[Bounty Hunter Wars] - 03(3)

If only … Zuckuss kept an eye on the bar’s entrance and allowed his thoughts to slip back into brooding about the past.

If only the old Bounty Hunters Guild hadn’t broken up. If only its successor organizations, the short-lived True Guild and Guild Reform Committee factions, hadn’t fallen apart with the speed of a core meltdown. Those were big ifs, Zuckuss knew, especially when it was taken into account that the main reason the Guild and everything that came after it had disintegrated so rapidly and thoroughly was the basic greed and irascibility that lay at the center of every bounty hunter’s heart-or whatever a droid like 4-LOM had instead.

That was the real reason. Zuckuss took another sip of the drink in front of him. Boba Fett was just the excuse. There were plenty of bounty hunters, former members of the vanished Guild, who blamed Fett for everything that had happened. And it was true, up to a point, that Boba Fett’s entry into the old Bounty Hunters Guild had been the event that had brought about the organization’s disintegration, and that had put every creature in it at the throat of those he had previously called his brothers. But Zuckuss knew that Boba Fett had been no more than the key in the lock that had let free all the forces of avarice and conspiracy that had been bottled up inside the Guild for so long, getting stronger and more malignant all the while. It was amazing that the Bounty Hunters Guild had even endured as long as it had, given the irascible and hungry natures of its members; that was a tribute to the organizational skills of its final leader, the Trandoshan Cradossk. He had probably been the only creature in the galaxy ruthless and clever enough to have kept a lid on the Guild’s rank and file.

We did it to ourselves, thought Zuckuss glumly. The drink, and the ones before it, had done nothing to lift his spirits. Now we have to live with the consequences. He knocked back the sour dregs at the bottom of the glass.

“You know what?” Zuckuss let his thoughts turn into spoken words. “It’s a cold, hard galaxy we live in.”

4-LOM gave him a typically unemotional droid glance. “If you say so.”

Nothing that the Rebel Alliance could do was likely to change that, either. The Rebels didn’t have a chance of winning, anyway, not against the massed strength of the Empire and all of Palpatine’s deep, enfolding cunning. In the darker corners of the galaxy, where surreptitiously acquired information was bought and sold, traded in whispers from one furtive creature to the next, rumors had been heard of a gathering of the Imperial forces, somewhere out near a moon called Endor-like a fist clenching together, into a hammer that would crush the Alliance forever, and end once and for all its crazy dreams of freedom. And now, the galaxy’s bounty hunters were without the Guild that had preciously enforced professional relations among its members-the Hunter’s Creed had at least kept them from murdering one another outright in the course of pursuing business. Small, upstart organizations had sprung up in the power vacuum created by the old Guild’s destruction, but they were still too weak to create order among such naturally violent and greed-driven creatures. Most hunters were still on their own, friendless except for whatever partnerships they could forge with one another. Zuckuss had been partners with different bounty hunters before, even while the Guild had been going through its ugly

process

of disintegration. He had even been partners with Boba Fett, on more than one occasion-but somehow, he had never come out any the better for it. Typically, Boba Fett wound up getting what he was after, and all the rest were lucky if they were still alive afterward. Doing business with Fett was a recipe for disaster.

Truth to tell, though, Zuckuss’s other partnerships hadn’t gone much better. Whatever his personal feelings about 4-LOM, he could swallow those easily enough, given that the two of them had actually been putting credits into their pockets since hooking up. They seemed to have complementary skills: Zuckuss operated on instinct, the way most organic creatures were capable of, and 4-LOM possessed the cold logic of a machine. What had made Boba Fett such a fearsome individual in the bounty hunter trade was that he had all of those capabilities, and more, inside a single skin.

“Here he comes-“

Zuckuss’s musings were interrupted by the soft-spoken announcement from 4-LOM. Even without facing the entrance, the droid bounty hunter had been able to detect the sudden flamboyant appearance of their quarry,

the presently free creature they planned on turning into

hard merchandise and a hefty addition to their credit accounts.

“A round for everyone, innkeeper!” The booming voice of Drawmas Sma’Da filled the bar, like the rumble of thunder over the planet’s horizon. Zuckuss looked up from his drink and saw the immense, befurred, and caparisoned form of the most notorious gambler and oddsman in five systems, spreading his arms wide. The gemstones studding Sma’Da’s pinkly manicured fingers sparkled in a multicolored constellation of wealth and extravagance; his broad, thrown-back shoulders were swathed in the soft fur pelts of a dozen worlds’ rarest species. The artfully preserved heads of the animals that had died for his adornment, with black pearls for eyes, dangled over a belly of wobbling girth. “If I’m in a good mood,” shouted Sma’Da, “then all should be so lucky!”