For a moment, a great, calming peace descended upon Neelah, like the hand of a noble infant's nurse drawing a blanket snug upon the small, cooing form; a blanket marked with the exact same image, only embroidered with pure golden thread rather than scratched into the floor of a squalid holding cage on a bounty hunter's ship. One by one, the locked doors inside her head opened, spill-ing their pent-up light into the depths of her spirit, chas-ing away the dark, obscuring shadows in which she had been wrapped for so long.
She gazed upon the image awhile longer, not caring if anyone should discover her doing so. None of that mat-tered now. The key she had found had not only opened the locks, but had burst them asunder. Nothing could make her forget.
That's what the corporation used as its emblem, Nee-lah told herself, a long time ago. Before I was born...
The old, archaic letters spelled out the initials KDY, for Kuat Drive Yards. Bound by a triangle, for the art of engineering, and a greater circle that represented the uni-verse and everything in it.
Another key turned, in one of the farthest locks, as she looked upon the image.
It turned, and she remembered her name.
Her real name ...
The empty eyes opened, but were still blind.
Yet Kud'ar Mub'at—the hollowed thing that had been Kud'ar Mub'at—seemed to sense the presence of other creatures.
The joints of the spidery legs creaked as though about to break into splinters. The broken abdomen, edges of its wound frozen by exposure to the cold of the vacuum surrounding the web, scraped against the remains of what had been its nest and throne of power, the point from which it had drawn the strands entangling so many others of the galaxy's creatures. Slowly, the small trian-gular head rose from where it had shrunk into the chitin-ous thorax.
"Is there... business... to transact?" The assembler's voice, which had once been so gratingly high-pitched, was now a rasping whisper, as of dry strings twisting against one another. "Business ... is what I want ... all that I want..."
Dengar had the unnerving sensation that the assem-bler's gaze had fastened upon him. The narrow face, with its clusters of unseeing eyes, turned in his direction and stopped for a moment, before moving like a rusted mechanical apparatus toward the other bounty hunter in the web's central chamber.
"I won't say it's good to meet up with you again, Kud'ar Mub'at." Standing closer to. the arachnoid as-sembler's withered form, Boba Fett held the black cable looped in one gloved hand. The cable's surface shim-mered, seeming much more imbued with life than the greyed-out thing in the nest, as the power and control-ling data continued to stream from the ship tethered alongside the web. "But then, I never much cared for our little meetings."
"Ah! You are so unkind." The triangular head gave a tiny nod, imitating human gestures as it had done in its previous existence. "You were always nearly as cruel as you were greedy, Boba Fett—it is Fett, isn't it? I can rec-ognize your voice, but it's so dark in here now ... I can't see you."
"It's not dark, you fool." From Boba Fett's hand, the black cable ran into the narrow cleft right behind the as-sembler's head; a metal needle had been inserted into the knot of ganglia inside the thinly armored skull that had functioned as the neuro-cerebral center for the creature. "You're dead. Get used to it."
"Believe me, Fett... I already have." A lopsided smile opened on the narrow face. "There are advantages... to my present condition." One thin forelimb withdrew from the cluster of legs curled beneath Kud'ar Mub'at's abdomen, and wavered feebly in the air. "For one . . . death is much less painful than dying... which I remem-ber in excruciating detail... not pleasant. And second... now I can say whatever I please . . . without worrying about the consequences. What can I suffer now, any greater than that which I already have?" Laughter like breaking twigs came out of the angled mouth. "So let me tell you right now, Boba Fett ... I never cared for you, either."
"Then we're making progress," replied Fett. "Since we can skip your usual line of empty flattery."
Dengar stood back, watching the confrontation be-tween the former business associates. One's dead, he thought, and the other's alive—but they still have some-thing in common. Neither one gave up easily.
"Very clever of you ... managing this." The dry husk of the assembler shifted in the flaccid remains of the nest, as though its vacuum-blunted nerve endings were capa-ble of feeling discomfort. "I didn't know such a thing was possible ..." One of its hind limbs scratched at the inserted cable, but was unable to dislodge it. "I'm not sure I care for it..."
"Don't worry. It's only a temporary condition." Boba Fett didn't bother displaying to the creature's blind eyes the black cable he held. "Soon as we're done here, I'll pull the plug. And you can go back to being what you were a few moments ago. A corpse, floating in space."
The triangular head slowly nodded. "Then you have at last, Boba Fett, that which I want... more than any-thing else. Bargain with it, as you will."
"I want information, Kud'ar Mub'at. Information that you have." Boba Fett's gloved fist closed tighter upon the cable. "That you knew when you were alive, but you wouldn't have told me then."
At Dengar's back, he felt the slow pulsing of the web around him. He turned and saw brighter sparks racing across the neural fibers. Once more, the sensation of being inside a living brain—or at least a partly living one—assaulted him. The assembler's thoughts and ideas were like storm clouds, threaded with electrical dis-charges, ominous as a slowly darkening horizon.
"What would you like to know, Boba Fett?"
Stepping closer to the assembler's revivified corpse, Boba Fett brought his own visor-shielded gaze closer to the blind one's. "I want to know about a client of yours. A former client, I mean."
"Exactly so." The dry, rasping laughter sounded again. "I understand that certain progeny of mine . . . have taken over the family enterprise, as it were." The up-raised forelimb reached out and lightly tapped the brow of Fett's helmet. "Perhaps you should go and talk to young Balancesheet. It keeps secrets very well, though, as I learned so painfully. You'd have to bargain hard to get what you want." Feebly, the limb folded back in on itself and scratched at Kud'ar Mub'at's chest, or what would have been the place where its heart had once functioned. "I don't feel so well... I feel cold..."
Boba Fett shook his head. "I know enough about how you managed your affairs. Some things you let your subnodes in on, and others you kept to yourself. There were certain matters—the shadier sorts of deals you arranged—that you preferred to keep just in your own private memory, rather than the one shared through the web's neural fibers. The client I'm inquiring about was one of those. His name was Nil Posondum—"
The deracinated laugh from Kud'ar Mub'at's mouth was even harsher and louder this time. "Posondum!" The noise from the hollowed-out form was like the claws of rats scuttling across crumpled flimsiplast. "A client of mine!" From beneath the dead assembler, several of its limbs thrashed about in a spasm of mirth.
"You are so rarely wrong, Boba Fett... but this time you are!"
The mention of the human's name puzzled Dengar. He had heard it before, from Neelah when she had been musing aloud, away from Boba Fett, about the few scraps of memory left to her. But even before that, Den-gar had come across the name; he remembered it as a piece of hard merchandise for which a standard bounty had been posted, some time in the past. It wouldn't have surprised him at all to have learned that Boba Fett had been the bounty hunter who had collected the credits on that one, like so many others.
"Don't lie to me." Boba Fett seemed as if he were about to jerk the black cable like a noose around the dead assembler's neck. "I know all about the money you received from Nil Posondum. I found the record of it aboard Ree Duptom's ship Venesectrix."