Star Wars - The Bounty Hunter Wars - The Mandalorian Armor Read online

  STAR WARS

  THE BOUNTY HUNTER WARS 1 THE MANDALORIAN ARMOR

  K.W.Jeter

  Scan/OCR - Demilich ([email protected])

  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. Scraps of the canopy that had shaded

  Jabba's massive 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 slobbering 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 appetites.

  "For w
hat 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 spawned 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 scrap 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-altitude 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

  al most 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 scraped 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 hitting 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

  pass, 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 scraps 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 Sarla
cc. 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