The location of the arachnoid assemblers' home-world was something that Boba Fett wouldn't reveal. You don't need to know that. Which was just as well with Dengar; the notion of a whole hidden world some-where, populated by an entire species of spidery, schem ing assemblers gave him the creeps. But Boba Fett's knowledge of an aspect of their physiology was some-thing he did share. Just as an individual assembler, such as Kud'ar Mub'at or Balancesheet, could generate and extrude additional cerebro-neural tissue in the form of an extended nervous system running through a web big enough in which to live and in the tethered subnodes that filled the space, so could that tissue be regenerated from the outside. A constantly monitored and adjusted stimulating pulse would actually restore the strands of dead tissue to functioning life, with the synaptic termi-nals seeking one another out and knitting themselves back together.
That basic rundown of assembler physiology had taken place in the cockpit of the Hound's Tooth. Stand-ing now inside the reconstructed web, Dengar looked down at the black, shimmering cables looped near his boots. Neelah was still back aboard the ship moored alongside, making sure that the necessary energy and controlling data kept flowing from the onboard comput-ers. There was no danger of her disengaging the Hound's Tooth and leaving them stranded inside the web; she was more intent on breaking through to the past and its se-crets than either bounty hunter could have been.
Dengar looked up as another shimmering motion ran through the fibers of the web. The effect was less spas-modic and threatening than the previous one, and settled down to a barely discernible but constant trembling in the curving structure. At the same time, the vibration died in the black cables running out to the ship; they be-came as inert as the web itself had been when he and Boba Fett had commenced its resurrection from the dead.
"That's it," Boba Fett announced. He stood up from where he had been kneeling beside the empty nest at the center of the chamber and tossed the pulsator tool aside. "Now we're ready for the last step."
Which was exactly what Dengar had been dreading. He had been able to reconcile himself to being inside the living web; it was at least without personality or a guiding intelligence, the revivified neural circuits as empty of thought as some giant, hollow vegetation. But for the past to be retrieved, with all its secrets intact and read-able, that idiot nervous system would have to be linked to the brain that contained the necessary memories. And we'll be inside it, thought Dengar. It struck him as being even worse, in some ways, than the Sarlacc could ever have been.
"Come over here and give me a hand." Boba Fett ges-tured as he spoke the order. "We need to get it into posi-tion for the hookup."
Reluctantly, Dengar ducked his head beneath the horizontal beam keeping the web's walls spread apart. He threaded his way through the maze of the other sup-ports that had been so laboriously installed, mostly by him rather than Fett.
At the center of the chamber, the neural activity that Boba Fett had summoned up from the formerly dead tis-sue was more visible, the pulsing of the structural fibers overlaid with a shimmering network of sparks racing across the synaptic connections. Dengar tried to main-tain his balance on the uneven floor of the space, without laying a hand on any of the surrounding structural fibers. There was no chance of receiving an electrical shock from the bright circuits of light, but the thought of touching the now-living mass unnerved him.
"Get on that side of it," instructed Boba Fett. He pointed toward the one thing inside the chamber that was still part of the dead world they had found when they had come to this point in space. "We'll need to lift it all the way clear. I don't want the legs dragging across any of the neural fibers."
He did as Fett had told him, still trying to avoid con-tact with the dead object for as long as possible. Dengar's reluctance betrayed him; as he stepped gingerly toward it, the toe of one of his boots caught on a loop of black cable, tripping him and toppling him forward.
His hands automatically caught hold of the object's hard, chitinous exoskeleton, the stiff hairs on the spidery limbs poking into his own flesh like tapering needles. Dengar managed to push himself away, just far enough that he found himself looking straight into the largest of the empty multiple eyes.
There had been no need to bring any of the dead sub-nodes here inside the web; the small corpses had all been left outside, continuing to drift through the cold vacuum, their curled forms dragging across the hull and cockpit canopy of the Hound's Tooth as before. But this one, the creator of all the others, was the most important element of the procedure.
Kud'ar Mub'at's narrow face, only an inch or so away from Dengar's, almost seemed to be smiling at his dis-comfiture. In this small, nightmarishly claustrophobic world, the dead found enjoyment in mocking those still alive.
"Quit fooling around," said Boba Fett with a trace of impatience. "Grab hold and lift."
Dengar did as ordered, helping the other bounty hunter settle Kud'ar Mub'at's corpse onto the waiting re-ceptacle of the nest it had occupied in its previous exis-tence. He stepped back, wiping his hands against the front of his gear, and watched as Fett picked up the pul-sator tool and went back to work.
He knew it wouldn't be long now before a flicker of life and intelligence appeared in the empty eyes that had gazed into his own. The prospect of discovering the secrets of the past, and finding the way to a mountain of credits, didn't make him dread that coming moment any less.
It was her turn to sit in the pilot's chair.
Neelah had stood in the hatchway of the Hound's Tooth cockpit area often enough, watching Boba Fett as he had navigated the ship to this remote sector. Even when the bounty hunter had swiveled the chair around in order to talk with her, the difference between their positions had been irritatingly symbolic. Like Jabba's court, it had struck Neelah, with him on his throne and everybody else petitioning for his attention.
One of the metal panels beneath the cockpit's gauges and controls had been pried open by Boba Fett, so he could rig up the black cables that now snaked out through an airlock access port and across the few meters of distance to the reconstructed web. All of the equip-ment aboard the Hound was inferior to what Boba Fett had installed aboard his own Slave I; he'd had to impro-vise the necessary gear and connections, to get the needed stream of electro-neural pulsations to apply to the dead fibers. Even now, the onboard computer generating the control data was unstable enough that Neelah had been assigned the task of monitoring it, riding gain on its out-put to keep it within operational limits.
That took only a fraction of her attention, no matter how important the job might have been. Fortunately so; sitting at the cockpit's control panel, with access to the rest of the ship's computerized databases, she could set about her own agenda. And without Boba Fett or Den-gar knowing anything about it—that suited her to per-fection. They'll find out, she had told herself, when—and if —I want them to.
There were already secrets she was keeping from the two bounty hunters. She had been keeping them for a while now, since the moment when Boba Fett had re-counted the story of what he had found aboard the other ship, the one called the Venesectrix, that had belonged to the dead Ree Duptom. Little doors to the past had opened up inside her head, into chambers of memory; dark chambers, whose contents she could barely make out, and with the doors to the chambers beyond still frustratingly locked to her. Boba Fett and Dengar were over there in the assembler's web that they had so pains-takingly woven back together, as though they had been primitive scientists stitching together a dismembered body, hoping to animate it with lightning pulled down from some planet's storm-wracked sky. Their creation, with the formerly dead Kud'ar Mub'at installed as the brain atop its spine, might very well sit up and tell them the se-crets they had come here to discover, as though the past were a golden key on its cold tongue. But in the mean-time, Neelah had a little key of her own to use. There were some other doors, outside her shadowed memory, and right inside the computers of the Hound's Tooth, that she was going to unlock.