The Falleen prince’s eyelids drew partway down upon the violet color of his gaze as the deep intertwinings of his meditations continued. Beyond the curved transparisteel of the Vendetta’s great viewport, the waiting stars, ripe for the plucking, lay scattered in silence. So also with the pieces, both visible and invisible, his own and the other players’, upon the squares of that gameboard to which the galaxy had been reduced. If one pawn was about to be swept from the board, what did it matter?
There were plenty left with which the game could be played to its conclusion.
Prince Xizor folded his arms across his chest, the motion bringing the edge of his cape around his boots. He felt sure now that Slave I would soon emerge from hyperspace … and into the trap that had been so carefully prepared.
After all-a thin smile lifted one corner of Xizor’s mouth as he contemplated the stars-where else was it to go?
“You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.” On the other side of the holding cage’s durasteel bars, the Imperial stormtrooper-former Imperial stormtrooper-slowly shook his head. And smiled. “I wouldn’t want to be in your boots right now.”
“Don’t worry about that,” replied Boba Fett. He had come down from the cockpit and into Slave I’s cargo hold to see how this particular piece of hard merchandise was enduring the rigors of the journey. The bounty placed on Trhin Voss’on’t’s head by Emperor Palpatine had stipulated
live delivery-a corpse was therefore useless and, worse, unprofitable to Boba Fett.
If Voss’on’t’s death had been all that was required to collect that veritable mountain of credits, the job would have been much easier. I wouldn’t have needed that fool Bossk along, thought Fett. Partners-even temporary ones-were always an irksome expedient, to be disposed of as quickly as possible.
“Your position here,” continued Boba Fett aloud, “is quite secure. As is mine. I’m the winner, and you’re the loser. I’ll get paid, and you’ll get whatever Palpatine has in store for you.” Which wasn’t likely to be pleasant, Fett knew. Though that hardly concerned him-once a bounty hunter collected his fee, interest in the merchandise’s fate ceased.
“Think so?” The smile on Voss’on’t’s scarred, hatchet-like face turned into an ugly smirk. “This galaxy is full of surprises, pal. There might just be one in store for you.”
Boba Fett ignored the stormtrooper’s warning. Mind tricks, he figured. Voss’on’t was part of the usual run of thugs and laser-cannon fodder that got recruited into the Empire’s fighting ranks. If not of the same intellectual caliber of the Imperial Navy’s admirals, he was still smart enough to have risen to those ranks trained in basic psychological warfare techniques. And sowing doubt in the mind of an opponent was the first, and most effective, of such subtle weapons-one didn’t have to be a Jedi Knight to use it.
Still-he had to recognize that Voss’on’t had a point. Treachery was an infinite substance in the galaxy, as widely distributed as hydrogen atoms in space. And in getting involved in the Voss’on’t job, he had become unavoidably entangled with some of the most treacherous sentient creatures on or off any of the galaxy’s worlds. Not just Palpatine, but the arachnoid assembler Kud’ar Mub’at as well.
It’s a lot of credits, thought Boba Fett as he gazed at the captive in the holding cage. He no longer saw Voss’on’t as a living thing, but simply as merchandise to be delivered for a profit. It was the largest bounty that Fett could remember hearing of in his entire career. The lengths to which Emperor Palpatine would go to satisfy his lust for vengeance made a lesser entity like the crimelord Jabba the Hurt look like a piker. But it was one thing for Palpatine to offer that kind of bounty for the renegade stormtrooper; it was another thing for him to actually pay it out. Not that Palpatine couldn’t afford to-he had the wealth of uncounted systems at his command-but because his greed was even greater than that wealth.
And as far as Kud’ar Mub’at was concerned-Boba Fett held zero illusions about that immense, scuttling spider, with its wobbling, pallid abdomen and obsequious, conniving words. Kud’ar Mub’at was presumably holding the bounty for Voss’on’t, awaiting whichever of the galaxy’s bounty hunters returned to its web with the merchandise. Boba Fett knew that the assembler would love to have both the merchandise and the bounty wind up in its
sole possession-and the best way to do that would be to arrange for the sudden demise of whoever had actually done the work of capturing the stormtrooper.