Star Wars - [The Bounty Hunter Wars 03] - Hard Merchandise (by K W Jeter)

1

NOW...

Two bounty hunters sat in a bar, talking.

"Things aren't what they used to be," said Zuck- uss morosely. As a member of one of the ammonia-

breathing species of his homeworld Gand, he had to be careful in establishments such as this. Intoxicants

and stimulants that produced feelings of well-being in other creatures often evoked a profound

melancholy in him. Even in a high-class place that supposedly catered to all known physiologies—the

soothing, programmed play of lights across the columned walls, the shifting spectra that were supposed

to relax weary travelers' central nervous systems, struck Zuckuss as crepuscular and depressing as the

faded hopes of his youth. I had ambitions once, he told himself, leaning over the tall, blue-tinged glass in

front of him. Big ones. Where had they gone?

"I wouldn't know," said Zuckuss's companion. The droid bounty hunter 4-LOM sat across from him, an

untouched drink—perhaps only water—in front of him. A mere formality: the drink had been taken away

twice already and replaced with exactly the same thing, so the

charges could be rung up on 4-LOM's tab. That was the only way that nonimbibing constructs such as

droids could make themselves welcome in any kind of watering hole. "Your attitude," continued 4-LOM,

"implies a value judgment on your part. That is, that things were better at one time than they are now. I

don't make those kinds of judgments. I merely deal with things as they are."

You would, thought Zuckuss. This was what he got for hooking up with a

cold-blooded—cold-circuited, at least—creature like 4-LOM. There were plenty of ex- citable droids in

the galaxy—Zuckuss had run into a few— but the ones that were attracted to the bounty hunter trade all

shared the same vibroblade-edged logic and absolute-zero emotional tone. They hunted, and killed when

necessary, without even the tiniest acceleration of electrons along their inner connectors.

The bar's soft, dirgelike background music—it was supposed to be soothing as well, with harmonic

over- tones of almost narcotic languor—made Zuckuss think of his previous partner Bossk. The

Trandoshan bounty hunter had been cold-blooded, literally so, but one would never have guessed it from

the way he'd carried on.

"Now that," said Zuckuss with a slow, emphatic nod, "that was real bounty hunting. That had some

passion to it. Real excitement." He extended the retractable pipette from the lower part of his face mask

and sucked up an- other swallow of the drink, though he knew it would only deepen and darken his

mood. "We had some good times together, me and Bossk..."

"That wasn't what you said when you agreed to be- come partners with me once more." 4-LOM's

photo-optical receptors kept a slow, careful scan around the bar and its other occupants, even as the

droid kept up his end of the conversation. He talked for no reason other than to avoid drawing attention

to himself and Zuckuss as they waited for their quarry to make an appearance. "Value judgments aside,

the exact record of your statement is

that you had had enough of Bossk's way of doing busi- ness. Too much danger—if that's what you mean

by 'excitement'—and not enough credits. So you wanted a change."

"Don't use my own words against me." Zuckuss knew that he had gotten what he had asked for. And

what could be worse than that?

"Mourn the old days if you want," said 4-LOM after a few moments of silence had passed. "We have

business to take care of. Please direct your waning attention toward the entrance."

Worse than dealing with Boba Fett, grumbled Zuck- uss to himself. At least when you got involved with

Fett, you were assured that you were face-mask-to-helmet with the best bounty hunter in the galaxy,

someone who had plenty of reason for taking such a high-and-mighty atti-tude. Where did 4-LOM get

off, lording it over him this way? If it hadn't been for some stretches of bad luck, and a few unfortunate

strategic decisions, it would have been the droid that had been looking to hook up with him again, rather

than the other way around. Though they had been partners before, and for a lot longer than Zuck-uss had

been hooked up with Bossk, the relationship be-tween them could never be the same. Back then,

4-LOM had even saved Zuckuss's life, when he had been dying from his ammonia-breathing lungs having

been exposed to an accidental inhalation of oxygen. The two of them had even made other plans

together, of working for the Rebel Alliance in some way . . .

Those plans hadn't worked out, though. Their time as members of the Rebel Alliance—double agents,

actually, since they had kept secret their new allegiance to the Rebel cause—had been occupied with one

significant op- eration: an attempt to snatch from Boba Fett the car-bonite slab with Han Solo frozen

inside it, before Fett could deliver the prize to Jabba the Hurt. The plan, using several other bounty

hunters as unwitting dupes, had had disastrous results. It hadn't succeeded, and 4-LOM

had needed a complete core-to-sheath rebuild to get back on his feet. And, mused Zuckuss, he wasn't

the same af- ter that. This idealism that had led 4-LOM to join the Rebel Alliance had all but evaporated,

replaced by his former cold-spirited greed. Zuckuss supposed that came from hanging out once again

with the other bounty hunters; he had felt their mercenary natures rubbing off onto him as well.

Plus there was one factor that both of them hadn't counted on when they had joined theAlliance . A

factor that made all the difference in the universe—

Being a Rebel didn't pay.

At least not in credits. And there were still so many tempting targets all through the galaxy, the kind of

hard merchandise that a smart, fast bounty hunter could get rich from. Like the one that Zuckuss and

4-LOM had come here to get.

Zuckuss took another sip of his drink. Triple agents, he thought. That must be what we are now. Neither

he nor 4-LOM had ever formally renounced allegiance to the Rebel Alliance, but they had both been

taking care of their own business for some time now.

Moodily, he shook his head. He'd have to think about all the rest of those things some other time; right

now, there were more pressing matters at hand.

Zuckuss did as he'd been instructed by 4-LOM. The entrance to the bar was the one direction, in back

of 4-LOM, that the droid bounty hunter couldn't scan without cranking around his head unit. Bright

laughter, some of it as high-pitched and sharp-edged as breaking glass, and a tangled whirl of gossiping

conversations sounded in Zuckuss's ears as he lifted his gaze toward the entrance's fluttering

circumference. Beyond it, a slop- ing tunnel led up to the surface of the planet and its night sky filled with

a chain of pearllike moons. Smaller and more avid orbs dotted the length of the entrance tunnel; those

were the eyes of the tiny ergovore crea- tures that scuttled and darted in and out of the soft, trembling

crevices.

As a way of keeping weapons out of the establish- ment, metal detector units would have been both

useless and insulting; the bar catered to a clientele that not only included independent droids such as

4-LOM, who could pay their way handsomely enough, but also any number of the galaxy's most

aristocratic and stiff-necked blood- lines. From the rims of his own large, insectoid eyes, Zuckuss could

spot some of the galaxy's richest and most glittering denizens, devoted to spending their vast inherited

wealth in as ostentatious a manner as possible. For many of them, their weapons were ceremonial

orna-ments, dictated by fierce custom and the privileges given to their rank; to have asked them to divest

of even the smallest dagger or low-penetration blaster would have been an insult, expiable only by the

death of the establish-ment's proprietor, a stub-fingered Bergamasque named Salla C'airam. The only

acceptable alternative, preserv-ing their honor and the bar's decorum, was to ask them to hand over the

power sources for their blasters and similar high-tech weapons, thus limiting the damage and potential

loss of life to what could be achieved with inert metal. C'airam kept the ergovores in the entrance tun-nel

hungry enough that their sensitive antennae were at constant quivering alert for the emanations from even

the smallest power cell, no matter how well hidden; their flocking and chittering toward any they detected

was a sure giveaway of anyone trying to violate the house rules.

All of which meant that the blaster holstered at Zuck- uss's hip was useless at the moment; that was an

un- comfortable feeling for him. It was little consolation that everyone else in the bar was similarly

disarmed. He would have preferred the usual setup that he encountered in the watering holes in which he

more often hung out, where everyone including the bartenders was armed to the teeth. Then you know

where you stand, thought Zuckuss. This other stuff's too tricky.

"How much longer?" He leaned forward to ask the question of 4-LOM. "Until the merchandise is

supposed

to show up?" He didn't have much patience for waiting, either. He hadn't become a bounty hunter in

order to sit around waiting.

"His arrival is precisely fixed," replied 4-LOM. "Such precision of movement and timing is nearly the

equal of my own; in that, I admire the creature. Especially given that there is a price on his head, a bounty

that it is our in- tention to collect. Many other sentient creatures, given those circumstances, would try to

make their comings and goings erratic, to vary them in such a way as to frus- trate pursuers in

determining their target's patterns of behavior. But he has confidence in the precautions that he has taken,

including the limiting of his public recre- ational activities to this establishment." 4-LOM rested his hands

unmoving on the table. "We shall soon deter- mine if the merchandise's confidence is rewarded with a

continuing freedom."

There was no point in arguing with a droid such as 4-LOM. One might as well have had a conversation

with the tracking systems aboard a standard pursuit ship. Even worse, Zuckuss knew that 4-LOM was

correct; there had been a good reason for arriving at this place so far ahead of their quarry, getting set up

and letting the minutes pass until the moment of action came. He knew all that; he just didn't care for what

he knew.

If only . . . Zuckuss kept an eye on the bar's entrance and allowed his thoughts to slip back into

brooding about the past.

If only the old Bounty Hunters Guild hadn't broken up. If only its successor organizations, the short-lived

True Guild and Guild Reform Committee factions, hadn't fallen apart with the speed of a core meltdown.

Those were big ifs, Zuckuss knew, especially when it was taken into account that the main reason the

Guild and every- thing that came after it had disintegrated so rapidly and thoroughly was the basic greed

and irascibility that lay at the center of every bounty hunter's heart—or what- ever a droid like 4-LOM

had instead.

That was the real reason. Zuckuss took another sip of the drink in front of him. Boba Fett was just the

excuse. There were plenty of bounty hunters, former members of the vanished Guild, who blamed Fett

for everything that had happened. And it was true, up to a point, that Boba Fett's entry into the old

Bounty Hunters Guild had been the event that had brought about the organization's disintegration, and

that had put every creature in it at the throat of those he had pre-viously called his brothers. But Zuckuss

knew that Boba Fett had been no more than the key in the lock that had let free all the forces of avarice

and conspiracy that had been bottled up inside the Guild for so long, getting stronger and more malignant

all the while. It was amaz- ing that the Bounty Hunters Guild had even endured as long as it had, given the

irascible and hungry natures of its members; that was a tribute to the organizational skills of its final

leader, the Trandoshan Cradossk. He had probably been the only creature in the galaxy ruth-less and

clever enough to have kept a lid on the Guild's rank and file.

We did it to ourselves, thought Zuckuss glumly. The drink, and the ones before it, had done nothing to

lift his spirits. Now we have to live with the consequences. He knocked back the sour dregs at the

bottom of the glass.

"You know what?" Zuckuss let his thoughts turn into spoken words. "It's a cold, hard galaxy we live in."

4-LOM gave him a typically unemotional droid glance. "If you say so."

Nothing that the Rebel Alliance could do was likely to change that, either. The Rebels didn't have a

chance of winning, anyway, not against the massed strength of the Empire and all of Palpatine's deep,

enfolding cun- ning. In the darker corners of the galaxy, where surrep- titiously acquired information was

bought and sold, traded in whispers from one furtive creature to the next, rumors had been heard of a

gathering of the Impe-rial forces, somewhere out near a moon called Endor—

like a fist clenching together, into a hammer that would crush theAlliance forever, and end once and for

all its crazy dreams of freedom. And now, the galaxy's bounty hunters were without the Guild that had

preciously en- forced professional relations among its members—the Hunter's Creed had at least kept

them from murder- ing one another outright in the course of pursuing busi- ness. Small, upstart

organizations had sprung up in the power vacuum created by the old Guild's destruction, but they were

still too weak to create order among such naturally violent and greed-driven creatures. Most hunt- ers

were still on their own, friendless except for what-ever partnerships they could forge with one another.

Zuckuss had been partners with different bounty hunt- ers before, even while the Guild had been going

through its ugly process of disintegration. He had even been partners with Boba Fett, on more than one

occasion— but somehow, he had never come out any the better for it. Typically, Boba Fett wound up

getting what he was after, and all the rest were lucky if they were still alive afterward. Doing business with

Fett was a recipe for disaster.

Truth to tell, though, Zuckuss's other partnerships hadn't gone much better. Whatever his personal

feelings about 4-LOM, he could swallow those easily enough, given that the two of them had actually

been putting cred- its into their pockets since hooking up. They seemed to have complementary skills:

Zuckuss operated on instinct, the way most organic creatures were capable of, and 4-LOM possessed

the cold logic of a machine. What had made Boba Fett such a fearsome individual in the bounty hunter

trade was that he had all of those capabilities, and more, inside a single skin.

"Here he comes—"

Zuckuss's musings were interrupted by the soft-spoken announcement from 4-LOM. Even without

facing the entrance, the droid bounty hunter had been able to de- tect the sudden flamboyant appearance

of their quarry,

the presently free creature they planned on turning into hard merchandise and a hefty addition to their

credit accounts.

"A round for everyone, innkeeper!" The booming voice of Drawmas Sma'Da filled the bar, like the

rumble of thunder over the planet's horizon. Zuckuss looked up from his drink and saw the immense,

befurred, and caparisoned form of the most notorious gambler and oddsman in five systems, spreading

his arms wide. The gemstones studding Sma'Da's pinkly manicured fingers sparkled in a multicolored

constellation of wealth and extravagance; his broad, thrown-back shoulders were swathed in the soft fur

pelts of a dozen worlds' rarest species. The artfully preserved heads of the animals that had died for his

adornment, with black pearls for eyes, dangled over a belly of wobbling girth. "If I'm in a good mood,"

shouted Sma'Da, "then all should be so lucky!"

Luck was a preoccupation with Drawmas Sma'Da. As it was with Zuckuss and every other sentient

creature in the galaxy: If I had his luck, thought the bounty hunter, I'd be retired by now. Sma'Da had

been fortunate not only in the placing of his bets, but clever as well, in that he had virtually created an

entirely new field of wager-ing. The flamboyant gambler had been the first to cover wagers on the various

ups and downs of the struggle be-tween the Empire and the Rebel Alliance. No military conflict was too

small-scale, no political infighting too inconsequential, for Sma'Da to make odds, accept bets— often on

either side of the outcome, then pay off and col- lect when the particular event was over. By now, his

"Invisible & Ineluctable Casino," as he called it, stretched from one end of the galaxy to the other, a

shadow of the actual war going on between Emperor Palpatine and the Rebels. No matter who won,

either on the battlefield or the database of wagers, Drawmas Sma'Da came out ahead: he raked off the

house percentage on every bet placed, win or lose. All those profitable little bites mounted

up to an impressive pile of credits, one reflected in Sma'Da's own ever-increasing girth.

Two humanoid females, with the kind of large-eyed, mysteriously smiling beauty that made the males of

nearly every species weep with frustration, draped them-selves on either side of Sma'Da's capacious

shoulders, as though they were the ultimate ornaments of his success and wealth. They moved in synch

with him, or almost seemed to float without walking, so ineffable was their grace; the tripartite organism

of Sma'Da and his consorts moved into the center of the establishment, like a new sun rearranging the

orbits of all the lesser planets it found itself among.

The proprietor Salla C'airam, all bowing obsequious- ness and fluttering tentaclelike appendages, hurried

toward Sma'Da. "How good to see you again, Drawmas! It's al- ways too long between visits!"

Sma'Da had been in the bar just the previous night, Zuckuss knew. The proprietor was carrying on as

though he and the gambler had been cruelly separated for years.

A crowd of sycophants, flatterers, favor-seekers, gold diggers, and those who derived some deep

spiritual bene- fit from basking in the radiance of accumulated credits, had already formed around

Sma'Da. Signaling to the bar's waiters and serving staff, Salla C'airam led the way to the highly visible

table that had been kept in readiness for just such distinguished personages. Sma'Da's jowly face, split by

a gold-toothed smile, beamed above the crowd as it shifted, like the swell of an ocean tide, toward the

other side of the bar. A banquet equal to both Sma'Da's appetite and credit accounts had already been

laid out by the swiftly darting waiters; crystalline decanters, filled with exotic offworld liqueurs and roiling

with low-level combustibles, towered above platters of meats spiced with cellular-suspension

enhancements.

"There's enough in front of him to feed an Imperial division." Zuckuss kept the gambler and his entourage

in sight from the corner of his eye. If the expensive viands

had been converted back into credits, the sum would have gone to feed several divisions. He could see

Sma'Da's oddly delicate hands, pudgy folds welling around the wide bands of his rings, picking at the

delicacies, playfully stuffing the choicer morsels into the smiling mouths of the consorts at either side of

him. "Eventually," mused Zuckuss, "he'll implode, from sheer mass and density, like a black hole."

"Unlikely," said 4-LOM. "If creatures could suffer such a fate, that's what would have happened to

Jabba the Hutt. His appetite was many times greater than this person's. You saw that for yourself."

"I know." Zuckuss slowly nodded. "I was just trying to forget about anything I might have seen at

Jabba's palace." As with every other mercenary type in the galaxy, he had spent some time in the employ

of the late Huttese crimelord. Jabba had been involved in so many shady deal- ings throughout the galaxy

that it would have been hard for a bounty collector not to hook up with him at some point. Rarely,

though, had any of them profited by it; a successful association with a creature like Jabba the Hutt was

one that you survived intact.

"Anyway," continued 4-LOM, keeping his emotion- less voice low, "don't waste time worrying about

our tar- get's state of health. He just has to live long enough for us to collect the bounty that's been

posted on him."

A burst of laughter and bright, chattering voices came from the crowd at Drawmas Sma'Da's table. All

eyes and attention in the bar had been drawn to the gambler from the moment he had entered. Zuckuss

felt a bit more se- cure because of the noise and the general diversion, as though it had made him and

4-LOM briefly invisible. With someone like Sma'Da in the room, no one would be watching them.

"It's ready." 4-LOM made the simple, quiet announce- ment. The droid bounty hunter leaned forward

slightly, passing a small object underneath the table to Zuckuss. "Time to put our plans into action."

Time was always the crucial factor. Despite his com- plaints, Zuckuss knew exactly why they had had to

ar- rive at the bar so much earlier than their target. Some preparations required precisely measured

amounts of time, things readied in silence and stealth, even if right under the inquisitive eyes of a bar full of

ignorant onlookers. They don't need to know, thought Zuckuss with a mea- sure of satisfaction. But they

will.

He took the object from 4-LOM's hand, carefully minimizing his actions so that anyone glancing in this

di- rection would have no clue of what might be happening beneath the table. The rest of the preparations

were swiftly completed; there was no need for Zuckuss to watch his own hands going about their work.

With this kind of equipment, so essential to a bounty hunter's trade, he could have performed the

necessary operations with his large eyes completely blindfolded.

"Okay," said Zuckuss after a moment. He leaned back, chancing a quick peek under the table's surface.

A tiny blinking red light indicated that his part of the prepa-rations had been completed satisfactorily.

"Looks good to me."

4-LOM gave a slight nod, a humanoid gesture that he had picked up somewhere along the way. "Then I

sug- gest you proceed."

It's always up to me, grumbled Zuckuss to himself as he pushed back his chair and stood up. No matter

who he had for a partner, somehow he always wound up do- ing the dirty work.

"Excuse me ..." The crowd around Drawmas Sma'Da's table had grown even larger and denser, just in

the short while that Zuckuss had been getting ready. He shoved and wedged himself through the press of

bodies, the din of their excited words and laughter clattering in his earholes. "Pardon me ... I've got a

message for the esteemed Sma'Da..."

The blinking dot of red light that Zuckuss had checked under the table with 4-LOM was safely hidden

inside his close-fitting, equipment-studded tunic. A couple of quick,

sharp blows from the points of his elbows right to a few midsections of the closely packed crowd

enabled him to work his way right up to the front of Sma'Da's table. He gave a slight, formal bow as he

found himself confronting the gambler over the trays of picked-over delicacies.

"A message?" Drawmas Sma'Da was well known for his alert attention to voices from the crowd. "How

inter- esting. I wasn't expecting any such; these aren't my usual business hours." The gambler's eyes were

barely visible through the rounded folds of flesh, pushed upward by his exuberant smile. "But," he

continued with an expan-sive wave of his grease-shiny hands, "I might be inter- ested in hearing it. If it's

important enough."

Sma'Da's words hardly counted as a witticism, but the smiles on the faces of his escorts widened, and

his flatter- ers in the assembled crowd broke into loud, appreciative guffaws.

Star Wars - [The Bounty Hunter Wars 03] - Hard Merchandise (by K W Jeter)

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