[Bounty Hunter Wars] - 03(42)

With one gloved hand grasping the side of the hatchway, Boba Fett scanned the scene around him. The interior of Kud’ar Mub’at’s web was lit a shimmering blue-white by the phosphorescence of masses of illuminator 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 translucent, 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. Before crashing into the web, Boba Fett had reoriented the ship from it usual vertically oriented, tail-downward position; that would have brought the rounded curve of the cockpit like a blunt hammer-blow against the web’s exterior. At the last second, a quick burst of one of the navigational jets had brought the sharper, knifelike projection of the hull above the cockpit toward the rapidly approaching 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 miasma 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 shrieking 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 parent 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 completely overloaded by the sudden disconnection from the assembler on his nest in another part of the web. Spidery, crablike subnodes, trailing their snapped connectors behind 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 quieter, 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 previous 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 excised section such as this was like standing in some creature’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 uniform 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 together. “Then you’d better untie these. Never get there, otherwise.”