Hard Merchandise

1

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 ammoniabreathing 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 universeBeing 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 Endorlike 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.

"Judge its importance for yourself." Zuckuss gazed back into the gambler's fat-swaddled eyes. "The infor-mation in it comes from Sullust."

The smile on Sma'Da's own face didn't diminish, but what could be seen of his eyes grew brighter and more avarice-driven, like glints of razor-edged durasteel. " 'Sul-lust'? That doesn't sound any chimes in my memory." He tilted his head to one side, as coyly as possible for some-thing so massive. "Who is this Sullust you speak of?"

At Zuckuss's back, the laughter and the hubbub of voices had died away. They knew what the name meant— the bar was exactly the sort of crossroads where infor-mation about Imperial and Rebel comings and goings would be traded.

"Not who," replied Zuckuss, "but where. And I think you already know that." Sma'Da had based his entire gambling enterprise upon rumors and secrets, the tiny scraps of information that enabled him to calculate odds with such precision. "Don't you?"

"Perhaps so." Sma'Da's golden smile gleamed even more dazzlingly. "But only a fool turns down an oppor-tunity to learn more. Dear things—" He turned to his female companions on either side of him, one after the other. "Amuse yourselves elsewhere for a little while. I need a moment alone with this interesting person." He fluttered his beringed paws at the crowd.

"Make way, make way." Pouting, the females detached themselves and floated away. The sycophants and other assorted hangers-on took the cue as well, dispersing while whis-pering among themselves and keeping watch on the gam-bler from the corners of their eyes. "There," said Sma'Da as Zuckuss sat down beside him. "Much more private now, wouldn't you say?"

"Adequate." Zuckuss still didn't feel entirely at ease in such public surroundings. Proper bounty hunting, he felt, was best done in remote areas or in the depths of interstellar space, where it would have been just him, the target, and a high-powered weapon pointing in the target's direction. That'd wipe the smile from this one's face, Zuckuss thought. He glanced over at the table he'd left; 4-LOM was sitting as placidly as be-fore, not even seeming to be interested at all in the ac-tion that was about to come down. Zuckuss turned back toward Sma'Da. "I was pretty sure that a creature in your line of business would be interested in news from Sullust. You're probably already taking in bets on it."

"Oh, I might." The dangling animal heads bobbed as Sma'Da shrugged his broad shoulders. "It's hard, though, to get any of my regular clientele to put down their cred-its, one way or another. The reports that have circulated, concerning the Imperial buildup near the moon of Endor, have made a great many creatures nervous. It's one thing to bet on a minor battle here or there, a mere skirmish or a Rebel raid on an Imperial armaments depot, that sort of thing; quite another to place a wager on what could very likely be the end of this great game." Sma'Da heaved an immense, fat-quivering sigh. "If that should be the case—if Emperor Palpatine should indeed quash the Re-bellion once and for all—how I shall miss these glorious days!" He shook his head, as though already immured in regret over a vanished past. "The Rebel Alliance has brought the radiant aspect of hope to every corner of the galaxy; and where there's hope, there's risk-taking. And then..." Sma'Da's smile reappeared, even slyer than be-fore. "There's wagering. And that's always profitable, for someone like me."

The gambler's words gave Zuckuss a measure of cold comfort. He's no different than me, thought Zuckuss. Not that he had expected anything different; most of the galaxy's denizens, in Zuckuss's estimation, spent all their time looking out for Number One, namely themselves. If he had ever believed otherwise, he might have been tempted stay with the Rebel Alliance. But he was certain that idealism was a rare trace element in the universe's composition, whereas greed was as ubiquitous as hydro-gen atoms.

"I like profits as well," said Zuckuss. One of the wait-ers had brought another drink, shimmering amethyst in color, and had placed it in front of him; he didn't touch it. "That's why I sought you out."

"Good for you." Sma'Da gave an appreciative nod. "And good for me, if whatever information you've brought with you should turn out useful. The more one knows, the easier it is to make odds. Though mind you"—he peered closer at Zuckuss— "it's hard to take me by surprise on these things, anymore. There's not much I haven't heard about what's been going on near Endor; I have excellent sources for all kinds of gossip and rumor."

"I'm pretty sure this is something you haven't heard before." Zuckuss reached into his tunic.

"Ah." Sma'Da put the tips of his glittering fingers to-gether. "My pulse races with anticipation."

"How's this, then?" Zuckuss pulled out a blaster pis-tol and set its cold, hard muzzle against Drawmas Sma'Da's forehead. "You're coming with me."

He had the satisfaction of seeing the gambler's eyes widen for a moment. Then they all but vanished again, from the upwelling pressure of Sma'Da's expansive grin.

"That's very funny. How amusing!" Sma'Da drew his hands apart, enough to clap them together again in ap-preciation. "Everyone—please observe!" He called out loudly to the crowd in the bar; eager faces swiveled in the direction of the table. "To what lengths creatures go merely to provide me with a few fleeting moments of amusement!" His laughter boomed against the walls, as though to frighten the play of colors against their sur-face. "Bringing in and waving around a blaster, in the one place it's sure to be useless! Not even a power source for it!"

The laughter was contagious; Zuckuss could hear it sweep through the establishment like a wave breaking over and carrying away the staff as well as the patrons. Their bright, barking noise mounted louder, approach-ing some critical mass of hilarity. Zuckuss glanced over at 4-LOM, in the center of the establishment's space; the droid bounty hunter was the only one not laughing. 4-LOM sat and waited with machinelike patience, know-ing what was to come.

"You poor fool." Drawmas Sma'Da hadn't bothered to pull away from the blaster placed at his brow; he obvi-ously wanted all the onlookers to relish the joke to its full. "Did you think I'd be somehow frightened by a lump of dead metal? Or did you not even notice what happened when you came in here, what little piece of that weapon was taken away from you by our good inn-keeper's minions? Really—" With one pudgy hand, he dabbed away the tears that had managed to squeeze past the folds surrounding his eyes. "It's just too good."

"Even better than you think," said Zuckuss. He shifted the blaster slightly away from Sma'Da's head and squeezed the trigger. A coruscating bolt of energy shot out and blew away a section of the bar's ceiling, charred fragments and hot sparks raining down on the upturned faces of the crowd. "This weapon's live."

Sma'Da had instinctively dived when the blaster bolt had scorched past the side of his head. His immense girth had toppled the table, sending a cascade of liquor and the remains of the banquet cascading across the floor. Crockery and crystal decanters shattered, the fragments gleaming like transparent teeth imbedded in the wetly gleaming disorder. A few of the bar's patrons still looked stunned and disbelieving; some of the sharper-witted ones had rushed for the exit and were now scrabbling to get past one another and up the narrow tunnel to the surface.

"Let's go." Zuckuss reached down with his free hand, grabbed Sma'Da's trembling elbow, and pulled the gam-bler to his feet; he had to lean back to counterbalance Sma'Da's greater weight. "There's some creatures who are ready to pay a nice pile of credits for the privilege of having a talk with you. A long talk." And probably not a pleasant one, judging from the panicked look on the other's face and the fear-induced quivering that shook this mass like a small planet's seismic activity.

The bar's proprietor came rushing up, pushing his way past the remaining crowd. "What is the meaning of this?" Salla C'airam was nearly as agitated as the gam-bler caught in Zuckuss's grip."It's an outrage? It's impos-sible! It's—"

"It's business." Zuckuss diverted the blaster's aim for a moment, away from Sma'Da and toward C'airam. That was enough to stop him in his tracks. C'airam's ten-tacles drew short and wrapped themselves tightly around his body. "You've already got a mess here." Zuckuss used the blaster to point to the sodden, trampled-upon— and expensive—garbage on the floor. "You can either start cleaning it up ... or you can join it. Your pick."

C'airam's floppy, seemingly boneless appendages set-tled lower, a sure sign in his species of wanting to avoid a violent confrontation. "I do not know," he spoke with measured sulkiness, "how you managed to get a power source for your weapon into these premises. It's strictly forbidden—"

"Sue me."

"If any of my staff here were involved..." The gaze of the proprietor's gelatinous-appearing eyes, nearly as large as Zuckuss's, swept menacingly across the waiters and bartenders. "If I should discover any complicity, any treachery on their part..."

"Don't worry about it," said Zuckuss. He pushed the trembling mass of Sma'Da ahead of himself.

"They're off the hook." He didn't feel like sharing any of the credit for this job with nonbounty hunters; the little bit of ac-tion, the deep, warm feeling of empowerment that came with drawing a live weapon on a fat, blubbering piece of merchandise, had given his spirits a considerable lift. With the gambler's quivering bulk ahead of him, Zuck-uss stopped just beside the table at which his partner 4-LOM had remained sitting throughout all the commo-tion that had taken place. "Speaking of your staff"— Zuckuss turned, swiveling the muzzle of the blaster back toward C'airam— "you've got the usual service droids in your kitchen, don't you?"

C'airam gave a puzzled nod.

"Fine. Go have one of your other staff pull the moti-vator out of one of 'em. A standard FV50 unit will do nicely." Zuckuss raised the weapon's muzzle a little higher. "I suggest you have them hurry. I might not have the same resources of patience that you do."

On hasty orders from C'airam, one of the bar staff scuttled back into the establishment's kitchen and returned only seconds later with a double-cylindrical ob-ject in his hands.

"Thanks." Zuckuss took the motivator from him, and then shooed him away with a wave of the blaster.

"Don't move," he warned Sma'Da—needlessly. The gam-bler, face now shiny with sweat, looked incapable of any-thing beyond involuntary respiration. Keeping the blaster in one hand, Zuckuss set the motivator down on the table, then swiftly—he had practiced this step before coming to C'airam's bar—unlatched the access panel just below the back of 4-LOM's head unit. "This should do it..."

"Don't forget the red feedback-loop clip." Even with-out a working motivator inside the bounty hunter droid, 4-LOM retained enough low-level auxiliary power to maintain consciousness and interactive communications. "Make sure you've got that in-phase before you power up the major thoracic systems."

"I know what I'm doing," Zuckuss replied testily. With just one hand, it took a few moments longer to get the circuits aligned properly. "You'll be up and running in a minute."

4-LOM's immobilized state had been a necessary part of the plan; otherwise, the droid could have taken a more active part in rounding up Drawmas Sma'Da. The most essential item, though, had been making sure that Zuckuss had had an operative blaster pistol to work with. That had meant getting a power source past the establishment's security—impossible—or cre-ating one on the spot. Which was exactly what 4-LOM had figured out how to do in its preparations for this job, even before he had taken Zuckuss on as a partner. With the help of a few highly paid technical con-sultants, 4-LOM had designed and installed within himself a device capable of stripping out the internal circuit of a standard motivator, the primary mecha-nism that enabled droid locomotion, and high-grading the resulting simple power source into one both pow-erful and small enough to be used in a blaster pistol. Like the alchemical wizards on certain remote worlds, who claimed to be able to convert base materials into infinitely more valuable substances, 4-LOM had given himself the ability to change a dull but useful internal component to something very valuable indeed—a blaster power-source, in a locale where none was expected to be.

There were only two drawbacks to the motivator-into-power-source procedure. The first was that the resulting power source would only have enough charge for a few bolts. The second was that without a motivator, 4-LOM would be incapable of any motion, either walking toward the target's table or even lifting an arm with a weapon clutched in its hand. That second problem was the main reason that 4-LOM had decided to take on a partner; pulling this off was obviously a two-creature job. And as far as the first problem was concerned, that new partner was well versed enough in ordinary, nonbounty hunter psychology to know that a few shots would be all that was needed.

"Got it." Zuckuss slammed the access panel cover into place. "Time to get out of here."

"Agreed." 4-LOM pushed its chair back and stood up from the table. The droid reached over and grabbed Sma'Da's elbow. "I would prefer it," 4-LOM told the gambler, "if you did not show any resistance. I have ways of enforcing my preferences."

Sma'Da stared back at the droid bounty hunter with blubbering terror.

"Good," said 4-LOM. "I'm pleased you understand." 4-LOM glanced over at Zuckuss. "You see? I told you this would be an easy job."

Zuckuss nodded. "I've had worse." Lots worse, he thought. So far he hadn't actually risked being killed on this one. Though that might change, if he and his partner didn't hurry.

"Both of you—" The proprietor Salla C'airam had re-covered enough of his composure that he was able to screech and flap several of his appendages simultaneously. "You're barred from this establishment! Permanently! Don't ever show your faces around here again!"

"Don't worry about that." Zuckuss shoved Sma'Da toward the exit tunnel. He kept everyone in the bar covered with the blaster—there were one or two shots left in its charge, at the most—as he and 4-LOM hustled Sma'Da out. "The drinks were terrible, anyway."

Not until later, when he and 4-LOM were aboard the droid bounty hunter's ship, with Sma'Da safely stowed in a cage belowdecks, did Zuckuss realize that they had stiffed C'airam. Neither he nor 4-LOM had settled their drinks tab before leaving.

Serves him right, thought Zuckuss.

"So where are we taking this merchandise?" Standing in the hatchway of the cockpit, Zuckuss gave a nod to in-dicate Drawmas Sma'Da below them.

"I've already notified the nearest Imperial outpost." 4-LOM reached across the controls and made slow mi-nor navigational adjustments."They know we'll be bring-ing him in. And they'll have the bounty ready to be paid out."

"This was a job for the Empire?"Zuckuss hadn't even bothered to ask before he had agreed to hook up with the other bounty hunter. "Why would Palpatine want him?"

"Let's just say that our merchandise, in his previous role as gambling entrepreneur, was a little too accurate about setting odds for various military encounters be-tween Imperial forces and the Rebel Alliance." 4-LOM didn't glance back as he tweaked the ship's controls. "There's a limit to how many times one creature can pre-dict things like that, using nothing but intelligence and luck. At the rate that Sma'Da was calling the shots, it be-gan to look like he might have had access to some sources of inside information. From inside the Imperial forces, that is."

Zuckuss mulled the other's words over. "It's possi-ble," he said after a moment, "that it could've been just luck. Real good luck."

"If that's the case," replied 4-LOM drily, "then it wasn't good luck for our merchandise at all. It was bad luck— the worst kind, in fact, since it brought him to the atten-tion of Emperor Palpatine. Now he's going to have a lot of explaining to do. It won't be a pleasant process."

Probably not, thought Zuckuss as he left the ship's cockpit area. Even if Drawmas Sma'Da rolled over on any informants he might have had among the Emperor's minions, the techniques that would be used to ensure that the former gambler was telling the truth would leave him a squeezed-out rag. He wouldn't be so fat and jolly when all that was over.

The brief excitement that Zuckuss had felt during the job, when he had pulled out the live blaster and fired it off, shutting off all the onlookers' laughter like flipping a switch, had already faded. He sat down with his back against one of the ship's weapons lockers and defocused his large, insectlike eyes. He couldn't help feeling that even if his bounty hunter career was go-ing better now that he had hooked up with 4-LOM, it somehow wasn't quite as much . . . fun, for lack of a better word. Granted, that kind of amusement had nearly gotten him killed, and on more than one occa-sion. Still...

His thoughts turned to memories as he leaned his head back against the locker. He remembered two other partners in particular; one of them, Boba Fett, could be anywhere in the galaxy now. There was no stopping Fett, or apparently even slowing him down. The last glimpse of Boba Fett that Zuckuss remembered had been through the narrow hatch of an emergency escape pod, just prior to being jettisoned from another ship similar to this one.

There had been another bounty hunter in that escape pod, one that had fumed with a murderous anger the whole time that the pod had been hurtling through space, toward some yet-unknown destination. That had been Bossk; both murder and anger were things that came naturally to Trandoshans. But it had made for cramped quarters inside the little durasteel sphere. Tem-pers had flared, both his and Bossk's, and they had kept from killing each other only by agreeing, once the escape pod came to rest on the nearest planet, that they would go their separate ways. And so they had.

He was both glad and somehow sorry that his partner-ship with the cold-blooded, fiery-tempered reptilian Bossk was long over. There was no amount of fun that was worth the risks that came with an association with a creature like that.

Zuckuss shook his head. At least I'm still alive, he thought. That has to count for something.

He wondered where Bossk was now ...