“Yes?”
Boba
Fett
turned
around-slowly,
as nonthreateningly as possible for someone
with
his reputation. “What is it?”
“I was wondering”-the short bounty hunter, with the large insectoid eyes and breathing hoses, stood in the doorway-“if I might have a word with you… .”
What was this one’s name? They all looked alike to Boba Fett. Zuckuss, he remembered. The partner of Bossk, at least as recently as that business where he had snatched the accountant Nil Posondum out from under their noses.
“Of course, if you’re busy-” Zuckuss clasped his gloved hands together in an obvious show of nervousness. “I can come back some other time-“
“Not at all.” Boba Fett had also seen this one at the Guild’s banquet hall, close to the reptilian Bossk. So there was undoubtedly still some connection between the two of them. “No time like the present,” said Fett. “For talking about important things.”
This one didn’t take long. Zuckuss was hardly in Fett’s quarters for more than a few minutes before he had scuttled back out into the corridor, disappearing before anyone from the Guild could spot him there. Small fry, thought Boba Fett. Not one of the major players in the Bounty Hunters Guild that Kud’ar Mub’at had briefed him on. But important enough, with a line straight to the ear of Bossk. Who, as the impatient heir apparent to the Guild leadership, would have a great deal to do with it being torn apart.
The
conversation went exactly as Boba Fett had expected, and just as Kud’ar Mub’at would have predicted. Zuckuss was like so many others in the Bounty Hunters Guild, down in the lower ranks: a perfect combination of greed and naivete. Just smart enough to kill, mused Fett after Zuckuss had left. The short bounty hunter had glanced nervously out the doorway, to make sure no one was there to see him as he scurried down the torchlit corridor. Not smart enough to keep himself from getting killed. It might not happen this time-Zuckuss might, with the erratic luck of the feckless, survive the breakup of the Guild-but it would eventually.
He supposed that was the big difference between himself and poor Zuckuss, between himself and Bossk and Bossk’s vicious, aging father and all the rest of the Guild members. Boba Fett sat down on the stone bench for a moment; the armaments he carried with him, that were as much a part of him as his spine, prevented him from leaning back. He never wasted time thinking
about himself, any more than an explosively lethal missile from the rocket launcher strapped to his back would have as it sped toward its doomed and pinpointed target. But he knew that the reason he was alive and that others were dead, or soon would be, was that he possessed the true and essential secret of being a bounty hunter-As good as he was at catching and, if need be, killing other sentient creatures, he was even better at surviving their attempts to kill him. Everything else was just a matter of superior firepower.
Boba Fett stood up from the stone bench. If he stayed here any longer, there would be others coming to talk to him. Others who thought they could protect themselves the way he did, but who were already fatally enmeshed in the trap spun by Kud’ar Mub’at, so far away that he couldn’t be seen or the tugs on the strands of his web even felt. Besides Bossk and Zuckuss, there had also been one of Cradossk’s top advisers on the Guild council, and the Twi’lek majordomo, back for a longer talk than when he’d brought Fett to this dank chamber. All of them had been in pure deal-cutting mode, eager to help pull the Bounty Hunters Guild apart so they would get a bigger piece of whatever was left in the wreckage.
Right now he didn’t feel like talking to anyone else. Action meant more than words; that was one other thing Boba Fett was sure of. A man was killed by words, and saved by action. Spending so much time talking to other sentient creatures had been like wrapping himself in death. What he wanted to do right now was head back to the Slave I, his refuge docked at the edge of the Guild’s main
compound, lock himself behind its overlapping security layers, all systems primed to fry anyone who tried to breach them, and rest. If not the sleep of the virtuous-Fett
had
no
illusions
about
that,
or regrets-then at least the sleep of someone who had put in a good day’s work. In his business, that meant helping others arrange their own destruction.
The
presence of those other sentient creatures, carrying their fates around with them, all unaware, laid -a cold hand on Boba Fett’s heart, or whatever passed for it after all these years of death. It felt like some prophecy of his own death, though he was just as sure that that was a long way off, far from here in both time and space.