THE HUTT GAMBI(65)
Jabba had paid him to come here and speak with him, and it would have been a breach of bounty hunter protocol for Fett to accept such a meeting if he’d had an outstanding bounty on Jabba’s grotesque head.
Leaving his blast rifle on the stairs, Fett strode straight up to Jabba’s dais. The Hutt Lord was reclining above the crowd, so he’d be high enough up to have the best view of all the degenerate festivities.
Even from inside the Mandalorian face mask, Boba Fett could whiff the pungent odor of the Hutt. Something between ancient mold and garbage .
. .
At a gesture from the Hutt Lord, the band quieted down. Fett stood before Jabba, and inclined his head slightly. He spoke Basic. “You sent for me?”
“I did,” boomed Jabba in Huttese. “Do you understand me, bounty hunter?”
Fett inclined his helmeted head in a “yes.”
“Very well. Lobb Gerido, clear the room, and then make yourself scarce.”
“Yes, Master,” the Twi’lek babbled, and then he scuttled about, headtails flying, shooing all the sycophants and hangers-on out of the audience chamber. Finally, with a last bow, Gerido himself vanished.
Jabba glanced around, took a puff off his hookah pipe, then, when he was sure they were alone, he leaned forward confidingly. “Bounty hunter, I thank you for coming to see me. Your five thousand credits will be deposited before you leave this throne room.”
Fett nodded silently.
“I have already spoken to the Guild representative in this sector, and arranged a generous endowment of the Guildhouse,” Jabba said.
“However, he told me that you are not governed by the Guild, though you sometimes take on Guild commissions.”
“That’s correct,” Fett confirmed. He was becoming intrigued. If Jabba just wanted someone dead, why this elaborate buildup? What was the Bloated One getting at?
Jabba puffed thoughtfully on his water pipe for nearly a minute, cogitating, his bulbous eyes with their slitted pupils blinking. “Do you know why I have summoned you here, bounty hunter?”
“I’m assuming it’s because you want to post a bounty, so I’ll hunt down and kill someone,” Fett said. “That’s why people contact me.”
“No,” Jabba said. He put the hookah aside and stared levelly at Fett, obviously getting to the point. “I want to pay you to not kill someone.”
The macrobinocular viewplate that was built into Fett’s Mandalorian helmet included infrared vision, plus motion and sound sensors. The bounty hunter could literally see Jabba tense, and change color. This is important to him, Fett realized, surprised. Most Hutts were such phenomenally selfish beings that he’d never heard of one willing to stick his neck out for anyone.
“State your offer,” Fett said.
“There is an outstanding bounty of twenty thousand credits on a human who has proven very useful to me. I wish to pay you twenty-five thousand to ignore that bounty until further notice.”
Fett had one word for Jabba. “Who?”
“Han Solo. He’s a good pilot, the best. He runs our spice on schedule, and the Imperials can never catch him. He’s proven extremely valuable to Desilijic. I’ll pay you to stop hunting him.”
Boba Fett stood there in silence, thinking hard.
For the first time in years, the bounty hunter was in a quandary, torn between his duty, his need for extra credits, and his own personal desires.
Jabba’s offer was tempting in many ways. Boba Fett’s ship, Slave I, had recently been damaged in an asteroid field, and Fett needed some rather expensive repairs to get the weapons systems back up to full capability.
On the other hand, he’d been looking forward to bringing Solo in for a long time, ever since he and that gambler friend of his, Calrissian, had captured, drugged, and robbed the bounty hunter. Boba Fett couldn’t allow two space burns to get the best of him and live …
On the other hand, just last week, Lord Aruk of Besadii had contacted Boba Fett in an interstellar holo-communication, and told him that he was no longer willing to pay top credits for Solo. Instead, he wanted a priority live delivery bounty on a Corellian woman, Bria Tharen.
He’d raised the amount, too. The bounty on her was fifty thousand credits. And the Hutt Lord had reduced the bounty on Solo to ten thousand credits, disintegration now permitted. Teroenza, Fett gathered, was unaware of this change.
Fifty thousand credits was the biggest bounty currently on Boba Fett’s list. He’d immediately begun searching for this woman named Tharen, whom Aruk had described as being a leader in the Corellian rebel movement. The Besadii Lord said she had led a raid to Ylesia to rescue slaves, and she was also suspected of leading several space raids to free slaves bound from Ylesia to the mines of Kessel.