[Bounty Hunter Wars] - 01(20)

Though it wasn’t all just junk, Boba Fett knew; that was merely what Kud’ar Mub’at let show on the surface of the web, perhaps as a matter of protective camouflage. Not everyone had done as well in their encounters with the assembler as he had; the few times that Fett had actually gone into the web, he’d spotted some not inconsiderable treasures, bits and pieces that the less fortunate had been obliged to leave behind, to discharge their debts to Kud’ar Mub’at. It would probably be better to leave one’s skin behind than try to cheat the spidery entity.



Faint greenish lights showed in a rough circle, indicating the docking section of the web. One of Kud’ar Mub’at’s subassemblies-Signaler was what it was called, if

Fett

remembered correctly-was a

phosphorescent herpetoid node, long enough to encircle one end of the web with its glowing, snakelike form. Kud’ar Mub’at had let enough intelligence develop in the node so that it could blink out a simple directional landing pattern for any ship making a rendezvous with the web. Another group of subassemblies, arrayed just inside the pulsing circle, were devoid of even that much brainpower; they could sense the proximity of a spacecraft and, like the ten tacles of a Threndrian snareflower, grab hold and bring it in tight and secure to the web’s entry port. Boba Fett loathed the idiot appendages, with their flexing vacuum-resistant scales like rust-pitted armor plate. He’d told Kud’ar Mub’at before, that if he ever found any scraps from the tentacles still clinging to the Slave I after he’d left the web, he’d turn around and pluck the nodes one by one from the web with a short-range tractor beam. That’d be a painful process for Kud’ar Mub’at; every piece of the living web was connected to the assembler by a skein of neurofibers.



He cut the Slave I’s approach engines, leaving the craft with enough momentum to keep it on a slow and steady course toward the web’s dock. Inside the ring of light, the tips of the grappling nodes had already begun to ease into position as the subassemblies woke from their dreaming half sleep.



“Ah, my dear Fett.” A high-pitched voice greeted him as he clambered down from the docking port into the narrow confines of the web’s interior. “How truly a delight it is to see you once more. After how horribly such a long time it has been-“



“Stow it.” Boba Fett looked up and saw by the top of his

helmet

one of Kud’ar Mub’at’s

mobile

vocal appendages, a subassembly that was little more than a rudimentary mouth tethered by a glistening cord. This one must have been just recently extruded by the assembler, the neural silk was still white and unmarked by the web’s centuries of accumulated filth. “I’m here for business, not conversation.”



The little voice box scurried along the tunnel’s fibrous ceiling, a pair of tiny claws reeling in its con necting line as it kept pace with Fett. “Ah, that is truly indeed the bounty hunter of my long acquaintance, so bold and vivid he is in my remembering! How sadly long I have been without the pleasure of your succinct and charming wit.”



Fett made no reply as he clambered through the tunnel, its interwoven tissues yielding beneath the weight of his boots. Wherever his thick gloves grabbed hold, ripples of firing synapses sparked in fading concentric circles, as though from a stone dropped in an ocean filled with phosphorescent plankton. A few light nodes, the smaller brethren of Signaler on the web’s exterior, glowed before him and dropped back

into darkness after he had passed by. Fett supposed that when Kud’ar Mub’at had no visitor, the web remained unlit. The assembler required no light to move around inside an artifact constructed of its own spun-out cortex.



“There you are in your entirety!” The same voice, like sheet metal being torn in half, sounded from in front of Boba Fett as he ducked beneath a ridge of hardened silk. “I knew you’d return, crowned with the eminence of success.” The words were louder, coming from Kud’ar Mub’at’s own mouth rather than the little voice-box node. “And of undeniable punctuality you are as well, indeed.”



Boba Fett stepped into the web’s central chamber, a space large enough for him to stand upright in. It was more than a matter of simile that it seemed to Fett as though he had walked into the center of the assembler’s brain. That was the reality of Kud’ar Mub’at’s nest and body, an interconnected unity, one and the same thing. It lives inside its armor, thought Fett, as I live inside mine.



“I returned here when I said I would.” Fett turned his masked gaze upon the assembler. “It was a simple enough job.”