[Bounty Hunter Wars] - 01(8)

Stepping past Jabba’s thronelike platform, Kuat of Kuat looked around the hologram of the Hutt’s court. The assembled faces were a rogues’ gallery of interstellar villainy, ranging from petty theft to murder-and beyond. Hutts tended to attract these types, the way small fur-bearing animals attracted fleas. Though in a certain sense,

it

was a symbiotic rather than

parasitic relationship: At home in his palace, Jabba had been able to

look around himself and at least see sentient creatures whose morals were on a par with, or even below, his own.



Kuat of Kuat walked slowly through the recreated court, looking for one face in particular. Not even a face, but a mask. He paused before the frozen image of Jabba’s majordomo, a glittering-eyed, evilly smiling Twi’lek named Bib Fortuna. The males of the planet Ryloth, even with all the extra cognitive abilities packed into the heavy, tapering appendages hanging from their bare skulls onto their shoulders, had no capacity for generating wealth and no courage to steal it, even though they were nearly as avaricious as Hurts. This particular one had tried to worm his way into the Kuat Drive Yards’ corporate bureaucracy, before a noteworthy display of untrustworthi-ness had gotten him booted from the headquarters on the planet Kuat. Hurts, however, had more of a taste for flattery and tail kissing; Kuat of Kuat wasn’t surprised that Fortuna had wound up in Jabba’s palace.



He didn’t spot what he was looking for until he raised his eyes toward the holographic court’s encircling gallery.

There he is, thought Kuat of Kuat.

The distinctive helmeted visage of Boba Fett, the galaxy’s most feared bounty hunter, gazed down at the mingled courtiers below like a totem of some planet’s primordial deity, contemplating a justice Colder than the spaces between the stars. Arrayed along Fett’s arms and slung at his back were his working tools, the wrist lasers and miniaturized flamethrower, and all the other weapons that were as precise in his hands as the tiny probes were in Kuat of Kuat’s. The helmet, with its dark T-shaped visor, hid

the

bounty

hunter’s eyes and

the

measured calculations going on behind them.



Satisfied for the moment, Kuat of Kuat walked back to the edge of the hologram. Even being in a three-dimensional simulation of Jabba’s court, with its miasma of avarice and bad hygiene, brought a twinge of nausea to his gut. Better to watch from the outside of the hologram, from the pristine and mathematic angles of his own office. At the workbench, he adjusted the probe’s angle in the holoprojector’s circuits. Without even glancing over his shoulder, he could sense Jabba’s image and the others in the Hurt’s dimly lit court restored to motion, acting out their parts in this little segment of the past.



Another adjustment muted the audio portion of the playback; Kuat of Kuat didn’t need to hear Jabba’s slobbering voice and the cruel laughter of his sycophants to discern what was happening. Another Twi’lek,

a female-on Ryloth, the females were nowhere as repulsive as their male counterparts-had become the source for Jabba’s amusement. A pretty slave, a pantalooned dancing girl

with

her distinctive Twi’lek head appendages decorated to resemble an ancient court jester’s cap of bells-but her childlike appeal and grace wasn’t enough to satisfy her master’s appetites. A look of apprehension, close to panic, had moved across her face as she had sat decorously at one side of the court, as though she’d had a prescient glimpse of her fate. Which was being played out again as the image of Jabba the Hutt, wattled bulk jiggling and eyes widening with delight, reeled in the chain fastened to the Twi’lek dancing girl’s iron collar, dragging her toward the thronelike platform. The poor girl must have seen the same thing happen to others before her; beautiful creatures had been a disposable commodity for Jabba.



Just as Kuat of Kuat expected, the next few moments of the playback showed the trapdoor sliding open in front of Jabba’s platform. The dancing girl’s fall snapped the links of the chain; the court’s motley denizens clustered around the grates, straining to watch her death at the claws and teeth of the rancor, Jabba’s favorite pet, in the darkness below. The nausea returned to Kuat of Kuat’s stomach, sharpened to disgust. A waste, he thought. The dancing girl had been beautiful enough to be useful to someone; the destruction of such a pretty device angered him more than anything else.



He’d seen enough, at least at this level of detail. If the fat slug was as dead as had been reported, he now didn’t regret the loss of trade. There’d be others, moving up the ranks of the Huttese species’ galaxy-wide hierarchy. Kuat of Kuat reached over and froze the playback, the better to scan the images for the one in whom he had the most interest.