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No more, no less."
"You'd do anything for credits, wouldn't you?" Boba Fett could see his own reflection, doubled in the small mirrors of the accountant's resentfully burning eyes. The image he saw was of a full helmet, battered and discolored, yet completely functional; his face was concealed by the narrow, T-shaped visor. His combat gear bristled with armaments, from shin to wrist; the tapered nose of a directional rocket protruded from behind one shoulder. A walking arsenal, a humanoid figure built out of machines. The lethal kind.
The reflected image nodded slowly. "That's right," said Boba Fett. "I do the things I'm good at, and for which I get paid the best." He glanced down at the data readout. "It's nothing personal."
"Then we could make a deal." Posondum looked up hopefully at his captor. "Couldn't we?" "What kind of deal?" "What do you think?" The accountant stood up I and gripped the bars nearest to Fett. "You like getting paid-I know the kind of outrageous fees you charge for your services-and I like remaining alive. I'm probably as fond of that as you are of credits." Boba Fett let his masked gaze rest upon the other's sweating face. "You should have considered how precious your life is to you before you incurred the wrath of the Hutts. It's a little late for regrets now.
"But it's not too late for you to make some credits.
More credits than the Hutts can pay you." Posondum pressed his face into the bars, as though he could somehow squeeze out between them through the sheer force of his desperation. "You let me go and I'll make it worth your while."
"I doubt it," said Fett coldly. "The Hutts pay excellent bounties. That's why I like taking on their jobs."
"And why do you think they want to get me back so badly?" Posondum's knuckles turned white and bloodless as his fists tightened. "Just for the old ledgers I've got stowed away inside my head? Or just so the competition won't find out a few little trade secrets?"
"It's not my business as to why my clients desire certain things. Things such as yourself." A small in dicator light pulsed on his wrist-mounted data readout; he'd have to return to the Slave I's controls soon. "I'm just pleased that they do want them. And that they'll pay."
"Just like I will." Posondum lowered his voice, though there was no one to overhear. "I took more than information when I left the Hutts. I took credits-a lot of 'em."
"That was foolish of you." Fett knew how tight the Huttese were with credits; it was a characteristic of their species. There had been times when he'd needed to take extreme measures to get paid for the completion of a job, even when the terms had been agreed upon beforehand.
So to steal from a Hutt, and to think that one could get away with it, was the height of idiocy.
"Maybe so-but there was so much of it. And I thought I could get away, that I could hide. And my new bosses would protect me... ."
"They did the best they could." Boba Fett shrugged. "It just wasn't good enough. It never is, when I'm involved."
"Look, I'll give you the credits. All of them."
Posondum trembled with the fervor of his plea. "Every credit I stole from the Hurts-it's all yours. Just let me go."
"And just where are these credits?"
Posondum drew back from the cage's bars.
"They're hidden."
"I could very easily find out the location." Fett kept his voice as level and emotionless as before. "The extracting of useful information is a specialty of mine."
"It's memory-encrypted," said the accountant. I
"Below the conscious level. And with a trauma sen-sor implanted." He pointed to a small scar just above his left ear. "You try to dig the info out of me, it'll trip and wipe the cortical segment clean. Then nobody will ever find where I put the credits."
"There's ways around those things." Boba Fett had seen them before. "Bypasses and shunts-they're not pleasant. But they work." He supposed the Hutts were already preparing a deep neurosurgical dissection room for Posondum upon his return. "It doesn't matter to me, though. Since I'm not making a deal with you, anyway."
"But why not?" The accountant had reached one of his ski
"It very well might be." He had stepped away from the cage, back to the unadorned and functional metal treads that would return him to the Slave I's cockpit. "You might be as good a thief as you are a number cruncher.
And if you're going to steal even one credit from a Hutt, you might as well steal a billion. The consequences are the same. But even if you do have that kind of credits hidden away, I'm not interested in them. Or not interested enough. I have my reputation to think of."
"Your ..." Posondum gaped at him in amazement and dismay. "Your what?"
"The Hutts and all my other clients-they pay me the kind of bounties they do because of one thing. I deliver.
Once I've caught my prey, nothing stops me from bringing it in. Nothing. If I take on a job, I complete it. And everyone in the galaxy knows that."
"But ... but I've heard of other bounty hunters ... who'll cut a deal... ."
"Other bounty hunters may conduct their business as they please." Fett barely managed to keep from his voice the contempt with which he held the so-called Bounty Hunters Guild's members. That kind of shortsighted greed was one of the reasons he had no desire to associate himself with the Guild. "They have their standards ... and I have mine." One of his gloved hands grasped the ladder's side rail; he looked back over his shoulder at the cage. "And I've got the merchandise, and they don't.
There's a co
Posondum's knees visibly weakened, his hands sliding down the bars as he sank limply toward the cage's floor.
Whatever glint of hope had been in his face was now extinguished.
"I suggest you go ahead and eat." Boba Fett nodded his helmet toward the tray and its congealed contents.
"You'll need to keep up your strength."
He didn't wait for an answer. He climbed up from the ship's holding pens and back toward its waiting controls. "Here he comes." Lookout had spotted the approaching ship. That was its job. "I can see him."
"Of course you can," said Kud'ar Mub'at. "That's a good node." With the tip of one multijointed, chitinous leg, the assembler stroked the little semicreature's head. The exterior-observation node was one of the more simpleminded subassem-blies scurrying about the web.
Kud'ar Mub'at had let just about enough cerebral tissue develop inside so that it could focus its immense light- gathering lens on the surrounding stars and anything that moved among them. "Tell Calculator just what you saw."
The necessary data zapped along the web's tangled neurons. Another subassembly, with useless vestigial legs and a softly fragile shell encasing its specific-function cortex, mulled over what it had received, converting raw visuals to useful numbers. "Thyip thyoud arrive ..."
Calculator's tiny lisping mouth moved beneath the wobbling lump of neural matter. "In leth thyan thuh-ree thtandard time part-th."
"I know who it is!" Identifier scrambled up onto Kud'ar Mub'at's shoulder-if arachnoids could be said to have shoulders-and excitedly chattered into its earhole.
The little database subassembly had listened in to what Lookout had told Calculator. "I know, I know! It's the Slave I! Positive identification made-"
"Of course it is." With another leg, Kud'ar Mub'at plucked Identifier from its body-the childlike subassemblies would swarm all over it, if it let them-and set the node down on one of the web's structural strands.
"Now just settle down, little one."
"Boba Fett must be aboard!" Identifier, with its own miniature versions of its parent's stiff-spined legs, skittered back and forth on the taut silken fiber. "Boba Fett!" The subassembly had no particular liking for the bounty hunter; it just got excited over any visitors to the web. "It's Boba Fett's ship!"