Hard Merchandise

10

"I can't believe," said Dengar, looking around himself, "that this place was any more cheerful when it was alive."

He and Boba Fett were surrounded by the tangled fi-brous walls of what had been Kud'ar Mub'at's web. Enough structural integrity had been achieved that the main chamber and a few of the narrow corridors leading from it could hold a breathable atmospheric pressure. That made working in the reconstructed spaces easier, if nowhere near enjoyable.

Boba Fett ignored his comment, just as he had ignored all of Dengar's previous grumbling complaints. Standing several meters away, near the spot where Kud'ar Mub'at's thronelike nest had once been, Boba Fett continued the application of the low-level electrosynaptic pulse device that was slowly bringing the web back from the dead. Behind the bounty hunter, thick cables snaked back toward the temporary exit port that led to the web's ex-terior. The cables' glossy black sheathing, like the skin of a planet-bound herpetoid creature, shimmered with the effects of the energy coursing within. That energy, and the parallel data flow that shaped and adjusted it to the task of revivifying the web's interwoven neural cells, came from the Hound's Tooth, moored almost within touch-ing distance of the heavier structural fibers that bound the mass of finer neurons together.

"That should hold." Dengar made the comment aloud, as much for the purpose of hearing a human voice in this dismal space as for getting any reaction from his partner. The walls of the web's main chamber had to be propped apart from each other, to keep them from col-lapsing in on him and Fett. From the Hound's cargo hold, they had stripped out enough durasteel beams for the job, transferring them over from the ship and awk-wardly wrestling them into place among the sections of web they had previously scoured from the vacuum and laboriously bound back together. Even doing that much of a reconstruction on the late arachnoid assembler's web would have been impossible if the Black Sun cleanup crew, the henchmen of Prince Xizor that had de-stroyed it in the first place, had turned blasters or any other kind of incendiary weapons on it. But all the pieces, the floating strands and knots of pallid grey tis-sue, had still been floating in the vacuum, waiting to be resurrected. "Any more of them?" Catching his breath, Dengar rested a hand on a horizontally mounted beam next to his head. "Might be able to scrounge a few more out of the ship—"

As if in reply, the durasteel beam groaned and creaked, echoed by the others that filled the chamber like the ele-ments of a three-dimensional maze. The tangled walls pulsed and contracted, as though the two men were caught in some giant creature's digestive tract.

It's like the Sarlacc, thought Dengar. He gazed with both fascination and disgust at the motions of the web's structure. The effect had reminded him of the few details that Boba Fett had recounted, about having been swal-lowed by the blind, omnivorous beast that had once formed the fang-ringed center of the Great Pit of Carkoon, back in the Dune Sea on Tatooine. This must be what it's like, to be swallowed up and still be alive...

The pulsing motion ceased as Boba Fett drew the working tip of the tool in his hands away from the intri-cate cluster of neural ganglia before him. Across his boots, the black cable lay, still shimmering with the power relayed from the ship. The dark gaze of Boba Fett's hel-met visor glanced back over his shoulder, toward Den-gar. "That was just a test," he said. "Of the web's spinal connections."

"Thanks for warning me." The shiver that had tight-ened Dengar's shoulders now slowly ebbed away. I'll be glad, he thought, when this is over. Facing blaster fire, and every other hazard that seemed to come with being Boba Fett's partner, were all preferable to the task of restoring Kud'ar Mub'at's web to a semblance of life.

Unfortunately, that was a necessary part of the plan. Without it—without the extended neural system of the web being once more filled with the sparks of impulse and sensation—the quest that had led both Dengar and Boba Fett, and Neelah as well, to this remote sector of space, and even remoter and more isolated sector of the past, was over.

Fett had explained it all to them. How it was going to work, the only way it could: if the past held the key to the present, then the past had to be broken into and ran-sacked, the same way the high walls of some rich crea-ture's palace on a fortified planet would be breached. You found a crack in the wall and widened it enough to enter, then went in and got what you wanted. Simple in the concept; difficult—and dangerous, it seemed to Dengar—in the execution.

The crack in the wall of the past was represented by the memory of the once-living, now-dead arachnoid as-sembler, Kud'ar Mub'at. Great, Dengar had said to Boba Fett. That ends it right there, doesn't it? Talking to the dead, learning their secrets, wasn't a hard job; it was an impossible one. Kud'ar Mub'at was the link to Neelah's stolen past, and the key to Dengar and Boba Fett's profit-ing from that past—if it had been important enough to steal from her, and hide the traces of the theft through a deep memory wipe of her brain, then the chances would be good that it would be worth a good deal of credits to find it and restore it once again. The scent of credits was even stronger with the other possibility connected to the theft of Neelah's past: finding out who—or what—it was that had been behind the failed plot to implicate the late Prince Xizor in the raid by Imperial stormtroopers on a moisture farm on Tatooine, a raid that had been the trigger, or at least part of it, for Luke Skywalker's transfor-mation into a leader and legend of the Rebel Alliance. As Boba Fett, with his keen instinct for profits, had pointed out, anytime a trail led that close to the center of major events in the galaxy—with threads tangling around not only a creature who had been the leader of the richest and most powerful criminal organization in all the sys-tems, but also around Emperor Palpatine and his most feared servant, Lord Darth Vader—then the terminus of that trail was likely to be buried under a mountain of credits and influence.

As much as Dengar might have felt that the quest was hopeless, he had to confess to himself that all of his inner greed circuits had been fired up by his partner's talk. Sure, he had thought, you can get killed, poking into Pal-patine's and Vader's secrets. But you can also get rich — or at least rich enough to get out of the bounty hunter game. And back into the safe haven of his beloved Mana-roo's arms, and a life that didn't revolve around kidnap-ping and killing other creatures while trying to avoid getting killed oneself. That was worth at least a little risk.

All it would take would be bringing a certain assem-bler back from the dead, so that its memory of those events and plots and schemes could be riffled through. Dengar had gotten used to surprises from his bounty hunter partner, but the next revelation from Boba Fett had exceeded all that had gone before.

Bringing Kud'ar Mub'at back from the dead, Fett had explained, isn't impossible. Gathering together the pieces of the puzzle—all the scattered strands and chunks of neural tissue that the Black Sun cleanup crew had left drifting in space—would be the hardest part. But the pieces were all there, floating around the Hound's Tooth. The rest would be relatively easy, or at least according to Boba Fett. I knew more about Kud'ar Mub'at than it knew about itself. In the cockpit area of the Hound, Fett had related to Dengar and Neelah the results of his previous investigations into the nature of such assembler creatures.

Knowing things about one's business associates al-ways gave one an advantage, especially if they were mat-ters of which the other creature was ignorant. And Kud'ar Mub'at had never shown any great curiosity about its own genetic background or physiology, or whether other assemblers existed anywhere else in the galaxy. Kud'ar Mub'at had been content to consider itself unique, with nothing else like it anywhere in the known systems; it made negotiations with clients easier to have the confi-dence that there was no other arachnoid assembler whose services they could engage. If Kud'ar Mub'at had ever encountered any other assemblers, it would probably have arranged for their murder, much as it had eliminated its own predecessor, the assembler that had originally created it as a subnode, then suffered the consequences of an unforeseen rebellion. Just as Kud'ar Mub'at had suffered in turn, its former subnode Balancesheet was now somewhere else in the galaxy's empty spaces, taking care of the business it had inherited from its own de-posed creator. But there are other assemblers, Boba Fett had told Dengar and Neelah. I found them. And even more important: I learned from them.

The location of the arachnoid assemblers' home-world was something that Boba Fett wouldn't reveal. You don't need to know that. Which was just as well with Dengar; the notion of a whole hidden world some-where, populated by an entire species of spidery, schem ing assemblers gave him the creeps. But Boba Fett's knowledge of an aspect of their physiology was some-thing he did share. Just as an individual assembler, such as Kud'ar Mub'at or Balancesheet, could generate and extrude additional cerebro-neural tissue in the form of an extended nervous system running through a web big enough in which to live and in the tethered subnodes that filled the space, so could that tissue be regenerated from the outside. A constantly monitored and adjusted stimulating pulse would actually restore the strands of dead tissue to functioning life, with the synaptic termi-nals seeking one another out and knitting themselves back together.

That basic rundown of assembler physiology had taken place in the cockpit of the Hound's Tooth. Stand-ing now inside the reconstructed web, Dengar looked down at the black, shimmering cables looped near his boots. Neelah was still back aboard the ship moored alongside, making sure that the necessary energy and controlling data kept flowing from the onboard comput-ers. There was no danger of her disengaging the Hound's Tooth and leaving them stranded inside the web; she was more intent on breaking through to the past and its se-crets than either bounty hunter could have been.

Dengar looked up as another shimmering motion ran through the fibers of the web. The effect was less spas-modic and threatening than the previous one, and settled down to a barely discernible but constant trembling in the curving structure. At the same time, the vibration died in the black cables running out to the ship; they be-came as inert as the web itself had been when he and Boba Fett had commenced its resurrection from the dead.

"That's it," Boba Fett announced. He stood up from where he had been kneeling beside the empty nest at the center of the chamber and tossed the pulsator tool aside. "Now we're ready for the last step."

Which was exactly what Dengar had been dreading. He had been able to reconcile himself to being inside the living web; it was at least without personality or a guiding intelligence, the revivified neural circuits as empty of thought as some giant, hollow vegetation. But for the past to be retrieved, with all its secrets intact and read-able, that idiot nervous system would have to be linked to the brain that contained the necessary memories. And we'll be inside it, thought Dengar. It struck him as being even worse, in some ways, than the Sarlacc could ever have been.

"Come over here and give me a hand." Boba Fett ges-tured as he spoke the order. "We need to get it into posi-tion for the hookup."

Reluctantly, Dengar ducked his head beneath the horizontal beam keeping the web's walls spread apart. He threaded his way through the maze of the other sup-ports that had been so laboriously installed, mostly by him rather than Fett.

At the center of the chamber, the neural activity that Boba Fett had summoned up from the formerly dead tis-sue was more visible, the pulsing of the structural fibers overlaid with a shimmering network of sparks racing across the synaptic connections. Dengar tried to main-tain his balance on the uneven floor of the space, without laying a hand on any of the surrounding structural fibers. There was no chance of receiving an electrical shock from the bright circuits of light, but the thought of touching the now-living mass unnerved him.

"Get on that side of it," instructed Boba Fett. He pointed toward the one thing inside the chamber that was still part of the dead world they had found when they had come to this point in space. "We'll need to lift it all the way clear. I don't want the legs dragging across any of the neural fibers."

He did as Fett had told him, still trying to avoid con-tact with the dead object for as long as possible. Dengar's reluctance betrayed him; as he stepped gingerly toward it, the toe of one of his boots caught on a loop of black cable, tripping him and toppling him forward.

His hands automatically caught hold of the object's hard, chitinous exoskeleton, the stiff hairs on the spidery limbs poking into his own flesh like tapering needles. Dengar managed to push himself away, just far enough that he found himself looking straight into the largest of the empty multiple eyes.

There had been no need to bring any of the dead sub-nodes here inside the web; the small corpses had all been left outside, continuing to drift through the cold vacuum, their curled forms dragging across the hull and cockpit canopy of the Hound's Tooth as before. But this one, the creator of all the others, was the most important element of the procedure.

Kud'ar Mub'at's narrow face, only an inch or so away from Dengar's, almost seemed to be smiling at his dis-comfiture. In this small, nightmarishly claustrophobic world, the dead found enjoyment in mocking those still alive.

"Quit fooling around," said Boba Fett with a trace of impatience. "Grab hold and lift."

Dengar did as ordered, helping the other bounty hunter settle Kud'ar Mub'at's corpse onto the waiting re-ceptacle of the nest it had occupied in its previous exis-tence. He stepped back, wiping his hands against the front of his gear, and watched as Fett picked up the pul-sator tool and went back to work.

He knew it wouldn't be long now before a flicker of life and intelligence appeared in the empty eyes that had gazed into his own. The prospect of discovering the secrets of the past, and finding the way to a mountain of credits, didn't make him dread that coming moment any less.

It was her turn to sit in the pilot's chair.

Neelah had stood in the hatchway of the Hound's Tooth cockpit area often enough, watching Boba Fett as he had navigated the ship to this remote sector. Even when the bounty hunter had swiveled the chair around in order to talk with her, the difference between their positions had been irritatingly symbolic. Like Jabba's court, it had struck Neelah, with him on his throne and everybody else petitioning for his attention.

One of the metal panels beneath the cockpit's gauges and controls had been pried open by Boba Fett, so he could rig up the black cables that now snaked out through an airlock access port and across the few meters of distance to the reconstructed web. All of the equip-ment aboard the Hound was inferior to what Boba Fett had installed aboard his own Slave I; he'd had to impro-vise the necessary gear and connections, to get the needed stream of electro-neural pulsations to apply to the dead fibers. Even now, the onboard computer generating the control data was unstable enough that Neelah had been assigned the task of monitoring it, riding gain on its out-put to keep it within operational limits.

That took only a fraction of her attention, no matter how important the job might have been. Fortunately so; sitting at the cockpit's control panel, with access to the rest of the ship's computerized databases, she could set about her own agenda. And without Boba Fett or Den-gar knowing anything about it—that suited her to per-fection. They'll find out, she had told herself, when—and if —I want them to.

There were already secrets she was keeping from the two bounty hunters. She had been keeping them for a while now, since the moment when Boba Fett had re-counted the story of what he had found aboard the other ship, the one called the Venesectrix, that had belonged to the dead Ree Duptom. Little doors to the past had opened up inside her head, into chambers of memory; dark chambers, whose contents she could barely make out, and with the doors to the chambers beyond still frustratingly locked to her. Boba Fett and Dengar were over there in the assembler's web that they had so pains-takingly woven back together, as though they had been primitive scientists stitching together a dismembered body, hoping to animate it with lightning pulled down from some planet's storm-wracked sky. Their creation, with the formerly dead Kud'ar Mub'at installed as the brain atop its spine, might very well sit up and tell them the se-crets they had come here to discover, as though the past were a golden key on its cold tongue. But in the mean-time, Neelah had a little key of her own to use. There were some other doors, outside her shadowed memory, and right inside the computers of the Hound's Tooth, that she was going to unlock.

He didn't want to tell me, thought Neelah. All the things that he knows about my past. She nodded with the pleasure of anticipation. Boba Fett wasn't as smart as he always pretended to be. The bounty hunter had left her right where she needed to be, to find out all those se-crets on her own.

Neelah bent over the control panel, turning her atten-tion to the computer's main display panel. The power and data flow through the black cables, out to the web tethered to the ship, was operating smoothly for now; she could safely ignore it while she worked on her own agenda.

The keypads for the computer were at the far end of the troughlike grooves in the panel, designed for the use of a Trandoshan's heavy claws. Her own forearms disappeared in them, almost up to the elbow, as she punched in command sequences, first laboriously, then with increasing speed. Within seconds, a screenful of information appeared in front of her that had been locked away beneath Boba Fett's own personal secu-rity codes before.

She sat back in the pilot's chair, breathing out a deep sigh of relief. Satisfaction mingled with the previous pleasure she had felt. The little doors inside her head, which had opened when she heard Boba Fett say the name of the dead bounty hunter, had given her access to a key more valuable than Fett could ever have imagined. Not in the form of information, such as her real name, or the story of how she had come to be aboard Ree Dup-tom's ship—That would've been too easy, Neelah thought wryly—but as an ability, the skill and craft necessary to hack through the coded locks that Boba Fett had installed on this ship's computers when he had transferred his own data files over from his Slave I. Like disjointed pieces of an archaic jigsaw puzzle fitting together, showing just a bit of the total picture, the name of Ree Duptom had connected with other fragments floating inside the vacuum that her memory had been wiped into.

I know how to do this, she thought as she punched a few more commands into the computer. Whoever she had been in the past, whatever her real name had been in that world stolen from her, that person had not only been someone born to a noble bloodline, on a planet and among people accustomed to taking orders from some-one of hereditary rank—her own growing impatience with the two bounty hunters, her frustration at not being instantly obeyed, had already indicated as much—but also was a person of considerable technical expertise. Boba Fett, thought Neelah with a smile, should've known better than to leave me here with his computer files. But then, the bounty hunter would have had no way of know-ing just how easy it would turn out to be for her to break through his security codes and into his private data.

The hardest thing had been keeping her mask up, of showing just enough surprise at what Boba Fett had told her and Dengar, while not giving away just how much buried memory it had restored to light inside her head. She wasn't going to reveal any of that, until after she had found some more pieces to fit in with the others.

At least, thought Neelah, 7 know the name of the piece I'm looking for. She had already figured out that Boba Fett had been holding back on her, not telling everything—or anything—of what he knew about the one name, the one fragment of memory, that had still been there in the darkness. She had said the name Nil Posondum to him, long before they had arrived at this point in space, and she had instantly known from the slight catch of silence in his reaction that the name meant something to Boba Fett as well. Exactly what the connec-tion was to the bounty hunter, she was about to discover. With her hands deep within the Trandoshan-sized grooves on the cockpit's control panel, Neelah keyed in the name and initiated a core-deep search function.

It took only a few seconds for the results to come up on the display screen. While it was still blank she glanced down at the smaller display that monitored the flow of data and power to Dengar and Boba Fett in the web, saw that all was within operational parame-ters, and looked back up. This time, there was a face to go with the name.

Human, balding and aging, with a nervous, fidgety quality to his eyes, apparent even in a still-frame shot— both full-on and in profile, Nil Posondum was not par-ticularly impressive. Even worse, the sight of his face did nothing to trigger any more memory flashes inside Nee-lah. There was almost the opposite effect: the conviction grew certain within her that she had never laid eyes on him before, in this life or in the stolen past.

Below the man's unprepossessing image was a sum-mary of personal data—nothing in its details caught Neelah's eye. Until the very last notation, which indi-cated that the man had died in one of Slave I's holding cages, en route to being delivered by Boba Fett to the creatures who had put up the bounty for him. Neelah slumped back in the pilot's chair, glaring at the display screen in frustration. The thought that this piece of memory had led to nothing more than a blind alley sparked fury inside her. Boba Fett may have found some way of wringing secrets out of a deceased arachnoid as-sembler, but getting anything out of the late Nil Poson-dum was more likely to be a lost cause.

Neelah glanced up at the control panel's chronometer, gauging how long Dengar and Boba Fett had been work-ing over in the reconstructed web. She knew she'd have to shut down her investigations into Fett's databases be-fore the two bounty hunters returned to the ship—and there would be no way of telling when she would get an-other chance at rummaging through the files for the clues she needed.

Feverishly, she punched in another string of com-mands, bringing up the last of the files associated with the name Nil Posondum. A cursory autopsy indicating the cause of death as autoasphyxiation, a statement of credits received by Boba Fett for turning over mer-chandise in a damaged condition, a list of personal ef-fects owned by the late merchandise, mainly the torn and stained clothing he had been wearing when cap-tured by Fett, a visual scan of markings that Posondum had managed to scratch into the metal floor of the holding cage ...

Wait a minute. Neelah suddenly froze, cold sweat dampening her palms inside the keypad grooves. She leaned closer to the display screen, her nose almost touching the transparent panel. Her heart began pound-ing faster, the rush of blood almost dizzying her as she stared at the image before her.

Just some lines scratched into blank metal ... a cir-cle, perhaps a little lopsided; understandable, given the circumstances that the man who'd made them had been in ... and a triangle inside the circle, the three points just touching the enclosing line ...

And three stylized letters, in an archaic, pre-Basic language. Three letters that only a person who had seen them since childhood, and who had been taught their meaning, would recognize. Someone such as Neelah herself, and any of her noble bloodline. A lineage that came from one of the most powerful industrial planets in the galaxy, its ancestry reaching generations back in time. Boba Fett, for all his cleverness and carefully groomed information sources, would never have been able to discern what was meant by the image—not be-cause it was a guarded secret, but simply because it was a symbol that had fallen out of use, supplanted by a later one that could be understood by anyone in the galaxy. Only the old traditionalists, the memory-rich families and their entourages, of the planet on which Neelah had been born would have kept it as a token of a glorious past.

For a moment, a great, calming peace descended upon Neelah, like the hand of a noble infant's nurse drawing a blanket snug upon the small, cooing form; a blanket marked with the exact same image, only embroidered with pure golden thread rather than scratched into the floor of a squalid holding cage on a bounty hunter's ship. One by one, the locked doors inside her head opened, spill-ing their pent-up light into the depths of her spirit, chas-ing away the dark, obscuring shadows in which she had been wrapped for so long.

She gazed upon the image awhile longer, not caring if anyone should discover her doing so. None of that mat-tered now. The key she had found had not only opened the locks, but had burst them asunder. Nothing could make her forget.

That's what the corporation used as its emblem, Nee-lah told herself, a long time ago. Before I was born...

The old, archaic letters spelled out the initials KDY, for Kuat Drive Yards. Bound by a triangle, for the art of engineering, and a greater circle that represented the uni-verse and everything in it.

Another key turned, in one of the farthest locks, as she looked upon the image.

It turned, and she remembered her name.

Her real name ...

The empty eyes opened, but were still blind.

Yet Kud'ar Mub'at—the hollowed thing that had been Kud'ar Mub'at—seemed to sense the presence of other creatures.

The joints of the spidery legs creaked as though about to break into splinters. The broken abdomen, edges of its wound frozen by exposure to the cold of the vacuum surrounding the web, scraped against the remains of what had been its nest and throne of power, the point from which it had drawn the strands entangling so many others of the galaxy's creatures. Slowly, the small trian-gular head rose from where it had shrunk into the chitin-ous thorax.

"Is there... business... to transact?" The assembler's voice, which had once been so gratingly high-pitched, was now a rasping whisper, as of dry strings twisting against one another. "Business ... is what I want ... all that I want..."

Dengar had the unnerving sensation that the assem-bler's gaze had fastened upon him. The narrow face, with its clusters of unseeing eyes, turned in his direction and stopped for a moment, before moving like a rusted mechanical apparatus toward the other bounty hunter in the web's central chamber.

"I won't say it's good to meet up with you again, Kud'ar Mub'at." Standing closer to. the arachnoid as-sembler's withered form, Boba Fett held the black cable looped in one gloved hand. The cable's surface shim-mered, seeming much more imbued with life than the greyed-out thing in the nest, as the power and control-ling data continued to stream from the ship tethered alongside the web. "But then, I never much cared for our little meetings."

"Ah! You are so unkind." The triangular head gave a tiny nod, imitating human gestures as it had done in its previous existence. "You were always nearly as cruel as you were greedy, Boba Fett—it is Fett, isn't it? I can rec-ognize your voice, but it's so dark in here now ... I can't see you."

"It's not dark, you fool." From Boba Fett's hand, the black cable ran into the narrow cleft right behind the as-sembler's head; a metal needle had been inserted into the knot of ganglia inside the thinly armored skull that had functioned as the neuro-cerebral center for the creature. "You're dead. Get used to it."

"Believe me, Fett... I already have." A lopsided smile opened on the narrow face. "There are advantages... to my present condition." One thin forelimb withdrew from the cluster of legs curled beneath Kud'ar Mub'at's abdomen, and wavered feebly in the air. "For one . . . death is much less painful than dying... which I remem-ber in excruciating detail... not pleasant. And second... now I can say whatever I please . . . without worrying about the consequences. What can I suffer now, any greater than that which I already have?" Laughter like breaking twigs came out of the angled mouth. "So let me tell you right now, Boba Fett ... I never cared for you, either."

"Then we're making progress," replied Fett. "Since we can skip your usual line of empty flattery."

Dengar stood back, watching the confrontation be-tween the former business associates. One's dead, he thought, and the other's alive—but they still have some-thing in common. Neither one gave up easily.

"Very clever of you ... managing this." The dry husk of the assembler shifted in the flaccid remains of the nest, as though its vacuum-blunted nerve endings were capa-ble of feeling discomfort. "I didn't know such a thing was possible ..." One of its hind limbs scratched at the inserted cable, but was unable to dislodge it. "I'm not sure I care for it..."

"Don't worry. It's only a temporary condition." Boba Fett didn't bother displaying to the creature's blind eyes the black cable he held. "Soon as we're done here, I'll pull the plug. And you can go back to being what you were a few moments ago. A corpse, floating in space."

The triangular head slowly nodded. "Then you have at last, Boba Fett, that which I want... more than any-thing else. Bargain with it, as you will."

"I want information, Kud'ar Mub'at. Information that you have." Boba Fett's gloved fist closed tighter upon the cable. "That you knew when you were alive, but you wouldn't have told me then."

At Dengar's back, he felt the slow pulsing of the web around him. He turned and saw brighter sparks racing across the neural fibers. Once more, the sensation of being inside a living brain—or at least a partly living one—assaulted him. The assembler's thoughts and ideas were like storm clouds, threaded with electrical dis-charges, ominous as a slowly darkening horizon.

"What would you like to know, Boba Fett?"

Stepping closer to the assembler's revivified corpse, Boba Fett brought his own visor-shielded gaze closer to the blind one's. "I want to know about a client of yours. A former client, I mean."

"Exactly so." The dry, rasping laughter sounded again. "I understand that certain progeny of mine . . . have taken over the family enterprise, as it were." The up-raised forelimb reached out and lightly tapped the brow of Fett's helmet. "Perhaps you should go and talk to young Balancesheet. It keeps secrets very well, though, as I learned so painfully. You'd have to bargain hard to get what you want." Feebly, the limb folded back in on itself and scratched at Kud'ar Mub'at's chest, or what would have been the place where its heart had once functioned. "I don't feel so well... I feel cold..."

Boba Fett shook his head. "I know enough about how you managed your affairs. Some things you let your subnodes in on, and others you kept to yourself. There were certain matters—the shadier sorts of deals you arranged—that you preferred to keep just in your own private memory, rather than the one shared through the web's neural fibers. The client I'm inquiring about was one of those. His name was Nil Posondum—"

The deracinated laugh from Kud'ar Mub'at's mouth was even harsher and louder this time. "Posondum!" The noise from the hollowed-out form was like the claws of rats scuttling across crumpled flimsiplast. "A client of mine!" From beneath the dead assembler, several of its limbs thrashed about in a spasm of mirth.

"You are so rarely wrong, Boba Fett... but this time you are!"

The mention of the human's name puzzled Dengar. He had heard it before, from Neelah when she had been musing aloud, away from Boba Fett, about the few scraps of memory left to her. But even before that, Den-gar had come across the name; he remembered it as a piece of hard merchandise for which a standard bounty had been posted, some time in the past. It wouldn't have surprised him at all to have learned that Boba Fett had been the bounty hunter who had collected the credits on that one, like so many others.

"Don't lie to me." Boba Fett seemed as if he were about to jerk the black cable like a noose around the dead assembler's neck. "I know all about the money you received from Nil Posondum. I found the record of it aboard Ree Duptom's ship Venesectrix."

"You might . . . very well have," wheezed Kud'ar Mub'at's corpse. "And that is in fact the truth; I did receive a substantial sum of credits from our late friend Nil Posondum. But such a transaction ... does not mean he was a client of mine. Just as I was a go-between, an arranger of deals, when I was still alive ... so have other creatures served that oh-so-useful purpose. Perhaps not on the overarching scale ... at which I did ..." The chi-tinous form paused, as though it needed to catch its breath, or more likely, let the pulsating energy from the black cable recharge its neuro-cerebral tissues. It hun-kered down lower in the nest, the joints of its thin legs sticking above its head. "Posondum was merely—what is the term criminal types use?—a bagman. Yes ... that's right... that's the word." Two of Kud'ar Mub'at's fore-limbs slowly wavered apart in an expansive gesture. "He brought the credits here to the web ... to me . . . and communicated certain important details ... of what his client desired. I then made certain other arrangements on behalf of that third party . . . such as the hiring of Ree Duptom to carry out two very delicate assignments. Which, alas, he never lived to do—and so much trouble and confusion has resulted from that lapse!"

"I'll say." From behind Boba Fett, Dengar muttered his comment. Getting answers from the dead assembler had seemed only to make things more confusing rather than less.

"Standard business practice," continued Kud'ar Mub'at's withered corpse. "I kept most of the credits ... that the original client sent here with Nil Posondum. For a tiny percentage of what was left over . . . Posondum then delivered the fee I had arranged with Ree Duptom. Posondum then went about his other scrabbling little business affairs, one of which turned out badly enough for him to wind up as hard merchandise in your holding cage, Boba Fett. Of course ... I always knew that a little hustling nonentity such as Nil Posondum would end up like that... but I'm suspicious about what happened to Duptom. He operated on a large enough scale to have real enemies... who would very much have liked to have seen him dead..."

"I'm not interested in Ree Duptom's enemies." Boba Fett's words turned impatient. "I want to know who he was working for. Who hired him—through you—to transport fabricated evidence about Prince Xizor's in-volvement in an Imperial stormtrooper raid on the planet Tatooine? Was it the same person who paid for him to kidnap and wipe the memory of the young female hu-man I found aboard his ship?"

"Of course it was, Boba Fett." The dead assembler tucked its forelimbs back around its abdomen. "You know that—it had to be, since one payment was made for both jobs. I got the client a bargain rate that way. I like to keep my customers happy ... it makes for good business."

Boba Fett dropped the black cable and stepped for-ward. With one gloved hand, he grabbed the dead as-sembler's narrow, triangular head, almost wrenching it from the stalklike neck as he turned the blind eyes toward himself. "Tell me," demanded Fett. "Who was the client? Who paid Ree Duptom for those jobs?"

"A good question, my dear Fett." The dead assembler managed to sneer at him. "A very good question, in-deed ... and how I wish I could answer it for you... and for myself."

"What are you talking about?" Boba Fett took his hand away from the other creature. "You know who it was. You'd have to know—"

"Correction; I did know. When I was alive." A macabre, tittering laugh came from within the assembler's hollowed body. "But that was then, and this is now. You and your partner here have done a very good job of reassembling my poor, sundered web—but not a perfect job. There were some parts of my extended neural system that were too damaged for you to restore; I can feel them missing, as though some of my actual physical limbs had been amputated. And when there are pieces missing in a web, it stands to reason that there must be holes in their place." The claw tip at the end of the raised forelimb tapped at the skull's enclosing chitin. "There are, I regret to inform you, large gaps in my memory . . . things I cannot remember. Though, of course, it would have been impossible for me to have ever forgotten the inimitable Boba Fett . . . I'm afraid that Nil Posondum was not quite so memorable a figure. There may have only been a few strands of my memory in which details about him were encoded... so you have to understand how they would be easily lost." The blind eyes seemed to regard Boba Fett with amusement. "You've come all this way for nothing ... how unfortunate."

"I'll tell you what's unfortunate," said Boba Fett. "Unfortunate is how you're going to feel when I'm done with you. You're not going to hold out on me this time."

"What are you going to do about it?" The assembler's laughter turned into a grating cackle. "A hundred differ-ent ways of killing at your disposal—I can just see you standing there, bristling with all your weapons, like a walking arsenal—and all of them useless now. You can keep me alive as long as you want... it merely delays the moment of my falling once again into the sweetness of death. You were as much responsible as any other crea-ture, Boba Fett, for my having discovered the pleasures of being dead—I realize now that it was the best deal I ever made! But I've tasted it, and drank deep of that in-toxicating darkness ... deep enough that I can wait for it again. And in the meantime .. . your threats are of little avail..."

The assembler's words unnerved Dengar more than anything else that had happened so far, in this roughly woven mausoleum floating in space. "Come on—" He stepped forward and grabbed Boba Fett by the elbow. "It's right. There's nothing you can do—"

"Just watch." Fett pulled his arm away from Dengar's grasp. "Maybe the problem isn't whether you're dead or alive, Kud'ar Mub'at." He stepped around to the side of the nest and the grey creature hunkered down in it. "Maybe you're just not alive enough." Boba Fett reached behind the assembler's jointed neck and grabbed the con-trols of the pulsator device, leaving the gleaming metal needle still inserted up into the cerebral cortex. "That can be changed."

Looking down at the black cable, Dengar saw its sur-face shimmer with a wildly increasing intensity. Instinc-tively, he drew his boot back, as though it had come too close to an exposed high-voltage conduit. The cable seemed almost alive, twisting about on the fibrous floor of the web, like a glistening serpent from the bogs of a swamp-covered planet.

At the same time, he heard a crackling and tearing noise from the center of the chamber. Dengar looked up and saw the assembler's corpse thrashing convulsively, the jointed sticklike limbs pulled out from beneath the torn abdomen and whipping in the air, as though a wind-storm had animated the black, leafless branches of a win-ter forest. Kud'ar Mub'at's triangular face was contorted with the energy surging behind the blind eyes, the angled mouth stretched open in a silent scream.

Boba Fett still had his hand upon the pulsator device's controls, his durasteel-like grip forcing the assembler's overloaded corpse to stay in the hollow of the flaccid nest. "Now do you remember?"

The assembler made no answer. A couple of its smaller, weaker limbs detached themselves from the corpse, fly-ing across the chamber and striking the curved walls.

"Hey..." Dengar looked around himself with alarm. The storm he had imagined tearing through the web's confines now seemed to have become even stronger and more visible. Flaring sparks ran through the neural fibers like quick lightning, leaving behind the scent of ozone and burning tissue. "Maybe you'd better back off on that—this place is tearing itself apart!"

Echoing Dengar's words, the web shuddered, hard enough to knock him from his feet. He caught hold of one of the horizontal durasteel beams that had been in-stalled to keep the unpressurized structure from collaps-ing in on itself, and managed to keep himself upright. Though only for a second: another convulsive wave rolled through the web, the floor whipping high enough to throw him clear. As he fell backward, Dengar saw the beam rip loose from its mooring point on one side of the tunnellike space; it swung about from the other end, smashing loose the beams farther on in a clashing chain reaction.

He's gone crazy, thought Dengar. Through the falling, colliding durasteel beams and the heaving of the web's floor and walls, he couldn't even spot Boba Fett, up in the main chamber beside the corpse of Kud'ar Mub'at. The frustration from coming all this way, intent on infor-mation, and finding no answers, must have unhinged the other bounty hunter's mind. Boba Fett was normally so calm and calculating—he would have to have been tem-porarily insane not to see how the drastically increased pulsator flow had triggered a catastrophic agony in the assembler. The creature's diminished physical form and the attached neural fibers running through the length of the web were thrashing themselves to pieces; Dengar could hear the racketing clatter of the spidery limbs, and the shattering of the chitinous exoskeleton at their center. That was bad enough, but the web shook and buckled at the same time; already, great sections of the fibrous struc-ture that Dengar and Boba Fett had so laboriously sealed back together were now ripping apart from one another, like rough cloth being pulled by giant, invisible hands.

With speed born of desperation, Dengar scrambled beneath the tilted beam and dived for the black cable. It seemed even more animated now, with the motion im-parted to it by the buckling and heaving of the web's floor. He grabbed hold of the cable with one hand while simultaneously reaching into his belt pouch for his vibro-blade . With one upward stroke, the 'blade sliced through the cable, sparks of short-circuited wires spitting out from the raw end.

He had thought that terminating the pulsing input from the computers back onboard the Hound's Tooth would also end the thrashing agony of the web. The re-mainder of the cable running to the pulsator device in-serted in the back of Kud'ar Mub'at's skull had gone slack and lifeless, the shimmering now dissipated and in-ert. But for some reason Dengar couldn't understand, the web around him continued its self-destroying contor-tions. One of the largest structural fibers, thicker in di-ameter than his own waist, suddenly snapped, shredding apart a tangle of smaller strands, their pallid grey shafts flurrying across his shoulders and hastily averted face.

Pushing himself up onto his hands and knees, Den-gar looked through the maze of fallen durasteel beams. He could just barely make out the figures of Boba Fett and the assembler collapsed inside its nest. For some reason, Kud'ar Mub'at's corpse now looked as lifeless as it had when he and Boba Fett had first dragged it into the reconstructed web. There wasn't time to ponder that mystery; before Dengar could get to his feet, a blaze of light seemed to explode in the main chamber ahead of him. In its glare, Boba Fett was knocked back as the assembler disintegrated, its sticklike limbs flying through tumbled arcs and away from the atomized fragments of its body.

The noise from the explosion had deafened Dengar for a moment. Shaking his head to clear it, he was sud-denly aware of another, even more threatening sound: the ragged ends of the structural fibers around him flut-tered and streamed pennantlike, drawn by the slowly in-creasing roar of the web's atmosphere rushing through an exterior breach.

Dizzied by the oxygen thinning in his nostrils and lungs, Dengar staggered forward and grabbed Boba Fett's forearm, pulling the other bounty hunter to his feet. "What's . . . what's happening? ..." With his free hand, Dengar gestured toward the tattered remains of Kud'ar Mub'at. "It's dead again! It has to be—there's nothing left of it!" He gazed around in panic at the heav-ing walls of the surrounding web.

"Why is it still—"

"You idiot." Boba Fett shoved him away from the as-sembler's nest and toward the web's main corridor. "Can't you tell? We're under attack!"

Dengar realized that the other man was correct; as if in confirmation, another white-hot flash tore through the chamber, inches behind them. He felt the heat of a laser-cannon bolt on his back as he ran through the col-lapsing, disintegrating web. The transfer hatch to the Hound's Tooth was just meters ahead of him...

It might as well have been kilometers.

Another bolt hit, bursting apart the curve of struc-tural fibers directly above him. Sparks and blackened shards of tissue whirled around Dengar as he felt himself both rising and falling into darkness.

She had been turning over the words inside her head. The words, a name, her true name. Neelah had exited from the security-locked files that she had broken into—all the things that Boba Fett hadn't told her, that he himself didn't know the value of—and shut down that part of the ship's computers. That had left a blank display screen in front of her as she had taken her hands and forearms out of the Trandoshan-fitted control grooves on the cockpit panel. She didn't care about that, or the cold stars slowly wheel-ing about in the forward viewport. In her mind's eye, she could still envision the symbol she had found buried in Boba Fett's datafiles, the ones concerning the late Nil Posondum. As she leaned back in the pilot's chair, eyes closed, the lopsided circle and inner triangle that Poson-dum had scratched into the floor of the holding cage, so long ago, transformed itself into the ancient, gold-worked emblem of the planet Kuat's noble families.

And one of them, she mused, is my family. Neelah wasn't quite sure of all the details—parts of her memory were still shrouded in obscuring mists—but she knew for certain that there were several such noble families, all of them linked economically to the fount of wealth known as Kuat Drive Yards. They all had at one time borne the KDY emblem on their most dignified robes, and other items such as the heirloom blanket in which she had been wrapped as an infant. It had only been in later generations that factionalism and bad blood be-tween the ruling families had given rise to separate clan insignia.

Though she didn't know everything—such as what had happened to have brought her so far from home— she knew the name of that infant swaddled in the ancient emblem. My name, thought Neelah. My real name.

"Kateel." She whispered the name aloud, as though calling softly to that person who had been lost and now was found again. "Kateel of Kuhlvult."

Then she smiled. Well, thought Neelah, it's a begin-ning ...

Another sound—or silence, the absence of sound— broke into her contented meditations. Her brow creased as she opened her eyes; it took a moment before she real-ized what had happened. Looking down, she saw that the black cable that Boba Fett had rigged from the ship's computer, snaking out to the airlock's exit port and then looped to the reconstructed web of Kud'ar Mub'at, had suddenly ceased its pulsating shimmer. It lay like a dead thing across the floor of the cockpit.

Perhaps the two of them, Dengar and Boba Fett, had finished their work over there. Neelah found it hard to imagine that the pair of bounty hunters had found out anything from the arachnoid assembler, or what part of it they had been able to reclaim from the dead, compa-rable in value to what she had discovered while sitting in the comfort of the pilot's chair.

That guess didn't make sense, though; Boba Fett had expressly told her that the power and data line would have to run continuously, right up until he came back here to the Hound's Tooth and switched it off himself. Her part of the entire process had been to watch and make sure that the improvised device had kept inside the operational parameters programmed by Fett. So if it stopped on its own —the realization slowly crowded out the thoughts about her own rediscovered name—then something must have happened to them ...

Neelah looked up to the forward viewport, and saw the web disintegrating into chaos and flame.

Barely a second passed before she was able to spot the source of the destruction. In the distance, another ship had appeared, firing its laser cannon. Another coruscat-ing bolt tore through the web, even as she watched.

Instinctively, she grabbed for the navigational con-trols on the panel in front of her. Piloting the ship, even a cumbersomely fitted-out one such as the Hound's Tooth, was within her abilities; manning its weaponry and firing back at the attacking ship were impossible, though.

She shoved forward the main thruster engine control; its responding force shoved her back into the pilot's chair. Another few quick adjustments brought the Hound about, away from the web and the unknown ship, still firing its laser cannon as it rocketed closer. Through the ship's frame, Neelah had heard the conducted noise of the transfer hatch ripping away from where it had been sealed to the web.

Another push on the thruster control would send the Hound's Tooth on a full-power, blazing arc away from this sector of space. An emergency escape vector was al-ready programmed into the hyperspace navicomputer; she would only have to punch a couple of buttons to reach safety.

And then what? Neelah sat frozen at the ship's con-trols, mind racing. Maybe I've found out enough, she told herself. Her name, her true name; there had been many times, all the way back to the palace of Jabba the Hurt, that she had despaired of ever discovering even that much. She should be satisfied with that...

More words escaped her lips that came from the past and the memories she had found within herself. They were a string of expletives in one of the planet Kuat's an-cient, pre-Basic tongues.

She slammed on the Hound's side jets, and was imme-diately swiveled about in the pilot's chair as the ship swung back toward the web and its attacker.

This is just like the story I told, thought Dengar. About all those things that happened back then...

He struggled to remain conscious, knowing that death was on the other side of the blackness threatening to engulf him. The swirling dark spots that signaled ter-minal oxygen starvation had coalesced into one annihi-lating wave, roaring down the length of the web's central tunnel. Any further drop in atmospheric pressure would be enough to kill both him and Boba Fett; the murderous vacuum of space would boil the blood right out of their ruptured flesh and viscera. Dragging in as much fiery breath as he could, Dengar saw the web clear and partly come into focus; once more, he saw the image from the story he had related to Neelah, of the Black Sun cleanup crew tearing apart the living web of Kud'ar Mub'at. Only this time, there weren't any henchmen of Prince Xizor going about their destructive business; the web seemed almost to be ripping itself apart before his red-misted eyes.

Then the image changed. Now that, he thought deliri-ously, wasn't in the story. The prow of a bounty hunter ship, the one called Hound's Tooth, tore through the exterior of the web. Great tangles of structural fibers rolled across the curve of the cockpit's forward viewport; through the mired transparisteel, Dengar just barely rec-ognized Neelah at the control panel. Braking jets spat flame, slowing the ship down before it could barrel over him and crush his form to the web's tangled floor.

It's too late. That was his last thought as the blackness exploded from inside his skull. I'll neverSomething grabbed him around his bursting chest, picking him up bodily and diving with him toward the hull of the Hound's Tooth. But he didn't strike the ship's exterior; instead, he felt himself land skidding across the level flooring of the ship's open airlock.

A rush of oxygen filled his aching lungs, and he was able to see a blurred vision of Boba Fett standing just in-side the airlock door, smashing his gloved fist upon the small control pad at its edge. The door sealed shut and the enclosed space repressurized itself.

Dengar pushed himself up onto his knees and col-lapsed against the curved metal behind him. He wiped a trembling hand across his face, then looked at his palm and saw it reddened with the blood leaking from his nose and mouth.

The airlock's interior door hissed open. Boba Fett didn't bother to reach down and help Dengar stand upright, but instead just stumbled into the ship's cargo hold. Even weaker, Dengar crawled after the other bounty hunter, then used the bars of one of the empty cages to pull him-self to his feet. He stood clutching the bars as his heart slowly stopped hammering in his chest.

"All right..." Dengar managed to wheeze out a few painful words. "Now... we're even..."

Boba Fett didn't seem to hear him. As Dengar watched, the other bounty hunter started climbing the ladder up to the ship's cockpit.