Hard Merchandise Page 17

  "That kind of simplistic analysis is why you're the one taking orders, and I'm the one giving them." Boba Fett laid his gloved hands flat on the arms of the pilot's chair. "The battle that's likely to take place near Endor might

  be over, once it's begun, in less than a few minutes. And it will have a decisive impact on the fate of the ongoing struggle between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance. They've been building up to this confrontation for a long time. And it does matter which side wins, to creatures like us. Palpatine wishes to make absolute his control over the galaxy, and everything in it. Such a grasp would extend to you, Dengar, as well as to myself. Our own ambitions, and what we do to pursue them, might no longer be possible if Palpatine were to achieve all that he desires."

  "And what about mine?" Standing beside Dengar, the female Neelah spoke up. "What happens to me, and what I want?"

  "You don't even know what that is," replied Boba Fett. "But you can believe me about it—or not, just as you choose. The past and the world that was stolen from you will be lost forever if Palpatine wins this struggle with the Rebel Alliance. There will be no way for you to get it back then."

  "And if the Rebels win?"

  "There's no way they can." Boba Fett gave a flat, hard shake of his head. "My own career as a bounty hunter should be proof enough that cunning and ruthlessness inevitably triumph over all the high-minded ideals that the universe can generate." The bounty hunter's scorn for the Rebels, for any creature motivated by some­thing beyond profits, was evident. "But if the impossible should happen—the galaxy has seen stranger events come about—then that would be bad for our business as well. The Rebels' pretenses to a higher morality would prevent them from paying the established rates for our services, and they would also at the same time seek to ex­terminate those criminal operations which have been some of my best customers. Let's face it—the best out­come, as far as bounty hunters are concerned, would be for this battle near Endor to wind up being a draw some­how, with neither force eliminating the other, and the struggle between the Rebel Alliance and the Empire con-

  tinuing. We can hope for that to happen—but we can't count on it."

  Dengar had felt his own hopes falling as he had lis­ tened to Boba Fett's bleak prognosis. What a universe, he thought glumly. Whether the war was won by the forces of good or by the greatest evil the galaxy had ever known, somehow the results were the same, at least for him. I wind up losing, no matter what. That longed-for future, with him and Manaroo and nothing to do with the bounty hunter trade, seemed to recede at a light- speed pace. The only way for him to make the kind of credits he needed was as a bounty hunter, hooked up with the notorious Boba Fett, but that same Boba Fett made it sound as if it was soon going to be impossible to even be a bounty hunter. Where was the fairness in an ar­ rangement like that?

  The female Neelah didn't seem concerned by the dis­ mal long-term prospects that Boba Fett had described. "So what do you propose doing in the meantime? And why did you bring us here?"

  "My plans are my own," said Boba Fett. "But some of them concern you, and it's now become convenient for you to have some of your many questions answered. You wanted the past—your past—then so it shall be." He gestured with one hand toward the viewport behind him. "I hereby give it to you."

  Dengar could see Neelah scowling disgustedly at the viewport. Outside the ship, pallid strands of neural tissue and their tethered, spiderlike corpses continued to drag their shapes past the transparisteel.

  "Is this some kind of a joke?" Neelah's glare was even angrier as she turned it toward Fett. "I don't see any­ thing, that—"

  Leaning forward in the pilot's chair, Boba Fett inter­ rupted her. "You don't see, because you don't understand. Not yet, at any rate. But if you listen to me, you will."

  With a scowl still upon her face, Neelah folded her arms across her breast. "Go ahead. I'm listening."

  From the corner of his eye, Dengar glanced over at the

  young woman. It wasn't the first time that he had heard that tone of command in her voice. She's used to giving orders, thought Dengar, and having creatures obey them. It was the same haughty tone of voice that Neelah had used on him, ordering him to continue telling the story of Boba Fett and the breakup of the old Bounty Hunters Guild, and it had been more effective than any blaster pistol she could have pulled on him. But to hear her talk that way to Boba Fett, as though barely able to control her impatience with a slow-moving servant, was still star­ tling. Who is she? wondered Dengar. And how did she wind up as a memory-wiped dancing girl in Jabba the Hutt's palace? His own curiosity about Neelah's past al­most matched hers.

  "This part of the story," said Boba Fett, "didn't begin here. And it happened a little while before the arachnoid assembler Kud'ar Mub'at met his demise. I had business in one of the nearby systems that had been successfully concluded—you don't need to know about that—and I was returning toward the center of the galaxy, where sev­ eral potentially lucrative opportunities were awaiting me. Of course, I was aboard my own Slave I at the time, and not an under-equipped mediocrity like this ship. One of the functions I had programmed into Slave I's com­puters was a complete database of the ships of all other bounty hunters, both those affiliated with the Bounty Hunters Guild and the few, such as myself, operating as independent agents. It rarely happens, but on occasion some other bounty hunter, or the Guild while it still ex­isted, has managed to obtain information before I have, about some particular hard merchandise to be rounded up for a good price." Fett's shoulders lifted in a dismis­ sive shrug. "Some clients prefer to employ less-qualified bounty hunters, hoping they'll be able to get what they want at a lower price. That's their choice, but it rarely works out that way."

  True enough, thought Dengar. He had heard those other stories, all of which went to prove that it was al-

  most as dangerous trying to avoid doing business with Boba Fett as actually going ahead and getting involved with him. In a lot of ways, he was virtually inescapable.

  "So I sometimes find it worthwhile," continued Boba Fett, "to keep an eye on what other bounty hunters are up to. And if Slave I's ID scanners home in on a bounty hunter's ship in a navigational sector that should other­ wise be empty of such activity, then I find that very inter­ esting indeed. It's even more interesting when the onboard computers read out the ID code of a ship belonging to a bounty hunter known for his unsavory business practices."

  That description puzzled Dengar. It was hard to imag­ ine any bounty hunter being more ruthless than Boba Fett himself. "So who was it that you came across?"

  "The ID code identified the ship as one known most often as the Venesectrix. Rarely spotted anywhere close to the central sectors of the galaxy; its owner preferred operations farther out into the border territories. And of course, there was a reason for that: the owner of the Ve­nesectrix was a certain Ree Duptom." Pausing a mo­ ment, Boba Fett looked over at Dengar. "Perhaps you're familiar with the name."

  "Wait a minute ..." It took a moment, but the name finally hooked up with a memory synapse inside Den- gar's head. "Ree Duptom—he's the only one who ever got booted out of the Bounty Hunters Guild!" That took some doing, Dengar knew; there had been plenty of crea­ tures in the Guild whose ethical standards had been way below his own. He wasn't familiar with the exact details— Duptom had been booted out of the Bounty Hunters Guild before Dengar had joined it—but there had been an unspoken legend attached to him, as being the one creature that all other bounty hunters considered scum. "I didn't think he was still active, even out in the border."

  "I guess he's not," said Neelah drily. "Pay attention, why don't you? He's obviously being discussed in the past tense for a reason."

  "True." Boba Fett gave an acknowledging nod of his

  head. "When I came across the Venesectrix in open space, the ship's engines weren't powered up; it was simply drifting. I attempted to establish communication with its pilot, but I received no response over the comm unit. The reasonable assumptio
n was that the pilot was either dead or had abandoned his ship. To determine which was the case—and to find anything that might have been valuable aboard—I forced entry through the Venesectrix's airlock." In the cockpit viewport behind Boba Fett, a few more dead subnodes bumped against the curved transparisteel. "And I found Ree Duptom, all right."

  "Dead, I suppose." The expression on Neelah's face was one of utter boredom. "You know, I'm still waiting to hear the part that has anything to do with me."

  Boba Fett ignored her impatience. "Duptom didn't make a good-looking corpse. He hadn't been the hand­ somest humanoid to begin with—his appearance matched his ethics—but being caught in a hard-energy particle burst from a partial core meltdown of his own ship's en­ gines hadn't helped any. Fortunately, the burst's lethal ef­ fects had been contained within a zone just a couple of meters deep; he had obviously been working in the en­ gine compartment when the meltdown occurred, gotten the dose of radiation, then staggered back up to the Ve­nesectrix's cockpit area to die. Which didn't take long."

  The story's details aroused Dengar's suspicions. "So did his ship's engines malfunction—or were they sabo­ taged?" From what he had heard in the Bounty Hunters Guild, Ree Duptom had made nearly as many enemies for himself as Boba Fett had.

  "I didn't investigate that question," said Fett. "Once a competitor of mine is dead, I lose interest in them. How they wound up that way is someone else's business; noth­ ing to do with me."

  Right, thought Dengar.

  "Anyway, somebody like Ree Duptom was perfectly capable of killing himself through his own stupidity." Boba Fett shook his head, as though in disgust. "His ship

  and all of his equipment were poorly maintained; frankly, he was not a credit to the bounty hunter trade in a lot of ways. But Duptom was obviously able to find certain clients, nevertheless. The evidence of that was right there aboard his ship. And the uncompleted jobs that he had been working on were interesting enough for me to take them over."

  "What were they?"

  "There were two matters," replied Boba Fett, "that Ree Duptom's untimely death had left hanging. The first one was in the form of a deactivated cargo droid—or what had once been a cargo droid. Someone had cleverly transformed it into an autonomic spy device, with not only built-in vid cameras and sound recording equip­ ment, but an olfactory detect and sample circuit as well. The droid's hidden sensors could pick up trace amounts of scent molecules in the atmosphere and analyze them for biologic source details."

  "Why would anybody want information like that?" This time, Dengar was puzzled by the story, rather than suspicious. "What's the good of knowing what some event smelled like, if you already had the visual and au­ dio recording?"

  "It all depends," said Boba Fett, "on what you're looking for, and what the spy device had been designed to catch. This converted cargo droid was capable of de­ tecting evidence of something—or someone—that would otherwise have remained hidden and undiscovered if vi­sual and auditory clues were all that had been processed. Which is what it in fact had done; I found that out when I removed the data record from inside the droid and ana­ lyzed it. The truth came out, concerning a certain indi­ vidual having been at a certain place, and at a certain important time, even though he had tried to conceal his presence from anyone else who might have been watch­ ing and listening."

  "What place?" Neelah's tone was as demanding and impatient as before. "What time?"

  "Back on Tatooine—for such a desolate, backwater

  world, it has assumed a great deal of importance for the rest of the galaxy." Boba Fett gestured toward the view­ port, as though indicating one of the bright points of light visible beyond the drifting subnodes. "But that's something bounty hunters know instinctively—or at least the ones who survive and prosper. The smallest, appar­ently insignificant speck of dirt can loom unexpectedly large one day. And you had better be prepared for that. In this case, the speck of dirt was a moisture farm in the Dune Sea, some distance away from the Mos Eisley space­port. A moisture farm owned by one Owen Lars—nobody important—and operated by him and his wife, Beru, as­sisted by a young nephew of theirs. Who just happened to be someone very important—"

  "Luke Skywalker," said Dengar. "That's who you're talking about, isn't it?"

  "Indeed." Boba Fett gave a single nod. "Enough of the details have become known, about Skywalker's transfor­ mation from an insignificant, planet-bound nonentity with big and hopeless dreams to a major figure in the Rebel Alliance, to have already coalesced into legend. And that transformation could be said to have begun with a raid by Imperial stormtroopers on that dreary little moisture farm, a raid that left Skywalker's aunt and uncle as little more than blackened skeletons in the ruins."

  "So what's the big mystery about that? Darth Vader ordered the stormtrooper raid on the moisture farm—a lot of creatures in the galaxy know about that by now." Dengar shrugged his shoulders. "Anybody who's had any contact at all with the Rebel Alliance has heard most of the story."

  "The mystery," said Boba Fett quietly, "has to do with what I found in the deactivated cargo droid aboard Ree Duptom's ship. The spy device's audio and video records documented the stormtroopers' raid; the droid must have been hiding and watching from behind a nearby sand dune. The details, when I played back the files, were con­ sistent with the known accounts of the raid and its after­ math. There were only Imperial stormtroopers to be

  observed, going about their lethal business. But the addi­ tional data that the cargo droid's spy recordings held— the olfactory information, taken from the atmosphere at the time and place of the raid on the moisture farm— indicated somebody else had been there, as well as the stormtroopers."

  "All right"—Neelah spread her hands apart, waiting to hear— "who was it?"

  "In the analysis of the spy device's olfactory data were the unmistakable pheromones of a male of the Falleen species." Boba Fett raised a finger for emphasis. "That much was easily determined. But using my own data­ bases aboard Slave I, I was able to narrow it down even further. The specific pheromone traces could only have come from a member of the Falleen nobility; there's a ge­ netic marker that is unique to that bloodline."

  "A Falleen nobleman?" Dengar's brow creased as he puzzled over the information. "But they're all dead

  now-

  "There was one still alive," said Boba Fett, "at the time of the stormtrooper raid on Tatooine. Before that, the Falleen nobility had been virtually wiped out by a ge­ netic warfare experiment, one that was initiated by Lord Vader. Of that family grouping, the only surviving mem­ ber was Prince Xizor, who was then the head of the Black Sun organization."

  "I don't get it." Dengar felt even more confused than before. "You're saying that Prince Xizor was part of the raid that killed Luke Skywalker's aunt and uncle? But Xizor would've had to have been directing the Imperial stormtroopers somehow, but keeping himself out of sight—"

  "Not at all." Boba Fett put his gloved hands flat on the arms of the pilot's chair again. "The spy device into which the cargo droid had been transformed contained the evidence of Prince Xizor being present at the raid on the moisture farm—but the evidence might not have been genuine."

  "Faked? You mean somebody else created some kind

  of phony evidence and planted it inside the cargo droid?" The possibilities were multiplying faster than Dengar could keep track. "Or maybe Xizor himself did it for some reason." That didn't seem to make sense, but then very little seemed to anymore. "But why? Why would anybody do that?"

  "That," replied Fett, "is something I do not know. Or at least, not yet. But the chances of the evidence having been manufactured, with the purpose of making it appear that Prince Xizor had something to do with the raid that killed Skywalker's aunt and uncle, remain considerable."

  "I don't see why that should be." Arms folded across her breast, Neelah seemed less than impressed with Boba Fett's analysis. "Why make things more complicated than they need to be? Maybe this Xizor creature re
ally did lead the raid, and somehow he got caught out at it, even though he'd tried to keep himself hidden."

  "There's several reasons for being suspicious about the evidence I found inside the cargo droid. One is that Lord Vader and Prince Xizor were mortal enemies, even as they continued their roles as Palpatine's loyal servants. Of course, it served the Emperor's purposes to have Vader and Xizor at each other's throats, just as I suspect it served his purpose to pretend he didn't know that Xi­zor was the leader of Black Sun. The Emperor has a devi­ous mind—he derives more of his power from that, I believe, than any mystical Force—and it suited him for the moment to keep Xizor on a long leash. The time came, though, when the prince found a tighter grip around his neck than he would ever have thought possi­ble. He wasn't clever enough to avoid being caught in the snare that he helped weave around himself—and that cost him his life. I don't intend to follow his example." Boba Fett leaned back in the pilot's chair, his visor-shielded gaze regarding his audience. "The upshot of the enmity that existed between Xizor and Vader is that it would have been unlikely in the extreme for Xizor to have taken any part in the stormtrooper raid without