"Useful?" Suhlak gave a slow nod. "Yeah—and expensive."
"There's a surprise," said Dengar sourly.
"Shut up." Neelah hissed the words at him. "This is the only way we've got."
Suhlak pointed toward Balancesheet. "You mentioned a certain sum of credits when you contacted me."
"Yes—" The assembler nodded. "That was to get your interest."
"Oh, you got it, all right. But now that I see exactly what you're talking about..." Suhlak made a show of reluctantly shaking his head. "I'm not sure it's enough. Given the risks involved, and all. And . . . certain per-sonal issues that have to be overcome."
"What sum," asked Balancesheet, "would take care of those problems for you?"
"The figure you mentioned—up front. And then"— Suhlak's eyes narrowed to slits—"the same amount again, when the job's completed."
It was Balancesheet's turn to look doubtful. "That's a considerable amount of credits."
"Yeah, and it's a considerable amount of risk. Plus— you don't have any other options right now. So take it or leave it."
"Taken," Boba Fett spoke up. "Pay this creature, Balancesheet. I don't feel like haggling."
"You got yourself a good deal." Suhlak barked out a harsh laugh. "Think about it. I've made a lot of deliveries in my time—and you're the only one who ever succeeded at getting in my way. With you aboard this time, that'll be one thing I won't have to worry about."
"So you're going to be taking all of us back to Ta-tooine?" Neelah pointed to herself and the two bounty hunters. "That's the deal?"
Suhlak shook his head. "Sweetheart, I've only got a modified Z-95 Headhunter—that's what I use in my busi-ness. Fast, maneuverable—but a little on the cramped side, even with the bubbled-out passenger space I had added to it. There's really just room for me and one other creature. Boba Fett's making this trip, and that's it."
"But ..." An edge of panic, a glimpse into the un-known, cut through Neelah's thoughts. Everything—all the answers to the questions that remained with her— depended upon Boba Fett. "How do I know ... how do we know... that you'll come back?"
"Don't worry," said Boba Fett. "This will be a two-way journey, all right. How else am I going to make any credits on this deal?"
"Hey, wait a minute." Suhlak pushed himself away from the bulkhead on which he'd been leaning. "Nobody said anything about getting back here. My price was just for getting you to Tatooine!"
Boba Fett turned his shielded gaze toward the younger man. "Take it or leave it, Suhlak. Or else we'll explore another option—namely, my killing you and then pilot ing your ship myself. The odds of making it to Tatooine wouldn't be as good, but at least I wouldn't have to put up with you any longer."
For a few seconds, the hunt saboteur glared back at Fett. Then he nodded. "All right. Let's get going."
12
"We've found them."
Those words came from the comm unit speaker in Kuat of Kuat's private quarters. The felinx watched from its silken-lined basket beneath Kuat's lab bench as he turned toward the voice of the absent Kodir of Kuhlvult, security head for all of Kuat Drive Yards.
"I'm not so much concerned about 'them.' The person we need to locate is Boba Fett." Kuat regarded the view of stars and construction docks visible from the curv-ing bank of transparisteel panels near the bench. "If you haven't found him, I don't even want to hear your report."
"Don't worry," said Kodir. "I wouldn't have put the link through if I hadn't succeeded at the task given to me."
Kuat made no reply. Even though Kodir wasn't physi-cally present at the Kuat Drive Yards corporate head-quarters, he had as clear an image of her as if she were standing before him. She had all the haughty bearing of a member of one of Kuat's ruling families, combined with the intimidatingly honed athletic grace that had made her such a suitable candidate for the position she now held. That, plus a sharp-edged mental acuity equal to his own, evoked a small measure of unease in Kuat. In truth, he'd had a better personal relationship with Fenald, his previous security head; the only problem being that Fen-ald had been a traitor, to both Kuat and to Kuat Drive Yards, by being part of the scheme to wrest control of the corporation away from him and turn it over to the greed-iest and most ambitious factions among the ruling fami-lies. If it hadn't been for Kodir of Kuhlvult, Fenald and the conspirators he'd fallen in with would very likely have succeeded in their plans—and the corporation that Kuat of Kuat and his predecessors had treasured and protected for so many generations would now be on its way to utter ruin. No one from the planet Kuat's other ruling families had the experience and cunning to cir-cumvent all of Emperor Palpatine's schemes to break Kuat Drive Yards' independence and make it a mere component of the Empire. So Kodir had earned both Kuat's respect and his trust, no matter how much her tough, even brutal mannerisms grated against his own instincts. It's a brutal universe, Kuat had told himself more than once. And he had certainly played his own hard game of survival in it. Perhaps what disturbed him about Kodir was a certain essential resemblance to his own ruthlessness in service to the corporation.
"So now we know where Boba Fett is." Kuat spoke into the comm unit mike on top of the lab bench.
"Is he still aboard the ship called the Hound's Tooth}"
"That's how I found him." A tone of self-satisfaction was audible in Kodir's voice. "The Hound's Tooth was spotted by one of our paid spies, at the edge of one of the remoter border systems. Then it vanished again; obvi-ously, Boba Fett was piloting a course designed to throw off any trackers. But the sighting of the Hound's Tooth was close enough to a certain navigational sector that had figured prominently at one time in Boba Fett's activi-ties that I took a chance at keeping it under more inten-sive surveillance. And sure enough, the Hound's Tooth showed up there."
"Indeed." Kuat nodded to himself. That was the type of work, both methodical and insightful, that he had ex-pected from Kodir. "So where is it?"
"It's out by where the arachnoid assembler Kud'ar Mub'at used to have its web, before it was destroyed by Prince Xizor. And the fragments of the web had drifted a bit since then, so Boba Fett apparently had to do some searching of his own to find them. But he did; by the time my ship got close enough to do some surreptitious moni-toring of his activities, he and his companions had recon-structed most of the web."
"Interesting." Rubbing his chin, Kuat wondered what that piece of information meant. The death of the assem-bler Kud'ar Mub'at at the hands of Prince Xizor's Black Sun cleanup crew had previously been something of a re-lief to him. Kud'ar Mub'at had had too much knowledge of Kuat's own dealings with the assembler; those kinds of secrets were better kept by the dead than by any living creature, no matter how well paid for silence. If Xizor hadn't taken care of Kud'ar Mub'at, then the chances would have been good that Kuat of Kuat would have been forced to, eventually. "Were you able to discern ex-actly what they were up to?"
"Negative on that," came Kodir's reply. "I ordered our ship to pull back from the sector when another vessel was detected, approaching from directly opposite us. We did manage to ID that ship; it's the freighter that Kud'ar Mub'at's successor Balancesheet is now using as its base of operations."
"Do you think there was some kind of arranged ren-dezvous between Balancesheet and Boba Fett?"
"I'm pretty sure there wasn't." Kodir's voice sounded grimly amused. "Balancesheet has had that clunky old freighter of his outfitted with some decent armaments; it opened fire on both the reconstructed web and the Hound's Tooth alongside. Things got a little confused af-ter that, but right now it seems as if Balancesheet and Boba Fett have sorted it out; Fett and his associates are currently aboard Balancesheet's freighter."