He didn't want to tell me, thought Neelah. All the things that he knows about my past. She nodded with the pleasure of anticipation. Boba Fett wasn't as smart as he always pretended to be. The bounty hunter had left her right where she needed to be, to find out all those se-crets on her own.
Neelah bent over the control panel, turning her atten-tion to the computer's main display panel. The power and data flow through the black cables, out to the web tethered to the ship, was operating smoothly for now; she could safely ignore it while she worked on her own agenda.
The keypads for the computer were at the far end of the troughlike grooves in the panel, designed for the use of a Trandoshan's heavy claws. Her own forearms disappeared in them, almost up to the elbow, as she punched in command sequences, first laboriously, then with increasing speed. Within seconds, a screenful of information appeared in front of her that had been locked away beneath Boba Fett's own personal secu-rity codes before.
She sat back in the pilot's chair, breathing out a deep sigh of relief. Satisfaction mingled with the previous pleasure she had felt. The little doors inside her head, which had opened when she heard Boba Fett say the name of the dead bounty hunter, had given her access to a key more valuable than Fett could ever have imagined. Not in the form of information, such as her real name, or the story of how she had come to be aboard Ree Dup-tom's ship—That would've been too easy, Neelah thought wryly—but as an ability, the skill and craft necessary to hack through the coded locks that Boba Fett had installed on this ship's computers when he had transferred his own data files over from his Slave I. Like disjointed pieces of an archaic jigsaw puzzle fitting together, showing just a bit of the total picture, the name of Ree Duptom had connected with other fragments floating inside the vacuum that her memory had been wiped into.
I know how to do this, she thought as she punched a few more commands into the computer. Whoever she had been in the past, whatever her real name had been in that world stolen from her, that person had not only been someone born to a noble bloodline, on a planet and among people accustomed to taking orders from some-one of hereditary rank—her own growing impatience with the two bounty hunters, her frustration at not being instantly obeyed, had already indicated as much—but also was a person of considerable technical expertise. Boba Fett, thought Neelah with a smile, should've known better than to leave me here with his computer files. But then, the bounty hunter would have had no way of know-ing just how easy it would turn out to be for her to break through his security codes and into his private data.
The hardest thing had been keeping her mask up, of showing just enough surprise at what Boba Fett had told her and Dengar, while not giving away just how much buried memory it had restored to light inside her head. She wasn't going to reveal any of that, until after she had found some more pieces to fit in with the others.
At least, thought Neelah, 7 know the name of the piece I'm looking for. She had already figured out that Boba Fett had been holding back on her, not telling everything—or anything—of what he knew about the one name, the one fragment of memory, that had still been there in the darkness. She had said the name Nil Posondum to him, long before they had arrived at this point in space, and she had instantly known from the slight catch of silence in his reaction that the name meant something to Boba Fett as well. Exactly what the connec-tion was to the bounty hunter, she was about to discover. With her hands deep within the Trandoshan-sized grooves on the cockpit's control panel, Neelah keyed in the name and initiated a core-deep search function.
It took only a few seconds for the results to come up on the display screen. While it was still blank she glanced down at the smaller display that monitored the flow of data and power to Dengar and Boba Fett in the web, saw that all was within operational parame-ters, and looked back up. This time, there was a face to go with the name.
Human, balding and aging, with a nervous, fidgety quality to his eyes, apparent even in a still-frame shot— both full-on and in profile, Nil Posondum was not par-ticularly impressive. Even worse, the sight of his face did nothing to trigger any more memory flashes inside Nee-lah. There was almost the opposite effect: the conviction grew certain within her that she had never laid eyes on him before, in this life or in the stolen past.
Below the man's unprepossessing image was a sum-mary of personal data—nothing in its details caught Neelah's eye. Until the very last notation, which indi-cated that the man had died in one of Slave I's holding cages, en route to being delivered by Boba Fett to the creatures who had put up the bounty for him. Neelah slumped back in the pilot's chair, glaring at the display screen in frustration. The thought that this piece of memory had led to nothing more than a blind alley sparked fury inside her. Boba Fett may have found some way of wringing secrets out of a deceased arachnoid as-sembler, but getting anything out of the late Nil Poson-dum was more likely to be a lost cause.
Neelah glanced up at the control panel's chronometer, gauging how long Dengar and Boba Fett had been work-ing over in the reconstructed web. She knew she'd have to shut down her investigations into Fett's databases be-fore the two bounty hunters returned to the ship—and there would be no way of telling when she would get an-other chance at rummaging through the files for the clues she needed.
Feverishly, she punched in another string of com-mands, bringing up the last of the files associated with the name Nil Posondum. A cursory autopsy indicating the cause of death as autoasphyxiation, a statement of credits received by Boba Fett for turning over mer-chandise in a damaged condition, a list of personal ef-fects owned by the late merchandise, mainly the torn and stained clothing he had been wearing when cap-tured by Fett, a visual scan of markings that Posondum had managed to scratch into the metal floor of the holding cage ...
Wait a minute. Neelah suddenly froze, cold sweat dampening her palms inside the keypad grooves. She leaned closer to the display screen, her nose almost touching the transparent panel. Her heart began pound-ing faster, the rush of blood almost dizzying her as she stared at the image before her.
Just some lines scratched into blank metal ... a cir-cle, perhaps a little lopsided; understandable, given the circumstances that the man who'd made them had been in ... and a triangle inside the circle, the three points just touching the enclosing line ...
And three stylized letters, in an archaic, pre-Basic language. Three letters that only a person who had seen them since childhood, and who had been taught their meaning, would recognize. Someone such as Neelah herself, and any of her noble bloodline. A lineage that came from one of the most powerful industrial planets in the galaxy, its ancestry reaching generations back in time. Boba Fett, for all his cleverness and carefully groomed information sources, would never have been able to discern what was meant by the image—not be-cause it was a guarded secret, but simply because it was a symbol that had fallen out of use, supplanted by a later one that could be understood by anyone in the galaxy. Only the old traditionalists, the memory-rich families and their entourages, of the planet on which Neelah had been born would have kept it as a token of a glorious past.