Tales from the New Republic (30 page)

The Storyteller stopped, enjoying the eager stares of the children.

“How does it end?” asked the little girl breathlessly.

Her question was taken up by the other kids as they demanded a resolution to the tale.

The Storyteller smiled appreciatively and continued. “Well, after many, many years Boba Fett managed to track Rivo down to a backwater planet in the Outer Rim Territories, to the very cantina where the slicer was hiding—” He paused for effect and then said softly, “—And then the greatest bounty hunter of all time finally completed his task. You see, Boba Fett
never
loses.” He glanced at his chronometer. “Now, it’s way past your bedtimes. Get off to sleep, all of you. And no bad dreams or no more stories before bedtime.”

Satisfied, the children filed up the stairs to their rooms, still chattering about the story. All except for the little girl. She paused at the top of the steps with a quizzical look on her face. “Is Boba Fett a good guy or a bad guy?”

He considered that for a moment. “That’s a question only you can answer,” he said finally.

The girl shrugged her shoulders and bounded up the stairs, leaving the Storyteller alone with his thoughts.

Well, not quite alone.

“How long have you been sitting there?” the Storyteller asked.

“You tell me,” came the flat, filtered response.

The Storyteller turned toward the shadowed booth from which a gray and green-garbed figure emerged. Boba Fett stood before the Storyteller, arms folded across his armored chest.

“After all these years you actually managed to find me.” Smiling, the Storyteller stood up. “At least my little tale will be authentic now.”

The bounty hunter slowly reached into one of his pouches and the Storyteller took a deep breath. Fett withdrew something silver and shiny and the Storyteller suddenly had visions of thermal detonators.

Fett casually tossed the object toward the man, who caught it out of reflex.

The Storyteller braced himself for the end, but when it didn’t come he looked at the object in his palm. It was a credit chit.

Fett was already walking toward the exit.

The Storyteller held it up, confused. “What is this?”

The bounty hunter didn’t turn around. “Many things, Rivo. An end, a new beginning… and maybe even an answer to a little girl’s question.” Fett glanced back once, then disappeared through the doors.

The Storyteller (he no longer really thought of himself as Rivo) examined the chit. It contained fifty thousand credits. The exact bounty put on his head by Jabba. Suddenly, everything became clear. He grinned and ran outside.

Boba Fett was gone… vanished into the wastes of Ladarra.

The Storyteller stood there in silence. And realized something was wrong. For a brief moment, he couldn’t quite figure it out—then it suddenly hit him.

There was no squeaking.

The Storyteller looked down… and found himself staring at the disintegrated remains of the bar’s repliwood sign. He threw back his head and began laughing.

“Wonder what we’ll find?” Solum’ke mused for what I guessed was the half-dozenth time since we set out.

“Maybe nothing,” I replied—again. “It’s just a legend, after all. Don’t get your hopes up.”

“Well, Diergu-Rea Duhnes’rd, love of my life, I think there’s something to it,” she persisted. She formed her bulbous, mottled lips into a delightful pout. “The Qwohog thinks so, too. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have talked us into renting this sail barge.”

Talked you
, I mentally corrected her.
Talked you into spending the last of my credits during the Day of the Sepulchral Night
.

If we’d stayed in the city—and on dry ground—we could have booked passage on that Corellian corvette occupying most of the port and got back into Imperial lanes. There we could pick up a few leads on lucrative contracts. I’d spent so many credits on our brief vacation on this backwater world that I needed to turn a good bounty to replenish my normally bulging account.

We’d come to Zelos II several days ago for a little relaxation. The place is known for its tourist spots—elaborate spas and cantinas that cater to all manner of beings and all manner of tastes and appetites. For the past several days I’d been lavishly doling out my credits on the exhibitions and in the casinos, and—of course—on the more-than-suitable accommodations in which I had been romancing the lovely Solum’ke. Like me, she’s a Weequay, a tough-looking humanoid with alluring coarse, gnarled skin. Hers is an enchanting desert tan, shaded darker in just the right places and relatively smooth across her beautiful bald head. Mine is a dark gray, nearly the color of the magnificent wiry topknot that extends to the center of my back. We make an attractive couple.

We don’t
have
to use words between us—not spoken ones, anyway. Ours is the ability to excrete pheromones that allow us to communicate our moods and desires. Right now my desire was to be elsewhere, but I kept my pheromones in check so as not to give it away and disappoint her.

“Look at the moons,” she breathed huskily. Her pheromones said she was in a very romantic mood. “They’re beautiful.”

We don’t
have
to use words. But I like the sound of her voice, and she knows it. I followed her gaze. Zelos II has four moons, and I had read somewhere that moonlight is an essential ingredient to an amorous environment. That’s one of the reasons I suggested we come to this planet.

Unfortunately, it was also because of those four moons that we were now on an understaffed sail barge skimming a meter above the Great Zelosi Sea and leaving land uncomfortably far behind.

K’zk, the Qwohog piloting the rented barge, had been sitting at a nearby table in the restaurant we had selected for dinner last night. He had looked small and out of place among his humanlike Zelosian companions—whom he was failing to convince to make this very trip. In fact, he pretty much looked out of place away from water. That drew Solum’ke’s attention, and she immediately became more interested in K’zk’s diatribe than in my soft-spoken words of adoration and the grilled lemock haunch sizzling on her plate.

Qwohogs are bipedal amphibians. This one was pale green, almost matching the restaurant’s drapes. He had silvery-blue scales atop his head, pointed ears, and long, thin fingers that he waved every time he uttered a word. His speech was funny and clipped, made harsh and nasally by the vocalizer mask he wore. I’d learned that Qwohogs normally communicate by sending vibrations through the water—freshwater—and need a mask to be understood above the waves. Saltwater isn’t their preferred environment, but apparently this Qwohog and his fellows had swallowed their fears and were about to strike off across the Great Zelosi Sea. They just needed someone along who wasn’t averse to maybe getting in the saltwater.

“Isn’t this romantic?” Solum’ke whispered, interrupting my musings. She demurely leaned against the rail and stared at three of Zelos II’s moons. They hung low in the sky, practically touching the sea. “The moons, the water, the breeze across my skin. Truly romantic.”

“Not if you’re a Zelosian,” I said as I moved closer and placed my hand on the small of her back. “Right now it’s midmorning, and under any other circumstance you couldn’t see those moons. The fourth moon’s aligned with the sun. The natives are superstitious enough as it is about the moons and night and day. But on this particular day their behavior is extreme—or so I can tell from the datachips I’ve skimmed. No wonder K’zk couldn’t get any of the natives to come with him. Suicides, insanity, unfounded hysteria. In fact…”

“All right,” she said flatly, the whimsy suddenly gone from her voice. “It’s an eclipse. Nothing romantic about an eclipse, huh? At least not to you. Hysteria. Such a romantic word.”

“The Day of the Sepulchral Night,” I said, thinking I should say something to get the mood back. I shouldn’t have gotten analytical on her. “Not romantic in and of itself, certainly. But everything’s romantic—and perfect—when you’re with me.”

She grinned, revealing a pearly row of wide, blunt teeth, and settled against me. “I’m so glad we came to this place.”

I kept my pheromones in control, smiled, and thought about my credits, which were continuing to evaporate on sail barge rent with each kilometer of sea we crossed. “Nowhere else could we have seen this day of night,” I answered as I held her close.

The Zelosians’ culture is wrapped around day and night—we both learned that our first day on the planet. Light is good, darkness is bad, according to their philosophy. And during this extremely rare eclipse, the natives lock themselves indoors in abject terror. The cantinas and casinos close, the spas are boarded up, and only non-Zelosian ships in the port come and go. Even I had to admit the morning sky looked a little eerie.

The reflection of the three full moons, a sallow blue, a pallid violet, and a glimmering green a shade darker than K’zk the Qwohog, hit the small waves, sending patterns of light dancing toward the prow and the horizon.

I squinted at a spot far in front of us. Something was breaking up the light show.

“Wreck off starboard!” one of the four Qwohog crewmen called. It was a scant crew, the Zelosians who worked the barge taking the day off to hide. My rent had paid for the craft only—K’zk provided the crew.

“There, K’zk!” a stocky Qwohog shouted. “That wave-skimmer’s busted good. Must’ve run aground on the rocks!” The Qwohog gestured wildly toward jagged shards of hull that floated on the dark water, scattered amid bits of torn sail and rigging.

A coral spike jutted defiantly out of the center of the refuse. The ruined wave-skimmer’s masthead, a remarkably buxom Zelosian woman, was caught against the spike and thumped hollowly like a beating heart with each lapping wave. There were bodies, most bobbing facedown, the life long since seeped out of them. A few men were draped over the larger pieces of hull and might still be alive. It was impossible to tell from this distance, and the matter was becoming moot. I spied a tiny dome-shaped pate cut through the water—melk. The scaly rodent-sized beast rose, rolled its eyes back and opened its mouth. In an instant it had begun to feast on one of the possible survivors. Other melk were appearing, about two dozen I guessed. I imagined the waves, painted black by the eclipse, were becoming tinted red with blood.

K’zk padded toward us and peered toward the coral spike and slowly shook his head. “Too many shoals around here. Tide’s too low. Any skimmer captain worth his water would have known better, wouldn’t have taken a skimmer into these parts.” He ran his slender fingers across his scales. “Lower the sails!” he called through his mask. “Hold our position! I don’t want us drifting any closer.” Softer, he said to the closest Qwohog, “Take a sail raft over. See if there might be any survivors. I’ll not risk this barge going into those shallows for any man. Diergu-Rea, do you mind going with him? Little short-handed because of the eclipse, you know.”

I scowled. I didn’t like the water, but I knew how to swim, so I wasn’t afraid of hopping in a little sail raft. But I didn’t want our captain to spend the rest of the day picking through bloating bodies. With so many melk feasting, the odds of finding someone alive were about as great as finding a veelgeg in a kemlish pulled from Kryndyn’s deep bay. Nil, in other words. I wasn’t worried about the melk looking to me for dinner. With so much flesh in the water, they’d leave the sail raft alone. What worried me was the waste of time.

We were here to find Zelosian’s Chine—or not find it, more likely—and return to the relative safety of the Kryndyn spaceport. I thought about voicing my objection, since I was financing this little trip, but one of the Qwohogs cut me off.

“Found a couple of live ones, K’zk!” An alert Qwohog had a pair of macrobinoculars pressed to his eyes and trained on the water. He was gesturing with a spindly arm.

I let out a deep breath and headed toward the sail raft. “Yeah, I’ll go.”

“Me, too,” Solum’ke added excitedly. Her pheromones told me she was honestly anxious to help.

We climbed into the raft, reached for the syntherope dispenser to lower it a bit, then we kicked on the repulsorlift switch. The tiny craft settled about a half a meter above the water. I glanced back at K’zk, who was checking over the barge’s repulsorlift unit.

Our Qwohog mate guided the sail raft among the refuse. From the looks of the broken deck plates and the floating, bent mast, I guessed the wave-skimmer had been a little less than half the size of the sail barge. Its lift mechanism probably wasn’t powerful enough to float it high above the spires, and hence the skimmer had struck one and become crippled.

The smell of the bodies wasn’t strong yet, suggesting the men probably died around dawn. Still, it was enough to make Solum’ke wrinkle her pretty nostrils. She pointed toward the two men the Qwohog had miraculously spotted. Humans, not Zelosians like most of the unfortunates facedown in the water. They were clinging desperately to a couple of cargo crates lashed to another coral spike. It kept them out of the water and away from melk, but it was a precarious perch. The men waved frantically and called to us. The sail raft scraped against a ridge edging just above the surface as we made our way toward them. I glanced over the side, the moonlight revealing a shallow reef. I could’ve stretched my arm over the side and touched it if I weren’t afraid a melk would bite my hand off. If we’d taken the sail barge in to rescue these men, we might’ve run aground, too, and been melk food.

As we pulled alongside the crates, I helped the survivors into the sail raft. They were pale men with dark brown hair that was matted with blood. Their features hinted that they were Corellian—far from our home, but not at all that far from the Corellian corvette that was in port. If they were from that ship, they might be our free ride out of here—transportation in exchange for our saving their lives.

The older one looked to be in worse shape. His lip was split, and a deep gash along his leg was swelling, probably becoming infected. It looked like a melk had bit him and spit him back out. A primitive gaffhook at his side was crusted with blood and made me wonder if he had managed to take a piece out of the reptile.

“Thank the moons someone saw us,” the younger man said. “We’d have been dead by evening if you hadn’t come along.”

“Anyone else alive?” Solum’ke asked.

The pair shook their heads and found a spot in the center of the sail raft, settling heavily onto the seat. “They’re sleeping in the bellies of the melk,” the eldest said. He extended his hand to me, and I shook it. It was terribly cold. He’d been in the water a while. He introduced himself as Hanugar, and the younger survivor as Sevik.

“What happened?” I found myself asking.

“A coral reef and a low tide because of the eclipse,” Hanugar said. “The wave-skimmer we rented struck it late last night. Cracked the hull open and ruined the repulsorlift mechanism. It was a good ship, but the captain was nervous, wanting to get home before the Day of the Sepulchral Night. When we hit, we took on water too fast to do anything to save her.”

“What were you doing so far from the coast?” Solum’ke wondered aloud.

Sevik shrugged. “Sightseeing. The regular tourist stuff.”

The Qwohog steered the sail raft back to the barge, while we listened to Hanugar and Sevik explain how they were barely able to tie the cargo containers together and hang onto a coral spike to escape being melk bait. They seemed genuinely thankful for the rescue, and volunteered to pay for our passage offworld. My hunch was right. They were from the big corvette in port.

Once on deck, Solum’ke looked over the Corellians’ wounds. She has a knack for fashioning poultices and bandages—Sriluur knows she’s had to bandage me plenty of times after I ended up on the wrong end of a cantina fight.

“What brought you out here so late at night?” Sevik asked us. It was a fair question—we’d asked it of him.

“Sightseeing. The regular tourist stuff,” Solum’ke replied.

“Honeymooning,” I whispered in answer so softly that he couldn’t hear. I grinned and turned away, knowing Solum’ke wouldn’t tell the Corellians the real reason we were out here—hunting for treasure that according to K’zk was buried in Zelosian’s Chine.

From somewhere behind me, I heard K’zk order one of his fellows to bring the Corellians some food. As the pair devoured the meal, I listened to their idle banter. K’zk was telling them we were heading south, thinking about skimming toward the Bryndas Islands where the more exotic spas could be found. The Qwohog sounded convincing. Ha! I thought to myself.
He had tried to convince the Zelosians at the restaurant to come out on this fool treasure hunt with him. But they’d have nothing to do with it because of the eclipse. Then he turned his charms on Solum’ke and succeeded. Treasure appealed to her
.

I heard the flap of the sails rising and billowing above me, the rev of the repulsorlift engine. Time to be on our way again.

K’zk had told us he couldn’t go after the treasure himself. It was the problem with saltwater. He couldn’t breathe it, and being submerged in it could make his skin blister. Going after the treasure might entail getting wet—and hence his need for someone to help him. He said we’d split whatever we found fifty-fifty.