A moment passed, then Neelah slowly nodded. She stepped away from Dengar and Boba Fett, and followed the first of the two KDY security operatives into the transfer hatch. Behind her as she stepped toward the other ship, she could hear Kodir give one last taunting farewell to the two bounty hunters.
"Good luck," said Kodir to Dengar and Fett. "When you're outsmarted and outgunned, that's the best you can hope for."
Glancing over her shoulder, Neelah saw the transfer hatch seal shut.
Kodir pushed her forward. "Let's get going. We've got an appointment to keep."
16
"I still don't understand how they were able to stop us." In the cockpit of the Hound's Tooth, Dengar shone a handheld worklight through the access panel. "What did they do to make the engines cut out like that?"
"It's obvious." Boba Fett's voice came muffled from beneath the control panel. He lay on his back, shoulders and helmeted head deep within the maze of circuitry ca-bles. "This ship wasn't built at the Kuat Drive Yards, but Bossk must have taken it in there at some point for some custom retrofitting. Probably an updated weaponry tar-geting system—that's one of the first modifications that a bounty hunter gets done on his ship when he's a few credits ahead."
That was accurate, Dengar knew—there had been a time when he had been planning on getting the same job done on his craft, back before he'd met up with his be-trothed, Manaroo, and other, more desirable goals had been put on his agenda. And Kuat Drive Yards, the top in the shipbuilding and engineering field, had been where he'd wanted to go for it.
He knelt down beside Boba Fett's outstretched legs, angling the light source up to where the other bounty hunter's gloved hands were working. "So you think Bossk took it in there, and they put in some hidden cut-out de-vice that he didn't know about?"
"Exactly," replied Fett. "Nothing too elaborate, just a simple override that could be triggered by a coded pulse from a remote transmitter. Which, of course, they had aboard their own security division vessel."
"Yeah, but why would they do that to Bossk's ship? I mean, KDY would've had to have done it a while back; they wouldn't have known it would come in handy like this someday."
"They didn't do it against Bossk specifically." With a needle-tipped logic probe, Boba Fett traced the intricate wiring beneath the control panel. "KDY probably does it to every ship that comes into their docks for retrofit work—just so they'd have a backdoor system in place, in case they ever needed to disable one of their customers' ships. It'd be an insurance policy for KDY—and shutting down the Hound's Tooth was one of the times they cashed it in."
"Yeah, but ..." Dengar shook his head. "I can't be-lieve they'd put something like that in the ships they build for the Imperial Navy—or in your ship. I mean, Kuat Drive Yards built Slave I, didn't they?"
"Of course KDY wouldn't try putting a cut-off device into my ship, or anything they built for the Empire." Boba Fett peered upward at the circuits, concentrating on his task. "There would be too much at risk if it was found. And KDY knows that the Imperial Navy has a standard practice of thoroughly checking out all the work done on new vessels, and on any retrofits, for pre-cisely that reason, to make sure that any kind of delayed or optional sabotage device hasn't been smuggled in. As do I; when I accepted delivery of Slave I, I went over the ship with a fine-tooth comb, just as I had told them I would. So naturally, I didn't find anything amiss. A cus-tomer like Bossk, though, isn't quite as thorough— which is what KDY was counting on." Boba Fett tilted his head to one side. "Bring the light in a little closer; I think I've found it."
"Can you fix it?" Leaning forward on his knees, Den-gar tried to see in through the access panel.
"It'll take some work. Typical KDY job; very well en-gineered. It's not just a simple break in the circuit with a pulse-reception activator. They wired in a parallel micro-filament of some kind of high-temp pyrogenic; when it went off, it vaporized the entire signal-relay subsystem, out to the main engines and the navigational jets." Boba Fett pulled himself out from underneath the control panel and sat up. "We'll need to strip out the circuits from most of the cargo area servo-mechanisms, just to get the materials to patch in here."
"Okay—" Dengar stepped back as the other bounty hunter got to his feet. "I'll get started pulling out the bulkhead sheaths." He reached down and picked up a clench-awl from the open tool kit on the cockpit's floor. "But I got another question."
Boba Fett didn't look at him, but continued examin-ing a section of charred wiring from beneath the controls. "What's that?"
"When we get this ship up and running—what hap-pens then?"
"Then we head for the planet Kuat," said Boba Fett. "I don't let anyone—not even Kuat of Kuat—take things from me. Without paying for them."
"We've got a lot to talk about," said Kodir of Kuhlvult. "Don't we?"
Neelah gazed back at the figure seated before her, in the security head's private quarters. The other woman had dismissed the rest of the ship's personnel, leaving her and Neelah by themselves. She had heard the door hiss shut behind her, as though it were sealing them both into a space inviolable enough for the revealing of secrets.
But I don't know if that is what will happen here, thought Neelah. For all she knew, there would be noth-ing but more lies and mystery, darkness and words whose only meaning was to conceal.
And worst of all—some of those words would be her own.
"I suppose we do." Neelah remained standing, even though Kodir had offered her a chair. "I've got a lot of questions. That I think you might have the answers to."
"That's not how it works." Kodir gave a single shake of her head. "Kuat of Kuat put me in charge of security for Kuat Drive Yards, not because I was good at giving information away, but because I know how to keep a lid on it. People—even you—find out things when I want them to, not the other way around."
"Perhaps I shouldn't have come along for the ride, then."
"You didn't have that choice." Kodir stood up and stepped toward her. The edge of the other woman's cape swirled close to Neelah's feet as Kodir reached out and gently stroked the side of her head.
"Choices have been in short supply for you, I know. So much has been lost to you..."
"Those are the things," said Neelah, "that I'm look-ing for." She didn't draw away from the other's hand, though it felt cold and alien as the fingertips drew down to the curve of her jaw. "The things I've lost: my past, and my name."
"And you've had no luck. What a shame." Kodir smiled sympathetically at her. "Perhaps you should have chosen your companions more wisely. One rarely profits by hanging out with bounty hunters."
Neelah didn't correct her, though she could have. My name, she thought to herself, is Kateel. She had discov-ered that much in the fragments of her memory. And that the name belonged to one of Kuat's ruling families. Nee-lah had remembered that as well, when she had seen the record in Boba Fett's datafiles of the emblem that his hard merchandise Nil Posondum had scratched into the floor of the holding cage. There had been other things she had remembered, little bits of light penetrating the mists, when she had seen Kodir of Kuhlvult's face...
She had seen the woman long before Kodir had stepped through the transit hatch and boarded the Hound's Tooth. Of that, Neelah was sure.
That certainty had given rise to caution inside her. In that past, whose shapes were still frustratingly vague, things had happened between this Kodir of Kuhlvult and herself—and they hadn't all been pleasant. She wanted me to do something—Neelah couldn't remember what yet, only that it had been important, and that a great many other creatures' fates besides her own had de-pended upon her answer. Which had been a refusal; she hadn't gone along with Kodir's plans back then, what-ever they had been.