There were still a great many moves left in the game, though, before that happened. Kuat was determined to play them all.
"I suppose," he told the felinx, "we'll be seeing him again." That had been the main reason that he had canceled any orders for a second bombing run on Tatooine's Dune Sea. The conviction had settled in Kuat of Kuat that it was a pointless endeavor; if Boba Fett was going to be eliminated, it wasn't by any means as relatively crude as that. "He'll take a good deal of killing. Before he's dead enough."
He supposed it hadn't been a complete waste, though.
Perhaps I've slowed him down-there would be time to shift a few other pieces into position, to contemplate the game board and devise strategies for it.
The felinx had waited long enough; now it impatiently informed its master so.
"Soon enough." Kuat of Kuat cradled the animal in the crook of his arm again and idly scratched the spot behind its ears that it liked the best. "A little time, perhaps.
But it won't be long."
It never was, when it came to dealing with Boba Fett.
Just as before, on another part of the board, when the pawns had been creatures such as that wretched spidery assembler Kud'ar Mub'at and the Bounty Hunters Guild.
That game, Kuat knew, had played out with fatal speed.
"Not long," murmured Kuat of Kuat again. "Not long at all ..."
"There's something big coming down." Bossk's smile was jagged and ugly. As always. "Something really big."
Boba Fett leaned back against the wall behind the stone bench. Nothing the Trandoshan told him ever came as a surprise; the big reptile just hadn't learned that yet, about how far behind the curve he was always fated to be.
Maybe he will find out, thought Fett, before he dies. "Go on," said Fett. In the meantime there was some value to a pretense of ignorance on his own part. "Tell me about it."
"Wait a second." Bossk turned his scaly head, looking over the bleak contents of Boba Fett's temporary quarters at the Bounty Hunters Guild's main complex. He had already pushed the iron-hinged door shut behind himself with a push from his clawed hand. "This isn't," he growled in a low voice, "something everybody needs to know about." The inspection from his slit-pupiled eyes apparently satisfied him, that there were no obvious listening devices installed in the cracks between the damp stones. "At least, they don't need to for the moment."
"You have a compulsion for secrecy." Idiot, thought Boba Fett-a thousand snooping machines could have been hidden in the chamber that a mere visual scan wouldn't have detected. "That's commendable."
"Gotta be careful." Bossk sat down on the bench beside him and leaned in close. "Especially about 1 something like this."
"Which is?"
All around the sparsely furnished, rough-hewn space, the corridors of the Bounty Hunters Guild compound folded and coiled around each other, replicating the devious pathways of the minds contained therein. Those minds, of the bounty hunters themselves, had been getting progressively more devious since Boba Fett's arrival in their midst. He could sense it, like being inside an infinitely replicating maze, branching through fractal progressions of paranoia and deceit. That was fine by him it was what his plans, and those of the arachnoid assembler Kud'ar Mub'at, called for. The bounty hunters were already getting lost in that maze; some of them wouldn't survive to find their way out.
It's different for me, thought Fett. He was un concerned about the maze's exponential complexity. It didn't matter whether he had a map, or a thread leading his way out. When the time came, he would break his way through the encircling walls, as though they were made of flimsiplast rather than the stone of other sentient creatures' greed and malice. Soon enough ...
"A big job," said Bossk. His claws tightened reflexively, as though upon either the neck of some merchandise or the credits to be gotten for it. "The kind you like."
Fett kept any trace of emotion out of his voice, words blank as the visor of his helmet. "How big?" Leaning even closer, Bossk whispered hoarsely into the audio receptor at the side of Fett's helmet. The Trandoshan's fang-lined smile was even bigger when he drew away, the number recited.
"I see." Boba Fe tt wasn't surprised by the amount of the bounty being offered; he had his own sources of information, so much sharper and beyond those of any Guild member. "That's an enticing sum." He wasn't surprised, either, that Bossk had shaved a quarter million credits off the price. Like most bounty hunters, Bossk had a flexible notion of what constituted a fair division of profits. "Very enticing, indeed."
"Yeah, ain't it?" The contemplation of that kind of credits flow seemed to inspire a new level of glittering- eyed avarice in Bossk. "I knew you'd go for it."
"And what is the exact nature of this merchandise?"
Boba Fett already knew, but he had to ask in order to keep up the masquerade; Bossk had to believe that he was revealing the details rather than just confirming them.
"Somebody must want it pretty badly to put that kind of price on it."
"You can say that again." Bossk held up one claw.
"Here's the scoop. Seems a certain Lyunesi comm handler named Oph Nar Dinnid managed to work himself up a real case of hyper-eros." The toothy smile shifted into a leer. "You know how it goes-the same old story."
Fett knew what the Trandoshan was talking about. The Lyunesi were one of six sentient species on Ryoone, a planet down-spiral from one of the remoter sectors of the Outer Rim Territories. Unusually dismal conditions had been brought about millennia ago by a seemingly permanent suspension of volcanic ash in the upper atmosphere, resulting in a ruthless competition for survival. The other inhabitants of Ryoone would have wiped out the Lyunesi long ago if the fragile creatures hadn't mastered the arts of interspecies communication. Their skills went far beyond mere translation of words and meaning; surrounded by enemies, with the continuation of their own breed dependent upon every nuance of language and gesture, the Lyunesi bought their lives with interpretive skills far beyond even the most highly developed protocol droid. On Ryoone, that meant they made possible all the fluid and rapidly shifting diplomacy between the planet's other species, the madly dissolving and re-forming alliances, the declarations of war and swiftly terminated peace treaties between sentient creatures who didn't even share the same metabolic basis, let alone language. In the galaxy beyond Ryoone, the Lyunesi were found at every communication nexus, sorting out and fine-tuning the messages and negotiations between one wildly dissimilar sector of the Empire and another. All that expertise at reading other species' inten tions and secrets had its downside, though. From time to time various Lyunesi fell prey to their own sensitivity.
An all-consuming passion seized them; worse, it was nearly always reciprocated by the object of their desire.
Unlike members of the reptilian Falleen species, whose conquests were achieved with a notable coldness and lack of feeling, Lyunesi and their hypererotic targets rapidly found themselves in situations where neither partner was left with a shred of self-preserving intelligence. Given the high-level diplomatic stations where Lyunesi were so often found, the results were usually catastrophic.
And fatal.
"I know the story," said Boba Fett. Both in general and in the specific case of Oph Nar Dinnid, which his own sources had told him about. "Better that a high-ranking female should get involved with someone like Prince Xizor. The experience is reputedly more intense and pleasurable, and after it's over, the female might still be alive. If she keeps her wits about her." Fett supposed that with someone like his sometime employer Xizor, that was what passed as chivalry. "The problem with Lyunesi is that they're not smart enough to be heartless."