"Don't be too sure about that," said Neelah. "There's two other people on this ship—and only one of you."
"If you think that you and Dengar could pull off a lit-tle mutiny, you're welcome to try." No emotion, not even scorn, sounded in Boba Fett's voice. "I've some use for both of you at the moment, but that could change. Real fast." He gestured with one gloved hand toward Neelah. "It's up to you."
She already knew that it was no good asking him what exactly that "use" was. Boba Fett was notorious for play-ing his cards close to his chest, revealing nothing, not even to those who were supposedly his partners.
"You don't leave someone with very many options." Neelah heard her own voice go as cold and hard as Fett's. "Do you?"
"My business is to reduce other creatures' options. That's why I always kept a cage in the cargo hold of my own ship." Boba Fett's hand now pointed toward the decks below the cockpit. "The previous owner of this ship had the same facilities installed; all bounty hunters have them. If you'd rather make the rest of the journey in a rather less comfortable manner, believe me, it can be arranged. Don't expect Dengar to join you, though. He's at least smart enough not to go along with a plan like that."
One more creature around here, thought Neelah, that I can't trust. Boba Fett was infuriatingly correct about that as well; she knew that if Dengar was given the choice between throwing his lot in with her or maintain-ing whatever kind of partnership he had with Fett, he'd go on following the other bounty hunter's orders in a flash. Why wouldn't he? If Dengar stuck with Boba Fett, he had a chance of getting a piece of the action, a slice of the credits that Fett's various schemes and enterprises generated. And that slice, however thin it was cut com-pared to Boba Fett's own, was still better than risking a shot at getting killed for the sake of somebody without even her real name, let alone any other known friend or ally in the galaxy. Dengar couldn't be blamed if he was smart enough to know the odds and to play them for his own benefit.
As for winding up in the cage herself—Neelah wasn't sure whether she cared or not. What's the difference? She could see her own face reflected in the dark visor of Boba Fett's helmet; it was a face that bore the grim, fatalistic expression of someone who might have managed to save herself from the deadly confines of Jabba the Hutt's palace, only to have wound up in another situation that was just like it in essence. I don't make the decisions, she thought. Even whether I live or die.
"So we should all go along with your plan," said Nee-lah, "whatever it is. Without complaining."
Boba Fett shrugged. "Complain all you want. Just not to me. And"—he pointed to the blaster pistol tucked in her belt—"without thinking you could get a jump on me. It's not going to happen."
"Sure about that?"
"Let me put it another way," said Fett. "It hasn't hap-pened yet. And all those who tried to make it happen— they're no longer with us."
She didn't need to be reminded about that. Everything she had heard about Boba Fett, from her time back in Jabba's palace to here onboard the stolen Hound's Tooth, listening to Dengar's tale of the disintegration of the old Bounty Hunters Guild and its ugly aftermath, had rein-forced the impression she'd already had of him. A sen-tient creature put its own life up as the wager when it gambled in any dealings with Boba Fett.
Still —it was a thought she'd had more than once— there are times when you have to go ahead and place your bet. If she hadn't done that, back when she had been the personal property of the late Jabba, she would have eventually wound up being fed to the Hurt's pet rancor, just as poor Oola had been. It was better to die with a wager on the table than to just cringe and wait for any one of the many grisly deaths that this galaxy held for the timid.
Neelah's hand had strayed to the butt of the blaster pistol at her side, resting there as though only another thought, and another decision, were all that stood be-tween her and testing the advice that both Boba Fett and her own remaining caution had given her.
One shot was all that it would take; one fiery bolt from the blaster. The weapon grew warm within her grasp. Some wordless certainty deep inside her, unat-tached to any fragment of memory, any recall of her stolen past, told Neelah that she actually had a chance of pulling it off. The person she had been before, her true identity, hidden behind the blank curtain that had been drawn across all that was rightfully hers to recall—that person, she had come to realize, had reflexes nearly as fast as Boba Fett's. Maybe faster, given that even now she had the element of surprise on her side. He wouldn't ex-pect it, thought Neelah. She could tell that for all his skills as a bounty hunter, both physical and psychologi-cal, there was a blind spot in that helmet-visored gaze: it was only to be expected that he would be unable to ad-mit that any part of his plans, any piece of hard merchan-dise, could have moves equal to his own.
The notion was tempting. She could almost taste it under her tongue, like the hot salt of her own blood. It was the same temptation that she had yielded to once be-fore, in Jabba's palace back on the planet of Tatooine, when she had decided it was better to put an end to the Hutt's ownership of her body and spirit, even if the price to do so was her life. The mystery of her true name and identity was just as maddeningly intolerable; knowing that the answer might be locked inside the mind held by that dark-visaged helmet of Mandalorian battle armorthat thought drove out all others. One quick move with her hand, which already could feel the cold metal of the blaster a millimeter away from her sweating palm, and the mystery would be over, one way or another. One of them would be dead, with either a smoking blaster hole drilled through Boba Fett's chest or her own, depending upon which of them got a bolt off first. And right now, she knew deep inside herself, she was close to not even caring which of them it was ...
"But then you'll never know."
Neelah heard the voice, and for a moment thought it was her own, speaking inside her head. Then she realized that the hard, emotionless words had been Boba Fett's.
He can tell, she realized. He can always tell. Exactly what she had been thinking—her hand, trembling close to the butt of the blaster pistol at her side, had given it away.
"That's the price," continued Fett. "That's still the price."
She nodded. But didn't pull her hand away from the blaster.
"I'll make it easy for you." Boba Fett reached down and drew the blaster that had been holstered on the belt of his battle armor. Holding it by the barrel, he threw it into the farther corner of the cockpit space, where it clanged against one of the bare durasteel bulkheads. "Now you won't have to worry about whether it would cost you your life. The only one that's at stake is my own."
He's playing with me. The lack of any perceptible emotion in his voice only made it clearer to her. The same thing she had known from the beginning: Boba Fett didn't win by sheer violence, or the brutal efficiency of his weapons. The force of his will, and his understanding of other creatures' thoughts, were just as annihilating. She was wrong, she knew that now. Whatever he did, it wasn't play; it was deadly serious. Even in this, in making it easy for her to kill him—if that was what she chose—there was something he wanted from her.
Neelah pulled the blaster from her belt—the weapon seemed to rise of its own accord, as though directed by some intelligence wired into its intricate circuitry—and pointed it straight at Boba Fett's chest. Her finger made closer contact with the trigger, the small bit of metal sensed by and made one with the twitching filament at the end of her nervous system, that then ran directly into the churning storm of thoughts and desires caught inside her skull. With her arm held out, unmoving, she gazed over the blaster's sights at the cold, dark visage that mir-rored her own face ... And couldn't fire.