"They're hidden."
"I could very easily find out the location." Fett kept his voice as level and emotionless as before. "The extracting of useful information is a specialty of mine."
"It's memory-encrypted," said the accountant.
"Below the conscious level. And with a trauma sensor implanted." He pointed to a small scar just above his left ear. "You try to dig the info out of me, it'll trip and wipe the cortical segment clean. Then nobody will ever find where I put the credits."
"There's ways around those things." Boba Fett had seen them before. "Bypasses and shunts-they're not pleasant. But they work." He supposed the Hutts were already preparing a deep neurosurgical dissection room for Posondum upon his return. "It doesn't matter to me, though. Since I'm not making a deal with you, anyway."
"But why not?" The accountant had reached one of his skinny arms through the bars, trying to grab hold of Boba Fett's sleeve. "It's a fortune-it's more than the Hutts have offered you-"
"It very well might be." He had stepped away from the cage, back to the unadorned and functional metal treads that would return him to the Slave I's cockpit. "You might be as good a thief as you are a number cruncher. And if you're going to steal even one credit from a Hutt, you might as well steal a billion. The consequences are the same. But even if you do have that kind of credits hidden away, I'm not interested in them. Or not interested enough. I have my reputation to think of."
"Your…" Posondum gaped at him in amazement and dismay. "Your what?"
"The Hutts and all my other clients-they pay me the kind of bounties they do because of one thing. I deliver. Once I've caught my prey, nothing stops me from bringing it in. Nothing. If I take on a job, I complete it. And everyone in the galaxy knows that."
"But…but I've heard of other bounty hunters ... who'll cut a deal …."
"Other bounty hunters may conduct their business as they please." Fett barely managed to keep from his voice the contempt with which he held the so-called Bounty Hunters Guild's members. That kind of shortsighted greed was one of the reasons he had no desire to associate himself with the Guild. "They have their standards…and I have mine." One of his gloved hands grasped the ladder's side rail; he looked back over his shoulder at the cage. "And I've got the merchandise, and they don't. There's a connection."
Posondum's knees visibly weakened, his hands sliding down the bars as he sank limply toward the cage's floor. Whatever glint of hope had been in his face was now extinguished.
"I suggest you go ahead and eat." Boba Fett nodded his helmet toward the tray and its congealed contents.
"You'll need to keep up your strength." He didn't wait for an answer. He climbed up from the ship's holding pens and back toward its waiting controls.
5
"Here he comes." Lookout had spotted the approaching ship. That was its job. "I can see him."
"Of course you can," said Kud'ar Mub'at. "That's a good node." With the tip of one multijointed, chitinous leg, the assembler stroked the little semicreature's head. The exterior-observation node was one of the more simpleminded subassem-blies scurrying about the web. Kud'ar Mub'at had let just about enough cerebral tissue develop inside so that it could focus its immense lightgathering lens on the surrounding stars and anything that moved among them. "Tell Calculator just what you saw." The necessary data zapped along the web's tangled neurons. Another subassembly, with useless vestigial legs and a softly fragile shell encasing its specific-function cortex, mulled over what it had received, converting raw visuals to useful numbers. "Thyip thyoud arrive…" Calculator's tiny lisping mouth moved beneath the wobbling lump of neural matter. "In leth thyan thuh-ree thtandard time part-th."
"I know who it is!" Identifier scrambled up onto Kud'ar Mub'at's shoulder-if arachnoids could be said to have shoulders-and excitedly chattered into its earhole. The little database subassembly had listened in to what Lookout had told Calculator. "I know, I know! It's the Slave I! Positive identification made-"
"Of course it is." With another leg, Kud'ar Mub'at plucked Identifier from its body-the childlike subassemblies would swarm all over it, if it let them-and set the node down on one of the web's structural strands.
"Now just settle down, little one."
"Boba Fett must be aboard!" Identifier, with its own miniature versions of its parent's stiff-spined legs, skittered back and forth on the taut silken fiber. "Boba Fett!" The subassembly had no particular liking for the bounty hunter; it just got excited over any visitors to the web. "It's Boba Fett's ship!"
Kud'ar Mub'at sighed wearily, someplace deep inside his near-spherical abdomen. His own mannerisms were slow and somewhat languid, or as much so as the latter term could be applied to a chitin-encased arachnoid. The constant chatter of Identifier ^nnoyed him on occasion. Perhaps, mused Kud'ar Mub'at, I should reabsorb that node. And design and develop another one. A quieter one. But right now the problem wasn't so much that of raw materials-Kud'ar Mub'at could always extrude more subas sembly fiber-as of time. Time lag, to be precise; even a node as relatively uncomplicated as that took hundreds of time units to develop to an operational standard. With as much business as Kud'ar Mub'at was handling right now, it couldn't afford to be without a functioning identifier. Maybe later, thought the assembler as it hung suspended in a nexus of the web's thicker strands. When this business with Boba Fett is over. Kud'ar Mub'at figured that its credit accounts would be fat enough then, so that it could afford to take a little time off. It would have to talk to Balancesheet about that.
"Go tell Docker and the Handler twins." Kud'ar Mub'at gave the little chore to Identifier, rather than just plugging back into the web's communication neurons. "Tell them to get ready for company."
The little subassembly jumped and scurried away, down the dark, fibrous corridors to the web's distant landing snare. That'll keep it out of my leg hairs for a while, thought Kud'ar Mub'at. It gently moved Lookout aside and applied one of its own compound eyes to the view hole, scanning the stars for any visible indication of his enemy and business associate.
He'd long ago decided that this was the worst part of the job. I'd rather hang out with the Hutts, thought Boba Fett. And that was saying something Huttese palaces, like the one Jabba the Hutt kept on Tatooine, were sinkholes of gratuitous depravity. Every time he'd been in one, either delivering a captive or collecting a bounty in person, he'd felt as though he had been slogging through a sewer filled with the galaxy's offal and waste. The careless ease with which someone like Jabba could dispose of an underling-Boba Fett had heard of the pet rancor creature that Jabba kept beneath his palace, but hadn't yet seen it-always irritated him. Why kill when there was no profit involved? A waste of time, credits, and flesh. But even a Hutt's palace was more to Fett's liking than Kud'ar Mub'at's web.
The tapering cylinder floated in the Slave I's viewport, gradually growing closer. It didn't even look like a constructed artifact, as much as it resembled some accidental conglomeration of glue and wire, strung together with a Corellian scavenge rat's idiot thrift. As Fett's ship approached, and Kud'ar Mub'at's web blotted out more of the stars in the viewport, various bits of machinery could be seen, sharper-edged than the clotted fibers in which they were embedded. Boba Fett had been dealing with the arachnoid assembler long enough to know that it couldn't resist a bargain, no matter what kind of worthless junk was involved; portions of the web were a museum of defunct interstellar transports and other dead castoffs. Even Jawas pursued their trade in junk and used droids as a way of turning a profit; Kud'ar Mub'at apparently just liked accumulating stuff, incorporating it into the space-drifting home the assembler had spun out from its own guts.