"That should hold." Dengar made the comment aloud, as much for the purpose of hearing a human voice in this dismal space as for getting any reaction from his partner. The walls of the web's main chamber had to be propped apart from each other, to keep them from col-lapsing in on him and Fett. From the Hound's cargo hold, they had stripped out enough durasteel beams for the job, transferring them over from the ship and awk-wardly wrestling them into place among the sections of web they had previously scoured from the vacuum and laboriously bound back together. Even doing that much of a reconstruction on the late arachnoid assembler's web would have been impossible if the Black Sun cleanup crew, the henchmen of Prince Xizor that had de-stroyed it in the first place, had turned blasters or any other kind of incendiary weapons on it. But all the pieces, the floating strands and knots of pallid grey tis-sue, had still been floating in the vacuum, waiting to be resurrected. "Any more of them?" Catching his breath, Dengar rested a hand on a horizontally mounted beam next to his head. "Might be able to scrounge a few more out of the ship—"
As if in reply, the durasteel beam groaned and creaked, echoed by the others that filled the chamber like the ele-ments of a three-dimensional maze. The tangled walls pulsed and contracted, as though the two men were caught in some giant creature's digestive tract.
It's like the Sarlacc, thought Dengar. He gazed with both fascination and disgust at the motions of the web's structure. The effect had reminded him of the few details that Boba Fett had recounted, about having been swal-lowed by the blind, omnivorous beast that had once formed the fang-ringed center of the Great Pit of Carkoon, back in the Dune Sea on Tatooine. This must be what it's like, to be swallowed up and still be alive...
The pulsing motion ceased as Boba Fett drew the working tip of the tool in his hands away from the intri-cate cluster of neural ganglia before him. Across his boots, the black cable lay, still shimmering with the power relayed from the ship. The dark gaze of Boba Fett's hel-met visor glanced back over his shoulder, toward Den-gar. "That was just a test," he said. "Of the web's spinal connections."
"Thanks for warning me." The shiver that had tight-ened Dengar's shoulders now slowly ebbed away. I'll be glad, he thought, when this is over. Facing blaster fire, and every other hazard that seemed to come with being Boba Fett's partner, were all preferable to the task of restoring Kud'ar Mub'at's web to a semblance of life.
Unfortunately, that was a necessary part of the plan. Without it—without the extended neural system of the web being once more filled with the sparks of impulse and sensation—the quest that had led both Dengar and Boba Fett, and Neelah as well, to this remote sector of space, and even remoter and more isolated sector of the past, was over.
Fett had explained it all to them. How it was going to work, the only way it could: if the past held the key to the present, then the past had to be broken into and ran-sacked, the same way the high walls of some rich crea-ture's palace on a fortified planet would be breached. You found a crack in the wall and widened it enough to enter, then went in and got what you wanted. Simple in the concept; difficult—and dangerous, it seemed to Dengar—in the execution.
The crack in the wall of the past was represented by the memory of the once-living, now-dead arachnoid as-sembler, Kud'ar Mub'at. Great, Dengar had said to Boba Fett. That ends it right there, doesn't it? Talking to the dead, learning their secrets, wasn't a hard job; it was an impossible one. Kud'ar Mub'at was the link to Neelah's stolen past, and the key to Dengar and Boba Fett's profit-ing from that past—if it had been important enough to steal from her, and hide the traces of the theft through a deep memory wipe of her brain, then the chances would be good that it would be worth a good deal of credits to find it and restore it once again. The scent of credits was even stronger with the other possibility connected to the theft of Neelah's past: finding out who—or what—it was that had been behind the failed plot to implicate the late Prince Xizor in the raid by Imperial stormtroopers on a moisture farm on Tatooine, a raid that had been the trigger, or at least part of it, for Luke Skywalker's transfor-mation into a leader and legend of the Rebel Alliance. As Boba Fett, with his keen instinct for profits, had pointed out, anytime a trail led that close to the center of major events in the galaxy—with threads tangling around not only a creature who had been the leader of the richest and most powerful criminal organization in all the sys-tems, but also around Emperor Palpatine and his most feared servant, Lord Darth Vader—then the terminus of that trail was likely to be buried under a mountain of credits and influence.
As much as Dengar might have felt that the quest was hopeless, he had to confess to himself that all of his inner greed circuits had been fired up by his partner's talk. Sure, he had thought, you can get killed, poking into Pal-patine's and Vader's secrets. But you can also get rich — or at least rich enough to get out of the bounty hunter game. And back into the safe haven of his beloved Mana-roo's arms, and a life that didn't revolve around kidnap-ping and killing other creatures while trying to avoid getting killed oneself. That was worth at least a little risk.
All it would take would be bringing a certain assem-bler back from the dead, so that its memory of those events and plots and schemes could be riffled through. Dengar had gotten used to surprises from his bounty hunter partner, but the next revelation from Boba Fett had exceeded all that had gone before.
Bringing Kud'ar Mub'at back from the dead, Fett had explained, isn't impossible. Gathering together the pieces of the puzzle—all the scattered strands and chunks of neural tissue that the Black Sun cleanup crew had left drifting in space—would be the hardest part. But the pieces were all there, floating around the Hound's Tooth. The rest would be relatively easy, or at least according to Boba Fett. I knew more about Kud'ar Mub'at than it knew about itself. In the cockpit area of the Hound, Fett had related to Dengar and Neelah the results of his previous investigations into the nature of such assembler creatures.
Knowing things about one's business associates al-ways gave one an advantage, especially if they were mat-ters of which the other creature was ignorant. And Kud'ar Mub'at had never shown any great curiosity about its own genetic background or physiology, or whether other assemblers existed anywhere else in the galaxy. Kud'ar Mub'at had been content to consider itself unique, with nothing else like it anywhere in the known systems; it made negotiations with clients easier to have the confi-dence that there was no other arachnoid assembler whose services they could engage. If Kud'ar Mub'at had ever encountered any other assemblers, it would probably have arranged for their murder, much as it had eliminated its own predecessor, the assembler that had originally created it as a subnode, then suffered the consequences of an unforeseen rebellion. Just as Kud'ar Mub'at had suffered in turn, its former subnode Balancesheet was now somewhere else in the galaxy's empty spaces, taking care of the business it had inherited from its own de-posed creator. But there are other assemblers, Boba Fett had told Dengar and Neelah. I found them. And even more important: I learned from them.