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  "We're tracking him, Your Lordship." The comm spe­ cialist aboard the Vendetta bowed his head with a suffi­ cient measure of cringing obsequiousness to avoid Xizor's wrath. Serving aboard the Falleen prince's personal flag­ship was an honor earned not only by excellence at one's job, but also by attention to all the little rituals that flat­ tered his ego. "Our tracking sensors had detected his jump into hyperspace; his ship should be arriving in this sector of realspace momentarily."

  Xizor stood brooding at the Vendetta's forward view­ port; the curved transparisteel revealing the dark pan­ orama of stars and vacuum extended far above his head. One hand rubbed the angles of his chin as the violet centers of his half-lidded eyes focused on the arc of his own thoughts. Without turning around, he spoke an-

  other question: "Were we able to determine his final navigation coordinates? Before the jump."

  "Data analysis was able to break out only the first broad-scale coordinates—"

  Once again, he turned his hard glare onto the comm specialist standing on the platform walkway behind him. " 'Only'?" He slowly shook his head, eyes narrowing even farther. "I don't think 'only' is good enough. Make a note"—Xizor extended the tapered claw of his fore­ finger toward the datapad clutched in the specialist's hands—"to the disciplinary unit. They need to have a lit­ tle discussion with the data analysis section. They need to be ... motivated."

  The change in the comm specialist's face, from merely pallid to dead white, was pleasing to Xizor. Motivation, in the lower ranks of Black Sun, was a synonym for ter­ ror; he had put a lot of his own effort in designing and maintaining the appropriate measures for creating just that effect. Violence was an art; a balance had to be main­ tained, somewhere short of the deaths of valuable and not easily replaced staff members. At the same time, it had to be made clear that no creature ever left Black Sun, at least not while alive. Such administrative duties would have been a chore to Prince Xizor, if the practice of the art involved had not been such an intrinsic pleasure.

  "So noted, Your Excellency." As long as it was some­one else's neck on the chopping block, the comm special­ ist was only too eager to comply with Xizor's request.

  He had already dismissed the comm specialist from his mind. With only fragmentary information available about the trajectory of the bounty hunter Boba Fett's ship, Slave I, there was much for Xizor to mull over. He gazed out at the galaxy's bright skeins, not seeing the in­ dividual stars and systems so much as the possibilities they represented. It had already been verified that Boba Fett had left the dull, virtually anonymous mining planet on which the former Imperial stormtrooper Trhin Voss'on't had taken refuge; a refuge that had proven ineffective when Fett and his temporary partner Bossk had tracked

  Voss'on't down for the bounty that Emperor Palpatine had placed on his head. Voss'on't was now Boba Fett's hard merchandise, to use the language of the bounty hunters; the bounty for the traitorous stormtrooper was due to Fett as soon as delivery was made to the arach­ noid arranger and go-between known as Kud'ar Mub'at.

  Turning his gaze to one side of the viewport, Xizor could see the unlovely fibrous mass of Kud'ar Mub'at's web, floating in otherwise empty space. The web had been woven, over a period of unknown decades, perhaps centuries, from the assembler's own extrudations. Mired in the weft of tough exterior strands were bits and pieces of various ships, poking out like metal scraps sunk in the corrugated mud of a dried swamp; those fragments were all that remained of debtors that Kud'ar Mub'at had foreclosed upon, or business partners whose dealings with the assembler had gone disastrously awry. Involve­ment with Kud'ar Mub'at might not lead to the same de­gree of violence as with Boba Fett, but annihilation was just as final.

  To enter into the web—Xizor had done it many times—was to step inside Kud'ar Mub'at's brain, both metaphorically and literally. The thinner, palely glisten­ing fibers were spun-out extensions of Kud'ar Mub'at's own cerebro-neural tissue; tethered to the strands and scuttling along them were the numerous subnodes that the assembler had created, little replicas and variations of itself, taking care of appointed duties ranging from the simple to the complex. They were all linked to and under the control of their master and parent—

  Or so Kud'ar Mub'at thinks, Prince Xizor reminded himself. The very last time he had been inside the assem­ bler's web, just before coming back here aboard the Vendetta, Xizor had had a most interesting—and poten­tially profitable—conversation. Not with Kud'ar Mub'at itself, but one of the assembler's creations, the accoun­ tant subnode called Balancesheet. It had shown Xizor that it had managed to detach itself from the web's linked and

  intertwining neurofibers, without Kud'ar Mub'at being aware of what had happened. Balancesheet had also mas­ tered the assembler's knack of creating subnodes, one of which it had spliced into the web in order to deceive Kud'ar Mub'at that all was well. The net result was as if part of Kud'ar Mub'at's brain had begun its own mutiny against its creator, laying out plans and schemes, of which Kud'ar Mub'at was as yet unaware.

  It was going to find out soon enough, though. That thought lifted a corner of Xizor's mouth into a cruel smile. He would enjoy even more the actual moment when the crafty arachnoid, squatting on its nest in the center of its self-created web, discovered that it had been outsmarted. At last, after having been the puller of so many invisible strings laced throughout the galaxy that had brought wealth to its dusty coffers and ruin to other sentient creatures. Not that Xizor felt pity for any of those; they had gotten what they deserved for letting themselves get entangled in Kud'ar Mub'at's intricately woven schemes. But those schemes had become a little too extensive for Xizor's taste; when they started inter­fering with his and Black Sun's various enterprises, it was time to trim them back. What better way than uprooting them at the source? The unexpected discovery of Balance-sheet's own ambitions along those lines—the crafty sub-node had made it clear that it no longer cared to remain a mere appendage of its creator-parent—made possible the removal of Kud'ar Mub'at, while still retaining all the valuable go-between services that the assembler performed for Black Sun.

  Get rid of the old one —the notion had a definite ap­ peal to Prince Xizor—and put a new one in its place. And by the time that Balancesheet, as inheritor of all its cre­ator's position and power, would get just as troublesome as Kud'ar Mub'at had become, perhaps a new genera­tion of crafty arachnoids would be ready for patricidal rebellion. Or even more pleasing to contemplate: Xizor's ambitions for Black Sun would have reached such a zenith

  of power, outstripping even that of Emperor Palpatine, so there would be no need for such a scuttling, secretive little creature. Now there was a particular "old one"— the image of Palpatine's wizened visage appeared in Xi­zor's thoughts, like a senile ghost—who had also enjoyed his day, his moment in power. And during that time, Xi­zor had had to bow his proud head and pretend to be the Emperor's loyal servant more than once. The fact that the old man had been taken in by that little charade was proof enough that Palpatine's time was soon to be over, and that the remnants of the Empire would then be ready to fall into the control of Black Sun. Prince Xizor and his followers had waited long enough in the shadows, bid­ing their time, waiting for the lightless dawn that would be their moment of triumph ...

  Soon enough, Xizor promised himself. He and all the rest of Black Sun had only to wait, and craftily move into their final positions the pawns that were already arrayed on the great gameboard of the universe. The arachnoid arranger Kud'ar Mub'at's web of plans and schemes was nothing compared to the one that Xizor had woven, a net cast across worlds and entire systems of worlds. Nei­ ther Emperor Palpatine nor his dark henchman Lord Vader had any comprehension of Black Sun's reach, the things that were in its grasp already or the ones that its fist was about to close upon. For all of Palpatine's vaunted claims of knowledge of the Force and its dark side, he was still blind to the machinations and maneu­verings taking place virtually under his nose. That was due, Xizor figured, to the old fool's own
greed and ambi­ tion, and to his perpetual undervaluing of any other creature's intelligence. The Imperial court of Palpatine, on the distant world of Coruscant, was stuffed with flunkeys and witless servants; their master had made the mistake of assuming that everyone else was either a dolt like them or a mysticism-addled thug like Vader.

  The memory of the Dark Lord's invisible grip upon Xizor's throat, squeezing out the breath from his lungs, was still sharp and humiliating; he didn't believe in that

  mysterious Force, not the same way that Vader and the Emperor did, but he had still been compelled to ac­ knowledge something of its cruel power. Mind tricks, brooded Xizor, that was all it had amounted to. But that had been enough—more than enough—to reignite his hatred for Darth Vader. That hatred had been born in the deaths of Xizor's family members, deaths for which he held Vader personally responsible. Behind all his other ambitions, the goals of conquest and domination toward which he'd mercilessly driven Black Sun, there lay a smaller, more personal one: to make sure that Lord Vader paid the ultimate price for his deeds against the blood of a Falleen prince.

  That vengeance could not come soon enough to sat­ isfy Prince Xizor.

  And a small piece of the machinery that would bring that vengeance about was on its way here—or it should be, if he had correctly gauged his understanding of the bounty hunter Boba Fett. For one such as that, Xizor had decided, profit is everything. He had baited the trap with enough credits to ensure Boba Fett's keen interest, first to bring about the destruction of the old Bounty Hunters Guild, and now to bring the renegade Imperial storm- trooper Trhin Voss'on't back to Kud'ar Mub'at's web, where the price that had been put on Voss'on't's head was supposedly waiting. The fool, thought Xizor con­ temptuously. Boba Fett had no idea of how he had been manipulated, a mere pawn in Xizor's gambits. Perhaps he would never learn, or learn too late to save himself, now that his usefulness to Xizor had come to an end.

  The Falleen prince's eyelids drew partway down upon the violet color of his gaze as the deep intertwinings of his meditations continued. Beyond the curved trans­paristeel of the Vendetta's great viewport, the waiting stars, ripe for the plucking, lay scattered in silence. So also with the pieces, both visible and invisible, his own and the other players', upon the squares of that game- board to which the galaxy had been reduced. If one pawn was about to be swept from the board, what did it matter?

  There were plenty left with which the game could be played to its conclusion.

  Prince Xizor folded his arms across his chest, the mo­ tion bringing the edge of his cape around his boots. He felt sure now that Slave I would soon emerge from hy­perspace ... and into the trap that had been so carefully prepared.

  After all—a thin smile lifted one corner of Xizor's mouth as he contemplated the stars—where else was it to go?

  "You don't know what you're getting yourself into." On the other side of the holding cage's durasteel bars, the Imperial stormtrooper—former Imperial stormtrooper— slowly shook his head. And smiled. "I wouldn't want to be in your boots right now."

  "Don't worry about that," replied Boba Fett. He had come down from the cockpit and into Slave I's cargo hold to see how this particular piece of hard merchandise was enduring the rigors of the journey. The bounty placed on Trhin Voss'on't's head by Emperor Palpatine had stipulated live delivery—a corpse was therefore use­less and, worse, unprofitable to Boba Fett.

  If Voss'on't's death had been all that was required to collect that veritable mountain of credits, the job would have been much easier. I wouldn't have needed that fool Bossk along, thought Fett. Partners—even temporary ones—were always an irksome expedient, to be disposed of as quickly as possible.

  "Your position here," continued Boba Fett aloud, "is quite secure. As is mine. I'm the winner, and you're the loser. I'll get paid, and you'll get whatever Palpatine has in store for you." Which wasn't likely to be pleasant, Fett knew. Though that hardly concerned him—once a bounty hunter collected his fee, interest in the merchandise's fate ceased.

  "Think so?" The smile on Voss'on't's scarred, hatchet- like face turned into an ugly smirk. "This galaxy is full

  of surprises, pal. There might just be one in store for you."

  Boba Fett ignored the stormtrooper's warning. Mind tricks, he figured. Voss'on't was part of the usual run of thugs and laser-cannon fodder that got recruited into the Empire's fighting ranks. If not of the same intellectual caliber of the Imperial Navy's admirals, he was still smart enough to have risen to those ranks trained in ba­sic psychological warfare techniques. And sowing doubt in the mind of an opponent was the first, and most effec­tive, of such subtle weapons—one didn't have to be a Jedi Knight to use it.

  Still—he had to recognize that Voss'on't had a point. Treachery was an infinite substance in the galaxy, as widely distributed as hydrogen atoms in space. And in getting involved in the Voss'on't job, he had become un­ avoidably entangled with some of the most treacherous sentient creatures on or off any of the galaxy's worlds. Not just Palpatine, but the arachnoid assembler Kud'ar Mub'at as well.

  It's a lot of credits, thought Boba Fett as he gazed at the captive in the holding cage. He no longer saw Voss'on't as a living thing, but simply as merchandise to be delivered for a profit. It was the largest bounty that Fett could remember hearing of in his entire career. The lengths to which Emperor Palpatine would go to sat­isfy his lust for vengeance made a lesser entity like the crimelord Jabba the Hurt look like a piker. But it was one thing for Palpatine to offer that kind of bounty for the renegade stormtrooper; it was another thing for him to actually pay it out. Not that Palpatine couldn't af­ford to—he had the wealth of uncounted systems at his command—but because his greed was even greater than that wealth.

  And as far as Kud'ar Mub'at was concerned—Boba Fett held zero illusions about that immense, scuttling spi­ der, with its wobbling, pallid abdomen and obsequious, conniving words. Kud'ar Mub'at was presumably hold­ing the bounty for Voss'on't, awaiting whichever of the

  galaxy's bounty hunters returned to its web with the merchandise. Boba Fett knew that the assembler would love to have both the merchandise and the bounty wind up in its sole possession—and the best way to do that would be to arrange for the sudden demise of whoever had actually done the work of capturing the stormtrooper.

  "I can see you thinking." Trhin Voss'on't's sly voice insinuated itself into Boba Fett's consciousness. "Even through that helmet of yours—I can hear the little gears meshing."

  "You hear nothing except your own delusions." Boba Fett defocused his hard, cold gaze upon his captive.

  "Think so?" The ugly, lopsided smile still curled one corner of Voss'on't's mouth. "Consider your situation from a ... military point of view." He gave another pity­ ing shake of his head. "You're outgunned, Fett. Deal with it."

  There was still time remaining before Slave I was scheduled to emerge from hyperspace and within sight of Kud'ar Mub'at's space-drifting web. Time enough to play a little more of this mental game with the hard mer­ chandise. Boba Fett didn't need the amusement—nothing amused him except more credits stacking up in his ac­ counts. But there was at least one good reason for letting Voss'on't rattle on: it was common knowledge that high- level stormtroopers, such as he had been before his de­ fection, were trained in self-annihilatory techniques, in case of capture by enemy forces. A self-willed shutdown of his entire autonomic cardiovascular system would render Voss'on't as unprofitable as any hot bolt from the blaster slung at Boba Fett's hip would.

  Standard bounty hunter procedure in a case like this, where the suicide of the merchandise was a possibility, would have been to render him safely unconscious with a steady-release transdermal anesthetic patch applied just above one of the main neck arteries. Boba Fett had done just that, many times before, with other pieces of hard merchandise—it was rare when any one of them looked forward to being handed over at the end of their journeys with anything but total dread. And if Trihn Voss'on't was as intelligent and ratio
nal as he appeared, he had no reason to be optimistic about the welcome that he would receive from his former master, the Emperor Palpatine. Death would be at the end of that process as well, though it would be a long—and

  uncomfortable—time in com­ ing. Palpatine had ways of making sure of that.

  But Boba Fett's own bounty hunter's skills, his ability to see into the workings of his merchandise's thoughts, had told him that Voss'on't was not going to take his own life. Once the former Imperial stormtrooper had gotten over both the physical trauma of being captured— it hadn't been easy on anyone; both Boba Fett and Bossk had nearly been killed in the process—plus the indignity of waking up caged, a measure of his fighting spirit had reappeared, even cockier than before. Boba Fett had caught a glint in Voss'on't's narrow gaze of the same will to survive—and even dominate—that burned like a cold fire under the jacket of his own Mandalorian battle armor.

  He actually thinks he can win. The stormtrooper ceased being mere merchandise for a few seconds as Boba Fett regarded him in the holding cage. He hadn't expected a combat-hardened veteran such as Trhin Voss'on't to beg and grovel for his life, as so many previ­ous tenants of the holding cage had done. What he had expected was a show of snarling, raging defiance, the kind of ugly temper to which the sadistically violent were given when the tables were turned on them.