The Bounty Hunter Wars_ The Mandalorian Armor Part 18

"So when will you be sending off the messenger pod?" Dengar worked at securing the fastenings of his gear. Even from inside the windowless cantina, he knew that night had settled in on the Dune Sea. It would be a long cold journey on the exposed saddle of the swoop to get back to where he had left Boba Fett and the girl Neelah. "The sooner you send it, the better."

"Don't worry," soothed the Q'nithian. He folded his bifurcate talons on top of each other, with the magnifying lens laid flat on the table. "It will be on its way to Kuat, both the planet and the man himself, within a matter of hours."

"Great." Dengar slid out from the booth. "I'll be checking to make sure that it gets there."

He stopped inside the same arched doorway by which he had entered the cantina. The place was packed now; it had taken some effort to squeeze his way among the various off-planet anatomies that frequented this dive. At the side of the cantina's central area, the j.i.z.z-wailer band had set up on the little stage they always used; their clattering, wailing racket had already added another layer of noise above the mingled conversations. n.o.body ever actually listened to the music, but it provided a useful acoustic cover for the various business dealings that the cantina's patrons wished to keep private.

Dengar moved up the short flight of steps that led to the street level outside. From the doorway's arch, he could see across the heads of the crowd, all the way back to the booth where he had left the Q'nithian. Even if he hadn't been in shadow, the Q'nithian's weak eyesight would have ruled out his being spotted as he watched and waited. Several minutes pa.s.sed, and he didn't see the Q'nithian get up from the booth, and none of the other creatures in the cantina joined him there, either. Dengar figured that was a good sign; if the Q'nithian was going to sell him out, stab him in the back by pa.s.sing on the information about Boba Fett to some other interested party in the cantina, the creature would have done so immediately. That way, some bunch of thugs could have jumped him before he'd had a chance to get out of Mos Eisley, then painfully extracted the other bounty hunter's location from him.

He was jostled a few times by other creatures entering the cantina before he finally decided that the Q'nithian was staying on the up-and-up with him-or at least as much as he could reasonably expect from one of Mos Eisley's shadier denizens. Dengar turned and headed up the rest of the steps. A few seconds later he was threading his way through the s.p.a.ceport's dark alleys. He had one more errand to take care of-the one on which Boba Fett had sent him here-before he could return to the hills on Mos Eisley's outskirts, where he had left the damaged swoop.

What Dengar hadn't seen was the little creature that inched its way down the metal support pillar of the booth's table, then started a slow, laborious crawl across the cantina's floor. Still no bigger in diameter than Dengar's hand, it had been thin as paper when it had surrept.i.tiously emerged from the cloak of the Q'nithian's feathers; by the time the mimbrane organism had finished listening to the conversation between the two larger creatures in the booth, it had swollen pillowlike, to the thickness of a humanoid finger joint.

Its milkily translucent tissues shimmered with the acoustic energy stored within as the tiny, rudimentary legs around its edges helped it slither past the feet of the cantina's paying customers. A row of primitive sensory organs on its top surface gave the mimbrane just enough ability to distinguish between light and shadow; it navigated mainly by ingrained memory, taking the route it had been taught between the Q'nithian and the other creatures who were waiting for it.

High above the mimbrane's creeping progress, one of the Tonnika sisters, her face all avaricious delicacy framed between intricate braids, laughed at the joke her identical-twin companion had just told her; the punch line had something to do with a crude comparison between Wookiee mating practices and the sour, pinched faces of the Imperial Navy's top admirals. The gray trail rising from the smoking wand in Senni Tonnika's fine-boned hand drew a wavering line in the cantina's muggy air as she took a step backward, too quickly for the mimbrane to scurry away from the sharp point of her boot heel. It caught the mimbrane at one corner of its amorphous body, with just enough force to squeeze out the last thing it had absorbed while clinging to the underside of the booth's table.

"Did you hear something?" Senni stopped laughing and looked around herself in puzzlement.

"I hear a lot of things." Her sister, Brea, smiled and leaned closer, drawing deep the smoke the other had just exhaled. "All the time . . ."

"No-" She frowned and looked down toward the floor, slick with spilled drinks and littered with the discarded wrappings of small, unmarked packages. "I mean from down there." She gave a shake of her head. "I very distinctly heard a little voice, and it said, I'll be checking to make sure that it gets there.' "

"You're imagining things."

The mimbrane had already crept away, hurrying as best it could toward its destination. When it reached the booth on the farthest side of the cantina, it didn't need to climb up to the table. A greasy, black-nailed hand reached down and picked it up.

"Fat little thing, ain't it?" Vol Hamame had once been a member of Big Gizz's swoop gang. They had had a parting of the ways, and not an amicable one. Since then, Hamame had found other employment, equally criminal. But a little more profitable. In a lot of ways, life had improved since he had been able to get away from Spiker, Gizz's obnoxious second in command. "Looks like the Q'nithian seat it over here, all stuffed with information."

"What else?" Hamame's partner was equally villainous-looking; the mucus-lined pleats of his nasopharynx fluttered wetly with each breath. "That's what these things are for." The mimbrane's tiny legs wriggled futilely as Phedroi flipped it onto its glistening back. "Let's see what it's got for us."

Only one of the Q'nithian system's moons had its own atmosphere; it was there, on deeply creviced fault lines, grinding constantly against each other from the tidal pull of the moon's captor planet, that the thick cl.u.s.ters of the mimbrane creatures grew and multiplied like the shelf fungi found on arboreal worlds. They lived on acoustic energy, absorbing sound vibrations and incorporating them layer by layer into their own simple bodies. Millennia of seismic shifts and groans were recorded in the oldest mimbranes, buried beneath the weight of their overlapping offspring and grown into undulating ma.s.ses big enough to wrap around an Imperial cruiser like a shining blanket.

Small, fresh mimbranes had more practical uses. They were the perfect eavesdropping device, recording into their gelatinous fibers any sounds that struck the tympanic cells in which the creatures were sheathed. Being totally organic, they couldn't be detected by the usual antibugging sweep devices.

Hamame's jag-edged fingertip pressed down on the bulging center of the mimbrane. The stored energy converted back into sound.

"I heard you mention poor Santhananan's name." The Q'nithian's familiar squawk spoke the words. "He met a sad demise, I'm afraid."

"That's right." Phedroi gave a smirking nod. "You had us murder him for you."

"Shut up," said Hamame. "Let's hear the rest." He prodded the mimbrane again.

"Yeah, I'm sure it was tragic." The mimbrane emitted Dengar's recorded voice. "What I want to know is, did anybody pick up on his business?"

The two thugs listened to all of the deal that had gone down between Dengar and the Q'nithian. "Now, that's interesting." Hamame leaned back on his side of the booth. "That Q'nithian is a sneaky type, but he's earned his keep with this bit." On the table between him and Phedroi, the mimbrane was now perfectly flat, all the stored acoustic energy drained from its cells. "So Boba Fett's still alive."

"That's one tough barve." Phedroi gave an admiring shake of his head, the coa.r.s.e and dirty ringlets of his beard sc.r.a.ping across his tunic collar. "You just can't kill him. If falling down a Sarlacc won't do the trick, then what will?"

Hamame reached inside his jacket and pulled out his blaster. He pointed the muzzle up toward the cantina's ceiling. "This will."

19.

It had taken a long time for him to come into his own. To receive, to possess all that should have been his from the beginning. To be known as the toughest, hardest, most feared bounty hunter in the entire galaxy . . .

Bossk leaned back in the pilot's chair of the Hound's Tooth, savoring the pleasures that came with success. Mingled with a simmering anger that never completely ebbed from the essence of a Trandoshan; he folded the claws of both hands across the scales of his chest and gazed slit-eyed at the stars visible through the viewport. Too long, he brooded; too long a time. If all the creatures on all those worlds had had any sense, they would have recognized him as the best. The absolute best.

Instead-and this brought the fire inside him to a hotter pitch-he'd had to wait until Boba Fett was dead. And that had been much too long in coming.

A thread of regret mingled with the other emotions. He would have liked to have killed Fett himself, torn out his compet.i.tor's throat with one roundhouse sweep of his claws. Or to have focused the crosshairs of a blaster rifle's sight upon that nar-row-visored helmet, then pressed the firing stud and seen Boba Fett's masked visage replaced by a quick explosion of blood and bone splinters ...

Bossk slowly nodded. Now, that would have been a real pleasure. And one that he would have deserved to savor, just like the taste of Fett's blood leaking between his fangs, after having suffered so many humiliations at the hands of that sneaking, underhanded barve.

Some of the anger was replaced with self-pity. There were so many things of which he had been cheated in this life. The leadership of the Bounty Hunters Guild-that should have been his as well. Now it could hardly be said that the Guild existed at all. Granted, a lot of personal satisfaction had come with killing old Cradossk, his father-that was the sort of thing that really defined the relationship between Trandoshan generations-but he hadn't gotten much material benefit out of the act. Instead of becoming the head of a galaxy-wide organization of predators, skimming a cut off the bounties collected on all the hard merchandise changing hands on any inhabited world, he'd wound up on his own, a scrabbling independent agent like all the other bounty hunters. That had all been Boba Fett's doing; the breakup of the Bounty Hunters Guild had been a long time ago, before Bossk had learned one of the most important lessons in this business-Don't trust your compet.i.tion. Kill them.

That's true wisdom, Bossk a.s.sured himself. For a lot of reasons. There had been other sources of anger, other humiliations he had suffered at Boba Fett's hands. They had just kept piling up, one after another. When Bossk had stood within striking distance of Fett, back when Darth Vader had been giving the job to all the best bounty hunters in the galaxy, to track down and find Han Solo's Millennium Falcon, it had taken all of his self-control not to leap over and rip out Fett's throat. And then that last infuriating maneuver, when Fett had outsmarted both him and his partner, Zuckuss, delivering the carbonite-encased form of Han Solo to Jabba's palace right beneath Bossk's outstretched claws-that had driven him almost insane with rage.

So when the word had reached him that Boba Fett was dead, dissolved in the digestive secretions of the Sarlacc beast, a combination of elation and frustration had welled up inside him. If the universe was going to be so obliging as to just give him that which he'd most fervently longed for, he'd just have to accept that as philosophically as he could. The fact that he was now forever frustrated in taking care of the job himself, of reaping the intense pleasure of personally separating Boba Fett from the realm of the living-that just showed that the universe wasn't really fair and just, after all. But Bossk had set the Hound's Tooth at maximum speed for the too-familiar planet of Tatooine, just to bask in the atmosphere that had been the last to fill his enemy's lungs.

He didn't get that far, though; Tatooine hung like a dusky smudge in the aft viewport screen. Before he'd had time to set landing coordinates for the Mos Eisley s.p.a.ceport, Bossk had found something just as familiar-and even more intriguing-in auto-nomic orbit outside Tatooine's atmosphere. When he'd first spotted the Slave I in the c.o.c.kpit's forward viewport, and recognized it as Boba Fett's ship, his hands had immediately darted to the targeting and firing controls of the Hound's blaster cannons. The only thing that had kept him from blowing Slave I into atoms floating in empty s.p.a.ce was the realization that the other ship hadn't trained any of its weapons onto his own. That, and remembering Boba Fett was already dead. A simple hailing call had returned the information that Slave I was empty, but still under the protection of its internal guard circuitry.

This is too good, Bossk had decided. It was one thing to inherit-by default-the mantle of top bounty hunter in the galaxy. But to also stumble upon the late Boba Fett's personal ship, the repository of all his weaponry and databases, all the painstakingly acquired secrets and strategies that had put him at the top of this dangerous trade-Bossk couldn't resist an opportunity like that.

He was smart enough to avoid trying to crack Slave I's security measures himself. Other creatures had gotten killed trying to do just that. Boba Fett had wired the ship with enough traps and self-aiming firepower to wipe out a small army, if it had attempted to enter without the appropriate pa.s.sword authorization. But with Fett being dead, there was no time pressure about getting past the ship's circuits; Bossk had the credits and the leisure that allowed for calling in professional a.s.sistance.

That was one advantage to being this close to Tatooine; services of that kind were exactly the sort available in Mos Eisley. If one could afford to pay the price.

A harsh electronic buzz sounded from the Hound's comm unit. A message had been received; undoubtedly, the one for which Bossk had been waiting. He pulled himself closer to the c.o.c.kpit's control panel and saw something that puzzled him for a moment.

There were two messages waiting for him.

The first was from Slave I, just as he had expected. The other had arrived almost simultaneously: a messenger pod, sent straight from the surface of Tatooine; the small, self-propelled device was now sitting in the receptor bay of the Hound's Tooth. Bossk prodded a few more b.u.t.tons with his foreclaw and got a readout from it.

The coded message unit was from a Q'nithian message expediter down in Mos Eisley with whom Bossk had a long-standing working arrangement. A business relationship: the Q'nithian had a general knowledge of the kinds of things that Bossk was interested in. Any message that the Q'nithian was hired to send across the galaxy, that fit those criteria, would get routed first to Bossk before continuing on the rest of its journey.

Bossk read the destination info off the unit. It was headed to the distant engineering center of Kuat, to the head of Kuat Drive Yards, Kuat of Kuat. Bossk nodded to himself as he read the address data. The Q'nithian had been correct in figuring that he would want to see this. Anything, thought Bossk, that's being sent to someone as rich and powerful as Kuat is something that I'm interested in. A successful bounty hunter always had to have his info sources open wideband so he could filter through all the galaxy's secrets and rumors for the bits that might turn out profitable.

He had already decided, though, to read the encoded message unit later-after he had taken care of the other business, for which he had been waiting so long. The tip of his claw hit the next b.u.t.ton on the c.o.c.kpit's comm controls.

"I'm all finished over here." The recorded voice, dry and emotionless, was that of the lead technician for D/Crypt Information Services, one of the many semilegitimate businesses that abounded in Mos Eisley. "The security codes have been sieved out, and you now have full access to the ship designated as Slave I. After you pay me, of course."

That detail was already taken care of. Bossk transmitted an account transfer order to Mos Eisley's black-market escrow exchange, then fired up the primary navigation engines. In the time it would take for him to maneuver the Hound's Tooth over to the other ship, the D/Crypt tech would already have received the payment confirmation.

"Good thing you didn't keep me waiting." The D/Crypt technician was a wizened little humanoid, the top of his bald head barely coming up to Bossk's chest. "I don't like to be kept waiting. If you had kept me waiting, I would have charged you triple overtime."

"Don't sweat it." Bossk let the transfer connection, between his own Hound and the Slave I, seal shut behind him. "I would've paid." He glanced around the bleakly functional confines of Slave I's cargo hold; the bars of the merchandise cages were uncomfortably familiar to him from the last time he had been aboard the ship. The hinges of the main cage's door had been repaired, but still showed signs of the laser bolt that D'harhan had unleashed upon them. That had been a long time ago, when Boba Fett had still been alive and busily engaged upon breaking up the old Bounty Hunters Guild. "Everything's clear?"

"As far as I can determine, it is." With his high-power trifocals slid up onto his pink, unsunned brow, the D/Crypt tech busily packed up his equipment cases.

"What's that mean?"

The tech blinked myopically at Bossk. "Nothing's perfect. Not in this galaxy, at least." He gave a shrug with his thin shoulders. "Ninety-nine percent, though; I 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 b.o.o.by 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 c.o.c.kpit.

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 pa.s.sword 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 c.o.c.kpit 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 c.o.c.kpit 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 s.p.a.ce 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 c.o.c.kpit spilled past him and through the doorway. There was only one object in the enclosed s.p.a.ce; 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 quant.i.ties of lethal fissionable materials. This droid showed signs of use-its metal sides were dented and sc.r.a.ped-but it had obviously been decontaminated; the radiation detector that Bossk kept clipped 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 carca.s.s.

Or supposedly battered. Working from a hunch, Bossk sc.r.a.ped 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 b.u.t.ton-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 s.p.a.ce, holding in one hand the mult.i.track 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 a.s.sortment 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 surrept.i.tious 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 s.p.a.ceport 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 cautions 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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.n.a.lyzer 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 a.n.a.lyzer 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 pa.s.sed before the rest appeared. subtype s.e.xual, gender male. Then the last: species match-fal-leen. The words remained until Bossk blanked the screen with a press of his clawed thumb.

That was even more interesting. Bossk nodded slowly to himself, the a.n.a.lyzer device resting silent in his hands. Falleens didn't serve in the Imperial storm-troopers; the whole species was too congenitally arrogant to submit to military discipline. They were fearsome enemies, but strictly solo fighters. And schemers, given to intrigues matched only by those of Emperor Palpatine himself.

And there was one Falleen in particular, who had risen almost to the top in Palpatine's court. Prince Xizor had been perhaps the only one there who could get away with defying Lord Vader's commands, and Xizor was dead now. There had been even more to Xizor's defiance than the Emperor had been aware of, though rumors told of Vader having suspected the truth. That Prince Xizor had been in fact the secret head of the infamous Black Sun, the criminal organization that spanned the galaxy, an empire in its own right.

Speculations raced inside Bossk's skull. Had Prince Xizor also been there on Tatooine when Vader's stormtroopers had raided the moisture farm at the edge of the Dune Sea? When Luke Skywalker's aunt and uncle had been killed? That was what the olfactory record in the droid's spy circuits would indicate. But it didn't tell why Xizor would have been there-or why Kuat of Kuat would have planted a surveillance system that would detect the evidence of Xizor's involvement. Or how Boba Fett had come to possess the spy recording . . .

That many questions without answers made Bossk's head hurt, as though it might explode from the pressure building within. This is going to take some time, he thought grimly, to figure out. He extracted the rest of the recording devices from the droid, stacked the metal boxes up in his hands, and turned back toward the secret chamber's doorway.

Back aboard the Hound's Tooth, Bossk set the spy devices down beside a corner of the c.o.c.kpit's main control panel. His head ached, the scales of his brow almost visibly flexing from the pounding of his thoughts. He decided it would be better if he waited awhile-maybe even slept a bit, in the lowered respiration and nearly stilled heartbeat mode of the coldblooded Trandoshans-before tackling the mysteries of the recorded hit on the moisture farm. Go at it fresh, Bossk told himself.

In the meantime there was the other matter to check out, the encoded message unit that the Q'nithian down in Mos Eisley had routed his way. Bossk was already wondering if there might be some connection between it and what he had just discovered aboard Boba Fett's Slave I ship. The name of Kuat was popping up in a suspicious number of connections right now-the encoded message unit was addressed to Kuat of Kuat, and the deactivated spy droid was an obvious Kuat Drive Yards construction.

He sat down at the c.o.c.kpit controls of his own Hound's Tooth and pulled the encoded message unit over to himself. The Q'nithian had provided him with a simple bypa.s.s key and decryption protocol, with which he'd be able to read the enclosed information, then seal up the message unit and send it on its way without the eventual recipient being able to tell that-its security had been breached.

Bossk extracted a single slip of paper from the unit. That's it? he thought, feeling slightly disappointed. When this much attempted secrecy was involved, there were usually items of obvious significance to be found-entire Imperial code manuals, battle plans, that sort of thing. As he turned the slip over he couldn't imagine that he'd find anything important on it. ...

A moment later Bossk came to; he found himself lying on the floor, a befuddled consciousness slowly seeping back into his brain. The pilot's chair was tilted backward, from where he had toppled from it.