Figh exploded into high-pitched laughter, a squealing gale that sent clouds of acrid snuff rising from the box on the table. "Lucky! Lucky!" He slapped his narrow paws beside the box. "Luck is for fools. Used to tell me that. You did."
"Then I've gotten even smarter than I was before." Bossk could feel the expression on his muzzle turn ugly and brooding. "Now I know how important luck is. Boba Fett has luck. That's why every time I've encoun-tered him, he's won."
"Luck?" Figh shrugged. "Little more than that. What. I think."
The awkward Basic of the creature sitting across from Bossk irritated him. "I don't care what you think," he growled. "I've got plans of my own. Plus, I've got the odds on my side now."
"Figure that? How so?"
"Simple." Bossk had had a long time to brood over the matter. "Boba Fett's run of luck has gone on way too long. It's got to end; maybe it's already ended. Then it'll be my turn." He nodded slowly, as though already tast-ing blood seeping between the fangs in his mouth. "And it'll be payback time for Boba Fett."
That produced another bout of snickering laughter from Figh. "Long time coming. That payback. Not the only one—you."
Bossk knew that was true enough. The breakup of the old Bounty Hunters Guild, for which Boba Fett had been largely responsible, had left a lot of creatures throughout the galaxy with a simmering hatred for Fett. He hit us all, right where it hurts. Bossk nodded again, even slower and with eyes narrowed. In our pockets. The old system, under the Guild, had spread the wealth out, not evenly— Bossk's father, Cradossk, as head of the Bounty Hunters Guild, had always done better for himself than any of his followers—but well enough that no hunter went com-pletely hungry. All that was changed now; a lot of former bounty hunters were either dead or had dropped out of the trade, getting into other lines of work that were ei-ther closer to or further from being legal. The criminal organization Black Sun had reorganized; the Empire had picked up some new recruits, as had the Rebel Alliance.
"We could've hung together," sulked Bossk. "If we'd been smart." He couldn't—and didn't—blame himself for that much; he had tried to keep the other bounty hunters, or at least the younger and tougher ones, to-gether after the Bounty Hunters Guild had broken up. That had been the whole point of the Guild Reform Committee that he had put together—with himself at the head, naturally—right after he had eliminated old Cra-dossk, in the traditional and time-honored Trandoshan fashion. The old lizard would've wanted it that way, Bossk told himself. And if Cradossk hadn't, who cared? He was still just as dead and out of the way now.
"Smart, lucky—big ifs," said Figh. "For you. For Boba Fett, not ifs."
"Yeah, well, we'll see about that." The drink's intoxi-cants had fueled Bossk's anger. "Like I said, I got plans."
"Plans take money. You got?"
Bossk glared at the Mhingxin, wondering just how much he knew. "Enough."
"True?" Figh gave a doubtful shrug. "Not so heard around here."
The murder of the beggar, whose body Bossk had left in the alley at Mos Eisley's perimeter, was starting to seem pointless. Or at least pointless beyond the simple pleasure of snapping another creature's neck in his fists. It was beginning to seem that everybody in the spaceport had a line on his financial condition.
"You heard wrong, then." Bossk decided to bluff it out. "Use that little rodent brain of yours, for a change. The old Bounty Hunters Guild had a huge treasury stashed away, before it fell apart. Who do you think wound up with all those credits?"
Figh smiled unpleasantly. "Not you."
"Look, just because I didn't land here with my own personal ship—that doesn't mean anything. I got my own reasons for wanting to keep a low profile."
The Mhingxin uttered a common, low-slang ex-pression for bovine waste material. "Broke, you, that's the truth. What heard, more than one mouth. Smiling and laughing, too. Nearly as many enemies, you, as Boba Fett. All that killing." Figh shook his head, rudi-mentary snout whiskers fluttering. "Stepping on toes. Probably why your bad luck. Nobody wish you good luck."
Bossk felt the urge rise in him to reach across the table and do the same thing to Figh that he had done to the beggar he had left in the alley. He restrained himself; the consequences wouldn't have been insurmountable, but he didn't need the expense right now of paying the bar-tender to take care of the mess. Plus—now that Bossk thought about it—there was a certain value to having an information source like Figh around.
"So tell me something." Bossk leaned across the table, clawed hands folded around the drink in front of him. "Since you've heard so much about my state of affairs. If I didn't get the Bounty Hunters Guild treasury, then who did?"
"Everybody knows. Not even worth charging you for." Figh's sneer split one side of his face. "The credits gone, and so is Gleed Otondon. Figure out."
That jibed with everything Bossk had been able to find out while he had been making his way here to Ta-tooine . He could still remember the annihilating fury that had boiled up inside him when he had attempted to access the mountain of credits that had been stashed away from the vanished Guild and had found the ac-counts completely ransacked. Whoever had been re-sponsible, and who now had the credits that should rightfully have been in Bossk's pockets, had not only known the crypto-security codes for the accounts, but also exactly what banking and financial-center worlds they had been located at. Obviously an inside job: some of the accounts had been emptied just a few min-utes before Bossk got to them and found them bare. So it must have been somebody who had been at the top levels of the old Bounty Hunters Guild, Bossk figured, one of his father Cradossk's most trusted advisors, a creature that would have been in a position to snoop out the access codes and the other information neces-sary for locating all those hidden credits. And stealing them, brooded Bossk. The injustice of it still rankled. If anyone was going to steal that money, it should have been him.
Whoever it had been, though, it obviously wasn't one of the younger bounty hunters that had gone with him into the Guild Reform Committee. None of those had had access to that kind of information in the old Guild; they had all still been trying to scrabble up the ladder to those levels, with the places and positions of influence all occupied by their elders.
That had been the reason why so many of them had welcomed the breakup of the old Guild, and had even helped bring it about; even Bossk had seen the per-sonal advantages in revolution, of smashing the system in place and putting in a new one with himself in charge, supported by the younger and tougher bounty hunters. It just hadn't worked out that way. We should've killed 'em all, thought Bossk in retrospect, right at the start. Too many of the elders in the old Guild had survived the breakup, and had gone on to form their own spin-off fragment, the so-called True Guild. All that had been ac-complished by the existence of two splinter groups was a war of attrition between them. The elders had been a lot tougher than the young bounty hunters, Bossk in-cluded, had expected; tough enough, at least, to have thinned out the Guild Reform Committee's ranks pretty drastically, at the same rate that the True Guild's mem-bers had been picked off. If the goal had been to reduce the number of bounty hunters alive and working in the galaxy—and Bossk had heard rumors to that effect, about whoever had been behind Boba Fett's entry into the old Guild—then that goal had been well and bloodily achieved.
Though now, it appeared as if somebody else had done all right by the smashing of the old Guild. It and its successor fragments, the Guild Reform Committee and the True Guild, were long gone—why would any bounty hunter in his right mind stay in either organization when all it seemed to do was target him for death by the other side? The even smaller and less powerful splinter groups, forming after the disintegration of the two main factions, held no attraction for Bossk. He had already decided that it was better to be an independent operator, on one's own or, at the most, hooked up with a partner. The Hunter's Creed, the honor code that had kept most bounty hunters from killing one another off too readily, was over with; from now on, it was every hunter for him-self. The only thing left of value from the old Bounty Hunters Guild had been its treasury—and now that was gone as well.