[Bounty Hunter Wars] - 01(110)

As he bolted down a recoil brace on one of the ship’s exterior laser cannons, Fett supposed that old Cradossk was akeady dead by now. That was the first thing that Bossk had sworn to take care of, once the Trandoshan had fully comprehended how his father had set him up for getting killed on the Oph Nar Dinnid job. A few encrypted transmissions from Slave I, as it had journeyed back toward

the Guild compound, had also arranged

for Cradossk’s death to be the start of the coup action.



More blaster fire sounded as Boba Fett’s tools spot-welded the wiring harness’s main trunk connections. Slave I’s armaments were extensive and not designed for easy removal; some of them had circuitry that reached right down to the innermost bowels of the ship. Putting all of that back together was a long job, and one that had to be done exactly right; more than once, Fett’s life had depended on these weapons as much as the ones slung across the back of his uniform and fastened to his wrists and shins. With his attention thus focused, there was little chance of his being distracted by the violent internal politics of the Bounty Hunters Guild.



Besides, thought Boba Fett, I’ve already done my part. He touched a probe to the bare join, read off the voltage,

then withdrew it and let the replicating insulation swarm a thin yellow sheath over the wire. Or at least most of it, he corrected himself. The ship repair would be completed soon enough, but he knew there was still more to be taken care of before the job of destroying the Bounty Hunters Guild was finished. One great rift, between the old leadership and the upstarts, wasn’t enough. By his calculations, there would be an even split between the two groups once the binding agent of Cradossk had been removed. Some of the elders, who had always chafed under the old Trandoshan’s leadership, would throw in their lot with the young, impatient bounty hunters; some of the latter, reluctant to accept Bossk’s leading the breakaway faction, would side with whatever was left of the Guild’s elder council. But on both sides, Boba Fett would have his ringers and stoolies, feeding him useful information and helping to drive even more wedges of suspicion and greed between one bounty hunter and the next. There were two factions now; soon there would be dozens. And then, thought Fett with a cold lack of emotion, it’ll be every bounty hunter for himself.



That was something he was looking forward to.



He closed the access panel on the Slave I’s curved, glistening hull and looked up the craft’s length. The muzzle

of the laser cannon, a newer and

sleeker instrument of destruction than D’harhan had ever carried, could just be seen as it pointed toward the wash of stars overhead. D’harhan was dead, another piece of the past erased as though it had never happened at all; eventually all the past would be gone, consumed as if by the annihilating energy at the heart of the darkest stars… .



And that was fine with him as well.



Boba Fett moved over to another panel, close to the ship’s anterior maneuvering jets. With the code function embedded in his glove’s fingertip, he opened the panel and got to work, tracing and reconfiguring the intricate circuits.



The blaster fire from the compound continued, like the electrical discharge of a distant storm.



Someday, Fett supposed, the destruction of the Bounty Hunters Guild would be nothing but memory. But not his; he had no use for memory.



All remembering was in vain… .





18


NOW



She watched him at work. Or getting ready for work. His kind of work, though Neelah. That was what was indicated by the weapons, all the various mechanisms of reducing the galaxy’s inhabitants to scattered pieces of bleeding or charred tissue. Boba Fett had returned from the land of the dead, from its gray portal in which he’d slept, and was ready to fill his hands again with death.



“Which one’s that?” Neelah pointed to the brutally efficient-looking object, all matte-black metal

and embedded electronics, in Boba Fett’s grasp. An empty lens at the rear of the weapon’s metal glittered in a curve of crosshaired glass. “What does it do?”



“Rocket launcher.” Boba Fett didn’t look up from his painstaking labors. With a tool as delicate as a humanoid hair, improvised from one of the medical droids’ IV syringes, he scraped a dried mucuslike substance, a remnant of the weapon’s time in the Sarlacc’s gut, out of its intricate circuits. “And what it does, if you know how to work it, is kill a lot of creatures. At once. At a nice long distance away.”



“Thanks.” She felt one corner of her mouth twisting in an expression that would have been ugly if there had been an audience for it. “But I could figure that much out. Don’t think you have to patronize me. I was just trying to pass a little time with something