The Mandalorian Armor

4

"Stick with me," Bossk told the new Guild member.

"And I'll show you how it's done."

He could feel the other's rising anger, like the radiation from a reactor-core meltdown. That was exactly the response he wanted, that his comments were designed to evoke. There wasn't the tiniest segment of a standard time cycle that Bossk wasn't angry to some degree. He even slept angry, the way all Trandoshans did, dreaming of their razor fangs locked on the throats of their reptilian species' ancient enemies. Rage and blood lust were good things in the Trandoshan galaxy-view. That was how things got done.

"You needn't act wise and superior with me." The close-range audio unit built into Zuckuss's breathing apparatus had enough bandwidth to let his irritation sound through. "I've collected nearly as many bounties as you have. Your family connections are the only reason for your rank in the Guild."

Bossk displayed an ugly, lipless smile toward the partner he'd been assigned. The urge to reach over and pull the other's head off, air hoses and comlink wires dangling like the tendrils of swamp weed surrounding the birth pits back on Trandosha, was almost irresistible. Maybe later, Bossk told himself, when this job's over. He pointed a talon down the corridor in front of them. Both he and Zuckuss had their spines flat against the wall of a side passage; from behind sealed doors some twenty meters away, the brittle music of a jizz-wailer band sounded, mixed with the high-pitched babble of the casino's customers blowing their credits on rows of rigged jubilee wheels. Gambling held no attraction for Bossk; he preferred surer things. Another sentient creature's death was the best, especially if there was profit involved. Sometimes, though-as with this job-the quarry had to be taken alive, if there was going to be any payoff. That complicated things.

"The thermal charges are already in place." The point of Bossk's claw indicated a pair of tiny bumps on the doors of the casino's main accounting office. A chameleonoid visual sheath on the charges' casings prevented the security optics from detecting them. "When I blow them, I want you straight through those doors. Don't bother scanning for guards, just dive in-"

"Why me?" Zuckuss turned his large-eyed gaze toward him. "Why don't you do that bit?"

"Because," said Bossk, grating out an unconvincing show of patience, "I'll be covering you from behind." He held up his blaster rifle, its stock and grip controls modified for his talons, large even by Trandoshan standards. "I'll draw off any fire while you're securing the counting room. It's a standard two-prong attack, straight out of the Guild manual for this kind of situation."

"Oh." Leaning his head out from the passage, Zuckuss studied the doors. "That makes sense…I suppose …."

Idiot, thought Bossk. The actual reason was that the first one into the room was more likely to get sliced into bleeding pieces by the guards' tight-focus lasers. Better you than me-especially since his partner's death would mean he'd get to keep all of the bounty for himself, or at least the part that was left after the Guild took its share.

"Let's go." He shoved Zuckuss out ahead of himself, at the same time as he hit the trigger device mounted on the sleeve of his stalking gear. The faint sounds of music and frenetic pleasure were drowned out by the bassheavy rumble of the thermal charges ripping open the sealed doors.

Bossk planted himself in the middle of the corridor, clawed feet spread wide, blaster rifle raised to his slitpupiled eye. One talon squeezed onto the rifle's trigger stud in anticipation; the cold heart in his chest sped up with excitement as he peered through the coiling smoke ….

No fire came from beyond the ripped, heat-distorted metal.

"Zuckuss!" He shouted into the comlink mike mounted near the leathery scales of his throat. "What's going on?"

A moment passed before the other bounty hunter's reply came. "Well," said Zuckuss's voice, "the good news is that we don't have to worry about the guards …." Bossk charged down the corridor, rifle clutched in both sets of talons, and into the casino's accounting room. Or what was left of it the smoke from the thermal charges' explosion had lifted enough that the scattered taliputer and vidlink terminals could be seen. Along with the bodies of a half-dozen casino guards-each one had had a laser hole drilled through the chest plate of his uniform with impressive accuracy. And speed, Bossk managed to note. None of the guards had even managed to get his weapon unslung and up into firing position; whoever had taken them out had done so in a matter of sec onds.

"Look," said Zuckuss. He bent down and touched the hole in one guard's chest plate. "I'm getting a thermal reading here. The plastoid hasn't cooled-they were all lasered while we were still standing out in the corridor!" The bounty hunter stood and pointed to the room's far wall. A jagged hole, big enough for Bossk himself to have walked through without stooping, revealed the stacked cylinders of the power converters behind the main casino building. "Somebody beat us to it-"

"That's impossible," snapped Bossk. "That wall's monocrystal-chained; we'd have heard any blast powerful enough to get through it. Unless ..." A sudden suspicion hit him; he glanced over his shoulder to the opposite wall. A sonic dis-sipator, the dials on its silvery ovoid surface trembling at the overload point, hung overhead by its automatically extruded gripfeet. The indicators slowly backed away from their red zones as the impact of the wall-breaching explosion was converted into a harmless sibilant whisper.

The rage inside Bossk leaped up, as though it could blow out another hole, even bigger and hotter. That crossbred spawn of a…The curse died between his gritting fangs. There was only one bounty hunter who used that kind of sophisticated-and expensive-equipment. Either it had been smuggled into the counting room somehow, or-more likely-an access hole just big enough for the device had been drilled through the wall, followed by the explosive charge itself when the dissipator had been activated to soak up the noise. There was no point in looking around for the quarry for whom he and Zuckuss had come here. Bossk gripped the edge of the hole torn in the casino's exterior and scanned the planet's pockmarked horizon. In the distance, the infuriatingly familiar shape of a high-speed interstellar craft lifted into the deepening violet of the sky. The ship's engines trailed fire as it headed offworld.

"Come on!" Bossk grabbed Zuckuss by one arm and pulled him toward the gap in the wall. Shrieking alarms sounded from the corridor, triggered by the charges that had taken out the doors; it would only be a few seconds more before guards from other sections of the casino got here. He slung his rifle behind his shoulder and prepared to jump.

"But-" Zuckuss drew back. "But we must be ten meters up! At least!"

"So?" He growled at his partner. "Can you think of a quicker way out of here?"

A few seconds later he and Zuckuss were scrambling to their feet. The urge to murder filled Bossk again as Zuckuss groaned in pain.

"I think I broke something …."

'As laser shots from the casino guards above sizzled the ground, melting the planet's silicate-heavy ground into patches of glass, he started running, aware that Zuckuss was right behind him.

They caught up with their adversary out beyond the planet's atmosphere.

Bossk jammed the point of his talon down on the comm button as Zuckuss, beside him in the navigator's seat of the Hound's Tooth, fussed with a broken connector to one of his air hoses. "Shut off your engines," he barked into the link. There was no need for formalities; in this remote zone of the starways, no other ship was within hailing range. "You have merchandise onboard that belongs to us. Specifically, one sentient individual by the designation of Nil Posondum, formerly employed by the Trans-Galactic Gaming Enterprises Corporation-"

"Your property?" A cold, uninflected voice sounded from the speaker mounted above the Hound's controls. "And why would this said individual-if he were aboard my ship-why would he belong to you?"

"Maybe," whispered Zuckuss, "we shouldn't get this barve angry. He can be a tough customer."

"Shut up." Bossk pressed the comm button again. "By authority of the Bounty Hunters Guild. That's what makes him ours. Hand him over now, and you won't get into trouble."

"That's very amusing." No emotion, amused or otherwise, was discernible in the other's words. "But you seem to be laboring under a severe misapprehension."

"Yeah?" Bossk glared at the Hound's forward viewport. The other ship showed no sign of cutting its speed. "What am I mistaken about?"

"I'm not restricted by the authority of your socalled Bounty Hunters Guild. I answer to a higher law."

"Which is?"

"Mine." The temperature of the scattered atoms between the ships couldn't have been closer to absolute zero. "Specifically, what's mine I keep. Until I get paid for it."

Bossk's words grated through his fangs. "Look, you conniving, diseased gnathgrg-"

The comm indicator blinked off, the connection broken by the other ship.

"There he goes." Zuckuss gazed up at the viewport. The flaring trails from the engines of the Slave I, the transport of the galaxy's most ruthlessly efficient bounty hunter, blurred and disappeared into hyper-space. Cold and mocking stars filled the sector where it had been.

Bossk's slit pupils narrowed as he glared at empty space. The other ship, and its pilot and his captured prize, might be gone-but the seething fury in Bossk's scaled breast wasn't.

The figure in the cage cowered back from the bars as Boba Fett approached.

"There's no need for that." The Slave I's minimal galley had ejected a tray of some nondescript edible substance, a lumpish gray gel that was unappetizing but adequate for a standard humanoid life-form. Fett placed the tray on the metal-grated flooring and pushed it through an opening in the cage with the toe of his boot.

"I'm not being paid to hurt you. Therefore you won't be hurt."

"And if you were being paid to do that?" The former head accountant for the Trans-Galactic Gaming Enterprises Corporation gazed sulkily from the holding pen, the only one presently occupied aboard the Slave I. "What then?"

"You'd be in a world of pain." Boba Fett pointed to the tray; a little of its glistening contents had slopped onto the pen's floor. "As merchandise, you are more valuable alive than dead. In fact, you would be worthless to me as a corpse. To deliver you unharmed-relatively so-is the primary requirement for collecting the bounty that was posted on you. If you try starving yourself, you will be force-fed. I'm not known for being gentle about that sort of thing. If you were to be so foolish as to try to injure yourself in any other manner, you'll find yourself in restraints considerably less comfortable than your present situation."

The accountant named Nil Posondum looked around the bare cage. A thin pale hand gripped one of the bars. "I'd hardly call this comfortable."

"It can get worse." The shoulders of Boba Fett's armored combat gear lifted in a shrug. "My ship is built for speed, not luxury accommodations." He'd left the Slave I's controls set on autopilot; a small datapad clipped to his forearm monitored the craft's uninterrupted course through hyperspace. "You should take what pleasure you can from your time here. Things won't be any better for you where you're going." In fact, Boba Fett knew they would be much worse for the accountant. Posondum had made the grievous error of shifting allegiances, changing jobs in an industry where loyalty was prized-and disloyalty punished. Worse, the accountant had been keeping the financial records for a chain of illicit skefta dens in the Outer Rim Territories that were controlled by a Huttese syndicate. Hutts tended to view their employees as possessions-one of the reasons that Boba Fett had always kept a freelancer's independent relationship with his frequent client Jabba. The accountant Posondum hadn't been so smart; he'd been even stupider when he'd gone over to his former employers' competition with a cortical data-splint loaded with the Hutts' odds-rigging systems and gray-market transfer shuffles. Hutts were even more secretive than possessive; Boba Fett had sometimes wondered if they grew so huge by greedily ingesting everything that came into reach of their little hands and huge mouths, and letting nothing go. Not even one frightened accountant with a computerenhanced brain full of numbers.

"Why don't you just kill me now?" Posondum hunkered on the floor of the cage, his back against its bars. He'd tasted the tray and pushed it away in disgust. "You'd do a quicker job of it than the Hutts will."

"Likely so." He felt no pity for the man, who'd brought his troubles upon himself. You hang out with Hutts, he thought, you'd better be careful not to get rolled over on. "But as I said. I do what I get paid for. No more, no less."

"You'd do anything for credits, wouldn't you?" Boba Fett could see his own reflection, doubled in the small mirrors of the accountant's resentfully burning eyes. The image he saw was of a full helmet, battered and discolored, yet completely functional; his face was concealed by the narrow, T-shaped visor. His combat gear bristled with armaments, from shin to wrist; the tapered nose of a directional rocket protruded from behind one shoulder. A walking arsenal, a humanoid figure built out of machines. The lethal kind.

The reflected image nodded slowly. "That's right," said Boba Fett. "I do the things I'm good at, and for which I get paid the best." He glanced down at the data readout. "It's nothing personal."

"Then we could make a deal." Posondum looked up hopefully at his captor. "Couldn't we?" "What kind of deal?" "What do you think?" The accountant stood up I and gripped the bars nearest to Fett. "You like getting paid-I know the kind of outrageous fees you charge for your services-and I like remaining alive. I'm probably as fond of that as you are of credits." Boba Fett let his masked gaze rest upon the other's sweating face. "You should have considered how precious your life is to you before you incurred the wrath of the Hutts. It's a little late for regrets now.

"But it's not too late for you to make some credits. More credits than the Hutts can pay you." Posondum pressed his face into the bars, as though he could somehow squeeze out between them through the sheer force of his desperation. "You let me go and I'll make it worth your while."

"I doubt it," said Fett coldly. "The Hutts pay excellent bounties. That's why I like taking on their jobs."

"And why do you think they want to get me back so badly?" Posondum's knuckles turned white and bloodless as his fists tightened. "Just for the old ledgers I've got stowed away inside my head? Or just so the competition won't find out a few little trade secrets?"

"It's not my business as to why my clients desire certain things. Things such as yourself." A small in dicator light pulsed on his wrist-mounted data readout; he'd have to return to the Slave I's controls soon. "I'm just pleased that they do want them. And that they'll pay."

"Just like I will." Posondum lowered his voice, though there was no one to overhear. "I took more than information when I left the Hutts. I took credits-a lot of 'em."

"That was foolish of you." Fett knew how tight the Huttese were with credits; it was a characteristic of their species. There had been times when he'd needed to take extreme measures to get paid for the completion of a job, even when the terms had been agreed upon beforehand. So to steal from a Hutt, and to think that one could get away with it, was the height of idiocy.

"Maybe so-but there was so much of it. And I thought I could get away, that I could hide. And my new bosses would protect me …."

"They did the best they could." Boba Fett shrugged.

"It just wasn't good enough. It never is, when I'm involved."

"Look, I'll give you the credits. All of them." Posondum trembled with the fervor of his plea. "Every credit I stole from the Hurts-it's all yours. Just let me go."

"And just where are these credits?" Posondum drew back from the cage's bars.

"They're hidden."

"I could very easily find out the location." Fett kept his voice as level and emotionless as before. "The extracting of useful information is a specialty of mine."

"It's memory-encrypted," said the accountant.

"Below the conscious level. And with a trauma sensor implanted." He pointed to a small scar just above his left ear. "You try to dig the info out of me, it'll trip and wipe the cortical segment clean. Then nobody will ever find where I put the credits."

"There's ways around those things." Boba Fett had seen them before. "Bypasses and shunts-they're not pleasant. But they work." He supposed the Hutts were already preparing a deep neurosurgical dissection room for Posondum upon his return. "It doesn't matter to me, though. Since I'm not making a deal with you, anyway."

"But why not?" The accountant had reached one of his skinny arms through the bars, trying to grab hold of Boba Fett's sleeve. "It's a fortune-it's more than the Hutts have offered you-"

"It very well might be." He had stepped away from the cage, back to the unadorned and functional metal treads that would return him to the Slave I's cockpit. "You might be as good a thief as you are a number cruncher. And if you're going to steal even one credit from a Hutt, you might as well steal a billion. The consequences are the same. But even if you do have that kind of credits hidden away, I'm not interested in them. Or not interested enough. I have my reputation to think of."

"Your…" Posondum gaped at him in amazement and dismay. "Your what?"

"The Hutts and all my other clients-they pay me the kind of bounties they do because of one thing. I deliver. Once I've caught my prey, nothing stops me from bringing it in. Nothing. If I take on a job, I complete it. And everyone in the galaxy knows that."

"But…but I've heard of other bounty hunters ... who'll cut a deal …."

"Other bounty hunters may conduct their business as they please." Fett barely managed to keep from his voice the contempt with which he held the so-called Bounty Hunters Guild's members. That kind of shortsighted greed was one of the reasons he had no desire to associate himself with the Guild. "They have their standards…and I have mine." One of his gloved hands grasped the ladder's side rail; he looked back over his shoulder at the cage. "And I've got the merchandise, and they don't. There's a connection."

Posondum's knees visibly weakened, his hands sliding down the bars as he sank limply toward the cage's floor. Whatever glint of hope had been in his face was now extinguished.

"I suggest you go ahead and eat." Boba Fett nodded his helmet toward the tray and its congealed contents.

"You'll need to keep up your strength." He didn't wait for an answer. He climbed up from the ship's holding pens and back toward its waiting controls.