Star Wars_ Tales of the Bounty Hunters - Kevin J. Anderson [135]
After the Devaronians had gone, Dowd stood with his tablet, looking at Fett with plain curiosity. Fett sat in the pilot’s seat, still holding his rifle, pointed rather generally in Dowd’s direction.
Dowd said, “You’ll be retiring, I presume.”
Fett shrugged. “I haven’t thought about it.”
Dowd nodded. “What did he mean—about the music?”
“He had a music collection. Music the Empire suppressed, apparently. He asked me to deliver it to a woman who would see that the music was published.”
Dowd lifted an eyebrow. “Are you going to?”
“I said I would.”
Dowd nodded. “You’re a strange one.” The comment didn’t offend Fett; Dowd had made the observation before, and more than once, over the course of the decades they had known one another. Dowd reached into the pocket of his coat, and Fett stirred, bringing the rifle up slightly.
Dowd’s smile was thin. “I’ve a message chip for you. Message that arrived at Guild headquarters. Do you want it?”
“Leave it on the deck,” said Fett, “and leave. I’m very tired.”
The message was amazing.
The encryption code was so old that Fett had to dig into his computer’s archives to find the key for it. He’d made the practice, over the years, of giving his informants encryption codes in a numbered sequence; the first five digits of this message were 00802, which made it at least twenty-five years old—Fett’s current encryption identification numbers started well upwards of 12,000.
He unarchived the encryption key for the 802 protocol, and decoded the message.
It was short. It said:
Han Solo is on Jubilar—Incavi Larado.
In a lifetime of bounty hunting, Boba Fett had rarely, in conversation with others, said two words when one would do. He didn’t talk to himself, not ever—
Boba Fett said out loud, “One from the vaults.”
On his way to Jubilar, Boba Fett played the music that the Butcher of Montellian Serat had thought more important than his own life.
There were over five hundred infochips in the carrying case the Butcher had buried; each chip had the capacity to hold almost a day’s worth of music Fett opened the case, pulled one free at random, and plugged it in.
The sounds that surrounded him were—different, he had to admit. Atonal, crashing, and thoroughly unpleasant to the ear. He shook his head, pulled the chip free, and decided to try one more.
A long silence after the chip was inserted. Fett waited, and finally, impatiently, reached for it—
The sound tugged at the limits of audibility. Fett froze in the motion of reaching for the chip, straining to hear. The whisper grew into the faintest sound of a woodwind, and then a high horn joined it, playing counterpoint—
Fett’s hand dropped, and he leaned back in his chair, listening.
A voice that sounded female to Fett, but might have been a human male or an alien of any of a dozen sexes, for all Fett would have sworn to, joined in, weaving in and among the instruments, singing beautifully in a language that meant nothing to Fett, a language he had never heard before.
After a bit he reached up and pulled his helmet off.
“Lights off,” he said a while later.
He sat there in the cool cabin, on his way to Jubilar to kill Han Solo, listening in the darkness to the only copy, anywhere in the galaxy, of the legendary Brullian Dyll’s last concert.
In the icy Devaronian northlands, beneath the dark blue skies that had haunted Kardue’sai’Malloc’s dreams for over two decades, some ten thousand Devaronians had converged in the Judgment Field outside the ruins of the ancient holy city of Montellian Serat, the city Malloc had shelled into its current state.
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.