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.