"Great." The scowl deepened on Neelah's face. "You mean this story you've been telling me ... this history of how Boba Fett broke up the old Bounty Hunters Guild and everything that happened after that."
"Precisely," said Dengar. "You've already learned a lot from me. More than you're probably willing to ad-mit. You've got a lot better notion now of how Boba Fett operates—and how far you can trust him—than you did when we left Tatooine."
"For all the good it's done me—" Neelah crossed her arms across her breast. "You might as well have stayed quiet."
"So?" Still smiling, Dengar raised an eyebrow. "You don't want to hear the end of it, then? Not too long ago, you were pretty interested in the story. Enough to hold that blaster pistol on me, to get me to keep on telling it."
"I've changed my mind," said Neelah. "What's the point? He won, he survived, other creatures didn'tpretty much business as usual for Boba Fett. Big deal."
"Very well." Dengar was interested in seeing how long this mood of hers would last. "Of course, there's al-ways the chance that the end of the story would have something you need in it, the one clue that would unlock a whole lot of other puzzles. But if you don't want to take that chance—it's up to you."
"That's right." Neelah closed her eyes and tilted her head back. "So don't bother me with it."
The mood, and the feigned sleep, lasted all of five min-utes. Then one of her eyes opened, then both. She glared at Dengar with them.
"All right," Neelah said finally. "So finish it, already."
It was a small triumph, but still worthwhile. And it would pass the time until they reached whatever destina-tion they were headed for. "You're not going to bother pointing the blaster at me?"
Neelah shook her head. "I'm right at the point where that's probably not such a good idea. The impulse to blow you away might be a little too irresistible. So let's skip it. Just start talking, okay?"
"Fine," said Dengar. "Whatever you want..."
4
"Where's Boba Fett?"
That was the most important question—and Prince Xizor, the head of the Black Sun criminal organiza-tion, expected an answer from his underlings. And soon, thought Xizor grimly. Under the present circumstances, he didn't feel like taking the time to kill a few of them just to motivate a quicker response time.
"We're tracking him, Your Lordship." The comm spe-cialist aboard the Vendetta bowed his head with a suffi-cient measure of cringing obsequiousness to avoid Xizor's wrath. Serving aboard the Falleen prince's personal flag-ship was an honor earned not only by excellence at one's job, but also by attention to all the little rituals that flat-tered his ego. "Our tracking sensors had detected his jump into hyperspace; his ship should be arriving in this sector of realspace momentarily."
Xizor stood brooding at the Vendetta's forward view-port; the curved transparisteel revealing the dark pan-orama of stars and vacuum extended far above his head. One hand rubbed the angles of his chin as the violet centers of his half-lidded eyes focused on the arc of his own thoughts. Without turning around, he spoke an other question: "Were we able to determine his final navigation coordinates? Before the jump."
"Data analysis was able to break out only the first broad-scale coordinates—"
Once again, he turned his hard glare onto the comm specialist standing on the platform walkway behind him. " 'Only'?" He slowly shook his head, eyes narrowing even farther. "I don't think 'only' is good enough. Make a note"—Xizor extended the tapered claw of his fore-finger toward the datapad clutched in the specialist's hands—"to the disciplinary unit. They need to have a lit-tle discussion with the data analysis section. They need to be ... motivated."
The change in the comm specialist's face, from merely pallid to dead white, was pleasing to Xizor. Motivation, in the lower ranks of Black Sun, was a synonym for ter-ror; he had put a lot of his own effort in designing and maintaining the appropriate measures for creating just that effect. Violence was an art; a balance had to be main-tained, somewhere short of the deaths of valuable and not easily replaced staff members. At the same time, it had to be made clear that no creature ever left Black Sun, at least not while alive. Such administrative duties would have been a chore to Prince Xizor, if the practice of the art involved had not been such an intrinsic pleasure.
"So noted, Your Excellency." As long as it was some-one else's neck on the chopping block, the comm special-ist was only too eager to comply with Xizor's request.
He had already dismissed the comm specialist from his mind. With only fragmentary information available about the trajectory of the bounty hunter Boba Fett's ship, Slave I, there was much for Xizor to mull over. He gazed out at the galaxy's bright skeins, not seeing the in-dividual stars and systems so much as the possibilities they represented. It had already been verified that Boba Fett had left the dull, virtually anonymous mining planet on which the former Imperial stormtrooper Trhin Voss'on't had taken refuge; a refuge that had proven ineffective when Fett and his temporary partner Bossk had tracked Voss'on't down for the bounty that Emperor Palpatine had placed on his head. Voss'on't was now Boba Fett's hard merchandise, to use the language of the bounty hunters; the bounty for the traitorous stormtrooper was due to Fett as soon as delivery was made to the arach-noid arranger and go-between known as Kud'ar Mub'at.
Turning his gaze to one side of the viewport, Xizor could see the unlovely fibrous mass of Kud'ar Mub'at's web, floating in otherwise empty space. The web had been woven, over a period of unknown decades, perhaps centuries, from the assembler's own extrudations. Mired in the weft of tough exterior strands were bits and pieces of various ships, poking out like metal scraps sunk in the corrugated mud of a dried swamp; those fragments were all that remained of debtors that Kud'ar Mub'at had foreclosed upon, or business partners whose dealings with the assembler had gone disastrously awry. Involve-ment with Kud'ar Mub'at might not lead to the same de-gree of violence as with Boba Fett, but annihilation was just as final.
To enter into the web—Xizor had done it many times—was to step inside Kud'ar Mub'at's brain, both metaphorically and literally. The thinner, palely glisten-ing fibers were spun-out extensions of Kud'ar Mub'at's own cerebro-neural tissue; tethered to the strands and scuttling along them were the numerous subnodes that the assembler had created, little replicas and variations of itself, taking care of appointed duties ranging from the simple to the complex. They were all linked to and under the control of their master and parentOr so Kud'ar Mub'at thinks, Prince Xizor reminded himself. The very last time he had been inside the assem-bler's web, just before coming back here aboard the Vendetta, Xizor had had a most interesting—and poten-tially profitable—conversation. Not with Kud'ar Mub'at itself, but one of the assembler's creations, the accoun-tant subnode called Balancesheet. It had shown Xizor that it had managed to detach itself from the web's linked and intertwining neurofibers, without Kud'ar Mub'at being aware of what had happened. Balancesheet had also mas-tered the assembler's knack of creating subnodes, one of which it had spliced into the web in order to deceive Kud'ar Mub'at that all was well. The net result was as if part of Kud'ar Mub'at's brain had begun its own mutiny against its creator, laying out plans and schemes, of which Kud'ar Mub'at was as yet unaware.
It was going to find out soon enough, though. That thought lifted a corner of Xizor's mouth into a cruel smile. He would enjoy even more the actual moment when the crafty arachnoid, squatting on its nest in the center of its self-created web, discovered that it had been outsmarted. At last, after having been the puller of so many invisible strings laced throughout the galaxy that had brought wealth to its dusty coffers and ruin to other sentient creatures. Not that Xizor felt pity for any of those; they had gotten what they deserved for letting themselves get entangled in Kud'ar Mub'at's intricately woven schemes. But those schemes had become a little too extensive for Xizor's taste; when they started inter-fering with his and Black Sun's various enterprises, it was time to trim them back. What better way than uprooting them at the source? The unexpected discovery of Balance-sheet's own ambitions along those lines—the crafty sub-node had made it clear that it no longer cared to remain a mere appendage of its creator-parent—made possible the removal of Kud'ar Mub'at, while still retaining all the valuable go-between services that the assembler performed for Black Sun.