He knew it wouldn’t be long now before a flicker of life and intelligence appeared in the empty eyes that had gazed into his own. The prospect of discovering the secrets of the past, and finding the way to a mountain of credits, didn’t make him dread that coming moment any less.
It was her turn to sit in the pilot’s chair.
Neelah had stood in the hatchway of the Hound’s Tooth cockpit area often enough, watching Boba Fett as he had navigated the ship to this remote sector. Even when the bounty hunter had swiveled the chair around in order to talk with her, the difference between their positions had
been irritatingly symbolic. Like Jabba’s court, it had struck Neelah, with him on his throne and everybody else petitioning for his attention.
One of the metal panels beneath the cockpit’s gauges and controls had been pried open by Boba Fett, so he could rig up the black cables that now snaked out through an airlock access port and across the few meters of distance to the reconstructed web. All of the equipment aboard the Hound was inferior to what Boba Fett had installed aboard his own Slave I; he’d had to improvise the necessary gear and connections, to get the needed stream of electro-neural pulsations to apply to the dead fibers. Even now, the onboard computer generating the control data was unstable enough that Neelah had been assigned the task of monitoring it, riding gain on its output to keep it within operational limits.
That took only a fraction of her attention, no matter how important the job might have been. Fortunately so; sitting at the cockpit’s control panel, with access to the rest of the ship’s computerized databases, she could set about her own agenda. And without Boba Fett or Den-gar knowing anything about it-that suited her to perfection. They’ll find out, she had told herself, when-and if-I want them to.
There were already secrets she was keeping from the two bounty hunters. She had been keeping them for a while now, since the moment when Boba Fett had recounted the story of what he had found aboard the other ship, the one called the Venesectrix, that had belonged to the dead Ree Duptom. Little doors to the past had opened up inside her head, into chambers of memory; dark chambers, whose contents she could barely make out, and with the doors to the chambers beyond still frustratingly locked to her. Boba Fett and Dengar were over there in the assembler’s web that they had so painstakingly woven back together, as though they had been primitive scientists stitching together a dismembered body, hoping to animate it with lightning pulled down from some planet’s storm-wracked sky. Their creation, with the formerly dead Kud’ar Mub’at installed as the brain atop its spine, might very well sit up and tell them the secrets they had come here to discover, as though the past were a golden key on its cold tongue. But in the meantime, Neelah had a little key of her own to use. There were some other doors, outside her shadowed memory, and right inside the computers of the Hound’s Tooth, that she was going to unlock.
He didn’t want to tell me, thought Neelah. All the things that he knows about my past. She nodded with the pleasure of anticipation. Boba Fett wasn’t as smart as he always pretended to be. The bounty hunter had left her right where she needed to be, to find out all those secrets on her own.
Neelah bent over the control panel, turning her attention to the computer’s main display panel. The power and data flow through the black cables, out to the web tethered to the ship, was operating smoothly for now; she could safely ignore it while she worked on her own agenda.
The keypads for the computer were at the far end of the troughlike grooves in the panel, designed for the use of a Trandoshan’s heavy claws. Her own forearms disappeared in them, almost up to the elbow, as she punched in command sequences, first laboriously, then with increasing speed. Within seconds, a screenful of information appeared in front of her that had been locked away beneath Boba Fett’s own personal security codes before.
She sat back in the pilot’s chair, breathing out a deep sigh of relief. Satisfaction mingled with the previous pleasure she had felt. The little doors inside her head, which had opened when she heard Boba Fett say the name of the dead bounty hunter, had given her access to a key more valuable than Fett could ever have imagined. Not in the form of information, such as her real name, or the story of how she had come to be aboard Ree Duptom’s ship-That would’ve been too easy, Neelah thought wryly-but as an ability, the skill and craft necessary to hack through the coded locks that Boba Fett had installed on this ship’s computers when he had transferred his own data files over from his Slave I. Like disjointed pieces of an archaic jigsaw puzzle fitting together, showing just a bit of the total picture, the name of Ree Duptom had connected with other fragments floating inside the vacuum that her memory had been wiped into.