Star Wars_ Tales of the Bounty Hunters - Kevin J. Anderson [129]
The worst disaster of his life had taken place there, his fall into the Great Pit of Carkoon, into the maw of the Sarlacc.
Two years ago, Tatooine had intruded into Fett’s life again. Four mercs, two of them Devaronian, had walked into a bar in Mos Eisley. One of the Devaronian mercs recognized, or thought he had recognized, the Butcher of Montellian Serat. The identification might not have been accurate; the old Devaronian he pointed to had promptly killed all four of the mercs, and no one was able to question him about it.
The old Devaronian had vanished, clean off Tatooine … and Fett had tracked him. Here, to Peppel, a world almost as far away from Coruscant as Tatooine.
The target. Kardue’sai’Malloc, the Butcher of Montellian Serat. There was a five million credit bounty on the Butcher, five million credits of retirement money.
Boba Fett was not the man he had once been. His right leg, from the knee down, was artificial. Only constant medical treatment kept him from developing a cancer; the days he’d spent in the belly of the Sarlacc had altered his metabolism permanently, had damaged him genetically to such a degree that he could not have had children had he wanted them; his cellular structures did not always regenerate the way they were meant to.
To say nothing of the memories he had carried away from the Sarlacc and the Sarlacc’s genetic soup, memories that were not always his own.
Fett waited, on his belly in the cold, in the mud, nude except for the shorts that kept his privates decently covered, with arrows in a quiver slung across his back, and a bow in one hand, and a crystal knife inside a leather sheath. Malloc—or Labria, the name he’d been going by for the last couple of decades now—was trickier and more dangerous than anyone had ever dreamed. He’d had a reputation in Mos Eisley, Fett had learned; Labria, the worst spy in the city. He was a drunk, and nobody had respected him, or feared him, until the day he had killed four mercs in the prime of their lives.
Darkness gathered. Fett waited, shivering, worrying. Artificial light of some sort glimmered in the hut’s sole window. The metal content of his artificial leg was low, but Fett did not know how good the Butcher’s security system was; all he knew was that it was there. He’d slipped tripwires, light traps; had crawled, centimeter by centimeter, past blinking motion sensors.
If there were not some sort of sensor sweeping the clearing, Fett would have been surprised. It was the reason he had not worn his armor, nor brought more modern weapons.
The lights in the hut went out. The hut had no plumbing; the previous night at this time Malloc had waited for several minutes after the extinguishing of his light, letting his eyes acclimate to the darkness, Fett assumed, before coming outside.
Fett reached over his back, pulled an arrow free, and strung the bow. It was a compound bow, that required the least exertion after it had been pulled back; Fett pulled it and waited.
Last night at this time Malloc had come outside to relieve himself. Fett didn’t know as much about Devaronians as he might have (though he had studied an anatomy chart for Devaronians; he didn’t want to shoot the fellow in the wrong place). Conceivably they only relieved themselves once a week. If so, he was going to have to think of some other approach—
The door swung open, and the bounty stood in the doorway, assault rifle cradled in both hands, took a quick step outside, onto the porch, and then stepped off the porch and walked around to the side of the house nearer Fett’s hiding place. Fett tracked Malloc as he moved over to the open-air toilet the Devaronian had dug for himself, ten meters outside the hut.