"That's impossible," snapped Bossk. "That wall's monocrystal-chained; we'd have heard any blast powerful enough to get through it. Unless ..." A sudden suspicion hit him; he glanced over his shoulder to the opposite wall. A sonic dis-sipator, the dials on its silvery ovoid surface trembling at the overload point, hung overhead by its automatically extruded gripfeet. The indicators slowly backed away from their red zones as the impact of the wall-breaching explosion was converted into a harmless sibilant whisper.

The rage inside Bossk leaped up, as though it could blow out another hole, even bigger and hotter. That crossbred spawn of a ... The curse died between his gritting fangs. There was only one bounty hunter who used that kind of sophisticated-and expensive-equipment.

Either it had been smuggled into the counting room somehow, or-more likely- an access hole just big enough for the device had been drilled through the wall, followed by the explosive charge itself when the dissipator had been activated to soak up the noise. There was no point in looking around for the quarry for whom he and Zuckuss had come here. Bossk gripped the edge of the hole torn in the casino's exterior and scanned the planet's pockmarked horizon. In the distance, the infuriatingly familiar shape of a high-speed interstellar craft lifted into the deepening violet of the sky. The ship's engines trailed fire as it headed off- world.

"Come on!" Bossk grabbed Zuckuss by one arm and pulled him toward the gap in the wall. Shrieking alarms sounded from the corridor, triggered by the charges that had taken out the doors; it would only be a few seconds more before guards from other sections of the casino got here. He slung his rifle behind his shoulder and prepared to jump.

"But-" Zuckuss drew back. "But we must be ten meters up! At least!"

"So?" He growled at his partner. "Can you think of a quicker way out of here?"

A few seconds later he and Zuckuss were scrambling to their feet. The urge to murder filled Bossk again as Zuckuss groaned in pain.

"I think I broke something... ."

'As laser shots from the casino guards above sizzled the ground, melting the planet's silicate-heavy ground into patches of glass, he started running, aware that Zuckuss was right behind him.

They caught up with their adversary out beyond the planet's atmosphere.

Bossk jammed the point of his talon down on the comm button as Zuckuss, beside him in the navigator's seat of the Hound's Tooth, fussed with a broken connector to one of his air hoses. "Shut off your engines," he barked into the link. There was no need for formalities; in this remote zone of the starways, no other ship was within hailing range. "You have merchandise onboard that belongs to us. Specifically, one sentient individual by the designation of Nil Posondum, formerly employed by the Trans-Galactic Gaming Enterprises Corporation-"

"Your property?" A cold, uninflected voice sounded from the speaker mounted above the Hound's controls. "And why would this said individual-if he were aboard my ship-why would he belong to you?"

"Maybe," whispered Zuckuss, "we shouldn't get this barve angry. He can be a tough customer."

"Shut up." Bossk pressed the comm button again. "By authority of the Bounty Hunters Guild. That's what makes him ours. Hand him over now, and you won't get into trouble."

"That's very amusing." No emotion, amused or otherwise, was discernible in the other's words. "But you seem to be laboring under a severe misapprehension."

"Yeah?" Bossk glared at the Hound's forward viewport.

The other ship showed no sign of cutting its speed. "What am I mistaken about?"

"I'm not restricted by the authority of your so- called Bounty Hunters Guild. I answer to a higher law."

"Which is?"

"Mine." The temperature of the scattered atoms between the ships couldn't have been closer to absolute zero. "Specifically, what's mine I keep. Until I get paid for it."

Bossk's words grated through his fangs. "Look, you conniving, diseased gnathgrg-"

The comm indicator blinked off, the connection broken by the other ship.

"There he goes." Zuckuss gazed up at the viewport.

The flaring trails from the engines of the Slave I, the transport of the galaxy's most ruthlessly efficient bounty hunter, blurred and disappeared into hyper-space.

Cold and mocking stars filled the sector where it had been.

Bossk's slit pupils narrowed as he glared at empty space. The other ship, and its pilot and his captured prize, might be gone-but the seething fury in Bossk's scaled breast wasn't. The figure in the cage cowered back from the bars as Boba Fett approached.

"There's no need for that." The Slave I's minimal galley had ejected a tray of some nondescript edible substance, a lumpish gray gel that was unappetizing but adequate for a standard humanoid life-form. Fett placed the tray on the metal-grated flooring and pushed it through an opening in the cage with the toe of his boot.

"I'm not being paid to hurt you. Therefore you won't be hurt."

"And if you were being paid to do that?" The former head accountant for the Trans-Galactic Gaming Enterprises Corporation gazed sulkily from the holding pen, the only one presently occupied aboard the Slave I. "What then?"

"You'd be in a world of pain." Boba Fett pointed to the tray; a little of its glistening contents had slopped onto the pen's floor. "As merchandise, you are more valuable alive than dead. In fact, you would be worthless to me as a corpse. To deliver you unharmed-relatively so-is the primary requirement for collecting the bounty that was posted on you. If you try starving yourself, you will be force-fed. I'm not known for being gentle about that sort of thing. If you were to be so foolish as to try to injure yourself in any other manner, you'll find yourself in restraints considerably less comfortable than your present situation."

The accountant named Nil Posondum looked around the bare cage. A thin pale hand gripped one of the bars. "I'd hardly call this comfortable."

"It can get worse." The shoulders of Boba Fett's armored combat gear lifted in a shrug. "My ship is built for speed, not luxury accommodations." He'd left the Slave I's controls set on autopilot; a small datapad clipped to his forearm monitored the craft's uninterrupted course through hyperspace. "You should take what pleasure you can from your time here. Things won't be any better for you where you're going."

In fact, Boba Fett knew they would be much worse for the accountant. Posondum had made the grievous error of shifting allegiances, changing jobs in an industry where loyalty was prized-and disloyalty punished. Worse, the accountant had been keeping the financial records for a chain of illicit skefta dens in the Outer Rim Territories that were controlled by a Huttese syndicate. Hutts tended to view their employees as possessions-one of the reasons that Boba Fett had always kept a freelancer's independent relationship with his frequent client Jabba. The accountant Posondum hadn't been so smart; he'd been even stupider when he'd gone over to his former employers'

competition with a cortical data-splint loaded with the Hutts' odds-rigging systems and gray-market transfer shuffles. Hutts were even more secretive than possessive; Boba Fett had sometimes wondered if they grew so huge by greedily ingesting everything that came into reach of their little hands and huge mouths, and letting nothing go. Not even one frightened accountant with a computer- enhanced brain full of numbers.

"Why don't you just kill me now?" Posondum hunkered on the floor of the cage, his back against its bars. He'd tasted the tray and pushed it away in disgust. "You'd do a quicker job of it than the Hutts will."

"Likely so." He felt no pity for the man, who'd brought his troubles upon himself. You hang out with Hutts, he thought, you'd better be careful not to get rolled over on. "But as I said. I do what I get paid for.