and modifications far beyond the
ordinary. Palpatine himself couldn’t get this kind of detail in communications with his various underlings. But then … he doesn’t need it, Kuat of Kuat reminded himself. Not the way I do. The Emperor could always get what he wanted through fear and death. In the engineering business, one had to be a little more careful, not to eliminate one’s market.
“Go away,” he said to the felinx winding between his ankles. “You won’t like this.”
The felinx didn’t heed the warning. When Kuat of Kuat used the rest of his precise tools to complete the circuits inside the holoprojector, the images and sounds of another great room were laid over the office suite. The oppressive darkness generated by the recording and its chaos of noises, from the rattling of subsurface chains to cruel cross-species laughter, brought the silken fur straight up along the animal’s spine; it hissed at what it saw, particularly the holoform of one grossly elephantine individual with tiny hands
and immense, greedy eyes. When that image’s lipless mouth opened
to emit wetly glottal laughter, the felinx scrambled to safety beneath the farthest corner of the workbench.
Kuat of Kuat used the magnetically fastened tip of the probe to freeze the playback; the cacophony was replaced by silence as he glanced over his shoulder and saw the court of Jabba the Hutt rendered motionless. He turned away from the bench and walked into the center of the hologram. The forms were insubstantial as ghosts-he could have passed his hand through any one of the sycophants
and
hangers-on surrounding
the
Hutt’s thronelike hover platform-but detailed in such perfection that he could almost smell the sweat and rank odors of de cay rising from the grates in the synthesized floors.
“You’re dead, aren’t you?” With a thin smile, he brought his face close to the stilled image of Jabba the Hutt. “That’s such a shame. I hate to lose a good customer.” Over the years Jabba had commissioned several large
orders, lethal equipment for his thugs
and hirelings from KDY’s personal armaments division, plus elaborate palace furnishings and a superbly appointed sail barge, with military retrofits, from one of the Kuat subsidiaries devoted to luxury vessels. There had been extras thrown in that Jabba had known nothing about: hidden
recording devices that had captured
nearly everything that took place in the palace on Tatooine and aboard the floating barge. A good contractor, thought Kuat of Kuat, knows his accounts. Better than they even know themselves.
Word of the Hutt’s death had already seeped through the galaxy, gladdening many, setting off an acquisitive scramble among others. Of all of his species, Jabba had been the most active-if that word could be applied to something so obese and slow-and with the farthest reach in his shady enterprises. They’re already at each other’s throats-the late Hutt’s associates, including Jabba’s own supposedly grieving relations, struggling for control of his intricate and criminal legacy. That would be good for business; Kuat of Kuat already had appointments scheduled with some of the worst and most ambitious of the lot. New plans always called for new weapons.
The notion of throats mordantly amused him. What he’d already heard about Jabba the Hutt’s death was confirmed by the holographic image. One of Jabba’s ineffectual little hands held a length of chain, its other end fastened to a collar around the neck of a human form; standing at the edge of the recreated platform, Kuat of Kuat appraised with a connoisseur’s eye the revealed attractiveness of Princess Leia Organa. His own wealth and power had brought many varieties of feminine beauty through his private quarters, even from the highest ranks of the nobility. The princess, however …
He made a mental note to seek this woman’s ac quaintance, if he ever had the opportunity. If it hap pened, he wouldn’t be such an idiot as to leave something as simple and deadly as an iron chain lying about. “Never hand your enemy”-Kuat of Kuat spoke aloud to the dead Hutt’s image-“the means by which she can kill you.”
Jabba’s death was a minor concern at the moment, though. Even the presence of Leia Organa at the late Hutt’s
court was, at this moment,
of
no
great significance to Kuat. There were others that he sought, faces to be found in the past. He returned to his workbench and, with a few delicate adjustments to the playback
unit, ran the recording back toward
its beginning, before Leia Organa had ever entered Jabba’s palace, disguised as an Ubese bounty hunter with captured Wookiee in tow. That should do it, thought Kuat as he glanced over his shoulder; he lifted the probe’s tip from the device, freezing the image once again.