But if, as she couldn't keep herself from fearing, the last possible clue no longer existed—if it had been a fool's errand on which Boba Fett had gone to Tatooine— then she had no idea of where she would be able to turn next. In a galaxy consumed with the struggle between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance, the chances were slim for someone with only a name as the key to the mysteries of her past, a name and its connection to the ruling families of the planet Kuat. For all she knew, it might have been the powerful Kuat of Kuat who had ordered the wiping of her memory and the abduction from her homeworld. And she'd already seen evidence enough, in the bombing raid on the Dune Sea, that Kuat was not someone who would forgo murderous violence to achieve his ends. If she were to blithely show up on the planet Kuat, seeking whatever position in its ranks of nobles that had been stolen from her, she might well be placing herself in the hands of those who had sought to eliminate her once before. Kuat might indeed be the one place where the answers could be found to the mysteries surrounding her—but it could just as easily be where certain death awaited her. With-out Boba Fett returning from Tatooine with the fabri-cated evidence that had been hidden in the cargo droid aboard his ship, she had no chance of knowing which would be the case.
He either meets up with us here, she thought, gazing above Dengar's head toward the viewport, and has the evidence with him ...
Neelah left the thought uncompleted in her mind. It was something she didn't want to contemplate any further.
And—she realized—she didn't have to.
"Look." Neelah pointed to the viewport. "Right there..."
Dengar had been monitoring the relative position of the KDY security cruiser behind them, on the dis-play from the Hound's rear scanner. He looked up and saw the bright spot of light in the midst of the field of stars. Bright and growing brighter, straight ahead of them.
"It's pretty small, from the looks of it. And fast. Maybe ..." Quickly, Dengar punched up the approach-ing craft's ID profile. "It's him," said Dengar, dropping his tensed shoulders in relief. "It's that Headhunter ship of N'dru Suhlak's. So Boba Fett has to be aboard it, right?" Smiling, Dengar glanced over his shoulder at Neelah. "I mean, it stands to reason—Suhlak wouldn't have come here to rendezvous with us without Fett, would he?"
"No—" Neelah shook her head. "He wouldn't have any reason to." So that set of possibilities, of the total that she had been obsessing over, was ruled out. At least Boba Fett hadn't abandoned them; she and Dengar were still part of whatever plans he was pursuing. "Now all we have to see is whether he found what he went to Tatooine for."
"We'll have to do a running transfer, in order to get him aboard." Dengar pointed to the image from the rear scanner. The cruiser from the Kuat Drive Yards' security division was still the same distance behind the Hound's Tooth. "If we come to a halt, even for a couple of min-utes, they'll be on top of us."
"Can we do that?"
"It's tricky, but possible." The comm unit mike was already in Dengar's hand. "Suhlak's Headhunter is com-ing within range. I'll get the details worked out with Boba Fett. You'll need to run the controls here in the cockpit while I man the transfer hatchway."
She listened as first Suhlak's, then Boba Fett's voice came over the cockpit speaker. As Dengar and Fett quickly calculated the necessary matching velocities for the ships, Neelah fought the impulse to ask—demand, rather— what had been found and brought back from Tatooine.
You've waited this long, she scolded herself. You can wait a few moments longer.
Left by herself in the Hound's cockpit, Neelah kept her hands poised on the thruster engine controls. Suhlak had brought the Z-95 Headhunter up alongside the Hound's Tooth, carefully modulating his speed and nar-rowing the gap between the two ships' hulls. A muted thump sounded through the frame, followed by the sharper vibrations of the transfer hatchway locking into place.
The three men showed up in the cockpit area at last, with Suhlak trailing behind the bounty hunters. "I got a stake in this now," Suhlak said to Neelah with a grin. "I didn't want to miss any of the show."
"You found it," said Neelah. She had spotted the ob-ject, a black rectangle a few inches thick, in one of Boba Fett's hands. The data recording unit trailed a few loose connectors, as though Fett had been working on it while en route. "You got it from Bossk."
"That poor guy." Dengar shook his head pityingly. "I hope Bossk was smart enough not to put up too much of a fight. What kind of condition did you leave him in? Or is he even still alive?"
"When I left him," said Boba Fett, "he still was. And not in too bad a shape."
"Who cares about him?" Neelah could conceal her impatience no longer. "You got it—that's all that matters."
"Correction." Suhlak pointed to the rear scanner dis-play. "You've still got a KDY security cruiser on your tail. And"—he leaned toward the control panel, peering at the image—"it's gaining on us."
"I'll take care of that." Boba Fett took over the pilot's chair from Neelah. She stood back and watched as the bounty hunter's hands fastened onto the thruster engine controls. With his hands inside the Trandoshan-sized grooves on the panel, Fett slammed the controls to their maximumAnd nothing happened.
"The engines have cut out," said Dengar. Reaching past Boba Fett, he tapped a forefinger against the power consumption gauges. "Take a look at that." The glowing red digits had dwindled to zero. He pointed to the indicator lights for the navigational jets. "Every-thing's gone down. This ship's not going anywhere."
"What's happening?" Neelah looked from the image on the rear scanner display, showing the KDY cruiser rapidly approaching, to the bounty hunters' faces. "What's gone wrong?"
"Good question," said Boba Fett. "If it was just the main thruster engines going dead, or the navigational jets by themselves, it could be a simple systems malfunc-tion. But for all of them to go out at once—something else did that to them. And deliberately."
"Like what?"
"Right now, I don't know—but let's take a look at the comm unit log." With a couple more commands tapped out inside the control grooves, Boba Fett brought a dif-ferent set of data scrolling across the smaller display screen. "There's part of the explanation." He pointed to the last line of digits and letters.
"A coded pulse was re-ceived from the vector directly behind us—obviously, from the KDY cruiser. We didn't hear anything on the comm unit speakers because the pulse didn't include a transceive request. So the pulse was picked up and acted upon by some other part of the Hound's operational circuitry."
"Hey—don't worry about it." The hunt saboteur Suhlak's voice broke into the discussion. "I can fix it."
"You can?" Standing next to Suhlak, Dengar looked at him in surprise.
"Sure." Before Dengar could react, Suhlak reached over and plucked the blaster pistol out of Dengar's belt. Suhlak took a quick step backward, covering the others with the weapon raised in his hand. "At least as far as I'm concerned."
Neelah glanced up from the blaster to Suhlak's face. "What're you doing?"
"Figure it out." Suhlak backed toward the cockpit area's hatchway. "That KDY cruiser has obviously got some way of keeping this ship stuck here—but it can't do it to my Headhunted So I'm outta here. And you peo-ple can deal with whoever's aboard the cruiser." Still keeping the blaster trained on them, Suhlak set his foot on the top tread of the ladder down to the Hound's cargo area. "Don't bother to ask if any of you can come along. I'm not going to risk having that cruiser chasing after me."