[Bounty Hunter Wars] - 01(19)

The necessary data zapped along the web’s tangled neurons. Another subassembly, with useless vestigial legs and a softly fragile shell encasing its specific-function cortex, mulled over what it had received, converting raw visuals to useful numbers. “Thyip thyoud arrive …” Calculator’s tiny lisping mouth moved

beneath

the wobbling lump of neural matter. “In leth thyan thuh-ree thtandard time part-th.”



“I know who it is!” Identifier scrambled up onto Kud’ar Mub’at’s shoulder-if arachnoids could be said to have shoulders-and excitedly chattered into its earhole. The little database subassembly had listened in to what Lookout had told Calculator. “I know, I know! It’s the Slave I! Positive identification made-“



“Of course it is.” With another leg, Kud’ar Mub’at plucked



Identifier

from

its

body-the

childlike subassemblies would swarm all over it, if it let them-and set the node down on one of the web’s structural strands. “Now just settle down, little one.”



“Boba Fett must be aboard!” Identifier, with its own miniature versions of its parent’s stiff-spined legs, skittered back and forth on the taut silken fiber. “Boba Fett!” The subassembly had no particular liking for the bounty hunter; it just got excited over any visitors to the web. “It’s Boba Fett’s ship!”



Kud’ar Mub’at sighed wearily, someplace deep inside his near-spherical abdomen. His own mannerisms were slow and somewhat languid, or as much so as the latter term could be applied to a chitin-encased arachnoid. The constant chatter of Identifier ^nnoyed him on occasion. Perhaps, mused Kud’ar Mub’at, I should reabsorb that node. And design and develop another one. A quieter one. But right now the problem wasn’t so much that of raw materials-Kud’ar Mub’at could always extrude more subas sembly fiber-as of time. Time lag, to be precise; even a node as relatively uncomplicated as that took hundreds of time units to develop to an operational standard. With as much business as Kud’ar Mub’at was handling right now, it couldn’t afford to be without a functioning identifier.



Maybe

later, thought the assembler as it

hung suspended in a nexus of the web’s thicker strands. When this business with Boba Fett is over. Kud’ar Mub’at figured that its credit accounts would be fat enough then, so that it could afford to take a little time off. It would have to talk to Balancesheet about that.



“Go tell Docker and the Handler twins.” Kud’ar Mub’at gave the little chore to Identifier, rather than just plugging back into the web’s communication neurons. “Tell them to get ready for company.”



The little subassembly jumped and scurried away, down the dark, fibrous corridors to the web’s distant landing snare. That’ll keep it out of my leg hairs for a while, thought Kud’ar Mub’at. It gently moved Lookout aside and applied one of its own compound eyes to the view hole, scanning the stars for any visible indication of his enemy and business associate.



He’d long ago decided that this was the worst part of the job. I’d rather hang out with the Hutts, thought Boba Fett. And that was saying something: Huttese palaces, like the one Jabba the Hutt kept on Tatooine, were sinkholes of gratuitous depravity. Every time he’d been in one, either delivering a captive or collecting a bounty in person, he’d felt as though he had been slogging through a sewer filled with the galaxy’s offal and waste. The careless ease with which someone like Jabba could dispose of an underling-Boba Fett had heard of the pet rancor creature that Jabba kept beneath his palace, but hadn’t yet seen it-always irritated him. Why kill when there was no profit involved? A waste of time, credits, and flesh. But even a Hutt’s palace was more to Fett’s liking than Kud’ar Mub’at’s web.



The

tapering cylinder floated in the Slave I’s viewport, gradually growing closer. It didn’t even look like a constructed artifact, as much as it resembled some accidental conglomeration of glue and wire,

strung together with a Corellian scavenge rat’s idiot thrift. As Fett’s ship approached, and Kud’ar Mub’at’s web blotted out more of the stars in the viewport, various bits of machinery could be seen, sharper-edged than the clotted fibers in which they were embedded. Boba Fett had been dealing with the arachnoid assembler long enough to know that it couldn’t resist a bargain, no matter what kind of worthless junk was involved; portions of the web were a museum of defunct interstellar transports and other dead castoffs. Even Jawas pursued their trade in junk and used droids as a way of turning a profit; Kud’ar Mub’at apparently just liked accumulating stuff, incorporating it into the space-drifting home the assembler had spun out from its own guts.