A look of panic appeared in Cradossk's yellowed eyes; he took a step backward from the figure looming in front of him. "Now wait a minute …." The bone shards fell on the floor as he raised his scaly hands, palms outward.
"I think you might be making some…rash assumptions here …."
One of Bossk's hands shot out, grabbing his father by the throat. "No, I'm not." The smile was gone from his face. On the other side of the private quarters, Zuckuss could see the red anger tingeing the younger Trandoshan's eyes. "I'm making the same assumption I made a long time ago, before I ever left for Circumtore. And you know what that is? It's that there isn't room in the Bounty Hunters Guild for both you and me."
"I ... I don't know what you're talking about …." Cradossk grabbed the other's wrist, in a futile attempt to ease his hold and get another breath into his own lungs. "The Guild... the Guild is for all of us. ..."
"I'm talking about the same thing you were talking about, just now." With his other hand, Bossk pointed a clawed thumb back toward the unlit depths of the bone chamber behind him. "I was in there the whole time the two of you have been blabbing away. And I heard everything you said. All that stuff about clearing out the undesirables from the Bounty Hunters Guild. And you know what?" Bossk tightened his hold, his fist at Cradossk's throat lifting the older Trandoshan up onto the claws of his toes. "I agree with you about all that. You're absolutely right The Guild is going to be a lot smaller. Real soon.'"
"Don't... don't be an idiot...." Cradossk managed to summon up a reserve of courage. "You can't kill me ... and get away with it...." His claws dug deeper into Bossk's wrist, enough to let a trickle of blood seep down his son's forearm. "I've got…connections…friends …." His voice became weaker and more fragmented as the hold at this throat constricted tighter. "All the…council of elders..."
"Those old fools?" Bossk sneered at his father. "I'm afraid you're a little behind the times; there have been things happening already that you just don't know about. Maybe if you didn't waste so many hours in here, mumbling and fondling your moldy reminders of past glories, these things wouldn't have sneaked up on you quite so fast." Still holding Cradossk upright, he turned and slammed the older reptilian against the table outside the bone chamber's entrance; the impact against his spine visibly dazed Cradossk. "Some of your old friends, your beloved elders, have already seen the light; they've come over to my side. In fact, some of them have been on my side for quite a while, just waiting for the right moment to-shall we say?-force your retirement. One way or another." The elaborate wording, so much different from Bossk's usual blunt speech, was a cruel way of toying with his father.
"Of course, some of the elders weren't so smart; they per sisted in their folly. Right up to the end."
"What…" Cradossk could barely squeeze any words out at all. "What do you mean…?"
"Oh, come on. What do you think I mean?" Bossk looked disgusted. "Let's just say there are going to be some fresh acquisitions in my little trophy chamber. The skulls of some of your old friends will look very nice mounted on its walls-"
"Watch out!" Zuckuss shouted a warning to Bossk. As Cradossk had fallen back against the table one of his hands had reached back and grasped an ornate ceremonial dagger; the gems embedded in its hilt flashed as he swung his arm around, the point of the blade aiming straight for Bossk's throat.
There was no way for Bossk to avoid the blade; if he had leaned back, the movement would only have presented a wider target for the blade to slash across. Instead, he lowered his head, catching the razor-sharp edge with the corner of his brow. The impact of flesh and bone against metal was enough to knock the weapon out of his father's hand and send it spinning off into a far corner of the room.
Ta king a hand from his father's throat, Bossk wiped away the blood seeping down through his face scales and into his eyes. "Now that," he said with eerie selfpossession, "didn't hurt at all." With a shake of his head, he sent blood spattering across Cradossk's face, as though sealing the bright ideogram of a death sentence there. "But I promise you-this will." From the doorway, Zuckuss could hear shouts and blaster fire coming from somewhere else in the Guild compound. That didn't surprise him; it had been pretty much what he'd been expecting since the Twi'lek majordomo had gone off to notify the others in the breakaway faction.
He turned back toward Cradossk's private quarters and watched the rest of what happened in there. For as long as he could. Then he stepped out into the corridor, shaking his head.
Bossk was certainly right about one thing, he had to admit. It did take a lot to kill a Trandoshan. The sound of the breakaway faction's weapons was heard even farther away.
Not literally; the news was reported secondhand to Kud'ar Mub'at. "Ah," the assembler purred, "that is most excellent!" Identifier had relayed all the details to him as they had come in from the listener nodes embedded in the web's fibrous exterior. "Isn't it pleasant," Kud'ar Mub'at asked rhetorically, "when things go fust the way they're supposed to?" It wrapped several sets of its thin, chitinous legs around itself in a hug of selfsatisfaction. "All my planning and scheming, and everything just so. Excellent! Exceedingly excellent!" The assembler's multiple eyes looked around the close space of its throne room, watching how its own pleasure and excitement spread in concentric waves through all the nodes connected to the strands of his nervous system. Even the most developed and relatively independent of them, like Balancesheet, was visibly aglow, with its little claws and arachnoid legs skittering around the tangled walls as though it were the complete embodiment of the assembler's good mood.
Perhaps even a little too excited; ostentatiously so, it seemed to Kud'ar Mub'at. Sometimes he detected a certain false note to Balancesheet's displays of enthusiasm. For a simple number-crunching node, Kud'ar Mub'at found himself thinking, that's a bit much. He made a mental note, one that was carefully shielded from the synaptic connections that would have let the subassembler nodes in on it, to reabsorb this balancesheet and begin growing a new one. Just as soon as this business with Boba Fett and the Bounty Hunters Guild was finished…It didn't seem like that would be much longer, from what the identifier node had just told Kud'ar Mub'at. Ignoring the jabbering of the nodes surrounding itself, the assembler adjusted its soft, globular abdomen into a more comfortable position in the self-generated nest; when it was done making adjustments, it contemplated the news with a calmer, more tranquil attitude. No sense getting agitated, it admonished itself, over something I knew was going to happen. Empires might rise and fall-they had before-and the galaxy might even collapse upon itself in one dark ball of relentless gravity. But until then, Kud'ar Mub'at, or some creature very much like it, would still be trading in the folly of other sentient creatures. That was its nature, just as it was the nature of those less wise to find themselves enmeshed in the traps spun for them ….
"Sometimes," mused Kud'ar Mub'at aloud, "they don't even know until it's too late. And sometimes they never know."
"Know what?" Balancesheet, a little calmer after its initial burst of enthusiasm, dangled itself close to the spiky mandibles of its parent's face. "What do you mean?" That kind of curiosity on a subassembler's part indicated the degree of independence that Kud'ar Mub'at had let develop in the node. There hadn't even been a mention of numbers, and still this tethered offspring wanted to know. A sharp paternal feeling twinged inside Kud'ar Mub'at; it would be a shame, however necessary, to pluck the node's legs one by one and crack its shell to extract the recyclable proteins and cellular matter inside.