"You're going to discover," said Boba Fett quietly, "that Palpatine is the one who decides what's fair and what's not." He turned away and strode toward the chamber's exit.
"Wait! Don't..."
Another voice, a higher-pitched shriek, sounded after Boba Fett. At the mouth of the web's corridor, he found himself suddenly encumbered by the sticklike limbs of the arachnoid assembler Kud'ar Mub'at. It had managed to scramble off its flaccid nest and lunge after him. Boba Fett looked down and saw the assembler's triangular face below, the compound eyes peering futilely for some sign of sympathy behind the helmet's dark visor.
"Take me with you," pleaded Kud'ar Mub'at. "You'll see ... I can still be of some ... use to you ..."
Boba Fett peeled the creature's limbs away from him-self. "I don't think so," he said. "Business partners al-ways wind up getting in my way. Then I have to do something about them." He shoved the assembler back toward the center of the main chamber. "You're just as well off with your other business associates."
Before he turned and walked away, Fett caught a glimpse of Prince Xizor's guards; they had returned and had pulled Trhin Voss'on't up between them. The look of panic on the stormtrooper's face was the last he saw be-fore he continued heading back to Slave I.
The web started to die before he even reached the ship.
A shudder ran through the walls around Boba Fett, as though the heavy structural fibers had suddenly con-tracted in upon themselves. The smaller, entangled fibers that formed the shell of the web scraped across each other, like rough woven fabric being pulled apart by in-visible giant hands. A sudden wind came close to knock-ing Boba Fett off balance as the atmospheric pressure inside the web fell. The rush of oxygen to the surround-ing vacuum tore the tattered rents in the web open wider; Boba Fett felt the chill of space seep through his Man-dalorian battle armor as he clamped his teeth on the hel-met's breathing tube, drawing in its last store of oxygen. As the tangled floor buckled beneath his feet, he fought his way toward Slave I.
He knew that in the distance behind him, the assem-bler Kud'ar Mub'at was facing the Black Sun cleanup crew. An operation such as that would be as thorough, and final, as Prince Xizor's commands would dictate. When they were done, there would no longer be a Kud'ar Mub'at, or the web that had once formed the assembler's private little world.
The web's death throes intensified as the interwoven neural fibers reacted to their creator's agony. On all sides of the central corridor and above Boba Fett's head, the tethered subnodes thrashed and convulsed, stirred from their torpor by the inputs of pain overloading their own systems. A thicket of spidery limbs rose up in front of Boba Fett, like animated twigs and the heavier, thicker branches of a leafless forest caught in a winter planet's flesh-stripping tornado. Sets of compound eyes gazed upon him with uncomprehending fear as the subnodes' claw tips fastened upon his battle armor, the larger ones seizing his arms and legs like chitinous hunting traps.
One of the immense docking subnodes, its bulk ex-tending twice the length of Boba Fett's own height, reared up beneath him, toppling him onto one shoulder. A swarm of hand-sized subnodes scurried in panic across the visor of his helmet; they clung to his fist as he unholstered his blaster pistol and fired at the docking subnode crashing down toward him. The subnode's shell burst apart, the blaster-charred fragments swirling like black snow in the vortices of the web's atmosphere rushing through the disintegrating structure. On his back, Boba Fett kept his outstretched fists locked together on the blaster; the con-tinuous volley of white-hot bolts scorched through the docking subnode's revealed soft tissues, dividing them into smoldering gobbets falling on either side of him.
In the thinned remainder of the web's air, the docking subnode's hollowed exoskeleton collapsed silently, the translucent broken pieces thrust aside by Boba Fett's forearm. He got to his feet, kicking aside the feeble claws of the smaller subnodes, just as a pulsing red dot at the side of his vision signaled the exhaustion of the helmet's store of compressed oxygen. With lungs already begin-ning to ache, he sprinted for Slave 7's entry hatchway.
Boba Fett collapsed in the pilot's chair as the ship's cockpit sealed tight around him. The dizzying constella-tion of dark spots, the forerunner of unconsciousness that had swelled in his vision as he'd climbed the ladder up from the main cargo hold, now faded as he breathed in the flow of air from the ship's minimized life-support systems. A moment later he leaned forward in the chair, eyes raised to the viewport as his right hand reached for the controls of the few navigational rockets still func-tioning on the ship.
It wasn't necessary to fire the rockets to get away from the web. As Boba Fett watched, the last of the heavy structural fibers broke free from one another, the inter-woven fabric unraveling into loose strands. Where Kud'ar Mub'at's abode and place of business had blotted out the stars behind, the light-specked black of empty space now stood.
In the distance, Prince Xizor's flagship awaited the ap-proach of the transfer shuttle bearing the Falleen noble, his guards and the Black Sun cleanup crew, and whatever might be left of the Imperial stormtrooper Trhin Voss'on't. It was of no concern to Fett whether the hard merchan-dise he had worked so hard to deliver in living condition might still be breathing; once payment had been made, his interest ceased.
A swarm of dead subnodes, the creations and servants of the arachnoid assembler, bumped against the convex transparisteel of the cockpit's viewport. The crablike ones were ensnared in the same pale strands of disconnected neural tissue that tangled around the empty claws of the larger varieties. Atmospheric decompression had burst open the shells of some of them, spreading apart their contents like grey constellations of soft matter; others were still intact enough to appear as if they were merely asleep, awaiting some synapse-borne message from their parent and master.
Boba Fett applied a burst of rotational force to Slave I. The hull-mounted navigational jet rolled the ship on its central axis, letting the loose, ragged net of subnodes slip past. A visual field clear of everything but cold stars showed in the viewport.
At the edge of the viewport a brighter light glared, as though one of the stars had gone nova. Fett could see that it was Prince Xizor's flagship, maneuvering out of the sector and preparing for a jump into hyperspace. Whatever business the Falleen noble was about, it was likely far from this desolate area of the galaxy; it might very well be back at the Emperor's court on Coruscant. I imagine, thought Boba Fett, that I'll encounter him again, before too long. The course of events in the Em-pire was accelerating ever faster, spurred by both Palpa-tine's ambitions and the Rebellion's mounting challenge. Xizor would have to move fast if he was to have any chance of bringing Black Sun to victory on that rapidly shifting gameboard.
It didn't matter to Boba Fett who won. His business would stay the same.
Before he looked down to the control panel's gauges to assess what kind of condition Slave I was in, another pallid strand traced its way across the curved exterior of the viewport. The rope of silent neural fiber was linked only to the arachnoid assembler Kud'ar Mub'at, or what remained of it after the work of Xizor's cleanup crew. The once-glittering compound eyes were empty and grey now, like small round windows to the hollows of the corpse that drifted slowly past. Around the assembler's globular abdomen, split open like a leathery egg, the spidery legs were drawn up tight, forming the last self-contained nest for the once-proud, now-vanquished creature.
Careful...
Boba Fett indulged himself for a moment, imagining a warning from the dead. The expressionless face turned slowly past the viewport.