Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters (36 page)

The bodyguard behind Fett was farthest away from the neural toxin; Fett spun, pulling his blaster free left-handed, and shot the man as he went for his weapon. The jolt took the bodyguard in the stomach; he staggered backward, still clutching his blaster, and Fett moved forward as the guard backpedaled, took aim and shot him a second time in the throat for good measure.

He swung back to the spice, to Voors and the other bodyguard. They weren’t dead just yet, of course. They fell and Fett stood watching them; the pickups buried in his helmet were busy recording their death throes. Jabba would want to see the recording—this was one of the first times Fett had taken the Hutt’s commission, but Fett understood Hutts; Jabba would pay a bonus for the actual images of his enemies’ deaths.

He worked the glove back over his right hand; it was numb already, to the wrist, from exposure to the nerve gas he’d released.

After their thrashing had ceased, Fett walked in closer, to get better pickups of them. He bent slightly to give his pickups the best angle. The pale-skinned bodyguard had turned blue; Voors, darker-skinned, had turned purple. His swollen tongue stuck out between his teeth; Fett imagined Jabba would enjoy that touch.

After a bit Fett straightened and stepped backward, getting a good dozen paces between himself and the eighteen canisters of spice.

He unslung his flame thrower, lit the flame, and played it over the plastic drums for what seemed to him a long time.

The Hutt had not paid him to burn the spice; but Jabba had not paid him
not
to, either; and there were things worth doing for free. When all that remained was a smoldering melted mess in the middle of the warehouse, Boba Fett, who thought himself a fair and a just man, slung the flamethrower back over his shoulder, turned about, and walked quietly out of the warehouse,
into the dark, silent night, into a future filled with promise.

Fifteen years passed.

In the
Slave I
, with engines and shields powered down to almost nothing, only a trickle of power feeding the instruments and the lifeplant, Boba Fett hung up high above Hoth System’s ecliptic, high above the system’s potentially lethal asteroid belt. He looked down on Hoth System and was gratified to see that he’d beaten the Imperials.

Somewhere down there, on Hoth itself, was, if Fett had guessed right, the current headquarters of the Rebellion. Fett didn’t care about the Rebellion one way or another; the Rebels were plainly doomed, and the day and manner of their passing from the universe did not fill him with much interest. The Empire would take care of them; Fett had smaller and more profitable prey in mind.

Where the Rebels were, Han Solo could be found.

The hyperspace message from the Imperials had been short and to the point; it had announced a crushing assault on Rebel headquarters, and offered a bounty of fifteen thousand credits to any Hunters who helped chase down Rebels fleeing the site of the battle.

Fifteen thousand credits wouldn’t have paid Fett’s operating expenses for half a year. But where the Rebels were …

Not too long ago, Jabba the Hutt’s standing bounty on Han Solo had reached one hundred thousand credits. It was one of the half dozen largest extant bounties Fett knew of; and if it didn’t exactly put Solo into the company of the Butcher of Montellian Serat, and the Butcher’s five million credit bounty, it was getting up there, getting up there.

He trained his sensors on Hoth at highest resolution, and keyed the computer to wake him if it saw the
Millennium Falcon
.

Sitting in the pilot’s seat, in his armor, helmet in his lap, Fett closed his eyes and went to sleep.

The hyperwave warning awoke him.

Fett opened his eyes and scanned his instruments. Weak, flickering signals from Hoth, that might have been no more than background noise (except that they weren’t); that wasn’t what had set off his alarm, though.

Ships, the instruments said, were coming out of hyperspace.
Big
ships, which meant Star Destroyers, which meant the Empire. Fett triangulated—and swore in his native language. Hoth was
between
him and the ships leaving hyperspace.
Oh, you fools, you fools
, Fett thought. If they’d set off
his
instruments, as far away as the
Slave I
was from their breakout point, then the Rebels, down on Hoth, must have been jolted out of their beds by the shrill of alarms going off.

Somebody had fouled up bad; and knowing Vader, Fett imagined that that particular somebody was not long for the galaxy.

The
Slave I
sat up above the ecliptic, and Fett did what he could while the inevitable battle played itself out. He lit the engines and moved in closer to Hoth; when the
Falcon
left the planet, if it did, it would be moving fast; Fett would have time for only a single run at it.

He took up position, still well above the ecliptic, floating above Hoth, above the battle; and prepared to wait. There was nothing else for it; if Fett had learned anything in his time as a Hunter, it was that patience paid. Certainly there was no profit to involving himself in the fighting. Ion cannon blasted up off the surface of Hoth; beneath their cover, Rebel transport ships
lifted off, accelerated away from Hoth, and made the jump to hyperspace. At this distance, even with image enhancement, Fett’s sensors could do no more than eke out the barest details of ship size and shape; but that little was enough. None of the ships leaving Hoth were the
Millennium Falcon;
the shape of that ship was burned into Fett’s brain.

A wave of transport ships. A wave of fighters. Another wave of transport ships … another. Another.

The ion cannon on the planet’s surface were firing more infrequently now; the Imperials must be having some success at taking the emplacements out. Fett waited, fighting back his impatience. The transports were away, occasional fighters still slipping the Imperial line and jumping to hyperspace. But still, no
Falcon
—

There
.

That
was the
Falcon
, or it was an hallucination. Fett’s fingers danced across the controls and the
Slave I
lit its engines to give chase. The computer calculated trajectories, and Fett did half a dozen things at once, readied the tractor beam, fed power to the fore deflectors, threw up the
Falcon’s
projected trajectory and ran an intersect for the
Slave I;
he needed to grapple them just before they hit hyperspace, ideally while avoiding death at the hands of trigger-happy Imperials—

Fett swore aloud for the second time in a single day. He wasn’t going to catch them.

The
Slave I
streaked through space, high above Hoth System, at the ship’s greatest acceleration, but there was no time, and the trajectories showed it plainly. Hoth was a cold world, far from its sun; the gravity gradient this far out was smaller than usual for a world habitable by humans—the
Falcon
was going to jump to hyperspace practically any moment.

Any moment, now; she was being chased by a Star Destroyer and what looked like its entire complement of TIE fighters. And—remember the basics, and Basic Number One was:
no bounty is worth dying for
. The Star
Destroyer and the TIE fighters were directing a withering fire upon the
Millennium Falcon
, laser light washing over the ship again and again; and if Fett got close enough to grapple, he would be close enough to take the brunt of that fire.

Any moment now—

And something was wrong. The
Falcon
wasn’t jumping.

Fett doubled-checked the trajectory his computer had run for the
Falcon
, and the trajectory was correct; the gravimetrics were correct, the vectors were correct, the
Falcon
should have jumped by now.

Something wrong with their hyperdrive
, Fett thought, and a moment later knew himself correct; the
Falcon
veered off—

—heading straight into the Hoth System asteroid belt.

Fett cut his engines, and simply watched as the
Millennium Falcon
dove into the belt. Solo was desperate; Fett wasn’t, not nearly desperate enough to take the
Slave I
in among those tumbling mountains of stone and iron.

The hundred thousand credits could wait for another day; you can’t spend money when you’re dead—

Fett leaned forward slightly in his seat, thinking to himself that it had, really, been quite a remarkable day for Imperial stupidity:

The TIE fighters were going in after them.

Fett sat back in his seat, shaking his head. Plainly none of those people knew the first thing about cost analysis.

After a long blank moment he turned his sensors back in-system, and picked out the unmistakable shape of Darth Vader’s Super Star Destroyer
Executor
.

He hailed it, received confirmation, and charted a course.

•   •   •

They took him to see Lord Vader.

Vader stood on the bridge, watching the remnants of the battle. Stars glittered and asteroids tumbled across the black sky beyond him. Vader did not look at Fett and wasted no words in greeting, and as always the deep voice seemed more the work of a machine than a man. “How did you know?”

Fett glanced around before replying; the bridge crew was so busy at its duties, or busy appearing to be busy at its duties, that none of them had even looked at him as he was brought in; and as usual Fett found himself touched by a certain grudging admiration for Vader’s leadership.

“Your people told me,” Fett said after a moment. “In essence. They gave us a meeting point in interstellar space. I knew you wouldn’t be jumping the fleet far, from that point; I ran the coordinates against my charts for this area.” He shrugged. “One planet too hot, another too cold, a third just right, but already inhabited by Lando Calrissian’s mining colony. That left Hoth.”

“You know the area well, then.” Fett did not think Vader expected a response; he offered none. Vader, still without looking at him, nodded as though he had. “The other Hunters will be here shortly. I’ll brief you all when they arrive.”

Fett took a step forward. “How much?”

Vader was silent a long moment. “I don’t care about the others who escaped. For Solo … one hundred and fifty thousand credits. The same again for Leia Organa. She will be with him.” He turned his head slightly. “No disintegrations.”

Fett’s escort gestured; Fett shrugged and turned and followed the escort from the bridge. Vader was a difficult client; he wanted living captives, not corpses or pictures of corpses.
No disintegrations;
he’d said that every time he’d hired Fett, after that first incident.

•   •   •

After the briefing, Fett and his competition were separated, and escorted back to their ships.

Fett’s escort was visibly uncomfortable in his presence; that suited him. Vader’s ship was the largest vessel Fett had ever
seen
, never mind actually been inside; it took almost five minutes for them to be shuttled from the bridge to the docking bay where the
Slave I
waited for him, and Fett was, by general policy, in no mood to talk. Particularly not to an Imperial officer of low rank.

They walked from the shuttle station to Fett’s ship. Halfway there, the Imperial said, “They say you’re Lord Vader’s favorite bounty hunter.”

Fett stopped in his tracks, stood still, and stared at the man long enough to intensify the fellow’s discomfort. “Yes.” He turned and continued walking, and the Imperial had to hurry after him.

But the man was stupid even for an officer of the Imperial Navy, or his curiosity surpassed his temerity; he didn’t take the hint. “They say you know the target. This fellow Solo, the one who helped Skywalker blow up the Death Star. They say that you know him.”

Fett walked along without replying for a good bit. Finally he said, reluctantly enough, “I saw him fight once.”

“Fight where?”

For some reason Fett answered him. “A long time ago. He got into the All-Human Free-For-All competition, out on Jubilar.” With real surprise Fett heard himself adding, “He was young, and he was outmatched. He made the finals round, though. Have you ever seen the Jubilar Free-For-All?”

The escort shook his head. “I’ve never even heard of the planet it takes place on.”

It was like listening to someone else talk; the words simply flowed out of Fett. “They put four fighters together in a ring, usually of the same species. To make it fairer.” A quick smile touched Fett’s features, as he thought about those fights; it was the first time Boba
Fett had smiled in years, and he did not notice it happening. “Fairer,” he repeated. “Usually three of them start by ganging up on the one they think weakest, which in this case would have been Solo. He was young, I told you that. They beat the weakest fighter into unconsciousness before turning on each other; and the last one standing is the victor.”

“They beat him unconscious? Han Solo?”

Fett stopped walking—and looked sideways at the man. A small motion, but—the Imperial found himself staring into the bounty hunter’s darkened visor.

Fett’s harsh voice sounded like an attack. “He won. It was one of the bravest things I ever saw.” He paused. “I’ll enjoy collecting him.”

The Imperial made a visible effort to collect himself. “Yes … I expect you will.”

Fett shook his head as though to clear it, turned and headed down the corridor once again, perhaps at a slightly quicker pace.

It was the longest conversation he’d had in years about anything except business.

The months passed in a rush; and when it was over Boba Fett found himself perhaps the best known bounty hunter in the galaxy.

It was a crowded time, and in Fett’s memory the events blurred into one another. Solo had hidden the
Falcon
among the Imperials’ garbage, released immediately before the jump into hyperspace, and so escaped from the Imperials at Hoth. A good trick, and one that might have worked against most Hunters; it had worked against Fett’s competition.