"Oh, but of course." The voice coming from the speaker was tinged with sarcasm. "It just happened that he got blown to atoms while he was bringing a piece of hard merchandise to me, a piece for which I'd have to hand over a pretty sum of credits. Creatures will believe that, all right."
"Let them believe whatever they will. You've got more pressing concerns right now."
"What?" Kud'ar Mub'at sounded puzzled. "To what are you referring, Xizor?"
"Simple enough." His own admiration for Boba Fett had increased, now that he could see what the bounty hunter was up to. "Your 'business associate,' for whom you've expressed such concern—Boba Fert—he's headed right your way."
"Well, of course he is. He's got merchandise to deliver—"
"I'm afraid you don't understand." Bestowing bad news on another sentient creature was a minor diversion that paled next to murder and plunder, but it was one from which Xizor could still derive some pleasure. "Or perhaps more likely, you simply have no awareness of what condition his ship Slave I is in. But we've already done a complete damage assessment. So you can believe me, Kud'ar Mub'at, when I tell you—Boba Fett's not go-ing to be able to stop."
"But... but that's absurd!"
"No," said Xizor. "It's actually rather clever of him. He's burning up the last remaining thruster engine aboard his ship, and he's already achieved a considerable ve-locity. It's a tribute to his piloting skills that he's able to keep Slave I—what's left of it—on a steady course, at that speed. But what Boba Fett can't do now—no one would be able to—is bring Slave I to a halt before it crashes into your web. From our scanning of his ship, we know that all of his braking rockets are out of commis-sion. Which, of course, is something that he knows as well."
A wordless, panicked shriek came over the comm unit speaker. The image that came to Prince Xizor's inner eye was that of Kud'ar Mub'at almost literally flying out of his nest inside the drifting web, with his spidery legs thrashing around him.
"How—" The absent assembler managed to regain a measure of control, enough to sputter out a desperate question. "How much time do I have?"
"I'd say..." Xizor glanced over at the tracking moni-tor and the rapidly flickering numbers on the readouts below it. "You'd better brace yourself."
Before any more annoyingly high-pitched sounds could come over the speaker, Xizor reached over and broke the comm unit connection between the Vendetta and Kud'ar Mub'at's web. A monitor below the main viewport showed the view from a remote scout module stationed on the other side of the web; glancing at the screen, Xizor could see the flaring jet of Slave I's remaining thruster en-gine. From this angle it looked like a star going nova, all glaring flame, bright enough to sting one's eyes.
"Your Excellency." Standing beside Xizor, the comm specialist spoke up. "Do you have orders for the crew?"
Xizor remained silent for a moment longer, watching the bounty hunter's ship as it sped on its trajectory straight toward Kud'ar Mub'at's web. His cold admira-tion of Boba Fert—and his appreciation—went up an-other notch. The game of death had just been made more complicated—and much more interesting. There was no doubt about the eventual outcome; there never was when Xizor played at it. But however sweet the bounty hunter's death would have been before, the pleasure was enhanced far beyond that now.
"Track and pursuit," said Xizor at last. "There's go-ing to be some pieces to pick up. Interesting pieces..."
Boba Fett emerged from Slave I—he had to step back and kick the exterior hatchway door open; its opera-tional power had failed and a loosened section of hull plating had wedged into one corner—and stepped into absolute, screeching chaos.
He'd expected as much. This result had been a part of his plan, from the moment he'd conceived the notion of plowing his ship into Kud'ar Mub'at's space-drifting web. His long familiarity with the arachnoid assembler, their years of doing business together, had enabled him to scope out the web's nature and capabilities. Kud'ar Mub'at had designed and spun the web out of self-extruded fila-ments, both structural and neural, so that it could incor-porate bits and pieces of ships and other artifacts made by sentient creatures; both the web's inside and outside were studded with those segments of durasteel, like func-tioning wreckage mired in the irregular, scum-thick surf of a frozen sea. That physical incorporation of such items had been due to Kud'ar Mub'at's greed—its desire to magnify and glorify itself with trophies from those un-fortunates who'd found themselves enmeshed too deeply in its schemes to get out—and to a need to preserve the web itself. The web had no other defenses; its ability to quickly incorporate and seal itself around anything that penetrated it was the only way it could maintain a life-supporting environment inside its curved, matted, and tangled fibrous walls.
With one gloved hand grasping the side of the hatch-way, Boba Fett scanned the scene around him. The inte-rior of Kud'ar Mub'at's web was lit a shimmering blue-white by the phosphorescence of masses of illumi-nator subnodes. The simple creatures clung to the upper walls by their tiny, scuttlings legs and radiated the soft glow from the bioluminescent compounds in their translu-cent, distended abdomens, hardly more than the size of Boba Fett's doubled fists. All of the shrieking noise in the web came not from the living light sources, tethered by neural filaments to their own creator, but from their subnode cousins, the faster-moving emitters of the sticky, viscous fluid by which the web repaired itself and incorporated fragments of ships into the crudely shaped structure.
The emitters scuttled around the web's torn edges, where Slave I had broken through and mired itself. Be-fore crashing into the web, Boba Fett had reoriented the ship from it usual vertically oriented, tail-downward po-sition; that would have brought the rounded curve of the cockpit like a blunt hammer-blow against the web's exte-rior. At the last second, a quick burst of one of the navi-gational jets had brought the sharper, knifelike projection of the hull above the cockpit toward the rapidly ap-proaching web. Once Slave I had thrust its way into the web, thick fibers entangling around it, a final burst from the opposite jet had brought it upright again, so that the wider surface of the cockpit against the web's interior brought it to a halt. The smell of the fibers that had been scorched black by the jets' firing hung as an acrid mi-asma in the web's pallidly lit cavern.
More than the web's structure had been hurt in the ship's impact. The web, a living thing itself, reacted to the trauma in its own pain-filled way. The din of shriek-ing that sounded in Boba Fett's ears came from the other subnodes that had already been in this section of the web, rather than having scurried there to contain the damage. Most of them had been torn loose from the neural-fiber strands that had tethered them to their controlling par-ent Kud'ar Mub'at; some were mute, never having been given vocal abilities, but the others now gave idiot cries as they dropped from the rough domed ceiling of the space. The matted floor was thick with the scuttling forms, writhing in spasms of pain or scrabbling in tight little circles, their limited onboard cerebral functions com-pletely overloaded by the sudden disconnection from the assembler on his nest in another part of the web. Spidery, crablike subnodes, trailing their snapped connectors be-hind them, clambered over Boba Fett's boots as he stepped down from Slave I's hatchway. He kicked a few aside as though they were chitin-shelled rats; a few of the smaller ones were unavoidably crushed beneath his boot soles, their husks crackling like thin eggshells.
Fett looked up toward the prow of his ship and saw that the emitter subnodes had almost finished sealing the web around the hull; only a section around the main thruster nozzles still extended out into the vacuum of space. The various high-pitched whistling noises that the web's atmosphere had made, escaping through the torn structural fibers, slowly died out as the emitters went about their work, filling in the last of the gaps between the living biomass and the ship's curved durasteel hull. Around Boba Fett, the blue-lit space grew steadily qui-eter, as more and more of the disconnected subnodes lapsed into a quivering catatonic state, overturned on their backs like sea creatures stranded by some planet's receding tide. The silence that slowly overcame the previ-ous hectic din was that of a partial death: as the web was strung with living fibers spun out from Kud'ar Mub'at's own cortex and cerebrospinal system, to stand in an ex-cised section such as this was like standing in some crea-ture's grossly magnified brain after an equally gigantic surgeon's scalpel had cut away a wedge of grey matter.