Bossk sat staring at the display for a few moments longer, then tucked it away again. He stood up from the booth and immediately halted in place.
The cantina crowd was massed solid in front of him, eyes of the galaxy's various shapes and colors regarding him, with none of the creatures saying a word. Then— slowly—the silence was broken, as first a few individu-als, then the entire crowd, began applauding and raucously cheering.
A drunken harf, with shining red, gogglelike eyes and an elongated snout, put a massive arm around Bossk's shoulders. "We don't like you any more than we ever did," said the creature. "We just never saw anything like that before. Not with Boba Fett, that is ..."
"Sure ..." Bossk nodded in appreciation of the other's words. "It means a lot to me, too." Back in the game, he thought dizzily. He didn't need the Hound's Tooth anymore; with the credits he had now, he could buy a whole new ship. And a better one ...
Ideas and desires whirled through Bossk's head. He pushed his way through the noisy crowd, heading for the light outside.
"Must've been one of those days." On a level stretch of plain outside Mos Eisley, N'dru Suhlak looked up from the access panel on his Headhunter's exterior hull. He had been keeping himself busy with necessary repairs to the craft; after the encounter with Osss-10 above Tatoo-ine's atmosphere, the Headhunter hadn't been in optimum shape. Reaching into his tool kit for a larger hydrospan-ner, he had spotted Boba Fett returning from his "busi-ness meeting" in the spaceport's cantina. "Couple of folks came by a little while ago; they told me some of what happened."
Fett had a small parcel, wrapped in unmarked flimsi-plast, tucked under his arm. "Creatures talk. You should ignore them."
"Don't know about that." Suhlak wiped his hands on a greasy rag, then slammed the access panel shut.
"Sounded kind of interesting. I mean, a big roaring blaster fight like that, and all those other creatures getting killed. Must have wiped out half the 'port's population."
"Nowhere near," said Fett drily. "These things get ex aggerated when they get told over and over." He reached up and stowed the package in the Headhunter's bubbled-out passenger area. "Is this thing ready to go? Just be-cause I got what I came here for, that doesn't mean I'm in any less of a hurry."
"We're outta here." Suhlak picked up his tool kit. "Sooner you're off my hands and I get paid, the happier I'll be."
In a few minutes, the Z-95 Headhunter was beyond Tatooine's atmosphere again, heading for deeper space and the rendezvous point with Dengar and Neelah aboard the Hound's Tooth. From the pilot's chair, Suhlak glanced over his shoulder and watched as Boba Fett un-wrapped the package and began examining its contents.
I don't even want to know, thought Suhlak. He turned back to the controls and the forward viewport. What-ever the package might hold, it was Fett's business and none of his own. Let him get killed over it.
Suhlak started punching numbers into the navicom-puter , getting ready for the jump into hyperspace.
15
"How long do you think we'll have to wait around here?" Dengar turned from the Hound's controls and glanced over his shoulder. "Before he shows up?" "I don't know," said Neelah. "Hope it's soon ..." They had dropped out of hyperspace and into the Oranessan system, followed by the KDY security cruiser, just as Boba Fett's scheme had predicted. Since then, Dengar had kept the Hound's Tooth at the precise speed that their strategy called for: just fast enough to stay out of reach of the pursuing cruiser. The mottled orb of Oran-u, the system's largest planet, filled the forward viewport as the chase continued.
All that Neelah and Dengar needed now was for Boba Fett to have successfully completed his mission on Tatooine and then rendezvous with them here, as they had agreed upon back at Balancesheet's freighter. Nee-lah had half expected Fett to already be here waiting for them; that sort of thing was exactly his style. But in-stead, when the Hound's Tooth had reached its destina-tion, they had been greeted with the disappointing reality of empty space, with no sign of the smaller Head hunter craft, with its hunt saboteur pilot and bounty hunter passenger.
"The way I see it," fretted Dengar, "is that there's a couple of things that could go sour right about now.
"Either something happened to Boba Fett and Suh-lak on the way to Tatooine or on the way here—like them getting intercepted and blown away by one of the other bounty hunters gunning for 'em—in which case they're not going to be showing up here at all. Or Boba Fett had some other plan of his own all along, and he's double-crossed us, which would mean that he never intended to meet up with us here at all." That notion made Dengar grit his teeth while giving a slow shake of his head. "Then we'd be waiting around here for nothing."
"I don't think that last one's too likely," said Neelah. Leaning back against the cockpit hatchway, she crossed her arms tight across her breast, as though that were the only way to keep her jangling nerves under control. "He's got reasons for hooking up with us again. Not be-cause he's got any great affection for either one of us, but because he'd still be thinking there'd be some way of gen-erating a profit from me."
"Maybe so." Dengar didn't seem convinced. "It's just that he's got such a devious mind. But then, I knew that before I ever became partners with him."
"There's another possibility." It was one that had been gnawing away for a while now, even before they had caught sight of the Oranessan system approaching in the distance. "The worst one."
"What's that?"
"Just this," said Neelah grimly. "That nothing hap-pened to Boba Fett on the way out to Tatooine, and nothing happened to them on the way here. And nothing happened on Tatooine, either."
Dengar's brow creased with puzzlement. "What do you mean?"
"Don't you get it? What if Boba Fett gets all the way to Tatooine, finds this Bossk creature—and Bossk doesn't have this fabricated evidence that was taken out of that cargo droid, back on Fett's ship." Neelah's voice tight-ened in her throat. "Maybe it doesn't exist anymore. Maybe Bossk got rid of it; maybe he decided it wasn't worth anything, and he destroyed it somewhere along the way."
"You're forgetting something," said Dengar. "Bossk has already put the word out that he's sitting on this stuff, looking for a buyer for it."
"That doesn't mean he has it." Neelah shook her head in disgust. "Boba Fett isn't the only bounty hunter with a devious mind. Bossk could've gotten rid of, or lost track of it in a hundred different ways, be-fore he had any idea of its value. Then when he heard that Kuat of Kuat was looking for it and was ready to pay a high price for it, he might have decided to see if he could scam the money for it from Kuat, without actually delivering it. Or Bossk might have thought that if it was so valuable, the prospect of getting it back would be a perfect enticement for luring Boba Fett within striking range—you know what kind of a grudge Bossk has against Fett. This might've been Bossk's way of finally settling up old scores—or at least try-ing to."
"Yeah . . . maybe so." Dengar slumped in the pilot's chair, looking deflated. "I hadn't thought about anything like that. But I guess you're right. It's possible."
Neelah had been doing plenty of thinking like that. All the way from Balancesheet's freighter and the drifting fragments of old Kud'ar Mub'at's web, her mind had been ceaselessly turning over one bleak idea after an-other. All of them processed out as the complete dashing of her hopes, of any chance of answering the remaining questions about her past. Those hopes had been raised from the dead, more thoroughly than Dengar and Boba Fett had revived Kud'ar Mub'at, by the assembler's suc-cessor and its surprise about the fabricated evidence be-ing back on Tatooine. Whether that was true or not, it had at least renewed Neelah's faith in there being still one more slender thread that would lead them out of the blind alley to which all their searching up until now had brought them.