating enough that he could see his own hand flopping limp and disjointed, leaving a trail of spattered blood on the sand. . . .

That was when he knew that what he saw and felt was real. And that he was still alive.

2.

A small object, moving by its own power through the cold expanses between the stars, had finally breached a planet's sensory perimeter. Kuat of Kuat had felt the hypers.p.a.ce messenger pod's approach even before his own corporate security chief came to tell him that it had been intercepted. He had a fine-tuned awareness of machines, from the smallest nano-sporoids to constructions capable of annihilating worlds. It was a family trait, something encoded deep within the Kuat blood for generations.

"Excuse me, Technician"-an obsequious voice came from behind him-"but you asked to be notified as the outer comm units picked up any traces. Of your . . . package."

Kuat of Kuat turned away from the great domed viewport and its vistas of emptiness studded with light. Far beyond the expanded orbit of the planet that bore the name identical to his, the hazy arm of one of the galaxy's more aesthetically pleasing spiral nebulae was about to rise into sight. He tried not to miss things like that; they served to remind him that the universe and all its interconnected workings was, in its essence, a machine like other machines. Even its const.i.tuent atoms, beyond the confusion of uncertainty principles and observer effects, ticked like ancient, primitive chrono gears. And finer things than that, Kuat of Kuat told himself, not for the first time. Such as men's spirits. Those were machines as well, however ineffable their substance.

"Very well." He stroked the silky fur of the felinx cradled in his arms; the animal made a deep, barely audible sound of contentment as his long, precise fingers found a specific zone behind the triangular ears. "That's just what I've been expecting." Machines, even the ones built in the Kuat Drive Yards, did not always function as intended; there were random variables that sometimes deposited metaphorical sand in the gears. It was a pleasure-frequent, but still undiminished-when things did work according to plan. "Has there been any readout on the contents?"

"Not yet." Fenald, the security chief, was dressed in the standard Kuat Drive Yards worksuit, devoid of any emblem of rank except for the variable-dispersion blaster slung conspicuously at his hip. "There's a full crew working on it, but"-a wry smile lifted a corner of his mouth-"the encryption codes are rather tight."

"They're meant to be." Kuat of Kuat would not be disappointed if the KDY employees weren't able to crack them; he had designed and implemented them himself. Setting Security's info-a.n.a.lysis division to work on them was a mere test, to see how well he'd done. "I don't care for anyone else reading my mail."

"Of course not." A slight nod in acknowledgment; despite the importance of Kuat Drive Yards as the elite and most powerful contractor of engineering and construction services to the Empire, the formalities of KDY headquarters were minimal, and had been for generations. Pomp and show and courtly flourishes were for those who didn't understand where true power came from. Fenald gestured toward the viewport, its hexagonal strutwork curving three times higher than his boss's imposing two-meter height. "I doubt if anyone has."

The felinx purred louder in Kuat of Kuat's arms; he'd found the exact spot wired into its pleasure centers. Born that way; a good amount of the minimal brain ma.s.s in the animal's excessively narrow skull-a trait of its inbred species-he'd had to replace with biosimulation circuits, to keep it from b.u.mping into walls and gnawing raw the flesh beneath its fur. His fingertips felt the edge of the cut into the animal's skull as he stroked it. Trans.m.u.ted even this far into a true machine, the animal was much more satisfactory, and-in ways Kuat of Kuat appreciated-even more beautiful.

A single bell note sounded in the s.p.a.cious office suite of KDY's hereditary CEO. Kuat of Kuat turned back to gaze at the viewport's limitless vista as his security chief leaned the side of his head against the small transponder embedded in his palm. The felinx had closed its eyes in ecstasy; it didn't see the rising edge of the far-distant nebula, like luminous smoke against black.

"They're bringing it in now," said Fenald.

"Excellent." Outside, in vacuum, an ion engine streaked fiery red, moving past the seemingly chaotic maze of construction platforms and grav-dock bays at a navigable sublight speed. The small utility shuttle, with its precious cargo aboard, was heading for the core of KDY's industrial complex. Perhaps a quarter of a standard time part before the shuttle arrived; Kuat of Kuat glanced over his shoulder at the other man. "You don't need to wait." He smiled. "I'll take care of it myself."

Security chiefs were paid to be curious about ev erything that happened within their sphere of operations. "As you please, Technician." The words were spoken with a stiffened spine and a nod just bordering on curtness. He was also paid to obey orders. "Let me know if there's anything else you require, in regard to this matter."

The felinx protested as Kuat of Kuat bent down, depositing it on the intricately tessellated floor. Tail demandingly erect, the creature rubbed itself against a trouser leg cut of the same utilitarian dark green as all the other work uniforms worn by KDY employees. The concerns of the most powerful beings in the galaxy-perhaps the most powerful beyond Emperor Palpatine's inner circle-didn't matter to the animal. A heat source and continued stroking were the limits of its desires.

As Kuat of Kuat straightened back up, the office suite's doors slid shut behind the departing chief of security. The felinx b.u.mped its head more insistently against his shin. "Not now," Kuat told it. "I've got work to do."

Persistence was a trait he admired; he couldn't be angry at the animal when it jumped up on his workbench. He let it march back and forth, level with his chest, as he a.s.sembled the necessary tools. Only when the pilot of the shuttle team, whose flight he had spotted from the viewport, entered and placed an elongated silver ovoid on the bench, then withdrew from his presence, did Kuat of Kuat shoo the animal away.

A pair of hovering worklights drew closer, erasing all shadow, as he leaned over the mirror-finished torpedo. This messenger pod was not just wired with, but actually built of, self-destruct modules, to prevent unauthorized access-or access by anyone except Kuat of Kuat himself. And even that was intended to be difficult; if he erred now, KDY would have a new hereditary owner and chief designer.

Held between thumb and forefinger, an ident.i.ty probe bit almost painlessly into his flesh, drawing samples of fluid and tissue. The microcircuitry inside the slender needlelike device ran through its programming, matching both genetic information and the automutating radioactive tracers that had been injected into his bloodstream. The probe gave no sign, audible or visible, whether everything checked out. The only indication would be when he held the inoxide tip to the messenger pod; if his charred remains weren't embedded in the wall behind him, then all was as it should be.

The probe tip clicked against the curved, reflective surface. No explosion resulted, except for the slight one of his held breath being released.

A hairline fissure opened along the side of the pod. The work went faster now as Kuat of Kuat pried open the silvery ovoid, dismantling the pieces of its sh.e.l.l in a precise order. A misstep, a segment taken out of turn, would also result in a fatal explosion, but he wasn't concerned about that happening. The only place where the proper sequence had been put down was in his memory, but no more accurate record could be imagined. When he admired machines, he admired himself.

The one on the workbench functioned just as perfectly: the last of the encasing sh.e.l.l separated into its component parts and fell away from the core. "You've come a long way, little one." He laid a tender, possessive hand on the holoprojector unit that had been revealed, "Just what do you have to tell me?"

A fading heat radiated into Kuat of Kuat's palm. The messenger pod's energy cell was an accelerated-decay module, producing enough power for a onetime jump in and out of hypers.p.a.ce. The navigational coordinates were hardwired; a matter of a few days ago it'd left the distant world of Tatooine. It could have reached the Kuat Drive Yards headquarters even sooner if a randomizing sublight process hadn't been programmed, to evade detection. Kuat of Kuat's own security men weren't the only ones watching the perimeter. A matter of business: paranoia was one of the operating costs that came with being of service to the Emperor.

Hands sheathed in insulated gloves, Kuat of Kuat lifted out the holoprojector. A standard playback unit, similar to ones found throughout the galaxy, but with tweaks and modifications far beyond the ordinary. Palpatine himself couldn't get this kind of detail in communications with his various underlings. But then . .

. he doesn't need it, Kuat of Kuat reminded himself. Not the way I do. The Emperor could always get what he wanted through fear and death. In the engineering business, one had to be a little more careful, not to eliminate one's market.

"Go away," he said to the felinx winding between his ankles. "You won't like this."

The felinx didn't heed the warning. When Kuat of Kuat used the rest of his precise tools to complete the circuits inside the holoprojector, the images and sounds of another great room were laid over the office suite. The oppressive darkness generated by the recording and its chaos of noises, from the rattling of subsurface chains to cruel cross-species laughter, brought the silken fur straight up along the animal's spine; it hissed at what it saw, particularly the holoform of one grossly elephantine individual with tiny hands and immense, greedy eyes. When that image's lipless mouth opened to emit wetly glottal laughter, the felinx scrambled to safety beneath the farthest corner of the workbench.

Kuat of Kuat used the magnetically fastened tip of the probe to freeze the playback; the cacophony was replaced by silence as he glanced over his shoulder and saw the court of Jabba the Hutt rendered motionless. He turned away from the bench and walked into the center of the hologram. The forms were insubstantial as ghosts-he could have pa.s.sed his hand through any one of the sycophants and hangers-on surrounding the Hutt's thronelike hover platform-but detailed in such perfection that he could almost smell the sweat and rank odors of de cay rising from the grates in the synthesized floors.

"You're dead, aren't you?" With a thin smile, he brought his face close to the stilled image of Jabba the Hutt. "That's such a shame. I hate to lose a good customer." Over the years Jabba had commissioned several large orders, lethal equipment for his thugs and hirelings from KDY's personal armaments division, plus elaborate palace furnishings and a superbly appointed sail barge, with military retrofits, from one of the Kuat subsidiaries devoted to luxury vessels. There had been extras thrown in that Jabba had known nothing about: hidden recording devices that had captured nearly everything that took place in the palace on Tatooine and aboard the floating barge. A good contractor, thought Kuat of Kuat, knows his accounts. Better than they even know themselves.

Word of the Hutt's death had already seeped through the galaxy, gladdening many, setting off an acquisitive scramble among others. Of all of his species, Jabba had been the most active-if that word could be applied to something so obese and slow-and with the farthest reach in his shady enterprises. They're already at each other's throats-the late Hutt's a.s.sociates, including Jabba's own supposedly grieving relations, struggling for control of his intricate and criminal legacy. That would be good for business; Kuat of Kuat already had appointments scheduled with some of the worst and most ambitious of the lot. New plans always called for new weapons.

The notion of throats mordantly amused him. What he'd already heard about Jabba the Hutt's death was confirmed by the holographic image. One of Jabba's ineffectual little hands held a length of chain, its other end fastened to a collar around the neck of a human form; standing at the edge of the recreated platform, Kuat of Kuat appraised with a connoisseur's eye the revealed attractiveness of Princess Leia Organa. His own wealth and power had brought many varieties of feminine beauty through his private quarters, even from the highest ranks of the n.o.bility. The princess, however . . .

He made a mental note to seek this woman's ac quaintance, if he ever had the opportunity. If it hap pened, he wouldn't be such an idiot as to leave something as simple and deadly as an iron chain lying about. "Never hand your enemy"-Kuat of Kuat spoke aloud to the dead Hutt's image-"the means by which she can kill you."

Jabba's death was a minor concern at the moment, though. Even the presence of Leia Organa at the late Hutt's court was, at this moment, of no great significance to Kuat. There were others that he sought, faces to be found in the past. He returned to his workbench and, with a few delicate adjustments to the playback unit, ran the recording back toward its beginning, before Leia Organa had ever entered Jabba's palace, disguised as an Ubese bounty hunter with captured Wookiee in tow. That should do it, thought Kuat as he glanced over his shoulder; he lifted the probe's tip from the device, freezing the image once again.

Stepping past Jabba's thronelike platform, Kuat of Kuat looked around the hologram of the Hutt's court. The a.s.sembled faces were a rogues' gallery of interstellar villainy, ranging from petty theft to murder-and beyond. Hutts tended to attract these types, the way small fur-bearing animals attracted fleas. Though in a certain sense, it was a symbiotic rather than parasitic relationship: At home in his palace, Jabba had been able to look around himself and at least see sentient creatures whose morals were on a par with, or even below, his own.

Kuat of Kuat walked slowly through the re-created court, looking for one face in particular. Not even a face, but a mask. He paused before the frozen image of Jabba's majordomo, a glittering-eyed, evilly smiling Twi'lek named Bib Fortuna. The males of the planet Ryloth, even with all the extra cognitive abilities packed into the heavy, tapering appendages hanging from their bare skulls onto their shoulders, had no capacity for generating wealth and no courage to steal it, even though they were nearly as avaricious as Hurts. This particular one had tried to worm his way into the Kuat Drive Yards' corporate bureaucracy, before a noteworthy display of untrustworthi-ness had gotten him booted from the headquarters on the planet Kuat. Hurts, however, had more of a taste for flattery and tail kissing; Kuat of Kuat wasn't surprised that Fortuna had wound up in Jabba's palace.

He didn't spot what he was looking for until he raised his eyes toward the holographic court's encircling gallery. There he is, thought Kuat of Kuat. The distinctive helmeted visage of Boba Fett, the galaxy's most feared bounty hunter, gazed down at the mingled courtiers below like a totem of some planet's primordial deity, contemplating a justice Colder than the s.p.a.ces between the stars. Arrayed along Fett's arms and slung at his back were his working tools, the wrist lasers and miniaturized flamethrower, and all the other weapons that were as precise in his hands as the tiny probes were in Kuat of Kuat's. The helmet, with its dark T-shaped visor, hid the bounty hunter's eyes and the measured calculations going on behind them.

Satisfied for the moment, Kuat of Kuat walked back to the edge of the hologram. Even being in a three-dimensional simulation of Jabba's court, with its miasma of avarice and bad hygiene, brought a twinge of nausea to his gut. Better to watch from the outside of the hologram, from the pristine and mathematic angles of his own office. At the workbench, he adjusted the probe's angle in the holoprojector's circuits. Without even glancing over his shoulder, he could sense Jabba's image and the others in the Hurt's dimly lit court restored to motion, acting out their parts in this little segment of the past.