Star Wars_ Tales of the Bounty Hunters - Kevin J. Anderson [99]
Toryn turned back into the blackness ahead. The droids had counted forty-seven survivors. She had passed twenty or thirty on this deck alone. The escape pods, if they could launch them, would carry six people apiece.
Eighteen people from a battered ship that held many times more that. She froze for a moment, unable to imagine how they would decide who would go if they could launch the pods. But she made herself start moving again.
Find the pods first, she told herself. Find a way to launch them. Then find other options for all of us they will leave behind, if you can.
Darth Vader had assigned four other bounty hunters besides 4-LOM and Zuckuss to this hunt—and each bounty hunter was furious because of it. None had been told other bounty hunters would be involved. 4-LOM could not calculate Darth Vader’s reasons for hiring six bounty hunters. The group included Dengar, an angry Corellian with a damaged head and without any impressive Hunts to his record; IG-88, an assassin droid, though 4-LOM had been under the impression that Darth Vader wanted the acquisitions he was sending them after alive; Bossk, a renowned Hunter of Wookiees; and, most impressively, Boba Fett. It was an odd assemblage.
4-LOM calculated that Vader was sending them after odd—and extremely wily—acquisitions. He searched his Imperial Most Wanted list, with its thousands of names and files, but found no one individual who should require such measures to Hunt down.
The bounty hunters stood together in a waiting room, eyeing each other and not speaking. Bounty hunter law forbade killing another bounty hunter, but 4-LOM calculated a 63.276 percent chance that at least three of the six bounty hunters there were considering murdering other members of the group to increase their own chances of success in this Hunt.
It was imperative that Zuckuss show no weakness now. 4-LOM studied his partner. Zuckuss stood fully erect, alert, breathing easily in his helmet. No one could detect his injuries, 4-LOM calculated.
Vader summoned them at once. The bounty hunters strode quickly down corridors, almost outpacing their guide. Imperials of all ranks made way for them—and stared after them. Processors in 4-LOM’s mind analyzed the faces and voices of the people he passed, matching them to the Imperial Most Wanted List and his guild’s list of posted bounties. 4-LOM always did this when he walked through crowds of people. The odds of a chance encounter with someone worth credits were low, and in the short time it took his mind to match a face to a posted bounty a person could disappear—but he had taken seven acquisitions off streets that way: unexpected, but welcome, credits earned while Hunting other prey. Wouldn’t it be interesting to unmask a Rebel spy here, on this flagship, and turn him or her over to Darth Vader?
But 4-LOM identified no Rebels in those corridors. All sentients present were apparently actual Imperials. He picked up most of their whispered comments: “Those bounty hunters are carrying blasters in the open!” “Who called them here?” “The Republic tried to control their kind, but the Empire should have abolished them.”
It amused 4-LOM to think what consternation the mere presence of six bounty hunters caused among professional soldiers—supposedly the Empire’s best and most fearless. 4-LOM calculated that fear of six bounty hunters affected the actions of 98.762 percent of all Imperials they passed in that corridor.
Fear was a valuable feeling to instill in acquisitions one Hunted: it clouded their logic and made most nonmechanical sentients actually run—a predictable, if usually fatal, choice. The instinctual programming inside