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  He hadn't rescued the ship a moment too soon. A burst of fire filled the tug module's viewports as a sudden crashing impact struck the frigate from below. The shock wave of an explosion ripping apart the empty dock jolted the frigate's stern. Klemp struggled with the navigational

  controls, fighting to keep the ship from toppling end over end and the prow out of the churning debris that welled up toward it.

  The nearest dock cranes still towered above the frigate, like immense durasteel-strutted gallows. Even with the thruster controls pushed to their maximum, the ship seemed to be only inching toward the clear space where Klemp would be able to hit the main thrusters and bring it out of danger. The fierce heat from the explosions seeped through the tug module's thin hull, evaporating the sweat as it beaded on his brow.

  A sharp blast ripped through the base of the nearest crane. Glancing toward the side viewport, Klemp saw the tapering metal structure begin to topple toward the frigate. There would be no way he could get the ship be­ yond the reach of the crane's top-mounted arm as it swung scythelike into the hull. If the crane's weight struck midship, it would break the frigate in half, send­ ing the pieces tumbling back down toward the exploding construction docks. Klemp knew he would be dead be­fore the ship's remnants hit the twisted metal rubble be­ low it.

  He quickly calculated the chances of abandoning the tug module, sprinting back toward the Y-wing, and fly­ ing it out through the entangling construction shroud and into the clear. Possible, he told himself. But you wouldn't have done the job you came here for—

  Cursing, Klemp reached for the navigational controls. The frigate halted its slow rise as he diverted all available power from the auxiliaries to the stern's side thrusters. With increasing speed, the ship pivoted about on its ver­tical axis.

  The toppling crane hit, its mass shearing along the flank of the frigate, grinding and tearing away any pro­ truding structural elements; inside the tug module, the impact of metal shearing away against metal sounded louder than any of the explosions below. Wincing against the stabbing, deafening noise, unable to take his hands away from the controls to shield his ears, Klemp saw a jagged piece of the crane snag the construction shroud's fabric. As the crane continued to topple away from its shattered base, it ripped away the shroud and the Y-wing fighter mired in it.

  No great loss, Klemp told himself as he looked over his shoulder and saw the Y-wing breaking apart, dragged toylike across the topside of the ship's hull. With a last, shuddering impact, the crane hit the stern and then top­ pled away.

  The ship was clear—at last. Klemp expelled his pent- up breath in one gasp, then slammed on the main thruster engines. The Lancer frigate seemed to hesitate for a fraction of a second, then heaved its bulk toward the stars.

  "All right. That does it." Dengar picked himself up from the floor of the Hound's Tooth's cockpit. On wobbling, unsteady legs, he confronted Boba Fett. "The partner­ ship's over."

  He reached over to the nearest bulkhead and steadied himself against it with one hand, watching as Fett me­ thodically checked out the weaponry strapped across his Mandalorian battle armor. Lucky we're even alive, thought Dengar. Though how long that was going to last, he had no idea. Their ship had barely managed to survive the high-velocity plunge from open space into the thick of the construction docks' roiling explosions. More of the blasts, approaching in sequence, shook the Hound's shock-loosened frame, the metal of its hull grat­ing against the rubble-strewn area on which it had crashed.

  "Suit yourself," said Fett. "I owed you for saving my life back on Tatooine. You decide if that debt's repaid by now."

  "Oh, it's paid, all right." Trembling with anger and accumulated shock, Dengar stepped back as Boba Fett

  approached the hatchway. "A few thousand times over. You haven't managed to get me killed yet—but I don't feel like giving you any more chances."

  "Fair enough." Boba Fett started down the ladder to the Hound's cargo hold. "I've got business to take care of."

  From the cockpit hatchway, Dengar stared at him in amazement. He's going looking for Kuat. The realization caused Dengar to slowly shake his head. There's no stop­ ping him.

  "You go your way," Dengar shouted into the smoke filling the hold. "And—"

  The explosions out in the construction docks grew louder, mounting on top of one another and blocking his words.

  And I'll go mine, he thought to himself. Dengar turned from the hatchway and dived toward the controls.

  He didn't bother plotting a trajectory, but simply slammed maximum power to the main thruster engines. Holding on to the controls inside the Trandoshan-sized forearm grooves, Dengar heard and saw a tangle of cables, their insulated sheaths charred and smoking, drag across the forward viewport. The hull's underside scraped across the warped freight tracks beneath as it ac­celerated; the explosions that had been marching across the docks finally caught up with the Hound's Tooth, lift­ing the stern as though it were caught and thrown by a giant hand. Dengar hung on desperately as the ship spun end over end, directly toward the side of one of the tow­ering cranes.

  The sequence of explosions was faster than the tum­ bling ship. Before the Hound's Tooth struck the crane, the dizzying image through the viewport was blotted out by pure white light, as if Dengar had caught a glimpse into the searing heart of a nova star.

  Metal ripped apart from metal as the crane dissolved in the blast, its massive struts flaring outward and then spiraling into the vacuum. Through the flames and smoke filling what had been the explosion's center, the Hound's Tooth spun into the clear.

  Dengar gaped at the cold, bright stars filling his vi­ sion. Made it... I made it...

  A few quick adjustments with the navigational jets steadied the ship to a level course. Panting, and with his pulse beginning to slow, Dengar let a fragile smile form across his face. He hadn't been expecting to survive at all; his real intent, he realized now, had been only to keep his corpse from being crushed and incinerated in the wreckage of the Kuat Drive Yards' construction docks.

  Pulling his hands from the grooves on the control panel, he laughed in amazement. "After all that," he said aloud. "And I'm the one who's still alive—"

  The words inside his head were wiped out by another blinding burst of light. Dengar shielded his eyes with a quickly raised forearm. As the glare faded, he lowered his arm and squinted through the forward viewport. In the distance, another, larger ship—one of the fleet that the Rebel Alliance pilots had been trying to rescue from the construction docks—had not been as lucky as he had been. The other ship's stern had been engulfed by flames just as it lifted away; one main thruster engine had been destabilized in the blast, and had gone into core overload. The resulting explosion had blown a gaping hole in the ship's hull, stranding the ship close to the Hound's Tooth.

  Dengar watched, then ducked reflexively as another one of the larger ship's thruster engines went off. Weak­ ened by the first engine's explosion, the ship disinte­ grated, one fireball after another ripping the structural frame to pieces.

  He watched, then froze in place, held by what he saw in the viewport. A massive section of the other ship's hull, larger than the Hound itself, shot away from the fragmented wreckage, its jagged edges trailing white-hot streaks and quick sparks of debris. The hull section spun and swelled in the viewport, heading directly for the Hound's Tooth.

  I guess I spoke too soon ...

  There wasn't time to either dodge or swing the ship about and try to outrun the doom heading for it. Dengar didn't even bother to brace himself as the broken section of the larger ship raced toward him.

  It hit, and he was thrown through sparks that stung his face and arms like a swarm of angry insects, into a darkness filled with the shrieks of alarm systems and the even louder clash of metal being ripped apart. For a mo­ ment, Dengar felt weightless; then he realized, as his arms flailed behind him, that he had been knocked through the cockpit hatchway and was falling to the cargo hold below. The impact of its grat
ed floor against his spine and the back of his skull brought him right to the point of losing consciousness. He held on, dazed and unable to move, listening as the Hound's Tooth's deflec­ tor shields collapsed, and the ship began to come apart around him.

  He had the cold but genuine comfort that he had at least gotten away from the exploding construction docks. That's all I wanted, Dengar thought once more. Just so my body could be found... somewhere, by someone...

  Another realization struck him. I must be already dead. It couldn't have happened while he was still alive, that a hand was reaching for him and taking his arm, pulling him up as though from his own grave. And that there would be light, and a face looking down at him; the one face he wanted to see more than any other.

  "Dengar!" The vision spoke his name. "It's me—it's Manaroo—"

  "I know." Drifting closer to unconsciousness, he smiled up at her. "I'm sorry, though . . . I'm sorry I'm dead..."

  "You idiot." A real hand, not a hallucination, slapped him across the jaw, jolting him fully aware. "I'll let you know whether you're dead or not."

  And then he knew he wasn't.

  "How did you know I'd be here?" Kuat of Kuat turned and regarded the figure that had entered the bridge of the moored Star Destroyer.

  "Where else would you be?" Boba Fett's battle armor was blackened with ash from the fires consuming the con­structions docks' wreckage. "It suits you; this is the biggest ship in the fleet. That makes for a suitably grandiose cof­ fin. Plus—the construction shroud had been obviously torn away before the explosions started. So there wouldn't be any risk of the Rebel Alliance pilots dropping in."

  "Very astutely observed." Kuat gave a judicious nod. "But I really believed that I'd be alone, right to the end. I didn't think that even you would try to track me down here."

  The ship's bulkheads trembled as another series of explosions went off. From the viewports of the bridge, masses of dark clouds, shot through with reddening flame, mounted up toward the stars.

  "It's worth making the effort," replied Boba Fett. "I've got questions that I want answers to."

  "Ask away, then." Kuat of Kuat smiled gently. "It's too late for me to try and conceal anything from you."

  Boba Fett stepped closer, across the floor buckled with heat and through the smoke filtering into the bridge. "Why did you want me dead?"

  "Nothing personal," said Kuat. "You mean zero to me. But I knew you had in your possession certain items that could prove rather embarrassing to me. And fatal to Kuat Drive Yards. There's an ancient piece of wisdom that advises anyone taking a shot at a powerful creature to be sure to hit him. That's very good advice; I knew the risks I was taking when I created that false evidence against Prince Xizor. But if my scheme had worked, I would have eliminated a major enemy—or at least given him something else to deal with, rather than con­ spiring to take over my corporation. But the one thing happened that I was unable to foresee: that both Xizor and a vital element of my scheme would be killed before

  the blow could be struck. Which left a considerable mess to clean up. Getting rid of you would have just been part of that cleanup process. Regrettable—but necessary, in the course of business."

  "I already figured out that much. A long time ago." Boba Fett had come within arm's reach of the other man. He pulled out his blaster pistol from its holster and aimed it at Kuat's chest. "What I need to know now is whether that's the end of it."

  Kuat looked with amusement at the weapon in front of him. "Rather late for that kind of threat, isn't it? I al­ ready consider myself as good as dead."

  "You can die here, the way you want—or I can drag you out of here and hand you over to Palpatine or the Al­ liance, or whoever else would be interested in settling some old scores with you. Your choice."

  "Very persuasive, Fett. But unnecessary. I'll be happy to tell you the truth—since I have nothing to lose now by doing so." Kuat reached out his hand and pushed the blaster muzzle away from himself. "All the conspiracies end here. There's no one else involved, no other forces to deal with, once these particular loose ends are taken care of. You don't have anything to be concerned about. Once I'm gone—and I've taken Kuat Drive Yards with me—there won't be anyone else coming after you. Or at least not in regard to the evidence I fabricated against Prince Xizor. You'll just have your usual run of enemies, and all the various creatures with a grudge against you, to deal with." Kuat peered more closely at the bounty hunter. "But you knew that already, didn't you? You said as much, that you had figured it all out. You wouldn't have come all this way, and risked this much—even your life, which you seem to value so highly—just to make ab­solutely sure of what you knew. So there must have been something else on your mind—right? Some other ques­tion you needed to ask of me. What is it?"

  Boba Fett hesitated a moment before speaking. "There's a female named Neelah that's been traveling with me."

  His voice lowered slightly. "But that's not her real name. She doesn't know I found out that she's actually Kateel of Kuhlvult. She's a member of one of the ruling families of the planet Kuat."

  "Very interesting." Kuat raised an eyebrow in sur­prise. "She would also then be the sister of Kodir of Kuhlvult, the head of security for Kuat Drive Yards. And someone that Kodir had been extremely interested in locating."

  "Did Kodir tell you why?"

  Kuat shrugged. "The love between one sister and an­other, I suppose—that's within the range of normal hu­man emotions. But whatever the reason, it was enough for Kodir to force her way into becoming security head so she would have the resources to find this sister who had vanished."

  "Then here're the questions." Boba Fett's dark-shielded gaze locked upon Kuat's eyes. "You've heard of a man named Fenald?"

  "Of course. He was head of security for Kuat Drive Yards, before Kodir of Kuhlvult was given the position." "So naturally," continued Fett, "you would've given a sensitive, important job—like making the arrangements for the planting of fabricated evidence against Prince Xizor—to him."

  "True enough." Kuat nodded. "That's exactly what I had him do. But how do you know about Fenald?"

  "There was encoded material attached to that fabri­ cated evidence when I found it inside the freight droid that had been converted to a spy device. I didn't have time to break the encryption seal then, but when I was coming back from Tatooine, where I had retrieved the evidence from another bounty hunter named Bossk, I managed to crack it. The encrypted material was Fe­nald's own identity code, including his connection to Kuat Drive Yards. He probably put it there so he'd have the ability to blackmail you by threatening to reveal to Xizor—or Palpatine or the Rebel Alliance—exactly where the fabricated evidence had come from, and who had been responsible for it."

  "I wouldn't put it past him."

  "Here's the other question," said Boba Fett. "Did you also order Fenald to make arrangements for Kateel of Kuhlvult to be abducted and memory-wiped?"

  "Of course not," said Kuat stiffly. "That's absurd. What motivation would I have for wanting something like that done?"

  "Then this Fenald could have been following some­ one else's orders when he contacted a go-between named Nil Posondum and made those arrangements?"

  "Very likely." Kuat smiled ruefully. "I know from per­ sonal experience that Fenald was capable of working for another at the same time he was my head of security. Loyalty, as I found out, was a negotiable item with him; he double-crossed me when members of some of the other ruling families conspired to take over Kuat Drive Yards."

  "Fenald's treachery might have been even more com­ plicated than that. Apparently he was double-crossing Kodir of Kuhlvult at the same time."

  Kuat's brow creased. "What do you mean?"

  "What better way for Kodir to have gotten your confidence—and the security head position—than to ex­ pose Fenald as a traitor to you? And the best way to do that would be to arrange for it with Fenald himself. Especially since Fenald had already been working for Kodir while he was still your se
curity head. In fact—" Boba Fett's voice drew taut as a durasteel wire. "Fenald was working for Kodir—following her orders—when he set up Kodir's sister Kateel to be abducted and memory-wiped."

  "Interesting," said Kuat, "if true."

  "It's true, all right. The only thing I needed to find out was whether or not you had ordered the acts committed against Kateel of Kuhlvult—and as you've pointed out, you're beyond having any interest in lying about the

  matter. So that leaves Kodir as the only one who could have given that job to Fenald to take care of." "How do you know that?"

  "Simple," replied Boba Fett. "When Kodir intercepted me with the KDY security division cruiser, she also found her sister Neelah—or Kateel, her real name—aboard the ship I had been using. Yet Kodir deliberately concealed any reaction to seeing Neelah there; in particular, Kodir showed no surprise at Neelah's not recognizing her in re­ turn. So Kodir knew that a memory wipe had been done on Neelah. If Kodir hadn't found that out from you—be­ cause you had been the one who ordered it—then logi­ cally, it must have been done on Kodir's instructions. It's easy enough to figure out what Fenald did: he had or­ ders from you for one job to be taken care of on the sly, and he had orders from Kodir for another, different job that had to be kept quiet. So he put more credits in his own pocket by using the go-between Nil Posondum to hire just one lowlife, Ree Duptom, to take care of both jobs. Fenald must have gotten a good rate that way. The only problem was that when Duptom was accidentally killed, it left a mess for both you and Kodir of Kuhlvult to worry about, without either one of you knowing that the other was involved. But it took getting information from both you and Kodir to figure out what must have happened back then."