Hard Merchandise Read online

  hard, chitinous exoskeleton, the stiff hairs on the spidery limbs poking into his own flesh like tapering needles. Dengar managed to push himself away, just far enough that he found himself looking straight into the largest of the empty multiple eyes.

  There had been no need to bring any of the dead sub- nodes here inside the web; the small corpses had all been left outside, continuing to drift through the cold vacuum, their curled forms dragging across the hull and cockpit canopy of the Hound's Tooth as before. But this one, the creator of all the others, was the most important element of the procedure.

  Kud'ar Mub'at's narrow face, only an inch or so away from Dengar's, almost seemed to be smiling at his dis­ comfiture. In this small, nightmarishly claustrophobic world, the dead found enjoyment in mocking those still alive.

  "Quit fooling around," said Boba Fett with a trace of impatience. "Grab hold and lift."

  Dengar did as ordered, helping the other bounty hunter settle Kud'ar Mub'at's corpse onto the waiting re­ceptacle of the nest it had occupied in its previous exis­ tence. He stepped back, wiping his hands against the front of his gear, and watched as Fett picked up the pul­sator tool and went back to work.

  He knew it wouldn't be long now before a flicker of life and intelligence appeared in the empty eyes that had gazed into his own. The prospect of discovering the secrets of the past, and finding the way to a mountain of credits, didn't make him dread that coming moment any less.

  It was her turn to sit in the pilot's chair.

  Neelah had stood in the hatchway of the Hound's Tooth cockpit area often enough, watching Boba Fett as he had navigated the ship to this remote sector. Even when the bounty hunter had swiveled the chair around

  in order to talk with her, the difference between their positions had been irritatingly symbolic. Like Jabba's court, it had struck Neelah, with him on his throne and everybody else petitioning for his attention.

  One of the metal panels beneath the cockpit's gauges and controls had been pried open by Boba Fett, so he could rig up the black cables that now snaked out through an airlock access port and across the few meters of distance to the reconstructed web. All of the equip­ment aboard the Hound was inferior to what Boba Fett had installed aboard his own Slave I; he'd had to impro­ vise the necessary gear and connections, to get the needed stream of electro-neural pulsations to apply to the dead fibers. Even now, the onboard computer generating the control data was unstable enough that Neelah had been assigned the task of monitoring it, riding gain on its out­ put to keep it within operational limits.

  That took only a fraction of her attention, no matter how important the job might have been. Fortunately so; sitting at the cockpit's control panel, with access to the rest of the ship's computerized databases, she could set about her own agenda. And without Boba Fett or Den- gar knowing anything about it—that suited her to per­ fection. They'll find out, she had told herself, when—and if —I want them to.

  There were already secrets she was keeping from the two bounty hunters. She had been keeping them for a while now, since the moment when Boba Fett had re­counted the story of what he had found aboard the other ship, the one called the Venesectrix, that had belonged to the dead Ree Duptom. Little doors to the past had opened up inside her head, into chambers of memory; dark chambers, whose contents she could barely make out, and with the doors to the chambers beyond still frustratingly locked to her. Boba Fett and Dengar were over there in the assembler's web that they had so pains­takingly woven back together, as though they had been primitive scientists stitching together a dismembered body,

  hoping to animate it with lightning pulled down from some planet's storm-wracked sky. Their creation, with the formerly dead Kud'ar Mub'at installed as the brain atop its spine, might very well sit up and tell them the se­ crets they had come here to discover, as though the past were a golden key on its cold tongue. But in the mean­ time, Neelah had a little key of her own to use. There were some other doors, outside her shadowed memory, and right inside the computers of the Hound's Tooth, that she was going to unlock.

  He didn't want to tell me, thought Neelah. All the things that he knows about my past. She nodded with the pleasure of anticipation. Boba Fett wasn't as smart as he always pretended to be. The bounty hunter had left her right where she needed to be, to find out all those se­ crets on her own.

  Neelah bent over the control panel, turning her atten­ tion to the computer's main display panel. The power and data flow through the black cables, out to the web tethered to the ship, was operating smoothly for now; she could safely ignore it while she worked on her own agenda.

  The keypads for the computer were at the far end of the troughlike grooves in the panel, designed for the use of a Trandoshan's heavy claws. Her own forearms disappeared in them, almost up to the elbow, as she punched in command sequences, first laboriously, then with increasing speed. Within seconds, a screenful of information appeared in front of her that had been locked away beneath Boba Fett's own personal secu­ rity codes before.

  She sat back in the pilot's chair, breathing out a deep sigh of relief. Satisfaction mingled with the previous pleasure she had felt. The little doors inside her head, which had opened when she heard Boba Fett say the name of the dead bounty hunter, had given her access to a key more valuable than Fett could ever have imagined. Not in the form of information, such as her real name, or

  the story of how she had come to be aboard Ree Dup­tom's ship—That would've been too easy, Neelah thought wryly—but as an ability, the skill and craft necessary to hack through the coded locks that Boba Fett had installed on this ship's computers when he had transferred his own data files over from his Slave I. Like disjointed pieces of an archaic jigsaw puzzle fitting together, showing just a bit of the total picture, the name of Ree Duptom had connected with other fragments floating inside the vacuum that her memory had been wiped into.

  I know how to do this, she thought as she punched a few more commands into the computer. Whoever she had been in the past, whatever her real name had been in that world stolen from her, that person had not only been someone born to a noble bloodline, on a planet and among people accustomed to taking orders from some­one of hereditary rank—her own growing impatience with the two bounty hunters, her frustration at not being instantly obeyed, had already indicated as much—but also was a person of considerable technical expertise. Boba Fett, thought Neelah with a smile, should've known better than to leave me here with his computer files. But then, the bounty hunter would have had no way of know­ing just how easy it would turn out to be for her to break through his security codes and into his private data.

  The hardest thing had been keeping her mask up, of showing just enough surprise at what Boba Fett had told her and Dengar, while not giving away just how much buried memory it had restored to light inside her head. She wasn't going to reveal any of that, until after she had found some more pieces to fit in with the others.

  At least, thought Neelah, 7 know the name of the piece I'm looking for. She had already figured out that Boba Fett had been holding back on her, not telling everything—or anything—of what he knew about the one name, the one fragment of memory, that had still been there in the darkness. She had said the name Nil Posondum to him, long before they had arrived at this

  point in space, and she had instantly known from the slight catch of silence in his reaction that the name meant something to Boba Fett as well. Exactly what the connec­ tion was to the bounty hunter, she was about to discover. With her hands deep within the Trandoshan-sized grooves on the cockpit's control panel, Neelah keyed in the name and initiated a core-deep search function.

  It took only a few seconds for the results to come up on the display screen. While it was still blank she glanced down at the smaller display that monitored the flow of data and power to Dengar and Boba Fett in the web, saw that all was within operational parame­ters, and looked back up. This time, there was a face to go with the name.

  Human, bald
ing and aging, with a nervous, fidgety quality to his eyes, apparent even in a still-frame shot— both full-on and in profile, Nil Posondum was not par­ ticularly impressive. Even worse, the sight of his face did nothing to trigger any more memory flashes inside Nee­lah. There was almost the opposite effect: the conviction grew certain within her that she had never laid eyes on him before, in this life or in the stolen past.

  Below the man's unprepossessing image was a sum­ mary of personal data—nothing in its details caught Neelah's eye. Until the very last notation, which indi­ cated that the man had died in one of Slave I's holding cages, en route to being delivered by Boba Fett to the creatures who had put up the bounty for him. Neelah slumped back in the pilot's chair, glaring at the display screen in frustration. The thought that this piece of memory had led to nothing more than a blind alley sparked fury inside her. Boba Fett may have found some way of wringing secrets out of a deceased arachnoid as­sembler, but getting anything out of the late Nil Poson­dum was more likely to be a lost cause.

  Neelah glanced up at the control panel's chronometer, gauging how long Dengar and Boba Fett had been work­ ing over in the reconstructed web. She knew she'd have

  to shut down her investigations into Fett's databases be­ fore the two bounty hunters returned to the ship—and there would be no way of telling when she would get an­ other chance at rummaging through the files for the clues she needed.

  Feverishly, she punched in another string of com­mands, bringing up the last of the files associated with the name Nil Posondum. A cursory autopsy indicating the cause of death as autoasphyxiation, a statement of credits received by Boba Fett for turning over mer­chandise in a damaged condition, a list of personal ef­ fects owned by the late merchandise, mainly the torn and stained clothing he had been wearing when cap­ tured by Fett, a visual scan of markings that Posondum had managed to scratch into the metal floor of the holding cage ...

  Wait a minute. Neelah suddenly froze, cold sweat dampening her palms inside the keypad grooves. She leaned closer to the display screen, her nose almost touching the transparent panel. Her heart began pound­ ing faster, the rush of blood almost dizzying her as she stared at the image before her.

  Just some lines scratched into blank metal ... a cir­cle, perhaps a little lopsided; understandable, given the circumstances that the man who'd made them had been in ... and a triangle inside the circle, the three points just touching the enclosing line ...

  And three stylized letters, in an archaic, pre-Basic language. Three letters that only a person who had seen them since childhood, and who had been taught their meaning, would recognize. Someone such as Neelah herself, and any of her noble bloodline. A lineage that came from one of the most powerful industrial planets in the galaxy, its ancestry reaching generations back in time. Boba Fett, for all his cleverness and carefully groomed information sources, would never have been able to discern what was meant by the image—not be­cause it was a guarded secret, but simply because it was a symbol that had fallen out of use, supplanted by a

  later one that could be understood by anyone in the galaxy. Only the old traditionalists, the memory-rich families and their entourages, of the planet on which Neelah had been born would have kept it as a token of a glorious past.

  For a moment, a great, calming peace descended upon Neelah, like the hand of a noble infant's nurse drawing a blanket snug upon the small, cooing form; a blanket marked with the exact same image, only embroidered with pure golden thread rather than scratched into the floor of a squalid holding cage on a bounty hunter's ship. One by one, the locked doors inside her head opened, spill­ ing their pent-up light into the depths of her spirit, chas­ing away the dark, obscuring shadows in which she had been wrapped for so long.

  She gazed upon the image awhile longer, not caring if anyone should discover her doing so. None of that mat­tered now. The key she had found had not only opened the locks, but had burst them asunder. Nothing could make her forget.

  That's what the corporation used as its emblem, Nee­ lah told herself, a long time ago. Before I was born...

  The old, archaic letters spelled out the initials KDY, for Kuat Drive Yards. Bound by a triangle, for the art of engineering, and a greater circle that represented the uni­ verse and everything in it.

  Another key turned, in one of the farthest locks, as she looked upon the image.

  It turned, and she remembered her name.

  Her real name ...

  The empty eyes opened, but were still blind.

  Yet Kud'ar Mub'at—the hollowed thing that had been Kud'ar Mub'at—seemed to sense the presence of other creatures.

  The joints of the spidery legs creaked as though about to break into splinters. The broken abdomen, edges of its wound frozen by exposure to the cold of the vacuum

  surrounding the web, scraped against the remains of what had been its nest and throne of power, the point from which it had drawn the strands entangling so many others of the galaxy's creatures. Slowly, the small trian­gular head rose from where it had shrunk into the chitin­ous thorax.

  "Is there... business... to transact?" The assembler's voice, which had once been so gratingly high-pitched, was now a rasping whisper, as of dry strings twisting against one another. "Business ... is what I want ... all that I want..."

  Dengar had the unnerving sensation that the assem­ bler's gaze had fastened upon him. The narrow face, with its clusters of unseeing eyes, turned in his direction and stopped for a moment, before moving like a rusted mechanical apparatus toward the other bounty hunter in the web's central chamber.

  "I won't say it's good to meet up with you again, Kud'ar Mub'at." Standing closer to. the arachnoid as­sembler's withered form, Boba Fett held the black cable looped in one gloved hand. The cable's surface shim­mered, seeming much more imbued with life than the greyed-out thing in the nest, as the power and control­ling data continued to stream from the ship tethered alongside the web. "But then, I never much cared for our little meetings."

  "Ah! You are so unkind." The triangular head gave a tiny nod, imitating human gestures as it had done in its previous existence. "You were always nearly as cruel as you were greedy, Boba Fett—it is Fett, isn't it? I can rec­ ognize your voice, but it's so dark in here now ... I can't see you."

  "It's not dark, you fool." From Boba Fett's hand, the black cable ran into the narrow cleft right behind the as­ sembler's head; a metal needle had been inserted into the knot of ganglia inside the thinly armored skull that had functioned as the neuro-cerebral center for the creature. "You're dead. Get used to it."

  "Believe me, Fett... I already have." A lopsided smile opened on the narrow face. "There are advantages... to my present condition." One thin forelimb withdrew from the cluster of legs curled beneath Kud'ar Mub'at's abdomen, and wavered feebly in the air. "For one . . . death is much less painful than dying... which I remem­ ber in excruciating detail... not pleasant. And second... now I can say whatever I please . . . without worrying about the consequences. What can I suffer now, any greater than that which I already have?" Laughter like breaking twigs came out of the angled mouth. "So let me tell you right now, Boba Fett ... I never cared for you, either."

  "Then we're making progress," replied Fett. "Since we can skip your usual line of empty flattery."

  Dengar stood back, watching the confrontation be­ tween the former business associates. One's dead, he thought, and the other's alive—but they still have some­thing in common. Neither one gave up easily.

  "Very clever of you ... managing this." The dry husk of the assembler shifted in the flaccid remains of the nest, as though its vacuum-blunted nerve endings were capa­ ble of feeling discomfort. "I didn't know such a thing was possible ..." One of its hind limbs scratched at the inserted cable, but was unable to dislodge it. "I'm not sure I care for it..."

  "Don't worry. It's only a temporary condition." Boba Fett didn't bother displaying to the creature's blind eyes the black cable he held. "Soon as we're done here, I'll p
ull the plug. And you can go back to being what you were a few moments ago. A corpse, floating in space."

  The triangular head slowly nodded. "Then you have at last, Boba Fett, that which I want... more than any­ thing else. Bargain with it, as you will."

  "I want information, Kud'ar Mub'at. Information that you have." Boba Fett's gloved fist closed tighter upon the cable. "That you knew when you were alive, but you wouldn't have told me then."

  At Dengar's back, he felt the slow pulsing of the web around him. He turned and saw brighter sparks racing across the neural fibers. Once more, the sensation of being inside a living brain—or at least a partly living one—assaulted him. The assembler's thoughts and ideas were like storm clouds, threaded with electrical dis­ charges, ominous as a slowly darkening horizon.

  "What would you like to know, Boba Fett?"

  Stepping closer to the assembler's revivified corpse, Boba Fett brought his own visor-shielded gaze closer to the blind one's. "I want to know about a client of yours. A former client, I mean."

  "Exactly so." The dry, rasping laughter sounded again. "I understand that certain progeny of mine . . . have taken over the family enterprise, as it were." The up­raised forelimb reached out and lightly tapped the brow of Fett's helmet. "Perhaps you should go and talk to young Balancesheet. It keeps secrets very well, though, as I learned so painfully. You'd have to bargain hard to get what you want." Feebly, the limb folded back in on itself and scratched at Kud'ar Mub'at's chest, or what would have been the place where its heart had once functioned. "I don't feel so well... I feel cold..."