Her surprise faded quickly. He's been ahead of me be-fore, thought Neelah. He probably will be again.
"So this is the location, huh?" She peered again toward the dark vista afforded by the viewport. "Where Prince Xi-zor tried to eliminate you, then changed his mind and took out that arachnoid assembler instead."
"Precisely." Boba Fett pointed toward the viewport. "As you can see, everything Dengar told you about the incident was the truth. Xizor's cleanup crew didn't leave much of Kud'ar Mub'at's web. Black Sun operatives are known for their thoroughness."
More of the dead subnodes, like the shed carapaces of ordinary crawling spiders, drifted past the Hound's Tooth. Neelah felt the skin of her forearms prickle into goose-flesh as she heard—or imagined that she did—the light scraping and tapping of empty chitin against the ship's hull. The sensation was more dreamlike than anything to do with actual memory.
"Why did you bring us here?" The spirit-chilling un-canniness of the sight out of the viewport, the dead crea-tures tethered together by the strands of neural tissue, as much a part of one another now as they had been in their living existence, touched a thread of anger inside Neelah. "Just to reminisce?"
"There's very little I do," replied Boba Fett calmly, "that is without purpose. I came here for a reason. And you were brought here for the same reason."
"How would I know that?" Neelah folded her arms across her breast. "You haven't seen fit to tell us anything about where we were headed, or why." She glared at the figure in front of her. "Or is this something else that you let Dengar in on, but not me?"
"Neither you nor Dengar were aware of our destina-tion, and there was a good reason for that as well. If you don't know something, you can't be compelled to reveal it. That's why I've made it a practice not to tell anyone, even my own associates, if I can avoid it." Boba Fett pointed a gloved fingertip toward Neelah. "I don't keep my silence for your sake, but it's to your advantage, nevertheless. A good many of the ways to get someone such as yourself to talk are not pleasant. And some of them don't leave you alive afterward, either."
"Thanks for your concern," Neelah said sourly. "I ap-preciate it."
"Your sarcasm is pointless. When I decide to start caring about anyone else's opinions of my operating methods, I'll let you know." Boba Fett leaned back in the pilot's chair. "But you wanted to find out; you merely had to wait, and the time has come."
Like flicking a switch, the bounty hunter's words trans-formed the anger inside Neelah to sudden, unreasoning panic. "I... I don't know ..."
"You don't know if you're ready for that." Boba Fett's visor-shielded gaze seemed to penetrate to the depths of her spirit. "You've come all this way; you've waited so long and so impatiently; you've fought to find out all that's been hidden from you. And now you're afraid."
"No—" She quickly shook her head. "No, I'm not."
"We shall see about that," replied Boba Fett, even more quietly—and more ominously—than before.
"Because you don't have a choice. You never did."
He's right. Neelah squeezed her eyelids shut once again; at her sides, her hands closed into fists, the sinews of her forearms straining with tension. From the moment she had caught sight of this helmeted figure, before she had learned his name, she had known that this moment would come. It had been fated to do so, if she could only stay alive long enough. She had done that much, escap-ing from the death that would have been hers inside Jabba the Hutt's palace, then binding her destiny to one who had been only a shadow's breadth away from death himself. Just to find out, Neelah told herself fiercely. To find out...
She didn't know. Whether it would be better to dis-cover what lay in that other world, the past that had been stolen from her, or to go on in darkness, to leave it hidden.
"Go tell Dengar to come up here."
Neelah heard Boba Fett's command, and slowly opened her eyes.
I don't have a choice. She nodded slowly. About any Boba Fett glanced over his shoulder at the dead, hollow-eyed creatures drifting in the emptiness outside the ship, then brought his gaze back around to her.
"We have a lot to talk about," said Boba Fett. "We'd better get started."
8
He was dreaming.
Dengar knew he was, because he could see Manaroo right in front of him.
Turning with a bunch of flimsiplast sheets in her fist and a seriously annoyed look on her face —though that made her no less beautiful to him—Manaroo rapped the knuckles of one hand across the invoices.
"Those Jawas are undercutting us again," she said. "We're going to have to do something about them, once and for all —"
"They undercut us because they sell junk." In the load-ing bay of a medium-tonnage cargo freighter, surrounded by datacoded shipping containers and uncrated machin-ery still shiny with factory lubricants, Dengar took his wife in his arms and kissed her on the brow. They had been married how many years now, and the skip in his pulse was still the same as the first time he had ever held her soft warmth against himself. The tiny tattooed moons and stars on her wrists no longer glowed as brightly as before, but his own love for her showed no sign of fad-ing. "That's their stock in trade; they're Jawas, right? So don't worry about 'em. They're not our competition."
Manaroo fretted some more, looking over his shoul-der at the invoices in her hands. "They're little chiseling womp rats, is what they are."
"Don't worry." Another kiss; Dengar smiled as he leaned back from her face. "The word's getting out among the moisture farmers, about what kind of equipment we're selling. And what kind of long-term percentage contracts we can offer. Hey —" With one hand he stroked her hair, only slightly darker than the pale blue of her Aruzan skin, away from her forehead. "We're already in the black ..."
"You slimy bucket of nerf-waste." That wasn't Manaroo's voice. And the kick in the ribs, as he lay on the makeshift pallet with his eyes closed, wasn't from his beloved, either.
"I ought to kill you," continued Neelah, from some-where on the other side of his closed eyes and the sweet, dwindling remnants of his dream. A blow from her small, rock-hard fist, right across the side of Dengar's jaw, pro-duced a constellation of stars that blotted out the image he was trying to hold, of Manaroo wrapped in his em-brace. "As a matter of fact, maybe I will..."
He had been knocked far enough awake that he was able to roll with the next punch Neelah delivered from where she stood above him. Getting onto his hands and knees, Dengar scrambled toward the nearest bulkhead, then grabbed hold of it and pulled himself upright to face her.
Definitely not dreaming, Dengar told himself, not now. He found himself uncomfortably awake and stand-ing in the rank-smelling, close-quartered cargo hold of the Hound's Tooth. "What are you going on about?" He crouched slightly, taking a stance with his empty hands outstretched to fend off another attack from the anger-crazed female in front of him. "What did I do?"
"What did you do ..." Neelah echoed his words as she looked at him in disgust, her own hands planted on her slim hips. "Tried to make a fool out of me, that's what. All that time I was pressing on you to tell me about what'd happened to Boba Fett in the past, and you were already under orders to fill me in on exactly that."
"Oh." Dengar relaxed a bit, lowering his hands. "No big deal." He immediately raised them again when he saw that her anger hadn't ebbed any. "Anyway—what're you complaining about? You didn't have somebody wav-ing a blaster in your face, wanting a bedtime story!"
The structural damage sustained by the Hound's Tooth had loosened the durasteel bars of the holding cage, with several of them wrenched free of their upper sockets and splaying out into the cargo hold. Neelah grasped one of the shorter bars from near the cage's door and pulled it free of the socket below. It made a formidable if simple weapon; with it cocked back over her shoulder, ready to swing, she took a step closer to Dengar.