He's gone crazy, thought Dengar. Through the falling, colliding durasteel beams and the heaving of the web's floor and walls, he couldn't even spot Boba Fett, up in the main chamber beside the corpse of Kud'ar Mub'at. The frustration from coming all this way, intent on infor-mation, and finding no answers, must have unhinged the other bounty hunter's mind. Boba Fett was normally so calm and calculating—he would have to have been tem-porarily insane not to see how the drastically increased pulsator flow had triggered a catastrophic agony in the assembler. The creature's diminished physical form and the attached neural fibers running through the length of the web were thrashing themselves to pieces; Dengar could hear the racketing clatter of the spidery limbs, and the shattering of the chitinous exoskeleton at their center. That was bad enough, but the web shook and buckled at the same time; already, great sections of the fibrous struc-ture that Dengar and Boba Fett had so laboriously sealed back together were now ripping apart from one another, like rough cloth being pulled by giant, invisible hands.
With speed born of desperation, Dengar scrambled beneath the tilted beam and dived for the black cable. It seemed even more animated now, with the motion im-parted to it by the buckling and heaving of the web's floor. He grabbed hold of the cable with one hand while simultaneously reaching into his belt pouch for his vibro-blade . With one upward stroke, the 'blade sliced through the cable, sparks of short-circuited wires spitting out from the raw end.
He had thought that terminating the pulsing input from the computers back onboard the Hound's Tooth would also end the thrashing agony of the web. The re-mainder of the cable running to the pulsator device in-serted in the back of Kud'ar Mub'at's skull had gone slack and lifeless, the shimmering now dissipated and in-ert. But for some reason Dengar couldn't understand, the web around him continued its self-destroying contor-tions. One of the largest structural fibers, thicker in di-ameter than his own waist, suddenly snapped, shredding apart a tangle of smaller strands, their pallid grey shafts flurrying across his shoulders and hastily averted face.
Pushing himself up onto his hands and knees, Den-gar looked through the maze of fallen durasteel beams. He could just barely make out the figures of Boba Fett and the assembler collapsed inside its nest. For some reason, Kud'ar Mub'at's corpse now looked as lifeless as it had when he and Boba Fett had first dragged it into the reconstructed web. There wasn't time to ponder that mystery; before Dengar could get to his feet, a blaze of light seemed to explode in the main chamber ahead of him. In its glare, Boba Fett was knocked back as the assembler disintegrated, its sticklike limbs flying through tumbled arcs and away from the atomized fragments of its body.
The noise from the explosion had deafened Dengar for a moment. Shaking his head to clear it, he was sud-denly aware of another, even more threatening sound: the ragged ends of the structural fibers around him flut-tered and streamed pennantlike, drawn by the slowly in-creasing roar of the web's atmosphere rushing through an exterior breach.
Dizzied by the oxygen thinning in his nostrils and lungs, Dengar staggered forward and grabbed Boba Fett's forearm, pulling the other bounty hunter to his feet. "What's . . . what's happening? ..." With his free hand, Dengar gestured toward the tattered remains of Kud'ar Mub'at. "It's dead again! It has to be—there's nothing left of it!" He gazed around in panic at the heav-ing walls of the surrounding web.
"Why is it still—"
"You idiot." Boba Fett shoved him away from the as-sembler's nest and toward the web's main corridor. "Can't you tell? We're under attack!"
Dengar realized that the other man was correct; as if in confirmation, another white-hot flash tore through the chamber, inches behind them. He felt the heat of a laser-cannon bolt on his back as he ran through the col-lapsing, disintegrating web. The transfer hatch to the Hound's Tooth was just meters ahead of him...
It might as well have been kilometers.
Another bolt hit, bursting apart the curve of struc-tural fibers directly above him. Sparks and blackened shards of tissue whirled around Dengar as he felt himself both rising and falling into darkness.
She had been turning over the words inside her head. The words, a name, her true name. Neelah had exited from the security-locked files that she had broken into—all the things that Boba Fett hadn't told her, that he himself didn't know the value of—and shut down that part of the ship's computers. That had left a blank display screen in front of her as she had taken her hands and forearms out of the Trandoshan-fitted control grooves on the cockpit panel. She didn't care about that, or the cold stars slowly wheel-ing about in the forward viewport. In her mind's eye, she could still envision the symbol she had found buried in Boba Fett's datafiles, the ones concerning the late Nil Posondum. As she leaned back in the pilot's chair, eyes closed, the lopsided circle and inner triangle that Poson-dum had scratched into the floor of the holding cage, so long ago, transformed itself into the ancient, gold-worked emblem of the planet Kuat's noble families.
And one of them, she mused, is my family. Neelah wasn't quite sure of all the details—parts of her memory were still shrouded in obscuring mists—but she knew for certain that there were several such noble families, all of them linked economically to the fount of wealth known as Kuat Drive Yards. They all had at one time borne the KDY emblem on their most dignified robes, and other items such as the heirloom blanket in which she had been wrapped as an infant. It had only been in later generations that factionalism and bad blood be-tween the ruling families had given rise to separate clan insignia.
Though she didn't know everything—such as what had happened to have brought her so far from home— she knew the name of that infant swaddled in the ancient emblem. My name, thought Neelah. My real name.
"Kateel." She whispered the name aloud, as though calling softly to that person who had been lost and now was found again. "Kateel of Kuhlvult."
Then she smiled. Well, thought Neelah, it's a begin-ning ...
Another sound—or silence, the absence of sound— broke into her contented meditations. Her brow creased as she opened her eyes; it took a moment before she real-ized what had happened. Looking down, she saw that the black cable that Boba Fett had rigged from the ship's computer, snaking out to the airlock's exit port and then looped to the reconstructed web of Kud'ar Mub'at, had suddenly ceased its pulsating shimmer. It lay like a dead thing across the floor of the cockpit.
Perhaps the two of them, Dengar and Boba Fett, had finished their work over there. Neelah found it hard to imagine that the pair of bounty hunters had found out anything from the arachnoid assembler, or what part of it they had been able to reclaim from the dead, compa-rable in value to what she had discovered while sitting in the comfort of the pilot's chair.
That guess didn't make sense, though; Boba Fett had expressly told her that the power and data line would have to run continuously, right up until he came back here to the Hound's Tooth and switched it off himself. Her part of the entire process had been to watch and make sure that the improvised device had kept inside the operational parameters programmed by Fett. So if it stopped on its own —the realization slowly crowded out the thoughts about her own rediscovered name—then something must have happened to them ...