[Bounty Hunter Wars] - 03(17)

And Bossk had already vowed that he would. That kind of payback could only be made in one kind of coin. Death. The taste of blood in Bossk’s jaws would not just be imagined then; soon it would be real.

He sat brooding for a while longer, hunched forward at the table, the empty glass in front of his claws. Brooding and wondering where Boba Fett was right now; he was already impatient for Eobbim Figh to return with that information.

Probably taking it easy somewhere, Bossk thought bitterly. The Hound’s Tooth was a good ship, well appointed in the best of Trandoshan taste; not just an efficient hunting craft, but one with a minimal but necessary degree of comfort for its rightful owner. Thinking of Boba Fett lounging about in the Hound’s comforts infuriated him even more.

He’s there, seethed Bossk, and I’m stuck here. His claws closed into fists, aching for a throat to break inside them.

There was no justice in the galaxy. While he scrabbled for a place to lie low, on a backwater hole like Tatooine, Boba Fett was safe in the peace and tranquillity of interstellar space, far from harm.

No justice at all…





3


She had just about decided to kill them both.

Neelah looked at the back of Boba Fett’s helmet as he sat at the cockpit controls of the Hound’s Tooth. There was no indication that he was aware of her standing in the hatchway behind him. But knowing Fett, with his constant, preternatural awareness, she felt sure that nothing was getting by him. He can bear the blood rushing in my veins, thought Neelah. He knows.

The other bounty hunter, the one named Dengar, was still asleep in the ship’s cargo area. Neelah had left him there, worn out from relating Boba Fett’s grim history to her. Like most bounty hunters, Dengar was a creature of action; shifting words about, bringing the past to life in even the rawest, most direct terms, was hard labor for him. Especially under duress; she had woken him up before this last time with a blaster pistol aimed at his head. She had been impressed with the degree of motivation that had inspired in Dengar.

She still had the blaster pistol with her; in fact, it dangled from her hand as she watched Fett adjusting the ship’s navigational controls. Originally, it had been one of Boba Fett’s weapons; she had managed to slip it away from him here in the cockpit, before he had been able to stop her. That had earned Neelah a grudging congratulations from him. Very few creatures had ever managed a stunt like that.

Maybe I should’ve killed him then, thought Neelah. Or at least tried to. Her finger tightened upon the weapon’s trigger. All she had to do was raise the weapon, aim-hardly difficult at this minimal distance-and fire. And this uncertainty in her existence would be taken care of, once and for all…

“Don’t delude yourself.” Boba Fett’s voice snapped her out of the murderous reverie into which she had fallen. “I’m aware of your presence.” He hadn’t turned around, but had continued his adjustments to the ship’s controls. A final number was punched into one of the navicomputer touchpads, then Fett swiveled around in the pilot’s chair to face her. “You’d have more luck if you were a droid. Some of those can be virtually silent.”

The remark struck Neelah as unintentionally ironic. If I were a droid, she thought, I wouldn’t have any of the problems I do now. Even her identity, knowing who or what she was, other than a human female with a false name, a name not her own, and a past that had been stolen from her-it was hard to imagine a droid being concerned about things like that. Memory for a droid was a matter of chips and micro-implants, tiny recording devices as manufactured and interchangeable as themselves. Machines have it easy, thought Neelah. They didn’t need to find out what they were; they knew.

“I’ll be more careful next time,” said Neelah. With Boba Fett facing her, she had no more clue than before as to the secrets held within his skull. The dark, T-shaped visor of his helmet, that battered and discolored but still awesomely functional relic of the ancient Mandalorian warriors, concealed anything that might have told her what he thought and knew. The entire answer about who she was and how she had come to the remote, friendless sectors of the galaxy in which she had found herself might be locked up inside Boba Fett, like a key hidden in the very strongbox it was meant to unlock.

But the helmet, and its dark, shielded gaze, didn’t matter; not really. She was one of the few creatures in the galaxy who had ever seen Boba Fett without his helmet-for all the good it had done her. Back on the planet Tatooine, in the harsh glare of the twin suns above the Dune Sea, Neelah had found him close to death, vomited out onto the hot sands by the Sarlacc beast whose death throes he had engineered from inside its gut. The Sarlacc’s gastric secretions, like a corrosive acid capable of etching unalloyed durasteel, had stripped Boba Fett of his armor, right down to and including a good deal of his skin. If she hadn’t stumbled across him, his life would have oozed away like the blood seeping out from his raw flesh and hissing on the sun-baked rocks surrounding him.