[Bounty Hunter Wars] - 03(79)

“I’ll say.” From behind Boba Fett, Dengar muttered his comment. Getting answers from the dead assembler had seemed only to make things more confusing rather than less.

“Standard business practice,” continued Kud’ar Mub’at’s

withered corpse. “I kept most of the credits … that the original client sent here with Nil Posondum. For a tiny percentage of what was left over … Posondum then delivered the fee I had arranged with Ree Duptom. Posondum then went about his other scrabbling little business affairs, one of which turned out badly enough for him to wind up as hard merchandise in your holding cage, Boba Fett. Of course … I always knew that a little hustling nonentity such as Nil Posondum would end up like that… but I’m suspicious about what happened to Duptom. He operated on a large enough scale to have real enemies… who would very much have liked to have seen him dead…”

“I’m not interested in Ree Duptom’s enemies.” Boba Fett’s words turned impatient. “I want to know who he was working for. Who hired him-through you-to transport fabricated evidence about Prince Xizor’s involvement in an Imperial stormtrooper raid on the planet Tatooine? Was it the same person who paid for him to kidnap and wipe the memory of the young female human I found aboard his ship?”

“Of course it was, Boba Fett.” The dead assembler tucked its forelimbs back around its abdomen. “You know that-it had to be, since one payment was made for both jobs. I got the client a bargain rate that way. I like to keep my customers happy … it makes for good business.”

Boba Fett dropped the black cable and stepped forward. With one gloved hand, he grabbed the dead assembler’s narrow, triangular head, almost wrenching it from the stalklike neck as he turned the blind eyes toward himself. “Tell me,” demanded Fett. “Who was the client? Who paid Ree Duptom for those jobs?”

“A good question, my dear Fett.” The dead assembler managed to sneer at him. “A very good question, indeed … and how I wish I could answer it for you… and for myself.”

“What are you talking about?” Boba Fett took his hand away from the other creature. “You know who it was. You’d have to know-“

“Correction; I did know. When I was alive.” A macabre, tittering laugh came from within the assembler’s hollowed body. “But that was then, and this is now. You and your partner here have done a very good job of reassembling my poor, sundered web-but not a perfect job. There were some parts of my extended neural system that were too damaged for you to restore; I can feel them missing, as though some of my actual physical limbs had been amputated. And when there are pieces missing in a web, it stands to reason that there must be holes in their place.” The claw tip at the end of the raised forelimb tapped at the skull’s enclosing chitin. “There are, I regret to inform you, large gaps in my memory … things I cannot remember. Though, of course, it would have been impossible for me to have ever forgotten the inimitable Boba Fett … I’m afraid that Nil Posondum was not quite so memorable a figure. There may have only been a few strands of my memory in which details about him were encoded… so you have to understand how they would be easily lost.” The blind eyes seemed to regard Boba Fett with amusement. “You’ve come all this way for nothing … how unfortunate.”

“I’ll tell you what’s unfortunate,” said Boba Fett. “Unfortunate is how you’re going to feel when I’m done with you. You’re not going to hold out on me this time.”

“What are you going to do about it?” The assembler’s laughter turned into a grating cackle. “A hundred different ways of killing at your disposal-I can just see you standing there, bristling with all your weapons, like a walking arsenal-and all of them useless now. You can keep me alive as long as you want… it merely delays the moment of my falling once again into the sweetness of death. You were as much responsible as any other creature, Boba Fett, for my having discovered the pleasures of being dead-I realize now that it was the best deal I ever made! But I’ve tasted it, and drank deep of that intoxicating darkness … deep enough that I can wait for it again. And in the meantime… your threats are of little avail…”

The assembler’s words unnerved Dengar more than anything else that had happened so far, in this roughly woven mausoleum floating in space. “Come on-” He stepped forward and grabbed Boba Fett by the elbow. “It’s right. There’s nothing you can do-“