The customized Ubrikkian space yacht dropped out of hyperspace, flanked by a complement of six Z-95 Headhunters, all of them materializing at once into the void immediately outside the short-range detection systems of Cog Hive Seven.
For a moment, nothing seemed to move. The Minstrel-class yacht, christened Star Jewel, appeared to hang suspended almost lazily in space, as if evaluating its options. Opulent to the point of obscenity, the Jewel was as lethal as it was extravagant. Its optimized CL-14 hyperdrive motivator had made the journey from Hutt space through the Triellus trade route almost too swiftly for the purposes of its owner, who had expressed emphatic interest along the way in building an even greater appetite in the kell dragons he’d kept chained in his throne room. When they’d left Nal Hutta, the dragons were already hungry. By the time the hyperdrives settled into silence, the creatures were literally drooling on the throne room floor.
Now, seated before the great transparisteel dome in all his vast, draconian majesty, Jabba Desilijic Tiure turned from his beloved dragons to gaze outward into the vast expanse of nothingness, none of which belonged to him, although he felt right at home here. It hadn’t been too terribly long ago—really just a few short centuries—since he’d relocated his base of operations to the B’omarr Monastery on Tatooine, and he was still young enough that such unexpected jaunts across the galaxy appealed to the daring side of his nature.
Everything had gone as expected. There was no sign of the target that had brought them here, not yet, although there was no rush. The Jewel’s crew, the usual entourage of slave girls, carnivorous pets, and cutthroat enforcers (Trandoshans, Gran, and Gamorreans), made the final preparations for their own dark business here—an opportunity that Jabba, having come so far, had no intention of letting slip away.
“Ramp down the turbolasers.” He activated the comlink to the Jewel’s bridge, where his pilot and second-in-command, Scuppa, had sequestered himself for the duration of the trip. “Power all systems down to silence. I want no detectable heat signature from the ion engines until my signal.”
The order had the expected results: seconds later, Scuppa himself appeared in the throne room, expressing himself with characteristic bluntness. “I don’t like this.”
“Scuppa, my boy, come closer and join the party.” Beckoning the pilot toward himself and the rabble surrounding him, Jabba grinned. “Surely you don’t think you’re better than us?”
“I never said—”
“Good. Squeamishness is for the weak.” Jabba waved him over, taking perverse delight in the pilot’s reluctance. It wasn’t that Scuppa had any qualms about mingling with the exotic concubines, hired muscle, or low-level hangers-on that were currently amusing themselves taunting the kell dragons; he simply wasn’t comfortable being away from the ship’s navigational system when they were this far off the trade route. After all, one never knew what trouble one might run into in the Outer Rim. “We won’t have to wait long now.”
“It’s a mistake to power down the turbolasers,” Scuppa said. “If the prison barge gets the drop on us …”
“They won’t.” Jabba reached down for the bowl beneath his hookah and drew out a Klatooine paddy frog, dropping the unfortunate creature live and squirming into his mouth. “I’ve already dispatched the Star Jewel’s guard to locate them before they find us.”
“Another bad idea.” Scuppa’s lower lip reshaped itself into an even more displeased moue. “With the Headhunters gone, we’re already more exposed than ever.”
“Relax, Scuppa. It’s almost time. Sit down, enjoy the show.”
He gestured to the open area directly below his throne. The pilot remained standing in the open hatchway while two of Jabba’s bodyguards—a psychopathic Gamorrean war criminal and a dwarf Oskan blood eater—thrashed in mortal combat across the floor in front of where Jabba himself was seated, just outside the reach of the kell dragons. Within a few seconds, the blood eater had slashed open the Gamorrean’s face and latched on to him to feed. Already Jabba felt himself growing bored, restless in the way that all too often characterized the final moments before he allowed himself the full gratification of settling the business at hand.
Today that business was revenge.
Over the past three years, the credits that he’d lost to Iram Radique’s arms sales had metastasized from a minor annoyance to an intolerable insult. Even so, Jabba had been prepared to absorb a certain degree of indignity, at least temporarily—in his almost six hundred years of experience as a crime lord, he’d discovered that men like Radique rarely lasted long enough to bother with. Even when they took ingenious measures to protect themselves, like disappearing into the woodwork of Cog Hive Seven, as Radique had, it was simply a matter of time before they backed the wrong army, allied themselves with the wrong crime syndicate, sold guns to the wrong separatists. After a meteoric rise in reputation, they invariably disappeared without a trace, never to be spoken of again. Jabba, in his great leniency and mercy, had decided that he would stand by and allow Radique to fall victim to his own success. For the time being, he would continue to send his men into the prison as guards to discover the arms dealer’s identity, but nothing more.
But things had changed on Cog Hive Seven.
As of yesterday, they had changed very quickly indeed.
Of course, Jabba hadn’t been personally attached to any of the lackeys he’d sent into the prison undercover—but to stand by and allow his own people to be slaughtered, ripped apart, and devoured by the inmates of the prison, while the prison’s female warden stood by grinning like a monkey lizard, was an affront to the very pillars of his authority.
Watching his foot soldiers being destroyed, Jabba had made up his mind that if he couldn’t put Iram Radique out of business, then he would simply destroy Cog Hive Seven completely. Ultimately it would prove both simpler and far more gratifying. And he’d realized immediately how to do it.
An alarm sounded on the control panel beside his throne, the signal of an incoming transmission from the pilot of one of the Headhunters.
“Transport ship in sight,” the pilot reported back. “We’re closing in on her now.”
Jabba saw Scuppa straighten up in anticipation, while down below the throne, the blood eater finished its meal to the scattered applause of the others. The Gamorreans and Trandoshans were as eager as he was to get on with their true business at hand.
“Get to the armory,” Jabba told them. “Suit up.” He turned to Scuppa. “You should be relieved, my friend. I’m going to let you reactivate your turbolasers.”
Within minutes, the prison transport barge Purge had drifted into attack range, although Jabba had ordered Scuppa to ignore any request from the Purge’s captain to identify himself. Failure to respond to the prison barge’s hailing frequency had resulted in the anticipated result—the barge had brought its own weapons systems online, under the assumption that the Star Jewel was a pirate vessel, or worse.
“I’m speaking to the captain of the unidentified space yacht.” The voice of the Purge’s captain through the intercom sounded strained with impatience. “You are in a designated approach corridor for prison transport to Cog Hive Seven. Identify yourself at once or you will be fired on.”
Scuppa’s voice, equally anxious, crackled through the Jewel’s comm-link. “Jabba, how much longer—”
“Easy, friend.” Jabba waited, a smile writhing over his lips, saturating his entire face with the pleasure of impending attack. Silently counting off the seconds, he peered out the dome, yellow eyes gleaming with excitement as he gazed out on the Purge. Down below, the Trandoshans and Gamorreans had gone to the armory to suit up and prepare the weapons.
The throne room was almost empty.
Except for the dragons.