"You might . . . very well have," wheezed Kud'ar Mub'at's corpse. "And that is in fact the truth; I did receive a substantial sum of credits from our late friend Nil Posondum. But such a transaction ... does not mean he was a client of mine. Just as I was a go-between, an arranger of deals, when I was still alive ... so have other creatures served that oh-so-useful purpose. Perhaps not on the overarching scale ... at which I did ..." The chi-tinous form paused, as though it needed to catch its breath, or more likely, let the pulsating energy from the black cable recharge its neuro-cerebral tissues. It hun-kered down lower in the nest, the joints of its thin legs sticking above its head. "Posondum was merely—what is the term criminal types use?—a bagman. Yes ... that's right... that's the word." Two of Kud'ar Mub'at's fore-limbs slowly wavered apart in an expansive gesture. "He brought the credits here to the web ... to me . . . and communicated certain important details ... of what his client desired. I then made certain other arrangements on behalf of that third party . . . such as the hiring of Ree Duptom to carry out two very delicate assignments. Which, alas, he never lived to do—and so much trouble and confusion has resulted from that lapse!"
"I'll say." From behind Boba Fett, Dengar muttered his comment. Getting answers from the dead assembler had seemed only to make things more confusing rather than less.
"Standard business practice," continued Kud'ar Mub'at's withered corpse. "I kept most of the credits ... that the original client sent here with Nil Posondum. For a tiny percentage of what was left over . . . Posondum then delivered the fee I had arranged with Ree Duptom. Posondum then went about his other scrabbling little business affairs, one of which turned out badly enough for him to wind up as hard merchandise in your holding cage, Boba Fett. Of course ... I always knew that a little hustling nonentity such as Nil Posondum would end up like that... but I'm suspicious about what happened to Duptom. He operated on a large enough scale to have real enemies... who would very much have liked to have seen him dead..."
"I'm not interested in Ree Duptom's enemies." Boba Fett's words turned impatient. "I want to know who he was working for. Who hired him—through you—to transport fabricated evidence about Prince Xizor's in-volvement in an Imperial stormtrooper raid on the planet Tatooine? Was it the same person who paid for him to kidnap and wipe the memory of the young female hu-man I found aboard his ship?"
"Of course it was, Boba Fett." The dead assembler tucked its forelimbs back around its abdomen. "You know that—it had to be, since one payment was made for both jobs. I got the client a bargain rate that way. I like to keep my customers happy ... it makes for good business."
Boba Fett dropped the black cable and stepped for-ward. With one gloved hand, he grabbed the dead as-sembler's narrow, triangular head, almost wrenching it from the stalklike neck as he turned the blind eyes toward himself. "Tell me," demanded Fett. "Who was the client? Who paid Ree Duptom for those jobs?"
"A good question, my dear Fett." The dead assembler managed to sneer at him. "A very good question, in-deed ... and how I wish I could answer it for you... and for myself."
"What are you talking about?" Boba Fett took his hand away from the other creature. "You know who it was. You'd have to know—"
"Correction; I did know. When I was alive." A macabre, tittering laugh came from within the assembler's hollowed body. "But that was then, and this is now. You and your partner here have done a very good job of reassembling my poor, sundered web—but not a perfect job. There were some parts of my extended neural system that were too damaged for you to restore; I can feel them missing, as though some of my actual physical limbs had been amputated. And when there are pieces missing in a web, it stands to reason that there must be holes in their place." The claw tip at the end of the raised forelimb tapped at the skull's enclosing chitin. "There are, I regret to inform you, large gaps in my memory . . . things I cannot remember. Though, of course, it would have been impossible for me to have ever forgotten the inimitable Boba Fett . . . I'm afraid that Nil Posondum was not quite so memorable a figure. There may have only been a few strands of my memory in which details about him were encoded... so you have to understand how they would be easily lost." The blind eyes seemed to regard Boba Fett with amusement. "You've come all this way for nothing ... how unfortunate."
"I'll tell you what's unfortunate," said Boba Fett. "Unfortunate is how you're going to feel when I'm done with you. You're not going to hold out on me this time."
"What are you going to do about it?" The assembler's laughter turned into a grating cackle. "A hundred differ-ent ways of killing at your disposal—I can just see you standing there, bristling with all your weapons, like a walking arsenal—and all of them useless now. You can keep me alive as long as you want... it merely delays the moment of my falling once again into the sweetness of death. You were as much responsible as any other crea-ture, Boba Fett, for my having discovered the pleasures of being dead—I realize now that it was the best deal I ever made! But I've tasted it, and drank deep of that in-toxicating darkness ... deep enough that I can wait for it again. And in the meantime .. . your threats are of little avail..."
The assembler's words unnerved Dengar more than anything else that had happened so far, in this roughly woven mausoleum floating in space. "Come on—" He stepped forward and grabbed Boba Fett by the elbow. "It's right. There's nothing you can do—"
"Just watch." Fett pulled his arm away from Dengar's grasp. "Maybe the problem isn't whether you're dead or alive, Kud'ar Mub'at." He stepped around to the side of the nest and the grey creature hunkered down in it. "Maybe you're just not alive enough." Boba Fett reached behind the assembler's jointed neck and grabbed the con-trols of the pulsator device, leaving the gleaming metal needle still inserted up into the cerebral cortex. "That can be changed."
Looking down at the black cable, Dengar saw its sur-face shimmer with a wildly increasing intensity. Instinc-tively, he drew his boot back, as though it had come too close to an exposed high-voltage conduit. The cable seemed almost alive, twisting about on the fibrous floor of the web, like a glistening serpent from the bogs of a swamp-covered planet.
At the same time, he heard a crackling and tearing noise from the center of the chamber. Dengar looked up and saw the assembler's corpse thrashing convulsively, the jointed sticklike limbs pulled out from beneath the torn abdomen and whipping in the air, as though a wind-storm had animated the black, leafless branches of a win-ter forest. Kud'ar Mub'at's triangular face was contorted with the energy surging behind the blind eyes, the angled mouth stretched open in a silent scream.
Boba Fett still had his hand upon the pulsator device's controls, his durasteel-like grip forcing the assembler's overloaded corpse to stay in the hollow of the flaccid nest. "Now do you remember?"
The assembler made no answer. A couple of its smaller, weaker limbs detached themselves from the corpse, fly-ing across the chamber and striking the curved walls.
"Hey..." Dengar looked around himself with alarm. The storm he had imagined tearing through the web's confines now seemed to have become even stronger and more visible. Flaring sparks ran through the neural fibers like quick lightning, leaving behind the scent of ozone and burning tissue. "Maybe you'd better back off on that—this place is tearing itself apart!"
Echoing Dengar's words, the web shuddered, hard enough to knock him from his feet. He caught hold of one of the horizontal durasteel beams that had been in-stalled to keep the unpressurized structure from collaps-ing in on itself, and managed to keep himself upright. Though only for a second: another convulsive wave rolled through the web, the floor whipping high enough to throw him clear. As he fell backward, Dengar saw the beam rip loose from its mooring point on one side of the tunnellike space; it swung about from the other end, smashing loose the beams farther on in a clashing chain reaction.