Hard Merchandise Page 2

  "There's enough in front of him to feed an Imperial division." Zuckuss kept the gambler and his entourage in sight from the corner of his eye. If the expensive viands

  had been converted back into credits, the sum would have gone to feed several divisions. He could see Sma'Da's oddly delicate hands, pudgy folds welling around the wide bands of his rings, picking at the delicacies, playfully stuffing the choicer morsels into the smiling mouths of the consorts at either side of him. "Eventually," mused Zuckuss, "he'll implode, from sheer mass and density, like a black hole."

  "Unlikely," said 4-LOM. "If creatures could suffer such a fate, that's what would have happened to Jabba the Hutt. His appetite was many times greater than this person's. You saw that for yourself."

  "I know." Zuckuss slowly nodded. "I was just trying to forget about anything I might have seen at Jabba's palace." As with every other mercenary type in the galaxy, he had spent some time in the employ of the late Huttese crimelord. Jabba had been involved in so many shady deal­ ings throughout the galaxy that it would have been hard for a bounty collector not to hook up with him at some point. Rarely, though, had any of them profited by it; a successful association with a creature like Jabba the Hutt was one that you survived intact.

  "Anyway," continued 4-LOM, keeping his emotion­ less voice low, "don't waste time worrying about our tar­ get's state of health. He just has to live long enough for us to collect the bounty that's been posted on him."

  A burst of laughter and bright, chattering voices came from the crowd at Drawmas Sma'Da's table. All eyes and attention in the bar had been drawn to the gambler from the moment he had entered. Zuckuss felt a bit more se­ cure because of the noise and the general diversion, as though it had made him and 4-LOM briefly invisible. With someone like Sma'Da in the room, no one would be watching them.

  "It's ready." 4-LOM made the simple, quiet announce­ ment. The droid bounty hunter leaned forward slightly, passing a small object underneath the table to Zuckuss. "Time to put our plans into action."

  Time was always the crucial factor. Despite his com­ plaints, Zuckuss knew exactly why they had had to ar­ rive at the bar so much earlier than their target. Some preparations required precisely measured amounts of time, things readied in silence and stealth, even if right under the inquisitive eyes of a bar full of ignorant onlookers. They don't need to know, thought Zuckuss with a mea­ sure of satisfaction. But they will.

  He took the object from 4-LOM's hand, carefully minimizing his actions so that anyone glancing in this di­ rection would have no clue of what might be happening beneath the table. The rest of the preparations were swiftly completed; there was no need for Zuckuss to watch his own hands going about their work. With this kind of equipment, so essential to a bounty hunter's trade, he could have performed the necessary operations with his large eyes completely blindfolded.

  "Okay," said Zuckuss after a moment. He leaned back, chancing a quick peek under the table's surface. A tiny blinking red light indicated that his part of the prepa­rations had been completed satisfactorily. "Looks good to me."

  4-LOM gave a slight nod, a humanoid gesture that he had picked up somewhere along the way. "Then I sug­ gest you proceed."

  It's always up to me, grumbled Zuckuss to himself as he pushed back his chair and stood up. No matter who he had for a partner, somehow he always wound up do­ ing the dirty work.

  "Excuse me ..." The crowd around Drawmas Sma'Da's table had grown even larger and denser, just in the short while that Zuckuss had been getting ready. He shoved and wedged himself through the press of bodies, the din of their excited words and laughter clattering in his earholes. "Pardon me ... I've got a message for the esteemed Sma'Da..."

  The blinking dot of red light that Zuckuss had checked under the table with 4-LOM was safely hidden inside his close-fitting, equipment-studded tunic. A couple of quick,

  sharp blows from the points of his elbows right to a few midsections of the closely packed crowd enabled him to work his way right up to the front of Sma'Da's table. He gave a slight, formal bow as he found himself confronting the gambler over the trays of picked-over delicacies.

  "A message?" Drawmas Sma'Da was well known for his alert attention to voices from the crowd. "How inter­ esting. I wasn't expecting any such; these aren't my usual business hours." The gambler's eyes were barely visible through the rounded folds of flesh, pushed upward by his exuberant smile. "But," he continued with an expan­sive wave of his grease-shiny hands, "I might be inter­ ested in hearing it. If it's important enough."

  Sma'Da's words hardly counted as a witticism, but the smiles on the faces of his escorts widened, and his flatter­ ers in the assembled crowd broke into loud, appreciative guffaws.

  "Judge its importance for yourself." Zuckuss gazed back into the gambler's fat-swaddled eyes. "The infor­ mation in it comes from Sullust."

  The smile on Sma'Da's own face didn't diminish, but what could be seen of his eyes grew brighter and more avarice-driven, like glints of razor-edged durasteel. " 'Sul­ lust'? That doesn't sound any chimes in my memory." He tilted his head to one side, as coyly as possible for some­thing so massive. "Who is this Sullust you speak of?"

  At Zuckuss's back, the laughter and the hubbub of voices had died away. They knew what the name meant— the bar was exactly the sort of crossroads where infor­ mation about Imperial and Rebel comings and goings would be traded.

  "Not who," replied Zuckuss, "but where. And I think you already know that." Sma'Da had based his entire gambling enterprise upon rumors and secrets, the tiny scraps of information that enabled him to calculate odds with such precision. "Don't you?"

  "Perhaps so." Sma'Da's golden smile gleamed even more dazzlingly. "But only a fool turns down an oppor­ tunity to learn more. Dear things—" He turned to his

  female companions on either side of him, one after the other. "Amuse yourselves elsewhere for a little while. I need a moment alone with this interesting person." He fluttered his beringed paws at the crowd. "Make way, make way." Pouting, the females detached themselves and floated away. The sycophants and other assorted hangers-on took the cue as well, dispersing while whis­pering among themselves and keeping watch on the gam­bler from the corners of their eyes. "There," said Sma'Da as Zuckuss sat down beside him. "Much more private now, wouldn't you say?"

  "Adequate." Zuckuss still didn't feel entirely at ease in such public surroundings. Proper bounty hunting, he felt, was best done in remote areas or in the depths of interstellar space, where it would have been just him, the target, and a high-powered weapon pointing in the target's direction. That'd wipe the smile from this one's face, Zuckuss thought. He glanced over at the table he'd left; 4-LOM was sitting as placidly as be­ fore, not even seeming to be interested at all in the ac­ tion that was about to come down. Zuckuss turned back toward Sma'Da. "I was pretty sure that a creature in your line of business would be interested in news from Sullust. You're probably already taking in bets on it."

  "Oh, I might." The dangling animal heads bobbed as Sma'Da shrugged his broad shoulders. "It's hard, though, to get any of my regular clientele to put down their cred­ its, one way or another. The reports that have circulated, concerning the Imperial buildup near the moon of Endor, have made a great many creatures nervous. It's one thing to bet on a minor battle here or there, a mere skirmish or a Rebel raid on an Imperial armaments depot, that sort of thing; quite another to place a wager on what could very likely be the end of this great game." Sma'Da heaved an immense, fat-quivering sigh. "If that should be the case—if Emperor Palpatine should indeed quash the Re­bellion once and for all—how I shall miss these glorious

  days!" He shook his head, as though already immured in regret over a vanished past. "The Rebel Alliance has brought the radiant aspect of hope to every corner of the galaxy; and where there's hope, there's risk-taking. And then..." Sma'Da's smile reappeared, even slyer than be­ fore. "There's wagering. And that's always profitable, for someone like me."

  The gam
bler's words gave Zuckuss a measure of cold comfort. He's no different than me, thought Zuckuss. Not that he had expected anything different; most of the galaxy's denizens, in Zuckuss's estimation, spent all their time looking out for Number One, namely themselves. If he had ever believed otherwise, he might have been tempted stay with the Rebel Alliance. But he was certain that idealism was a rare trace element in the universe's composition, whereas greed was as ubiquitous as hydro­gen atoms.

  "I like profits as well," said Zuckuss. One of the wait­ ers had brought another drink, shimmering amethyst in color, and had placed it in front of him; he didn't touch it. "That's why I sought you out."

  "Good for you." Sma'Da gave an appreciative nod. "And good for me, if whatever information you've brought with you should turn out useful. The more one knows, the easier it is to make odds. Though mind you"—he peered closer at Zuckuss— "it's hard to take me by surprise on these things, anymore. There's not much I haven't heard about what's been going on near Endor; I have excellent sources for all kinds of gossip and rumor."

  "I'm pretty sure this is something you haven't heard before." Zuckuss reached into his tunic.

  "Ah." Sma'Da put the tips of his glittering fingers to­ gether. "My pulse races with anticipation."

  "How's this, then?" Zuckuss pulled out a blaster pis­ tol and set its cold, hard muzzle against Drawmas Sma'Da's forehead. "You're coming with me."

  He had the satisfaction of seeing the gambler's eyes

  widen for a moment. Then they all but vanished again, from the upwelling pressure of Sma'Da's expansive grin.

  "That's very funny. How amusing!" Sma'Da drew his hands apart, enough to clap them together again in ap­ preciation. "Everyone—please observe!" He called out loudly to the crowd in the bar; eager faces swiveled in the direction of the table. "To what lengths creatures go merely to provide me with a few fleeting moments of amusement!" His laughter boomed against the walls, as though to frighten the play of colors against their sur­face. "Bringing in and waving around a blaster, in the one place it's sure to be useless! Not even a power source for it!"

  The laughter was contagious; Zuckuss could hear it sweep through the establishment like a wave breaking over and carrying away the staff as well as the patrons. Their bright, barking noise mounted louder, approach­ ing some critical mass of hilarity. Zuckuss glanced over at 4-LOM, in the center of the establishment's space; the droid bounty hunter was the only one not laughing. 4-LOM sat and waited with machinelike patience, know­ing what was to come.

  "You poor fool." Drawmas Sma'Da hadn't bothered to pull away from the blaster placed at his brow; he obvi­ ously wanted all the onlookers to relish the joke to its full. "Did you think I'd be somehow frightened by a lump of dead metal? Or did you not even notice what happened when you came in here, what little piece of that weapon was taken away from you by our good inn­keeper's minions? Really—" With one pudgy hand, he dabbed away the tears that had managed to squeeze past the folds surrounding his eyes. "It's just too good."

  "Even better than you think," said Zuckuss. He shifted the blaster slightly away from Sma'Da's head and squeezed the trigger. A coruscating bolt of energy shot out and blew away a section of the bar's ceiling, charred fragments and hot sparks raining down on the upturned faces of the crowd. "This weapon's live."

  Sma'Da had instinctively dived when the blaster bolt had scorched past the side of his head. His immense girth had toppled the table, sending a cascade of liquor and the remains of the banquet cascading across the floor. Crockery and crystal decanters shattered, the fragments gleaming like transparent teeth imbedded in the wetly gleaming disorder. A few of the bar's patrons still looked stunned and disbelieving; some of the sharper-witted ones had rushed for the exit and were now scrabbling to get past one another and up the narrow tunnel to the surface.

  "Let's go." Zuckuss reached down with his free hand, grabbed Sma'Da's trembling elbow, and pulled the gam­ bler to his feet; he had to lean back to counterbalance Sma'Da's greater weight. "There's some creatures who are ready to pay a nice pile of credits for the privilege of having a talk with you. A long talk." And probably not a pleasant one, judging from the panicked look on the other's face and the fear-induced quivering that shook this mass like a small planet's seismic activity.

  The bar's proprietor came rushing up, pushing his way past the remaining crowd. "What is the meaning of this?" Salla C'airam was nearly as agitated as the gam­bler caught in Zuckuss's grip."It's an outrage? It's impos­sible! It's—"

  "It's business." Zuckuss diverted the blaster's aim for a moment, away from Sma'Da and toward C'airam. That was enough to stop him in his tracks. C'airam's ten­tacles drew short and wrapped themselves tightly around his body. "You've already got a mess here." Zuckuss used the blaster to point to the sodden, trampled-upon— and expensive—garbage on the floor. "You can either start cleaning it up ... or you can join it. Your pick."

  C'airam's floppy, seemingly boneless appendages set­ tled lower, a sure sign in his species of wanting to avoid a violent confrontation. "I do not know," he spoke with measured sulkiness, "how you managed to get a power source for your weapon into these premises. It's strictly forbidden—"

  "Sue me."

  "If any of my staff here were involved..." The gaze of the proprietor's gelatinous-appearing eyes, nearly as large as Zuckuss's, swept menacingly across the waiters and bartenders. "If I should discover any complicity, any treachery on their part..."

  "Don't worry about it," said Zuckuss. He pushed the trembling mass of Sma'Da ahead of himself. "They're off the hook." He didn't feel like sharing any of the credit for this job with nonbounty hunters; the little bit of ac­ tion, the deep, warm feeling of empowerment that came with drawing a live weapon on a fat, blubbering piece of merchandise, had given his spirits a considerable lift. With the gambler's quivering bulk ahead of him, Zuck­ uss stopped just beside the table at which his partner 4-LOM had remained sitting throughout all the commo­tion that had taken place. "Speaking of your staff"— Zuckuss turned, swiveling the muzzle of the blaster back toward C'airam— "you've got the usual service droids in your kitchen, don't you?"

  C'airam gave a puzzled nod.

  "Fine. Go have one of your other staff pull the moti­ vator out of one of 'em. A standard FV50 unit will do nicely." Zuckuss raised the weapon's muzzle a little higher. "I suggest you have them hurry. I might not have the same resources of patience that you do."

  On hasty orders from C'airam, one of the bar staff scuttled back into the establishment's kitchen and re­ turned only seconds later with a double-cylindrical ob­ ject in his hands.

  "Thanks." Zuckuss took the motivator from him, and then shooed him away with a wave of the blaster. "Don't move," he warned Sma'Da—needlessly. The gam­bler, face now shiny with sweat, looked incapable of any­ thing beyond involuntary respiration. Keeping the blaster in one hand, Zuckuss set the motivator down on the table, then swiftly—he had practiced this step before coming to C'airam's bar—unlatched the access panel just

  below the back of 4-LOM's head unit. "This should do it..."

  "Don't forget the red feedback-loop clip." Even with­ out a working motivator inside the bounty hunter droid, 4-LOM retained enough low-level auxiliary power to maintain consciousness and interactive communications. "Make sure you've got that in-phase before you power up the major thoracic systems."

  "I know what I'm doing," Zuckuss replied testily. With just one hand, it took a few moments longer to get the circuits aligned properly. "You'll be up and running in a minute."

  4-LOM's immobilized state had been a necessary part of the plan; otherwise, the droid could have taken a more active part in rounding up Drawmas Sma'Da. The most essential item, though, had been making sure that Zuckuss had had an operative blaster pistol to work with. That had meant getting a power source past the establishment's security—impossible—or cre­ating one on the spot. Which was exactly what 4-LOM had figured out how to do in its preparations for this job, even before h
e had taken Zuckuss on as a partner. With the help of a few highly paid technical con­sultants, 4-LOM had designed and installed within himself a device capable of stripping out the internal circuit of a standard motivator, the primary mecha­nism that enabled droid locomotion, and high-grading the resulting simple power source into one both pow­erful and small enough to be used in a blaster pistol. Like the alchemical wizards on certain remote worlds, who claimed to be able to convert base materials into infinitely more valuable substances, 4-LOM had given himself the ability to change a dull but useful internal component to something very valuable indeed—a blaster power-source, in a locale where none was expected to be.