[Bounty Hunter Wars] - 01(113)
The droid fell mercifully silent. It either knew when it was defeated or when further discussion was pointless.
He left the swoop bike in the dry, dusty hills outside Mos Eisley, then walked the rest of the way into the spaceport. Dengar figured he’d draw less attention to himself that way. And right now creatures noticing him-the wrong creatures, at least-was the last thing he wanted.
Before heading in, along one of the old foot trails that led to Mos Eisley’s back alleys, Dengar uprooted some dead scruff brush and hastily camouflaged the swoop with
it. The stripped-down, one-person repulsorlift vehicle belonged to somebody else. Or used to-Big Gizz, the leader of one of Tatooine’s toughest swoop gangs, had crashed and burned on this machine. Gizz had been hard and mean enough to have been one of Jabba the Hutt’s most valuable employees, but that hadn’t been enough to keep his leathery hide intact; creatures who worked for Jabba just naturally seemed to end up with short life expec tancies. If the work itself didn’t wind up getting them killed, then their own violent natures brought about their fates. Dengar had never thought that the pay scale that Jabba offered was worth the risk. Big Gizz had been luckier than most; there had been enough of him left to scrape up and patch back together. Whatever he was up to these days, he had presumably gotten himself some new transportation to do it with.
The squat, indifferently maintained shapes of Mos Eisley came slowly into view as Dengar worked his way down the last, loose-graveled hillside. His on-foot progress wasn’t much slower than the swoop had been, crossing the Dune Sea from where he had left Neelah and Boba Fett. The swoop had been unusable wreckage when Dengar had first found it, the bent and scattered pieces testifying to the way in which Big Gizz had ended that particular run. Dengar had pieced the vehicle back together, even buying and grafting on the bits of the repulsor-engine circuitry that were too burned out to be made functional again, then stashed it away near his main hiding place in the desert. A bounty hunter’s life was one in which a working form of transport, no matter how banged up and slow, could be the difference between cashing in on valuable merchandise or winding up as bones being pecked at by the Dune Sea’s scavengers.
Tatooine’s twin suns were smearing the sky dusky orange
as Dengar approached the spaceport’s ragged perimeter. Digging the swoop out from the bombing raid’s aftermath, the tumbled rocks and displaced sand dunes, had taken a little while longer than he’d expected it to; the swoop had been buried nearly two meters deep, and he found it only because he’d had the foresight to tag it with a short-distance location beacon. Just my luck, he had thought sourly, when he’d finally managed to drag the swoop to the surface and start it up. The forward stabilizer blades had been bent almost double by the largest
boulder that had crashed onto the minimal vehicle; any movement speedier than a relative crawl sent a spine-jarring shudder through the frame, quickly es calating to a rolling spin that would have crashed him to the ground if he hadn’t backed off the throttle. The swoop’s damaged condition had necessitated
a
more circuitous route across the Dune Sea wastes than he would have taken otherwise; he might have been able to outrun a Tusken Raider’s bantha mount, but not a shot from one of their ancient but effective rifles.
“Looking for anything … special?” A hood-shrouded figure, with a distinctive crescent-shaped proboscis, sidled up to Dengar as soon as he’d made his way between the first of the low, featureless buildings. “There are creatures in this district … who can accommodate … all interests.”
“Yeah, I bet.” Dengar brushed past the meddlesome creature. “Look, just take a hike, why don’t you? I know my way around.”
“My
apologies.” The hem of the creature’s rough-cloth robe swept across the alley dust as it made a small bow. “I mistakenly thought … that you were a … newcomer here.”
Dengar kept walking, quickening his strides. That had been an unfortunate encounter; he had been hoping to make it to the cantina at the center of Mos Eisley without being noticed. The spaceport abounded with snitches and informers, creatures who made a living selling out others either to the Empire’s security forces or to whichever criminals and assorted marginal dealers might have a financial interest in someone else’s comings and goings. That was what had always made Mos Eisley, an otherwise dilapidated port on a backwater planet, one of the galaxy’s prime hangouts for those practicing the bounty-hunter trade. If you stuck around long enough, you eventually heard something that could be turned to profit. The downside, as Dengar was well aware, was that it was hard to keep one’s business a secret around here. A couple of whispers in the right ear holes, and you wound up becoming someone else’s merchandise.