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the guards had even managed to get his weapon unslung and up into firing
position;
whoever had taken them out had done so in a matter of sec onds.
"Look," said Zuckuss. He bent down and touched the hole in one guard's chest
plate. "I'm getting a thermal reading here. The plastoid hasn't cooled-they
were all lasered while we were still standing out in the corridor!" The bounty
hunter stood and pointed to the room's far wall. A jagged hole, big enough for
Bossk himself to have walked through without stooping, revealed the stacked
cylinders of the power converters behind the main casino building. "Somebody
beat us to it-"
"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,
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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
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