Just outside the cockpit hatchway, Bossk saw a door partly ajar, one that he didn’t remember from his previous time aboard Slave I. He saw now that it was cleverly constructed, the hinges concealed and the door’s edges the same dimensions as the surrounding bulkhead panel; anyone who hadn’t known of it would have had a hard time locating it. When the D/Crypt technician had scoured out the security systems, Bossk figured, the door’s powered lock must have sprung it open.
Or-Bossk’s hand froze on the door as he started to pull it open. Or maybe this is the trap.
He pulled his hand back, automatically reaching for the blaster slung at his hip. The space he could see on the other side of the door was unlit. But only for a moment longer; a quick shot from the blaster lit up everything inside.
The door now dangled loose; Bossk kicked it farther open. Light from the cockpit spilled past him and through the doorway. There was only one object in the enclosed space; a featureless, almost cubical shape, it stood nearly as tall as Bossk. For a moment he thought it was some kind of storage locker, until he spotted the pair of short, stubby legs upon which it balanced. A droid, an inert-screen load shifter; Bossk recognized the variety as one used in engineering facilities and interstellar shipyards. The large shape was essentially a shielded container
for
transporting
quantities
of
lethal fissionable materials. This droid showed signs of use-its metal sides were dented and scraped-but it had obviously been decontaminated; the radiation detector that Bossk kept clipped to his belt would have gone off otherwise.
None of the droid’s sensor circuits lit up as Bossk stepped closer to it. The simple electronic brain had been removed as well. Bossk wondered why Boba Fett would have bothered to do something like that-or why a droid of this dull, uninteresting type was even here aboard the Slave I.
The access hatch on the side of the droid was unlatched; Bossk pulled it open, bending his head to see inside. He undipped a small electric torch from his belt and shone it around the container’s interior.
Something
was
wrong.
Bossk
could
tell
that immediately; there was no shielding material lining the droid’s cargo space. Not much room for fissionables, either; the interior was crowded with various pieces of linked equipment. Spy equipment; discreet surveillance gear was a familiar category in the bounty-hunter trade. Some
of
the stuff inside the droid
was
pretty sophisticated; Bossk recognized a full array of optical and auditory pickups, wired to micropinhole elements studding the droid’s battered carcass.
Or supposedly battered. Working from a hunch, Bossk scraped a claw across the droid’s exterior rust streaks; the orangish-red color came right off. This was faked, decided Bossk. Somebody had worked on this droid to make it look decrepit and falling apart.
He spotted another fake. Wiring from a remote-signal receiver led to a tiny radiation emitter mounted at the edge of the droid’s cargo hatch. An old trick: when the emitter was activated-at a distance, with somebody’s thumb on a transmitter button-there would be just enough radiation to trigger the alarms on any detection devices nearby. That would usually be enough to get even hard-core scavengers like the Jawas to abandon the machinery, for fear of contamination.
Bossk poked around some more, inside the deactivated droid. If Boba Fett had been doing the same a while back-maybe before he’d gone down to Tatooine and hired on at Jabba the Hutt’s palace-he must have been interrupted before he’d gotten very far. Most of the seals were still in place on the various bits of enclosed gear. When Bossk snapped one and peeled it off a circuit module, he made an interesting discovery: the corporate emblem of Kuat Drive Yards was embossed on the silvery metal ribbon dan gling in his hands.
There’s a coincidence, mused Bossk. He knew it was more than that. The messenger pod that the Q’nithian in Mos Eisley had routed his way had an intended destination at the planet Kuat, the headquarters of Kuat Drive Yards; it was supposed to go right into Kuat of Kuat’s hands. Bossk’s
mercenary instincts were aroused by
these overlapping signs of interest on the part of one of the galaxy’s richest and most powerful creatures.
The big question right now was what Kuat had been using this pseudo-dilapidated droid to spy on. Bossk poked some more in the droid’s innards and found at last what he was looking for, what he had known would be there. He pulled his head back out of the droid’s hollow space, holding in one hand the multitrack recording unit that had been connected to the various sensors.
That must have been what Boba Fett had been looking for as well, before he’d been called away, leaving this investigation unfinished. The only other object in the concealed