This was the point at which Nom Anor ceased to be simply unpleasant business and became something Fett hadn’t really seen before: a threat he might not be able to handle.
It was as if the executor changed before his eyes, shifting subtly from just a hideously disfigured face made worse by its few vestiges of normality into something totally alien he had to be able to kill. It felt personal tor a moment, and that was anathema. The trick whs to understand the enemy without identifying with him. Now he’d name his higher price. He knew exactly what he had to demand.
“As long as we work for you,” Fett said, “you leave the Mandalore sector alone.”
Nom Anor stared into Fett’s visor and Fett stared hack, his helmet cam recording, even if the executor couldn’t tell that. The creature’s face was a nightmare, a corpse from a battlefield: nose and lips missing, leaving a hole in the center of his face set above teeth that were every bit as human as his own. His skin was a mass of puckered but regular scars and intricate tattoos. A thick ridge of bone or scar tissue-Fett wasn’t sure which-ran from under his sunken eye sockets to the back of his hairless, scarred, tattooed scalp. It was just the eyes and the teeth.
They were utterly human, as if someone were trapped in a monstrous suit and trying to get out. The image clicked into place almost like an overlay on a holochart. Fett suddenly imagined what Nom Anor might have looked like with a nose, and a mouth, and regular skin. He imagined what the warriors would look like: because these invaders all had the same terrible faces. They mutilated themselves deliberately.
Fierfek. If that’s what they do to themselves…
“You still try to bargain with me,” said Nom Anor.
“That’s my price. It goes up when I find clients haven’t been totally open with me.” Like not mentioning a galactic invasion. Fett was the one doing the buying now, though: he was buying time. “You’re going to have to fight for every meter of ground here. Thousands of sentient species, countless worlds, and every one will put up a fight. You need us. If only to deal with the Jedi.”
“And I could kill you now, of course.”
“I’m one man. The clans will find a new Mandalore right away, and then they’ll tight. Your call.”
Beviin muttered irritably, “Thanks, ‘Alor.”
The prisoner began moaning incoherently and slumped hack on the deck, convulsing, eyes rolled back in his head. Nom Anor watched him with apparent fascination, making no attempt to help, and tor a second Fett seriously considered drawing his blaster and putting the wretched man out of his misery. He decided it wasn’t his business, but he also knew he would regret not doing it for the rest of his life.
Another Yuuzhan Vong entered the compartment, as tattooed and mutilated as Nom Anor but wearing a draped charcoal-gray robe-for want of a better word-that seemed to be stapled to his flesh, from shoulders to scalp. These people liked pain. Fett could grit bis teeth and take it, but there was endurance, and then there was the sick, disturbing fondness for it; and pain looked like it was central to the Yuuzhan Vong way of life.
He’d seen enough. Or at least he thought he had.
The new Yuuzhan Vong bent over the prisoner slumped on the floor and took a firm grip of the coral gorget to wrench it out of his neck. The captive looked dead: Fett was pretty good at spotting dead now.
Beviin, standing with fists on hips and outwardly impassive, swore angrily in the privacy of the helmet comlink. “I want to hunt down every last crab-boy in the galaxy,” he muttered. Beviin was usually the most easygoing of men, and the venom in his voice surprised Fett. “Whether you have a deal with them or not, Mand’alor.”
Two freakish creatures with far less exotic scars and tattoos than Nom Anor arrived with a new prisoner, a thin male Twi’lek in late middle age, and he was terrified, struggling, screaming. Fett wasn’t squeamish, but his code of honor said that you killed cleanly, and pain was a side-effect, not a hobby. It happened fast: the hired help held down the Twi’lek and the creature in the stapled robe simply rammed the yorik-kul that had been tipped from the dead victim up into the sternum of the new prisoner, so hard that the nodules broke through the skin of his neck, leaving him gurgling and choking. The surgical shock should have killed him, but somehow the crab-boys-Beviin had a gift for well-crafted abuse-could keep him alive.
Fett made a point of not looking at Beviin in case it started him off. He could hear him grinding his teeth and swallowing hard. If Beviin gave in to his urge to sort things out with a blaster for one victim, there would be an awful lot more in the Mandalore system who paid the price.