Pushing himself up onto his hands and knees, Dengar looked through the maze of fallen durasteel beams. He could just barely make out the figures of Boba Fett and the assembler collapsed inside its nest. For some reason, Kud’ar Mub’at’s corpse now looked as lifeless as it had when he and Boba Fett had first dragged it into the reconstructed web. There wasn’t time to ponder that mystery; before Dengar could get to his feet, a blaze of light seemed to explode in the main chamber ahead of him. In its glare, Boba Fett was knocked back as the assembler disintegrated, its sticklike limbs flying through tumbled arcs and away from the atomized fragments of its body.
The noise from the explosion had deafened Dengar for a moment. Shaking his head to clear it, he was suddenly aware of another, even more threatening sound: the ragged ends of the structural fibers around him fluttered and streamed pennantlike, drawn by the slowly increasing roar of the web’s atmosphere rushing through an exterior breach.
Dizzied by the oxygen thinning in his nostrils and lungs, Dengar staggered forward and grabbed Boba Fett’s forearm, pulling the other bounty hunter to his feet. “What’s … what’s happening? …” With his free hand, Dengar gestured toward the tattered remains of Kud’ar Mub’at. “It’s dead again! It has to be-there’s nothing left of it!” He gazed around in panic at the heaving walls of the surrounding web. “Why is it still-“
“You idiot.” Boba Fett shoved him away from the assembler’s nest and toward the web’s main corridor. “Can’t you tell? We’re under attack!”
Dengar realized that the other man was correct; as if in confirmation, another white-hot flash tore through the chamber, inches behind them. He felt the heat of a laser-cannon bolt on his back as he ran through the collapsing, disintegrating web. The transfer hatch to the Hound’s Tooth was just meters ahead of him…
It might as well have been kilometers.
Another bolt hit, bursting apart the curve of structural fibers directly above him. Sparks and blackened shards of tissue whirled around Dengar as he felt himself both rising and falling into darkness.
She had been turning over the words inside her head. The words, a name, her true name. Neelah had exited from the security-locked files that she had broken into-all the things that Boba Fett hadn’t told her, that he himself didn’t know the value of-and shut down that part of the ship’s computers. That had left a blank display screen in front of her as she had taken her hands and forearms out of the Trandoshan-fitted control grooves on the cockpit panel. She didn’t care about that, or the cold stars slowly wheeling about in the forward viewport. In her mind’s eye, she could still envision the symbol she had found buried in Boba Fett’s datafiles, the ones concerning the late Nil Posondum. As she leaned back in the pilot’s chair, eyes closed, the lopsided circle and inner triangle that Posondum had scratched into the floor of the holding cage, so long ago, transformed itself into the ancient, gold-worked emblem of the planet Kuat’s noble families.
And one of them, she mused, is my family. Neelah wasn’t quite sure of all the details-parts of her memory were still shrouded in obscuring mists-but she knew for certain that there were several such noble families, all of them linked economically to the fount of wealth known as Kuat Drive Yards. They all had at one time borne the KDY emblem on their most dignified robes, and other items such as the heirloom blanket in which she had been wrapped as an infant. It had only been in later generations
that factionalism and bad blood between the ruling families had given rise to separate clan insignia.
Though she didn’t know everything-such as what had happened to have brought her so far from home-she knew the name of that infant swaddled in the ancient emblem. My name, thought Neelah. My real name.
“Kateel.” She whispered the name aloud, as though calling softly to that person who had been lost and now was found again. “Kateel of Kuhlvult.”
Then she smiled. Well, thought Neelah, it’s a beginning …
Another sound-or silence, the absence of sound-broke into her contented meditations. Her brow creased as she opened her eyes; it took a moment before she realized what had happened. Looking down, she saw that the black cable that Boba Fett had rigged from the ship’s computer, snaking out to the airlock’s exit port and then looped to the reconstructed web of Kud’ar Mub’at, had suddenly ceased its pulsating shimmer. It lay like a dead thing across the floor of the cockpit.
Perhaps the two of them, Dengar and Boba Fett, had finished their work over there. Neelah found it hard to imagine that the pair of bounty hunters had found out anything from the arachnoid assembler, or what part of it they had been able to reclaim from the dead, comparable in value to what she had discovered while sitting in the comfort of the pilot’s chair.