A signal flare, a quick streak of white light soaring up from the construction docks, cut short Kuat's musing.
He briefly took one hand away from the felinx and touched a miniaturized keypad on his opposite wrist. The circuitry controlling the viewscreens' time-aperture filtering went into activated status, synchronizing with
the close-range signal from the micro-shutters implanted in his corneas. For a split second, the view-screens flickered opaque, then became transparent again as the two optical systems locked in tight with each other.
No sound would travel through the vacuum between the docks and the arching viewscreens of Kuat's offices. But the glare of fiery light, if left unblocked, would be enough to startle the sleeping felinx awake. The creature was easily frightened; Kuat had no wish to have it clawing its panicky way out of his arms. There was still a white, threadlike scar under his own chin, from the last time that had happened.
The final signal flare, red this time, coursed across the field of stars above Kuat Drive Yards. That meant all KDY personnel had been cleared from the dock where the completed Imperial battle cruiser lay waiting, still shrouded in service lines and access canopies.
There was no need for a signal from him; everything happened automatically from this point. A simple imbedded fuse catalyzed the pyrogenic compounds interlaced in the shrouding material; the oxygen still captured inside the canopies' folds was sufficient for the christening of fire, the purging of everything that wasn't hardened durasteel.
In seconds, the battle cruiser had been wrapped in flames, churning in upon themselves, absent the rising convection effects that would have been caused by a surrounding atmosphere. The surrounding canopies had already blackened and been torn into great, ragged-edged sheets of ash, dissolving into nothingness as the last fiery glow dissipated. From the construction dock, the battle cruiser rose slightly, a perfect weapon, cleansed and tempered.
A few bits of ash, compelled outward by the force of the vanished flame, drifted against the thick glass of the segmented viewscreens. Kuat of Kuat stood with the still-sleeping felinx cradled in his arms, the afterimage of fire shifting its spectrum behind the filters of his eyes.
4
"You know how to pilot this thing?"
Boba Fett glanced over his shoulder at the other bounty hunter standing in the hatchway of the Hound's Tooth's cockpit." There are certain difficulties," he said evenly, with no apparent emotion." But they can be overcome." He raised his own gloved hands from the control panel's distinctive forearm grooves." Trandoshan operating interfaces are on the crude and awkward side, but the ship's configuration is otherwise standard. Anything of which those big claws are capable, I assure you is equally within my grasp."
I bet, thought Dengar. He leaned against the side of the hatchway, watching Boba Fett make some final navigation adjustments. He'd had his own encounters with Trandoshans, including the former owner of this ship, and they had all been unpleasant. Bossk had had a reputation for a hot temper even back in the days of the old Bounty Hunters Guild, when he'd had presumably less to gripe about. Cross him, and you were likely to get your head unscrewed from your shoulders like the lid of an emergency rations canister. That was what those claws were suitable for, not highspeed, pinpoint starhopping. Whereas someone like Boba Fett could work over an enemy with equal finality and handle intimidatingly complex gear, from any kind of interplanetary vessel to that Mandalorian battle armor that Fett wore.
Dengar pointed to the cockpit's comm equipment." What happens when somebody recognizes this ship, and they want to talk to Bossk? We might run into some old friend of his, somebody who can tell that this is the Hound."
"True," said Fett. He had turned his gaze back to the ship's controls." But where we're going, we're not likely to encounter many acquaintances of Bossk's. He confined himself to a relatively restricted number of sectors, the worlds and systems where he was well known enough to command a certain measure of respect. That's what he liked. Bossk never showed much initiative about expanding his operations into new territories."
"If you say so." Dengar shrugged." I guess that was his loss, huh?"
"Perhaps." Boba Fett punched another set of coordinates into the navicomputer." Or it might be why he's still alive at all. Sometimes-for creatures like him-it's better to play it safe."
Yeah? And what about creatures like us? He found himself gazing at the back of Boba Fett's helmet, wondering what was going on inside it, what schemes and hidden agendas might be ticking away in the other bounty hunter's skull. It was no help to have seen Fett without the distinctive Mandalorian helmet-he supposed he was one of the few, along with the former dancing girl Neelah, who could make that claim. All that time down on Tatooine, when the two of them had been nursing Boba Fett back to health, keeping him from dying after he'd managed to explode his way out of the Sarlacc's gut-and Dengar was still no closer to figuring out the creature whose life he'd saved. And that was bad news, considering he was now supposedly partners with the deadliest and most feared bounty hunter in the galaxy; a partnership that Boba Fett had proposed and that Dengar had accepted, perhaps a little too quickly, now that he'd had a chance to think it over. Why did I agree to that? The ostensible reason was that the arrangement had seemed the quickest way to make a lot of money, pay off the huge debtload he'd been dragging around for years, and marry his beloved Manaroo-if she were still waiting for him, and if he returned to her as something other than a blaster-fried corpse.
Being out of touch with her was pure torment for Dengar; the depth of his love for Manaroo had not been completely apparent to him until just before he had left Tatooine in Boba Fett's Slave I. Dengar had contacted Manaroo and had instructed her to take his ship The Punishing One and go into hiding. She had done that job well; right now, he had no idea where in this galaxy Manaroo was, and no way of communicating with her. They had agreed together that as long as Dengar was partners with the notorious bounty hunter Boba Fett, it would be too dangerous for them to remain in contact with each other. There were too many creatures with well-nursed grievances against Boba Fett, or who would see some way of profiting by his death; if those creatures discovered that Fett's partner had committed his heart and spirit and fortunes to a female on her own, she would then be seen as the weak point in Fett's armor, the way of getting at him through his business associate. Manaroo would become the target of every low-life scum in the galaxy; she was smart and tough enough to evade and fight them off, but not forever-and Dengar wouldn't be there to protect her. That factor had tormented his mind and influenced his decision more than anything else.
But even that small measure of safety for his beloved had come with a price. Someday they would be together again-but only if they both survived, and if they found one another once more.
Those were big ifs, and getting increasingly bigger in Dengar's mind, the more time he spent hooked up with Boba Fett. Life as a bounty hunter had been hazardous enough, before now-which had been one of the main reasons he'd wanted to get out of this line of work. And now, he thought gloomily, I've gone from the edges of all that danger right to the center. If his luck-and his skills-had been nothing to boast of before, he had at least managed to keep himself alive. But there hadn't been mysterious, unidentified forces bringing a full-scale bombing raid down on his head, as had happened back on Tatooine. The raid obviously hadn't been meant to kill him; his death wouldn't even have been noticed by whoever was gunning for Boba Fett. That was the problem with hooking up with someone like that. Fett had whatever it took to survive under the most murderous conditions-even the Sarlacc hadn't been able to kill him. Too bad, thought Dengar, for anybody else. If you weren't at that level, you were dead meat.