Zekk said, “Your target is also my target, and you’re standing between me and my bounty.”
Dengar roared. Zekk took careful aim at the Punishing One’s communications dish and blasted it to pieces. The bounty hunter could do nothing.
His ship hung helpless in space.
Bornan Thul tried to limp away, two of his engines sparking and flaming.
Many of the running lights on his ship winked out. Thul’s systems were failing.
“Hello, ‘Master Wary’,” Zekk transmitted. “We meet again, it seems.”
“I should never have been so foolish as to hire you in the first place,” Thul said bitterly. “My engines are damaged, my ship in ruins. I don’t know how I’ll ever make it away from here. I should have guessed no one would answer my distress call but one of you bloodthirsty bounty hunters.”
“Actually,” Zekk said, “I came to help you get away from Dengar. I … I’m not going to take you in.”
“Why should I believe you?” Thul shot back. “You bounty hunters are all the same, interested in profit but never in consequences. If Nolaa Tarkona gets the information I have, the whole galaxy will become a charnel house.”
“You mean the navicomputer Fonterrat gave you?” Zekk asked, gambling with what he already knew.
“Fonterrat? What do you know about him? That sniveling worm would let billions die for his own profit.”
“Fonterrat is dead—as are all the people on the human colony of Gammalin. It was a plague.”
Zekk had been to the modest settlement, wiped out down to the last inhabitant by a horrible disease unwittingly carried there by Fonterrat, a small-time scavenger who had made the mistake of doing business with Nolaa Tarkona.
Bornan Thul groaned. “Perhaps it is too late then.”
“What’s too late? I can help you protect the information you have—”
“No one can help me,” Thul said flatly. “Especially not a bounty hunter.”
“Listen, I found your brother Tyko, didn’t I?” Zekk said. “I’ve spent time with your son Raynar. Why won’t you trust me?”
“I can’t trust anyone,” Thul said. “There’s too much at stake. The Diversity Alliance has infiltrated everywhere. I can’t even be sure of the New Republic. The Alliance has spies in the military, in the government.”
Thul’s ship staggered away, as if running at only 10 percent power.
Zekk couldn’t believe the man was still trying to escape when he had so little chance. The Lightning Rod could run him down in an instant.
In his pilot’s seat, Zekk felt a sudden chill of warning down his spine.
His rear sensors showed Dengar’s ship powering up again, its lights flaring, weapons systems coming to bear.
“What?” Zekk exclaimed. The blasts of his ion torpedoes should have knocked the Punishing One out of commission for hours—but Dengar must have been prepared for such contingencies. Maybe he had repaired his communications quickly as well, Zekk thought.
“Dengar, behave yourself—or do you want me to shoot you again?”
In response, the other hunter fired three precisely targeted turbolaser blasts at him. Reacting immediately with his Jedi instincts, Zekk spun the Lightning Rod about in a corkscrew trajectory that took him up and away from the line of fire.
Intent only on escape, Bornan Thul continued to limp away in his damaged craft, gathering speed, trying to change coordinates to where he could escape into hyperspace.
“Oh no you don’t,” Zekk said, and took off after Thul. He saw the hyperdrive engines glowing on the fugitive’s battered ship. Somehow Thul had gathered the power and speed necessary to escape.
He must be making his computations right now!
Zekk toggled up a special torpedo, aimed carefully at the sluggish ship, then launched it. The torpedo sailed across space, a pinprick of fire that hit the hull of Thul’s craft an instant before the ship blurred, elongated, and then snapped away, streaking through into hyperspace.
One of Dengar’s engines flickered to life and he fired again at Zekk.
The wounded U-shaped craft picked up speed, pursuing with murderous intent.
With a flash, another ship emerged from hyperspace, and Zekk recognized the odd shape of Boba Fett’s Slave IV. Fett streaked into the fray, entering with all weapons primed. In a moment this place would be crawling with greedy bounty hunters who had picked up Thul’s distress signals.
They were like predatory fish chasing after wounded prey.
Zekk decided the best thing to do right now was to get away, so that he could track down Bornan Thul in his own time.
He had chosen a very narrow and dangerous course. The trackers were a rough bunch, unruly and deadly, and they only operated according to certain terms. Zekk had violated those terms. He had taken sides against most of the other hunters.
And Bornan Thul didn’t even believe his motives.
But Zekk knew that bringing in Raynar’s father could prove deadly for humanity. He had been to Gammalin. He had seen how the virulent disease had swept through the population. Was Bornan Thul a carrier of the plague? What information did Fonterrat’s old navicomputer contain, and why did Nolaa Tarkona want it so badly?
Dengar’s recovering ship rounded on the Lightning Rod and opened fire.
Zekk again dodged as he punched coordinates into his navicomputer.
From Slave IV Boba Fett also issued a warning, ordering Zekk not to flee. Zekk knew he could not possibly escape from the combined efforts of Dengar and Boba Fett.
Leaving the dueling field behind, he flew off, closing his mind to the shouts of outrage that poured from his comm system.
“Sorry, Fett,” Zekk muttered under his breath. “I know you won’t understand, but it was the only way I could live with myself.” Dengar’s and Boba Fett’s words cut off abruptly as soon as he launched into hyperspace.
Relaxing slightly, Zekk permitted himself a slow sigh of relief and pleasure. He was confident now that his position was clear.
And all was not lost. Yes, Bornan Thul had escaped … but Zekk had borrowed a trick from Dengar.
Just in case Thul wouldn’t listen to him—as had indeed proved to be the case—Zekk had prepared a tracking device, a torpedo carrying a transmitter that would strike and cling to the fugitive’s ship.
The transmitter would activate in a couple of days, and then Zekk could find Bornan Thul anytime he wanted. It would be as easy as following the blips….
But finding the hunted man was one thing—figuring out how to help him was quite another.
6
As they approached the Twi’lek homeworld, Jaina maintained sufficient distance that the Rock Dragon would appear as an indistinguishable blip against the stellar background.
The fire and ice planet hung tantalizingly close, but Jaina did not dare move nearer. The Diversity Alliance was extremely watchful.
“Finding Ryloth’s the easy part,” she said, turning slightly in the pilot’s chair. “Getting into Nolaa Tarkona’s tunnels is going to be the real trick.”
The Twi’lek clans had built their homes by boring into cliffsides and creating enormous cities, complete with towering structures, in caverns and grottoes that were protected from the harsh environment of the planet’s surface. Nolaa Tarkona had taken over a prime section of tunnels not far from the ryll mining areas, and the Diversity Alliance now controlled Ryloth and held its population in an iron grip.
“We must be patient,” Tenel Ka said. “Lusa was certain that the correct opportunity would arise. The plan should work.”
“Excuse me, Mistress Jaina,” Em Teedee piped up from where he had been wired to the navigational console, “my initial scans indicate substantial traffic in the vicinity of Ryloth. The planet appears to have many orbiting vessels as well as frequent arrivals and departures of automated industrial ships in the inhabited sections of the mountains.”