“Maybe.” Ott Klemp climbed up after the commander. “But that’s only going to be after a lot of them are dead as well.”
Rozhdenst leaned forward and slapped the younger man on the shoulder. “Save it for when they get here.”
The landing dock’s doors swung slowly open, revealing the field of stars beyond, as Klemp fired up the shuttle’s thruster engine. A moment later, the craft traced a red arc away from Kuat Drive Yards, heading back toward the waiting squadron.
10
“I can’t believe,” said Dengar, looking around himself, “that this place was any more cheerful when it was alive.”
He and Boba Fett were surrounded by the tangled fibrous walls of what had been Kud’ar Mub’at’s web. Enough structural integrity had been achieved that the main chamber and a few of the narrow corridors leading from it could hold a breathable atmospheric pressure. That made working in the reconstructed spaces easier, if nowhere near enjoyable.
Boba Fett ignored his comment, just as he had ignored all of Dengar’s previous grumbling complaints. Standing several meters away, near the spot where Kud’ar Mub’at’s thronelike nest had once been, Boba Fett continued the application of the low-level electrosynaptic pulse device that was slowly bringing the web back from the dead. Behind the bounty hunter, thick cables snaked back toward the temporary exit port that led to the web’s exterior. The cables’ glossy black sheathing, like the skin of a planet-bound herpetoid creature, shimmered with the effects of the energy coursing within. That energy, and the parallel data flow that shaped and adjusted it to the task of revivifying the web’s interwoven neural cells, came from the Hound’s Tooth, moored almost within touching distance of the heavier structural fibers that bound the mass of finer neurons together.
“That should hold.” Dengar made the comment aloud, as much for the purpose of hearing a human voice in this dismal space as for getting any reaction from his partner. The walls of the web’s main chamber had to be propped apart from each other, to keep them from collapsing in on him and Fett. From the Hound’s cargo hold, they had stripped out enough durasteel beams for the job, transferring them over from the ship and awkwardly wrestling them into place among the sections of web they had previously scoured from the vacuum and laboriously bound back together. Even doing that much of a reconstruction on the late arachnoid assembler’s web would have been impossible if the Black Sun cleanup crew, the henchmen of Prince Xizor that had destroyed it in the first place, had turned blasters or any other kind of incendiary weapons on it. But all the pieces, the floating strands and knots of pallid grey tissue, had still been floating in the vacuum, waiting to be resurrected. “Any more of them?” Catching his breath, Dengar rested a hand on a horizontally mounted beam next to his head. “Might be able to scrounge a few more out of the ship-“
As if in reply, the durasteel beam groaned and creaked, echoed by the others that filled the chamber like the elements of a three-dimensional maze. The tangled walls pulsed and contracted, as though the two men were caught in some giant creature’s digestive tract.
It’s like the Sarlacc, thought Dengar. He gazed with both fascination and disgust at the motions of the web’s structure. The effect had reminded him of the few details that Boba Fett had recounted, about having been swallowed by the blind, omnivorous beast that had once formed
the fang-ringed center of the Great Pit of Carkoon,
back in the Dune Sea on Tatooine. This must be what it’s like, to be swallowed up and still be alive…
The pulsing motion ceased as Boba Fett drew the working tip of the tool in his hands away from the intricate cluster of neural ganglia before him. Across his boots, the black cable lay, still shimmering with the power relayed from the ship. The dark gaze of Boba Fett’s helmet visor glanced back over his shoulder, toward Den-gar. “That was just a test,” he said. “Of the web’s spinal connections.”
“Thanks for warning me.” The shiver that had tightened Dengar’s shoulders now slowly ebbed away. I’ll be glad, he thought, when this is over. Facing blaster fire, and every other hazard that seemed to come with being Boba Fett’s partner, were all preferable to the task of restoring Kud’ar Mub’at’s web to a semblance of life.
Unfortunately, that was a necessary part of the plan.
Without it-without the extended neural system of the web being once more filled with the sparks of impulse and sensation-the quest that had led both Dengar and Boba Fett, and Neelah as well, to this remote sector of space, and even remoter and more isolated sector of the past, was over.