Dengar had for clearing his accounts. If, Neelah figured, he doesn’t get killed along the way.
She looked down again at the bounty hunter on the makeshift pallet. Dengar was already asleep, or doing a good imitation of it. Telling stories-even true ones-was obviously not in his usual repertoire of skills. Any kind of action, no matter how strenuous or life-endangering, was more suited to him than stringing words together.
A feeling of acute distaste rose inside Neelah as she raised her eyes again to the dull metal bulkheads of the ship’s cargo hold. She had only been able to stand being here as long as the unreeling story had diverted her attention. Now, the close, stench-filled air formed a choking fist inside her throat, as though she could literally taste the despair and anger of that other hard merchandise, the ones who had fallen into the hands of Bossk. They might not have been as profitable as those that Boba Fett tracked down and secured, but their lives had been worth just as much to themselves, if no one else.
I’ve got to get out of here, thought Neelah desperately. She didn’t know if her own words meant the cargo hold, this ship that its previous owner had named Hound’s Tooth, or the dark mystery that her life had become. It didn’t matter; there was only one exit before her, the metal ladder at the side of the hold that led to the ship’s cockpit area. Go on, Neelah told herself, hesitating as she set a hand on an eye-level tread. You’ve faced him before. A wry smile twisted the corner of her mouth. And you’re not dead yet. She had even pulled and held a blaster pistol on Boba Fett, right there in the Hound’s cockpit-how many other creatures in the galaxy could say they had done something like that and survived to talk about it? Neelah put her boot on the lowest rung and started climbing.
Boba Fett was at the cockpit’s panel, making precise adjustments to the large, troughlike controls designed for a Trandoshan’s outsize claws. In the hatchway behind, Neelah stood watching him, the back of his scarred and dented helmet as enigmatic as the dark, T-shaped visor that hid his eyes. I’ve seen those as well, she reminded herself. And lived.
Another accomplishment that undoubtedly put her in a tiny fraction of the galaxy’s inhabitants, on all the worlds and in every system. The helmet had been the one part of the battle gear that hadn’t been reduced to wet rags by the acidic digestive juices of the Sarlacc creature in the Great Pit of Carkoon, into which Boba Fett had fallen when Han Solo had been rescued by his friends Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. But Neelah and Dengar had still had to remove the helmet from the unconscious Fett to feed and rehydrate him until he could fend for himself once more. Even in that condition, hovering between life and death, Boba Fett had still seemed an intimidating figure. Anyone with a degree less furious energy and survival instinct as part of his spirit would have been consumed by the blind, gaping-mawed creature that had swallowed him, rather than finding the means to literally explode his way out to the open air. It wasn’t just Boba Fett’s short way with other creatures’ lives that made him such a legend; it was also the tenacity with which he clung to his own.
The bounty hunter was either ignoring her as he went about his tasks on the Hound’s control panel, or he hadn’t been aware of her coming up the cargo-hold ladder to the cockpit’s hatchway; he continued the work of his gloved hands without remarking on her presence. He knows I’m here, thought Neelah. There’s not much he doesn’t know…
She raised her eyes to the viewport in front of the control panel just as Boba Fett dropped the Hound’s Tooth out of hyperspace. A vista of stars, different from those left on the other side of the galaxy, filled the viewport. Neelah looked across the bright, cold field, hoping that the uncaring regard of the distant stars would provide her some relief from the cramped, claustrophobic quarters inside the ship. She looked, and she saw-The past.
Not her own, but Boba Fett’s. It’s just like the story, a part of Neelah marveled, almost childlike in its reaction. The story Dengar told.
Floating in the vacuum outside the Hound’s Tooth were the tattered fragments of Kud’ar Mub’at’s web. It had not been from any particular skill on Dengar’s part that she had been able to so vividly imagine the image of the arachnoid assembler and its web, both before and after Prince Xizor’s cleanup crew had torn it apart. There had been another tantalizing fragment of memory inside her own head, something that had somehow evaded the attempt to wipe it out of existence. Somehow, from out of her past and the world that had been stolen from her, Dengar’s account of Boba Fett’s history had triggered that remembrance; she had known exactly what Kud’ar Mub’at and his flock of created subnodes had looked like. I knew it, thought Neelah. And now they were here, gently drifting, surrounded by strands of pallid neural tissue like elongated ghosts, bumping soundlessly against the transparisteel of the cockpit’s forward viewport.