That game, Kuat knew, had played out with fatal speed.
"Not long," murmured Kuat of Kuat again. "Not long at all ..."
"There's something big coming down." Bossk's smile was jagged and ugly. As always. "Something really big."
Boba Fett leaned back against the wall behind the stone bench. Nothing the Trandoshan told him ever came as a surprise; the big reptile just hadn't learned that yet, about how far behind the curve he was always fated to be.
Maybe he will find out, thought Fett, before he dies. "Go on," said Fett. In the meantime there was some value to a pretense of ignorance on his own part. "Tell me about it."
"Wait a second." Bossk turned his scaly head, looking over the bleak contents of Boba Fett's temporary quarters at the Bounty Hunters Guild's main complex. He had already pushed the iron-hinged door shut behind himself with a push from his clawed hand. "This isn't," he growled in a low voice, "something everybody needs to know about." The inspection from his slit-pupiled eyes apparently satisfied him, that there were no obvious listening devices installed in the cracks between the damp stones. "At least, they don't need to for the moment."
"You have a compulsion for secrecy." Idiot, thought Boba Fett-a thousand snooping machines could have been hidden in the chamber that a mere visual scan wouldn't have detected. "That's commendable."
"Gotta be careful." Bossk sat down on the bench beside him and leaned in close. "Especially about 1 something like this."
"Which is?"
All around the sparsely furnished, rough-hewn space, the corridors of the Bounty Hunters Guild compound folded and coiled around each other, replicating the devious pathways of the minds contained therein. Those minds, of the bounty hunters themselves, had been getting progressively more devious since Boba Fett's arrival in their midst. He could sense it, like being inside an infinitely replicating maze, branching through fractal progressions of paranoia and deceit. That was fine by him it was what his plans, and those of the arachnoid assembler Kud'ar Mub'at, called for. The bounty hunters were already getting lost in that maze; some of them wouldn't survive to find their way out.
It's different for me, thought Fett. He was un concerned about the maze's exponential complexity. It didn't matter whether he had a map, or a thread leading his way out. When the time came, he would break his way through the encircling walls, as though they were made of flimsiplast rather than the stone of other sentient creatures' greed and malice. Soon enough ...
"A big job," said Bossk. His claws tightened reflexively, as though upon either the neck of some merchandise or the credits to be gotten for it. "The kind you like."
Fett kept any trace of emotion out of his voice, words blank as the visor of his helmet. "How big?" Leaning even closer, Bossk whispered hoarsely into the audio receptor at the side of Fett's helmet. The Trandoshan's fang-lined smile was even bigger when he drew away, the number recited.
"I see." Boba Fe tt wasn't surprised by the amount of the bounty being offered; he had his own sources of information, so much sharper and beyond those of any Guild member. "That's an enticing sum." He wasn't surprised, either, that Bossk had shaved a quarter million credits off the price. Like most bounty hunters, Bossk had a flexible notion of what constituted a fair division of profits. "Very enticing, indeed."
"Yeah, ain't it?" The contemplation of that kind of credits flow seemed to inspire a new level of glittering- eyed avarice in Bossk. "I knew you'd go for it."
"And what is the exact nature of this merchandise?"
Boba Fett already knew, but he had to ask in order to keep up the masquerade; Bossk had to believe that he was revealing the details rather than just confirming them.
"Somebody must want it pretty badly to put that kind of price on it."
"You can say that again." Bossk held up one claw.
"Here's the scoop. Seems a certain Lyunesi comm handler named Oph Nar Dinnid managed to work himself up a real case of hyper-eros." The toothy smile shifted into a leer. "You know how it goes-the same old story."
Fett knew what the Trandoshan was talking about. The Lyunesi were one of six sentient species on Ryoone, a planet down-spiral from one of the remoter sectors of the Outer Rim Territories. Unusually dismal conditions had been brought about millennia ago by a seemingly permanent suspension of volcanic ash in the upper atmosphere, resulting in a ruthless competition for survival. The other inhabitants of Ryoone would have wiped out the Lyunesi long ago if the fragile creatures hadn't mastered the arts of interspecies communication. Their skills went far beyond mere translation of words and meaning; surrounded by enemies, with the continuation of their own breed dependent upon every nuance of language and gesture, the Lyunesi bought their lives with interpretive skills far beyond even the most highly developed protocol droid. On Ryoone, that meant they made possible all the fluid and rapidly shifting diplomacy between the planet's other species, the madly dissolving and re-forming alliances, the declarations of war and swiftly terminated peace treaties between sentient creatures who didn't even share the same metabolic basis, let alone language. In the galaxy beyond Ryoone, the Lyunesi were found at every communication nexus, sorting out and fine-tuning the messages and negotiations between one wildly dissimilar sector of the Empire and another. All that expertise at reading other species' inten tions and secrets had its downside, though. From time to time various Lyunesi fell prey to their own sensitivity.
An all-consuming passion seized them; worse, it was nearly always reciprocated by the object of their desire.
Unlike members of the reptilian Falleen species, whose conquests were achieved with a notable coldness and lack of feeling, Lyunesi and their hypererotic targets rapidly found themselves in situations where neither partner was left with a shred of self-preserving intelligence. Given the high-level diplomatic stations where Lyunesi were so often found, the results were usually catastrophic.
And fatal.
"I know the story," said Boba Fett. Both in general and in the specific case of Oph Nar Dinnid, which his own sources had told him about. "Better that a high-ranking female should get involved with someone like Prince Xizor. The experience is reputedly more intense and pleasurable, and after it's over, the female might still be alive. If she keeps her wits about her." Fett supposed that with someone like his sometime employer Xizor, that was what passed as chivalry. "The problem with Lyunesi is that they're not smart enough to be heartless."
"Yeah, well, this Dinnid person managed to get himself into a large-capacity vat of nerf waste." Bossk sneered; he had been born without those wasteful, sentimental emotions. "He was working for one of the major liege-holder clans out in the Narrant system; I won't say which one-"
"You don't have to. They're all alike." Boba Fett was well acquainted with those clans; they were really more loose confederations of genetically linked species, with deep layers of ritual obeisance and internal blood oaths patching over their differences. It didn't work; they needed the ultradiplomatic Lyunesi around just to keep from killing each other off. A good gig for the natives of a backwater world like Ryoone-as long as they didn't screw up.
But they always did.
"Let me guess," said Boba Fett. "Dinnid's employers found him in a, let's say, compromising position with a wife or daughter from one of the top clan houses."
"Got that one right." Bossk's eyes glittered as sharp as his fangs. A Trandoshan's enjoyment of another creature's troubles went far beyond the mere anticipation of profit to be gained thereby. "All the way to the top.
Right up to the supreme liege-lord himself. And just like these Lyunesi-they've got no sense at all-the revelation of the affair was in public. At one of the formal clan- oath ceremonies, couple thousand sublieges and their retinues all in their lord's great hall. Somebody accidentally struck the curtain behind the dais, it collapses, and there's our Oph Nar Dinnid and the liegelord's alpha concubine, for all the galaxy to see. Like I said no sense at all."
Bossk's description of events matched what Fett's sources had told him. "It's remarkable that this Dinnid person got out alive."
"I take it back the guy had some sense." Bossk shrugged. "Not enough to keep himself out of trouble, but at least enough to have already planned his escape route when the nerf droppings hit the ventilation system. There was a lot of confusion in the great hall-you can imagine-and Dinnid hightailed it out to a speeder he'd kept fueled and waiting, with its destination coordinates already programmed in."
"Where could he go? Where he'd be safe, that is."
Boba Fett already knew the answer, but continued with his pretense. "The Narrant liege-lords have a sense of honor that doesn't easily accept embarrassment. They'll stop at nothing to get someone who has publicly humiliated them back in their grasp."
"True." Bossk gave a quick nod. "That's why this particular lord has put up such a killer bounty for the merchandise he wants. He can't just take his own troops out and hunt down the little idiot, haul him back, and get whatever satisfaction he can out of Dinnid's hide-at least, not without spreading the story even farther afield. So, naturally, the lord wants the bounty hunters to do his dirty work for him."
Silence was always a desired commodity in the bounty- hunter trade. Boba Fett had made a specialty of quick, efficient-and quiet-work. "With that kind of credits being put up, I expect every bounty hunter in the Guild will be going after Oph Nar Dinnid."
"It's not that easy," said Bossk. "The sneak not only had his escape means planned, he had the perfect place to hole up figured out as well. He's with the Shell Hutts."
Boba Fett had heard that much as well. Of all the Huttese clans, the Shell Hutts were the least numerous, and the most removed from the various alliances and interconnected dealings that bonded the other Hutts together. The Shell Hutts didn't even look like their distant brethren, except in bulk and physiognomy; they had the same basic body mass and large-eyed, slit-mouthed faces, perfect for greedily stuffing assorted wriggling tidbits into. In that sense, of wanting to control everything on which their immense eyes fastened, they were identical to the rest of the Hutts.
Identical in anatomic toughness as well, with thick leathery skins impervious to blaster shots and acids, and vital organs so deeply buried under layers of blubber that they couldn't be even nicked with a vibroblade-the only physical threat that Hutts feared was specific bands of hard unshielded radiation, the kind whose toxic effects built up in their bodies' shielding fat rather than being dissipated through normal excretion processes.
That had kept the Hutts from extending their criminal enterprises to certain areas of the galaxy. Until one of the Huttese clans, sometime in the hazy millennia of the past, had given themselves what their own genetics had failed to protective armored casings, bolted and welded together from heavy durasteel plates, supported and maneuvered about by built-in repulsor fields. All that showed of the Shell Hutts' soft, gelatinous flesh were their jowly faces, protruding tortoiselike from iris- collared ports at the front of the floating ovoid cases.
Even the Shell Hutts' delicate little hands were hidden inside, manipulating the controls for the externally mounted grasping devices. Those seemed to work just as well at grabbing onto and holding big chunks of ill- gotten wealth.
"Why would the Shell Hutts be interested in a comm handler on the run?" Boba Fett had had dealings with various members of the Shell Hutts; he knew they didn't do anything without a credits-related reason, just like the other Huttese. "If they need that level of translation and diplomacy skills, they can just buy whoever's on the market. Someone who doesn't have a price on his head."
"Oph Nar Dinnid made himself valuable to them." A
trace of grudging admiration sounded in Bossk's harsh voice. "Seems he had memory aug-mentors surgically implanted in his cortical areas, and stuffed them full of the Narrant system's top-secret business information, dealings, and records that he had access to from working as the supreme liege-lord's protocol intermediary.
There's a lot of data inside Dinnid's head that the Shell Hutts have found to be pretty interesting. And profitable."
"So? That's not something that would keep Dinnid safe for long. The Shell Hutts aren't exactly reticent about stripping data out of somebody's memory and then tossing the remains out like an empty husk."
Bossk leaned closer, close enough that Boba Fett could smell blood and meat through his helmet's air filters. "Dinnid may be an idiot, all right, but he's not that kind of idiot. The memory augmentors he had installed inside his skull have a time-based readout function wired into them. All the secret business data from the Narrant system that he's carrying is released a few bits at a time-plus it's under an autodestruct encryption. The Shell Hutts try to crack his head open to get at the data, everything gets wiped. But that's not even the best part. They can't even tell how much data is inside Dinnid. Basically, he's valuable to the Shell Hutts for an indefinite period of time; it could be decades before the information is done spooling out of him."
"That was clever of him." As with the rest of the story that Bossk had just related, Boba Fett feigned hearing it for the first time. "But it also means that the Shell Hutts aren't going to let go of him for a good long time."