Hard Merchandise

7

The story ended.

Or at least for now, thought Neelah. She had been sit-ting for a long time with her back against the cold dura-steel bulkhead of the Hound's Tooth's cargo hold. Sitting and listening as the other bounty hunter Dengar had fin-ished his account of Boba Fett's past, and all that had come out of the scheme to destroy the old Bounty Hunters Guild.

"That's it, huh?" She was glad she hadn't had to keep a blaster aimed at Dengar to motivate him to keep talk-ing. Her arm would have gotten tired by now. It had been a long story, though filled with enough action and vio-lence to keep her from getting bored. With one hand she rubbed at the small of her back, then unfolded her legs and stood up. "I take it that Boba Fett got everything sorted out after that."

"Good guess," said Dengar. He rapped his knuckles on the bulkhead behind himself. "Since you've been on Slave I, before we transferred over to this ship, you know it's in fully functional shape now. There were some inci-dents I heard about, though, that happened in the process of getting repaired. And redesigned, from the bulkheads to the engine core." Dengar pointed with his thumb to the cage. "Apparently, Fett decided that he needed bigger quarters for the amount of hard merchandise he was going to be ferrying around—so things had to be shifted around to make room for it. Otherwise, the ladder wouldn't be necessary to get to the cockpit. The whole refitting process took more than just credits, from all reports. And a few other creatures wound up getting killed. But that's not unusual with the way Boba Fett works."

"I'll say." After hearing the story of the war among the bounty hunters, Neelah found it a wonder that any-body who had ever come in contact with Boba Fett was still alive. Creatures he doesn't like, she thought wryly, have a habit of winding up dead. If Bossk, the Tran-doshan bounty hunter that Fett had stolen this ship from, was still alive somewhere, it was a triumph of the same dumb luck that had gotten him out of his previous scrapes with his rival. "Too bad for those creatures, I suppose."

And what about me? She had been warned by Dengar that the story wasn't going to answer all of her questions. It didn't matter how much she had found out about Boba Fett—as if she had needed more confirmation about how cold and ruthless he could be—she still hadn't found out anything more about herself. I still don't know who I am, thought Neelah glumly. Who I really am. All the mysteries, all the questions that repeated over and over inside her skull, were still infuriatingly present. They had been in there since she had found herself in Jabba the Hurt's palace, back on that remote world of Tatooine. Since then, little scraps of the past had slipped into her memory-scrubbed brain, tantalizing pieces of the world from which someone, some dark entity, had abducted her. The only constant, the only link between that past world and this harsh, threatening one in which she was forced to feel her way like a blind creature in a vibroblade-edged corridor, was Boba Fett—of that, Neelah was cer-tain. She could feel it in the tightening of her sinews, the white-knuckled clenching of her fists, that overtook her every time she found the reflection of her face caught in the dark visor of Boba Fett's helmet. Even in Jabba's palace, when she had seen his ominous form across the Hurt's crowded, noisy throne room, Neelah had been certain of the connection between herself and the bounty hunter. He knows, she thought bitterly. Whatever my true name is—he knows it. Her name, her past, all that she had lost. But as of yet, she had found no way of forc-ing him to reveal those secrets to her.

She was beginning to wonder why she had bothered to save his life.

Turning her head, Neelah looked around at the con-fines of the ship's cargo hold. This part of the ship that had formerly belonged to the Trandoshan Bossk was not much different from Boba Fett's own Slave I. Form and function, stripped bare metal, cages for hauling around a bounty hunter's unwilling merchandise. It smelled differ-ent, though; the acrid, reptilian stench curled in her nos-trils with each breath, reminding her unpleasantly of the blood-scented musk that had permeated the stone walls of the fortresslike palace where she had served as a danc-ing girl. And where I would've wound up, she knew, as rancor bait. The same mix of odors from dozens of the galaxy's species, their bodies' exudations and hormonal secretions, that had hung in the palace's close, stifling air, seemed to have penetrated the very metal of Bossk's ship. Slave I had been cleaner and closer to sterile, befitting the cold, precise logic of its owner. A clinical surgery, in its own way, with Boba Fett the doctor that took creatures' spirits apart, the better to convert them into the hard merchandise in which he traded. An involuntary shiver traced Neelah's spine as she saw in her mind's eye the scalpel that lay in Boba Fett's hidden gaze.

"Sorry it didn't do the trick for you." Dengar's voice broke into her thoughts. "But if you didn't know it be-fore, at least you do now. He's not anybody to fool around with. Not unless you don't care whether you live or die."

"I don't have that choice," replied Neelah. "Believe me, if I could have avoided meeting Boba Fett, I would have." She had the notion, unsubstantiated yet by any hard facts from memory, that the life she had led before had been one where bounty hunters, and all the sticky, spirit-corroding evil they brought with them, were on the scarce side. "I could have done without the pleasure of his acquaintance."

"Suit yourself." Dengar had made up a little pallet for himself near the bulkhead where he had sat while re-counting the story about Boba Fett's past. "Now for me, it's a real honor, hooking up with him and all. Being as I'm in the bounty hunter business myself. Not at the same level as him, though." Hands clasped behind his head, Dengar lay down on the thin nest of rags and pack-ing foam. "So for him to ask me to come along as his partner..."

Dengar didn't have to explain anything more than that. Good for you, thought Neelah. Back on Tatooine, in their hiding place below the parched surface of the Dune Sea, Dengar had told her about his hopes of actu-ally quitting the dangerous bounty hunter trade and set-tling down with his beloved Manaroo. The couple had been betrothed for some time, but had put off their mar-riage until Dengar had found some way of getting out from under the enormous weight of debt he carried. Fi-nancially, it had all been downhill for him since he'd quit—at Manaroo's gentle prodding—his previous spe-ciality as a Grade One Imperial Assassin. He was a dif-ferent person now, and a better one—working for the Empire ate away at one's spirit, sometimes fatally so, and he had Manaroo to thank for saving him from that fate. But it still left the mountain of debt that had accumu-lated so swiftly upon his back. Creatures who owed credits in this galaxy, and who didn't pay up, also had a good chance of winding up dead; even with Jabba the Hutt dead, there were plenty of other hard lenders who operated that way. A partnership with the notorious Boba Fett was the best, and maybe only, opportunity Dengar had for clearing his accounts. If, Neelah figured, he doesn't get killed along the way.

She looked down again at the bounty hunter on the makeshift pallet. Dengar was already asleep, or doing a good imitation of it. Telling stories—even true ones—was obviously not in his usual repertoire of skills. Any kind of action, no matter how strenuous or life-endangering, was more suited to him than stringing words together.

A feeling of acute distaste rose inside Neelah as she raised her eyes again to the dull metal bulkheads of the ship's cargo hold. She had only been able to stand being here as long as the unreeling story had diverted her atten-tion. Now, the close, stench-filled air formed a choking fist inside her throat, as though she could literally taste the despair and anger of that other hard merchandise, the ones who had fallen into the hands of Bossk. They might not have been as profitable as those that Boba Fett tracked down and secured, but their lives had been worth just as much to themselves, if no one else.

I've got to get out of here, thought Neelah desper-ately. She didn't know if her own words meant the cargo hold, this ship that its previous owner had named Hound's Tooth, or the dark mystery that her life had become. It didn't matter; there was only one exit before her, the metal ladder at the side of the hold that led to the ship's cockpit area. Go on, Neelah told herself, hesitating as she set a hand on an eye-level tread. You've faced him be-fore. A wry smile twisted the corner of her mouth. And you're not dead yet. She had even pulled and held a blaster pistol on Boba Fett, right there in the Hound's cockpit—how many other creatures in the galaxy could say they had done something like that and survived to talk about it? Neelah put her boot on the lowest rung and started climbing.

Boba Fett was at the cockpit's panel, making precise adjustments to the large, troughlike controls designed for a Trandoshan's outsize claws. In the hatchway be-hind, Neelah stood watching him, the back of his scarred and dented helmet as enigmatic as the dark, T-shaped vi-sor that hid his eyes. I've seen those as well, she reminded herself. And lived. Another accomplishment that un-doubtedly put her in a tiny fraction of the galaxy's inhabi-tants, on all the worlds and in every system. The helmet had been the one part of the battle gear that hadn't been reduced to wet rags by the acidic digestive juices of the Sarlacc creature in the Great Pit of Carkoon, into which Boba Fett had fallen when Han Solo had been rescued by his friends Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. But Nee-lah and Dengar had still had to remove the helmet from the unconscious Fett to feed and rehydrate him until he could fend for himself once more. Even in that condition, hovering between life and death, Boba Fett had still seemed an intimidating figure. Anyone with a degree less furious energy and survival instinct as part of his spirit would have been consumed by the blind, gaping-mawed creature that had swallowed him, rather than finding the means to literally explode his way out to the open air. It wasn't just Boba Fett's short way with other creatures' lives that made him such a legend; it was also the tenacity with which he clung to his own.

The bounty hunter was either ignoring her as he went about his tasks on the Hound's control panel, or he hadn't been aware of her coming up the cargo-hold ladder to the cockpit's hatchway; he continued the work of his gloved hands without remarking on her presence. He knows I'm here, thought Neelah. There's not much he doesn't know...

She raised her eyes to the viewport in front of the con-trol panel just as Boba Fett dropped the Hound's Tooth out of hyperspace. A vista of stars, different from those left on the other side of the galaxy, filled the viewport. Neelah looked across the bright, cold field, hoping that the uncaring regard of the distant stars would provide her some relief from the cramped, claustrophobic quar-ters inside the ship. She looked, and she sawThe past.

Not her own, but Boba Fett's. It's just like the story, a part of Neelah marveled, almost childlike in its reaction. The story Dengar told.

Floating in the vacuum outside the Hound's Tooth were the tattered fragments of Kud'ar Mub'at's web. It had not been from any particular skill on Dengar's part that she had been able to so vividly imagine the image of the arachnoid assembler and its web, both before and af-ter Prince Xizor's cleanup crew had torn it apart. There had been another tantalizing fragment of memory in-side her own head, something that had somehow evaded the attempt to wipe it out of existence. Somehow, from out of her past and the world that had been stolen from her, Dengar's account of Boba Fett's history had trig-gered that remembrance; she had known exactly what Kud'ar Mub'at and his flock of created subnodes had looked like. I knew it, thought Neelah. And now they were here, gently drifting, surrounded by strands of pal-lid neural tissue like elongated ghosts, bumping sound-lessly against the transparisteel of the cockpit's forward viewport.

The dead subnodes looked both eerie and pathetic, their broken exoskeletons surrounded by thin, twiglike limbs, claws curled up under the split abdomens. Smaller ones, seemingly no bigger than a child's fist, were entan-gled with the giants that had been capable of tethering a ship to the now-vanished web's docking area. All of them were hollow-eyed, with the unseeing gaze that blind, dead things turned toward those fortunate creatures still alive. Or unfortunate, thought Neelah. Maybe the poor dead subnodes, pieces of their defeated master and creator, were really the lucky ones; they no longer had to wonder about what would happen to them next. For them, all the galaxy's cruel uncertainties were over.

For a moment, the sight of the space-drifting sub-nodes evoked the disturbing sensation in Neelah that she had fallen backward in time, pulling this ship and its contents along, as though her empty memory were a true black hole, with its own irresistible gravity. But some how the process had wound up landing them in Boba Fett's past, the moment just after the crude dissection and death of his former business associate Kud'ar Mub'at. But that was so long ago, thought Neelah; it made her feel dizzy to even contemplate it. She closed her eyes, wondering if when she opened them again, time would begin unreeling on its proper course once more.

Her eyelids flicked open without her willing them to. I was wrong. She saw that now. The momentary dis-placement in time had passed. Neelah stepped forward and laid a hand on the back of the pilot's, steadying her-self as she gazed out the viewport. "They've been dead a long time," she said softly. "A very long time."

"Of course." Boba Fett had raised his own gaze from the instrument gauges; now he looked out on the same dark vista as Neelah did. "The last time I was in this sec-tor, these entities had just been killed—along with their creator, Kud'ar Mub'at." He turned and looked over his shoulder at Neelah. "But you know all about that, don't you?"

A sudden realization hit her. "You were listening in, weren't you? Over the ship's internal communications system. All the while that Dengar was telling me about what happened to you in the past."

Boba Fett gave a single dismissive shake of his head. "I hardly needed to," he replied. "Since Dengar was act-ing on the exact instructions I had previously given him."

"What?" Neelah looked back at Fett in amazement. "You told him—"

"It's convenient for me to have you brought up to speed on a few matters of common interest. Having Den-gar take care of it saves me the trouble—and it kept the two of you occupied while I was tracing this sector's ex-act location and navigating us here. That took time, as we arrived here via a route that would throw off anyone else who might have been spying upon my activities. Time, which you managed to pass in your own way." Boba Fett's voice sounded almost tinged by a partial smile. "I'll have to congratulate my colleague Dengar on his acting abilities—he kept his act going, even when you pulled that blaster pistol on him."

Her surprise faded quickly. He's been ahead of me be-fore, thought Neelah. He probably will be again.

"So this is the location, huh?" She peered again toward the dark vista afforded by the viewport. "Where Prince Xi-zor tried to eliminate you, then changed his mind and took out that arachnoid assembler instead."

"Precisely." Boba Fett pointed toward the viewport. "As you can see, everything Dengar told you about the incident was the truth. Xizor's cleanup crew didn't leave much of Kud'ar Mub'at's web. Black Sun operatives are known for their thoroughness."

More of the dead subnodes, like the shed carapaces of ordinary crawling spiders, drifted past the Hound's Tooth. Neelah felt the skin of her forearms prickle into goose-flesh as she heard—or imagined that she did—the light scraping and tapping of empty chitin against the ship's hull. The sensation was more dreamlike than anything to do with actual memory.

"Why did you bring us here?" The spirit-chilling un-canniness of the sight out of the viewport, the dead crea-tures tethered together by the strands of neural tissue, as much a part of one another now as they had been in their living existence, touched a thread of anger inside Neelah. "Just to reminisce?"

"There's very little I do," replied Boba Fett calmly, "that is without purpose. I came here for a reason. And you were brought here for the same reason."

"How would I know that?" Neelah folded her arms across her breast. "You haven't seen fit to tell us anything about where we were headed, or why." She glared at the figure in front of her. "Or is this something else that you let Dengar in on, but not me?"

"Neither you nor Dengar were aware of our destina-tion, and there was a good reason for that as well. If you don't know something, you can't be compelled to reveal it. That's why I've made it a practice not to tell anyone, even my own associates, if I can avoid it." Boba Fett pointed a gloved fingertip toward Neelah. "I don't keep my silence for your sake, but it's to your advantage, nevertheless. A good many of the ways to get someone such as yourself to talk are not pleasant. And some of them don't leave you alive afterward, either."

"Thanks for your concern," Neelah said sourly. "I ap-preciate it."

"Your sarcasm is pointless. When I decide to start caring about anyone else's opinions of my operating methods, I'll let you know." Boba Fett leaned back in the pilot's chair. "But you wanted to find out; you merely had to wait, and the time has come."

Like flicking a switch, the bounty hunter's words trans-formed the anger inside Neelah to sudden, unreasoning panic. "I... I don't know ..."

"You don't know if you're ready for that." Boba Fett's visor-shielded gaze seemed to penetrate to the depths of her spirit. "You've come all this way; you've waited so long and so impatiently; you've fought to find out all that's been hidden from you. And now you're afraid."

"No—" She quickly shook her head. "No, I'm not."

"We shall see about that," replied Boba Fett, even more quietly—and more ominously—than before.

"Because you don't have a choice. You never did."

He's right. Neelah squeezed her eyelids shut once again; at her sides, her hands closed into fists, the sinews of her forearms straining with tension. From the moment she had caught sight of this helmeted figure, before she had learned his name, she had known that this moment would come. It had been fated to do so, if she could only stay alive long enough. She had done that much, escap-ing from the death that would have been hers inside Jabba the Hutt's palace, then binding her destiny to one who had been only a shadow's breadth away from death himself. Just to find out, Neelah told herself fiercely. To find out...

She didn't know. Whether it would be better to dis-cover what lay in that other world, the past that had been stolen from her, or to go on in darkness, to leave it hidden.

"Go tell Dengar to come up here."

Neelah heard Boba Fett's command, and slowly opened her eyes.

I don't have a choice. She nodded slowly. About any Boba Fett glanced over his shoulder at the dead, hollow-eyed creatures drifting in the emptiness outside the ship, then brought his gaze back around to her.

"We have a lot to talk about," said Boba Fett. "We'd better get started."