Hard Merchandise Page 28

  "But. . . but look at the chance you're taking." The gears of Bossk's thoughts slowly started moving again. "I don't have what you're talking about right here on me. You think I'd carry stuff like that around? No way." Bossk shook his head vigorously. "I've got it well hid, someplace where nobody else would be able to find it."

  "Whatever's been hidden can be found again."

  "Maybe so," said Bossk, "but not without a lot of searching. And that would take time. Time that you

  don't have right now." His words started coming faster. "You said yourself, just a couple minutes ago, that you came here to Tatooine in a hurry. That must mean you've got to get your hands on that stuff real quick. You kill me now, and that's not going to happen. You'll be stuck here in Mos Eisley, rooting through every possible place I could have stashed the goods. And maybe you won't ever find it. Think about that." Bossk gave a quick nod, his own fanged muzzle almost brushing that of the blaster being held on him. "Then what'll you do? You won't be getting any help from me, if I'm already dead."

  "Good point." The blaster pistol remained where it was, unwavering in Boba Fett's grip. "But not good enough. Do the math, Bossk. If I kill you now, I might in­ deed have only a small chance of finding what I came here for. But all your chances will be over. What's incon­ venient for me will be terminal for you." Boba Fett's fin­ ger rested upon the trigger, a centimeter away from unleashing its fire. "There's nothing left to discuss. So what's it going to be?"

  The darkly shining metal in the other bounty hunter's hand mesmerized Bossk. He had looked straight at death before—in the bounty hunter trade, it was a regular occurrence—but never with as much certainty as now. The pulse in his veins seemed to stop, along with time it­ self; all the rest of the cantina faded away, along with its whispering voices and watching eyes. The universe seemed to have contracted, down to the width of the booth's ta­ ble, holding nothing but himself and the helmeted figure across from him, with the blaster as the pivot of gravity between them.

  "All right ..." Bossk's throat had gone as dry as the Dune Sea, somewhere out in that vanished world sur­ rounding the booth. "I'll..." The next words caught in his throat, as though they were too big to dislodge. "I'll go ahead and ..." His hands drew into fists, claws dig­ ging ragged parallel grooves in the table's surface. For a moment longer, Bossk remained paralyzed, then he found

  himself slowly shaking his head. "No, I won't," he said flatly. "I won't do it."

  "What did you say?" The blaster didn't move, but a minute fraction of surprise sounded in Boba Fett's voice.

  "You heard me." Bossk's heart was racing now; his vi­ sion blurred with the increased pressure for a moment, then he managed to bring Boba Fett's image into focus again. "I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to give you the stuff I found inside that droid." He raised his hand from the marks his claws had dug into the table and spread them wide, making an additional target out of his chest. "Go ahead and fire. I don't care." A certain exhila­ration came with those words; Bossk felt absolutely free for the first time in his existence. "You know ... I just realized something. That's how you always won before," he marveled aloud. "It was because you didn't care. Whether you lived or died, or whether you won or lost. So you always wound up surviving, and you always won." Bossk slowly shook his head, admiring his own sudden insight. "That's amazing."

  "Spare me." The dark-visored gaze remained as steady as the blaster in Boba Fett's hand. "I won because I had more firepower—and brainpower—than you or anyone else did. That's what matters. Nothing else."

  "Yeah, well, not this time." Bossk found himself smil­ ing with genuine pleasure, even though he knew he might very well be enjoying the last few seconds of his life. "You know, I really should've figured this out be­fore. I've been in plenty of tight spots, where I was look­ing death straight in the face—like when Governor Desnand was planning on peeling my skin right off me— and I always managed to fight or bribe my way out of them. I even managed to steal the Hound's Tooth back from Tinian and Chenlambec, and that took some doing, believe me. And then to have you steal the Hound away from me ..." Bossk slowly shook his head. "Crazy busi­ness, huh? Not surprising that I never figured out what it all meant. At least until now." Bossk gestured at the

  blaster in Boba Fett's hand. "So you got the firepower, all right, for all the good it'll do you. Go ahead. Shoot."

  A shadow fell across the table. The cantina's bar­ tender had pushed his way through the crowd, right up to the side of the rear booth. "Hold on, you two—" The man's lumpish face was shiny with sweat. "We don't want any trouble here—"

  "It's a little late for that." Boba Fett swung the muzzle of the blaster around toward the bartender. "Isn't it?"

  "Now . . . wait a minute ..." The bartender held up his hands, palms outward, as though they were capable of stopping a blaster bolt. "I was just ... trying to help you work things out. That's all..."

  "And so you can." With his free hand, Boba Fett reached into one of the pouches in his battle armor and drew out a data-transfer chip. "Does this establishment have a verify-and-transmit connection with the local banking exchange?"

  "Sure—" The bartender nodded and pointed toward the opposite side of the cantina. "Back in the office. We use it for our own accounts. We get a lot of credits, from a lot of different systems, moving through here."

  "Fine." With his thumb, Fett punched in a few quick commands on the chip's miniaturized input module. "Take this and have the balance in my local cache account deposited in the name and identity scan of this individual here." He indicated Bossk with a nod of his helmet. "Keep the five-percent service fee for yourself. Got that?"

  The bartender nodded again.

  "Then do it."

  Bearing the transfer chip in his hands like a precious relic, the bartender turned and hurried toward the can­ tina office. The crowd parted before him, to let him pass. Then their wondering faces all turned back toward the scene in the booth.

  "All right," said Boba Fett. He tucked the blaster back into its holster. "There. You've won."

  Bossk stared at him uncomprehendingly for a mo­ment before he could speak. "What did you say?"

  "You've won." A note of impatience tinged Fett's words. "Isn't that what you wanted?"

  A tiny bell note sounded from a pouch on one of the straps crossing Bossk's scale-covered chest. He fumbled out the small readout card with his own account balance encoded on it. A few minutes ago, the numbers had been pitifully small. But now the transfer of funds had gone through, as Fett had instructed the cantina's bartender. The resulting change in the readout figure widened Bossk's eyes into almost perfect circles.

  The crowd in the cantina had heard what Boba Fett had said. The volume and buzzing urgency of their com­ ments to each other went up several notches.

  "I won?" Bossk lifted his gaze from the readout to his own reflection in the dark visor of Fett's helmet.

  "Look," said Boba Fett. "I don't have time to either kill you or argue with you any further. I've paid you—" He pointed to the readout in Bossk's claws. "And that's more than you would've gotten from Kuat. So that's my half of the business we're doing here. So work with me on this, all right? Your turn. Where's the stuff you took from my ship?"

  Bossk still felt slightly stunned. "It's... not here ..."

  "You told me that already. So where is it?"

  "Back at the hovel-stack... where I've been staying..." Bossk gave him the directions, the exact route down Mos Eisley's twisting alleys. "Move the pallet... and there's a hole underneath, covered with a board ..."

  "That's your hiding place?" Boba Fett shook his head in disgust. "I could have saved my credits." He slid out from the booth. "Make it last," he said, pointing to the readout in Bossk's hand. "Might be all you'll see for a while." Fett turned and strode away, the crowd quickly shifting to either side of the cantina.

  Bossk sat staring at the display for a few moments longer, then tucked it away again. He stood up from the booth and i
mmediately halted in place.

  The cantina crowd was massed solid in front of him, eyes of the galaxy's various shapes and colors regarding

  him, with none of the creatures saying a word. Then— slowly—the silence was broken, as first a few individu­ als, then the entire crowd, began applauding and raucously cheering.

  A drunken harf, with shining red, gogglelike eyes and an elongated snout, put a massive arm around Bossk's shoulders. "We don't like you any more than we ever did," said the creature. "We just never saw anything like that before. Not with Boba Fett, that is ..."

  "Sure ..." Bossk nodded in appreciation of the other's words. "It means a lot to me, too." Back in the game, he thought dizzily. He didn't need the Hound's Tooth anymore; with the credits he had now, he could buy a whole new ship. And a better one ...

  Ideas and desires whirled through Bossk's head. He pushed his way through the noisy crowd, heading for the light outside.

  "Must've been one of those days." On a level stretch of plain outside Mos Eisley, N'dru Suhlak looked up from the access panel on his Headhunter's exterior hull. He had been keeping himself busy with necessary repairs to the craft; after the encounter with Osss-10 above Tatoo­ine's atmosphere, the Headhunter hadn't been in optimum shape. Reaching into his tool kit for a larger hydrospan­ner, he had spotted Boba Fett returning from his "busi­ ness meeting" in the spaceport's cantina. "Couple of folks came by a little while ago; they told me some of what happened."

  Fett had a small parcel, wrapped in unmarked flimsi­plast, tucked under his arm. "Creatures talk. You should ignore them."

  "Don't know about that." Suhlak wiped his hands on a greasy rag, then slammed the access panel shut. "Sounded kind of interesting. I mean, a big roaring blaster fight like that, and all those other creatures getting killed. Must have wiped out half the 'port's population."

  "Nowhere near," said Fett drily. "These things get ex-

  aggerated when they get told over and over." He reached up and stowed the package in the Headhunter's bubbled- out passenger area. "Is this thing ready to go? Just be­ cause I got what I came here for, that doesn't mean I'm in any less of a hurry."

  "We're outta here." Suhlak picked up his tool kit. "Sooner you're off my hands and I get paid, the happier I'll be."

  In a few minutes, the Z-95 Headhunter was beyond Tatooine's atmosphere again, heading for deeper space and the rendezvous point with Dengar and Neelah aboard the Hound's Tooth. From the pilot's chair, Suhlak glanced over his shoulder and watched as Boba Fett un­ wrapped the package and began examining its contents.

  I don't even want to know, thought Suhlak. He turned back to the controls and the forward viewport. What­ ever the package might hold, it was Fett's business and none of his own. Let him get killed over it.

  Suhlak started punching numbers into the navicom­puter , getting ready for the jump into hyperspace.

  15

  "How long do you think we'll have to wait around here?" Dengar turned from the Hound's controls and glanced over his shoulder. "Before he shows up?" "I don't know," said Neelah. "Hope it's soon ..." They had dropped out of hyperspace and into the Oranessan system, followed by the KDY security cruiser, just as Boba Fett's scheme had predicted. Since then, Dengar had kept the Hound's Tooth at the precise speed that their strategy called for: just fast enough to stay out of reach of the pursuing cruiser. The mottled orb of Oran-u, the system's largest planet, filled the forward viewport as the chase continued.

  All that Neelah and Dengar needed now was for Boba Fett to have successfully completed his mission on Tatooine and then rendezvous with them here, as they had agreed upon back at Balancesheet's freighter. Nee­lah had half expected Fett to already be here waiting for them; that sort of thing was exactly his style. But in­ stead, when the Hound's Tooth had reached its destina­ tion, they had been greeted with the disappointing reality of empty space, with no sign of the smaller Head-

  hunter craft, with its hunt saboteur pilot and bounty hunter passenger.

  "The way I see it," fretted Dengar, "is that there's a couple of things that could go sour right about now. "Either something happened to Boba Fett and Suh­lak on the way to Tatooine or on the way here—like them getting intercepted and blown away by one of the other bounty hunters gunning for 'em—in which case they're not going to be showing up here at all. Or Boba Fett had some other plan of his own all along, and he's double-crossed us, which would mean that he never intended to meet up with us here at all." That notion made Dengar grit his teeth while giving a slow shake of his head. "Then we'd be waiting around here for nothing."

  "I don't think that last one's too likely," said Neelah. Leaning back against the cockpit hatchway, she crossed her arms tight across her breast, as though that were the only way to keep her jangling nerves under control. "He's got reasons for hooking up with us again. Not be­cause he's got any great affection for either one of us, but because he'd still be thinking there'd be some way of gen­erating a profit from me."

  "Maybe so." Dengar didn't seem convinced. "It's just that he's got such a devious mind. But then, I knew that before I ever became partners with him."

  "There's another possibility." It was one that had been gnawing away for a while now, even before they had caught sight of the Oranessan system approaching in the distance. "The worst one."

  "What's that?"

  "Just this," said Neelah grimly. "That nothing hap­ pened to Boba Fett on the way out to Tatooine, and nothing happened to them on the way here. And nothing happened on Tatooine, either."

  Dengar's brow creased with puzzlement. "What do you mean?"

  "Don't you get it? What if Boba Fett gets all the way

  to Tatooine, finds this Bossk creature—and Bossk doesn't have this fabricated evidence that was taken out of that cargo droid, back on Fett's ship." Neelah's voice tight­ ened in her throat. "Maybe it doesn't exist anymore. Maybe Bossk got rid of it; maybe he decided it wasn't worth anything, and he destroyed it somewhere along the way."

  "You're forgetting something," said Dengar. "Bossk has already put the word out that he's sitting on this stuff, looking for a buyer for it."

  "That doesn't mean he has it." Neelah shook her head in disgust. "Boba Fett isn't the only bounty hunter with a devious mind. Bossk could've gotten rid of, or lost track of it in a hundred different ways, be­ fore he had any idea of its value. Then when he heard that Kuat of Kuat was looking for it and was ready to pay a high price for it, he might have decided to see if he could scam the money for it from Kuat, without actually delivering it. Or Bossk might have thought that if it was so valuable, the prospect of getting it back would be a perfect enticement for luring Boba Fett within striking range—you know what kind of a grudge Bossk has against Fett. This might've been Bossk's way of finally settling up old scores—or at least try­ing to."

  "Yeah . . . maybe so." Dengar slumped in the pilot's chair, looking deflated. "I hadn't thought about anything like that. But I guess you're right. It's possible."

  Neelah had been doing plenty of thinking like that. All the way from Balancesheet's freighter and the drifting fragments of old Kud'ar Mub'at's web, her mind had been ceaselessly turning over one bleak idea after an­ other. All of them processed out as the complete dashing of her hopes, of any chance of answering the remaining questions about her past. Those hopes had been raised from the dead, more thoroughly than Dengar and Boba Fett had revived Kud'ar Mub'at, by the assembler's suc­cessor and its surprise about the fabricated evidence be­ ing back on Tatooine. Whether that was true or not, it

  had at least renewed Neelah's faith in there being still one more slender thread that would lead them out of the blind alley to which all their searching up until now had brought them.

  But if, as she couldn't keep herself from fearing, the last possible clue no longer existed—if it had been a fool's errand on which Boba Fett had gone to Tatooine— then she had no idea of where she would be able to turn next. In a galaxy consumed with the struggle between the Empi
re and the Rebel Alliance, the chances were slim for someone with only a name as the key to the mysteries of her past, a name and its connection to the ruling families of the planet Kuat. For all she knew, it might have been the powerful Kuat of Kuat who had ordered the wiping of her memory and the abduction from her homeworld. And she'd already seen evidence enough, in the bombing raid on the Dune Sea, that Kuat was not someone who would forgo murderous violence to achieve his ends. If she were to blithely show up on the planet Kuat, seeking whatever position in its ranks of nobles that had been stolen from her, she might well be placing herself in the hands of those who had sought to eliminate her once before. Kuat might indeed be the one place where the answers could be found to the mysteries surrounding her—but it could just as easily be where certain death awaited her. With­out Boba Fett returning from Tatooine with the fabri­cated evidence that had been hidden in the cargo droid aboard his ship, she had no chance of knowing which would be the case.

  He either meets up with us here, she thought, gazing above Dengar's head toward the viewport, and has the evidence with him ...