looking straight into the dark, narrow visor of his helmet, they might have fled before even opening their mouths.
"Yes?" Boba Fett turned around-slowly, as nonthreateningly as possible for someone with his reputation. "What is it?"
"I was wondering"-the short bounty hunter, with the large insectoid eyes and breathing hoses, stood in the doorway-"if I might have a word with you... ."
What was this one's name? They all looked alike to Boba Fett. Zuckuss, he remembered. The partner of Bossk, at least as recently as that business where he had snatched the accountant Nil Posondum out from under their noses.
"Of course, if you're busy-" Zuckuss clasped his gloved hands together in an obvious show of nervousness.
"I can come back some other time-"
"Not at all." Boba Fett had also seen this one at the Guild's banquet hall, close to the reptilian Bossk. So there was undoubtedly still some connection between the two of them. "No time like the present," said Fett. "For talking about important things."
This one didn't take long. Zuckuss was hardly in Fett's quarters for more than a few minutes before he had scuttled back out into the corridor, disappearing before anyone from the Guild could spot him there. Small fry, thought Boba Fett. Not one of the major players in the Bounty Hunters Guild that Kud'ar Mub'at had briefed him on. But important enough, with a line straight to the ear of Bossk. Who, as the impatient heir apparent to the Guild leadership, would have a great deal to do with it being torn apart.
The conversation went exactly as Boba Fett had expected, and just as Kud'ar Mub'at would have predicted.
Zuckuss was like so many others in the Bounty Hunters Guild, down in the lower ranks a perfect combination of greed and naivete. Just smart enough to kill, mused Fett after Zuckuss had left. The short bounty hunter had glanced nervously out the doorway, to make sure no one was there to see him as he scurried down the torchlit corridor. Not smart enough to keep himself from getting killed. It might not happen this time-Zuckuss might, with the erratic luck of the feckless, survive the breakup of the Guild-but it would eventually.
He supposed that was the big difference between himself and poor Zuckuss, between himself and Bossk and Bossk's vicious, aging father and all the rest of the Guild members. Boba Fett sat down on the stone bench for a moment; the armaments he carried with him, that were as much a part of him as his spine, prevented him from leaning back. He never wasted time thinking about himself, any more than an explosively lethal missile from the rocket launcher strapped to his back would have as it sped toward its doomed and pinpointed target. But he knew that the reason he was alive and that others were dead, or soon would be, was that he possessed the true and essential secret of being a bounty hunter- As good as he was at catching and, if need be, killing other sentient creatures, he was even better at surviving their attempts to kill him. Everything else was just a matter of superior firepower.
Boba Fett stood up from the stone bench. If he stayed here any longer, there would be others coming to talk to him. Others who thought they could protect themselves the way he did, but who were already fatally enmeshed in the trap spun by Kud'ar Mub'at, so far away that he couldn't be seen or the tugs on the strands of his web even felt.
Besides Bossk and Zuckuss, there had also been one of Cradossk's top advisers on the Guild council, and the Twi'lek major-domo, back for a longer talk than when he'd brought Fett to this dank chamber. All of them had been in pure deal-cutting mode, eager to help pull the Bounty Hunters Guild apart so they would get a bigger piece of whatever was left in the wreckage.
Right now he didn't feel like talking to anyone else.
Action meant more than words; that was one other thing Boba Fett was sure of. A man was killed by words, and saved by action. Spending so much time talking to other sentient creatures had been like wrapping himself in death. What he wanted to do right now was head back to the Slave I, his refuge docked at the edge of the Guild's main compound, lock himself behind its overlapping security layers, all systems primed to fry anyone who tried to breach them, and rest. If not the sleep of the virtuous-Fett had no illusions about that, or regrets-then at least the sleep of someone who had put in a good day's work. In his business, that meant helping others arrange their own destruction.
The presence of those other sentient creatures, carrying their fates around with them, all unaware, laid
-a cold hand on Boba Fett's heart, or whatever passed for it after all these years of death. It felt like some prophecy of his own death, though he was just as sure that that was a long way off, far from here in both time and space.
Being back inside his own ship would be as much a relief as being out in the emptiness between the stars.
He would be alone there, sealed off from all the others, living and dead... .
That was what he needed. He pushed the rough wooden door shut behind himself and strode down the corridor, beneath the flickering light of the torches. Anywhere but here, thought Boba Fett. The tunnel stretched out before him. Above him, the invisible weight of rock and stone pressed down, like the tomb he hadn't earned yet.
here, thought Boba Fett. The tunnel stretched out before him. Above him, the invisible weight of rock and stone pressed down, like the tomb he hadn't earned yet.
"You were saying things." Dengar handed the figure on the pallet a metal cup filled with water. "In your sleep."
Sleep was the wrong word, he knew. Dying would have been more accurate. Except that Boba Fett hadn't died, after all. After everything.
"Is that so?" Even unhelmeted, Boba Fett had a gaze that was as cold and exterminating as anything that had looked out from the black, narrow visor. Lying on the improvised bed in the hiding place's smallest subchamber, Fett's lethal potential appeared undiminished, as though his ravaged flesh were only a temporary costume, less real than the ragged battle-gear stacked up in the corner. "What did I say?"
"Nothing important," replied Dengar. He knew better than to have told the truth, if Fett's drugged, unconscious mutterings had amounted to anything. This barve lives by secrets, thought Dengar. To get inside any of those secrets would be like stealing something from him. And the consequences of that, Dengar was well aware, would not be pretty. "Something about not liking so many sentient creatures around you. Stuff like that."
"Ah." Boba Fett raised his head and managed to sip the water he'd been given. His smile looked like a blade wound in the abraded skin of his face. "I still don't like it."
"Please do not agitate the patient." The taller of the two medical droids scolded Dengar. The droid and its shorter partner were busily changing the dressings around Boba Fett's torso. Bloodied rags and sterile gel sheets were peeled away from the raw flesh beneath. Wounds such as Fett's took a long time to heal; the Sarlacc's gastric secretions were like acid creeping toward the bone, long after the beast itself was dead. "If I had the authority to do so," continued SHS1-B, "I would order you out of this area immediately."
"But you don't." Dengar leaned back against the subchamber's crumbling rock wall. The air inside the hiding place was as hot and desiccating as the interior of one of the ancient burial mounds that studded the farther reaches of the Dune Sea, where Tatooine's double suns turned corpses into withered leather. "Besides," said Dengar, "if you two haven't killed him by now, nothing will."
"Sarcasm." le-XE spoke as it readied another combination of opiates and antiseptics.
"Nonappreciation."
"There's someone else in this place, isn't there?"
Boba Fett had drawn his head back from the metal cup that Dengar had held out to him. The mere effort of his words sent his chest laboring, the dials and readouts on the surrounding equipment blipping into the red. "A female."
Dengar said nothing. He placed the half-empty cup on top of one of the sighing machines that the two medical droids tended. He had other things to take care of, other things to do besides talk with the sinister figure lying on the pallet, a little farther away from death's shores than Fett had been even a couple of days ago. One of the hiding place's power generators had conked out, spewing white sparks and a dense cloud of greasy smoke. That had necessitated shutting down all but the minimum air recyclers, resulting in the hot, thick miasma bound inside the hiding place. Dengar could more profitably take care of the generator, getting it up and back online, rather than staying here at Boba Fett's bedside.
But the other man's cold gaze held him as tight as the curved hook of a gaffstick.
"There's no need to lie to me about it," said Boba Fett. His words were as cold and unemotional as the gaze from his eyes. "I saw her. She came in here. Yesterday, I suppose. It's still hard for me to tell about these things. But it was dark, and she must have thought I was asleep. Or that I had died, perhaps."
"Please," said SHSl-B. It fussed with the tubes running between the machines and Boba Fett's body.
"You're making our job considerably more difficult."
Dengar ignored the medical droid. He was about to answer Fett, to tell the bounty hunter who the female was, when the bombs hit. Real bombs.
Dust sifted from the subchamber's ceiling, speckling the lenses of SHZl-B's head unit swiveling up toward the sound of thunder. Windstorms infrequently lashed the Dune Sea, floods of sand churning down the stone gulleys and vanishing just as quickly beneath the twin suns. Dengar had always thought that the hiding place he'd dug for himself was too far beneath the planet's surface to take any damage from mere weather. It'll take something stronger, he'd decided, to get in here.
His own words were still looping around inside his head when the rocks fell, with even louder thunder from above, onto his face.
He'd looked up, along with the two medical droids. He had a memory flash, of a light sharp as blades against his eyes and brighter than Tatooine's suns combined into one. Then he was spitting out gravel and blood as he felt his arm being tugged by someone unseen.
"Come on!" The voice was Neelah's; her hands gripped tight around his forearm and pulled. Rocks and sand poured off his chest as his scrabbling efforts, feeble at first and then made stronger by sudden desperation, combined with hers to extract him from the remains of the subchamber. "He's still in there!"
She meant Boba Fett, of course. The hiding place's emergency lights flickered as the remaining generator came to life. Dengar could still hear thunder, receding into the distance up on the surface level. The thunder would return, he knew; he was familiar enough with saturation-bombing techniques to be aware that that was what was going on up there. One wave would be succeeded by another, crossing the ground at a right angle from the first sweep. There wouldn't be any stones left, no gulleys or eroded pillars; everything would be hammered into dust. And as for whatever might lie beneath the surface ...
Neelah was already digging at the rubble that blocked the doorway to the subchamber. Enough of the dust had settled that Dengar could see how the bombs' impact had knocked him back toward the hiding place's main area. If he had been any farther inside, where the medical droids had been taking care of their patient, the rockfall would have come straight down on him, crushing his skull.
"Confusion." Neelah's bleeding fingers had already excavated the smaller of the droids. With its carapace dented, torso readouts cracked and blinking, le-XE
crawled away from the rocks and righted itself with difficulty. "Noise. Not-goodness."
"What are you waiting for?" Neelah looked back around at him, her eyes blazing through the dust and sweat covering her face. "Help me!"
"Are you crazy?" Dengar reached down and grabbed an arm, pulling Neelah to her feet. "There isn't time for that-whoever's laying down those bombs on the surface will be back in less than a minute. We've got to get out of here!"
"I'm not going without him." Neelah yanked her arm from Dengar's grasp. "Save yourself, if you want to." She turned away and started tugging at one of the larger rocks, nearly as high as herself.