[Bounty Hunter Wars] - 01(127)

“How should I know?”



“Exactly,” said Hamame. “You don’t know. And you’re going to off Boba Fett without discovering who it is he wants to talk to? Maybe there’s someone out there that wants to keep him alive, would pay big credits if we had him and didn’t



him.”



Phedroi thought it over. “I suppose that could be the case.”



“Yeah, well, you suppose and I know.” Hamame squinted at the scene in question, lit by Dengar holding up a small portable worklight. His and the female’s shadows stretched away and merged with the surrounding darkness as they watched Boba Fett applying the sizzling point of a miniature torch to exposed circuitry. “There’s a lot more going on here than what it looks like. I can tell that right down in my gut.”



“I’m getting a bad feeling about this… .” Phedroi shook his head. “Maybe we should go back and get some more people in on this action. You know, like safety in numbers.” If he could have arranged for a whole Imperial battalion to help them out, his nervousness would have been only slightly diminished. “I mean, especially if we’re going to take on Boba Fett …”



“What, and wind up splitting the profits with every scrabbling little thief in Mos Eisley?” Hamame looked over at him in disgust. “Look. From what we can get for Boba Fett-from somebody-we’ll be able to retire from this game. One big score, and we’re golden.”



Of course, he had laid that kind of talk before on his partner. That was how they had both wound up on a forsaken dump of a planet like Tatooine. But this time, vowed Hamame, it’ll be different. They just had to see it through.



“All right.” Phedroi looked along his blaster rifle’s barrel at the other figures in the night, then back to his partner. “So just what is it you’re going to do?’J



Hamame stood up, his boots digging into the slope of the dune. “Simple.” He smiled as he slung his blaster rifle’s leather strap across his shoulder. “I’m going to go down there and talk to them.”



“That does it,” muttered Phedroi aloud as he watched his partner go striding toward the distant pool of light. “This is definitely the hardest merchandise you’ve ever gotten me mixed up with.”



She watched him tighten and seal the last connectors. “Is that thing ready to go?” Neelah pointed to the comm unit on the pebble-strewn ground, its interior filled with the hard shadows cast by the worklight in Dengar’s upraised hand.



“It has to run through its logic checks,” said Boba Fett, “before it can sync up with the database of transmission codes.” He set down the handheld servodriver he had been using, then picked up a circuit probe; he tapped its point against the side of his helmet. “We were real lucky-none of the onboard memory in here got corrupted, in spite of all the banging around it’s gone through. If I’d had to build the comm protocols up from scratch, it would’ve taken a couple of days. At least.”



For a moment she thought he had been talking about the contents of his head, the brain tissue encased in bone,

and

all

its memories and hard,

unfeeling personality. The true Boba Fett, thought Neelah. Back from the dead. Then she realized he was talking about the elaborate circuits inside the helmet itself, the comlink between him and his ship orbiting above the planet’s atmosphere. What was it called? He’d told her; something sinister and cold, stripped of even the minimal affection that could exist between a sentient creature and his tools. Slave, Neelah remembered. Slave I; that was it. Something to be used and discarded, when its pure functionality was at an end. She supposed that human beings and all other sentient creatures were that way for him as well. That was how things had been in the palace of Jabba the Hutt as well; when there had been more amusement to be gained from tossing poor Oola into the rancor pit, nothing else mattered to the master holding the other end of the chain.



She had been there, and she had been lucky to escape. Not just luck; she had fought and schemed her way out of the palace and the inevitable death it had held. Better to die out in the wastes of the Dune Sea, bones cracked by the desert’s scavengers, than be the victim of a fat slug’s idle boredom. But where did I wind up instead? That was the question that circled in Neelah’s mind as she watched the two bounty hunters. It had been one thing to get hooked up with a mercenary creature like Boba Fett when he had represented nothing more than a mystery to her, the black hole of her own hidden past. It was another thing entirely now that he had recovered from his wounds and was pursuing his own agenda again. Revenge and credits, supposed Neelah, in varying proportions; that was all that any bounty hunter was concerned with. Even this Dengar, though he had given some indication of a human nature developed beyond those two fundamental desires. She knew that she could trust either one of them just about as far as she pitch them both across the dunes with one hand. Creatures who trusted any bounty hunter usually wound up as merchandise or corpses, depending upon what was best for business.