Maybe I should've killed him then, thought Neelah. Or at least tried to. Her finger tightened upon the weapon's trigger. All she had to do was raise the weapon, aim—hardly difficult at this minimal distance—and fire. And this uncertainty in her existence would be taken care of, once and for all...
"Don't delude yourself." Boba Fett's voice snapped her out of the murderous reverie into which she had fallen. "I'm aware of your presence." He hadn't turned around, but had continued his adjustments to the ship's controls. A final number was punched into one of the navicomputer touchpads, then Fett swiveled around in the pilot's chair to face her. "You'd have more luck if you were a droid. Some of those can be virtually silent."
The remark struck Neelah as unintentionally ironic. If I were a droid, she thought, I wouldn't have any of the problems I do now. Even her identity, knowing who or what she was, other than a human female with a false name, a name not her own, and a past that had been stolen from her—it was hard to imagine a droid being concerned about things like that. Memory for a droid was a matter of chips and micro-implants, tiny recording devices as manufactured and interchangeable as them-selves. Machines have it easy, thought Neelah. They didn't need to find out what they were; they knew.
"I'll be more careful next time," said Neelah. With Boba Fett facing her, she had no more clue than before as to the secrets held within his skull. The dark, T-shaped visor of his helmet, that battered and discolored but still awesomely functional relic of the ancient Mandalorian warriors, concealed anything that might have told her what he thought and knew. The entire answer about who she was and how she had come to the remote, friendless sectors of the galaxy in which she had found herself might be locked up inside Boba Fett, like a key hidden in the very strongbox it was meant to unlock.
But the helmet, and its dark, shielded gaze, didn't matter; not really. She was one of the few creatures in the galaxy who had ever seen Boba Fett without his helmet— for all the good it had done her. Back on the planet Tatooine, in the harsh glare of the twin suns above the Dune Sea, Neelah had found him close to death, vomited out onto the hot sands by the Sarlacc beast whose death throes he had engineered from inside its gut. The Sar-lacc's gastric secretions, like a corrosive acid capable of etching unalloyed durasteel, had stripped Boba Fett of his armor, right down to and including a good deal of his skin. If she hadn't stumbled across him, his life would have oozed away like the blood seeping out from his raw flesh and hissing on the sun-baked rocks surrounding him.
She had saved his life then, hiding him with the help of Dengar, and keeping him safe long enough to let his wounds heal, wounds that would have killed a creature of lesser will. Even unconscious, under the chemical weight of the most powerful anesthetic drugs, he had still been Boba Fett, tenacious in his grasp on the world of the living.
And Boba Fett afterward, as well—frustratingly so. Gratitude seemed to be a substance in short supply among bounty hunters. Save the guy's life, thought Nee-lah bitterly, and what do you get? Not much—and defi-nitely not answers to questions. Anything she knew of her past was limited to the few scraps that had survived that mystery-producing memory wipe, and the infuriat-ingly little bits and pieces that she had picked up back in Jabba the Hutt's palace, and then here aboard the stolen ship Hound's Tooth. So far she had gotten nothing from Dengar; the history he had been relating to her, of the in-fighting and skulduggery that had finally broken up the old Bounty Hunters Guild, hadn't yet revealed anything of her past. And what it had told her about Boba Fett's past she had already pretty well figured out: that he was nobody to get involved with, even on a partnership basis. A successful business dealing with Boba Fett was one where he kept all the credits, and the other creature got to keep its life. And an unsuccessful one? Boba Fett still kept the credits.
For him to have hauled Neelah onto first his own ship, Slave I, when they had all been under siege by a couple of well-armed lowlifes out of Mos Eisley, then onto this ship he had taken from the reptilian bounty hunter known as Bossk, didn't indicate any gratefulness on Boba Fett's part, any recognition of the fact that he wouldn't even be alive now if it hadn't been for her. He's got some use for me —Neelah had figured that out a while back. If she wasn't exactly hard merchandise—the bounty hunter term for their captives, to be traded in for the nice fat re-wards that had been placed on their heads—she was nevertheless part of one of Fett's mercenary schemes. I just don't know what part yet.
"Careful might not be enough." Boba Fett's cold, emotionless words broke into her thoughts. "Being smart is better. A smart creature doesn't make it a habit to come up behind me without warning. I've killed a few, just for doing that."
"Oh?" Neelah had become sufficiently used to his ca-pacity for violence to no longer be intimidated. Plus, hav-ing nothing to lose—not even one's self—reduced one's fears. "And for no other reason?"
"A warning, perhaps." Boba Fett gave a slight shrug. "To others, not to do the same thing."
"That only works," said Neelah, "when the creature who's listening cares what happens."
He gave no sign of being amused by her comment. "You don't?"
"I'm still trying to find out. If I do or not."
"It doesn't matter to me," said Boba Fett, "whether you do. Just as long as you stay out of the way. While I go about my business."
Neelah felt a hot spark of anger igniting inside her, triggered by Fett's matter-of-fact tone. "And what busi-ness is that? Specifically."
"You'll find out soon enough. When we reach our destination."
Even as small a piece of information as that had proved impossible for her to pry out of Boba Fett. He hadn't seen fit to divulge it to Dengar, either, even though the two bounty hunters were supposed to be partners. In-stead, Fett had been cagey and silent as to the course he had plotted for the Hound's Tooth since they had taken over the ship.
"I've asked you before." Neelah spoke through grit-ted teeth, her hand straying toward the blaster pistol she had tucked inside her belt. "Why all the big mystery?"
"No mystery at all," replied Boba Fett. "Just as I said, you'll find out soon enough. Right now, you don't need to know."
A part of herself that was as cold and dispassionate as the bounty hunter observed her own reaction to his ob-stinate words, as though there were some small clue to be derived there. Neelah was well aware that the imperious response, which she had to keep a tight grip upon, was not that of someone born to be a slave, a dancing girl, and eventual food for a pet rancor in some obese Hutt's palace. She had known that even while she had been un-der the control of the late and unlamented Jabba, with-out even the slightest scrap of memory as to how she had come to be there. The only thing left of her previous existence, whatever it had been and on what distant world, had been the certainty that the cold attention the bounty hunter Boba Fett had directed toward her, in that grisly pit of depravity known as Jabba's palace, had been for some reason inextricably linked with that past.
"You can't blame me," said Neelah, "for wanting to know. You're the one who's told me so many times about what a dangerous place the galaxy is. If we're heading into some region that's going to turn out to be trouble— big trouble—I'd like some warning about it."
"Why?" The question, the way it was spoken by Fett, didn't invite an answer. "There wouldn't be anything you could do about it."
That infuriated her even more. The feeling of helpless-ness, of events being out of her control—that rubbed against some part of her innermost nature as though it were a raw wound. But the blood that she wanted to spill wasn't her own, but Fett's.