Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters (35 page)

T
he last statement of the Journeyman Protector Jaster Mereel, known later as the Hunter Boba Fett, before exile from the world of Concord Dawn:

“Jaster Mereel.”

Journeyman Mereel sat in his cell, in chains, with early morning sunshine streaking in through a tall and narrow barred window, high on the cell’s wall.

His ankles were chained together so that he could not walk; another chain encircled his waist, and his wrists were linked to that. He was young, and he did not rise when the Pleader entered his cell; he could see that the discourtesy displeased the older man.

The Pleader Iving Creel seated himself on the bench facing Mereel. He wasted no time on courtesies, himself. “How will I plead you?”

Mereel had been stripped of the uniform of the Journeyman Protector. He was an ugly young man who wore his prison grays with dignity, as though they were themselves a uniform, and he took his time answering, looking the Pleader over, examining him—as though, the Pleader thought with a flash of annoyance, it was Iving Creel facing a trial today, and not this arrogant young murderer. “You’re Iving Creel,” he said finally. “I’ve heard of you. You’re rather famous.”

Creel said stiffly, “No one wants it said you were not treated fairly.”

An unpleasant grin touched the young man’s lips. “You’ll plead me unrepentant.”

Creel stared at him. “Do you understand the seriousness of this, boy? You
killed
a man.”

“He had it coming.”

“They’ll exile you, Jaster Mereel. They’ll exile you—”

“I could always go join the Imperial Academy,” Mereel said, “if I got exiled. I expect I’d make a good storm—”

Creel overrode him: “—and they may
execute
you, if you anger them sufficiently. Is it such a hard thing to say you’re sorry for having taken a life unjustly?”

“I
am
sorry,” said Mereel. “Sorry I didn’t kill him a year ago. The galaxy’s a better place without him.”

Pleader Creel studied the boy, and nodded slowly. “You’ve chosen your plea; well enough. You can change it any time before I make the plea, if you wish … think on it, I urge you. You’ll face prison or exile for the murder of another Protector; for all the man was a disgrace to his uniform, you had no business killing him. But your arrogance is likely to see you executed yourself, Jaster Mereel, before this day is done.”

“You can’t love life too much, Pleader.” The ugly young man smiled, an empty, meaningless movement of the lips, and the Pleader Iving Creel found himself remembering that smile, at odd moments, for the rest of his life. “Everyone dies.”

Years passed.

The target was young—younger than the man who had taken the name of Fett had been led to believe; indeed, tonight’s target was not long out of his teens. In itself that was not a problem; Fett had collected children many years younger than that. Among his earliest collections, not long after leaving the stormtroopers, had been a boy of barely fourteen Standard years; the boy had dishonored the daughter of a wealthy businessman who had, even in Fett’s wide experience, a rather remarkable vindictive turn. Most fathers, Fett knew, on
most planets, would not have killed a boy for such behavior; indeed, most bounty hunters would have turned down such a job.

Fett was not among them. Laws vary, planet to planet; but morality never changes. He had delivered the boy to his executioners and he had never regretted it.

Now, years later, he stood in the shadows at the back of the Victory Forum, in the town of Dying Slowly, on the planet Jubilar, and watched them set up for the main match in Regional Sector Number Four’s All-Human Free-For-All extravaganza.

The Victory Forum was a huge place, poorly lit, named by the winning side for a recent battle in one of Jubilar’s wars. The Forum had had another name, not too long ago; and would, in Fett’s estimation, have another name again sometime soon. The current war was not going well. Jubilar was used as a penal colony by half a dozen worlds in the near stellar neighborhood; which army a convict ended up in depended upon which spaceport he was evicted at.

The Forum’s seats sloped down toward the five-sided ring, two hundred rows of rising seats separating Fett from the ring itself, and the fighting. The audience was still arriving, only minutes before the main bout, and the Forum was only half full, an audience of some twenty thousand, mostly men, filling the seats.

Fett was in no hurry; he focused his helmet’s macrobinoculars on the ring, and the area immediately about it, and prepared to wait through the fight.

Young Han Solo watched the ring attendant, a Bith, hosing the blood from the previous bout out of the ring, and wondered how he’d gotten himself into such a mess.

Well, not wondering, exactly, that wasn’t accurate, since actually he remembered the events with a certain
painful clarity. Wondering how he’d been
stupid
enough to get himself into the current mess was more like it. Han stood in the tunnel with the other three fighters, watching the blood get cleaned off the mat he would shortly be standing on—fighting on—and swore to himself that if he got out of the current mess with his skin still holding his insides inside, he’d learn to deal seconds so well that no one would
ever
catch him at it.

Anyway, how was a traveling man supposed to know that cheating at cards was a
felony
in some jerk backwaters? “A
felony,
” Han muttered aloud. He glanced over … and up … and up some more … at the fighter standing next to him. “What did
you
get sent to Jubilar for?”

The man looked down a considerable distance at Han and said slowly, “I killed some people.”

Han looked away. “Right … me too,” he lied after a moment. “I killed
lots
of people.”

The heavily armed ring attendant, standing behind the four of them, growled, “Shut up.”

A movement, out of the corner of his eye, caught Han’s attention; he leaned forward slightly and looked off to the right. A fellow in … gray. Gray combat armor of some sort; he appeared to be watching the ring.

Boba Fett was not watching the ring. He was watching a young entrepreneur named Hallolar Voors, who sat ringside with a pair of beautiful, immaculately dressed women in the seats to each side of him; a young entrepreneur who was going to be dead before he had the opportunity to sample the charms of either of them.

Even at that early age, Han Solo had managed to get some experience on him: “That’s Mandalorian combat armor. Who—”

The muted sounds of the crowd rose up in a roar and drowned him out.

The ring attendant yelled over it. “Time to fight, you low trash, you smelly sinful one-eyed egg-sucking sons of slime-devils!
Time to fight!
”

From where he stood, high above the ring, Boba Fett watched as the fighters came up, out of the tunnel, and into the five-sided ring. Four fighters, as Fett had been told was usual for a Free-For-All; the announcer stood in the fifth corner, waiting patiently as the fighters disrobed and took their positions, as the full-throated roar of twenty thousand men reverberated through the Forum.

Pickups, situated around the edge of the ring, would broadcast the fight around the planet.

Three of the fighters were what Fett would have expected, big bruisers for whom the Free-For-All ring had been the obvious alternative to conscription. The fourth surprised him; Fett zoomed in on the man—

The face jumped into focus. For a moment the image startled Fett; the fighter appeared to be staring straight up at Fett. He zoomed the macrobinoculars out to a wider viewing angle—and interestingly enough the impression was accurate; the fellow
was
staring at him. The young fighter disrobed slowly, staring up past the ring lights, into the gloom, at the spot where Fett stood, as the other fighters limbered up in their corners.

The man
was
young—no older, in all likelihood, than Fett’s target tonight.
Bad night
, thought Fett,
to be young and quick and full of promise
.

The announcer moved out into the center of the ring, and raised his hands, palms out. His voice echoed out across the Forum and the watching audience: “This is the final elimination! These are the rules: no eye gouges. No blows to the throat or groin. No intentional deaths.
There … are … no … other …
rules.
” He paused, and the audience’s cheers rose to a frenzied pitch as his voice boomed out: “
The last one standing will be the victor!
”

The announcer climbed out of the ring, and despite himself, watching the fighters, the youngster in particular, standing there alone and brave and scared, despite himself Fett found his pulse quickening as, with the rest of the crowd, he waited for the dropping flag that would signal the bout’s beginning.

There were moments when Fett appreciated life—he was hardly an old man himself, and there were nights, nights like these, when it was good—and behind the helmet, Fett grinned at the thought as it came to him—when it was good to be young, and quick, and full of promise.

The dark blue match flag fluttered down from the rafters, and into the ring.

The three bruisers moved in on the young fighter.…

Boba Fett said, “Spice.”

The target, Hallolar Voors, said “Yes, Gentle Fett. Spice. Eighteen canisters. And if you can handle it, we can deliver the same amount again, twice a quarter.”

Fett nodded as though he were paying attention. It was not long after the end of the fights, and he walked with Voors through a huge, dimly lit, apparently deserted warehouse at the edge of Executioner’s Row; Executioner’s Row was a slum that was itself at the edge of Dying Slowly. Fett wasn’t impressed with the imagination they showed on Jubilar, but he had to concede they displayed a certain consistency.

Voors had traded in the two women for a pair of conspicuously armed bodyguards. The bodyguards trailed behind them.

“The spice trade in this sector has been controlled
by the Hutts for a long time,” Fett observed. “Where did you find an independent source?”

Voors smiled at Fett; Fett, staring straight ahead, watched the smile in the heads-up tactical display in his helmet. The tac display gave him a 360-degree view of his surroundings; Fett wondered whether Voors knew that, or if he was just smiling for the practice of it. It was a handsome smile, Fett had to admit.

The Mandalorian armor itself bothered people, but Fett had found that it bothered people more when he did not look at them while speaking. And if they thought he could not see what was going on around him, so much the better.

Voors did not seem, to Fett, the sort who would know much about the capabilities of Mandalorian battle armor. In fact the man looked much like what he was: the son of a wealthy local businessman, a dark, charming, handsome young fellow wearing expensive clothes, with a good smile, who was fatally out of his league and did not know it.

“The source is … private,” Voors said. “And desires to stay that way, I’m afraid.”

Fett nodded, once; he hardly cared.

Moments later they came to a wide, relatively empty area, lit well enough that Fett’s macrobinoculars, adjusted to the darkness they had been walking through, lowered the gain automatically; inside the helmet, the scene still appeared bright as day to Fett.

Three rows of plastic canisters, six to a row, sat out in the middle of the empty area. The canisters were fat, and half the height of a man. Fett pointed at random. “Open that one.”

One of the bodyguards standing behind Fett glanced at Voors; Voors nodded quickly. The warehouse lights changed, went dark red; normal white light activated spice. The bodyguard moved forward, knelt, and touched the two clasps that kept the canister sealed; it
left Fett with one bodyguard still behind him, slightly to his left.

Fett took a step forward and looked down. It looked like spice; he reached in and pulled out a handful. “Seal it and turn the white lights back on.”

The lights came back up … and it was spice, all right. Fett scattered it across the top of the canister, and it lay there glowing in the light, twinkling and flickering as the spice was activated. Fett’s left hand, hanging by his belt, touched a stud on the belt, releasing the neural toxin, and continued the motion, up to touch his right hand. He worked free the glove, stood there with his naked right hand held up in the air. “Do you mind if I smell it? Real spice has a sharp, pleasant odor—”

Voors glanced at his bodyguards. “If you insist.”

Fett reached up, as though to take off his helmet—saw them watching him with plain anticipation. Another of the armor’s benefits; taking the helmet off became an act of theater. He paused with his hand on the base of his helmet, and relaxed. “I wanted to ask you a question.” The hand dropped slightly. “Does your conscience ever bother you?”

Voors stared at him. “Are you serious? Over spice?”

“Does it ever bother your conscience,” Fett said again, in the voice that always sounded so harsh when he spoke Basic, “trafficking in spice?”

Voors said a little hesitantly, “It’s not even addictive. And there are valid medical uses for it—”

The bodyguard nearest Fett blinked, shook his head and blinked again. “Substances that are not addictive,” said Fett, “frequently lead to the misuse of substances that are. Doesn’t that bother you?”

Voors took a deep breath and exploded. “
No
, it doesn’t bother me! My conscience is just—” His mouth shut … and then opened again, as though he intended to continue speaking.