by K. W. Jeter
"To fire off any laser-cannon bolts now, Your Excel-lency, would be highly inadvisable." The comm special-ist had summoned up his last reserves of courage; his voice sounded a little less shaky. "Any evasive maneu-vers on Boba Fett's part might result in the bolts striking Kud'ar Mub'at's web instead." The comm specialist shrugged and spread his hands, palms upward. "Of course, that would be up to you to decide, as to whether to risk it or not. But given the ongoing business relations between Black Sun and the assembler—"
"Yes, yes; refrain from explanation." Xizor irritably waved off the underling. "You don't need to remind me about all that." Sending a few laser-cannon bolts through Kud'ar Mub'at itself, and not just the assembler's messily conglomerated web, would not have been any cause for grief; Xizor had already decided upon the elimination of this business associate, whose entangling concerns had grown so inconvenient. But to do so in this way, with all the repercussions that would follow from it becoming known throughout the galaxy that Black Sun had a short and fatal way with those that served them, would cripple Xizor's further plans. Beyond that, the new ally that Xi-zor had slated to replace Kud'ar Mub'at was also inside the assembler's web—Xizor had no intention of losing so potentially valuable a creature as Balancesheet, the crafty little accountant subnode that had declared its indepen-dence from it creator. "Hold your fire," Xizor instructed the weapons systems techs behind him.
The comm specialist had put one hand to his ear, lis-tening to a subaudible message being patched through the cochlear implant inside his skull. "Your Excellency—" he said, looking up at Xizor. "Kud'ar Mub'at has made direct contact with us. He wishes to have a word with you."
All I need, thought Xizor irritably. "Very well—put it through."
He listened to Kud'ar Mub'at's high-pitched, nerve-grating voice through the speaker mounted above the bridge's central control panel. "My so-esteemed Prince Xizor," came the assembler's voice. "Of course, as al-ways, boundless is my trust in your wisdom and abilities. Never would I doubt the propriety of any action that was initiated by your spotless hands—"
"Get on with it," growled Xizor. The panel micro-phone picked up his words and relayed them on a tight-beam connection to the web drifting in the distance, beyond Boba Fett's ship. "I've got more urgent things to take care of than listening to you." He kept an eye on the viewport and the image of Boba Fett's ship, still gather-ing speed.
"Very well," sniffed the assembler. Xizor could imag-ine it on its nest in the web, folding multiple jointed limbs more tightly around its pallid, wobbling abdomen. "Your display of temperament is perhaps understand-able, but it does not diminish the admiration I—"
"Either say what you want of me or be silent."
The tone of the assembler's voice turned sour and sulky. "As you wish, Xizor. How is this for bluntness: you must be an idiot to have begun firing upon Boba Fett in open space. Do Falleens have no capacity for discre-tion? This entire sector is under constant observation be-cause of the presence of my web here. Must I remind you that others are very likely watching? Some of those watchers are business associates of mine, or those with whom I might wish to do business at some time. I realize that your reputation would be enhanced by publicly eliminating the so-esteemed Boba Fett—but what about my reputation?" Kud'ar Mub'at's voice grew louder from the panel speaker. "I certainly would prefer to have crea-tures killed rather than pay the money I owe them—don't mistake me about that—but I would prefer if it didn't be-come widely known that this sort of thing happens to them. Pray tell, who's going to do business with me if they think they're going to wind up dead?"
"Don't worry about it," replied Prince Xizor. Only a portion of his attention was given to the conversation with the absent assembler. "You can tell anyone you want that Boba Fett's death had nothing to do with you."
"Oh, but of course." The voice coming from the speaker was tinged with sarcasm. "It just happened that he got blown to atoms while he was bringing a piece of hard merchandise to me, a piece for which I'd have to hand over a pretty sum of credits. Creatures will believe that, all right."
"Let them believe whatever they will. You've got more pressing concerns right now."
"What?" Kud'ar Mub'at sounded puzzled. "To what are you referring, Xizor?"
"Simple enough." His own admiration for Boba Fett had increased, now that he could see what the bounty hunter was up to. "Your 'business associate,' for whom you've expressed such concern—Boba Fert—he's headed right your way."
"Well, of course he is. He's got merchandise to deliver—"
"I'm afraid you don't understand." Bestowing bad news on another sentient creature was a minor diversion that paled next to murder and plunder, but it was one from which Xizor could still derive some pleasure. "Or perhaps more likely, you simply have no awareness of what condition his ship Slave I is in. But we've already done a complete damage assessment. So you can believe me, Kud'ar Mub'at, when I tell you—Boba Fett's not go-ing to be able to stop."
"But... but that's absurd!"
"No," said Xizor. "It's actually rather clever of him. He's burning up the last remaining thruster engine aboard his ship, and he's already achieved a considerable ve-locity. It's a tribute to his piloting skills that he's able to keep Slave I—what's left of it—on a steady course, at that speed. But what Boba Fett can't do now—no one would be able to—is bring Slave I to a halt before it crashes into your web. From our scanning of his ship, we know that all of his braking rockets are out of commis-sion. Which, of course, is something that he knows as well."
A wordless, panicked shriek came over the comm unit speaker. The image that came to Prince Xizor's inner eye was that of Kud'ar Mub'at almost literally flying out of his nest inside the drifting web, with his spidery legs thrashing around him.
"How—" The absent assembler managed to regain a measure of control, enough to sputter out a desperate question. "How much time do I have?"
"I'd say..." Xizor glanced over at the tracking moni-tor and the rapidly flickering numbers on the readouts below it. "You'd better brace yourself."
Before any more annoyingly high-pitched sounds could come over the speaker, Xizor reached over and broke the comm unit connection between the Vendetta and Kud'ar Mub'at's web. A monitor below the main viewport showed the view from a remote scout module stationed on the other side of the web; glancing at the screen, Xizor could see the flaring jet of Slave I's remaining thruster en-gine. From this angle it looked like a star going nova, all glaring flame, bright enough to sting one's eyes.
"Your Excellency." Standing beside Xizor, the comm specialist spoke up. "Do you have orders for the crew?"
Xizor remained silent for a moment longer, watching the bounty hunter's ship as it sped on its trajectory straight toward Kud'ar Mub'at's web. His cold admira-tion of Boba Fert—and his appreciation—went up an-other notch. The game of death had just been made more complicated—and much more interesting. There was no doubt about the eventual outcome; there never was when Xizor played at it. But however sweet the bounty hunter's death would have been before, the pleasure was enhanced far beyond that now.
"Track and pursuit," said Xizor at last. "There's go-ing to be some pieces to pick up. Interesting pieces..."
Boba Fett emerged from Slave I—he had to step back and kick the exterior hatchway door open; its opera-tional power had failed and a loosened section of hull plating had wedged into one corner—and stepped into absolute, screeching chaos.
He'd expected as much. This result had been a part of his plan, from the moment he'd conceived the notion of plowing his ship into Kud'ar Mub'at's space-drifting web. His long familiarity with the arachnoid assembler, their years of doing business together, had enabled him to scope out the web's nature and capabilities. Kud'ar Mub'at had designed and spun the web out of self-extruded fila-ments, both structural and neural, so that it could incor-porate bits and pieces of ships and other artifacts made by sentient creatures; both the web's inside and outside were studded with those segments of
durasteel, like func-tioning wreckage mired in the irregular, scum-thick surf of a frozen sea. That physical incorporation of such items had been due to Kud'ar Mub'at's greed—its desire to magnify and glorify itself with trophies from those un-fortunates who'd found themselves enmeshed too deeply in its schemes to get out—and to a need to preserve the web itself. The web had no other defenses; its ability to quickly incorporate and seal itself around anything that penetrated it was the only way it could maintain a life-supporting environment inside its curved, matted, and tangled fibrous walls.
With one gloved hand grasping the side of the hatch-way, Boba Fett scanned the scene around him. The inte-rior of Kud'ar Mub'at's web was lit a shimmering blue-white by the phosphorescence of masses of illumi-nator subnodes. The simple creatures clung to the upper walls by their tiny, scuttlings legs and radiated the soft glow from the bioluminescent compounds in their translu-cent, distended abdomens, hardly more than the size of Boba Fett's doubled fists. All of the shrieking noise in the web came not from the living light sources, tethered by neural filaments to their own creator, but from their subnode cousins, the faster-moving emitters of the sticky, viscous fluid by which the web repaired itself and incorporated fragments of ships into the crudely shaped structure.
The emitters scuttled around the web's torn edges, where Slave I had broken through and mired itself. Be-fore crashing into the web, Boba Fett had reoriented the ship from it usual vertically oriented, tail-downward po-sition; that would have brought the rounded curve of the cockpit like a blunt hammer-blow against the web's exte-rior. At the last second, a quick burst of one of the navi-gational jets had brought the sharper, knifelike projection of the hull above the cockpit toward the rapidly ap-proaching web. Once Slave I had thrust its way into the web, thick fibers entangling around it, a final burst from the opposite jet had brought it upright again, so that the wider surface of the cockpit against the web's interior brought it to a halt. The smell of the fibers that had been scorched black by the jets' firing hung as an acrid mi-asma in the web's pallidly lit cavern.
More than the web's structure had been hurt in the ship's impact. The web, a living thing itself, reacted to the trauma in its own pain-filled way. The din of shriek-ing that sounded in Boba Fett's ears came from the other subnodes that had already been in this section of the web, rather than having scurried there to contain the damage. Most of them had been torn loose from the neural-fiber strands that had tethered them to their controlling par-ent Kud'ar Mub'at; some were mute, never having been given vocal abilities, but the others now gave idiot cries as they dropped from the rough domed ceiling of the space. The matted floor was thick with the scuttling forms, writhing in spasms of pain or scrabbling in tight little circles, their limited onboard cerebral functions com-pletely overloaded by the sudden disconnection from the assembler on his nest in another part of the web. Spidery, crablike subnodes, trailing their snapped connectors be-hind them, clambered over Boba Fett's boots as he stepped down from Slave I's hatchway. He kicked a few aside as though they were chitin-shelled rats; a few of the smaller ones were unavoidably crushed beneath his boot soles, their husks crackling like thin eggshells.
Fett looked up toward the prow of his ship and saw that the emitter subnodes had almost finished sealing the web around the hull; only a section around the main thruster nozzles still extended out into the vacuum of space. The various high-pitched whistling noises that the web's atmosphere had made, escaping through the torn structural fibers, slowly died out as the emitters went about their work, filling in the last of the gaps between the living biomass and the ship's curved durasteel hull. Around Boba Fett, the blue-lit space grew steadily qui-eter, as more and more of the disconnected subnodes lapsed into a quivering catatonic state, overturned on their backs like sea creatures stranded by some planet's receding tide. The silence that slowly overcame the previ-ous hectic din was that of a partial death: as the web was strung with living fibers spun out from Kud'ar Mub'at's own cortex and cerebrospinal system, to stand in an ex-cised section such as this was like standing in some crea-ture's grossly magnified brain after an equally gigantic surgeon's scalpel had cut away a wedge of grey matter.
"Let's go." Boba Fett reached back inside Slave I's hatchway and grabbed the front of Trhin Voss'on't's uni-form jacket, now hardly more than rags held together by its blood-tarnished metal fastenings. With a sharp pull, he got the former stormtrooper to his feet; another tug brought the other man stumbling out of the ship. "Time to get paid."
Voss'on't's eyes were two burning nicks in his bruised, oil-stained face. The hands tied behind his back thrust his shoulders forward. "If you're in such a hurry—" His voice was raw from both smoke inhalation and barely controlled rage. He nodded toward his boots and the segment of arrow-dart line that hobbled his ankles to-gether. "Then you'd better untie these. Never get there, otherwise."
"I've got a better idea," said Fett. With a swift hori-zontal arc of his forearm, he clouted Voss'on't across the face, sending him slamming back against the edge of Slave I, then sprawling among the twitching, dying sub-nodes that littered the space's floor. Blood streamed from Voss'on't's nose as Fett looked down at him. "Let's leave you tied up just the way you are, and you can forget about any more escape attempts." Reaching down, he grabbed the rags of Voss'on't's jacket and hauled him up-right again. "They're not going to do you any good now. And I've started to find them annoying."
"Yeah, I bet." Voss'on't sneered at him. His bound hands squeezed into white-knuckled fists, as though he were imagining them around Boba Fett's neck.
The stormtrooper had been on the losing end of every exchange with Fett, going right back to the distant colo-nial mining world where Fett and his temporary partner Bossk had tracked him down. Yet he still displayed a deeply ingrained will to fight. It won't do him much good, thought Boba Fett. There would be little difference in the outcome whether Voss'on't continued to struggle and scheme, or whether he finally gave up and accepted his fate. That being the case, Boba Fett didn't care which the stormtrooper wound up doing. It was just a matter of convenience.
A darker, more venomous expression settled across Voss'on't's face. "You might be able to get paid, bounty hunter. You managed to get your merchandise this far, so anything's possible. But what are you going to do when Prince Xizor shows up here?" Voss'on't had seen the im-age of Xizor's ship on Slave I's cockpit viewport, and had been able to identify it just as readily as Fett had. "And that's going to be any minute now."
"You don't need to worry about that. I'll deal with him then." A length of loose cord dangled from the knot around Voss'on't's wrists; Boba Fett used that to pull him along, twisted partway around and barely able to walk. As they progressed toward the interior tunnel that would lead them to Kud'ar Mub'at itself, Fett glanced over his shoulder at his captive.
"You didn't appear surprised by Xizor being in this sector of space, waiting for us. It seems a reasonable assumption that you knew he'd be here."
"Assume whatever you want." Voss'on't leaned back from the tug of the line around his wrists. "You'll find out what the deal is soon enough. And you want to know something? It's going to be a real surprise."
Boba Fett maintained his own silence. And kept a hand on the butt of the blaster pistol strapped at his side.
"Ah ... my inimitable associate . .. the esteemed ... Boba Fett ..." A halting voice, squeaking like rusted metal, greeted them as they emerged from the web's cen-tral tunnel. "How charmed ... I am ... to see you once more..."
Standing in the center of the web's main chamber, with the stormtrooper tethered a few steps behind him, Boba Fett gazed upon the arachnoid assembler. Or upon the crippled shell of what Kud'ar Mub'at had been; Slave I's crashing into the web had obviously had an effect for the worse upon its master as well.
"You're not looking too good, Kud'ar Mub'at." It was a statement of plain fact; Boba Fett felt no great sympathy for the assembler. I'd better get my credits, thought Fett, before it dies.
"How
... kind of you ... to show such concern ..." The pneumatic subnode that had formed Kud'ar Mub'at's cushioned throne was apparently dead, its deflated and flaccid membrane extending around the assembler like a grey, waxen puddle. Kud'ar Mub'at itself was hunched down in the thicket of its spidery black legs, the inverted triangular face lowered and tilted to one side. Most of the compound eyes studding its visage appeared lifeless, the sentient spark gone out behind them, as though a gust of wind had blown out the guttering flame inside a lantern. Only the two largest eyes at the front seemed able to focus upon the web's untimely visitors. "To be hon-est with you... there've been times... I've felt better..."
"Face it, " Boba Fett said bluntly. "You're dying."
"Oh, no ... not at all ..." The triangular head raised itself a bit, displaying a shakily lopsided imitation of a humanoid smile. "I'll survive this ... as I've survived other things ..." A twiglike forelimb lifted, its end claw twitching and pointing to Kud'ar Mub'at's head. "This is no more . . . than the results of ... a neural feedback surge . . . from the crash . . . that's all ..." The claw tapped against the black shell of the assembler's skull with a dry little clicking noise. "Your sudden entry . . . into my humble abode ... most unfortunate ..." Kud'ar Mub'at tried to raise itself a little higher in its deflated nest, but failed, collapsing once more into the broken tangle of its arms. "But you shall see ... all things can be mended ..." A crazed light shone in the largest of the as-sembler's eyes. "I've had so much practice . . . creating additions to myself . . . outside my body . . . that I can create a new cortex inside here ..." The raised claw tip dug harder at the skull behind the triangular face, as though already getting down to the repair job. "To replace the one .. . that the circumstances ... of your ar-rival ... damaged."