Hard Merchandise (star wars)

by K. W. Jeter

  "I'll say." From behind Boba Fett, Dengar muttered his comment. Getting answers from the dead assembler had seemed only to make things more confusing rather than less.

  "Standard business practice," continued Kud'ar Mub'at's withered corpse. "I kept most of the credits ... that the original client sent here with Nil Posondum. For a tiny percentage of what was left over . . . Posondum then delivered the fee I had arranged with Ree Duptom. Posondum then went about his other scrabbling little business affairs, one of which turned out badly enough for him to wind up as hard merchandise in your holding cage, Boba Fett. Of course ... I always knew that a little hustling nonentity such as Nil Posondum would end up like that... but I'm suspicious about what happened to Duptom. He operated on a large enough scale to have real enemies... who would very much have liked to have seen him dead..."

  "I'm not interested in Ree Duptom's enemies." Boba Fett's words turned impatient. "I want to know who he was working for. Who hired him—through you—to transport fabricated evidence about Prince Xizor's in-volvement in an Imperial stormtrooper raid on the planet Tatooine? Was it the same person who paid for him to kidnap and wipe the memory of the young female hu-man I found aboard his ship?"

  "Of course it was, Boba Fett." The dead assembler tucked its forelimbs back around its abdomen. "You know that—it had to be, since one payment was made for both jobs. I got the client a bargain rate that way. I like to keep my customers happy ... it makes for good business."

  Boba Fett dropped the black cable and stepped for-ward. With one gloved hand, he grabbed the dead as-sembler's narrow, triangular head, almost wrenching it from the stalklike neck as he turned the blind eyes toward himself. "Tell me," demanded Fett. "Who was the client? Who paid Ree Duptom for those jobs?"

  "A good question, my dear Fett." The dead assembler managed to sneer at him. "A very good question, in-deed ... and how I wish I could answer it for you... and for myself."

  "What are you talking about?" Boba Fett took his hand away from the other creature. "You know who it was. You'd have to know—"

  "Correction; I did know. When I was alive." A macabre, tittering laugh came from within the assembler's hollowed body. "But that was then, and this is now. You and your partner here have done a very good job of reassembling my poor, sundered web—but not a perfect job. There were some parts of my extended neural system that were too damaged for you to restore; I can feel them missing, as though some of my actual physical limbs had been amputated. And when there are pieces missing in a web, it stands to reason that there must be holes in their place." The claw tip at the end of the raised forelimb tapped at the skull's enclosing chitin. "There are, I regret to inform you, large gaps in my memory . . . things I cannot remember. Though, of course, it would have been impossible for me to have ever forgotten the inimitable Boba Fett . . . I'm afraid that Nil Posondum was not quite so memorable a figure. There may have only been a few strands of my memory in which details about him were encoded... so you have to understand how they would be easily lost." The blind eyes seemed to regard Boba Fett with amusement. "You've come all this way for nothing ... how unfortunate."

  "I'll tell you what's unfortunate," said Boba Fett. "Unfortunate is how you're going to feel when I'm done with you. You're not going to hold out on me this time."

  "What are you going to do about it?" The assembler's laughter turned into a grating cackle. "A hundred differ-ent ways of killing at your disposal—I can just see you standing there, bristling with all your weapons, like a walking arsenal—and all of them useless now. You can keep me alive as long as you want... it merely delays the moment of my falling once again into the sweetness of death. You were as much responsible as any other crea-ture, Boba Fett, for my having discovered the pleasures of being dead—I realize now that it was the best deal I ever made! But I've tasted it, and drank deep of that in-toxicating darkness ... deep enough that I can wait for it again. And in the meantime .. . your threats are of little avail..."

  The assembler's words unnerved Dengar more than anything else that had happened so far, in this roughly woven mausoleum floating in space. "Come on—" He stepped forward and grabbed Boba Fett by the elbow. "It's right. There's nothing you can do—"

  "Just watch." Fett pulled his arm away from Dengar's grasp. "Maybe the problem isn't whether you're dead or alive, Kud'ar Mub'at." He stepped around to the side of the nest and the grey creature hunkered down in it. "Maybe you're just not alive enough." Boba Fett reached behind the assembler's jointed neck and grabbed the con-trols of the pulsator device, leaving the gleaming metal needle still inserted up into the cerebral cortex. "That can be changed."

  Looking down at the black cable, Dengar saw its sur-face shimmer with a wildly increasing intensity. Instinc-tively, he drew his boot back, as though it had come too close to an exposed high-voltage conduit. The cable seemed almost alive, twisting about on the fibrous floor of the web, like a glistening serpent from the bogs of a swamp-covered planet.

  At the same time, he heard a crackling and tearing noise from the center of the chamber. Dengar looked up and saw the assembler's corpse thrashing convulsively, the jointed sticklike limbs pulled out from beneath the torn abdomen and whipping in the air, as though a wind-storm had animated the black, leafless branches of a win-ter forest. Kud'ar Mub'at's triangular face was contorted with the energy surging behind the blind eyes, the angled mouth stretched open in a silent scream.

  Boba Fett still had his hand upon the pulsator device's controls, his durasteel-like grip forcing the assembler's overloaded corpse to stay in the hollow of the flaccid nest. "Now do you remember?"

  The assembler made no answer. A couple of its smaller, weaker limbs detached themselves from the corpse, fly-ing across the chamber and striking the curved walls.

  "Hey..." Dengar looked around himself with alarm. The storm he had imagined tearing through the web's confines now seemed to have become even stronger and more visible. Flaring sparks ran through the neural fibers like quick lightning, leaving behind the scent of ozone and burning tissue. "Maybe you'd better back off on that—this place is tearing itself apart!"

  Echoing Dengar's words, the web shuddered, hard enough to knock him from his feet. He caught hold of one of the horizontal durasteel beams that had been in-stalled to keep the unpressurized structure from collaps-ing in on itself, and managed to keep himself upright. Though only for a second: another convulsive wave rolled through the web, the floor whipping high enough to throw him clear. As he fell backward, Dengar saw the beam rip loose from its mooring point on one side of the tunnellike space; it swung about from the other end, smashing loose the beams farther on in a clashing chain reaction.

  He's gone crazy, thought Dengar. Through the falling, colliding durasteel beams and the heaving of the web's floor and walls, he couldn't even spot Boba Fett, up in the main chamber beside the corpse of Kud'ar Mub'at. The frustration from coming all this way, intent on infor-mation, and finding no answers, must have unhinged the other bounty hunter's mind. Boba Fett was normally so calm and calculating—he would have to have been tem-porarily insane not to see how the drastically increased pulsator flow had triggered a catastrophic agony in the assembler. The creature's diminished physical form and the attached neural fibers running through the length of the web were thrashing themselves to pieces; Dengar could hear the racketing clatter of the spidery limbs, and the shattering of the chitinous exoskeleton at their center. That was bad enough, but the web shook and buckled at the same time; already, great sections of the fibrous struc-ture that Dengar and Boba Fett had so laboriously sealed back together were now ripping apart from one another, like rough cloth being pulled by giant, invisible hands.

  With speed born of desperation, Dengar scrambled beneath the tilted beam and dived for the black cable. It seemed even more animated now, with the motion im-parted to it by the buckling and heaving of the web's floor. He grabbed hold of the cable with one hand while simultaneously reaching into his belt pouch for his vibro-blade . With one u
pward stroke, the 'blade sliced through the cable, sparks of short-circuited wires spitting out from the raw end.

  He had thought that terminating the pulsing input from the computers back onboard the Hound's Tooth would also end the thrashing agony of the web. The re-mainder of the cable running to the pulsator device in-serted in the back of Kud'ar Mub'at's skull had gone slack and lifeless, the shimmering now dissipated and in-ert. But for some reason Dengar couldn't understand, the web around him continued its self-destroying contor-tions. One of the largest structural fibers, thicker in di-ameter than his own waist, suddenly snapped, shredding apart a tangle of smaller strands, their pallid grey shafts flurrying across his shoulders and hastily averted face.

  Pushing himself up onto his hands and knees, Den-gar looked through the maze of fallen durasteel beams. He could just barely make out the figures of Boba Fett and the assembler collapsed inside its nest. For some reason, Kud'ar Mub'at's corpse now looked as lifeless as it had when he and Boba Fett had first dragged it into the reconstructed web. There wasn't time to ponder that mystery; before Dengar could get to his feet, a blaze of light seemed to explode in the main chamber ahead of him. In its glare, Boba Fett was knocked back as the assembler disintegrated, its sticklike limbs flying through tumbled arcs and away from the atomized fragments of its body.

  The noise from the explosion had deafened Dengar for a moment. Shaking his head to clear it, he was sud-denly aware of another, even more threatening sound: the ragged ends of the structural fibers around him flut-tered and streamed pennantlike, drawn by the slowly in-creasing roar of the web's atmosphere rushing through an exterior breach.

  Dizzied by the oxygen thinning in his nostrils and lungs, Dengar staggered forward and grabbed Boba Fett's forearm, pulling the other bounty hunter to his feet. "What's . . . what's happening? ..." With his free hand, Dengar gestured toward the tattered remains of Kud'ar Mub'at. "It's dead again! It has to be—there's nothing left of it!" He gazed around in panic at the heav-ing walls of the surrounding web.

  "Why is it still—"

  "You idiot." Boba Fett shoved him away from the as-sembler's nest and toward the web's main corridor. "Can't you tell? We're under attack!"

  Dengar realized that the other man was correct; as if in confirmation, another white-hot flash tore through the chamber, inches behind them. He felt the heat of a laser-cannon bolt on his back as he ran through the col-lapsing, disintegrating web. The transfer hatch to the Hound's Tooth was just meters ahead of him...

  It might as well have been kilometers.

  Another bolt hit, bursting apart the curve of struc-tural fibers directly above him. Sparks and blackened shards of tissue whirled around Dengar as he felt himself both rising and falling into darkness.

  She had been turning over the words inside her head. The words, a name, her true name. Neelah had exited from the security-locked files that she had broken into—all the things that Boba Fett hadn't told her, that he himself didn't know the value of—and shut down that part of the ship's computers. That had left a blank display screen in front of her as she had taken her hands and forearms out of the Trandoshan-fitted control grooves on the cockpit panel. She didn't care about that, or the cold stars slowly wheel-ing about in the forward viewport. In her mind's eye, she could still envision the symbol she had found buried in Boba Fett's datafiles, the ones concerning the late Nil Posondum. As she leaned back in the pilot's chair, eyes closed, the lopsided circle and inner triangle that Poson-dum had scratched into the floor of the holding cage, so long ago, transformed itself into the ancient, gold-worked emblem of the planet Kuat's noble families.

  And one of them, she mused, is my family. Neelah wasn't quite sure of all the details—parts of her memory were still shrouded in obscuring mists—but she knew for certain that there were several such noble families, all of them linked economically to the fount of wealth known as Kuat Drive Yards. They all had at one time borne the KDY emblem on their most dignified robes, and other items such as the heirloom blanket in which she had been wrapped as an infant. It had only been in later generations that factionalism and bad blood be-tween the ruling families had given rise to separate clan insignia.

  Though she didn't know everything—such as what had happened to have brought her so far from home— she knew the name of that infant swaddled in the ancient emblem. My name, thought Neelah. My real name.

  "Kateel." She whispered the name aloud, as though calling softly to that person who had been lost and now was found again. "Kateel of Kuhlvult."

  Then she smiled. Well, thought Neelah, it's a begin-ning ...

  Another sound—or silence, the absence of sound— broke into her contented meditations. Her brow creased as she opened her eyes; it took a moment before she real-ized what had happened. Looking down, she saw that the black cable that Boba Fett had rigged from the ship's computer, snaking out to the airlock's exit port and then looped to the reconstructed web of Kud'ar Mub'at, had suddenly ceased its pulsating shimmer. It lay like a dead thing across the floor of the cockpit.

  Perhaps the two of them, Dengar and Boba Fett, had finished their work over there. Neelah found it hard to imagine that the pair of bounty hunters had found out anything from the arachnoid assembler, or what part of it they had been able to reclaim from the dead, compa-rable in value to what she had discovered while sitting in the comfort of the pilot's chair.

  That guess didn't make sense, though; Boba Fett had expressly told her that the power and data line would have to run continuously, right up until he came back here to the Hound's Tooth and switched it off himself. Her part of the entire process had been to watch and make sure that the improvised device had kept inside the operational parameters programmed by Fett. So if it stopped on its own —the realization slowly crowded out the thoughts about her own rediscovered name—then something must have happened to them ...

  Neelah looked up to the forward viewport, and saw the web disintegrating into chaos and flame.

  Barely a second passed before she was able to spot the source of the destruction. In the distance, another ship had appeared, firing its laser cannon. Another coruscat-ing bolt tore through the web, even as she watched.

  Instinctively, she grabbed for the navigational con-trols on the panel in front of her. Piloting the ship, even a cumbersomely fitted-out one such as the Hound's Tooth, was within her abilities; manning its weaponry and firing back at the attacking ship were impossible, though.

  She shoved forward the main thruster engine control; its responding force shoved her back into the pilot's chair. Another few quick adjustments brought the Hound about, away from the web and the unknown ship, still firing its laser cannon as it rocketed closer. Through the ship's frame, Neelah had heard the conducted noise of the transfer hatch ripping away from where it had been sealed to the web.

  Another push on the thruster control would send the Hound's Tooth on a full-power, blazing arc away from this sector of space. An emergency escape vector was al-ready programmed into the hyperspace navicomputer; she would only have to punch a couple of buttons to reach safety.

  And then what? Neelah sat frozen at the ship's con-trols, mind racing. Maybe I've found out enough, she told herself. Her name, her true name; there had been many times, all the way back to the palace of Jabba the Hurt, that she had despaired of ever discovering even that much. She should be satisfied with that...

  More words escaped her lips that came from the past and the memories she had found within herself. They were a string of expletives in one of the planet Kuat's an-cient, pre-Basic tongues.

  She slammed on the Hound's side jets, and was imme-diately swiveled about in the pilot's chair as the ship swung back toward the web and its attacker.

  This is just like the story I told, thought Dengar. About all those things that happened back then...

  He struggled to remain conscious, knowing that death was on the other side of the blackness threatening to engulf him. The swirling dark spots that signaled ter-minal oxygen starv
ation had coalesced into one annihi-lating wave, roaring down the length of the web's central tunnel. Any further drop in atmospheric pressure would be enough to kill both him and Boba Fett; the murderous vacuum of space would boil the blood right out of their ruptured flesh and viscera. Dragging in as much fiery breath as he could, Dengar saw the web clear and partly come into focus; once more, he saw the image from the story he had related to Neelah, of the Black Sun cleanup crew tearing apart the living web of Kud'ar Mub'at. Only this time, there weren't any henchmen of Prince Xizor going about their destructive business; the web seemed almost to be ripping itself apart before his red-misted eyes.

  Then the image changed. Now that, he thought deliri-ously, wasn't in the story. The prow of a bounty hunter ship, the one called Hound's Tooth, tore through the exterior of the web. Great tangles of structural fibers rolled across the curve of the cockpit's forward viewport; through the mired transparisteel, Dengar just barely rec-ognized Neelah at the control panel. Braking jets spat flame, slowing the ship down before it could barrel over him and crush his form to the web's tangled floor.