Let him stew awhile, decided Kud'ar Mub'at. The assembler's full consciousness had already siphoned along the connecting neural fibers to another part of the web.
And to another visitor.
"You look different," said the Trandoshan bounty hunter." From the last time I was here at the web."
"Ah, my dear and most esteemed Bossk." The web's owner and creator, the arachnoid assembler Kud'ar Mub'at, traced a gesture with one upraised leg, signifying a galaxy's worth of hard-won wisdom and regret." You are still in the prime of a vigorous youthfulness. Is that not so? Whereas I myself. . ." The points of the tiny claws at the end of the leg tapped against a chitinous segment of exoskeletal carapace, just beneath the assembler's triangular face, and where a heart would have been if its anatomy were closer to humanoid or reptilian." I grow old and tired. Just as your beloved father Cradossk did, may his memory be enshrined among the stars."
"Yeah, well, the old lizard isn't going to get any older now. That's for sure." A glow of satisfaction kindled in Bossk's own scale-covered breast. His father's bones, gnawed and picked clean, rested in Bossk's trophy chamber, where he could gloat and meditate over them, anytime he wished. Served him right, thought Bossk, grinding his fangs together as though retasting the memories of his predecessor. With Trandoshans, death was the penalty, not just for getting old and tired, but for getting in the way of the next generation-Bossk, specifically. If his father Cradossk hadn't tried to hold on so tightly to the leadership of the Bounty Hunters Guild, things might not have gone so gruesomely for him. Or perhaps they might have; recycling the protein and other constituents of one's elders was such a time-honored tradition among their species, it would have seemed a shame not to have carried it on, even if Cradossk had graciously surrendered the Guild's leadership to his heir Bossk." He was a tough old lizard," mused Bossk aloud. His tongue traced the broken point of one of his own fangs." In a lot of ways. . ."
"Deep is the measure of my own reminiscing," said the assembler," when I recall your father Cradossk. Many were the dealings I had with him; much business did we do together. And most of it was highly and mutually profitable, I assure you."
"Believe me-I know all about that." Bossk folded his arms across his chest; his elbow nudged one of his holstered blaster pistols." I was in on a lot of that business. The profitable stuff-and the unprofitable."
"Ah. What can I say?" Two of Kud'ar Mub'at's legs lifted in an approximation of a shrug." It's a dangerous galaxy in which we live. Poor, struggling creatures that we are. Not everything works out as planned, does it?"
That's the truth, brooded Bossk. He had long harbored the notion-more than that, a cherished dream-that when he took over the Bounty Hunters Guild from his father's faltering claws, he would inherit a powerful and united organization, one that he would be able to rebuild into the dominant semilegal force among all the inhabited worlds. It could have been bigger than the great criminal syndicate Black Sun, inasmuch as the Guild had the ability to operate on both sides of the Empire's laws. Criminal overlords such as Jabba the Hutt hired bounty hunters, as did Emperor Palpatine, by way of his various underlings. In that sense, bounty hunters had always operated as sanctioned lawbreakers, to the degree that their clients either didn't care about or turned a blind eye to whatever methods were used to bring in the merchandise. Just as long as the job gets done, thought Bossk. It was a sweet arrangement. . . or had been.
The Trandoshan's musings turned bitter. Real sweet. . . Bossk nodded slowly. Until Boba Fett screwed it up. Not for himself-but for the Bounty Hunters Guild. And worst of alclass="underline" for Bossk.
"You seem pensive," commented Kud'ar Mub'at, nesting across from where Bossk sat." And so unfortunately melancholy. How that grieves me! Perhaps it would be better if we let the past be the past. And let go of those thorny memories that impinge upon the tender flesh of our bosoms."
"Easy for you to say," growled Bossk. As far as he could tell, nothing was poking at the assembler's globular abdomen hard enough to draw blood. Whereas he could just about taste his own, filling his mouth. It was in Kud'ar Mub'at's nature to have profited from the debacle that had befallen the Bounty Hunters Guild; Bossk wasn't exactly sure how the assembler might have gained from it, but he was sure that it had happened. No wonder the spidery creature could be so gracious; it was doing all right, as it always had. But for himself and the Guild. . .
Properly speaking, it wasn't even" the" Bounty Hunters Guild; not anymore, at least. That was more of Boba Fett's doing, the tragic result of having let him into the Guild in the first place-a perfect example of how senile old Cradossk had gotten, for him to have fallen for that gambit. Bossk had been suspicious of Boba Fett's intentions from the beginning. And his suspicions had turned out to be accurate: the outcome of Fett's joining the Bounty Hunters Guild had been to split the organization into two, neither one of them as powerful as the original, and both factions locked in combat with each other. One faction-the True Guild, as it called itself-was led by the elders that had been the original Guild's governing council behind Bossk's father Cradossk. The other faction was primarily made up of the younger Guild members, who had chafed for so long underneath the increasingly slow and inept leadership of the bold bounty hunters, and who had seized upon the internecine turmoil created by Boba Fett as their chance to break away and form a new organization.
Bossk had thrown his lot in with the latter group, the Guild Reform Committee. It was a committee in name only; group leadership had ceased upon the Trandoshan's assumption of its chairman position-now it was more of an efficient and brutal one-creature dictatorship, the exact image of what he had always intended the original Bounty Hunters Guild would become when his father Cradossk died. And it will be, Bossk had vowed. There was no room in the galaxy for two rival bounty hunter organizations; one of them would have to be exterminated. When that was taken care of-and Bossk had already set into motion his plans for accomplishing that particular task-then the Committee would resume the name of Bounty Hunters Guild. The one and only. . .
He had already removed a few personal obstacles to his control of the committee; if the bodies of some of the younger bounty hunters turned up in deliberately conspicuous places, it only served to illustrate the consequences of objecting to Bossk's one-creature, top-of-the-food-chain management style. And if some-quite a number, actually-of the Guild Reform Committee's rank-and-file decided that it was safer to go over to the old, stodgy True Guild, then Bossk considered it no great loss to his organization. Or to his plans. Who needs them? Bossk had long ago decided that it would be better to have fewer bounty hunters on his side, as long as they were also the tougher and more bloodthirsty and credits-hungry ones.
That had been the problem with the old Bounty Hunters Guild, one that he wasn't going to repeat when he had finished his campaign to take over and install himself as the head of what should have been his rightful inheritance all along. There had been just too many bounty hunters in the original Guild; sheer numbers had kept individual profits down, as well as making the whole organization slow and inefficient. It was small wonder that a private, non-Guild operator such as Boba Fett had been able to steal all their action. And even less of a wonder that when Fett had applied for membership in the Bounty Hunters Guild-and had been accepted by that fool Cradossk and his council of advisers-he had been able to split the organization into fragments in hardly any time at all. Those other Guild members, brooded Bossk, they just weren't up to Boba Fett's speed. They had fallen for Boba Fett's smooth line of talk-all that business about what the future was going to be like, and how they all had to work together-and they had suffered the consequences. The old Bounty Hunters Guild had been the only place where some-or even most-of those types had been able to survive. . . and without it, they were dead meat.