[Legacy Of The Force] - 02(42)

The woman scanned the readout on the screen in front of her, then eyed his battle-scarred armor suspiciously. She didn’t ask him to remove his helmet. “What brings you here … Master Vhett?”

There was a lot to be said for Mando’a, even if he didn’t speak much of it. “Looking for security work.”

“What kind?”

Now that was helpful. “Pharmaceuticals. Banks and personal protection got too rough.”

She looked at him warily as if trying to squint past the visor. “I thought you Mandalorians were supposed to be hard cases.”

“I’m not getting any younger.”

“None of us are.” She handed him back his bogus ID card. “They’re always hiring here. Industrial espionage is our national sport.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “Head into town on the monorail and you’ll find the job agencies on the main route. And if you don’t get hired in five days, you’re out of here, okay? We don’t like vagrants.”

So she had some knowledge of Mandalorians, but not of him. Vhett was just the pure Mando’a form of “Fett.” It was surprising how close you could skate to the truth without anyone noticing. He touched his glove to his helmet in what he hoped was a deferential gesture and strode on.

Most of the time, one of his tactics was being Boba Fett and not disguising the fact. When you had that kind of reputation, it did a lot of the work for you: bounties found it was definitely smarter to surrender to him than to try to run, because there was nowhere to hide from Fett. But he felt a little discretion might get him closer to Taun We a lot faster. Time wasn’t on his side.

Sometimes, too, it amused him to play a man down on his luck when he was actually one of the wealthiest individuals in the galaxy. But fortune wouldn’t be worth a mott’s backside if he didn’t find a cure.

So when are you going to draw up a contingency plan? You never were much for long-term strategy. There’ll come a point where you have to decide whether to go on looking for Ko Sai’s data or to prepare for death. So what are you going to do with all those credits?

Boba Fett took the monorail into town with a dozen people who didn’t have personal transport. They ranged from the obviously poor to the eccentric, and two Rodian tourists studying holomaps of Varlo. One of the passengers, a man a lot taller than Fett, was swathed in a black cloak with a hem that swept the dust and debris on the carriage floor, giving the cloth a permanent gray border.

Nobody even glanced at Fett. These weren’t people who dealt with bounty hunters; he might have been a household name, but the households where his name was known tended to be those who could afford plenty and were motivated to pay it to solve their problems in a very permanent way. The people here didn’t fit the bill.

Fett got off at the terminus and merged into an anonymous crowd of shoppers. The stores here were midmarket, the kind that clerical and technical staff would use. He walked into a clothing store and looked at the selection of men’s fashions displayed as holograms above a dais.

“Is this the best you’ve got?” he said to the salesman.

“If sir wants to impress, sir needs to shop on the waterfront,” said the salesman stiffly. “If sir has the credits, that is.

Fett assumed he meant one of the artificial rivers that he’d seen from the air. He looked over a voluminous dark tunic and cloak not unlike the one he’d seen the man wearing on the monorail. “I’ll take this. And a holdall.”

“Size?”

“Measure me.”

“Might I see your credit chip, sir?”

Fett dumped two cash-credit discs-one hundreds-on the counter. “Will this do nicely?”

The salesman took a stylus from his jacket, flipped the discs over, and checked the holostamp under the stylus’s beam of UV light. “Yes … sir.” He flicked the stylus with his thumbnail and the instrument spat a thin beam of red light. “If sir would mind removing his armor, then I can measure.”

“Over the armor.”

“Sorry?”

“The armor stays. I’m not the trusting type.”

The salesman hesitated for a moment but swept the laser across Fett from side to side and then top to toe, studied the precise measurements on the stylus’s display, and shrugged.

“Large,” he said.

“I can see you’re a professional.” Fett took the holdall and the clothing and headed for the nearest public refreshers.

It was cramped in the cubicle, but he slipped off his jet pack and rocket launcher, dismantled them into sections and put them in the holdall. The cloak and tunic draped over his armor just fine after that. Then he hesitated before removing his helmet.