Star Wars: The Bounty Hunter Wars II: Slave Ship by K.W. Jeter

Author:K.W. Jeter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307796479
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-03T23:00:00+00:00

13

NOW

He couldn’t stop thinking about the bounty hunter.

Kuat of Kuat knew that he was wasting time; the past was the past, and couldn’t be altered. There are messes that must be cleaned up, he told himself as he gazed out at the Kuat Drive Yards construction docks. That cleaning-up process had to happen now, in real time; the longer it was delayed, the more grievous the consequences would be. Everything that he had worked to achieve, that the Kuat bloodline had built this corporation into, might yet be wiped away by the forces that conspired against him.

He knew all these things, they weighed upon his spirit with the grinding mass of planets, yet he still found his thought returning, as though pulled by some even greater gravitational force, to the bounty hunter Boba Fett, and all that had happened in the past.

Fett was the key to it all. The key to what had happened then, and what must happen now if Kuat Drive Yards was to be saved.

There were things that all the galaxy knew about that past, the story that had grown to almost legendary proportions, about the breakup of the old Bounty Hunters Guild and the things that had come about after that. The capture of the renegade Imperial stormtrooper Trhin Voss’on’t, and what had happened when Boba Fett had gone to collect the bounty for him …

Those matters were public knowledge. Or at least some of them were.

And other ones were secrets, locked inside the skull of Kuat of Kuat. He had to make sure they remained secret.

If doing so demanded the death of other creatures—specifically, Boba Fett—then that was a regrettable necessity. Business was business.

He would agree with me about that, thought Kuat as his gaze lifted to the cold stars above the docks. Boba Fett would hardly be able to blame him for taking care of business in as efficient—and deadly—a manner as was needed.

Kuat turned away from the high, segmented viewscreens. It irked him that there was so much that had to be dealt with, as soon as possible, and yet he still had to bother with distractions such as a summons to a convocation of the planet Kuat’s ruling households. With a burden-laden sigh, he lifted the heavy robes from the carved stand upon which they hung between such events.

So simple a matter, and he was transformed.

All it took was for Kuat of Kuat to don the formal robes, the garb that signified his position at the head of the noble families of this world. He so rarely left the headquarters of the Kuat Drive Yards and his austere suite of offices looking out over the construction docks that his simple coveralls had become his unconscious preference. The same as that which the corporation’s engineering and security staff wore, with no signs of rank attached to them; if those beneath him obeyed his orders, it was because they knew he had earned authority through more than just genetic inheritance.

Even the felinx, the silky-haired

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