Hard Merchandise Page 27

  "Sure—dead ahead." Suhlak pointed to the forward viewport. In the distance was the buff-colored orb, with little of its surface obscured by cloud cover beneath the radiance of twin suns. "Plus, I thought we'd already got­ten past the worst we were going to encounter along the way. Without having to get into any running dogfights— I'd much rather sneak past anyone trying to stop me, in­ stead of having to shoot my way through." He shook his head. "I don't think we're going to be able to do that with this customer."

  "You've spotted someone?"

  "Correction—someone's spotted us." A red dot of light was pulsing on the control panel; Suhlak pointed to it. "I can't see him yet, but whoever it is, he's definitely got some kind of multifrequency scanning and lock-on device. It's got real distance capability, too. None of my detect systems can even get a fix on his location; the sig­nal that got bounced off us was less than a nanosecond in duration, and that's way too small to calculate off of."

  The cockpit area of the Headhunter had been exten­ sively modified, bubbled out to add a larger carrying capacity for Suhlak's paying passengers. But the space

  was still cramped enough that all Boba Fett would have had to do was turn away from the pilot's chair in order to place his hands against the curved bulkhead, as though he might have been able to sense the approaching preda­ tor in that way.

  On the cockpit panel, the red light began pulsing faster, at an accelerating clip. "I take it," said Boba Fett, "that we're picking up more of this unknown indi­vidual's scanning signals?"

  "You got it, pal. He's obviously trying to get enough vector data on us to predict our path and speed. Which means"—Suhlak slammed the navigational controls hard to one side; the stars in the viewport blurred horizontally as the Z-95 Headhunter banked at close to a ninety-degree deflection from its original course—"we go an­other way."

  The sharp maneuver had slammed Boba Fett against the pilot's chair. He braced himself, widening the stance of his boots and holding on tighter to the seat's back.

  Suhlak glanced over his shoulder at his passenger. "You better sit back and strap yourself in. This might get a little raucous."

  "And leave you running this show by yourself?" The lights from the control panel glinted on the dark visor of Boba Fett's helmet as he shook his head. "Don't worry— I can handle it."

  "Suit yourself. Because it seems our friend has gotten in range of us." Suhlak pointed to the upper left quad­ rant of the viewport. "There he is now. And it doesn't look like he just wants to say hello." Boosting the Head- hunter's main engines to full throttle, Suhlak threw the small ship into a looping spiral, piling on multiple g-forces. "Hold on—"

  The first shot fired from the pursuer struck the Head- hunter's exterior hull, to the rear of the expanded pas­ senger area. A burst of hot sparks rained across Boba Fett's back as a section of insulated circuitry overloaded and caught fire. Both he and Suhlak ignored the black smoke that started to fill the cockpit as the hunt saboteur pushed the thruster controls even farther forward, at the same time taking the craft into a wrenching counter-directional dive.

  "There. That should've taken care of him." Suhlak pointed to the display from the rear scanner. "See? We've lost him." With one hand, Suhlak pulled back the en­ gines' throttle. "Kinda disappointing, actually. I was hop­ ing for a lot more fun from—" He suddenly fell silent, leaning forward and peering at the forward viewport. "What the..."

  "Something wrong?"

  "Yeah ... you could say that..." Suhlak slowly nod­ ded, then raised his hand and pointed to the curved trans­paristeel in front of the control panel. "There he is ..."

  At the center of the viewport, the pursuing ship sat waiting in the distance, engines dropped to standby as though its pilot was confident of there being no escape for its prey.

  "Oh, great." Suhlak looked down at a smaller read­ out on the control panel. "We finally got an ID code from this guy. Believe me, he's the last one I wanted to run into."

  Boba Fett peered at the small bright image of the ship ahead. "Who is it?"

  "Osss-10," said Suhlak, shoulders slumping. "Now I'm sure you're bad luck."

  "Never heard of him."

  "You wouldn't have." Disgust sounded in Suhlak's voice. "That's because you're an old story, and he's the latest thing. Don't you get it? This is all because of what you did when you broke up the old Bounty Hunters Guild. The old rule book's been thrown out, and there's enough chaos in the bounty-hunting environment for totally new ones to start up. New—and better." Suhlak pointed his thumb at the viewport. "I've never even seen this Osss-10 guy face-to-face, don't know where he comes from, but I've already had some real unpleasant

  encounters with him. Somebody with a lot of credits must be bankrolling him: he's got all the state-of-the-art equipment, plus he's a real genius at programming his onboard computers. He's got some kind of predictive al­gorithms wired into his gear that I've never encountered before. The more confrontations you have with him, the bigger operational database he has to extrapolate from about what your next moves are going to be—just like he did right now. If he gets much smarter, next he's going to be able to know what I'm going to do before I know!"

  "So what are your plans?"

  "What difference does it make?" Suhlak slumped down in defeat. "I already threw my best stuff at this guy. The only thing I can think of to do is ... give up."

  "Right—" Boba Fett leaned past Suhlak and shoved the main thruster engine controls forward. The Z-95 Headhunter shot forward, rapidly accelerating toward the other craft in the distance.

  "What're you doing?" Suhlak struggled against the forearm restraining him in the seat. "You'll get us killed!"

  Fett said nothing, but pushed the thruster controls all the way to their limits.

  The pursuer craft loomed larger in the center of the viewport as the Headhunter sped straight toward it. Sud­ denly, the prow-mounted laser cannons began firing. Bolt after coruscating bolt struck the Headhunter, buf­ feting the craft from side to side, as more sparks and smoke filled its interior as though it were in the middle of a planetary lightning storm. Boba Fett kept his grip locked upon the thruster controls. Shock and the force of accele­ration were enough to keep Suhlak pinned where he was, watching helplessly as Boba Fett made quick naviga­ tional corrections with his other hand, maintaining their fiery course toward their opponent.

  A final volley of laser-cannon fire burst across the viewport, blinding in its white-hot glare. The Head-hunter burst through it, finding the other craft now di-

  rectly ahead. They were close enough to each other that Suhlak, opening his squeezed-shut eyes, had a momen­tary glimpse of a grimly intent face behind a curve of transparisteel—

  That was all he saw of Osss-10. Suhlak braced himself for the annihilating impact of the two ships crashing to­gether. Then suddenly he could see the rear of the other craft encircled with the flare from its own engines at full throttle. The cockpit through which he had glimpsed the pursuer's face swept upward and out of his vision; the bottom of the other ship's hull filled the viewport, near enough that Suhlak could have counted the thermal weld seams in the durasteel panels if they hadn't gone by so fast.

  A scraping noise, metal against metal, sounded through the smoke roiling in the cockpit area as the underside of Osss-10's ship tore off one of the Z-95 Headhunter's sen­ sor arrays. Then silence filled the space, broken only by the hissing of the automatic fire-control systems extin­ guishing the burning circuitry.

  Trembling, Suhlak leaned forward and checked the angle from his ship's rear scanner. The other ship was no­ where to be seen. He punched up the rest of his detection monitors. They all told the same story: Osss-10 had van­ ished from the sector as quickly as he had appeared.

  Boba Fett had pushed himself back from the con­trol panel, leaving the Headhunter at cruising speed. In the forward viewport loomed the planet Tatooine, closer now.

  "That... that was just insane ..." Suhlak shook his head, still seeing in his mi
nd's eye the vision of the other ship coming within millimeters of a shattering crash with his own. "We were that close to being killed..."

  "But we weren't," said Boba Fett. "So much for your new breed of bounty hunter. He might be able to predict what you're going to do—but he can't predict what I'm going to do. Nobody can."

  Suhlak reached for the ship's controls and aimed toward the cloudless terrain of the Dune Sea. Predictions, he thought. I'll give you predictions. He had already de­ cided, deep inside himself, that whatever amount of cred­ its he was slated to get for this job— It wasn't going to be enough.

  14

  "I was wondering when you'd show up." Bossk's un­ pleasant smile lit up in the shadows of the rear booth, the dim lights of the cantina glinting off the full array of his fangs. "I would've been real disappointed if you hadn't. I mean—disappointed in you."

  Boba Fett slid into the opposite side of the booth. A few inquisitive faces had turned his way as he strode through the dimly lit space, but his visor-shielded glance over his shoulder had convinced them to limit their at­tention to their own business. "Hope you haven't been waiting." He set his gloved hands down flat on the ta­ ble's damp-ringed surface.

  "Oh, I've been waiting, all right." Grimly brooding anger tinged Bossk's words. "I've been waiting for this moment for a long time."

  "Don't make a big deal about this," said Fett. "I just came here to do business with you. That's all."

  "Yeah, and that's the moment I'm talking about. The moment when I've got something that you want."

  Bossk leaned back in the booth's thinly padded seat and regarded—with growing satisfaction—the other

  bounty hunter sitting across from him. The feeling was the kind of satisfaction that came just before even stronger, more pleasurable feelings: the savoring of tri­umph and the satiation of one's appetite. He could al­most taste them, like the sweet saltiness of blood leaking through his fangs. Turnabout, thought Bossk, isn't just fair play. It was the peak of one's existence, at least for a creature like him. Trandoshans were famous throughout the galaxy for their ability to carry a grudge.

  "Not only that you want," continued Bossk. "But that you need."

  "Careful." Boba Fett's voice remained flat and un­ emotional, as though all of Bossk's taunting had had zero effect on him. "You might be overestimating the value of the goods."

  "I don't think so." Bossk set his own massive claws down on the table. "You wouldn't have come all this way—and back to Tatooine, which is hardly full of pleasant memories for you, is it?—if there hadn't been a pretty good reason for you to do so. You especially wouldn't have risked coming here with the odds stacked against you the way they are—what with every bounty hunter left over from the old Guild, and a bunch of new ones, all gunning for you."

  "For somebody who's as far out of the loop as you are these days, Bossk, you seem to know a lot about what's been going down."

  That remark got under Bossk's scales. "Look," he said, voice harshening, "I may not be working as a bounty hunter these days—" It galled him to have to make even that much of an admission of his prior defeats. "But that's all because you stole my ship from me. If I still had the Hound's Tooth, believe me, I'd be on top of this game."

  "I didn't steal the Hound from you," said Boba Fett mildly. "You abandoned it, and I took it over. A piece of junk like that really isn't worth stealing."

  "Junk!" His claws dug into the tabletop as he started to push himself up from the booth's seat. "That's the best ship in the galaxy—"

  At the edges of his slit-pupiled vision, Bossk was aware of the others in the cantina looking once again in his and Boba Fett's direction, some of them glancing surrepti­ tiously from the corners of their eyes, others more boldly. Bossk's raised voice had alerted them all to the possibility of imminent violence, which was always one of the chief sources of amusement for this crowd. He had always known that they didn't come here just for the clattering and whining music from the jizz-wailer band, still setting up and sound-checking their gear over in the corner.

  "Junk," muttered Bossk sulkily. With an effort of will, he forced his temper below the boiling-over point as he sat back down. Boba Fett was playing the usual round of mind games with him, just as the other bounty hunter had done so many times before. It was all part of Fett's usual negotiating strategy, a way of getting a psychologi­ cal advantage over an adversary. Whoever angers you, owns you —that was one of Boba Fett's operational mot­ toes. Bossk had heard it before, and had fallen for it often enough, that he knew it was true.

  "It's served my purposes," said Fett. "Well enough."

  Bossk raised one of his scaly eyebrows. "It's not here with you, is it?" His voice lifted with hope. "I mean, here in the spaceport."

  "Of course not. I had to get here in something of a hurry. I didn't have time to creep along in that pile of..." Fett paused for a moment. "That valuable relic."

  "Don't start." Bossk let his shoulders slump. "I just thought. . . that maybe I'd gotten it wrong from my in­ formation sources. That you'd been detected as being aboard N'dru Suhlak's Headhunter." Bossk tried turning his opponent's verbal tactic around. "You know, that's kind of a new low, even for you, Fett. Using a hunt sabo­ teur to ferry you around. I never knew anybody in the old Bounty Hunters Guild who would've touched one with a gaffi stick, except to beat him to death with it."

  Boba Fett didn't rise to the bait. "Circumstances, rather than desires, dictate my actions. That's why I'm still a bounty hunter, and you're not."

  "Don't worry about that," replied Bossk testily. "I'm going to be in the game again—and real soon. Aren't I?" To be on the safe side, he tilted his head back and scanned the crowd in the cantina, trying to spot any crea­ ture with whom Fett might be working. The chances of that were slim—most of the other top-rank bounty hunters would have been out searching for Boba Fett in­stead, scheming on turning him into the kind of hard merchandise for which Kuat of Kuat had posted such an impressive price. And Fett himself, as Bossk knew from his own past experience, rarely took on partners; Bossk was still amazed at having heard of him being in league with a relative second-rater like Dengar. "That's why you're here. You're going to make that all possible for me, huh? Even if you didn't bring the Hound back with you, so you could return it to me."

  "You can have your ship back—when I'm done with it." Boba Fett shrugged. "And if there's anything left of it then."

  Bossk ignored the comment, as being just another of Fett's infuriating verbal gambits. "Okay. So you came here to take care of some other business with me, right? Let's see if we can make this mutually rewarding. Be­cause it's not going to happen unless it is." Boss leaned across the table, letting his eyes narrow to slits. "How much you going to pay?"

  "You're mistaken." The other bounty hunter gazed right back at him. "I wasn't planning to 'pay' anything."

  "Plan again, pal." Bossk grated out the words. "I've got what you want—what I found inside that cargo droid aboard your ship—and I've got a real good idea of what it's worth. Because there are other creatures besides you looking for it, and they're offering a nice high fee on delivery."

  "So why didn't you sell it to them? From the looks of it, you could use the credits."

  "Because . . ." His fangs ground together, as though they had seized upon Boba Fett's throat. "I figured I could get even more out of you. And even if I couldn't get

  more—even if I couldn't get the same—I still wanted to get it out of your pockets. I wanted you to pay, Fett. Be­ cause I know that's worse for you than if I killed you."

  "You're right. I don't find that prospect at all pleas­ ant." Boba Fett reached under the table. His hand came back up with a blaster pistol in it, which he pointed be­ tween Bossk's eyes. "So why don't you just hand the goods over to me, and that way I won't have to kill you."

  "Are you crazy?" The sight of the weapon, hanging motionless right in his face, had frozen him as well. Glancing out of the corner of his sight, Bossk saw that al
l the mingled hubbub of conversations in the cantina had suddenly died, with every creature there turning and looking in the direction of the rear booth in which he and Boba Fett sat. "I thought you wanted to do business."

  "That's what this is." Boba Fett raised the weapon's muzzle a fraction of an inch higher. "Consider it my final offer."

  The show was too good to ignore; the cantina's other patrons had started buzzing and whispering, excitedly pointing out details of the confrontation to one another.

  "You are crazy." The blood in Bossk's veins, never warmer than the surrounding atmosphere, had suddenly chilled. "Look ... let's think about this."

  "There's no need to," said Fett evenly. "It's a straight­ forward proposition. Hand over the material that you found inside the cargo droid, when you were rummaging around in Slave I, and I won't kill you. What could be fairer than that? Mutually rewarding as well: I'd have what I came here for, and you'd still be alive."