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"you're wrong." D'harhan raised the voice box toward Fett. "IT won't be easy at all."
"I am aware of his meaning." A trace of fear sounded in even the droid IG-88's voice. "The light-mass core is shielded behind a grid of protective interlocks-that is standard for weapons of the class he bears, to prevent just such tampering. Removal is ill-advised, even for a skilled armory technician. You could trigger an overload destruct sequence that would destroy this ship even more thoroughly than the Shell Hutt's explosive charges would have."
"Listen to it," pleaded Bossk. "You're going to kill us all-"
"I know what I'm doing." Boba Fett spoke with an u
"do you know?" Another cloud of steam hissed from the laser ca
OTHERS ... THEN YOU KILL ME."
"It will only seem that way," said Boba Fett.
"There's a difference between this death and true death."
Slowly, he reached up toward the glistening machinery whose coils were buried deep in D'harhan's chest. "Trust me."
"Fett ... don't ..."
Whether it was his own voice or one of the others, Zuckuss could no longer tell. Flinching from certain doom, he averted his face; the last thing he saw was Boba Fett shrouded in steam, one hand sinking into the coils and wires nested beneath the laser ca
With all muscles involuntarily tensed, crouching against the bulkhead, Zuckuss awaited the harsh, deafening noise that he knew would be the last thing he would ever hear.
Instead, there was silence, ended by a sighing emission of steam, as though from a dying machine, the source of its energy shut off by a single valve.
He looked up, bringing his eyes away from his own lowered forearm. The red lights that had burned through the steam mist were gone now; as Zuckuss watched, the inert metal of the laser ca
Zuckuss's gaze broke from the silenced weapon and turned toward the other bounty hunter. Boba Fett hadn't moved from where he had been standing, as though the fall of the laser ca
The barrel of the laser ca
you owe me. D'harhan raised the silent communication device. big time.
Boba Fett said nothing, but turned away and strode toward the ladder leading to the cockpit. He halted with one boot on the bottom rung and looked over at the others watching him. "They're already waiting for us," he said quietly. "Down on Circum-tore."
Then he was gone. Zuckuss looked over at Bossk, just now getting to his feet in the doorless holding cage.
"We're lucky," said Zuckuss, "to be alive."
Bossk glanced up, toward the empty hatchway of the cockpit, then back down. The thin smile he gave Zuckuss contained at least a small particle of admiration.
"I suppose we'll find out"-Bossk slowly nodded, his gaze narrowing-"just how lucky we are... ."
"What exactly is the history between you and the Shell Hutts?" Zuckuss wasn't asking just to pass the time. Sitting at last on the surface of Circumtore, surrounded by the durasteel-plated Hutts and, even worse, their various guards and mercenaries, he felt no less endangered than before. It just keeps getting worse, Zuckuss mused gloomily to himself. Pretty soon he'd be wishing that everyone on this intrepid little team had gotten blown to spiraling, whistling atoms. "I mean ...
the way that the negotiator talked ..."
Boba Fett stood with his arms crossed, watching the Shell Hutts' customs inspectors poking through the interior of the Slave I. They weren't looking for contraband-which was something that the Shell Hutts, like all the members of the species, had no aversion to, as long as they got their piece of the action-but were combing the ship and its passengers for undeclared weaponry. Without his usual panoply of rocket launchers and other means of destruction, Fett looked even more dangerous, oddly enough; as though his simmering anger were some newly aroused lethal force, provoked by the intrusion on his personal domain.
"Hutts say all sorts of things." Boba Fett didn't turn toward Zuckuss as he spoke. "There's a lot of it you can safely ignore. A lot of creatures in the galaxy believe that all the Huttese are efficient businessmen, with nothing but credits on their minds, but they're not.
They spend too much time brooding about the past, keeping old scores. Bearing grudges. That kind of emotion always gets in the way of true rationality."
Nobody would ever make that kind of assessment, Zuckuss figured, of Boba Fett. The more time he spent anywhere near Fett, the more he was impressed-and appalled by the cold calculations taking place inside that visored helmet. Even over something like the team disarming itself for its landing on the Shell Hutts'
world; if Boba Fett was willing to go along with that, it must mean his intricately worked-out plans included this factor, accounted for it in some way. We might make it back out of here alive, thought Zuckuss. Or at least some of us might. The plans that he had let himself become part of- Cradossk's plans-called for one death out here, if not more.
"It seemed kind of specific, though. What Gheeta said." Zuckuss tried again. "When he was talking about what happened before. Is there some kind of old score to settle between you and the Shell Hutts?"
The customs inspectors-multilegged droids, bristling with inspection probes and energy-level meters-continued their inspection of the Slave I. Their black, spidery forms could be seen through the ship's open hatches and up inside the transparent shielding of the cockpit. One of the inspectors lay crumpled in pieces, a few lights still forlornly blinking, on the thrust-scarred landing dock. That one had been a little too brusque in frisking the Trandoshan Bossk for any concealed weapons, and had paid the price in quick, bolt-snapping disassembly.
"Nothing you have to worry about," said Boba Fett.
"It's a personal thing. Actually, between me and Gheeta.