Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters (24 page)

An irregular shape dropped toward the Lomabu “colony.”

“Corellian YT-1300 freighter,” announced the
Hound’s
baritone. “Modified. Heavily modified.
Illegally
modified. Crew and passengers: one Wookiee, two humans.”

Bossk snapped off the board with a left foreclaw. “We have them!” he exulted.

Tinian thought she heard something. She touched her headphones. “Listen!”

Bossk amplified the transmission over a bridge speaker. “Very funny,” drawled a male human. “But what we want is landing clearance. You going to give it, or shall I take this stuff and sell it back to Nada Synnt?”

“Solo,” Bossk hissed. “Shut down all power.”

The bridge went dark.

Tinian raised her tiny luma inside one hand. Red light welled through her fingers. Plan Three, then. She’d hoped not to run Plan Three.
Chen, I hope you’re ready
. She pressed to her feet. “Let’s go get them.” Trying to sound cocky, she slapped her blaster. “It’s time for a recharge, Bossk. And Chen needs his bowcaster.”

Bossk drew his forearms out of the troughs and rubbed them against each other. “Tinian, I want you and your Wookiee to determine Solo’s likely avenues of escape. Count his allies and resources. This will be excellent experience to round out your apprenticeship.”

“We don’t want to use those scanners again,” she objected.

Bossk flicked his tongue. “You’re right I’m sending you out in my scout craft, the
Nashtah Pup.
”

The
Pup
was as sweet a scout ship as Chenlambec had ever crewed, despite its unfamiliar controls … and it had broadband transceivers, including Chen’s personal favorite, single sideband. Its console curved around two black leather crew seats, with scanners mounted to create the illusion of looking out two trapezoidal windows, just as on the
Hound’s Tooth’s
bridge.

Chen steered it back toward the
Hound
to get the feel of maneuvering. The bigger ship had popped a dorsal hatch to launch the
Pup;
slowly it dropped shut behind
them. Now it was easy to see that the oval
Hound
’s primary engines lay under its main deck, with exhaust ports across its aft quarter.

“Watch it,” said Bossk’s voice in his headphones. “I’m tracking you with a quad gun.”

“Why bother?” snapped Tinian. “We’re practically unarmed.”

Chen ordered her to take the
Pup
down out of range, then pointed to one of his ears and over his shoulder toward the
Hound’s Tooth:
Bossk was undoubtedly monitoring.

She nodded and reached for the steering rods. The console wrapped around their crew chairs so neatly that either could fly the
Pup
comfortably.

Tinian stroked a control rod. “I like this little scout.”

Homesick for the
Wroshyr
, Chen barked.

“I didn’t ask to be born rich,” she argued. “I just wish this were mine.”

Chenlambec kept digging in his tool pouch. He had left Flirt under the
Hound’s
navicomputer and brought a remote relay. Now, he wired the remote—which was bigger than Flirt herself—into the
Pup’s
main communication line. Then he tapped out a code message to Flirt:
POWER DOWN
Hound’s
AUDIO RECEIVERS FOR TWO MINUTES, THEN HIS TRANSLATOR FOR TEN MINUTES
. His remote beeped twice, for “message received.” A minute later, it beeped twice, then repeated, indicating that she’d succeeded.

“I heard that,” said Tinian. “Bossk’ll be deaf to us for two minutes?”

Howling assent, Chen closed his hands around the throttle rods. Lomabu III loomed closer on the visual screen. They were approaching the daylight side at high noon, out of the orange sun. The Imperials must not see them.

Tinian talked rapidly into her headphone. “This message is for Governor Desnand, repeat, Governor Io Desnand of the Aida System. We wish to report that the
bounty hunter Bossk of Trandosha, repeat bounty hunter, repeat Bossk, is encroaching on your prison world Lomabu III. He is engaged in unauthorized pelt-baiting and means to abduct many of your laborers. This is another bounty hunter speaking. I have Bossk under observation, but he is also observing me. Can you make it worth my while to intercept him for you? Please reply on this frequency so that I may receive at … 1435 Standard hours.”

That transmission was headed for Aida, not Lomabu. There’d be some subspace delay. Chen pointed at the chrono to warn Tinian that her two minutes were up. His ten were about to begin. She switched off the transmitter. He let go of the throttle rods, and she took them.

With the Imperial Governor alerted, now he must close the other side of their net: He must make a contact below. Even if Flirt failed him, the Wookiee prisoners must be alerted and freed. Chen switched the transmitter to a local frequency.

Eerie howling noises filled the cabin. Single sideband was excellent for transmitting Wookiee speech, but difficult to tune for in Basic. Bossk could listen to this all day and not understand a word. Maybe his translator would choke on it too.

He called groundside.

At first, nothing happened. There was always the chance that no illicit transmitter had been set up inside the prison camp, but Chenlambec was willing to bet otherwise.

“Try again,” Tinian suggested. “We just dropped under the ionized atmospheric layer.”

Chen howled at the transceiver again. As Tinian brought the
Pup
toward the target archipelago, the answering howl from his transceiver abruptly modulated.

Chen grinned aside at Tinian, then answered. His mission took considerable explaining, particularly the
part about landing and staging a firefight. The target island grew on the fore screen.

“Explain about getting Bossk’s confidence,” Tinian hissed, steering out to sea on the island’s west side. The prison compound was on the east shore.

Chenlambec tried again. Evidently his contact was an elderly male using amateur equipment, desperately afraid that guards would return soon.

Chen didn’t ask what threat the Imperials used to control his people. The
Pup’s
scanners had shown him heavy artillery: two turbolaser emplacements plus plenty of unidentified metal technology.

He needed to get those weapons into his people’s hands.

Tinian came in low over a dense green jungle, sweeping overland toward the island’s east coast. Abruptly, Bossk’s voice echoed in the cabin. “What’s that? What are you doing?”

His time was up. If Flirt silenced the
Pup
any longer, Bossk might suspect her existence.

Tinian leaned toward the pickup. “We’re going to singe a little fur,” she answered. “Shall we bring some back?”

“If you know how,” said Bossk. It sounded like a challenge.

“Brace yourself, Chen,” Tinian muttered. “We’ll land in about one minute.”

She wasn’t confident of her landing skills, and this was an unfamiliar ship, even though she liked it. Chen flipped her small hands off the controls and grasped the rods. He feathered the main engine and set down the
Pup
near a cliff along the waterside. The compound would lie on a peninsula just north of that rocky promontory.

“Impressive,” Tinian said wistfully.

He cuffed her shoulder and ordered her to thaw the lockers. They must be blood-warm before returning to the
Hound
.

She gripped his forearm. “Be careful, Chen.”

He crooned a soft good-bye. Her concern pleased and honored him.

He popped the hatch and climbed down onto Lomabu III. A cool damp wind blew across his nose, and he felt its chill in his furless palms. Its salty smell had an organic overlay of dead fish and floating plants. Beneath a brilliant blue sky, close to the site where the
Pup
sat grounded, waves lapped at the jagged line of a long, broken wall. Green algae almost obscured a tracework of filigree just above waterline. Farther out in sapphire-blue water, other ruined walls formed a right-angled maze. The ruins barely broke the water, topped with broken stone and steel.

He and Tinian had landed near an abandoned city. Within a few years, decades at the most, the vast sea would dissolve these remaining walls and wash them away, and all evidence of the Lomabuans’ civilization would vanish.

Chenlambec wondered what the Lomabuans had looked like, and what crime they had committed that drove the Empire to depopulate the entire world. Were the Lomabuans slaves, like his own people … or dead?

He checked his bowcaster. Each piece fit again. It bothered him to know that Bossk was so familiar with Kashyyyk’s weaponry.

The rocky promontory that shielded the prison compound from his view would also keep prison guards from spotting the
Pup
. He strode forward, staying inside a narrow grove of twiggy brown trees that grew between the cliff’s foot and a pale, sandy strand.

Once he rounded the promontory, the prison compound became visible. Its gray walls rose in straight, perfect lines, freshly built and maintained by slave labor. It hunched at the other end of a slender peninsula, surrounded by a high metal fence. Four tall blocky towers loomed at the corners of its perimeter, and pale
sand covered the peninsula’s narrows between compound and mainland.

Only one turbolaser emplacement was in bowcaster range. Destroying that weapon would help set the stage for an uprising. He crawled forward, staying low. Rocky soil scratched his palms.

As he began to set his right palm on the sand, he realized that the sand was also crawling. He bent down to peer closer. What he had taken for a sandy beach was a vast colony of tiny creatures. Each was no larger than a grain of true sand, with legs or flagella so small he could only guess that they existed. The colony roiled as creatures climbed over each other and were climbed in turn.

He judged from the damp rocky soil above the crawling sand that the tide was going out Although the creatures’ movement seemed random, the colony slowly retreated, following the tide.

He dangled a bit of fur over the colony. It vanished where it touched down.

Ravenous little beasts!
Chen groped behind him into the glade, found a leaf-covered stick, and tossed it onto the crawling sand.

It dissolved from beneath.

This explained why the Imperials had selected this peninsula for a prison colony. Surrounded by voracious sand—even at low tide, he guessed—it could cage Wookiees who laughed at most weapons. Chen wondered if the Imperials had allowed one prisoner to “escape” in order to demonstrate the sand’s appetite—

But that was idle speculation. Now to create some heat for Bossk to see, so it would look as if there’d been a firefight … so he could realistically lead Bossk on with those bodies.

Cautiously avoiding the sand, he crawled close to the guard tower. He chose an explosive quarrel from his bandolier. Keeping his elbows low, he fitted it to his bowcaster, aimed carefully, and let it fly.

The tower erupted in orange flame. A human voice shouted. Chen sprang up and dashed for the promontory. He’d’ve liked to have seen how that explosion looked on Bossk’s sensors, since it would show up in the middle of a scene that didn’t exist.

As he jogged up, Tinian stood close to the
Pup’s
boarding ladder. “Don’t step on that sand!” she cried. “It—”

He roared agreement and a query as he clambered aboard.

“I’m fine. But are you?”

He vaulted into the cockpit and almost slipped in a red puddle. Tinian had lain the dead Wookiees between hatch and crew chairs. “No place else to put them,” she apologized, climbing in after him. “As soon as I brought them out of freeze, they started bleeding.”

He demanded to know what she’d done with the carbon freeze units.

“I lugged them up into the forest. I don’t think Bossk will find them there.”

And
hauled two Wookiees up the boarding ladder? She should’ve let him do that. Chen dropped into his chair and grasped the controls.

Once berthed on the
Hound
, Tinian sprang the
Pup’s
hatch. Bossk stood below her, silhouetted by lights that looked almost normally bright. “Now the Wookiee criminals know that we’re here,” the Trandoshan snarled. “Is that all you accomplished?”

“No,” Tinian snarled back. That wasn’t difficult; her back hurt. “We also performed our evaluation. Solo and Chewbacca can’t escape overland. There’s a colony of living, eating sand all along the shoreline, so they’ll have to take off upward if they try to escape us. Allies and resources? Plenty of Wookiees, but not as many as there were yesterday. Help us offload these pelts. There’s still meat on them.”

“Pelts?” Bossk shuffled up to the main hatch and peered in. “Did you actually—”

He fell silent. The fresh-looking corpses still lay bleeding on the deck. Chenlambec sat his station, baring his teeth in a howl. Tinian translated accurately this time. “Criminals. A gift,” she added, “just in case you still doubt us. Chen knocked off two sentries.”

Bossk reached down. He stroked one pelt, a rich brown tipped in black. “I had doubted that you would kill free Wookiees,” he answered. “I believe you now. I accept your gift.”

Sure you believe us
. Tinian let Bossk manhandle the cooling bodies off the
Pup
. Chen remained in his seat, curling his lip. He blinked rapidly, a sign of nausea. He asked her to tell Bossk something convincing.

“He wants me to say,” said Tinian, “that he finds your end of the Hunting trade repugnant. But we understand financial necessity.”

Bossk summoned X10-D as they climbed down. “Excellent pelts.” He stroked the other, which was solid black. “Prime condition. Maybe one hundred and fifty years?”

Chen turned his head.

Fortunately, X10-D rolled into the docking bay and stopped Bossk from making Chen feel any sicker. The draft droid dragged both corpses up the passage toward the aft hold. Bossk followed, stepping lightly. Tinian recalled the skinning rack and dip tank.

Chen slumped, shivering and keening.

Hesitantly Tinian laid a hand on his shoulder. When he didn’t brush her off, she tightened it. Chen felt her strongest grip as a gentle caress. “They would rejoice,” she whispered, “to know that in death they are helping end this carnage.”