She looked down again at the bounty hunter on the makeshift pallet. Dengar was already asleep, or doing a good imitation of it. Telling stories—even true ones—was obviously not in his usual repertoire of skills. Any kind of action, no matter how strenuous or life-endangering, was more suited to him than stringing words together.
A feeling of acute distaste rose inside Neelah as she raised her eyes again to the dull metal bulkheads of the ship's cargo hold. She had only been able to stand being here as long as the unreeling story had diverted her atten-tion. Now, the close, stench-filled air formed a choking fist inside her throat, as though she could literally taste the despair and anger of that other hard merchandise, the ones who had fallen into the hands of Bossk. They might not have been as profitable as those that Boba Fett tracked down and secured, but their lives had been worth just as much to themselves, if no one else.
I've got to get out of here, thought Neelah desper-ately. She didn't know if her own words meant the cargo hold, this ship that its previous owner had named Hound's Tooth, or the dark mystery that her life had become. It didn't matter; there was only one exit before her, the metal ladder at the side of the hold that led to the ship's cockpit area. Go on, Neelah told herself, hesitating as she set a hand on an eye-level tread. You've faced him be-fore. A wry smile twisted the corner of her mouth. And you're not dead yet. She had even pulled and held a blaster pistol on Boba Fett, right there in the Hound's cockpit—how many other creatures in the galaxy could say they had done something like that and survived to talk about it? Neelah put her boot on the lowest rung and started climbing.
Boba Fett was at the cockpit's panel, making precise adjustments to the large, troughlike controls designed for a Trandoshan's outsize claws. In the hatchway be-hind, Neelah stood watching him, the back of his scarred and dented helmet as enigmatic as the dark, T-shaped vi-sor that hid his eyes. I've seen those as well, she reminded herself. And lived. Another accomplishment that un-doubtedly put her in a tiny fraction of the galaxy's inhabi-tants, on all the worlds and in every system. The helmet had been the one part of the battle gear that hadn't been reduced to wet rags by the acidic digestive juices of the Sarlacc creature in the Great Pit of Carkoon, into which Boba Fett had fallen when Han Solo had been rescued by his friends Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. But Nee-lah and Dengar had still had to remove the helmet from the unconscious Fett to feed and rehydrate him until he could fend for himself once more. Even in that condition, hovering between life and death, Boba Fett had still seemed an intimidating figure. Anyone with a degree less furious energy and survival instinct as part of his spirit would have been consumed by the blind, gaping-mawed creature that had swallowed him, rather than finding the means to literally explode his way out to the open air. It wasn't just Boba Fett's short way with other creatures' lives that made him such a legend; it was also the tenacity with which he clung to his own.
The bounty hunter was either ignoring her as he went about his tasks on the Hound's control panel, or he hadn't been aware of her coming up the cargo-hold ladder to the cockpit's hatchway; he continued the work of his gloved hands without remarking on her presence. He knows I'm here, thought Neelah. There's not much he doesn't know...
She raised her eyes to the viewport in front of the con-trol panel just as Boba Fett dropped the Hound's Tooth out of hyperspace. A vista of stars, different from those left on the other side of the galaxy, filled the viewport. Neelah looked across the bright, cold field, hoping that the uncaring regard of the distant stars would provide her some relief from the cramped, claustrophobic quar-ters inside the ship. She looked, and she sawThe past.
Not her own, but Boba Fett's. It's just like the story, a part of Neelah marveled, almost childlike in its reaction. The story Dengar told.
Floating in the vacuum outside the Hound's Tooth were the tattered fragments of Kud'ar Mub'at's web. It had not been from any particular skill on Dengar's part that she had been able to so vividly imagine the image of the arachnoid assembler and its web, both before and af-ter Prince Xizor's cleanup crew had torn it apart. There had been another tantalizing fragment of memory in-side her own head, something that had somehow evaded the attempt to wipe it out of existence. Somehow, from out of her past and the world that had been stolen from her, Dengar's account of Boba Fett's history had trig-gered that remembrance; she had known exactly what Kud'ar Mub'at and his flock of created subnodes had looked like. I knew it, thought Neelah. And now they were here, gently drifting, surrounded by strands of pal-lid neural tissue like elongated ghosts, bumping sound-lessly against the transparisteel of the cockpit's forward viewport.
The dead subnodes looked both eerie and pathetic, their broken exoskeletons surrounded by thin, twiglike limbs, claws curled up under the split abdomens. Smaller ones, seemingly no bigger than a child's fist, were entan-gled with the giants that had been capable of tethering a ship to the now-vanished web's docking area. All of them were hollow-eyed, with the unseeing gaze that blind, dead things turned toward those fortunate creatures still alive. Or unfortunate, thought Neelah. Maybe the poor dead subnodes, pieces of their defeated master and creator, were really the lucky ones; they no longer had to wonder about what would happen to them next. For them, all the galaxy's cruel uncertainties were over.
For a moment, the sight of the space-drifting sub-nodes evoked the disturbing sensation in Neelah that she had fallen backward in time, pulling this ship and its contents along, as though her empty memory were a true black hole, with its own irresistible gravity. But some how the process had wound up landing them in Boba Fett's past, the moment just after the crude dissection and death of his former business associate Kud'ar Mub'at. But that was so long ago, thought Neelah; it made her feel dizzy to even contemplate it. She closed her eyes, wondering if when she opened them again, time would begin unreeling on its proper course once more.
Her eyelids flicked open without her willing them to. I was wrong. She saw that now. The momentary dis-placement in time had passed. Neelah stepped forward and laid a hand on the back of the pilot's, steadying her-self as she gazed out the viewport. "They've been dead a long time," she said softly. "A very long time."
"Of course." Boba Fett had raised his own gaze from the instrument gauges; now he looked out on the same dark vista as Neelah did. "The last time I was in this sec-tor, these entities had just been killed—along with their creator, Kud'ar Mub'at." He turned and looked over his shoulder at Neelah. "But you know all about that, don't you?"
A sudden realization hit her. "You were listening in, weren't you? Over the ship's internal communications system. All the while that Dengar was telling me about what happened to you in the past."
Boba Fett gave a single dismissive shake of his head. "I hardly needed to," he replied. "Since Dengar was act-ing on the exact instructions I had previously given him."
"What?" Neelah looked back at Fett in amazement. "You told him—"
"It's convenient for me to have you brought up to speed on a few matters of common interest. Having Den-gar take care of it saves me the trouble—and it kept the two of you occupied while I was tracing this sector's ex-act location and navigating us here. That took time, as we arrived here via a route that would throw off anyone else who might have been spying upon my activities. Time, which you managed to pass in your own way." Boba Fett's voice sounded almost tinged by a partial smile. "I'll have to congratulate my colleague Dengar on his acting abilities—he kept his act going, even when you pulled that blaster pistol on him."