Speculations raced inside Bossk's skull. Had Prince Xizor also been there on Tatooine when Vader's stormtroopers had raided the moisture farm at the edge of the Dune Sea? When Luke Skywalker's aunt and uncle had been killed? That was what the olfactory record in the droid's spy circuits would indicate. But it didn't tell why Xizor would have been there-or why Kuat of Kuat would have planted a surveillance system that would detect the evidence of Xizor's involvement. Or how Boba Fett had come to possess the spy recording…
That many questions without answers made Bossk's head hurt, as though it might explode from the pressure building within. This is going to take some time, he thought grimly, to figure out. He extracted the rest of the recording devices from the droid, stacked the metal boxes up in his hands, and turned back toward the secret chamber's doorway.
Back aboard the Hound's Tooth, Bossk set the spy devices down beside a corner of the cockpit's main control panel. His head ached, the scales of his brow almost visibly flexing from the pounding of his thoughts. He decided it would be better if he waited awhile-maybe even slept a bit, in the lowered respiration and nearly stilled heartbeat mode of the coldblooded Trandoshans-before tackling the mysteries of the recorded hit on the moisture farm. Go at it fresh, Bossk told himself.
In the meantime there was the other matter to check out, the encoded message unit that the Q'nithian down in Mos Eisley had routed his way. Bossk was already wondering if there might be some connection between it and what he had just discovered aboard Boba Fett's Slave I ship. The name of Kuat was popping up in a suspicious number of connections right now-the encoded message unit was addressed to Kuat of Kuat, and the deactivated spy droid was an obvious Kuat Drive Yards construction. He sat down at the cockpit controls of his own Hound's Tooth and pulled the encoded message unit over to himself. The Q'nithian had provided him with a simple bypass key and decryption protocol, with which he'd be able to read the enclosed information, then seal up the message unit and send it on its way without the eventual recipient being able to tell that-its security had been breached.
Bossk extracted a single slip of paper from the unit. That's it? he thought, feeling slightly disappointed. When this much attempted secrecy was involved, there were usually items of obvious significance to be found-entire Imperial code manuals, battle plans, that sort of thing. As he turned the slip over he couldn't imagine that he'd find anything important on it. ...
A moment later Bossk came to; he found himself lying on the floor, a befuddled consciousness slowly seeping back into his brain. The pilot's chair was tilted backward, from where he had toppled from it.
With trembling claws, he plucked the slip of paper from his chest. He held it up in front of his unwilling gaze. The same four words were still there. Words that changed everything, that turned the universe inside out, expelling Bossk from its bright center BOBA FETT IS ALIVE. He couldn't believe it. But at the same time…he knew it was true.
It was always true.
20
"There they are." Phedroi used the muzzle of his blaster rifle to point over the top of the dune. "We could probably take 'em all out, right now." Beside him, lying belly-down in the sand, Hamame shook his head. "Naw-" His rifle lay parallel to his partner's, aimed toward the three distant figures. Five, if the two medical droids were counted. "They're worth more alive than dead. Or at least Boba Fett is."
"Are you kidding?" Phedroi looked over at him in amazement. "You're going to try and take Boba Fett alive? That's crazy. The barve's too dangerous for that. Why push our luck? We should just be glad to get the chance to kill him."
Heat radiated up from the dune, though Tatooine's suns had set long ago. But it was more than the temperature differential between the ground and the starswept night that kept both men sweating. One thing, Hamame knew now, to have followed the other bounty hunter Dengar all the way from Mos Eisley to here, keeping a safe distance so they wouldn't be detected; it was something entirely different to have ditched their swoops and crept within firing distance of a tough customer like this. There was a history of bad things happening to crea tures who thought they had the drop on Boba Fett. Hamame kept watching what was going on at the mouth of the tunnel slanting beneath a low crest of hills.
"There's Dengar to take care of as well," he said, voice barely more than a whisper. "Plus there's some female there-I suppose you want to off her, too."
"Well, sure." That was how Phedroi's mind worked. It probably seemed obvious enough to him. Dengar had never had much of a reputation, but if he and this woman were hanging around with Boba Fett, it would be better to err on the side of caution. And he didn't know of any safer way of handling things, other than just wiping out everyone as long as there was the chance to do so. "Isn't that what you were planning on doing?"
"Not until I've had a chance to find out some more." Hamame nodded toward Fett and his companions. "Dengar picked up a sublight relay modulator back in Mos Eisley; that's what Fett's working on right now, getting it sync'd in with his comm equipment. So, obviously, he's going to be making some kind of contact just outside the planet's atmosphere. The question is, who with?"
"How should I know?"
"Exactly," said Hamame. "You don't know. And you're going to off Boba Fett without discovering who it is he wants to talk to? Maybe there's someone out there that wants to keep him alive, would pay big credits if we had him and didn't him."
Phedroi thought it over. "I suppose that could be the case."
"Yeah, well, you suppose and I know." Hamame squinted at the scene in question, lit by Dengar holding up a small portable worklight. His and the female's shadows stretched away and merged with the surrounding darkness as they watched Boba Fett applying the sizzling point of a miniature torch to exposed circuitry. "There's a lot more going on here than what it looks like. I can tell that right down in my gut."
"I'm getting a bad feeling about this …." Phedroi shook his head. "Maybe we should go back and get some more people in on this action. You know, like safety in numbers." If he could have arranged for a whole Imperial battalion to help them out, his nervousness would have been only slightly diminished. "I mean, especially if we're going to take on Boba Fett…"
"What, and w ind up splitting the profits with every scrabbling little thief in Mos Eisley?" Hamame looked over at him in disgust. "Look. From what we can get for Boba Fett-from somebody-we'll be able to retire from this game. One big score, and we're golden."
Of course, he had laid that kind of talk before on his partner. That was how they had both wound up on a forsaken dump of a planet like Tatooine. But this time, vowed Hamame, it'll be different. They just had to see it through.
"All right." Phedroi looked along his blaster rifle's barrel at the other figures in the night, then back to his partner. "So just what is it you're going to do?"
Hamame stood up, his boots digging into the slope of the dune. "Simple." He smiled as he slung his blaster rifle's leather strap across his shoulder. "I'm going to go down there and talk to them."
"That does it," muttered Phedroi aloud as he watched his partner go striding toward the distant pool of light.
"This is definitely the hardest merchandise you've ever gotten me mixed up with."
She watched him tighten and seal the last connectors.
"Is that thing ready to go?" Neelah pointed to the comm unit on the pebble-strewn ground, its interior filled with the hard shadows cast by the worklight in Dengar's upraised hand.