That
was what she had seen before. In Jabba’s palace-the helmet’s mask was a cruel, implacable face in itself, the gaze hidden inside as sharp as any cutting blade. Neelah grasped the helmet in both hands, holding it before her, like a skull or part of a dead machine. Even empty, it looked back at her in silence-and she was afraid.
Boba Fett …
The name sounded in her thoughts, though not spoken by her. That was what he’d been called. She knew that much; she’d heard the name whispered, by those who’d both hated and dreaded him.
“You’d better go now.” The medical droid’s voice broke into her thoughts. “It won’t be long before Dengar returns.”
Her hands trembled as she set the helmet back down on the pile of rags. At the chamber’s entrance, she stopped and looked back at the figure on the bed. A thread of something almost like pity crept into the knot of fear inside her.
She turned and hurried away, toward the slanting tunnel that would lead her to the more comforting darkness outside.
There had been voices. He’d heard them, from some where on the other side of a blind sea.
He supposed, in a still-functioning area of his brain, that that was part of dying. In a cortical nexus lying under the weight of pain and blurry not-pain, the remains of his mind and spirit picked over the few scraps of sensory data that impinged upon the living corpse that his body had become. They were like messages from another world, frustratingly incomplete and mysterious.
Of all the voices he’d heard, only one had been a woman’s. Not the same one as before, which he could remember being addressed as Manaroo; he had still been lying out on the desert, vomited up by the Sarlacc, when he had heard that one.
But that had been the past; now he heard another woman’s voice. That was the one that tormented him, that made the sleep of his dying a place where memories rose out of the darkness.
His eyelids had fluttered open, or had tried to; they were mired in some pliable substance clinging tightly to his face. As weak as he was, the stuff bound him as tightly as Han Solo had been in the block of carbonite he’d delivered to Jabba the Hutt. But he’d managed to raise
his eyelids just enough, a fraction
of
a centimeter, that he’d been able to catch an unfocused glimpse of the female. She had been there in Jabba’s palace, a simple dancing girl-but he knew she was something more than that. Much more. Jabba had called her … Neelah. That was it; he could remember that much. But that wasn’t her real name. Her real name …
Fragments of memory touched, then drifted apart, as the effort of vision took him back beneath the lightless weight pressing upon him.
There, he dreamed without sleeping, died yet still lived.
And remembered.
4
… AND THEN
JUST AFTER THE EVENTS OF
star wars: A new hope
“Stick with me,” Bossk told the new Guild member. “And I’ll show you how it’s done.”
He could feel the other’s rising anger, like the radiation from a reactor-core meltdown. That was exactly the response he wanted, that his comments were designed to evoke. There wasn’t the tiniest segment of a standard time cycle that Bossk wasn’t angry to some degree. He even slept angry, the way all Trandoshans did, dreaming of their razor fangs locked on the throats of their reptilian species’ ancient enemies. Rage and blood lust were good things in the Trandoshan galaxy-view. That was how things got done.
“You needn’t act wise and superior with me.” The close-range audio unit built into Zuckuss’s breathing apparatus had enough bandwidth to let his irritation sound through. “I’ve collected nearly as many bounties as you have. Your family connections are the only reason for your rank in the Guild.”
Bossk displayed an ugly, lipless smile toward the partner he’d been assigned. The urge to reach over and pull the other’s head off, air hoses and comlink wires dangling like the tendrils of swamp weed surrounding the birth pits back on Trandosha, was almost irresistible. Maybe later, Bossk told himself, when this job’s over.
He pointed a talon down the corridor in front of them. Both he and Zuckuss had their spines flat against the wall of a side passage; from behind sealed doors some twenty meters away, the brittle music of a jizz-wailer band sounded, mixed with the high-pitched babble of the casino’s customers blowing their credits on rows of rigged jubilee wheels. Gambling held no attraction for Bossk;
he preferred surer things. Another sentient creature’s death was the best, especially if there was profit involved. Sometimes, though-as with this job-the quarry had to be taken alive, if there was going to be any payoff. That complicated things.