Interlude II: There is no luck

Cad Bane frowned as he studied the bounty posting. Jango Fett sat on the opposite side of the table, idly twirling a knife as he thought. Ordinarily, the two bounty hunters wouldn't be caught dead anywhere near the other, but given the kind of sums being bandied about...

"Sixty mil is a lot of money," Fett said.

Bane scoffed. "Montoo can match it. That's not the problem and you know it."

Fett nodded, grudgingly accepting the rebuke. "Hutts are cocky bastards. Money like this, Jabba won't haggle. Yeah, Montoo can afford it.. but we take a hit on a Hutt, we'll be blacklisted at best. Probably end up with a price on our own heads."

"Mmmmph... Montoo's going to have to make this damn worth it. Really worth it... we can't just go straight at him. At best, he'll give us an extra twenty mil. Don't get me wrong, I'd settle for it if I had to... but we do something big enough, without warning him..."

"If you're wrong, hell, if we work together and he makes us split he bounty, we end up with thirty each," Jango countered.

"Still more than what Jabba's offering, and you know a Hutt will make us split it. I have a good feeling, we just need to make it big enough."

Fett was silent, a thoughtful frown crossing his face.

"Taris. One of the old Mandalores tried setting up a base in the ruins, wanted to use it as a staging area. Tides turn, Republic starts closing in, they take all the supplies and hide them in caches all over the planet, figure they can recover them later. I know there's a few Mandalorian atom splitters in one of them."

Cad stared for a moment. Then, he started laughing. "Atom splitters? That'll send a message alright! Still... Taris? That's a bit of a journey... sure there's nothing closer to Tantooine?"

Jango smirked. "Plenty closer, Taris just has the only caches I know the access codes to. Old clan secret. Mandalorian caches are usually rigged to explode if someone tries breaking in. If we're going after a cache with an atom splitter in it..."

Bane winced. "Right. Well then... Taris it is."

-----

Jango Fett punched in the ancient passcode into the grim covered door. Bane stood guard behind him, the rakghouls were gone for now, but they could reemerge at any moment. They must have killed hundreds by now.

The door opened, ancient gears grinding and screeching. The two bounty hunters stepped through quickly, both eager to get out of the open as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, when Jango tried to close the door behind them, it refused to budge. There was a loud metallic grinding noise, something in the doors finally breaking.

"Kriff! Jango, you're the one that knows what we're looking for! I'll hold off the Rakghouls, get that bomb!"

Jango ran into the ancient vault. Cad began firing behind him, the sharp cracks of his blaster pistols being answered by the murderous rage of the diseased creatures plaguing the ruins of the undercity.

Then he froze, utterly still. He found it. The ancient warhead was fairly unassuming, all said and done. You couldn't tell by looking at the elongated sphere that it was deliberately designed to poison a continent for millennia. That it was one of the largest concentrations of cobalt that one could find on any one planet.

The bomb wasn't what caught Jango's attention at all. The helmet laying atop it, however...

Mandalore's helmet... all this time... it's been laying right here... waiting... forgotten because generations of Mandalorians dismissed this whole cache as a bunch of ancient, outdated scrap metal.

"What's the hold-up?!" Bane shouted.

Shaking his head, Jango got to work. He hooked the ancient helmet on his pack and started loading the bomb onto a repulsor lift.