by K. W. Jeter
the accountant. Posondum had made the grievous error of
shifting allegiances, changing jobs in an industry where
loyalty was prized-and disloyalty punished. Worse, the
accountant had been keeping the financial records for a
chain of illicit skefta dens in the Outer Rim Territories
that were controlled by a Huttese syndicate. Hutts tended
to view their employees as possessions-one of the reasons
that Boba Fett had always kept a freelancer's independent
relationship with his frequent client Jabba. The
accountant Posondum hadn't been so smart; he'd been even
stupider when he'd gone over to his former employers'
competition with a cortical data-splint loaded with the
Hutts' odds-rigging systems and gray-market transfer
shuffles. Hutts were even more secretive than possessive;
Boba Fett had sometimes wondered if they grew so huge by
greedily ingesting everything that came into reach of
their little hands and huge mouths, and letting nothing
go. Not even one frightened accountant with a computer-
enhanced brain full of numbers.
"Why don't you just kill me now?" Posondum hunkered
on the floor of the cage, his back against its bars. He'd
tasted the tray and pushed it away in disgust. "You'd do
a quicker job of it than the Hutts
will."
"Likely so." He felt no pity for the man, who'd
brought his troubles upon himself. You hang out with
Hutts, he thought, you'd better be careful not to get
rolled over on. "But as I said. I do what I get paid for.
No more, no less."
"You'd do anything for credits, wouldn't you?" Boba
Fett could see his own reflection, doubled in the small
mirrors of the accountant's resentfully burning eyes. The
image he saw was of a full helmet, battered and
discolored, yet completely functional; his face was
concealed by the narrow, T-shaped visor. His combat gear
bristled with armaments, from shin to wrist; the tapered
nose of a directional rocket protruded from behind one
shoulder. A walking arsenal, a humanoid figure built out
of machines. The lethal kind.
The reflected image nodded slowly. "That's right,"
said Boba Fett. "I do the things I'm good at, and for
which I get paid the best." He glanced down at the data
readout. "It's nothing personal."
"Then we could make a deal." Posondum looked up
hopefully at his captor. "Couldn't we?" "What kind of
deal?" "What do you think?" The accountant stood up I and
gripped the bars nearest to Fett. "You like getting
paid-I know the kind of outrageous fees you charge for
your services-and I like remaining alive. I'm probably as
fond of that as you are of credits." Boba Fett let his
masked gaze rest upon the other's sweating face. "You
should have considered how precious your life is to you
before you incurred the wrath of the Hutts. It's a little
late for regrets now.
"But it's not too late for you to make some credits.
More credits than the Hutts can pay you." Posondum
pressed his face into the bars, as though he could
somehow squeeze out between them through the sheer force
of his desperation. "You let me go and I'll make it worth
your while."
"I doubt it," said Fett coldly. "The Hutts pay
excellent bounties. That's why I like taking on their
jobs."
"And why do you think they want to get me back so
badly?" Posondum's knuckles turned white and bloodless as
his fists tightened. "Just for the old ledgers I've got
stowed away inside my head? Or just so the competition
won't find out a few little trade secrets?"
"It's not my business as to why my clients desire
certain things. Things such as yourself." A small in
dicator light pulsed on his wrist-mounted data readout;
he'd have to return to the Slave I's controls soon. "I'm
just pleased that they do want them. And that they'll
pay."
"Just like I will." Posondum lowered his voice,
though there was no one to overhear. "I took more than
information when I left the Hutts. I took credits-a lot
of 'em."
"That was foolish of you." Fett knew how tight the
Huttese were with credits; it was a characteristic of
their species. There had been times when he'd needed to
take extreme measures to get paid for the completion of a
job, even when the terms had been agreed upon beforehand.
So to steal from a Hutt, and to think that one could get
away with it, was the height of idiocy.
"Maybe so-but there was so much of it. And I thought
I could get away, that I could hide. And my new bosses
would protect me. . . ."
"They did the best they could." Boba Fett shrugged.
"It just wasn't good enough. It never is, when I'm
involved."
"Look, I'll give you the credits. All of them."
Posondum trembled with the fervor of his plea. "Every
credit I stole from the Hurts-it's all yours. Just let me
go."
"And just where are these credits?"
Posondum drew back from the cage's bars.
"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. I
"Below the conscious level. And with a trauma sen-sor
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 light-
gathering 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.
Though it wasn't all just junk, Boba Fett knew; that
was merely what Kud'ar Mub'at let show on the surface of
the web, perhaps as a matter of protective camouflage.
Not everyone had done as well
in their encounters with
the assembler as he had; the few times that Fett had
actually gone into the web, he'd spotted some not
inconsiderable treasures, bits and pieces that the less
fortunate had been obliged to leave behind, to discharge
their debts to Kud'ar Mub'at. It would probably be better
to leave one's skin behind than try to cheat the spidery
entity.
Faint greenish lights showed in a rough circle,
indicating the docking section of the web. One of Kud'ar
Mub'at's subassemblies-Signaler was what it was called,
if Fett remembered correctly-was a phosphorescent
herpetoid node, long enough to encircle one end of the
web with its glowing, snakelike form. Kud'ar Mub'at had
let enough intelligence develop in the node so that it
could blink out a simple directional landing pattern for
any ship making a rendezvous with the web. Another group
of subassemblies, arrayed just inside the pulsing circle,
were devoid of even that much brainpower; they could
sense the proximity of a spacecraft and, like the ten
tacles of a Threndrian snareflower, grab hold and bring
it in tight and secure to the web's entry port. Boba Fett
loathed the idiot appendages, with their flexing vacuum-
resistant scales like rust-pitted armor plate. He'd told
Kud'ar Mub'at before, that if he ever found any scraps
from the tentacles still clinging to the Slave I after
he'd left the web, he'd turn around and pluck the nodes
one by one from the web with a short-range tractor beam.
That'd be a painful process for Kud'ar Mub'at; every
piece of the living web was connected to the assembler by
a skein of neurofibers.
He cut the Slave I's approach engines, leaving the
craft with enough momentum to keep it on a slow and
steady course toward the web's dock. Inside the ring of
light, the tips of the grappling nodes had already begun
to ease into position as the subassemblies woke from
their dreaming half sleep.
"Ah, my dear Fett." A high-pitched voice greeted him
as he clambered down from the docking port into the
narrow confines of the web's interior. "How truly a
delight it is to see you once more. After how horribly
such a long time it has been-"
"Stow it." Boba Fett looked up and saw by the top of
his helmet one of Kud'ar Mub'at's mobile vocal
appendages, a subassembly that was little more than a
rudimentary mouth tethered by a glistening cord. This one