He was jostled a few times by other creatures entering the cantina before he finally decided that the Q'nithian was staying on the up-and-up with him-or at least as much as he could reasonably expect from one of Mos Eisley's shadier denizens. Dengar turned and headed up the rest of the steps. A few seconds later he was threading his way through the spaceport's dark alleys. He had one more errand to take care of-the one on which Boba Fett had sent him here-before he could return to the hills on Mos Eisley's outskirts, where he had left the damaged swoop.
What Dengar hadn't seen was the little creature that inched its way down the metal support pillar of the booth's table, then started a slow, laborious crawl across the cantina's floor. Still no bigger in diameter than Dengar's hand, it had been thin as paper when it had surreptitiously emerged from the cloak of the Q'nithian's feathers; by the time the mimbrane organism had finished listening to the conversation between the two larger creatures in the booth, it had swollen pillowlike, to the thickness of a humanoid finger joint.
Its milkily translucent tissues shimmered with the acoustic energy stored within as the tiny, rudimentary legs around its edges helped it slither past the feet of the cantina's paying customers. A row of primitive sensory organs on its top surface gave the mimbrane just enough ability to distinguish between light and shadow; it navigated mainly by ingrained memory, taking the route it had been taught between the Q'nithian and the other creatures who were waiting for it.
High above the mimbrane's creeping progress, one of the Tonnika sisters, her face all avaricious delicacy framed between intricate braids, laughed at the joke her identical-twin companion had just told her; the punch line had something to do with a crude comparison between Wookiee mating practices and the sour, pinched faces of the Imper ial Navy's top admirals. The gray trail rising from the smoking wand in Senni Tonnika's fine-boned hand drew a wavering line in the cantina's muggy air as she took a step backward, too quickly for the mimbrane to scurry away from the sharp point of her boot heel. It caught the mimbrane at one corner of its amorphous body, with just enough force to squeeze out the last thing it had absorbed while clinging to the underside of the booth's table.
"Did you hear something?" Senni stopped laughing and looked around herself in puzzlement.
"I hear a lot of things." Her sister, Brea, smiled and leaned closer, drawing deep the smoke the other had just exhaled. "All the time…"
"No-" She frowned and looked down toward the floor, slick with spilled drinks and littered with the discarded wrappings of small, unmarked packages. "I mean from down there." She gave a shake of her head. "I very distinctly heard a little voice, and it said, I'll be checking to make sure that it gets there.' "
"You're imagining things."
The mimbrane had already crept away, hurrying as best it could toward its destination. When it reached the booth on the farthest side of the cantina, it didn't need to climb up to the table. A greasy, black-nailed hand reached down and picked it up.
"Fat little thing, ain't it?" Vol Hamame had once been a member of Big Gizz's swoop gang. They had had a parting of the ways, and not an amicable one. Since then, Hamame had found other employment, equally criminal. But a little more profitable. In a lot of ways, life had improved since he had been able to get away from Spiker, Gizz's obnoxious second in command. "Looks like the Q'nithian seat it over here, all stuffed with information."
"What else?" Hamame's partner was equally villainouslooking; the mucus-lined pleats of his nasopharynx fluttered wetly with each breath. "That's what these things are for." The mimbrane's tiny legs wriggled futilely as Phedroi flipped it onto its glistening back.
"Let's see what it's got for us."
Only one of the Q'nithian system's moons had its own atmosphere; it was there, on deeply creviced fault lines, grinding constantly against each other from the tidal pull of the moon's captor planet, that the thick clusters of the mimbrane creatures grew and multiplied like the shelf fungi found on arboreal worlds. They lived on acoustic energy, absorbing sound vibrations and incorporating them layer by layer into their own simple bodies. Millennia of seismic shifts and groans were recorded in the oldest mimbranes, buried beneath the weight of their overlapping offspring and grown into undulating masses big enough to wrap around an Imperial cruiser like a shining blanket.
Small, fresh mimbranes had more practical uses. They were the perfect eavesdropping device, recording into their gelatinous fibers any sounds that struck the tympanic cells in which the creatures were sheathed. Being totally organic, they couldn't be detected by the usual antibugging sweep devices.
Hamame's jag-edged fingertip pressed down on the bulging center of the mimbrane. The stored energy converted back into sound.
"I heard you mention poor Santhananan's name." The Q'nithian's familiar squawk spoke the words. "He met a sad demise, I'm afraid."
"That's right." Phedroi gave a smirking nod. "You had us murder him for you."
"Shut up," said Hamame. "Let's hear the rest." He prodded the mimbrane again.
"Yeah, I'm sure it was tragic." The mimbrane emitted Dengar's recorded voice. "What I want to know is, did anybody pick up on his business?"
The two thugs listened to all of the deal that had gone down between Dengar and the Q'nithian. "Now, that's interesting." Hamame leaned back on his side of the booth. "That Q'nithian is a sneaky type, but he's earned his keep with this bit." On the table between him and Phedroi, the mimbrane was now perfectly flat, all the stored acoustic energy drained from its cells. "So Boba Fett's still alive."
"That's one tough barve." Phedroi gave an admiring shake of his head, the coarse and dirty ringlets of his beard scraping across his tunic collar. "You just can't kill him. If falling down a Sarlacc won't do the trick, then what will?"
Hamame reached inside his jacket and pulled out his blaster. He pointed the muzzle up toward the cantina's ceiling. "This will."
19
It had taken a long time for him to come into his own. To receive, to possess all that should have been his from the beginning. To be known as the toughest, hardest, most feared bounty hunter in the entire galaxy…Bossk leaned back in the pilot's chair of the Hound's Tooth, savoring the pleasures that came with success. Mingled with a simmering anger that never completely ebbed from the essence of a Trandoshan; he folded the claws of both hands across the scales of his chest and gazed slit-eyed at the stars visible through the viewport. Too long, he brooded; too long a time. If all the creatures on all those worlds had had any sense, they would have recognized him as the best. The absolute best. Instead-and this brought the fire inside him to a hotter pitch-he'd had to wait until Boba Fett was dead. And that had been much too long in coming.
A thread of regret mingled with the other emotions. He would have liked to have killed Fett himself, torn out his competitor's throat with one roundhouse sweep of his claws. Or to have focused the crosshairs of a blaster rifle's sight upon that nar-row-visored helmet, then pressed the firing stud and seen Boba Fett's masked visage replaced by a quick explosion of blood and bone splinters ...