There was no further need to thank the men who had worked for him, and for Kuat Drive Yards. Kuat stood watching as they turned and slowly filed out through the high, arched doorway. As long as they were still employ-ees of the corporation—and in some ways, they would be even after Kuat Drive Yards had ceased to exist—they functioned as precisely and predictably as the tools upon which they had laid their hands.
When the footsteps of the men had faded down the corridor outside his quarters, Kuat of Kuat turned back to his lab bench. A simple audio recording device was plugged into the signal relay from the micro-probe spy device that listened to those other voices far above the construction docks. Those voices—Kodir's, and the Scavenger Squadron commander's, and that of the nego-tiating attache from the Rebel Alliance—had also talked of the fate of Kuat Drive Yards.
18
"You know," said Kodir, "we really should have had this little talk a long time ago."
Neelah stood with her arms folded across her breast, watching the other woman as she stepped away from the door and into the center of the tiny room. The door had been locked from the moment Neelah was shoved inside by a pair of KDY security operatives; she had expected as much, even before she tried opening it.
"I've been waiting." Neelah made sure that no emotion was apparent in her voice. That was some-thing she had picked up from Boba Fett, a way of mask-ing one's intent as completely as though behind the dark visor of a helmet. "We've got a lot to talk about, don't we?"
"There's enough." With a thin smile on her face, Kodir halted a few steps away from Neelah. "But always—so little time."
"So I can imagine." Neelah warily regarded her. "You must be busy right now. What with that stuff you man-aged to take off of Boba Fett, and everything you could do with it."
The smile shifted to a puzzled frown. "What do you know about that?"
"A lot," said Neelah. "More than you might think I'd know. I've got a good idea why you'd want a pile of fab-ricated evidence against a dead Falleen, and who you've been talking to about it." Neelah couldn't help letting a thin smile of her own show. "And I know things about you, Kodir. I know you like keeping secrets. Well, this is one that's gotten away from you."
Surprise flickered at the center of Kodir's gaze. "What do you mean?"
"Come on. There's no sense in trying to create any more lies, any more mysteries. You've been talking to somebody from the Rebel Alliance. Haven't you? Some-body important, who can get you what you want, what you've been after for a long time."
"How do you know that?"
Neelah stepped to one side, in a slow, circling dance with Kodir, their gazes locked tight with each other.
"That part's easy," she said. "I could see the Rebel ships up above the construction docks as we came in. And I know that we didn't land on the planet Kuat." Neelah tilted her head for a moment toward the sur-rounding bulkheads. "And you can't pass off something like this as the KDY headquarters. You see, I know what those headquarters are like. I've been there before. I re-member them."
Kodir's eyes widened. "You remember ..."
"Everything."
Both women stood still, the wary circling ended. Nee-lah now had her back to the small room's door.
"That changes ... a great deal ..." Kodir studied the figure standing before her. "Depending upon what it is that you think you know."
"It's not a matter of thinking,"replied Neelah grimly. "Next time you try something like this, you should hire better people to do your dirty work for you. Spend the credits; get the best. Not some incompetent like Ree Duptom—" That name produced a quick, startled reac tion in Kodir that Neelah was pleased to see. "Because if a memory wipe isn't done correctly—and thoroughly— then there's a lot of little, disconnected pieces left over. Scraps of memory, right around the edges of the dark. And bit by bit, those memories can link up with each other, and with things that can bring back even more memories from the shadows. And then—like I said"— she gave a single, slow nod—"everything comes back."
"That fool." Kodir's voice turned bitter. "I paid him enough so that whatever go-betweens and intermediaries were used, the end result would be to get just such a specialist, one that had formerly worked for the Em-pire itself—they're available, but expensive. I wasn't pleased when I found out later that some cheap hustler had pocketed the credits and done the memory-wipe job himself."
"Lucky for me, then, that he wasn't very good at it." Neelah tapped the side of her head with one finger.
"Be-cause I had already remembered my real name—Kateel of Kuhlvult—before you ever showed up at the Hound's Tooth; I had already found the clues that brought back that part of my memory. But when I saw your face— again—then all the rest came back." Neelah's hand low-ered and clenched into a trembling, white-knuckled fist. "Everything—including why my own sister had tried to get rid of me."
"I got rid of you"—a sneer curled one corner of Kodir's mouth—"because you were a fool."
"Because I wouldn't go along with the schemes you had worked up to overthrow Kuat of Kuat and take con-trol of the corporation."
"Still a fool, I see." Kodir shook her head in disdain. "It's not a matter of 'overthrowing' anyone. As I told you long ago, it's simple justice. Kuat and his predecessors have run Kuat Drive Yards for generations—and they've kept all the other ruling families frozen out. Kuat and his bloodline have never had the right to do that. But if you had joined forces with me, all of that would have come to an end. The others in the ruling families who had tried to force Kuat from the leadership—they were nothing but a diversion, too stupid to even conceal their inten-tions from him as I have."
"You confuse justice with ambition, Kodir. That was your first mistake. And then you mistook me for some-one as greedy as yourself."
"Oh, I admitted that I was wrong—that's why I had to do something about you, before you could let Kuat of Kuat know that I was plotting against him. I had to have you abducted from the planet Kuat, and have your memory wiped, so you'd no longer present a threat to me." Kodir's expression darkened into a venomous scowl. "But when I found out that the ones I had trusted—and paid—to do my 'dirty work' for me, as you call it, had failed me, I realized that I should have taken care of these things myself." Kodir's smile was hardly less ugly than the scowl had been. "And that's exactly what I've done, isn't it? After all—I tracked you down before you could do any damage to my plans. And believe me, it wasn't easy."
"You were lucky," said Neelah. "I had just enough clues—enough little pieces of my memory left—to try and find out what had happened, and try to make my way to someplace where I could find out those answers. I didn't realize that what I was doing would make it possi-ble for you to stumble across me."
"How ironic." Kodir's words were edged with sar-casm. "The things we do to try and save ourselves—they so often put us right in harm's way. As when I offered to make you part of my plans to get rid of Kuat of Kuat; if I had known how stupid and blindly loyal you were, I'd never have done that." She spread her hands apart, palms upward, in a mocking, blase show. "But that's why it's so important to learn from our mistakes. Isn't it? You made your mistakes—and I've made mine. And we've both gotten what we wanted. You wanted the truth about the past, about what happened to you—and now you know. And I wanted the leadership of Kuat Drive Yards. Guess what? That's just what I've been given."
"So you convinced the Rebel Alliance to get rid of Kuat, so you can take over the corporation. Congratula-tions. For however long it lasts."
"That'll be for quite a while," said Kodir. "It doesn't even matter which side wins the battle out near Endor. Now that I've got control of the corporation, I can deal with the Alliance or the Empire—it makes no difference to me."