“Just watch.” Fett pulled his arm away from Dengar’s grasp. “Maybe the problem isn’t whether you’re dead or alive, Kud’ar Mub’at.” He stepped around to the side of the nest and the grey creature hunkered down in it. “Maybe you’re just not alive enough.” Boba Fett reached behind the assembler’s jointed neck and grabbed the controls of the pulsator device, leaving the gleaming metal needle still inserted up into the cerebral cortex. “That can be changed.”
Looking down at the black cable, Dengar saw its surface shimmer with a wildly increasing intensity. Instinctively, he drew his boot back, as though it had come too close to an exposed high-voltage conduit. The cable seemed almost alive, twisting about on the fibrous floor of the web, like a glistening serpent from the bogs of a swamp-covered planet.
At the same time, he heard a crackling and tearing noise from the center of the chamber. Dengar looked up and saw the assembler’s corpse thrashing convulsively, the jointed sticklike limbs pulled out from beneath the torn abdomen and whipping in the air, as though a windstorm had animated the black, leafless branches of a winter forest. Kud’ar Mub’at’s triangular face was contorted with the energy surging behind the blind eyes, the angled mouth stretched open in a silent scream.
Boba Fett still had his hand upon the pulsator device’s controls, his durasteel-like grip forcing the assembler’s overloaded corpse to stay in the hollow of the flaccid nest. “Now do you remember?”
The assembler made no answer. A couple of its smaller, weaker limbs detached themselves from the corpse, flying across the chamber and striking the curved walls.
“Hey…” Dengar looked around himself with alarm. The storm he had imagined tearing through the web’s confines now seemed to have become even stronger and more visible. Flaring sparks ran through the neural fibers like quick lightning, leaving behind the scent of ozone and burning tissue. “Maybe you’d better back off on that-this place is tearing itself apart!”
Echoing Dengar’s words, the web shuddered, hard enough to knock him from his feet. He caught hold of one of the horizontal durasteel beams that had been installed to keep the unpressurized structure from collapsing in on itself, and managed to keep himself upright. Though only for a second: another convulsive wave rolled through the web, the floor whipping high enough to throw him clear. As he fell backward, Dengar saw the beam rip loose from its mooring point on one side of the tunnellike space; it swung about from the other end, smashing loose the beams farther on in a clashing chain reaction.
He’s gone crazy, thought Dengar. Through the falling, colliding durasteel beams and the heaving of the web’s floor and walls, he couldn’t even spot Boba Fett, up in the main chamber beside the corpse of Kud’ar Mub’at. The frustration from coming all this way, intent on information, and finding no answers, must have unhinged the other bounty hunter’s mind. Boba Fett was normally so calm and calculating-he would have to have been temporarily insane not to see how the drastically increased pulsator flow had triggered a catastrophic agony in the assembler. The creature’s diminished physical form and the attached neural fibers running through the length of the web were thrashing themselves to pieces; Dengar could hear the racketing clatter of the spidery limbs, and
the shattering of the chitinous exoskeleton at their center. That was bad enough, but the web shook and buckled at the same time; already, great sections of the fibrous structure that Dengar and Boba Fett had so laboriously sealed back together were now ripping apart from one another, like rough cloth being pulled by giant, invisible hands.
With speed born of desperation, Dengar scrambled beneath the tilted beam and dived for the black cable. It seemed even more animated now, with the motion imparted to it by the buckling and heaving of the web’s floor. He grabbed hold of the cable with one hand while simultaneously reaching into his belt pouch for his vibroblade. With one upward stroke, the ‘blade sliced through the cable, sparks of short-circuited wires spitting out from the raw end.
He had thought that terminating the pulsing input from the computers back onboard the Hound’s Tooth would also end the thrashing agony of the web. The remainder of the cable running to the pulsator device inserted in the back of Kud’ar Mub’at’s skull had gone slack and lifeless, the shimmering now dissipated and inert. But for some reason Dengar couldn’t understand, the web around him continued its self-destroying contortions. One of the largest structural fibers, thicker in diameter than his own waist, suddenly snapped, shredding apart a tangle of smaller strands, their pallid grey shafts flurrying across his shoulders and hastily averted face.