[Bounty Hunter Wars] - 01(78)
“Look at this thing.” Fascinated, Zuckuss had walked right up to the ovoid, his boots stepping onto the mesh. He laid a gloved hand on the battered and corrosion-marked surface. “It looks like it’s been in every battle since the Clone Wars-“
“Watch out,” said Boba Fett. But the warning was already too late.
A microscopic hairline fissure around the top of the ovoid
widened, with a hiss of inrushing air.
An elliptical section separated from the rest, tilting up ward on previously hidden internal hinges. For a moment nothing further showed from inside the craft. …
As though released by a high-compression spring, the barrel of a close-range laser cannon rose up, with its power sources and recoil housing mounted directly behind. The gleaming surfaces of black metal shone like the coils of an aroused serpent, intricate and deadly. A faint, shrill electronic whir sounded as the massive weapon’s range-sighting devices locked onto Zuckuss, swinging the point of the muzzle down within a meter of the bounty | hunter’s chest. Another series of sharp, concussive noises sounded within the machinery as the indicator lights’ glow shifted from yellow to a hot red, charged and ready to fire. That was followed by silence; Zuckuss froze where he stood, as though hypnotized by the black hole almost within touching distance of his hand, and its lethal potential even closer than that. There would be only a haze of disconnected atoms floating above the scorched remains of his boots after one shot from the weapon.
“Back up,” said Boba Fett quietly. “Do it slow, and you probably won’t get hurt.”
“Hurt?” Beside him, Bossk was gazing in wide-eyed fascination at the laser cannon’s darkly gleaming barrel. “He’s going to be vaporized!”
Zuckuss was unable to take his own gaze away from the death-bestowing machinery locked upon him. But he did manage to take one cautious step backward, then another; all the while the weapon’s tracking systems followed his every move, shifting angle slightly to remain targeted.
A few more steps and Zuckuss was back with the other bounty hunters. “Stay here,” Boba Fett told him.
“Don’t worry.” The stink of panic sweat seeped out of Zuckuss’s gear. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Boba Fett had already stepped past him, leaving Bossk and IG-88 behind as well. He strode without visible apprehension across the landing dock toward the ovoid resting above its glittering mesh. The laser cannon swung and locked onto him as he approached.
“It’s been a long time.” He stopped and spoke to the weapon itself, as though its charge-primed muzzle were a face masked like his, with the tracking systems as its all-seeing eyes. “A very long time.”
The red indicator lights along the weapon’s housing cooled from red, through a dull orange, down to a steady-state yellow. The optics and sensors of the tracking systems defocused slightly, as though the hand and mind behind the trigger had relaxed to a state of mere vigilance, rather than instantaneous aggression.
Slowly, the laser cannon rose, as though being lifted on some mechanism inside the ovoid-shaped craft. A cloud of hissing steam surrounded it, obscuring for a moment the outlines of the weapon, as though it were an outcropping of black rock, on a mountain peak wreathed in a sudden, violent storm. The cannon parted the steam as a massive humanoid torso appeared below, its wide shoulders bearing the weapon’s crushing weight. From the underside of the barrel, a quarter circle of gear-toothed metal curved down into an anchoring plate set in the creature’s chest, with interlocking motors to adjust the muzzle’s terminal elevation. Heavy cables, some glistening black, others made of silvery durasteel, looped beneath the arms and around the muscle-sheathed chest and ribs, connecting with the counterbalancing cylinders of power sources flanking the spine. The latter were revealed when the individual climbed out of the ovoid, black-gloved hands and thick-soled boots weighing upon the mesh’s strands. From the intricate joins of the weapon’s mounting, more steam lashed out, gathered, and dissipated in trailing wisps, indicating the presence of an old-style, liquid-based cooling system, primitive technology dating from the earliest days of the Republic. The laser cannon swung 180 degrees around on its mounting, as though the tracking system optics were actually the eyes in a head made of pure destructive capacity.
A tail section, like a primitive saurian’s, but made of segmented black metal and mounted by articulated bolts to the creature’s hips, was the last thing to be dragged out of the craft. With its top section hinged back and its pilot standing before it, the resemblance to a giant egg was complete, as though it had just now cracked open to disgorge a new combination of living matter and lethal machinery.