THE HUTT GAMBI(70)

Since pirate activity in Hutt space had been up lately, Han wound up taking the kid on most of their runs. After discussing the matter with Chewbacca, Han decided not to tell the youngster that they knew his name wasn’t “Solo.” It was Chewie who pointed out that it obviously meant a lot to Jarik to finally have a surname. Wookiees were very family-oriented, and Chewie felt sorry for the boy.

Soon after Han and Salla started their relationship, the Bria was spaceworthy. Shug’s modifications had increased her speed until she was a very respectable little vessel. But she was still, as Jarik put it, “one unpredictable lady.”

One run the Bria would perform perfectly, but the next … there seemed no end to the grief she gave Han, Chewie, and Jarik out in the spacelanes.

Han learned a whole new vocabulary of Wookiee swear words while he and Chewie sweated to fix their recalcitrant craft.

Once the sublight motivator burned out as they were skimming past the blackhole clusters of the Maw. That was interesting. For a while, Han didn’t believe they were ever going to make it back to Nar Shaddaa.

If it hadn’t been for Chewie’s quick repair work and Han’s piloting expertise, the freighter would have been sucked into a black hole.

Han found them a new apartment, a bigger one, in a better part of the Corellian section. He was frequently not at home, staying over at Salla’s place, so he allowed Jarik to spend the night so Chewbacca would have company.

Life, Han reflected (when he had time to reflect, which wasn’t often), was good. It had been at least two months since any bounty hunters had surfaced, and there hadn’t been any sightings of Boba Fett. He and Chewie were earning a decent living, and they had a ship of their own.

He had friends, and somebody special in his life, somebody who could talk the language of smugglers. Han was as content as he’d ever been .

. .

Deep in a remote area of space, between systems, two Hutt ships rendezvoused at a set of highly secret coordinates. Both ships belonged to members of the Desilijic kajidic, though neither ship was piloted by Han Solo. One ship was Jabba’s yacht, Star Jewel, and the other was Jiliac’s yacht, Dragon Pearl.

Under the urging of their pilots, who goosed the ships toward each other with little taps on their maneuvering thrusters, the two ships edged closer and closer, until they were in docking range. An umbilical tube extended from the airlock of Star Jewel, until it touched and anchored itself against the airlock of Dragon Pearl. The Hutt yachts hung in space, attached to each other by the tube.

Jabba and Jiliac were aboard Star Jewel. Comfortably ensconced in the yacht’s luxurious salon, Jiliac cradled her young offspring in her arms.

As the ship’s instruments indicated that the two ships were successfully connected, Jiliac put her tiny, unformed grub of a baby Huttlet down near her pouch-slit, and allowed the little creature to crawl inside. Infant Hutts survived mostly inside their mother’s pouch for the first year or so of their young lives.

As the two Hutts waited expectantly, they heard several sets of footsteps coming down the corridor. The door opened, and Teroenza, High Priest of Ylesia, entered.

The huge horned being was almost dwarfed by the enormous sluglike Hutts , but Teroenza didn’t seem particularly overawed, Jiliac noted. She gestured graciously to a t’landa Til resting sling she’d had specially installed.

“Welcome, Teroenza. Please make yourself at home. I trust you were able to camouflage your absence from your world?”

“My time is limited,” Teroenza said. “I set off in a landskimmer this morning, with a Gamorrean pilot, ostensibly to make a personal inspection of the Colony Eight construction. Halfway there, in the deepest jungle, I knocked the guard out, then set the skimmer to crash into a jungle giant.

Then I tossed a thermal detonator into the wreckage, and when it was burning well, I tossed the guard in. Your ship was waiting precisely where you guaranteed it would be. Tomorrow it can set me back in that area, and I shall suitably batter and dirty myself, then come staggering out of the jungle in time to meet one of the search parties.

Aruk will suspect nothing.”

“Well done,” Jiliac said. “But, as you note, our time is limited. Let us get right down to business. Aruk has become a … nuisance. A nuisance we would like to dispense with.”

Teroenza snorted. “No matter how high production is, he is dissatisfied. I have not seen my mate in over a year. He forbids me to take even a short visit home. And he has reduced the bounty on Han Solo, and altered it to a ‘kill on sight, disintegrations okay’ bounty!

He forbade me to raise it, even if I paid with my own credits. Said I was obsessed with Solo! When he did that, I could no longer support him. Contemplating the slow death of that Corellian space tramp has been my only pleasure for months. When I remember how he …” the High Priest went on with his litany of grievances against Han Solo.