Hard Merchandise

3

She had just about decided to kill them both.

Neelah looked at the back of Boba Fett's helmet as he sat at the cockpit controls of the Hound's Tooth. There was no indication that he was aware of her standing in the hatchway behind him. But knowing Fett, with his constant, preternatural awareness, she felt sure that nothing was getting by him. He can bear the blood rush-ing in my veins, thought Neelah. He knows.

The other bounty hunter, the one named Dengar, was still asleep in the ship's cargo area. Neelah had left him there, worn out from relating Boba Fett's grim history to her. Like most bounty hunters, Dengar was a creature of action; shifting words about, bringing the past to life in even the rawest, most direct terms, was hard labor for him. Especially under duress; she had woken him up be-fore this last time with a blaster pistol aimed at his head. She had been impressed with the degree of motivation that had inspired in Dengar.

She still had the blaster pistol with her; in fact, it dan-gled from her hand as she watched Fett adjusting the ship's navigational controls. Originally, it had been one of Boba Fett's weapons; she had managed to slip it away from him here in the cockpit, before he had been able to stop her. That had earned Neelah a grudging congratula-tions from him. Very few creatures had ever managed a stunt like that.

Maybe I should've killed him then, thought Neelah. Or at least tried to. Her finger tightened upon the weapon's trigger. All she had to do was raise the weapon, aim—hardly difficult at this minimal distance—and fire. And this uncertainty in her existence would be taken care of, once and for all...

"Don't delude yourself." Boba Fett's voice snapped her out of the murderous reverie into which she had fallen. "I'm aware of your presence." He hadn't turned around, but had continued his adjustments to the ship's controls. A final number was punched into one of the navicomputer touchpads, then Fett swiveled around in the pilot's chair to face her. "You'd have more luck if you were a droid. Some of those can be virtually silent."

The remark struck Neelah as unintentionally ironic. If I were a droid, she thought, I wouldn't have any of the problems I do now. Even her identity, knowing who or what she was, other than a human female with a false name, a name not her own, and a past that had been stolen from her—it was hard to imagine a droid being concerned about things like that. Memory for a droid was a matter of chips and micro-implants, tiny recording devices as manufactured and interchangeable as them-selves. Machines have it easy, thought Neelah. They didn't need to find out what they were; they knew.

"I'll be more careful next time," said Neelah. With Boba Fett facing her, she had no more clue than before as to the secrets held within his skull. The dark, T-shaped visor of his helmet, that battered and discolored but still awesomely functional relic of the ancient Mandalorian warriors, concealed anything that might have told her what he thought and knew. The entire answer about who she was and how she had come to the remote, friendless sectors of the galaxy in which she had found herself might be locked up inside Boba Fett, like a key hidden in the very strongbox it was meant to unlock.

But the helmet, and its dark, shielded gaze, didn't matter; not really. She was one of the few creatures in the galaxy who had ever seen Boba Fett without his helmet— for all the good it had done her. Back on the planet Tatooine, in the harsh glare of the twin suns above the Dune Sea, Neelah had found him close to death, vomited out onto the hot sands by the Sarlacc beast whose death throes he had engineered from inside its gut. The Sar-lacc's gastric secretions, like a corrosive acid capable of etching unalloyed durasteel, had stripped Boba Fett of his armor, right down to and including a good deal of his skin. If she hadn't stumbled across him, his life would have oozed away like the blood seeping out from his raw flesh and hissing on the sun-baked rocks surrounding him.

She had saved his life then, hiding him with the help of Dengar, and keeping him safe long enough to let his wounds heal, wounds that would have killed a creature of lesser will. Even unconscious, under the chemical weight of the most powerful anesthetic drugs, he had still been Boba Fett, tenacious in his grasp on the world of the living.

And Boba Fett afterward, as well—frustratingly so. Gratitude seemed to be a substance in short supply among bounty hunters. Save the guy's life, thought Nee-lah bitterly, and what do you get? Not much—and defi-nitely not answers to questions. Anything she knew of her past was limited to the few scraps that had survived that mystery-producing memory wipe, and the infuriat-ingly little bits and pieces that she had picked up back in Jabba the Hutt's palace, and then here aboard the stolen ship Hound's Tooth. So far she had gotten nothing from Dengar; the history he had been relating to her, of the in-fighting and skulduggery that had finally broken up the old Bounty Hunters Guild, hadn't yet revealed anything of her past. And what it had told her about Boba Fett's past she had already pretty well figured out: that he was nobody to get involved with, even on a partnership basis. A successful business dealing with Boba Fett was one where he kept all the credits, and the other creature got to keep its life. And an unsuccessful one? Boba Fett still kept the credits.

For him to have hauled Neelah onto first his own ship, Slave I, when they had all been under siege by a couple of well-armed lowlifes out of Mos Eisley, then onto this ship he had taken from the reptilian bounty hunter known as Bossk, didn't indicate any gratefulness on Boba Fett's part, any recognition of the fact that he wouldn't even be alive now if it hadn't been for her. He's got some use for me —Neelah had figured that out a while back. If she wasn't exactly hard merchandise—the bounty hunter term for their captives, to be traded in for the nice fat re-wards that had been placed on their heads—she was nevertheless part of one of Fett's mercenary schemes. I just don't know what part yet.

"Careful might not be enough." Boba Fett's cold, emotionless words broke into her thoughts. "Being smart is better. A smart creature doesn't make it a habit to come up behind me without warning. I've killed a few, just for doing that."

"Oh?" Neelah had become sufficiently used to his ca-pacity for violence to no longer be intimidated. Plus, hav-ing nothing to lose—not even one's self—reduced one's fears. "And for no other reason?"

"A warning, perhaps." Boba Fett gave a slight shrug. "To others, not to do the same thing."

"That only works," said Neelah, "when the creature who's listening cares what happens."

He gave no sign of being amused by her comment. "You don't?"

"I'm still trying to find out. If I do or not."

"It doesn't matter to me," said Boba Fett, "whether you do. Just as long as you stay out of the way. While I go about my business."

Neelah felt a hot spark of anger igniting inside her, triggered by Fett's matter-of-fact tone. "And what busi-ness is that? Specifically."

"You'll find out soon enough. When we reach our destination."

Even as small a piece of information as that had proved impossible for her to pry out of Boba Fett. He hadn't seen fit to divulge it to Dengar, either, even though the two bounty hunters were supposed to be partners. In-stead, Fett had been cagey and silent as to the course he had plotted for the Hound's Tooth since they had taken over the ship.

"I've asked you before." Neelah spoke through grit-ted teeth, her hand straying toward the blaster pistol she had tucked inside her belt. "Why all the big mystery?"

"No mystery at all," replied Boba Fett. "Just as I said, you'll find out soon enough. Right now, you don't need to know."

A part of herself that was as cold and dispassionate as the bounty hunter observed her own reaction to his ob-stinate words, as though there were some small clue to be derived there. Neelah was well aware that the imperious response, which she had to keep a tight grip upon, was not that of someone born to be a slave, a dancing girl, and eventual food for a pet rancor in some obese Hutt's palace. She had known that even while she had been un-der the control of the late and unlamented Jabba, with-out even the slightest scrap of memory as to how she had come to be there. The only thing left of her previous existence, whatever it had been and on what distant world, had been the certainty that the cold attention the bounty hunter Boba Fett had directed toward her, in that grisly pit of depravity known as Jabba's palace, had been for some reason inextricably linked with that past.

"You can't blame me," said Neelah, "for wanting to know. You're the one who's told me so many times about what a dangerous place the galaxy is. If we're heading into some region that's going to turn out to be trouble— big trouble—I'd like some warning about it."

"Why?" The question, the way it was spoken by Fett, didn't invite an answer. "There wouldn't be anything you could do about it."

That infuriated her even more. The feeling of helpless-ness, of events being out of her control—that rubbed against some part of her innermost nature as though it were a raw wound. But the blood that she wanted to spill wasn't her own, but Fett's.

"Don't be too sure about that," said Neelah. "There's two other people on this ship—and only one of you."

"If you think that you and Dengar could pull off a lit-tle mutiny, you're welcome to try." No emotion, not even scorn, sounded in Boba Fett's voice. "I've some use for both of you at the moment, but that could change. Real fast." He gestured with one gloved hand toward Neelah. "It's up to you."

She already knew that it was no good asking him what exactly that "use" was. Boba Fett was notorious for play-ing his cards close to his chest, revealing nothing, not even to those who were supposedly his partners.

"You don't leave someone with very many options." Neelah heard her own voice go as cold and hard as Fett's. "Do you?"

"My business is to reduce other creatures' options. That's why I always kept a cage in the cargo hold of my own ship." Boba Fett's hand now pointed toward the decks below the cockpit. "The previous owner of this ship had the same facilities installed; all bounty hunters have them. If you'd rather make the rest of the journey in a rather less comfortable manner, believe me, it can be arranged. Don't expect Dengar to join you, though. He's at least smart enough not to go along with a plan like that."

One more creature around here, thought Neelah, that I can't trust. Boba Fett was infuriatingly correct about that as well; she knew that if Dengar was given the choice between throwing his lot in with her or maintain-ing whatever kind of partnership he had with Fett, he'd go on following the other bounty hunter's orders in a flash. Why wouldn't he? If Dengar stuck with Boba Fett, he had a chance of getting a piece of the action, a slice of the credits that Fett's various schemes and enterprises generated. And that slice, however thin it was cut com-pared to Boba Fett's own, was still better than risking a shot at getting killed for the sake of somebody without even her real name, let alone any other known friend or ally in the galaxy. Dengar couldn't be blamed if he was smart enough to know the odds and to play them for his own benefit.

As for winding up in the cage herself—Neelah wasn't sure whether she cared or not. What's the difference? She could see her own face reflected in the dark visor of Boba Fett's helmet; it was a face that bore the grim, fatalistic expression of someone who might have managed to save herself from the deadly confines of Jabba the Hutt's palace, only to have wound up in another situation that was just like it in essence. I don't make the decisions, she thought. Even whether I live or die.

"So we should all go along with your plan," said Nee-lah, "whatever it is. Without complaining."

Boba Fett shrugged. "Complain all you want. Just not to me. And"—he pointed to the blaster pistol tucked in her belt—"without thinking you could get a jump on me. It's not going to happen."

"Sure about that?"

"Let me put it another way," said Fett. "It hasn't hap-pened yet. And all those who tried to make it happen— they're no longer with us."

She didn't need to be reminded about that. Everything she had heard about Boba Fett, from her time back in Jabba's palace to here onboard the stolen Hound's Tooth, listening to Dengar's tale of the disintegration of the old Bounty Hunters Guild and its ugly aftermath, had rein-forced the impression she'd already had of him. A sen-tient creature put its own life up as the wager when it gambled in any dealings with Boba Fett.

Still —it was a thought she'd had more than once— there are times when you have to go ahead and place your bet. If she hadn't done that, back when she had been the personal property of the late Jabba, she would have eventually wound up being fed to the Hurt's pet rancor, just as poor Oola had been. It was better to die with a wager on the table than to just cringe and wait for any one of the many grisly deaths that this galaxy held for the timid.

Neelah's hand had strayed to the butt of the blaster pistol at her side, resting there as though only another thought, and another decision, were all that stood be-tween her and testing the advice that both Boba Fett and her own remaining caution had given her.

One shot was all that it would take; one fiery bolt from the blaster. The weapon grew warm within her grasp. Some wordless certainty deep inside her, unat-tached to any fragment of memory, any recall of her stolen past, told Neelah that she actually had a chance of pulling it off. The person she had been before, her true identity, hidden behind the blank curtain that had been drawn across all that was rightfully hers to recall—that person, she had come to realize, had reflexes nearly as fast as Boba Fett's. Maybe faster, given that even now she had the element of surprise on her side. He wouldn't ex-pect it, thought Neelah. She could tell that for all his skills as a bounty hunter, both physical and psychologi-cal, there was a blind spot in that helmet-visored gaze: it was only to be expected that he would be unable to ad-mit that any part of his plans, any piece of hard merchan-dise, could have moves equal to his own.

The notion was tempting. She could almost taste it under her tongue, like the hot salt of her own blood. It was the same temptation that she had yielded to once be-fore, in Jabba's palace back on the planet of Tatooine, when she had decided it was better to put an end to the Hutt's ownership of her body and spirit, even if the price to do so was her life. The mystery of her true name and identity was just as maddeningly intolerable; knowing that the answer might be locked inside the mind held by that dark-visaged helmet of Mandalorian battle armorthat thought drove out all others. One quick move with her hand, which already could feel the cold metal of the blaster a millimeter away from her sweating palm, and the mystery would be over, one way or another. One of them would be dead, with either a smoking blaster hole drilled through Boba Fett's chest or her own, depending upon which of them got a bolt off first. And right now, she knew deep inside herself, she was close to not even caring which of them it was ...

"But then you'll never know."

Neelah heard the voice, and for a moment thought it was her own, speaking inside her head. Then she realized that the hard, emotionless words had been Boba Fett's.

He can tell, she realized. He can always tell. Exactly what she had been thinking—her hand, trembling close to the butt of the blaster pistol at her side, had given it away.

"That's the price," continued Fett. "That's still the price."

She nodded. But didn't pull her hand away from the blaster.

"I'll make it easy for you." Boba Fett reached down and drew the blaster that had been holstered on the belt of his battle armor. Holding it by the barrel, he threw it into the farther corner of the cockpit space, where it clanged against one of the bare durasteel bulkheads. "Now you won't have to worry about whether it would cost you your life. The only one that's at stake is my own."

He's playing with me. The lack of any perceptible emotion in his voice only made it clearer to her. The same thing she had known from the beginning: Boba Fett didn't win by sheer violence, or the brutal efficiency of his weapons. The force of his will, and his understanding of other creatures' thoughts, were just as annihilating. She was wrong, she knew that now. Whatever he did, it wasn't play; it was deadly serious. Even in this, in making it easy for her to kill him—if that was what she chose—there was something he wanted from her.

Neelah pulled the blaster from her belt—the weapon seemed to rise of its own accord, as though directed by some intelligence wired into its intricate circuitry—and pointed it straight at Boba Fett's chest. Her finger made closer contact with the trigger, the small bit of metal sensed by and made one with the twitching filament at the end of her nervous system, that then ran directly into the churning storm of thoughts and desires caught inside her skull. With her arm held out, unmoving, she gazed over the blaster's sights at the cold, dark visage that mir-rored her own face ... And couldn't fire.

She lowered the blaster, her finger loosening upon the trigger. "You win," she said.

"Of course." No more emotion sounded in Boba Fett's voice now than before. "There was little doubt of that. You might not know who you really are—and I might not know, either. That's something you haven't de-termined. But I still know more about you; I know how your mind works." A gloved forefinger tapped the side of his helmet. "You have to win here—" Shifting for-ward in the pilot's chair, Fett reached out and set the same fingertip lightly on Neelah's brow. "And here, be-fore you have a chance of winning anywhere else. Or even surviving."

"That's why the others lost, I suppose." As Boba Fett had drawn his hand away, Neelah gave a slow nod of her head. "Like Bossk. You were able to take his ship away from him, just because of what you were able to do in-side his head."

"Exactly," said Fett. He reached out again, taking the blaster pistol from Neelah's hand. It rested on his palm, an inert object. "Something like this ..." The shoulders of his Mandalorian battle armor lifted in a shrug. "It just makes things final. Sometimes. But by then, the battle is already over."

There was a certain wisdom in Boba Fett's words; Neelah knew that these were true as well, like the other things he had told her. "Why do you bother?" She peered toward the gaze hidden behind the dark visor. "Nobody ever said you were a creature of words; someone who would explain the reasons why he would do anything." Back in Jabba's palace, there had been henchmen of the Hutt who had claimed that Boba Fett was a creature of silence; they had never heard him speak even a single word. She didn't know if those thugs had been stupid or lucky. When somebody finally did hear Boba Fett speak, there was usually a reason for it, and one that was rarely to the listener's advantage. "So why are you telling me all this?"

"You're a reasonable creature," said Fett. "There are few such in the galaxy. In this, you and I are more similar than different in nature. Most sentient creatures are only partly so; they think a little, but then are governed by their emotions. The emotions I seek to produce in them are fear and helplessness. Then they're easier to deal with. But you, on the other hand ..." He gave a slow nod, as though carefully weighing his words. "It's differ-ent with one of your kind. First there is emotion—anger, frustration, the desire for revenge—all those things that you have yet to learn to control. But then your reasoning ability, your capacity for logic kicks in. Cold and analyti-cal, even about the things that matter the most to you. Even about your own lost identity. To be cold about other creatures' fates—that comes easily to most worlds' denizens. But to be cold about one's own self ..." His nod this time was more approving. "That's something I recognize. And that I have to treat differently from the other creatures I encounter."

Neelah wondered if this was more of his mind-gaming, another attempt to control her from within. "What hap-pens if you don't? Treat it differently, I mean."

"Then the possibility is raised of my losing the bat-tle." Boba Fett's hidden gaze stayed locked upon her face. "Though not the war, of course."

"What do you mean?"

"Simple," replied Fett. "You're valuable enough to me that I prefer to keep you alive. And . . . cooperative. It's easier to get that from you outside of a cage. But at the same time, I know the dangers of letting you keep a measure of freedom." He handed the blaster pistol back to her. "If those dangers were to become too great—then I'd have to eliminate you. As quickly, and as definitely, as possible."

Neelah regarded the blaster pistol in her hand for a moment, then finally tucked it back in her belt. When she raised her eyes, she looked past Boba Fett, to the star-filled viewport of the cockpit. Somewhere out there was the world from which she had come, that was now lost to her along with so much else. Perhaps, she mused, per-haps they've forgotten my name was well...

And if that was true . .. then she had nowhere else to go. The ship that surrounded her might be the only world she had left.

She brought her gaze around again to Boba Fett. "You'll have to forgive me," said Neelah. She managed a thin smile. "For being a little concerned about this mys-terious destination of ours. But you were the one who told me about all the big events shaping up—out there." One hand pointed toward the viewport.

"About the Im-perial forces gathering . . . some place named Endor." Even the name of the moon seemed fraught with dire portent. "You said it might be a decisive battle; maybe the one that ends the Rebel Alliance." She shook her head. "I came close enough to that struggle between the Empire and the Rebels, back on Tatooine." Bit by bit, Neelah had pieced out the significance of Luke Sky-walker and Princess Leia Organa having been on that remote backwater world. She had seen them both in Jabba's palace, along with their companion Han Solo— first frozen in a block of carbonite, then released and brought to life again. They had been responsible for the death of Jabba, she knew, which she also figured had been a stroke of good luck for herself; escaping from Jabba's clutches and staying free were two different things, at least as long as the Hutt had still been alive. She might owe them, and all the rest of the Rebels, her sur-vival—but that wasn't enough to get her involved with any of them again. "I don't," said Neelah decisively, "want to get near them. They've got their war; I've got mine."

"Don't worry." Boba Fett glanced over his shoulder at the viewport, then back to her again. "That's something else we've got in common. Rebellions are for fools; I deal with the universe as it is. So we're not going anywhere near Endor." He slowly shook his head. "Let them battle it out. And whoever wins . .

. it'll make no difference. Not to creatures like us."

She found a measure of comfort in his words. Though not without sensing the irony of accepting the wisdom of someone who would kill her, or cash her in to the highest bidder, if it suited him. It's all business, thought Neelah. Nothing more than that.

"Leave me," said Boba Fett. He swiveled the pilot's chair back toward the cockpit controls. "I have other things to take care of."

Neelah realized she had nothing more to say. He had won again. Before she'd even had a chance to make a move.

She turned away, stepping through the hatch and then starting down the ladder to the ship's cargo hold.

He smiled when she saw Neelah coming down the lad-der. "Sounds like we've got something in common also," said Dengar. "You didn't have any luck with him, either."

The resulting scowl on the female's face amused him. "What do you know about it?"

"Come on." From where he sat against one of the hold's bulkheads, Dengar pointed to the open panel and the same comm lines that Neelah had tapped into. "More than one can play that kind of game. I heard everything both you and Boba Fett said up there."

"Good for you," Neelah said sourly. She sat down with her back against the opposite bulkhead.

"Congratu-lations—now you know as much as I do. Which isn't much."

"Actually... I do know a little more than you."

Neelah's brow creased in puzzlement. "You found out something? About where we're going?"

"Of course not." Dengar shook his head. "If Boba Fett wants to keep quiet about his intentions, at least I'm not stupid enough to pry into them. But that's the future; that's what is going to happen, and right now we don't have any say about that. I guess that's just how things are when you accept a partnership with Boba Fett." Leaning back against the bulkhead behind him, Dengar spread his hands apart. "The past, though—that's another thing. Now that, I do know something about."

"Great." The scowl deepened on Neelah's face. "You mean this story you've been telling me ... this history of how Boba Fett broke up the old Bounty Hunters Guild and everything that happened after that."

"Precisely," said Dengar. "You've already learned a lot from me. More than you're probably willing to ad-mit. You've got a lot better notion now of how Boba Fett operates—and how far you can trust him—than you did when we left Tatooine."

"For all the good it's done me—" Neelah crossed her arms across her breast. "You might as well have stayed quiet."

"So?" Still smiling, Dengar raised an eyebrow. "You don't want to hear the end of it, then? Not too long ago, you were pretty interested in the story. Enough to hold that blaster pistol on me, to get me to keep on telling it."

"I've changed my mind," said Neelah. "What's the point? He won, he survived, other creatures didn'tpretty much business as usual for Boba Fett. Big deal."

"Very well." Dengar was interested in seeing how long this mood of hers would last. "Of course, there's al-ways the chance that the end of the story would have something you need in it, the one clue that would unlock a whole lot of other puzzles. But if you don't want to take that chance—it's up to you."

"That's right." Neelah closed her eyes and tilted her head back. "So don't bother me with it."

The mood, and the feigned sleep, lasted all of five min-utes. Then one of her eyes opened, then both. She glared at Dengar with them.

"All right," Neelah said finally. "So finish it, already."

It was a small triumph, but still worthwhile. And it would pass the time until they reached whatever destina-tion they were headed for. "You're not going to bother pointing the blaster at me?"

Neelah shook her head. "I'm right at the point where that's probably not such a good idea. The impulse to blow you away might be a little too irresistible. So let's skip it. Just start talking, okay?"

"Fine," said Dengar. "Whatever you want..."