[Bounty Hunter Wars] - 03(73)

Fett had explained it all to them. How it was going to work, the only way it could: if the past held the key to the present, then the past had to be broken into and ransacked, the same way the high walls of some rich creature’s palace on a fortified planet would be breached. You found a crack in the wall and widened it enough to enter, then went in and got what you wanted. Simple in the concept; difficult-and dangerous, it seemed to Dengar-in the execution.

The crack in the wall of the past was represented by the memory of the once-living, now-dead arachnoid assembler, Kud’ar Mub’at. Great, Dengar had said to Boba Fett. That ends it right there, doesn’t it? Talking to the dead, learning their secrets, wasn’t a hard job; it was an impossible one. Kud’ar Mub’at was the link to Neelah’s stolen past, and the key to Dengar and Boba Fett’s profiting from that past-if it had been important enough to steal from her, and hide the traces of the theft through a deep memory wipe of her brain, then the chances would be good that it would be worth a good deal of credits to find it and restore it once again. The scent of credits was even stronger with the other possibility connected to the theft of Neelah’s past: finding out who-or what-it was that had been behind the failed plot to implicate the late Prince Xizor in the raid by Imperial stormtroopers on a moisture farm on Tatooine, a raid that had been the trigger, or at least part of it, for Luke Skywalker’s transformation into a leader and legend of the Rebel Alliance. As Boba Fett, with his keen instinct for profits, had pointed out, anytime a trail led that close to the center of major events in the galaxy-with threads tangling around not only a creature who had been the leader of the richest and most powerful criminal organization in all the systems, but also around Emperor Palpatine and his most feared servant, Lord Darth Vader-then the terminus of that trail was likely to be buried under a mountain of credits and influence.

As much as Dengar might have felt that the quest was hopeless, he had to confess to himself that all of his inner greed circuits had been fired up by his partner’s talk. Sure, he had thought, you can get killed, poking into Palpatine’s and Vader’s secrets. But you can also get rich-or at least rich enough to get out of the bounty hunter game. And back into the safe haven of his beloved Manaroo’s arms, and a life that didn’t revolve around kidnapping and killing other creatures while trying to avoid getting killed oneself. That was worth at least a little risk.

All it would take would be bringing a certain assembler back from the dead, so that its memory of those events and plots and schemes could be riffled through. Dengar had gotten used to surprises from his bounty hunter partner, but the next revelation from Boba Fett had exceeded all that had gone before.

Bringing Kud’ar Mub’at back from the dead, Fett had explained, isn’t impossible. Gathering together the pieces of the puzzle-all the scattered strands and chunks of neural tissue that the Black Sun cleanup crew had left drifting in space-would be the hardest part. But the pieces were all there, floating around the Hound’s Tooth. The rest would be relatively easy, or at least according to Boba Fett. I knew more about Kud’ar Mub’at than it knew about itself. In the cockpit area of the Hound, Fett had related to Dengar and Neelah the results of his previous investigations into the nature of such assembler creatures.

Knowing things about one’s business associates always gave one an advantage, especially if they were matters of which the other creature was ignorant. And Kud’ar Mub’at had never shown any great curiosity about its own genetic background or physiology, or whether other assemblers existed anywhere else in the galaxy. Kud’ar Mub’at had been content to consider itself unique, with nothing else like it anywhere in the known systems; it made negotiations with clients easier to have the confidence that there was no other arachnoid assembler whose services they could engage. If Kud’ar Mub’at had ever encountered any other assemblers, it would probably have arranged for their murder, much as it had eliminated its own predecessor, the assembler that had originally created it as a subnode, then suffered the consequences of an unforeseen rebellion. Just as Kud’ar Mub’at had suffered in turn, its former subnode Balancesheet was now somewhere else in the galaxy’s empty spaces, taking care of the business it had inherited from its own deposed creator. But there are other assemblers, Boba Fett had told Dengar and Neelah. I found them. And even more important: I learned from them.

The location of the arachnoid assemblers’ homeworld was something that Boba Fett wouldn’t reveal. You don’t need to know that. Which was just as well with Dengar; the notion of a whole hidden world somewhere, populated by an entire species of spidery, scheming assemblers gave him the creeps. But Boba Fett’s knowledge of an aspect of their physiology was something he did share. Just as an individual assembler, such as Kud’ar