[Bounty Hunter Wars] - 01(9)

And who was no longer there in the hologram. The helmeted visage of the bounty hunter was missing from where Kuat of Kuat had spotted it before, up on the gallery overlooking the central area of Jabba’s court. Kuat of Kuat stepped away from the workbench and across the nearest edge of the hologram, looking up toward the simulation of the rough-domed ceiling, then around to the openings of low, tunnellike passages branching off to other parts of the palace. The image of Boba Fett was nowhere to be seen.



Kuat of Kuat ran the recording unit back to the point where the bounty hunter, face hidden behind the visored mask of his uniform, could be seen watching the court below him. This time, he didn’t let himself be distracted by the fate of the Twi’lek dancing girl; starting up the playback again, he saw where Boba Fett had slipped unnoticed from the gallery and out of the court, even before Jabba had started pulling on the chain and dragging the girl over the trapdoor.



Interesting. Kuat of Kuat let the holographic re cording play on. Our friend, he thought, had another agenda. Not surprising; Boba Fett had not reached the top of the bounty-hunter trade without building up a network of business interests and contacts, some of them-if not most-completely unaware of each other. Jabba the Hutt might have been stupid enough to believe that by paying Fett a generous retainer, he had thereby secured the bounty hunter’s exclusive services. If so, that indicated how much Jabba had been slipping, making the kind of mis takes that had led to his death.



Always a mistake to completely trust a bounty hunter. Kuat of Kuat didn’t commit mistakes like that.



Kuat ran the hologram playback forward. There was no sign of Boba Fett until much farther on in the recording. He spotted the bounty hunter’s image then, snapping a blaster rifle up into firing position as the disguised Leia Organa held up an activated thermal detonator and demanded payment for the captive Wookiee she had brought. That potentially lethal confrontation had ended with the Hutt’s

guttural

laughter and admiration

for

his resourceful opponent; the bounty for Chewbacca had been paid and Boba Fett had lowered his weapon.



So he did return there, mused Kuat as he watched the hologram. Whatever mysterious appointments Boba Fett might have kept in Jabba’s palace, they hadn’t prevented him from attending to his duties as the Hutt’s freelance bodyguard. It was a safe assumption that the reports gathered by Kuat’s corporate intelligence division were accurate: they had described Jabba’s death, out on his sail barge, hovering at the edge of the Great Pit of Carkoon in Tatooine’s Dune Sea, and had mentioned Boba Fett being there at the struggle.



More than that, the reports had also described Boba Fett’s death. What Kuat of Kuat wanted was proof of that. Operating without that proof was like building a machine with a critical component left untested. A machine, he thought, that could kill its master if it broke down. Someone like Boba Fett had a disquieting habit of survival; Kuat of Kuat would have to see the bounty hunter’s death before he would believe it.



He looked at the pieces of the messenger pod and its curved, reflective casing scattered on the workbench. The next pod to drop out of hyperspace and penetrate the planet Kuat’s atmosphere would very likely carry the necessary information inside it. All the units had been designed to carry only partial segments of what had been recorded at Jabba’s palace and aboard the Hutt’s sail barge. There was less likelihood that way of any of KDY’s powerful enemies intercepting the units and, if they managed to get past the security procedures, figuring out Kuat of Kuat’s own concerns.



One last thing to do with this message: He reached into the device and extracted the micro-probe. The breaking of the circuit initiated the self-destruct program; the metal grew white-hot, twisting in upon itself as it was consumed. From underneath the bench, the felinx fled in terror, streaking toward the office suite’s farthest recesses. A few more seconds passed, then the holoprojector and its contents had been reduced to blackened slag on the workbench’s surface, cooling into a single indecipherable hieroglyph.



The contents of the message, that had come so far to reach him, was safely locked away in Kuat of Kuat’s memory. When proof of Boba Fett’s death came, he might allow

himself to forget the smallest particle

of information. When it’s safe, Kuat of Kuat had already decided. Not until then.



And if that proof didn’t come … he would have to make other plans. Plans that would include more than one death as part of their internal workings. Meshing gears often had cruelly sharp teeth.



He turned away from the workbench and walked slowly through the empty spaces of the office suite, looking for the felinx. So that he could pick it up and cradle it in his arms, and soothe it of the fright it had received.