Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters (41 page)

It was a beautiful day late in the cold season, with a chill breeze out of the north, and high pale clouds skidding across the darkened skies. The suns hung low on the southern horizon; the Blue Mountains lifted away up to the north. Malloc barely noticed the Devaronians surrounding him, the members of his family dressed in their robes of mourning, as they pushed him through the crowds, to the pit where the quarra waited.

He heard the quarra growl, heard the growl rising as he grew closer to the pit.

His daughter and brother walked a bare few steps behind him. Malloc recalled he had once had a wife; he wondered why she was not there.

Perhaps she had died.

A dozen quarra in the pit, lean and hungry, leaping up toward the spot where Malloc’s guards brought him to a halt.

Devaronians are not creatures of ceremony; a herald cried out, “The Butcher of Montellian Serat!”—and
the screams of the crowd raised up and surrounded Malloc, an immense roar that drowned out the noise of the snarling quarra; the bonds that held him were released and strong young hands shoved him forward, and into the pit where the starving quarra waited.

The quarra leapt, and had their teeth in him before he reached the ground.

He could see the Blue Mountains from where he fell.

He had almost forgotten the mountains, the forests, all those years on that desert world.

Oh, but the trees were beautiful.

Arch your head back.

They made Han buy the speeder—Jubilar wasn’t big on rentals. Too frequently the rentals, and/or the renters, didn’t come back.

In early twilight Han pulled the speeder to a stop at the address they’d given him, and got out to look around.

Almost thirty years.

He felt so odd: everything had
changed
. Places that he remembered as well-kept buildings had grown run-down, places that used to be run-down had been torn down and new buildings built in their steads. Slums had spread everywhere—the planet’s never-ending battles had razed entire neighborhoods.

The neighborhood surrounding the Victory Forum, where Han had fought in Regional Sector Number Four’s All-Human Free-For-All extravaganza, was a blasted ruin. It looked like the remains of some ancient civilization, worn down by the eons. The small buildings surrounding the Forum had their windows broken out and boarded up; flame and shells and blaster fire had scored them.

All that remained of the Forum itself was broken rubble strewn across a huge empty lot. Han stepped off the sidewalk, into the lot. Glass and gravel crunched
beneath his feet as he walked across it, toward the main entrance.

He stood in the empty lot, staring at the desolation, with a cool wind tugging at him—and suddenly it struck him as though he were
there
, that moment, all those years ago:

 … standing in the ring. Facing the opponents, with the screams and cheers and taunts of the crowd in his ears. His heart pounding and his breath coming short, as the match flag fluttered down toward the ground, and the other three fighters came at him
.

Han took a running leap at the nearest. He got up two meters off the ground and landed a flying kick into the face of the onrushing first fighter. The man’s nose broke, his head snapped back
—

To this day Han had no clear memory of the next several minutes. They’d recorded the fights, and he’d seen the recording; but the knowledge of what had happened did not connect to his blurred memories of the events themselves. The boy had been hurt, and hurt badly, walking off the mat with a broken arm and a broken jaw, two broken ribs and a concussion and bruises across half his body; the bruises turned purple the next day. The woman who’d cared for Han the next several days, he couldn’t even remember what she’d looked like, she was a strange one and he did remember her running her fingers over the bruises, plainly fascinated—

Here. Here. Right about … here.

Han stood on the spot. This empty place … this was the spot. The ring. And when all was done, he’d been the last one left on his feet—

Thirty years. Over half his life had passed since that day.

Han took a slow step … stopped and took one last look around at the devastation, a ruin stretching to the horizon; and turned away and walked back to the speeder, and sat motionlessly in the speeder, leaning
back with his hands clasped behind his head, staring up at the sky as darkness fell around him, remembering.

“Mayor Baker,” Han said. “A real pleasure.”

He’d met her in a brightly lit hydroponics warehouse, in a complex of warehouses at the edge of Death, in the part of Death they had used to call Executioner’s Row. He’d come prepared; he was visibly armed with a blaster, had a couple of holdout blasters tucked inside his coat, and a third down in his boot.

Not that he expected any trouble; this was business, a business he’d been in for a long time before the Rebellion, and he knew what he was doing. But no point in taking chances, on a planet like Jubilar, in a city like Death.

They wanted him to smuggle Jandarra, to Shalam—Han had almost laughed aloud when the Mayor’s representative had approached him; Jandarra was one of Leia’s favorite treats. He expected that even she would be amused when he showed up on Shalam with a cargo hold full of it; and certainly the Shalamites wouldn’t dare prosecute him over it.

The Mayor smiled at Solo. She was a tall, obese woman with features that did not take to a smile very easily. Four bodyguards were present; two at the entrance to the warehouse, two a few steps behind the Mayor, all armed with assault rifles. “Gentleman Morgavi—Luke, isn’t it?”

Han smiled at her. “That’s right. Luke Morgavi. As I told your aide, ma’am, I’m an independent trader out of Boranda.”

She nodded. “A pleasure, Luke. Please, follow me.” She led him down through rows of hydroponics tanks, to a row toward the back where the growing lights were both brighter and of a different wavelength. Inside the tanks, small purple and green tubular vegetables grew. “Jandarra,” she said. “They’re native to Jubilar; they’re
a great delicacy, and they usually only grow in the desert after relatively rare rainstorms. After almost two years of work we managed to cultivate them—”

Han nodded. “And the Shalamite slapped a 100% tariff on you.”

Anger touched her voice. “We have
eighty
thousand credits’ worth of Jandarra here that are only worth
forty
thousand after the Shalamite tariff.”

“Those Shalamite,” Han commiserated. “Can’t trust ’em. They cheat at cards, too—did you know that?”

She stopped and studied Han. “No … Gentleman Morgavi. I did not.” You
cheat at cards
, she thought, and kept the pleasant smile on her face—it was hard work. He really
didn’t
recognize her—well, thirty years was a long time, after all, and she’d put on sixty kilos; and her last name, back then, before her marriage to the unfortunate Miagi Baker, had been Incavi Larado.

He’d said he’d come back, and here he was, the New Republic’s infamous General Solo—and only thirty years late.

“Eighty thousand credits’ worth,” she said again. “Delivered to Shalamite. That’s a forty thousand upside, and we’d be willing to go—”

“Fifty percent,” said Han politely. “Which would be twenty thousand credits, and I’d be happy to make the run for that amount.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You think you can get past the Shalamite Navy?”

Han said, “Lady, I used to run the
Imperial
lines. I’m talking about the old Star Destroyers—let me tell you a story—”

Out in the darkness, Boba Fett lay on his stomach, carefully adjusting his aim—he had to shoot in through the main entrance to the hydroponics warehouse, which wouldn’t have been difficult except that some of the tanks were in his way—he was going to have to wait for
Solo to come back out toward the warehouse’s entrance.

Fett waited patiently. He was surprised by his good fortune; who would have thought that a trap he had set three decades ago would come to fruition now?

Good fortune indeed—even today, with the Empire fallen, Han Solo had lots of enemies: Jabba’s relatives, loyal officers of the Empire who had managed to maintain small fiefdoms on a thousand planets across the galaxy; and the various bounties on Solo, Dead or Alive, were still impressive, even with Vader and Jabba and the Empire long gone; still worth making an effort for, even with four and half million credits in the bank.

Oddly enough, the sight of Solo—looking at him through the rifle scope—filled Fett with a nostalgia that surprised him. There was no question in Fett’s mind that Solo was a bad man, worse in every way that counted than the Butcher of Montellian Serat; and if that bounty had brought Fett no joy, he had handed the Butcher over to his executioners with little enough in the way of regret.

Solo, though—it came to Fett as a revelation that Solo’s presence, over the course of the decades, had in a way been oddly comforting. He had been a part, however peripherally, of Fett’s life for so long that Fett had difficulty picturing a world without him. The world had changed, and changed, and only Solo had remained a constant.

He’d Hunted Solo for various clients, various bounties. Fett had difficulty picturing a world without Solo—

—he leaned in and touched the scope’s focusing ring. Solo’s image, and that of the woman Fett assumed was Incavi Larado, though he did not recognize her, leapt into sharp relief; and Fett’s finger tightened on the trigger.

He wouldn’t make the mistake of trying to take Solo alive, not again.

And he would learn to picture a world without him.

•   •   •

They headed toward the entrance together, Mayor Incavi Baker smiling patiently, and with a certain effort that Han did not miss. He stayed a half step behind her as she walked, keeping part of her bulk between him and the loading docks outside, where the lights had gone out not long after they had all entered the warehouse together. The loading docks outside were pitch black; they might have assembled an army for all Han knew—

“—so this kid,” said Han, “his name was—uh, Maris, and this old guy with delusions—Jocko, yeah, anyway this guy Jocko, he thinks he’s a
Jedi Knight
—and let me tell you, that old guy with his delusions, he was a pain in the butt—anyway they tell me they have to get past the Imperial lines—”

What did they have waiting for him out there?

What
had he walked into?

He knows something is wrong
, Fett thought.
He’s
—

The main power line entered the warehouse at the northeast, and split, one bundle running up to the ceiling and the overhead lights, and another bundle running back toward the hydroponics tanks.

Han cocked his wrist a certain way, and the holdout blaster in his left sleeve dropped down into his hand.

Boba Fett had the crosshairs hovering just to the left of Incavi Baker’s approaching form; the cross-hair found Solo’s breast, lost it, found it again.

Fett squeezed the trigger—

—the warehouse lights died—

The blaster bolt tore through the darkness like a flash of lightning.

Han hit the ground rolling, sparks still trailing away from the spot where his first shot had struck the power cable, rolled away firing left-handed at the locations where he remembered the two closer bodyguards standing, pulling his blaster free right-handed. Screams, the woman was screaming, and he got off four shots with the holdout before it malfunctioned, burning out, the power supply flashing hot and terribly bright as it went, lighting Han as a target to the world, and Han came up out of his roll and made it to his feet and ran backward through the darkness, through the rows of hydroponics tanks, spots dancing in his eyes, using his scalded left hand on the sides of the tanks, to guide himself, as blaster bolts rained around him.

In that single flash as the holdout blaster had arced out, he had seen a shape running toward the warehouse entrance, a shape out of Han Solo’s nightmares, a shape out of the galaxy’s darkest history—a man in Mandalorian combat armor.

Incavi Baker lay on her back, staring up into infinity. There was a terrible pain in her side, and she knew she was dying.

She wished it weren’t so dark. Bright lights flashed around her, blaster bolts that lit the world up briefly, but even the blaster bolts were fading now.

A figure loomed up out of the darkness, knelt beside her. A man in gray armor. Incavi opened her mouth—but nothing came, and the man reached for her.

Something sharp and cold touched her neck.

Gradually, the pain went away.

•   •   •

A ringing in his ears.

The four bodyguards were dead; Solo must have killed the one off to the side, Fett thought, curled up around whatever wound Solo had left in him—Fett knew he had only killed the three who were still standing when he entered the warehouse, and that had been as much reflex as anything.

But—

He knelt beside the woman, holding her hand, until her thrashing stopped.

In all his years as a bounty hunter he had never killed the wrong target before, and there was a tightness in his throat he hadn’t felt since the day of his exile from Concord Dawn. He felt an absurd desire to apologize to the woman, which was ridiculous, she was as guilty of sin as any human being had ever been in the history of time, Fett had known her in her earlier days and there was nothing worthwhile in her or in her life, and certainly the galaxy would not miss her presence—

But he had not meant to kill her.

She shuddered slightly and her hand, holding his, went limp.

The macrobinoculars buried in his helmet didn’t help much, not in this darkness; they showed the still-warm forms of four bodyguards, and the bulk of this dead old woman; they showed the heat still emanating from the lamp fixtures that were now without power.

Toward the back of the warehouse, a heat source moved.

Fett came to his feet, rifle in hand, and went Hunting.

Mandalorian combat armor.

I didn’t come prepared for this
, Han thought. He had an assault rifle, taken from the bodyguard he’d kicked in the groin, but that wasn’t going to help so much, unless
he got in close to Fett, and that was going to be hard, with the macrobinoculars in Fett’s helmet.