Hard Merchandise (star wars) Read online

  "Don't worry about that." Zuckuss shoved Sma'Da toward the exit tunnel. He kept everyone in the bar covered with the blaster—there were one or two shots left in its charge, at the most—as he and 4-LOM hustled Sma'Da out. "The drinks were terrible, anyway."

  Not until later, when he and 4-LOM were aboard the droid bounty hunter's ship, with Sma'Da safely stowed in a cage belowdecks, did Zuckuss realize that they had stiffed C'airam. Neither he nor 4-LOM had settled their drinks tab before leaving.

  Serves him right, thought Zuckuss.

  "So where are we taking this merchandise?" Standing in the hatchway of the cockpit, Zuckuss gave a nod to in-dicate Drawmas Sma'Da below them.

  "I've already notified the nearest Imperial outpost." 4-LOM reached across the controls and made slow mi-nor navigational adjustments."They know we'll be bring-ing him in. And they'll have the bounty ready to be paid out."

  "This was a job for the Empire?"Zuckuss hadn't even bothered to ask before he had agreed to hook up with the other bounty hunter. "Why would Palpatine want him?"

  "Let's just say that our merchandise, in his previous role as gambling entrepreneur, was a little too accurate about setting odds for various military encounters be-tween Imperial forces and the Rebel Alliance." 4-LOM didn't glance back as he tweaked the ship's controls. "There's a limit to how many times one creature can pre-dict things like that, using nothing but intelligence and luck. At the rate that Sma'Da was calling the shots, it be-gan to look like he might have had access to some sources of inside information. From inside the Imperial forces, that is."

  Zuckuss mulled the other's words over. "It's possi-ble," he said after a moment, "that it could've been just luck. Real good luck."

  "If that's the case," replied 4-LOM drily, "then it wasn't good luck for our merchandise at all. It was bad luck— the worst kind, in fact, since it brought him to the atten-tion of Emperor Palpatine. Now he's going to have a lot of explaining to do. It won't be a pleasant process."

  Probably not, thought Zuckuss as he left the ship's cockpit area. Even if Drawmas Sma'Da rolled over on any informants he might have had among the Emperor's minions, the techniques that would be used to ensure that the former gambler was telling the truth would leave him a squeezed-out rag. He wouldn't be so fat and jolly when all that was over.

  The brief excitement that Zuckuss had felt during the job, when he had pulled out the live blaster and fired it off, shutting off all the onlookers' laughter like flipping a switch, had already faded. He sat down with his back against one of the ship's weapons lockers and defocused his large, insectlike eyes. He couldn't help feeling that even if his bounty hunter career was go-ing better now that he had hooked up with 4-LOM, it somehow wasn't quite as much . . . fun, for lack of a better word. Granted, that kind of amusement had nearly gotten him killed, and on more than one occa-sion. Still...

  His thoughts turned to memories as he leaned his head back against the locker. He remembered two other partners in particular; one of them, Boba Fett, could be anywhere in the galaxy now. There was no stopping Fett, or apparently even slowing him down. The last glimpse of Boba Fett that Zuckuss remembered had been through the narrow hatch of an emergency escape pod, just prior to being jettisoned from another ship similar to this one.

  There had been another bounty hunter in that escape pod, one that had fumed with a murderous anger the whole time that the pod had been hurtling through space, toward some yet-unknown destination. That had been Bossk; both murder and anger were things that came naturally to Trandoshans. But it had made for cramped quarters inside the little durasteel sphere. Tem-pers had flared, both his and Bossk's, and they had kept from killing each other only by agreeing, once the escape pod came to rest on the nearest planet, that they would go their separate ways. And so they had.

  He was both glad and somehow sorry that his partner-ship with the cold-blooded, fiery-tempered reptilian Bossk was long over. There was no amount of fun that was worth the risks that came with an association with a creature like that.

  Zuckuss shook his head. At least I'm still alive, he thought. That has to count for something.

  He wondered where Bossk was now ...

  2

  He didn't need to kill him... but he did. Bossk thought it was a good idea, not just to stay in practice for the bounty hunter trade, but also to make sure that no one in the Mos Eisley spaceport knew the circumstances of his arrival.

  The broken-down old transport pilot, a shambling wreck with a spine bent nearly double by too many high-g landings, had come gimping up to Bossk, obvi-ously looking for a handout. "Wait a minute," the old man had rasped, digging a yellow-nailed paw through the grey wisps of his beard as his rheumy eyes had peered closer at the figure in front of him. "I know you—"

  "You're mistaken." Bossk had taken passage aboard a number of local system freighters, all under assumed names, to reach the remote planet of Tatooine. There had been plenty of times in the past when he had flown his ship Hound's Tooth directly here and had made no attempt at concealing his identity. Right now, circum-stances were different for him. "Get out of my way." He shoved past the beggar, heading for the perimeter of the spaceport's landing field and the low shapes of the build-ings beyond. "You don't know who I am."

  "I sure do!" The beggar, dragging one foot-twisted leg behind himself, tagged after Bossk. They crossed the landing field, streaked with blackened char marks from thruster engines. "Bumped into ya out in the Osmani system; that was a long while back." He struggled to keep up with the Trandoshan's quick strides. "I was pi-loting a shuttle between planets—that was the cheapest gig I ever worked—and you lifted one of my passengers right off the ship." The beggar emitted a phlegm-rich, cackling laugh. "Gave me a damn good excuse for blow-ing my schedule, it did! I owe ya one!"

  Bossk halted and turned on his clawed heel. From the corner of his eye, he spotted some of the other passen-gers that had disembarked with him, now glancing over in this direction as though wondering what the raised voices were all about. "You don't owe me anything," hissed Bossk. "Except a little peace and quiet. Here—" He dug into a belt pouch and pulled out a decicredit coin, then flipped it into the dust beside the beggar's rag-shod feet. "Now you've made a profit on our little encounter. Take my advice as well," growled Bossk, "and try to keep it that way."

  The beggar scooped up the coin and followed after Bossk. "But you're a bounty hunter! One of the big ones! Top of the biz—or at least you were."

  That brought blood up into Bossk's slit-pupiled gaze; he could feel the muscles tightening underneath the scales of his shoulders. This time, when he stopped and turned around, he reached down and gathered up the front of the beggar's rags in his clenched fists and lifted the inso-lent creature up on tiptoe. He didn't care if anyone was watching. "What," he said quietly and ominously, "do you mean by that?"

  "No offense." A gap-toothed smile showed on the beggar's seamed humanoid face. "It's just that everybody in the galaxy knows what happened to the Bounty Hunters Guild. It's all gone, ain't it? Maybe there aren't any big-time bounty hunters left." The smile widened, like an overripe fruit splitting open in the heat of Tatooine's dou-ble suns. "Except for one."

  Bossk knew which one the beggar meant. It didn't im-prove his temper to be reminded about Boba Fett. "You're pretty free with your little comments, aren't you?" Hold-ing the beggar up close, he could smell the encrusted dirt and sweat on him. "Maybe you should be a little more careful."

  "I'm no freer with 'em than anybody else in this dump." Dangling from Bossk's doubled fists, the beggar nodded toward the sun-baked hovels of Mos Eisley. "Everybody around here talks their heads off, however many they've got of 'em. Pretty gossipy bunch, if you ask me."

  "Did I?" Bossk felt the points of his claws meeting through the beggar's wadded rags.

  "You don't have to, pal. 'Cause I'll tell you the way it is." The beggar appeared completely unafraid.

  "Place like Mos Eisley, ain't much else to do except talk. Mostly about each other
's business. Maybe your busi-ness, once they know you're in town. Lots of 'em would be real interested in hearing that a certain bounty hunter named Bossk just arrived. Without a ship of his own, traveling on an ordinary freighter, and"—the beggar leaned his head back to survey Bossk with one squinting eye—"not looking like he was doing too good at the moment."

  "I'm doing fine," said Bossk.

  "Sure you are, pal." The beggar managed a shrug. "Appearances can be deceiving, right? So maybe you got some real good reason for coming here, all incognito and all. Tricky guy like you, maybe ya got some big plan up your sleeve. So you probably want to stay incognito, right? Is that a good guess, or what?"

  Bossk forced his anger down a few degrees. "If you're so smart, why are you a beggar?"

  "It suits me. Nice clean outdoor work. You meet lovely people, too. Besides, it's only a part-time thing for me. It's a good cover for my real business."

  "Which is?"

  "Finding things out," said the beggar. "In a place like Mos Eisley, somebody like me is just about invisible. It's like being the plaster on the walls. So when crea-tures don't notice you, don't know you're even there, you can find out some interesting stuff. Stuff about other creatures—like you, Bossk. I didn't just recognize you, like pulling something out of my own personal memory bank. I knew you were coming here to Ta-tooine; I got friends all through this system and out on the freighters. They let me know you were heading this way. We kinda keep an eye on interesting characters like you, when they show up in these parts. Let's face it, no-body comes to a backwater world like this, unless they got a good reason. It's not exactly the center of the uni-verse, you know. So it figures that you've got some kind of a reason for coming here." The beggar scratched the side of his head with a dirty fingernail.

  "Couldn't be any kind of job for Jabba the Hutt—he's dead, must be a coupla weeks now. Ain't nothing worth bothering with out in what used to be his palace. And there's nobody around here with a bounty on his head—and believe me, I'd know if there was." The expression on his grizzled face turned slyer."So maybe it's just kinda your personal business, huh?"

  Bossk glared straight into the beggar's eyes. "I'd like to keep it that way."

  "I'm sure you would, pal. So that's why I was think-ing, soon as I recognized you, when you came off that transport. Thinking about some way you and I could do business, like. You've had partners before—shoot, bounty hunters are always hooking up with each other. Guess that's so you can watch each other's back, huh?" The beg-gar showed some more of the gaps in his smile. "Well, maybe you and me can be partners."

  "You must be joking." Bossk sneered at the beggar.

  "What use would I have for a partner like you? My line of work is bounty hunting, not begging."

  "Like I said before, pal, this ain't all I do. There's lots of other things I'm good at. One you might find really valuable. And that's keeping my mouth shut. I'm an ace at that—for the right price, of course."

  "I bet you are." Bossk gave a slow nod, then lowered the beggar to the black-streaked surface of the space-port's landing area. "But what about all the others? The ones in your little network of informants that you heard about me from?"

  "No problem; they can be taken care of." The beggar brushed off the front of his rags to little visible effect. "I've handed 'em a line before. All they knew was that you were heading this way, here to Tatooine. They don't need to know whether you stopped here, or for how long. I can tell 'em that you were just passing through, on your way to some other hole in the borderland regions. Communications are so bad out in these territories, they'll figure it just stands to reason if nobody reports spotting you for a while."

  "I see." Bossk looked down at the beggar. "And just what is the price for this ... service of yours?"

  "Very reasonable. Even in what appears to be your rather, um, reduced state financially, I'm sure you'll be able to afford it."

  Bossk mulled it over for a few moments. "All right," he said at last. "You're right about one thing. We're both men of business." He didn't want to attract any more attention to himself, out here in the public zone of the landing field. "Why don't we go on into town?" Bossk nodded toward Mos Eisley itself. "So we can talk over the details of our little partnership. Like businessmen."

  "Sounds good to me." The beggar started walking, in his hobbled, awkward manner, toward the distant build-ings. He glanced over his shoulder. "I'm a little thirsty, if you know what I mean."

  "Everybody's thirsty on this planet." With an easy stride, Bossk followed after the beggar. He already knew just what business arrangements he was going to make.

  When he was done making them, in one of the first back alleys that they came to inside Mos Eisley, Bossk wiped from his clawed hands the dirt that had stained the beggar's neck so greasily black. It didn't take long to do so; hardly more than the few seconds that had been required to snap the scrawny bones in the first place. Killing someone, Bossk had found over the years, was al-ways the best way to ensure their silence.

  With a couple of kicks, he pushed what now looked like no more than a bundle of rags over against the wall of the alley. Bossk glanced over his shoulder to make sure that no routine security patrol had spotted what had gone down. He had come here to Tatooine, and specifi-cally to Mos Eisley, for the purpose of lying low and making his plans without anyone being too curious about his identity—the beggar had been right about that much. About how to conduct business with a Trando-shan , the beggar had been a little off the mark. Too bad for him, thought Bossk as he headed for the bright-lit mouth of the alley.

  As for the suddenly deceased beggar's network of con-tacts off-planet—Bossk had already decided not to worry about them. He was probably lying to me, anyway. The beggar could have recognized Bossk and then made up that story about informants strung through the system, all keeping an eye on bounty hunters and other suspi-cious creatures, just to jack up the price he had been ask-ing for his continued silence.

  Which hadn't even been all that high; Bossk knew he could have easily afforded it, without dipping too far into his stash of credits. Things are cheaper on Tatooine, thought Bossk. They deserve to be. The shade of a pair of tethered dewback mounts fell across him as he made his way across Mos Eisley's central plaza and toward the cantina. Deciding to eliminate the beggar rather than pay the shakedown had been more a matter of general principles rather than economics. If a bounty hunter let himself begin paying to keep his affairs private, he'd eventually wind up paying off everybody. With that kind of overhead, Bossk knew, it'd be hard to turn a profit.

  He descended the rough-hewn stone steps into the cantina's familiar confines. In a hole like this, he wouldn't have to worry about anyone sticking a proboscis into his affairs. They'd know what the consequences would be. Plus, most of them had their own secrets—some of which Bossk knew a little about—so silence was a mutually desired commodity.

  A few glances were turned his way, but the faces re-mained carefully composed, devoid of even the slight-est sign of curiosity. The cantina's regulars, the various lowlifes and scheming creatures with whom he'd had innumerable business dealings, here and elsewhere in the galaxy, all responded as if they had never seen him before.

  That was the way he liked it.

  Even the bartender said nothing, though he remem-bered Bossk's usual order; he poured it from a chiseled stone flagon kept beneath the bar and set it down in front of the Trandoshan. Bossk didn't need to tell him to put it on his tab.

  "I'm looking for a place to stay." With his massive, scaled shoulders hunching over the drink, Bossk leaned closer to the bartender. "Someplace quiet."

  "So?" The scowl on the bartender's lumpish face didn't diminish; he continued wiping out an empty glass with a grease-mottled towel. "We ain't running a hotel here, you know."

  This time, Bossk slid a coin across the bar. "Some-place private."

  The bartender laid the towel down for a moment; when he picked it up again, the coin had vanished. "I'll ask around
."

  "Appreciate it." Bossk knew that those words meant the negotiations were concluded, and successfully. The Mos Eisley cantina actually did have some chambers for rent—dark, airless holes, down beneath the cellars and subcellars where the barrels of cheap booze were stored— but only a few creatures, even among the establishment's regular habitues, knew about them. The cantina's man-agement preferred keeping them little known, and empty more often than not; it cut down on the amount of raids and general hassles from the Empire's security forces. "I'll check with you later."

  "Don't bother." The bartender slapped something down. "Here's your change."

  Bossk didn't even bother to look. He palmed the small object, feeling the outline of a primitive all-metal key, and slipped it into one of the pouches on his belt. He al-ready knew the way to the chambers beneath the can-tina, down one of the narrow stairs tucked behind a crumbling stone wall.

  Carrying the drink with him, he slipped into one of the booths along the far wall. It wasn't too long before somebody joined him.

  "Long time, Bossk." A rodent-faced Mhingxin sat himself down on the other side of the booth's table. Eob-bim Figh's long-fingered hands, like collections of bones and coarse, spiky hairs, set out a multicompartmented box with an assortment of stim-enhanced snuff powders. "Good to see you." Figh's sharp-pointed nails dipped into the various powders, one after another, then to the elongated nostrils on the underside of his wetly shining snout. "Heard you were dead. Or something."

  "It would take a lot to kill me, Figh." Bossk sipped at the drink. "You know that."

  "Boba Fett is a lot. Lot of trouble." The Mhingxin shook his tapered head. "Shouldn't take him on. Not if you're smart."

  "I'm plenty smart enough for Fett," said Bossk sourly. "I just haven't been lucky."

  Figh exploded into high-pitched laughter, a squealing gale that sent clouds of acrid snuff rising from the box on the table. "Lucky! Lucky!" He slapped his narrow paws beside the box. "Luck is for fools. Used to tell me that. You did."