[Bounty Hunter Wars] - 03(51)

“All right-” Voss’on’t’s expression had gone from a sneer to burning anger as he had listened to Boba Fett. “So you’re further ahead of the game than I thought. You must feel clever, huh?”

“Clever enough,” said Fett. “Now let’s see how clever you are.” He let go of Voss’on’t, dropping him back to the chamber floor. “Didn’t you hear what Balancesheet and Prince Xizor said just now? They don’t want any more creatures around than necessary who know the truth behind this scheme to break up the Bounty Hunters Guild. They’ve already decided to get rid of Kud’ar Mub’at. What makes you so confident that they’ll want to leave you still alive?”

Voss’on’t was taken aback by Boba Fett’s words; it took him a moment to sputter out his reply. “You’re … you’re wrong! You don’t know anything about that! Everything I did… I did it in the service of the Emperor!” Voss’on’t’s eyes went wide, the tone of his voice growing more desperate. “The Emperor wouldn’t let anything happen to me now … not after all the risks I went through …” He snapped his beseeching gaze toward Xizor. “It wouldn’t be right… it wouldn’t be fair…”

“You’re going to discover,” said Boba Fett quietly, “that Palpatine is the one who decides what’s fair and what’s not.” He turned away and strode toward the chamber’s exit.

“Wait! Don’t…”

Another voice, a higher-pitched shriek, sounded after Boba Fett. At the mouth of the web’s corridor, he found himself suddenly encumbered by the sticklike limbs of the arachnoid assembler Kud’ar Mub’at. It had managed to scramble off its flaccid nest and lunge after him. Boba Fett looked down and saw the assembler’s triangular face below, the compound eyes peering futilely for some sign of sympathy behind the helmet’s dark visor.

“Take me with you,” pleaded Kud’ar Mub’at. “You’ll see … I can still be of some … use to you …”

Boba Fett peeled the creature’s limbs away from himself. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Business partners always wind up getting in my way. Then I have to do something about them.” He shoved the assembler back toward the center of the main chamber. “You’re just as well off with your other business associates.”

Before he turned and walked away, Fett caught a glimpse of Prince Xizor’s guards; they had returned and had pulled Trhin Voss’on’t up between them. The look of panic on the stormtrooper’s face was the last he saw before he continued heading back to Slave I.

The web started to die before he even reached the ship.

A shudder ran through the walls around Boba Fett, as though the heavy structural fibers had suddenly contracted in upon themselves. The smaller, entangled fibers that formed the shell of the web scraped across each other, like rough woven fabric being pulled apart by invisible giant hands. A sudden wind came close to knocking Boba Fett off balance as the atmospheric pressure inside the web fell. The rush of oxygen to the surrounding vacuum tore the tattered rents in the web open wider; Boba Fett felt the chill of space seep through his Mandalorian battle armor as he clamped his teeth on the helmet’s breathing tube, drawing in its last store of oxygen. As the tangled floor buckled beneath his feet, he fought his way toward Slave I.

He knew that in the distance behind him, the assembler Kud’ar Mub’at was facing the Black Sun cleanup crew. An operation such as that would be as thorough, and final, as Prince Xizor’s commands would dictate. When they were done, there would no longer be a Kud’ar Mub’at, or the web that had once formed the assembler’s private little world.

The web’s death throes intensified as the interwoven neural fibers reacted to their creator’s agony. On all sides of the central corridor and above Boba Fett’s head, the tethered subnodes thrashed and convulsed, stirred from their torpor by the inputs of pain overloading their own systems. A thicket of spidery limbs rose up in front of Boba Fett, like animated twigs and the heavier, thicker branches of a leafless forest caught in a winter planet’s flesh-stripping tornado. Sets of compound eyes gazed upon him with uncomprehending fear as the subnodes’ claw tips fastened upon his battle armor, the larger ones seizing his arms and legs like chitinous hunting traps.

One of the immense docking subnodes, its bulk extending twice the length of Boba Fett’s own height, reared up beneath him, toppling him onto one shoulder. A swarm of hand-sized subnodes scurried in panic across the visor of his helmet; they clung to his fist as he unholstered his blaster pistol and fired at the docking subnode crashing down toward him. The subnode’s shell burst apart, the blaster-charred fragments swirling like black snow in the vortices of the web’s atmosphere rushing through the disintegrating structure. On his back, Boba Fett kept his outstretched fists locked together on the blaster; the continuous volley of white-hot bolts scorched through the docking subnode’s revealed soft tissues, dividing them into smoldering gobbets falling on either side of him.