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  Boba Fett shook his head. "If you're expecting grati­ tude, then I'm in short supply. And you're the ones who owe me, remember? For him." He pointed with the blaster toward Voss'on't. "Nobody leaves here, dead or alive, until the bounty gets paid out."

  "That's right!" Kud'ar Mub'at unfolded his fore- limbs, stretching their sticklike lengths out toward Fett. "Don't... trust them," the assembler cried in agitation. "They're . . . they're trying to cheat you." A pleading tone filtered into the high-pitched voice. "I'm . . . the only one... who's on your side ..."

  "Shut up." Boba Fett knocked the assembler's claws away with a swipe of the blaster pistol. "If there's any­ body on my side, I haven't found them yet." He turned his visor-shielded gaze, and the blaster, toward Prince Xi­ zor. "So how about it?"

  "The bounty? Very well." Xizor gave a slight nod, then turned and gestured with one hand toward Balance- sheet. "Transfer the funds being held in escrow on Cor­uscant to the main operating and receipt account of the bounty hunter Boba Fett." He glanced back at Boba Fett and smiled. "You didn't really think all those credits were being kept here, did you?"

  "Doesn't matter where they were." Boba Fett kept the blaster pistol raised. "As long as they wind up in the right place."

  "The credits are already there," said Balancesheet. "I signaled for the transfer to be made before I had my own discussion with Prince Xizor." This time a trace of self- satisfaction sounded in the former subnode's voice. Its small compound eyes looked toward the Falleen. "I was confident that we would wind up in agreement on this matter."

  Xizor's eyes narrowed to slits. His courtly manner of just a few seconds before seemed to have evaporated. "Assumptions such as that might cause difficulties be­ tween us in the future."

  "Perhaps." The tiny creature didn't appear intimi­ dated. "We'll deal with that when the time comes."

  Through his own comlink mounted inside his helmet, Boba Fett accessed the remote communications func­ tions aboard Slave I. It took only a few seconds to verify the sum that had been in the now-empty escrow account, and that a transfer had gone through into his own ac­ count. The bounty for Trhin Voss'on't was his now.

  "Fine," said Boba Fett. The blaster pistol stayed raised in his hand. "You two can sort out your business affairs any way you want. They don't concern me. The only other item on my agenda is making sure that I get out of here alive. All those credits don't mean much if I'm too dead to spend them."

  "I'll guarantee you safe passage." Prince Xizor pointed down the web's central corridor, back toward Slave I mired in the fibrous structure. "You've got your bounty now. I'd suggest you return to your ship. You've deliv­ ered your hard merchandise, and we don't have anything more to discuss. And frankly"— Xizor glanced around the chamber with distaste—"I've spent enough time here already."

  "That's one thing we agree on, then." Boba Fett re­ garded the Falleen over the barrel of the blaster pistol. "But for the rest—I have my doubts. How much do you

  think I trust you, Xizor? You could be lying to me now, the same way Kud'ar Mub'at was when I got involved in this whole business." Fett slowly shook his head. "You know that my ship is barely capable of traveling; I can nurse it along to the nearest planet with an operating re­ pair yard if I take it slow. But I'm not going to sit out there and be a sitting duck for you to fire off your laser cannons at again."

  "You should weigh your words a little more carefully, bounty hunter." The cruel smile had long vanished from Xizor's harshly chiseled features. His violet-tinged eyes narrowed into slits that might have been cut with the point of a vibroblade. One hand shot out and grabbed the barrel of the blaster pistol being held on him. His fist squeezed tighter on the weapon, but made no move to push it away; it remained aimed directly at his chest. "I gave you the word of a Falleen noble; that should be enough to remove any doubts concerning your fate. If not, think on what my associate Balancesheet has told you: we have determined that you are worth more to us as a living bounty hunter than a dead one. Don't tempt me to change my mind once more on that point."

  "There's something I haven't decided, though." The blaster remained locked between Boba Fett and Xizor, with the bounty hunter's finger tight against the trigger. "I don't know," continued Fett, "if you're worth more to me alive or dead."

  "Don't be a fool," said Xizor coldly. "I've humored you long enough, allowing you to keep this thing pointed at me. If it pleased you to talk business while waving a blaster around, then so be it. But if you're planning on firing it, you'd better try doing it soon. I've just about run out of patience."

  "So have I."

  "Believe me, bounty hunter—you'll run out of luck just as quickly. You kill me, and what do you think would happen next? Even if my guards didn't find out within minutes, where do you think you'd run to in your

  crippled ship? I can assure you, Black Sun would not take well to the loss of its leader—and the life of that as­ sassin would be a very brief proposition." Xizor's hard gaze drilled through the visor of the Mandalorian battle- armor helmet and into Boba Fett's own. "It's not a mat­ ter of sentiment, bounty hunter; just business, pure and simple." He took his hand away from the barrel of the blaster pistol. "Now you have to decide."

  Boba Fett weighed the other creature's words. A few seconds of silence ticked away, then Fett nodded. "I ap­ pear to have no choice," he said. "Except to trust your word." He lowered the blaster and slipped it back into its holster. "Whether I want to or not."

  "That's smart enough." The chill half smile reap­ peared on Xizor's face. "You don't have to figure out everything in this galaxy; just enough to survive will do." He turned his gaze around to the former subnode Bal­ ancesheet, still perched on the chamber's wall near him. "Send for my guards," he ordered. "And have them bring the others—the cleanup crew—with them. It's time to bring this show to an end."

  The renegade stormtrooper had silently watched the tense exchange between the bounty hunter and the Fall­ een noble. Now, as Boba Fett turned away, Voss'on't called after him, "Take care of yourself." The words were filled with mocking venom. "I want you all in one piece, Boba Fett. For the next time we meet up."

  Boba Fett glanced over his shoulder at the other man. "I don't think there's going to be a next time. It doesn't matter who wanted you returned to them, or who put up the bounty for you." He slowly shook his head. "It doesn't even matter if you were part of the scheme to break up the old Bounty Hunters Guild." Boba Fett turned and walked back toward Voss'on't, then grabbed the rags of his jacket front and pulled him partway up from the chamber's matted floor. "Did you really think I hadn't figured that part out?" A rare tinge of anger sounded in Boba Fett's carefully emotionless voice. "The bounty for

  your return was far too much for a stormtrooper's life, no matter what he might have stolen. Emperor Palpatine doesn't buy his vengeance at that high a price. There's al­ways something else he wants, some other grand scheme involved. But I'm happy to take the credits, no matter the ultimate reason they were paid out."

  "All right—" Voss'on't's expression had gone from a sneer to burning anger as he had listened to Boba Fett. "So you're further ahead of the game than I thought. You must feel clever, huh?"

  "Clever enough," said Fett. "Now let's see how clever you are." He let go of Voss'on't, dropping him back to the chamber floor. "Didn't you hear what Balancesheet and Prince Xizor said just now? They don't want any more creatures around than necessary who know the truth behind this scheme to break up the Bounty Hunters Guild. They've already decided to get rid of Kud'ar Mub'at. What makes you so confident that they'll want to leave you still alive?"

  Voss'on't was taken aback by Boba Fett's words; it took him a moment to sputter out his reply. "You're ... you're wrong! You don't know anything about that! Everything I did... I did it in the service of the Emperor!" Voss'on't's eyes went wide, the tone of his voice growing more desperate. "The Emperor wouldn't let anything happen to me now . . . not after all the risks I went through ..." He snapped his bese
eching gaze toward Xizor. "It wouldn't be right... it wouldn't be fair..."

  "You're going to discover," said Boba Fett quietly, "that Palpatine is the one who decides what's fair and what's not." He turned away and strode toward the chamber's exit.

  "Wait! Don't..."

  Another voice, a higher-pitched shriek, sounded after Boba Fett. At the mouth of the web's corridor, he found himself suddenly encumbered by the sticklike limbs of the arachnoid assembler Kud'ar Mub'at. It had managed to scramble off its flaccid nest and lunge after him. Boba Fett looked down and saw the assembler's triangular

  face below, the compound eyes peering futilely for some sign of sympathy behind the helmet's dark visor.

  "Take me with you," pleaded Kud'ar Mub'at. "You'll see ... I can still be of some ... use to you ..."

  Boba Fett peeled the creature's limbs away from him­ self. "I don't think so," he said. "Business partners al­ ways wind up getting in my way. Then I have to do something about them." He shoved the assembler back toward the center of the main chamber. "You're just as well off with your other business associates."

  Before he turned and walked away, Fett caught a glimpse of Prince Xizor's guards; they had returned and had pulled Trhin Voss'on't up between them. The look of panic on the stormtrooper's face was the last he saw be­ fore he continued heading back to Slave I.

  The web started to die before he even reached the ship.

  A shudder ran through the walls around Boba Fett, as though the heavy structural fibers had suddenly con­ tracted in upon themselves. The smaller, entangled fibers that formed the shell of the web scraped across each other, like rough woven fabric being pulled apart by in­ visible giant hands. A sudden wind came close to knock­ ing Boba Fett off balance as the atmospheric pressure inside the web fell. The rush of oxygen to the surround­ ing vacuum tore the tattered rents in the web open wider; Boba Fett felt the chill of space seep through his Man­dalorian battle armor as he clamped his teeth on the hel­met's breathing tube, drawing in its last store of oxygen. As the tangled floor buckled beneath his feet, he fought his way toward Slave I.

  He knew that in the distance behind him, the assem­ bler Kud'ar Mub'at was facing the Black Sun cleanup crew. An operation such as that would be as thorough, and final, as Prince Xizor's commands would dictate. When they were done, there would no longer be a Kud'ar Mub'at, or the web that had once formed the assembler's private little world.

  The web's death throes intensified as the interwoven neural fibers reacted to their creator's agony. On all sides

  of the central corridor and above Boba Fett's head, the tethered subnodes thrashed and convulsed, stirred from their torpor by the inputs of pain overloading their own systems. A thicket of spidery limbs rose up in front of Boba Fett, like animated twigs and the heavier, thicker branches of a leafless forest caught in a winter planet's flesh-stripping tornado. Sets of compound eyes gazed upon him with uncomprehending fear as the subnodes' claw tips fastened upon his battle armor, the larger ones seizing his arms and legs like chitinous hunting traps.

  One of the immense docking subnodes, its bulk ex­ tending twice the length of Boba Fett's own height, reared up beneath him, toppling him onto one shoulder. A swarm of hand-sized subnodes scurried in panic across the visor of his helmet; they clung to his fist as he unholstered his blaster pistol and fired at the docking subnode crashing down toward him. The subnode's shell burst apart, the blaster-charred fragments swirling like black snow in the vortices of the web's atmosphere rushing through the disintegrating structure. On his back, Boba Fett kept his outstretched fists locked together on the blaster; the con­ tinuous volley of white-hot bolts scorched through the docking subnode's revealed soft tissues, dividing them into smoldering gobbets falling on either side of him.

  In the thinned remainder of the web's air, the docking subnode's hollowed exoskeleton collapsed silently, the translucent broken pieces thrust aside by Boba Fett's forearm. He got to his feet, kicking aside the feeble claws of the smaller subnodes, just as a pulsing red dot at the side of his vision signaled the exhaustion of the helmet's store of compressed oxygen. With lungs already begin­ ning to ache, he sprinted for Slave 7's entry hatchway.

  Boba Fett collapsed in the pilot's chair as the ship's cockpit sealed tight around him. The dizzying constella­ tion of dark spots, the forerunner of unconsciousness that had swelled in his vision as he'd climbed the ladder up from the main cargo hold, now faded as he breathed in the flow of air from the ship's minimized life-support systems. A moment later he leaned forward in the chair,

  eyes raised to the viewport as his right hand reached for the controls of the few navigational rockets still func­ tioning on the ship.

  It wasn't necessary to fire the rockets to get away from the web. As Boba Fett watched, the last of the heavy structural fibers broke free from one another, the inter­ woven fabric unraveling into loose strands. Where Kud'ar Mub'at's abode and place of business had blotted out the stars behind, the light-specked black of empty space now stood.

  In the distance, Prince Xizor's flagship awaited the ap­ proach of the transfer shuttle bearing the Falleen noble, his guards and the Black Sun cleanup crew, and whatever might be left of the Imperial stormtrooper Trhin Voss'on't. It was of no concern to Fett whether the hard merchan­ dise he had worked so hard to deliver in living condition might still be breathing; once payment had been made, his interest ceased.

  A swarm of dead subnodes, the creations and servants of the arachnoid assembler, bumped against the convex transparisteel of the cockpit's viewport. The crablike ones were ensnared in the same pale strands of disconnected neural tissue that tangled around the empty claws of the larger varieties. Atmospheric decompression had burst open the shells of some of them, spreading apart their contents like grey constellations of soft matter; others were still intact enough to appear as if they were merely asleep, awaiting some synapse-borne message from their parent and master.

  Boba Fett applied a burst of rotational force to Slave I. The hull-mounted navigational jet rolled the ship on its central axis, letting the loose, ragged net of subnodes slip past. A visual field clear of everything but cold stars showed in the viewport.

  At the edge of the viewport a brighter light glared, as though one of the stars had gone nova. Fett could see that it was Prince Xizor's flagship, maneuvering out of the sector and preparing for a jump into hyperspace. Whatever business the Falleen noble was about, it was

  likely far from this desolate area of the galaxy; it might very well be back at the Emperor's court on Coruscant. I imagine, thought Boba Fett, that I'll encounter him again, before too long. The course of events in the Em­pire was accelerating ever faster, spurred by both Palpa­tine's ambitions and the Rebellion's mounting challenge. Xizor would have to move fast if he was to have any chance of bringing Black Sun to victory on that rapidly shifting gameboard.

  It didn't matter to Boba Fett who won. His business would stay the same.

  Before he looked down to the control panel's gauges to assess what kind of condition Slave I was in, another pallid strand traced its way across the curved exterior of the viewport. The rope of silent neural fiber was linked only to the arachnoid assembler Kud'ar Mub'at, or what remained of it after the work of Xizor's cleanup crew. The once-glittering compound eyes were empty and grey now, like small round windows to the hollows of the corpse that drifted slowly past. Around the assembler's globular abdomen, split open like a leathery egg, the spidery legs were drawn up tight, forming the last self-contained nest for the once-proud, now-vanquished creature.

  Careful...

  Boba Fett indulged himself for a moment, imagining a warning from the dead. The expressionless face turned slowly past the viewport.

  Beware of everyone. If Kud'ar Mub'at's empty husk could speak, that was what it would have said. In this universe, there are no friends . . . only enemies. The assembler's gaping mouth was a small black vacuum, surrounded by the greater one of interstellar space. No trust... only b
etrayal...

  He didn't require advice such as that, even from one whose withered corpse testified to the truth of the silent words. Boba Fett knew all those things already. That was why he was alive, and the assembler was dead.

  All his remaining concerns—for the moment—were technical ones. Boba Fett turned toward the cockpit's

  navicomputer. He began accessing and inputting Slave I's astrogational coordinates, at the same time scrolling through the onboard computer's database of the sur­ rounding systems and planets. What he needed now was an advanced-technology shipyard, one without too many entanglements with either the Empire or the Rebel Alliance, or scruples about working for payments made under the table, as it were. Some of the weapons and tracking modules aboard Slave I were technically re­ stricted; a good deal of his profits from past jobs had gone into the bribery or commissioned theft necessary for getting top-secret beta-development tech out of the Imperial Navy's hidden research-and-development labs. Only a shipyard remote from the galaxy's center, and away from the prying scrutiny of Palpatine's spy agents, would have enough nerve—and greed—to do the kind of work that ordinarily had the death penalty attached to it.