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  "As you wish." Standing with his back turned toward the Rebel Alliance commander, Kuat picked up a micro- insertion logic probe from his lab bench. With the back of his other hand, he kept the felinx from investigating the delicate tool. "Now if you'll excuse me, I have work to do..."

  He heard the commander's footsteps receding, and then the doors of his private quarters opening and clos­ ing once more. In the space's restored silence, he re­ garded the thin, shining metal of the probe resting in the curve of his palm, as though it were a sharp-edged weapon. "They can watch all they want," murmured Kuat. He addressed his soft words to the noncompre­hending felinx, confident that no one else would over­hear them. Since having been betrayed by Kuat Drive Yards' former head of security, Kuat of Kuat had person­ally overseen the electronic security sweep of his private quarters. "They have no idea what I'm doing here." A faint smile moved across his face. "And they won't have much luck getting their hands on those ships ..."

  "So what's the scoop?" Ott Klemp, one of the younger and less-experienced pilots in the Scavenger Squadron, matched his pace to that of his commanding officer. "Are they going to cooperate with us?"

  "There's no 'they' at Kuat Drive Yards," replied Com­mander Rozhdenst. He had let Klemp bring him down to the KDY construction docks from the squadron's mobile base-support ship mainly to get the youngster some more, and much-needed, flight time near the immense, system-circling facility. "There's only Kuat of Kuat himself. He makes all the decisions." Rozhdenst continued his pur­ poseful stride down the high-ceilinged corridor, away from his unpleasantly terminated conference with Kuat Drive Yards' chief. "And right now, he's decided to keep on be­ ing 'neutral,' as he puts it. That's not good."

  "You think he'll turn over this new fleet to the Impe­rial Navy?"

  "What I think is that he'll do whatever he feels is in the best interests of Kuat Drive Yards. I believe him when he says as much. Which means that he'll do it in a sec­ ond, soon as Palpatine forks over the credits for the ships."

  The landing dock, with the Scavenger Squadron shut­ tle waiting for them, was only a few meters away. "Maybe we should do a preemptive strike," said Klemp. "Get our pilots inside those ships immediately, so that if any Impe­ rial Navy forces show up, we can keep 'em from getting their hands on the goods."

  Rozhdenst impatiently shook his head as he walked. "Negative on that. We'd be playing right into the Em­pire's hands if we tried something like that. We don't have enough pilots and crew to fully man even one ship out of a fleet like that. Getting them up and away from the KDY construction docks would be difficult enough, but trying to fight off an Imperial task force from in­ side those ships, without enough personnel to crew the onboard weaponry, would be suicide. No, we'd be bet­ ter off—we'd have more of a chance, that is—by inter­ cepting any Imperial ships coming from outside this

  sector, and fighting them off with what we've already got."

  "Sir, that's not much of a chance at all." Klemp's face had paled with the contemplation of what the com­ mander had described. "Our squadron might be able to keep a lid on a bunch of KDY ship fabricators and tech­nicians, but if the Empire routes any significant number of fighting craft here, we're done for."

  "Tell me something," growled Rozhdenst, "that I don't already know." The two men had reached the side of the shuttle craft. Next to the extended landing gear, the commander turned to the younger man. "Let me fill you in on something about our mission here. You're ab­solutely correct: if the Imperial Navy's forces were to move in, there wouldn't be much we could do to stop 'em. There's only one reason we're able to stay up there—" He pointed toward the sealed landing dock's upper reaches, and the rest of the Scavenger Squadron beyond it. "And that's because, right now, the Empire's attention—and its strength—is turned elsewhere. En-dor, to be exact. With our beat-up, inadequate craft, we wouldn't be able to stop the Imperial Navy—but we can slow it down. Maybe, if we fight hard and smart enough, slow it down to the point that we could contact the Alliance communications ship that's in orbit near Sullust, and get some kind of operational task force or­dered out here. And that Rebel force could stop the Imperial Navy from getting hold of these new ships." Rozhdenst started to climb up the rungs of a rolling ladder platform toward the shuttle's hatchway. "Of course," he said over his shoulder to Klemp, "if that's what happens, we won't be here to see it. We'll be dead."

  "Maybe." Ott Klemp climbed up after the com­ mander. "But that's only going to be after a lot of them are dead as well."

  Rozhdenst leaned forward and slapped the younger man on the shoulder. "Save it for when they get here."

  The landing dock's doors swung slowly open, reveal­ ing the field of stars beyond, as Klemp fired up the shut­ tle's thruster engine. A moment later, the craft traced a red arc away from Kuat Drive Yards, heading back toward the waiting squadron.

  10

  "I can't believe," said Dengar, looking around himself, "that this place was any more cheerful when it was alive."

  He and Boba Fett were surrounded by the tangled fi­ brous walls of what had been Kud'ar Mub'at's web. Enough structural integrity had been achieved that the main chamber and a few of the narrow corridors leading from it could hold a breathable atmospheric pressure. That made working in the reconstructed spaces easier, if nowhere near enjoyable.

  Boba Fett ignored his comment, just as he had ignored all of Dengar's previous grumbling complaints. Standing several meters away, near the spot where Kud'ar Mub'at's thronelike nest had once been, Boba Fett continued the application of the low-level electrosynaptic pulse device that was slowly bringing the web back from the dead. Behind the bounty hunter, thick cables snaked back toward the temporary exit port that led to the web's ex­ terior. The cables' glossy black sheathing, like the skin of a planet-bound herpetoid creature, shimmered with the effects of the energy coursing within. That energy, and

  the parallel data flow that shaped and adjusted it to the task of revivifying the web's interwoven neural cells, came from the Hound's Tooth, moored almost within touch­ing distance of the heavier structural fibers that bound the mass of finer neurons together.

  "That should hold." Dengar made the comment aloud, as much for the purpose of hearing a human voice in this dismal space as for getting any reaction from his partner. The walls of the web's main chamber had to be propped apart from each other, to keep them from col­ lapsing in on him and Fett. From the Hound's cargo hold, they had stripped out enough durasteel beams for the job, transferring them over from the ship and awk­wardly wrestling them into place among the sections of web they had previously scoured from the vacuum and laboriously bound back together. Even doing that much of a reconstruction on the late arachnoid assembler's web would have been impossible if the Black Sun cleanup crew, the henchmen of Prince Xizor that had de­stroyed it in the first place, had turned blasters or any other kind of incendiary weapons on it. But all the pieces, the floating strands and knots of pallid grey tis­sue, had still been floating in the vacuum, waiting to be resurrected. "Any more of them?" Catching his breath, Dengar rested a hand on a horizontally mounted beam next to his head. "Might be able to scrounge a few more out of the ship—"

  As if in reply, the durasteel beam groaned and creaked, echoed by the others that filled the chamber like the ele­ ments of a three-dimensional maze. The tangled walls pulsed and contracted, as though the two men were caught in some giant creature's digestive tract.

  It's like the Sarlacc, thought Dengar. He gazed with both fascination and disgust at the motions of the web's structure. The effect had reminded him of the few details that Boba Fett had recounted, about having been swal­ lowed by the blind, omnivorous beast that had once formed the fang-ringed center of the Great Pit of Carkoon,

  back in the Dune Sea on Tatooine. This must be what it's like, to be swallowed up and still be alive...

  The pulsing motion ceased as Boba Fett drew the working tip of the tool in his hands away from the intri­ cate cluster of neural gang
lia before him. Across his boots, the black cable lay, still shimmering with the power relayed from the ship. The dark gaze of Boba Fett's hel­ met visor glanced back over his shoulder, toward Den-gar. "That was just a test," he said. "Of the web's spinal connections."

  "Thanks for warning me." The shiver that had tight­ ened Dengar's shoulders now slowly ebbed away. I'll be glad, he thought, when this is over. Facing blaster fire, and every other hazard that seemed to come with being Boba Fett's partner, were all preferable to the task of restoring Kud'ar Mub'at's web to a semblance of life.

  Unfortunately, that was a necessary part of the plan. Without it—without the extended neural system of the web being once more filled with the sparks of impulse and sensation—the quest that had led both Dengar and Boba Fett, and Neelah as well, to this remote sector of space, and even remoter and more isolated sector of the past, was over.

  Fett had explained it all to them. How it was going to work, the only way it could: if the past held the key to the present, then the past had to be broken into and ran­ sacked, the same way the high walls of some rich crea­ ture's palace on a fortified planet would be breached. You found a crack in the wall and widened it enough to enter, then went in and got what you wanted. Simple in the concept; difficult—and dangerous, it seemed to Dengar—in the execution.

  The crack in the wall of the past was represented by the memory of the once-living, now-dead arachnoid as­sembler, Kud'ar Mub'at. Great, Dengar had said to Boba Fett. That ends it right there, doesn't it? Talking to the dead, learning their secrets, wasn't a hard job; it was an impossible one. Kud'ar Mub'at was the link to Neelah's

  stolen past, and the key to Dengar and Boba Fett's profit­ ing from that past—if it had been important enough to steal from her, and hide the traces of the theft through a deep memory wipe of her brain, then the chances would be good that it would be worth a good deal of credits to find it and restore it once again. The scent of credits was even stronger with the other possibility connected to the theft of Neelah's past: finding out who—or what—it was that had been behind the failed plot to implicate the late Prince Xizor in the raid by Imperial stormtroopers on a moisture farm on Tatooine, a raid that had been the trig­ ger, or at least part of it, for Luke Skywalker's transfor­ mation into a leader and legend of the Rebel Alliance. As Boba Fett, with his keen instinct for profits, had pointed out, anytime a trail led that close to the center of major events in the galaxy—with threads tangling around not only a creature who had been the leader of the richest and most powerful criminal organization in all the sys­tems, but also around Emperor Palpatine and his most feared servant, Lord Darth Vader—then the terminus of that trail was likely to be buried under a mountain of credits and influence.

  As much as Dengar might have felt that the quest was hopeless, he had to confess to himself that all of his inner greed circuits had been fired up by his partner's talk. Sure, he had thought, you can get killed, poking into Pal­patine's and Vader's secrets. But you can also get rich — or at least rich enough to get out of the bounty hunter game. And back into the safe haven of his beloved Mana­roo's arms, and a life that didn't revolve around kidnap­ping and killing other creatures while trying to avoid getting killed oneself. That was worth at least a little risk.

  All it would take would be bringing a certain assem­ bler back from the dead, so that its memory of those events and plots and schemes could be riffled through. Dengar had gotten used to surprises from his bounty hunter partner, but the next revelation from Boba Fett had exceeded all that had gone before.

  Bringing Kud'ar Mub'at back from the dead, Fett had explained, isn't impossible. Gathering together the pieces of the puzzle—all the scattered strands and chunks of neural tissue that the Black Sun cleanup crew had left drifting in space—would be the hardest part. But the pieces were all there, floating around the Hound's Tooth. The rest would be relatively easy, or at least according to Boba Fett. I knew more about Kud'ar Mub'at than it knew about itself. In the cockpit area of the Hound, Fett had related to Dengar and Neelah the results of his previous investigations into the nature of such assembler creatures.

  Knowing things about one's business associates al­ ways gave one an advantage, especially if they were mat­ters of which the other creature was ignorant. And Kud'ar Mub'at had never shown any great curiosity about its own genetic background or physiology, or whether other assemblers existed anywhere else in the galaxy. Kud'ar Mub'at had been content to consider itself unique, with nothing else like it anywhere in the known systems; it made negotiations with clients easier to have the confi­ dence that there was no other arachnoid assembler whose services they could engage. If Kud'ar Mub'at had ever encountered any other assemblers, it would probably have arranged for their murder, much as it had eliminated its own predecessor, the assembler that had originally created it as a subnode, then suffered the consequences of an unforeseen rebellion. Just as Kud'ar Mub'at had suffered in turn, its former subnode Balancesheet was now somewhere else in the galaxy's empty spaces, taking care of the business it had inherited from its own de­posed creator. But there are other assemblers, Boba Fett had told Dengar and Neelah. I found them. And even more important: I learned from them.

  The location of the arachnoid assemblers' home-world was something that Boba Fett wouldn't reveal. You don't need to know that. Which was just as well with Dengar; the notion of a whole hidden world some­where, populated by an entire species of spidery, schem-

  ing assemblers gave him the creeps. But Boba Fett's knowledge of an aspect of their physiology was some­thing he did share. Just as an individual assembler, such as Kud'ar Mub'at or Balancesheet, could generate and extrude additional cerebro-neural tissue in the form of an extended nervous system running through a web big enough in which to live and in the tethered subnodes that filled the space, so could that tissue be regenerated from the outside. A constantly monitored and adjusted stimulating pulse would actually restore the strands of dead tissue to functioning life, with the synaptic termi­ nals seeking one another out and knitting themselves back together.

  That basic rundown of assembler physiology had taken place in the cockpit of the Hound's Tooth. Stand­ ing now inside the reconstructed web, Dengar looked down at the black, shimmering cables looped near his boots. Neelah was still back aboard the ship moored alongside, making sure that the necessary energy and controlling data kept flowing from the onboard comput­ ers. There was no danger of her disengaging the Hound's Tooth and leaving them stranded inside the web; she was more intent on breaking through to the past and its se­ crets than either bounty hunter could have been.

  Dengar looked up as another shimmering motion ran through the fibers of the web. The effect was less spas­ modic and threatening than the previous one, and settled down to a barely discernible but constant trembling in the curving structure. At the same time, the vibration died in the black cables running out to the ship; they be­ came as inert as the web itself had been when he and Boba Fett had commenced its resurrection from the dead.

  "That's it," Boba Fett announced. He stood up from where he had been kneeling beside the empty nest at the center of the chamber and tossed the pulsator tool aside. "Now we're ready for the last step."

  Which was exactly what Dengar had been dreading. He had been able to reconcile himself to being inside the living web; it was at least without personality or a

  guiding intelligence, the revivified neural circuits as empty of thought as some giant, hollow vegetation. But for the past to be retrieved, with all its secrets intact and read­ able, that idiot nervous system would have to be linked to the brain that contained the necessary memories. And we'll be inside it, thought Dengar. It struck him as being even worse, in some ways, than the Sarlacc could ever have been.

  "Come over here and give me a hand." Boba Fett ges­ tured as he spoke the order. "We need to get it into posi­ tion for the hookup."

  Reluctantly, Dengar ducked his head beneath the horizontal beam keeping the web's walls spr
ead apart. He threaded his way through the maze of the other sup­ports that had been so laboriously installed, mostly by him rather than Fett.

  At the center of the chamber, the neural activity that Boba Fett had summoned up from the formerly dead tis­sue was more visible, the pulsing of the structural fibers overlaid with a shimmering network of sparks racing across the synaptic connections. Dengar tried to main­ tain his balance on the uneven floor of the space, without laying a hand on any of the surrounding structural fibers. There was no chance of receiving an electrical shock from the bright circuits of light, but the thought of touching the now-living mass unnerved him.

  "Get on that side of it," instructed Boba Fett. He pointed toward the one thing inside the chamber that was still part of the dead world they had found when they had come to this point in space. "We'll need to lift it all the way clear. I don't want the legs dragging across any of the neural fibers."

  He did as Fett had told him, still trying to avoid con­ tact with the dead object for as long as possible. Dengar's reluctance betrayed him; as he stepped gingerly toward it, the toe of one of his boots caught on a loop of black cable, tripping him and toppling him forward.

  His hands automatically caught hold of the object's