“I guess he’s not,” said Neelah drily. “Pay attention, why don’t you? He’s obviously being discussed in the past tense for a reason.”
“True.” Boba Fett gave an acknowledging nod of his head. “When I came across the Venesectrix in open space, the ship’s engines weren’t powered up; it was simply drifting. I attempted to establish communication with its pilot, but I received no response over the comm unit. The reasonable assumption was that the pilot was either dead or had abandoned his ship. To determine which was the case-and to find anything that might have been valuable aboard-I forced entry through the Venesectrix’s airlock.” In the cockpit viewport behind Boba Fett, a few more dead subnodes bumped against the curved transparisteel. “And I found Ree Duptom, all right.”
“Dead, I suppose.” The expression on Neelah’s face was one of utter boredom. “You know, I’m still waiting to hear the part that has anything to do with me.”
Boba Fett ignored her impatience. “Duptom didn’t make a good-looking corpse. He hadn’t been the handsomest humanoid to begin with-his appearance matched his ethics-but being caught in a hard-energy particle burst from a partial core meltdown of his own ship’s engines hadn’t helped any. Fortunately, the burst’s lethal effects had been contained within a zone just a couple of meters deep; he had obviously been working in the engine compartment when the meltdown occurred, gotten the dose of radiation, then staggered back up to the Venesectrix’s cockpit area to die. Which didn’t take long.”
The story’s details aroused Dengar’s suspicions. “So did his ship’s engines malfunction-or were they sabotaged?” From what he had heard in the Bounty Hunters Guild, Ree Duptom had made nearly as many enemies for himself as Boba Fett had.
“I didn’t investigate that question,” said Fett. “Once a competitor of mine is dead, I lose interest in them. How they wound up that way is someone else’s business; nothing to do with me.”
Right, thought Dengar.
“Anyway, somebody like Ree Duptom was perfectly capable of killing himself through his own stupidity.” Boba Fett shook his head, as though in disgust. “His ship and all of his equipment were poorly maintained; frankly, he was not a credit to the bounty hunter trade in a lot of ways. But Duptom was obviously able to find certain clients, nevertheless. The evidence of that was right there aboard his ship. And the uncompleted jobs that he had been working on were interesting enough for me to take them over.”
“What were they?”
“There were two matters,” replied Boba Fett, “that Ree Duptom’s untimely death had left hanging. The first one was in the form of a deactivated cargo droid-or what had once been a cargo droid. Someone had cleverly transformed it into an autonomic spy device, with not only built-in vid cameras and sound recording equipment, but an olfactory detect and sample circuit as well. The droid’s hidden sensors could pick up trace amounts of scent molecules in the atmosphere and analyze them for biologic source details.”
“Why would anybody want information like that?” This time, Dengar was puzzled by the story, rather than suspicious. “What’s the good of knowing what some event smelled like, if you already had the visual and audio recording?”
“It all depends,” said Boba Fett, “on what you’re looking for, and what the spy device had been designed to catch. This converted cargo droid was capable of detecting evidence of something-or someone-that would otherwise have remained hidden and undiscovered if visual and auditory clues were all that had been processed. Which is what it in fact had done; I found that out when I removed the data record from inside the droid and analyzed it. The truth came out, concerning a certain individual having been at a certain place, and at a certain important time, even though he had tried to conceal his presence from anyone else who might have been watching and listening.”
“What place?” Neelah’s tone was as demanding and impatient as before. “What time?”
“Back on Tatooine-for such a desolate, backwater world, it has assumed a great deal of importance for the rest of the galaxy.” Boba Fett gestured toward the viewport, as though indicating one of the bright points of light visible beyond the drifting subnodes. “But that’s something bounty hunters know instinctively-or at least the ones who survive and prosper. The smallest, apparently insignificant speck of dirt can loom unexpectedly large one day. And you had better be prepared for that. In this case, the speck of dirt was a moisture farm in the Dune Sea, some distance away from the Mos Eisley spaceport. A moisture farm owned