The female Neelah didn't seem concerned by the dis-mal long-term prospects that Boba Fett had described. "So what do you propose doing in the meantime? And why did you bring us here?"
"My plans are my own," said Boba Fett. "But some of them concern you, and it's now become convenient for you to have some of your many questions answered. You wanted the past—your past—then so it shall be." He gestured with one hand toward the viewport behind him. "I hereby give it to you."
Dengar could see Neelah scowling disgustedly at the viewport. Outside the ship, pallid strands of neural tissue and their tethered, spiderlike corpses continued to drag their shapes past the transparisteel.
"Is this some kind of a joke?" Neelah's glare was even angrier as she turned it toward Fett. "I don't see any-thing, that—"
Leaning forward in the pilot's chair, Boba Fett inter-rupted her. "You don't see, because you don't understand. Not yet, at any rate. But if you listen to me, you will."
With a scowl still upon her face, Neelah folded her arms across her breast. "Go ahead. I'm listening."
From the corner of his eye, Dengar glanced over at the young woman. It wasn't the first time that he had heard that tone of command in her voice. She's used to giving orders, thought Dengar, and having creatures obey them. It was the same haughty tone of voice that Neelah had used on him, ordering him to continue telling the story of Boba Fett and the breakup of the old Bounty Hunters Guild, and it had been more effective than any blaster pistol she could have pulled on him. But to hear her talk that way to Boba Fett, as though barely able to control her impatience with a slow-moving servant, was still star-tling. Who is she? wondered Dengar. And how did she wind up as a memory-wiped dancing girl in Jabba the Hutt's palace? His own curiosity about Neelah's past al-most matched hers.
"This part of the story," said Boba Fett, "didn't begin here. And it happened a little while before the arachnoid assembler Kud'ar Mub'at met his demise. I had business in one of the nearby systems that had been successfully concluded—you don't need to know about that—and I was returning toward the center of the galaxy, where sev-eral potentially lucrative opportunities were awaiting me. Of course, I was aboard my own Slave I at the time, and not an under-equipped mediocrity like this ship. One of the functions I had programmed into Slave I's com-puters was a complete database of the ships of all other bounty hunters, both those affiliated with the Bounty Hunters Guild and the few, such as myself, operating as independent agents. It rarely happens, but on occasion some other bounty hunter, or the Guild while it still ex-isted, has managed to obtain information before I have, about some particular hard merchandise to be rounded up for a good price." Fett's shoulders lifted in a dismis-sive shrug. "Some clients prefer to employ less-qualified bounty hunters, hoping they'll be able to get what they want at a lower price. That's their choice, but it rarely works out that way."
True enough, thought Dengar. He had heard those other stories, all of which went to prove that it was al most as dangerous trying to avoid doing business with Boba Fett as actually going ahead and getting involved with him. In a lot of ways, he was virtually inescapable.
"So I sometimes find it worthwhile," continued Boba Fett, "to keep an eye on what other bounty hunters are up to. And if Slave I's ID scanners home in on a bounty hunter's ship in a navigational sector that should other-wise be empty of such activity, then I find that very inter-esting indeed. It's even more interesting when the onboard computers read out the ID code of a ship belonging to a bounty hunter known for his unsavory business practices."
That description puzzled Dengar. It was hard to imag-ine any bounty hunter being more ruthless than Boba Fett himself. "So who was it that you came across?"
"The ID code identified the ship as one known most often as the Venesectrix. Rarely spotted anywhere close to the central sectors of the galaxy; its owner preferred operations farther out into the border territories. And of course, there was a reason for that: the owner of the Ve-nesectrix was a certain Ree Duptom." Pausing a mo-ment, Boba Fett looked over at Dengar. "Perhaps you're familiar with the name."
"Wait a minute ..." It took a moment, but the name finally hooked up with a memory synapse inside Dengar's head. "Ree Duptom—he's the only one who ever got booted out of the Bounty Hunters Guild!" That took some doing, Dengar knew; there had been plenty of crea-tures in the Guild whose ethical standards had been way below his own. He wasn't familiar with the exact details— Duptom had been booted out of the Bounty Hunters Guild before Dengar had joined it—but there had been an unspoken legend attached to him, as being the one creature that all other bounty hunters considered scum. "I didn't think he was still active, even out in the border."
"I guess he's not," said Neelah drily. "Pay attention, why don't you? He's obviously being discussed in the past tense for a reason."
"True." Boba Fett gave an acknowledging nod of his head. "When I came across the Venesectrix in open space, the ship's engines weren't powered up; it was simply drifting. I attempted to establish communication with its pilot, but I received no response over the comm unit. The reasonable assumption was that the pilot was either dead or had abandoned his ship. To determine which was the case—and to find anything that might have been valuable aboard—I forced entry through the Venesectrix's airlock." In the cockpit viewport behind Boba Fett, a few more dead subnodes bumped against the curved transparisteel. "And I found Ree Duptom, all right."
"Dead, I suppose." The expression on Neelah's face was one of utter boredom. "You know, I'm still waiting to hear the part that has anything to do with me."
Boba Fett ignored her impatience. "Duptom didn't make a good-looking corpse. He hadn't been the hand-somest humanoid to begin with—his appearance matched his ethics—but being caught in a hard-energy particle burst from a partial core meltdown of his own ship's en-gines hadn't helped any. Fortunately, the burst's lethal ef-fects had been contained within a zone just a couple of meters deep; he had obviously been working in the en-gine compartment when the meltdown occurred, gotten the dose of radiation, then staggered back up to the Ve-nesectrix's cockpit area to die. Which didn't take long."
The story's details aroused Dengar's suspicions. "So did his ship's engines malfunction—or were they sabo-taged?" From what he had heard in the Bounty Hunters Guild, Ree Duptom had made nearly as many enemies for himself as Boba Fett had.
"I didn't investigate that question," said Fett. "Once a competitor of mine is dead, I lose interest in them. How they wound up that way is someone else's business; noth-ing to do with me."
Right, thought Dengar.
"Anyway, somebody like Ree Duptom was perfectly capable of killing himself through his own stupidity." Boba Fett shook his head, as though in disgust. "His ship and all of his equipment were poorly maintained; frankly, he was not a credit to the bounty hunter trade in a lot of ways. But Duptom was obviously able to find certain clients, nevertheless. The evidence of that was right there aboard his ship. And the uncompleted jobs that he had been working on were interesting enough for me to take them over."
"What were they?"
"There were two matters," replied Boba Fett, "that Ree Duptom's untimely death had left hanging. The first one was in the form of a deactivated cargo droid—or what had once been a cargo droid. Someone had cleverly transformed it into an autonomic spy device, with not only built-in vid cameras and sound recording equip-ment, but an olfactory detect and sample circuit as well. The droid's hidden sensors could pick up trace amounts of scent molecules in the atmosphere and analyze them for biologic source details."