"And what happens if the Rebel Alliance comes here and wants these ships? What gets paid out then?" The temper in the other man's voice had disturbed the fe-linx in Kuat's arms; he did his best to soothe it.
"Am I to assume that Mon Mothma and the rest of the Al-liance command will be prepared to negotiate a fair— and profitable—deal for them?"
"I'm not authorized," said Rozhdenst, "to make those kinds of arrangements."
"What that translates to is that you don't have the means. The credits. And neither does the Alliance. Other-wise, Mon Mothma would have made the offer already."
A sneer twisted the corner of Rozhdenst's mouth. "And would you have accepted it? Not as long as you're so afraid of the reaction of your best customer, Emperor Palpatine."
"The deals I make," replied Kuat stiffly, "are for the best interests of my corporation."
"And too bad for everybody else in the galaxy." The sneer remained as Rozhdenst nodded. "They're fighting for their freedom—and their lives—and all you're con-cerned about is the amount of credits rolling into your coffers. Fine; arrange your ethics however you want to. You don't want to throw in your lot with the Rebel Al-liance, that's up to you. But I think I'm clear in warning you what the Alliance's'offer' is likely to be for those ships in your construction docks." Rozhdenst pointed to the view beyond the transparisteel panels. "If the Alliance decides that it needs the ships you've been building—and there's a high possibility of that—I'm going to be happy to take delivery of them from you whether or not you've agreed to sell them to us instead of the Empire. And we'll worry about making compensation to Kuat Drive Yards after the war is over."
"Your language doesn't surprise me, Commander. I would have been more surprised if you had persisted in maintaining a pretense of goodwill toward Kuat Drive Yards. But now we know exactly where we stand with each other, don't we?" Kuat turned and set the felinx down on top of the lab bench beside him. "So I guess we have made some progress."
Rozhdenst regarded him through eyes narrowed to slits. "As I said when I came here, Kuat—it would be bet-ter if we could work things out on a friendly basis. I'd rather trust you than have to watch you. But now we will be watching you."
"As you wish." Standing with his back turned toward the Rebel Alliance commander, Kuat picked up a micro-insertion logic probe from his lab bench. With the back of his other hand, he kept the felinx from investigating the delicate tool. "Now if you'll excuse me, I have work to do..."
He heard the commander's footsteps receding, and then the doors of his private quarters opening and clos-ing once more. In the space's restored silence, he re-garded the thin, shining metal of the probe resting in the curve of his palm, as though it were a sharp-edged weapon. "They can watch all they want," murmured Kuat. He addressed his soft words to the noncompre-hending felinx, confident that no one else would over-hear them. Since having been betrayed by Kuat Drive Yards' former head of security, Kuat of Kuat had person-ally overseen the electronic security sweep of his private quarters. "They have no idea what I'm doing here." A faint smile moved across his face. "And they won't have much luck getting their hands on those ships ..."
"So what's the scoop?" Ott Klemp, one of the younger and less-experienced pilots in the Scavenger Squadron, matched his pace to that of his commanding officer. "Are they going to cooperate with us?"
"There's no 'they' at Kuat Drive Yards," replied Com-mander Rozhdenst. He had let Klemp bring him down to the KDY construction docks from the squadron's mobile base-support ship mainly to get the youngster some more, and much-needed, flight time near the immense, system-circling facility. "There's only Kuat of Kuat himself. He makes all the decisions." Rozhdenst continued his pur-poseful stride down the high-ceilinged corridor, away from his unpleasantly terminated conference with Kuat Drive Yards' chief. "And right now, he's decided to keep on be-ing 'neutral,' as he puts it. That's not good."
"You think he'll turn over this new fleet to the Impe-rial Navy?"
"What I think is that he'll do whatever he feels is in the best interests of Kuat Drive Yards. I believe him when he says as much. Which means that he'll do it in a sec-ond, soon as Palpatine forks over the credits for the ships."
The landing dock, with the Scavenger Squadron shut-tle waiting for them, was only a few meters away.
"Maybe we should do a preemptive strike," said Klemp. "Get our pilots inside those ships immediately, so that if any Impe-rial Navy forces show up, we can keep 'em from getting their hands on the goods."
Rozhdenst impatiently shook his head as he walked. "Negative on that. We'd be playing right into the Em-pire's hands if we tried something like that. We don't have enough pilots and crew to fully man even one ship out of a fleet like that. Getting them up and away from the KDY construction docks would be difficult enough, but trying to fight off an Imperial task force from in-side those ships, without enough personnel to crew the onboard weaponry, would be suicide. No, we'd be bet-ter off—we'd have more of a chance, that is—by inter-cepting any Imperial ships coming from outside this sector, and fighting them off with what we've already got."
"Sir, that's not much of a chance at all." Klemp's face had paled with the contemplation of what the commander had described. "Our squadron might be able to keep a lid on a bunch of KDY ship fabricators and tech-nicians, but if the Empire routes any significant number of fighting craft here, we're done for."
"Tell me something," growled Rozhdenst, "that I don't already know." The two men had reached the side of the shuttle craft. Next to the extended landing gear, the commander turned to the younger man. "Let me fill you in on something about our mission here. You're ab-solutely correct: if the Imperial Navy's forces were to move in, there wouldn't be much we could do to stop 'em. There's only one reason we're able to stay up there—" He pointed toward the sealed landing dock's upper reaches, and the rest of the Scavenger Squadron beyond it. "And that's because, right now, the Empire's attention—and its strength—is turned elsewhere. En-dor, to be exact. With our beat-up, inadequate craft, we wouldn't be able to stop the Imperial Navy—but we can slow it down. Maybe, if we fight hard and smart enough, slow it down to the point that we could contact the Alliance communications ship that's in orbit near Sullust, and get some kind of operational task force or-dered out here. And that Rebel force could stop the Imperial Navy from getting hold of these new ships." Rozhdenst started to climb up the rungs of a rolling ladder platform toward the shuttle's hatchway. "Of course," he said over his shoulder to Klemp, "if that's what happens, we won't be here to see it. We'll be dead."
"Maybe." Ott Klemp climbed up after the com-mander. "But that's only going to be after a lot of them are dead as well."
Rozhdenst leaned forward and slapped the younger man on the shoulder. "Save it for when they get here."
The landing dock's doors swung slowly open, reveal-ing the field of stars beyond, as Klemp fired up the shut-tle's thruster engine. A moment later, the craft traced a red arc away from Kuat Drive Yards, heading back toward the waiting squadron.
10
"I can't believe," said Dengar, looking around himself, "that this place was any more cheerful when it was alive."
He and Boba Fett were surrounded by the tangled fi-brous walls of what had been Kud'ar Mub'at's web. Enough structural integrity had been achieved that the main chamber and a few of the narrow corridors leading from it could hold a breathable atmospheric pressure. That made working in the reconstructed spaces easier, if nowhere near enjoyable.
Boba Fett ignored his comment, just as he had ignored all of Dengar's previous grumbling complaints. Standing several meters away, near the spot where Kud'ar Mub'at's thronelike nest had once been, Boba Fett continued the application of the low-level electrosynaptic pulse device that was slowly bringing the web back from the dead. Behind the bounty hunter, thick cables snaked back toward the temporary exit port that led to the web's ex-terior. The cables' glossy black sheathing, like the skin of a planet-bound herpetoid creature, shimmered with the effects of the energy coursing within. That energy, and the parallel data flow that shaped and adjusted it to the task of revivifying the web's interwoven neural cells, came from the Hound's Tooth, moored almost within touch-ing distance of the heavier structural fibers that bound the mass of finer neurons together.