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 “business 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 because 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 unwrapped 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. Whatever 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 instead, when the Hound’s Tooth had reached its destination, they had been greeted with the disappointing reality of empty space, with no sign of the smaller Headhunter 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.”