Behind the stranger, the tail curled across the edge of the stiffened mesh. With one hand, the creature undipped a small keyboard device from the band of metal running from the hip bolts and across his abdomen. His other hand punched in a rapid sequence of ideograms, then thumbed a larger button i in the device’s corner.
“long … time.” The device’s speaker crackled as the stranger held it up in front of himself. Underneath the synthesized words, the hissing of the steam from the laser cannon’s housing could still be heard.
“YOU DO NOT
.
.
.
SEEM TO AGE
.
.
. BOBA FETT.”
“Should I?” The statement amused him. “Time enough for that when I’m dead.”
He could hear the other bounty hunters behind him. Bossk’s voice was louder than the rest: “I don’t like the looks of this… .”
The stranger was instantly transformed; Boba Fett knew that something had triggered a reaction sequence. On the housing of the laser cannon, the indicators flared red again; the tracking systems narrowed their focus, sighting in on a point behind Fett. Steam jetted farther from the housing’s apertures as the segmented metal tail stiffened, bracing the stranger into a tripod rigid enough to take the force of the high-powered weapon’s recoil.
Boba Fett glanced over his shoulder and saw that Bossk had instinctively dropped his hand to the butt of the blaster slung at his hip; the Trandoshan always did that when something aroused his suspicions.
“Not a good idea,” said Fett. With a nod of his helmet, he indicated Bossk’s hand, frozen in place by the laser cannon snapping into firing mode. “D’harhan tends to kill first and not bother investigating afterward.”
Bossk took his hand away from his blaster.
“Good.” Boba Fett looked toward Zuckuss and IG-88 as well. “Now our team is all here.”
“D’harhan and I go back a long way.” Across the controls of the Slave I, Boba Fett’s hands moved swiftly, setting the coordinates for dropping back
out
of hyperspace. “Longer than you can imagine.”
“How come I’ve never heard of him?” The ship’s cockpit area was small enough that Zuckuss had to remain standing in the hatchway behind Fett just to exchange a few words with him. “He seems very … impressive.”
Zuckuss had had a choice of traveling with Bossk and IG-88
in
the Hound’s Tooth, but the Trandoshan’s worsening temper had pushed him into the Slave I instead. Let the droid deal with him, Zuckuss had decided. Droids don’t take all that snarling and muttering personally.
But heading toward the Shell Hutts’ home base, a ring-shaped artificial planetoid called Circumtore, aboard the Slave I had proved even more unnerving. The stranger named D’harhan-or friend or mercenary companion, or whatever he might have been at one time to Boba Fett-had found the most secure corner of the ship’s belowdecks holding area, and had sat down on the gridded flooring with his back to the angle of the bulkheads. D’harhan had wrapped
his flex-shielded arms around
his
knees, partially resting the weight of the laser cannon mounted on his shoulders on them, the weapon’s gleaming barrel thrust slightly forward. When Zuckuss had entered the area, moving as stealthily as possible, he’d suddenly heard a whisper of vented steam; the other’s tracking systems had registered his presence, swinging the laser cannon in a horizontal arc toward him. Luckily, the firing indicators on the cannon’s housing had remained in their yellow standby mode.
It had taken a few moments for Zuckuss to realize that this intimidating and unfamiliar entity was only partially conscious at that moment. The square, heavily armored box mounted beneath the laser cannon’s curved forward support, resembling a thick breastplate with rows of input sockets and flickering LEDs, was the repository of all of D’harhan’s cerebral functions, surgically encased and transferred there from the emptied skull, discarded like an empty combat-rations container when the massive
weapon’s base had been drilled
into
the collarbones and vertebral column. What Boba Fett had described of the operation had been enough to set Zuckuss’s spine crawling. It was one thing to augment oneself
with
weapons and detection systems-Zuckuss frankly envied Fett’s impressive array of sensor and destructive devices; the man was a walking armory-but to go beyond that, to have whole major sections of one’s anatomy cut away and replaced with durasteel and attack-level charge batteries, to actually turn oneself into a weapon rather than just a bearer of weapons … a sick feeling had moved inside Zuckuss’s gut as he’d spied upon the sleeping D’harhan. That’s where it ends up, he’d thought gloomily. If you go all the way. The segmented metal tail, the third leg of the laser cannon’s tripod support, curled around D’harhan like a defensive barrier separating him from contact with the universe of living things… .