Hard Merchandise

8

He was dreaming.

Dengar knew he was, because he could see Manaroo right in front of him.

Turning with a bunch of flimsiplast sheets in her fist and a seriously annoyed look on her face —though that made her no less beautiful to him—Manaroo rapped the knuckles of one hand across the invoices.

"Those Jawas are undercutting us again," she said. "We're going to have to do something about them, once and for all —"

"They undercut us because they sell junk." In the load-ing bay of a medium-tonnage cargo freighter, surrounded by datacoded shipping containers and uncrated machin-ery still shiny with factory lubricants, Dengar took his wife in his arms and kissed her on the brow. They had been married how many years now, and the skip in his pulse was still the same as the first time he had ever held her soft warmth against himself. The tiny tattooed moons and stars on her wrists no longer glowed as brightly as before, but his own love for her showed no sign of fad-ing. "That's their stock in trade; they're Jawas, right? So don't worry about 'em. They're not our competition."

Manaroo fretted some more, looking over his shoul-der at the invoices in her hands. "They're little chiseling womp rats, is what they are."

"Don't worry." Another kiss; Dengar smiled as he leaned back from her face. "The word's getting out among the moisture farmers, about what kind of equipment we're selling. And what kind of long-term percentage contracts we can offer. Hey —" With one hand he stroked her hair, only slightly darker than the pale blue of her Aruzan skin, away from her forehead. "We're already in the black ..."

"You slimy bucket of nerf-waste." That wasn't Manaroo's voice. And the kick in the ribs, as he lay on the makeshift pallet with his eyes closed, wasn't from his beloved, either.

"I ought to kill you," continued Neelah, from some-where on the other side of his closed eyes and the sweet, dwindling remnants of his dream. A blow from her small, rock-hard fist, right across the side of Dengar's jaw, pro-duced a constellation of stars that blotted out the image he was trying to hold, of Manaroo wrapped in his em-brace. "As a matter of fact, maybe I will..."

He had been knocked far enough awake that he was able to roll with the next punch Neelah delivered from where she stood above him. Getting onto his hands and knees, Dengar scrambled toward the nearest bulkhead, then grabbed hold of it and pulled himself upright to face her.

Definitely not dreaming, Dengar told himself, not now. He found himself uncomfortably awake and stand-ing in the rank-smelling, close-quartered cargo hold of the Hound's Tooth. "What are you going on about?" He crouched slightly, taking a stance with his empty hands outstretched to fend off another attack from the anger-crazed female in front of him. "What did I do?"

"What did you do ..." Neelah echoed his words as she looked at him in disgust, her own hands planted on her slim hips. "Tried to make a fool out of me, that's what. All that time I was pressing on you to tell me about what'd happened to Boba Fett in the past, and you were already under orders to fill me in on exactly that."

"Oh." Dengar relaxed a bit, lowering his hands. "No big deal." He immediately raised them again when he saw that her anger hadn't ebbed any. "Anyway—what're you complaining about? You didn't have somebody wav-ing a blaster in your face, wanting a bedtime story!"

The structural damage sustained by the Hound's Tooth had loosened the durasteel bars of the holding cage, with several of them wrenched free of their upper sockets and splaying out into the cargo hold. Neelah grasped one of the shorter bars from near the cage's door and pulled it free of the socket below. It made a formidable if simple weapon; with it cocked back over her shoulder, ready to swing, she took a step closer to Dengar.

Fire flashed in her eyes for a second, then just as quickly dimmed. "Let's face it," she said. The metal bar clanged on the hold's floor as she tossed it away. "He ran a number on both of us. Just so he could have as much peace and quiet as he wanted while he navigated the ship."

"Well, yeah, I'm willing to let him have it, if that's what he wants." Dengar slowly straightened from his de-fensive crouch, ready to drop back into it if this female showed any more signs of her murderous temper. There was a big difference between her and Manaroo, it struck him. His betrothed could be just as tough if necessary, but so far she hadn't ever given any indications that she wanted to kill him. That might change after they were married—if that ever happened—but he was willing to take the chance.

"He's not just the head bounty hunter around here. He's also the pilot of the ship. I can wait un-til he gets us to where he wants to go."

"Your waiting's over," said Neelah. With her thumb, she pointed toward the cockpit above them.

"We've arrived."

"Yeah?" Dengar rubbed his chin, warily regarding the female. A hard knot of apprehension coalesced in his stomach. It was one thing to travel toward an unknown destination, but quite another thing to reach that myste-rious point. Whatever else Boba Fett might have filled him in on—it didn't amount to much—there hadn't been any talk about the events that would go down once they got there. "Now what?"

"That's the big question. But our intrepid captain has decided to break his silence, at least. So get a move on— Fett wants us both up in the cockpit for a briefing."

Dengar nodded, then managed a half smile. "That oughta improve your disposition, at least."

He followed Neelah up the ladder. But even as he mounted the metal treads, his mind slipped back to the last fading vestiges of the dream he had been enjoying be-fore being so violently awoken. It had been all about the same fantasy in which he indulged even when awake, during those relatively quieter times when he wasn't try-ing to keep from getting killed. The partnership with Boba Fett had to pay off, figured Dengar. Big time. Fett had to have something major cooking, or he wouldn't have bothered taking on a partner—gratitude wasn't a sufficient motivation with a hard character like that. Save a guy's life, brooded Dengar, and what do you get for it? Not much, except for a chance to get killed in some scheme of his. That was the easy part; the harder one would be turning this partnership gig into cold, hard credits, the kind that would pay off his debt load and set him and Manaroo up in a new life. Something like bro-kering the galaxy's high technologies to underdeveloped backwater planets, like that dump of a world Tatooine. That was where the real profits were to be made, and a lot more safely besides. Even with paying out the bribes to keep a commercial operation going, either to the Em-pire or, if the wildest imaginable possibilities came true, to whatever was put together by the Rebel Alliance, there would still be the chance of him and Manaroo do-ing well together. All it took were the connections—I've got those already, Dengar told himself—and a little bit of operating capital. Actually, a lot of capital; that was why he'd agreed to hook up with Boba Fett in the first place.

As he stepped from the ladder and through the cock-pit hatchway, Dengar slowly shook his head. Whatever was next on Boba Fett's agenda, he had the feeling it might not lead to that pile of credits he needed, and the new life they could buy.

"Let's get right to business," said Boba Fett, turning around in the pilot's chair to face Dengar and Neelah. "I don't care to waste any more time than we already have." He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder. "This is what's left of Kud'ar Mub'at's web—"

Dengar leaned forward, peering toward the viewport behind the other bounty hunter. "You're right," he said after a moment. The drifting corpses of the assembler's subnodes, tangled in ropelike strands of neural tissue, were both eerie and impressive. "It must be ..."

"I hardly need to be told when I'm correct about something." A trace of irritation sounded in Boba Fett's otherwise emotionless voice. "I rarely am not. And when I say that there is a considerable amount of time pressure upon our actions here, you should believe it."

"You mean what's going on with the Empire and the Rebels?" Dengar shrugged, then shook his head. "I don't see what the worry is. The big battle they've got shaping up between them—that's way out by Endor. That's prac-tically the other side of the galaxy; in any event, it's a long stretch from us. I don't see how it could affect what we're doing here. If anything—" He pointed to the view-port. "Their problems should make it easier for us to take care of whatever you brought us here for. Both the Empire and the Rebel Alliance have pulled out most of their forces from whatever dispersed locales they were in before, to get ready for the confrontation between them. That leaves a lot of systems and space just about empty of them. We can do what we want, and neither the Em-pire nor the Rebels will be any the wiser."

"That kind of simplistic analysis is why you're the one taking orders, and I'm the one giving them." Boba Fett laid his gloved hands flat on the arms of the pilot's chair. "The battle that's likely to take place near Endor might be over, once it's begun, in less than a few minutes. And it will have a decisive impact on the fate of the ongoing struggle between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance. They've been building up to this confrontation for a long time. And it does matter which side wins, to creatures like us. Palpatine wishes to make absolute his control over the galaxy, and everything in it. Such a grasp would extend to you, Dengar, as well as to myself. Our own ambitions, and what we do to pursue them, might no longer be possible if Palpatine were to achieve all that he desires."

"And what about mine?" Standing beside Dengar, the female Neelah spoke up. "What happens to me, and what I want?"

"You don't even know what that is," replied Boba Fett. "But you can believe me about it—or not, just as you choose. The past and the world that was stolen from you will be lost forever if Palpatine wins this struggle with the Rebel Alliance. There will be no way for you to get it back then."

"And if the Rebels win?"

"There's no way they can." Boba Fett gave a flat, hard shake of his head. "My own career as a bounty hunter should be proof enough that cunning and ruthlessness inevitably triumph over all the high-minded ideals that the universe can generate." The bounty hunter's scorn for the Rebels, for any creature motivated by some-thing beyond profits, was evident. "But if the impossible should happen—the galaxy has seen stranger events come about—then that would be bad for our business as well. The Rebels' pretenses to a higher morality would prevent them from paying the established rates for our services, and they would also at the same time seek to ex-terminate those criminal operations which have been some of my best customers. Let's face it—the best out-come, as far as bounty hunters are concerned, would be for this battle near Endor to wind up being a draw some-how, with neither force eliminating the other, and the struggle between the Rebel Alliance and the Empire con tinuing. We can hope for that to happen—but we can't count on it."

Dengar had felt his own hopes falling as he had lis-tened to Boba Fett's bleak prognosis. What a universe, he thought glumly. Whether the war was won by the forces of good or by the greatest evil the galaxy had ever known, somehow the results were the same, at least for him. I wind up losing, no matter what. That longed-for future, with him and Manaroo and nothing to do with the bounty hunter trade, seemed to recede at a light-speed pace. The only way for him to make the kind of credits he needed was as a bounty hunter, hooked up with the notorious Boba Fett, but that same Boba Fett made it sound as if it was soon going to be impossible to even be a bounty hunter. Where was the fairness in an arrangement like that?

The female Neelah didn't seem concerned by the dis-mal long-term prospects that Boba Fett had described. "So what do you propose doing in the meantime? And why did you bring us here?"

"My plans are my own," said Boba Fett. "But some of them concern you, and it's now become convenient for you to have some of your many questions answered. You wanted the past—your past—then so it shall be." He gestured with one hand toward the viewport behind him. "I hereby give it to you."

Dengar could see Neelah scowling disgustedly at the viewport. Outside the ship, pallid strands of neural tissue and their tethered, spiderlike corpses continued to drag their shapes past the transparisteel.

"Is this some kind of a joke?" Neelah's glare was even angrier as she turned it toward Fett. "I don't see any-thing, that—"

Leaning forward in the pilot's chair, Boba Fett inter-rupted her. "You don't see, because you don't understand. Not yet, at any rate. But if you listen to me, you will."

With a scowl still upon her face, Neelah folded her arms across her breast. "Go ahead. I'm listening."

From the corner of his eye, Dengar glanced over at the young woman. It wasn't the first time that he had heard that tone of command in her voice. She's used to giving orders, thought Dengar, and having creatures obey them. It was the same haughty tone of voice that Neelah had used on him, ordering him to continue telling the story of Boba Fett and the breakup of the old Bounty Hunters Guild, and it had been more effective than any blaster pistol she could have pulled on him. But to hear her talk that way to Boba Fett, as though barely able to control her impatience with a slow-moving servant, was still star-tling. Who is she? wondered Dengar. And how did she wind up as a memory-wiped dancing girl in Jabba the Hutt's palace? His own curiosity about Neelah's past al-most matched hers.

"This part of the story," said Boba Fett, "didn't begin here. And it happened a little while before the arachnoid assembler Kud'ar Mub'at met his demise. I had business in one of the nearby systems that had been successfully concluded—you don't need to know about that—and I was returning toward the center of the galaxy, where sev-eral potentially lucrative opportunities were awaiting me. Of course, I was aboard my own Slave I at the time, and not an under-equipped mediocrity like this ship. One of the functions I had programmed into Slave I's com-puters was a complete database of the ships of all other bounty hunters, both those affiliated with the Bounty Hunters Guild and the few, such as myself, operating as independent agents. It rarely happens, but on occasion some other bounty hunter, or the Guild while it still ex-isted, has managed to obtain information before I have, about some particular hard merchandise to be rounded up for a good price." Fett's shoulders lifted in a dismis-sive shrug. "Some clients prefer to employ less-qualified bounty hunters, hoping they'll be able to get what they want at a lower price. That's their choice, but it rarely works out that way."

True enough, thought Dengar. He had heard those other stories, all of which went to prove that it was al most as dangerous trying to avoid doing business with Boba Fett as actually going ahead and getting involved with him. In a lot of ways, he was virtually inescapable.

"So I sometimes find it worthwhile," continued Boba Fett, "to keep an eye on what other bounty hunters are up to. And if Slave I's ID scanners home in on a bounty hunter's ship in a navigational sector that should other-wise be empty of such activity, then I find that very inter-esting indeed. It's even more interesting when the onboard computers read out the ID code of a ship belonging to a bounty hunter known for his unsavory business practices."

That description puzzled Dengar. It was hard to imag-ine any bounty hunter being more ruthless than Boba Fett himself. "So who was it that you came across?"

"The ID code identified the ship as one known most often as the Venesectrix. Rarely spotted anywhere close to the central sectors of the galaxy; its owner preferred operations farther out into the border territories. And of course, there was a reason for that: the owner of the Ve-nesectrix was a certain Ree Duptom." Pausing a mo-ment, Boba Fett looked over at Dengar. "Perhaps you're familiar with the name."

"Wait a minute ..." It took a moment, but the name finally hooked up with a memory synapse inside Dengar's head. "Ree Duptom—he's the only one who ever got booted out of the Bounty Hunters Guild!" That took some doing, Dengar knew; there had been plenty of crea-tures in the Guild whose ethical standards had been way below his own. He wasn't familiar with the exact details— Duptom had been booted out of the Bounty Hunters Guild before Dengar had joined it—but there had been an unspoken legend attached to him, as being the one creature that all other bounty hunters considered scum. "I didn't think he was still active, even out in the border."

"I guess he's not," said Neelah drily. "Pay attention, why don't you? He's obviously being discussed in the past tense for a reason."

"True." Boba Fett gave an acknowledging nod of his head. "When I came across the Venesectrix in open space, the ship's engines weren't powered up; it was simply drifting. I attempted to establish communication with its pilot, but I received no response over the comm unit. The reasonable assumption was that the pilot was either dead or had abandoned his ship. To determine which was the case—and to find anything that might have been valuable aboard—I forced entry through the Venesectrix's airlock." In the cockpit viewport behind Boba Fett, a few more dead subnodes bumped against the curved transparisteel. "And I found Ree Duptom, all right."

"Dead, I suppose." The expression on Neelah's face was one of utter boredom. "You know, I'm still waiting to hear the part that has anything to do with me."

Boba Fett ignored her impatience. "Duptom didn't make a good-looking corpse. He hadn't been the hand-somest humanoid to begin with—his appearance matched his ethics—but being caught in a hard-energy particle burst from a partial core meltdown of his own ship's en-gines hadn't helped any. Fortunately, the burst's lethal ef-fects had been contained within a zone just a couple of meters deep; he had obviously been working in the en-gine compartment when the meltdown occurred, gotten the dose of radiation, then staggered back up to the Ve-nesectrix's cockpit area to die. Which didn't take long."

The story's details aroused Dengar's suspicions. "So did his ship's engines malfunction—or were they sabo-taged?" From what he had heard in the Bounty Hunters Guild, Ree Duptom had made nearly as many enemies for himself as Boba Fett had.

"I didn't investigate that question," said Fett. "Once a competitor of mine is dead, I lose interest in them. How they wound up that way is someone else's business; noth-ing to do with me."

Right, thought Dengar.

"Anyway, somebody like Ree Duptom was perfectly capable of killing himself through his own stupidity." Boba Fett shook his head, as though in disgust. "His ship and all of his equipment were poorly maintained; frankly, he was not a credit to the bounty hunter trade in a lot of ways. But Duptom was obviously able to find certain clients, nevertheless. The evidence of that was right there aboard his ship. And the uncompleted jobs that he had been working on were interesting enough for me to take them over."

"What were they?"

"There were two matters," replied Boba Fett, "that Ree Duptom's untimely death had left hanging. The first one was in the form of a deactivated cargo droid—or what had once been a cargo droid. Someone had cleverly transformed it into an autonomic spy device, with not only built-in vid cameras and sound recording equip-ment, but an olfactory detect and sample circuit as well. The droid's hidden sensors could pick up trace amounts of scent molecules in the atmosphere and analyze them for biologic source details."

"Why would anybody want information like that?" This time, Dengar was puzzled by the story, rather than suspicious. "What's the good of knowing what some event smelled like, if you already had the visual and au-dio recording?"

"It all depends," said Boba Fett, "on what you're looking for, and what the spy device had been designed to catch. This converted cargo droid was capable of de-tecting evidence of something—or someone—that would otherwise have remained hidden and undiscovered if vi-sual and auditory clues were all that had been processed. Which is what it in fact had done; I found that out when I removed the data record from inside the droid and ana-lyzed it. The truth came out, concerning a certain indi-vidual having been at a certain place, and at a certain important time, even though he had tried to conceal his presence from anyone else who might have been watch-ing and listening."

"What place?" Neelah's tone was as demanding and impatient as before. "What time?"

"Back on Tatooine—for such a desolate, backwater world, it has assumed a great deal of importance for the rest of the galaxy." Boba Fett gestured toward the view-port, as though indicating one of the bright points of light visible beyond the drifting subnodes.

"But that's something bounty hunters know instinctively—or at least the ones who survive and prosper. The smallest, appar-ently insignificant speck of dirt can loom unexpectedly large one day. And you had better be prepared for that. In this case, the speck of dirt was a moisture farm in the Dune Sea, some distance away from the Mos Eisley space-port. A moisture farm owned by one Owen Lars—nobody important—and operated by him and his wife, Beru, as-sisted by a young nephew of theirs. Who just happened to be someone very important—"

"Luke Skywalker," said Dengar. "That's who you're talking about, isn't it?"

"Indeed." Boba Fett gave a single nod. "Enough of the details have become known, about Skywalker's transfor-mation from an insignificant, planet-bound nonentity with big and hopeless dreams to a major figure in the Rebel Alliance, to have already coalesced into legend. And that transformation could be said to have begun with a raid by Imperial stormtroopers on that dreary little moisture farm, a raid that left Skywalker's aunt and uncle as little more than blackened skeletons in the ruins."

"So what's the big mystery about that? Darth Vader ordered the stormtrooper raid on the moisture farm—a lot of creatures in the galaxy know about that by now." Dengar shrugged his shoulders.

"Anybody who's had any contact at all with the Rebel Alliance has heard most of the story."

"The mystery," said Boba Fett quietly, "has to do with what I found in the deactivated cargo droid aboard Ree Duptom's ship. The spy device's audio and video records documented the stormtroopers' raid; the droid must have been hiding and watching from behind a nearby sand dune. The details, when I played back the files, were con-sistent with the known accounts of the raid and its after-math. There were only Imperial stormtroopers to be observed, going about their lethal business. But the addi-tional data that the cargo droid's spy recordings held— the olfactory information, taken from the atmosphere at the time and place of the raid on the moisture farm— indicated somebody else had been there, as well as the stormtroopers."

"All right"—Neelah spread her hands apart, waiting to hear— "who was it?"

"In the analysis of the spy device's olfactory data were the unmistakable pheromones of a male of the Falleen species." Boba Fett raised a finger for emphasis. "That much was easily determined. But using my own data-bases aboard Slave I, I was able to narrow it down even further. The specific pheromone traces could only have come from a member of the Falleen nobility; there's a ge-netic marker that is unique to that bloodline."

"A Falleen nobleman?" Dengar's brow creased as he puzzled over the information. "But they're all dead now "There was one still alive," said Boba Fett, "at the time of the stormtrooper raid on Tatooine. Before that, the Falleen nobility had been virtually wiped out by a ge-netic warfare experiment, one that was initiated by Lord Vader. Of that family grouping, the only surviving mem-ber was Prince Xizor, who was then the head of the Black Sun organization."

"I don't get it." Dengar felt even more confused than before. "You're saying that Prince Xizor was part of the raid that killed Luke Skywalker's aunt and uncle? But Xizor would've had to have been directing the Imperial stormtroopers somehow, but keeping himself out of sight—"

"Not at all." Boba Fett put his gloved hands flat on the arms of the pilot's chair again. "The spy device into which the cargo droid had been transformed contained the evidence of Prince Xizor being present at the raid on the moisture farm—but the evidence might not have been genuine."

"Faked? You mean somebody else created some kind of phony evidence and planted it inside the cargo droid?" The possibilities were multiplying faster than Dengar could keep track. "Or maybe Xizor himself did it for some reason." That didn't seem to make sense, but then very little seemed to anymore. "But why? Why would anybody do that?"

"That," replied Fett, "is something I do not know. Or at least, not yet. But the chances of the evidence having been manufactured, with the purpose of making it appear that Prince Xizor had something to do with the raid that killed Skywalker's aunt and uncle, remain considerable."

"I don't see why that should be." Arms folded across her breast, Neelah seemed less than impressed with Boba Fett's analysis. "Why make things more complicated than they need to be? Maybe this Xizor creature really did lead the raid, and somehow he got caught out at it, even though he'd tried to keep himself hidden."

"There's several reasons for being suspicious about the evidence I found inside the cargo droid. One is that Lord Vader and Prince Xizor were mortal enemies, even as they continued their roles as Palpatine's loyal servants. Of course, it served the Emperor's purposes to have Vader and Xizor at each other's throats, just as I suspect it served his purpose to pretend he didn't know that Xi-zor was the leader of Black Sun. The Emperor has a devi-ous mind—he derives more of his power from that, I believe, than any mystical Force—and it suited him for the moment to keep Xizor on a long leash. The time came, though, when the prince found a tighter grip around his neck than he would ever have thought possi-ble. He wasn't clever enough to avoid being caught in the snare that he helped weave around himself—and that cost him his life. I don't intend to follow his example." Boba Fett leaned back in the pilot's chair, his visor-shielded gaze regarding his audience. "The upshot of the enmity that existed between Xizor and Vader is that it would have been unlikely in the extreme for Xizor to have taken any part in the stormtrooper raid without Vader having known and, more, having approved of it— yet none of my information sources on the Imperial planet of Coruscant, some of them close indeed to Vader, have ever indicated that was the case. Similarly, my con-tacts inside Black Sun never reported their leader Xizor getting hooked up with one of Darth Vader's operations. Therefore, the best analysis would be that the evidence linking Xizor to the raid had been created by some third party, possibly as a way of drawing unwanted attention toward Prince Xizor. That possibility is reinforced by Ree Duptom's own history, before he met his death aboard his own ship: he had been involved on several previous occasions with various disinformation campaigns, some of them actually linking back to Emperor Palpatine's court. It had become something of a speciality with Dup-tom, the discreet spreading of lies in the various watering holes of the galaxy, so that they would do the most good for whoever had hired him."

"That was how he got kicked out of the old Bounty Hunters Guild." Dengar gave a slow nod. "He got a cou-ple of other bounty hunters killed by circulating stories that they had been the ones responsible for certain double crosses that went down. They weren't scams that he'd run, but shifting the blame let some other well-paying, weaselly creature get away."

"A time-honored tradition," said Boba Fett drily. "And one which Ree Duptom had been making a good part of his living at. Given his reputation for being able to do that sort of thing, someone had obviously engaged his services in some kind of scheme to falsely link Prince Xizor with the stormtrooper raid on Tatooine in which Luke Skywalker's aunt and uncle were killed. But two other deaths put an end to that plot: Duptom's own, when he was fried by the meltdown of his ship's engine core, and Xizor's. Whatever the intent had been in trying to link Xizor with the stormtrooper raid, it was hardly worth following through on it once he had been killed as well. The only thing left from the plot was the fabricated evidence contained in the cargo droid, and that was in my possession once I came across Duptom's ship drifting in space."

"For which, I'm sure, you'd find some good use." Un-folding an arm, Neelah held up two fingers. "But you said there was something else you found on that ship. What was the other item?"

"Perhaps this one will compel more of your attention. Ree Duptom might have been dead—" Boba Fett shrugged. "No great loss; but there was still another creature alive aboard the Venesectrix. In the cargo hold's cages, I found a young female human. Not in the best of physical condition—Duptom wasn't as careful about maintaining his merchandise as I am—but at least still breathing. She was still unconscious, the aftereffect of a rather thorough memory wipe that she had received ..."

Dengar heard a sudden gasp come from Neelah. He looked over at her, standing next to him, and saw that her eyes had gone wide with surprise.

"Good," said Boba Fett. "I see that I have managed to pique your interest. That moment aboard Ree Duptom's Venesectrix was indeed our first encounter. One that still remains as mystifying to me as it undoubtedly is to you. I could only assume that a memory-wiped female human had been in Duptom's possession as part of his various business enterprises—though not, of course, as an item of hard merchandise for which a bounty had been posted. While it was possible that Ree Duptom might have got-ten wind of some paying gig before I had, enough time had passed—as was indicated by the advanced state of decomposition of his corpse—so that I would have heard of anyone offering a bounty for the return of a person matching your physical description. That was not the case, so obviously Duptom had been involved in some other, probably less savory, type of business. But what that would have been, I had no clue—when you regained consciousness, you couldn't even tell me your name."

"I remember ..." Neelah's eyes were even wider than before. She nodded slowly. "Not my name ... that's still lost... but I remember now, that was the first time I laid eyes on you. Not in Jabba the Hutt's palace, but in a ship out in space." Neelah touched the side of her head with trembling fingertips. "It was like I woke up there ... and there were the bars of the cage, and I felt so cold ..."

"That was because you were dying. Whoever had done the memory-wipe job on you had been both thor-ough and brutal." Boba Fett's voice was flat and unemo-tional. "They didn't leave you in good shape. Plus you had been unconscious for some time, without food or water, after Ree Duptom had managed to get himself killed. If I hadn't taken care of you and nursed you back to a reasonable semblance of health, you would have died there aboard the Venesectrix—or on Slave I after I had brought you over to my ship. So you might want to regard whatever you did for me, back in the Dune Sea on Tatooine, as just repayment in kind."

"But you didn't save me ... because you felt sorry for me..."

"And pity didn't motivate you either, when you found me near death." Boba Fett regarded her coldly, but with no tone of accusation in his voice. "It was a simple busi-ness matter for both of us. You thought I might be of some use to you, just as long before that, I calculated the potential for turning a profit from you. And"—he turned his head slightly, as though studying her from another angle—"we both might be correct yet. But at the time I found you, that was an unknown quantity, just as it re-mains now. I have my standards, though; no piece of possibly valuable merchandise has ever died while in my keeping, other than when they've managed to commit suicide. That, I could tell, wasn't going to happen in your case; even starving and dehydrated, suffering from a trau-matic memory wipe, enough of your inner spirit remained, fighting to survive. Once you were out of physiological danger, it was just a matter of stowing you someplace where you'd be out of danger while I determined the best way of profiting from your situation."

"So you put her in Jabba the Hutt's palace?" The notion astonished Dengar. He stared at Boba Fett, eyes wide as Neelah's had gone. "That hellhole? She could've gotten thrown to Jabba's pet rancor!"

"The dangers of Jabba's palace were well known to me," said Boba Fett. "While substantial, they were nevertheless limited and predictable. And I would be on hand to circumvent them, in case Neelah had aroused any of Jabba's crueler desires—the Hutt, like all of his greedy species, might have been averse to meeting my price, but he valued my services enough to have made a standing offer for me to stay on at his palace for as long as I cared to."

"So you could keep an eye on me," said Neelah. Her gaze narrowed as she slowly nodded. "But more than that—you had already come to a dead end, trying to find out anything about me, who I really was, why somebody had done all those things to me. So you passed me off as a mere dancing girl, bringing me there to Jabba's palace while I was still too confused to even know what you were doing. But what you were really hoping for was that someone in that crowd of thugs and criminals in Jabba's court would recognize me for who I really was— and that would be how you'd find out how to turn a profit from me!"

"That possibility had occurred to me. Jabba's palace was a crossroads for all sorts of the galaxy's lowlife; some of them had even been in business with Ree Duptom be-fore. There was always a chance that one of them might have had an inkling about what kind of scheme he had been engaged upon when he met his death—who he was working for, and what they were trying to accomplish."

The corner of Neelah's mouth twisted in a sneer. "I guess it's too bad for both of us, then, that you didn't find out anything."

"Ah." A trace of amusement filtered into Boba Fett's voice. "But that's where you're wrong. I did discover something. Perhaps not the whole truth—your real name and where you came from—but enough to follow up on.

Enough that might lead us to that mutually profitable truth."

Standing beside Neelah, Dengar could see her hands tightening into fists.

"Tell me," commanded Neelah. "Now."

"I'll tell you because it suits my own purposes, and not for any other reason." The amused tone evaporated from Boba Fett's words. "There was a former business associate of Ree Duptom at Jabba's palace—his name doesn't matter—but what is important is that the two of them had been working together until just before Dup-tom's death. As a matter of fact, they'd had a falling out, the sort of thing that happens with low criminal mentali-ties like that. It was also the sort of thing that would lead one of them to do a delayed-effect sabotage on the en-gines of the other's ship, resulting in a lethal core melt-down." Fett shook his head. "No great loss—just as it wasn't any great loss when I had to sneak out of Jabba's court for a second, while the other dancing girl, the one named Oola, was giving her final performance. That was just long enough to set up a rendezvous later with my in-formant. It wasn't until after Princess Leia, disguised as an Ubese bounty hunter, had brought the Wookiee Chew-bacca into the court that I had enough time to obtain the data that this certain creature had—and then I made sure that he wouldn't be informing anyone else that I had been asking questions about your real identity."

"He knew ... he knew who I am?" Neelah leaned for-ward. "My real name?"

"Unfortunately, the creature knew nothing of that. And you can rest assured that I used every means of per-suasion at my disposal to make sure he told me every-thing that he did know. I didn't have to worry about leaving traces of those techniques; in Jabba's palace, a corpse turning up in that kind of condition was pretty much a daily occurrence. What he did tell me, though, before I returned to Jabba's court, was that his former business associate Ree Duptom had accepted two new jobs just before they had had their falling out with each other, and that one client would be paying for both jobs. But he didn't know who that client was; Duptom hadn't told him that much."

"Then the information's worthless!" A look of furi-ous despair sparked in Neelah's gaze. "It still doesn't tell us who I really am, or what happened to me!"

"Calm yourself. You've waited this long for the an-swers you want; you can wait a little while longer. Be-cause that may be all that it takes."

"What... what do you mean?"

"Did you forget," said the bounty hunter, "that I brought you to this point in space for a reason? Those answers, if they're to be found anywhere, are here." Boba Fett pointed to the cockpit's viewport and its unset-tling vista of dead arachnoid subnodes. "My late contact inside Jabba the Hurt's palace wasn't able to tell me your name—he had never even laid eyes on you before coming there—but he was able to provide the clue I needed."

Dengar spoke up this time. "So what was that?"

"Simple. The two last jobs that Ree Duptom had taken on were obviously the ones I found aboard his ship Venesectrix—whoever the person was who had hired him to do something with the fabricated evidence about Prince Xizor's involvement in the stormtrooper raid on Tatooine, that person must also have been the one that had arranged for the abduction and memory wipe of Neelah. But what my contact in the palace told me was that the person who paid for those jobs hadn't hired Ree Duptom directly. He had used an intermediary—a go-between."

"A go-between . . ." Suddenly, Dengar understood. "It must have been Kud'ar Mub'at! The assembler was the only creature who would have arranged that kind of job for Ree Duptom. But—"

"But it's dead," Neelah said flatly. "Kud'ar Mub'at is dead, remember? You were here when it happened." She shook her head in disgust. "You've brought us all the way out here for nothing. The dead can't tell us any secrets."

"That's where you're wrong." Boba Fett turned in the pilot's chair and pointed to the viewport behind him. "Look."

The Hound's Tooth had slowly moved farther into the tethered constellation of dead subnodes. Until it had at last come to the center of the torn strands of neural tissue.

In the scan of space visible outside the ship, a spider-like corpse larger than all the others drifted, jointed legs tucked up beneath what was left of its globular abdomen. The hollow, blind eyes of Kud'ar Mub'at gazed back at the visitors to the cold vacuum of its tomb.

"We only need to bring the dead back to life." Boba Fett spoke with calm assurance, just as though nothing would be easier. "And then listen ..."