"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...