Star Wars_ Tales of the Bounty Hunters - Kevin J. Anderson [96]
It was the only logical answer, after all.
He would learn the ways of the Force. Its dark side would be a great ally to him in his work.
Once away from 4-LOM, alone with his pain, Zuckuss stopped and held on to a handrail. The pain in his lungs was growing much worse, more difficult to control. The oxygen burns could not heal.
He knew he had to hide this weakness from the other bounty hunters, and especially from Darth Vader. But, he realized standing there, not moving because of his pain—he was hiding the worsening extent of his injuries from 4-LOM, too.
Zuckuss was surprised 4-LOM had stayed with him at all after he got hurt. 4-LOM told him calmly one day, in his droid’s logical, unemotional voice, that he estimated other bounty hunters would take 1.5 minutes to complete plans to exploit Zuckuss’s weakness and draw off their clients—or attempt to steal their ship and equipment and any remnants of fortune—should they gain knowledge of Zuckuss’s troubles.
Zuckuss never asked, but he was sure the droid had also calculated their diminishing chances for success in Hunts for bounty—Hunts in which 4-LOM had to do more and more of the work. If they were not successful in this Hunt, if they did not get the necessary resources to buy new lungs, Zuckuss believed his injuries would finally become so debilitating that 4-LOM would calculate no further profit in maintaining their partnership. The droid would leave. On that day, Zuckuss told himself, he would ask 4-LOM to calculate his chances for survival alone. He would want to know the odds to prepare himself. He would have only days, perhaps, but it comforted him to think that, under those circumstances, the injuries that ate away at his life would never kill him.
Zuckuss made his way to his bunk and his medicines. He gave himself a shot of pain killer, then sat on his bunk. He felt the drug race through his system, numbing his chest and lungs. Suddenly he could breathe the sweet ammonia in his ship a little easier. How he missed the ammonia mists of his own gas planet. For three Standard centuries, his family had worked there as findsmen: bounty hunters who meditated on the location of acquisitions and Hunted them in the swirling mists of Gand.
But the Empire took over Gand and brought in their excellent scanning equipment. It looked as if the time-honored tradition of findsmen would die. They were no longer needed. The Empire tracked acquisitions through the mists without help and without intuition.
But the profession did not die. Zuckuss and a few others took it off Gand into the wider galaxy—a place so wild, so vast, that intuition was all that could make a path across it to acquisitions no scanners could locate, all that could read the intentions of alien races, all that could give hints of the future and the rewards or trials its multitudinous paths led to, the ends everyone and everything rushed toward.
Zuckuss meditated, at times, on who would eventually kill him.
He knew it was a question of who would kill him, not what The mists surrounding his own mortality remained mostly unreadable, though in his meditations he had had hints—and none involved accident, or mechanical failure, or even the injuries to his lungs that brought him such pain. Another being would bring him death.
Zuckuss had ruled out 4-LOM. His long-standing partner did not want to kill him, and would not when they separated. But twice Zuckuss had sensed that Jabba the Hutt would grow impatient with his weakness, if he discovered it, and attempt to feed him to his Rancor. That was a future he preferred to avoid. He sensed that he would not be killed in the mists of his own world, however much he missed Gand and would have liked to die there. He would die somewhere else. He wondered for a time if Darth Vader would kill him, but he knew he had nothing to fear from Vader, at least for now.
When he could, Zuckuss stood up and injected himself with stimulants, then other drugs to boost the quickness of his mind and counteract the dulling effects of the pain killer. He heard the first mechanical sounds