Hard Merchandise Read online

  1

  NOW...

  Two bounty hunters sat in a bar, talking.

  "Things aren't what they used to be," said Zuck­ uss morosely. As a member of one of the ammonia- breathing species of his homeworld Gand, he had to be careful in establishments such as this. Intoxicants and stimulants that produced feelings of well-being in other creatures often evoked a profound melancholy in him. Even in a high-class place that supposedly catered to all known physiologies—the soothing, programmed play of lights across the columned walls, the shifting spectra that were supposed to relax weary travelers' central nervous systems, struck Zuckuss as crepuscular and depressing as the faded hopes of his youth. I had ambitions once, he told himself, leaning over the tall, blue-tinged glass in front of him. Big ones. Where had they gone?

  "I wouldn't know," said Zuckuss's companion. The droid bounty hunter 4-LOM sat across from him, an untouched drink—perhaps only water—in front of him. A mere formality: the drink had been taken away twice already and replaced with exactly the same thing, so the

  charges could be rung up on 4-LOM's tab. That was the only way that nonimbibing constructs such as droids could make themselves welcome in any kind of watering hole. "Your attitude," continued 4-LOM, "implies a value judgment on your part. That is, that things were better at one time than they are now. I don't make those kinds of judgments. I merely deal with things as they are."

  You would, thought Zuckuss. This was what he got for hooking up with a cold-blooded—cold-circuited, at least—creature like 4-LOM. There were plenty of ex­ citable droids in the galaxy—Zuckuss had run into a few— but the ones that were attracted to the bounty hunter trade all shared the same vibroblade-edged logic and absolute-zero emotional tone. They hunted, and killed when necessary, without even the tiniest acceleration of electrons along their inner connectors.

  The bar's soft, dirgelike background music—it was supposed to be soothing as well, with harmonic over­ tones of almost narcotic languor—made Zuckuss think of his previous partner Bossk. The Trandoshan bounty hunter had been cold-blooded, literally so, but one would never have guessed it from the way he'd carried on.

  "Now that," said Zuckuss with a slow, emphatic nod, "that was real bounty hunting. That had some passion to it. Real excitement." He extended the retractable pipette from the lower part of his face mask and sucked up an­ other swallow of the drink, though he knew it would only deepen and darken his mood. "We had some good times together, me and Bossk..."

  "That wasn't what you said when you agreed to be­ come partners with me once more." 4-LOM's photo-optical receptors kept a slow, careful scan around the bar and its other occupants, even as the droid kept up his end of the conversation. He talked for no reason other than to avoid drawing attention to himself and Zuckuss as they waited for their quarry to make an appearance. "Value judgments aside, the exact record of your statement is

  that you had had enough of Bossk's way of doing busi­ ness. Too much danger—if that's what you mean by 'excitement'—and not enough credits. So you wanted a change."

  "Don't use my own words against me." Zuckuss knew that he had gotten what he had asked for. And what could be worse than that?

  "Mourn the old days if you want," said 4-LOM after a few moments of silence had passed. "We have business to take care of. Please direct your waning attention toward the entrance."

  Worse than dealing with Boba Fett, grumbled Zuck­ uss to himself. At least when you got involved with Fett, you were assured that you were face-mask-to-helmet with the best bounty hunter in the galaxy, someone who had plenty of reason for taking such a high-and-mighty atti­tude. Where did 4-LOM get off, lording it over him this way? If it hadn't been for some stretches of bad luck, and a few unfortunate strategic decisions, it would have been the droid that had been looking to hook up with him again, rather than the other way around. Though they had been partners before, and for a lot longer than Zuck­uss had been hooked up with Bossk, the relationship be­tween them could never be the same. Back then, 4-LOM had even saved Zuckuss's life, when he had been dying from his ammonia-breathing lungs having been exposed to an accidental inhalation of oxygen. The two of them had even made other plans together, of working for the Rebel Alliance in some way . . .

  Those plans hadn't worked out, though. Their time as members of the Rebel Alliance—double agents, actually, since they had kept secret their new allegiance to the Rebel cause—had been occupied with one significant op­ eration: an attempt to snatch from Boba Fett the car­bonite slab with Han Solo frozen inside it, before Fett could deliver the prize to Jabba the Hurt. The plan, using several other bounty hunters as unwitting dupes, had had disastrous results. It hadn't succeeded, and 4-LOM

  had needed a complete core-to-sheath rebuild to get back on his feet. And, mused Zuckuss, he wasn't the same af­ ter that. This idealism that had led 4-LOM to join the Rebel Alliance had all but evaporated, replaced by his former cold-spirited greed. Zuckuss supposed that came from hanging out once again with the other bounty hunters; he had felt their mercenary natures rubbing off onto him as well.

  Plus there was one factor that both of them hadn't counted on when they had joined the Alliance. A factor that made all the difference in the universe—

  Being a Rebel didn't pay.

  At least not in credits. And there were still so many tempting targets all through the galaxy, the kind of hard merchandise that a smart, fast bounty hunter could get rich from. Like the one that Zuckuss and 4-LOM had come here to get.

  Zuckuss took another sip of his drink. Triple agents, he thought. That must be what we are now. Neither he nor 4-LOM had ever formally renounced allegiance to the Rebel Alliance, but they had both been taking care of their own business for some time now.

  Moodily, he shook his head. He'd have to think about all the rest of those things some other time; right now, there were more pressing matters at hand.

  Zuckuss did as he'd been instructed by 4-LOM. The entrance to the bar was the one direction, in back of 4-LOM, that the droid bounty hunter couldn't scan without cranking around his head unit. Bright laughter, some of it as high-pitched and sharp-edged as breaking glass, and a tangled whirl of gossiping conversations sounded in Zuckuss's ears as he lifted his gaze toward the entrance's fluttering circumference. Beyond it, a slop­ ing tunnel led up to the surface of the planet and its night sky filled with a chain of pearllike moons. Smaller and more avid orbs dotted the length of the entrance tunnel; those were the eyes of the tiny ergovore crea­ tures that scuttled and darted in and out of the soft, trembling crevices.

  As a way of keeping weapons out of the establish­ ment, metal detector units would have been both useless and insulting; the bar catered to a clientele that not only included independent droids such as 4-LOM, who could pay their way handsomely enough, but also any number of the galaxy's most aristocratic and stiff-necked blood­ lines. From the rims of his own large, insectoid eyes, Zuckuss could spot some of the galaxy's richest and most glittering denizens, devoted to spending their vast inherited wealth in as ostentatious a manner as possible. For many of them, their weapons were ceremonial orna­ments, dictated by fierce custom and the privileges given to their rank; to have asked them to divest of even the smallest dagger or low-penetration blaster would have been an insult, expiable only by the death of the establish­ment's proprietor, a stub-fingered Bergamasque named Salla C'airam. The only acceptable alternative, preserv­ing their honor and the bar's decorum, was to ask them to hand over the power sources for their blasters and similar high-tech weapons, thus limiting the damage and potential loss of life to what could be achieved with inert metal. C'airam kept the ergovores in the entrance tun­nel hungry enough that their sensitive antennae were at constant quivering alert for the emanations from
even the smallest power cell, no matter how well hidden; their flocking and chittering toward any they detected was a sure giveaway of anyone trying to violate the house rules.

  All of which meant that the blaster holstered at Zuck­ uss's hip was useless at the moment; that was an un­ comfortable feeling for him. It was little consolation that everyone else in the bar was similarly disarmed. He would have preferred the usual setup that he encountered in the watering holes in which he more often hung out, where everyone including the bartenders was armed to the teeth. Then you know where you stand, thought Zuckuss. This other stuff's too tricky.

  "How much longer?" He leaned forward to ask the question of 4-LOM. "Until the merchandise is supposed

  to show up?" He didn't have much patience for waiting, either. He hadn't become a bounty hunter in order to sit around waiting.

  "His arrival is precisely fixed," replied 4-LOM. "Such precision of movement and timing is nearly the equal of my own; in that, I admire the creature. Especially given that there is a price on his head, a bounty that it is our in­ tention to collect. Many other sentient creatures, given those circumstances, would try to make their comings and goings erratic, to vary them in such a way as to frus­ trate pursuers in determining their target's patterns of behavior. But he has confidence in the precautions that he has taken, including the limiting of his public recre­ ational activities to this establishment." 4-LOM rested his hands unmoving on the table. "We shall soon deter­ mine if the merchandise's confidence is rewarded with a continuing freedom."

  There was no point in arguing with a droid such as 4-LOM. One might as well have had a conversation with the tracking systems aboard a standard pursuit ship. Even worse, Zuckuss knew that 4-LOM was correct; there had been a good reason for arriving at this place so far ahead of their quarry, getting set up and letting the minutes pass until the moment of action came. He knew all that; he just didn't care for what he knew.

  If only . . . Zuckuss kept an eye on the bar's entrance and allowed his thoughts to slip back into brooding about the past.

  If only the old Bounty Hunters Guild hadn't broken up. If only its successor organizations, the short-lived True Guild and Guild Reform Committee factions, hadn't fallen apart with the speed of a core meltdown. Those were big ifs, Zuckuss knew, especially when it was taken into account that the main reason the Guild and every­ thing that came after it had disintegrated so rapidly and thoroughly was the basic greed and irascibility that lay at the center of every bounty hunter's heart—or what­ ever a droid like 4-LOM had instead.

  That was the real reason. Zuckuss took another sip of the drink in front of him. Boba Fett was just the excuse. There were plenty of bounty hunters, former members of the vanished Guild, who blamed Fett for everything that had happened. And it was true, up to a point, that Boba Fett's entry into the old Bounty Hunters Guild had been the event that had brought about the organization's disintegration, and that had put every creature in it at the throat of those he had pre­viously called his brothers. But Zuckuss knew that Boba Fett had been no more than the key in the lock that had let free all the forces of avarice and conspiracy that had been bottled up inside the Guild for so long, getting stronger and more malignant all the while. It was amaz­ ing that the Bounty Hunters Guild had even endured as long as it had, given the irascible and hungry natures of its members; that was a tribute to the organizational skills of its final leader, the Trandoshan Cradossk. He had probably been the only creature in the galaxy ruth­less and clever enough to have kept a lid on the Guild's rank and file.

  We did it to ourselves, thought Zuckuss glumly. The drink, and the ones before it, had done nothing to lift his spirits. Now we have to live with the consequences. He knocked back the sour dregs at the bottom of the glass.

  "You know what?" Zuckuss let his thoughts turn into spoken words. "It's a cold, hard galaxy we live in."

  4-LOM gave him a typically unemotional droid glance. "If you say so."

  Nothing that the Rebel Alliance could do was likely to change that, either. The Rebels didn't have a chance of winning, anyway, not against the massed strength of the Empire and all of Palpatine's deep, enfolding cun­ ning. In the darker corners of the galaxy, where surrep­ titiously acquired information was bought and sold, traded in whispers from one furtive creature to the next, rumors had been heard of a gathering of the Impe­rial forces, somewhere out near a moon called Endor—

  like a fist clenching together, into a hammer that would crush the Alliance forever, and end once and for all its crazy dreams of freedom. And now, the galaxy's bounty hunters were without the Guild that had preciously en­ forced professional relations among its members—the Hunter's Creed had at least kept them from murder­ ing one another outright in the course of pursuing busi­ ness. Small, upstart organizations had sprung up in the power vacuum created by the old Guild's destruction, but they were still too weak to create order among such naturally violent and greed-driven creatures. Most hunt­ ers were still on their own, friendless except for what­ever partnerships they could forge with one another. Zuckuss had been partners with different bounty hunt­ ers before, even while the Guild had been going through its ugly process of disintegration. He had even been partners with Boba Fett, on more than one occasion— but somehow, he had never come out any the better for it. Typically, Boba Fett wound up getting what he was after, and all the rest were lucky if they were still alive afterward. Doing business with Fett was a recipe for disaster.

  Truth to tell, though, Zuckuss's other partnerships hadn't gone much better. Whatever his personal feelings about 4-LOM, he could swallow those easily enough, given that the two of them had actually been putting cred­ its into their pockets since hooking up. They seemed to have complementary skills: Zuckuss operated on instinct, the way most organic creatures were capable of, and 4-LOM possessed the cold logic of a machine. What had made Boba Fett such a fearsome individual in the bounty hunter trade was that he had all of those capabilities, and more, inside a single skin.

  "Here he comes—"

  Zuckuss's musings were interrupted by the soft-spoken announcement from 4-LOM. Even without facing the entrance, the droid bounty hunter had been able to de­ tect the sudden flamboyant appearance of their quarry,

  the presently free creature they planned on turning into hard merchandise and a hefty addition to their credit accounts.

  "A round for everyone, innkeeper!" The booming voice of Drawmas Sma'Da filled the bar, like the rumble of thunder over the planet's horizon. Zuckuss looked up from his drink and saw the immense, befurred, and caparisoned form of the most notorious gambler and oddsman in five systems, spreading his arms wide. The gemstones studding Sma'Da's pinkly manicured fingers sparkled in a multicolored constellation of wealth and extravagance; his broad, thrown-back shoulders were swathed in the soft fur pelts of a dozen worlds' rarest species. The artfully preserved heads of the animals that had died for his adornment, with black pearls for eyes, dangled over a belly of wobbling girth. "If I'm in a good mood," shouted Sma'Da, "then all should be so lucky!"

  Luck was a preoccupation with Drawmas Sma'Da. As it was with Zuckuss and every other sentient creature in the galaxy: If I had his luck, thought the bounty hunter, I'd be retired by now. Sma'Da had been fortunate not only in the placing of his bets, but clever as well, in that he had virtually created an entirely new field of wager­ing. The flamboyant gambler had been the first to cover wagers on the various ups and downs of the struggle be­tween the Empire and the Rebel Alliance. No military conflict was too small-scale, no political infighting too inconsequential, for Sma'Da to make odds, accept bets— often on either side of the outcome, then pay off and col­ lect when the particular event was over. By now, his "Invisible & Ineluctable Casino," as he called it, stretched from one end of the galaxy to the other, a shadow of the actual war going on between Emperor Palpatine and the Rebels. No matter who won, either on the battlefield or the database of wagers, Drawmas Sma'Da came out ahead: he raked off the house percentag
e on every bet placed, win or lose. All those profitable little bites mounted

  up to an impressive pile of credits, one reflected in Sma'Da's own ever-increasing girth.

  Two humanoid females, with the kind of large-eyed, mysteriously smiling beauty that made the males of nearly every species weep with frustration, draped them­selves on either side of Sma'Da's capacious shoulders, as though they were the ultimate ornaments of his success and wealth. They moved in synch with him, or almost seemed to float without walking, so ineffable was their grace; the tripartite organism of Sma'Da and his consorts moved into the center of the establishment, like a new sun rearranging the orbits of all the lesser planets it found itself among.

  The proprietor Salla C'airam, all bowing obsequious­ ness and fluttering tentaclelike appendages, hurried toward Sma'Da. "How good to see you again, Drawmas! It's al­ ways too long between visits!"

  Sma'Da had been in the bar just the previous night, Zuckuss knew. The proprietor was carrying on as though he and the gambler had been cruelly separated for years.

  A crowd of sycophants, flatterers, favor-seekers, gold diggers, and those who derived some deep spiritual bene­ fit from basking in the radiance of accumulated credits, had already formed around Sma'Da. Signaling to the bar's waiters and serving staff, Salla C'airam led the way to the highly visible table that had been kept in readiness for just such distinguished personages. Sma'Da's jowly face, split by a gold-toothed smile, beamed above the crowd as it shifted, like the swell of an ocean tide, toward the other side of the bar. A banquet equal to both Sma'Da's appetite and credit accounts had already been laid out by the swiftly darting waiters; crystalline decanters, filled with exotic offworld liqueurs and roiling with low-level combustibles, towered above platters of meats spiced with cellular-suspension enhancements.