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  So be it, thought the Falleen noble. He gave a single, meditative nod as he gazed at the waiting field of stars. All had gone according to plan—his plan, and no other creature's. As his breast swelled with both satisfaction and anticipation, one fist tightened inside Xizor's other hand, as though it held and drew the cords binding all the far-flung worlds into a single woven net.

  Another entity, smaller and nearer, also stood by and waited. Behind Xizor, the comm specialist emitted a

  discreet but clearly audible cough. "Excuse me, Your Excellency—" The comm specialist had obviously sum­ moned all his remaining store of courage. He knew the risk involved in disturbing the meditations of Black Sun's leader. "Your crew," he reminded his commander as diplo­ matically as possible, "awaits their orders."

  "As well they should." Xizor knew that the crack of the whip, the slight but necessary touch of discipline he had administered, would have every station aboard the Vendetta primed and ready for action, with every crew member eager to demonstrate his worth. A shame, mused Xizor, to waste all that energy on so small a target. The Vendetta and its crew deserved more pyrotechnics— and the satisfaction that came with both violence and victory—than would be provided by one broken-down bounty-hunting hulk.

  "Your Excellency?" The comm specialist's words gen­ tly prodded him again.

  Xizor answered him without turning around from the Vendetta's great viewport. "The crew," said Xizor, "will have to wait a while longer."

  "But. . . Boba Fett's ship ..." The comm specialist sounded genuinely puzzled.

  There was no need to be reminded of Slave I's ap­ proach, the vector of its entry into this sector of space. Xizor could feel it in the tautening nerves of his own body, an ancient predatory instinct responding to the nearness of its prey. Even without that subtle, almost mystical sense, Xizor knew that the Vendetta's sensors would have hard confirmation of Slave I's presence, well before Boba Fett suspected that anything was amiss. A barrier of drifting structural debris, left over from the various ships and other artifacts that the arachnoid as­sembler Kud'ar Mub'at had incorporated into its web, served to effectively screen the Vendetta from long-range detection.

  "Notify the bridge," instructed Prince Xizor. "I'll be there directly. Have them bring all weapons systems to

  full operational capacity—immediately." He didn't want to take any chances on not having enough firepower for Boba Fett. "Have all target-accessing controls keyed to my command." Xizor glanced over his shoulder, display­ing a thin, cold smile to the comm specialist. "This is one that I wish to take care of personally."

  5

  The first hit was nearly the last one.

  Boba Fett didn't even see it coming. The first indica­ tion that Slave I had come under attack was the sudden burst of light that flared across the cockpit's viewport, as though the ship had struck the heart of some hidden sun. He would have been permanently blinded if the optical filters in his helmet's visor hadn't flashed opaque, pro­ tecting his eyes. Fett's own quick instincts had snapped him away from the searing glare, raising a forearm across the front of the helmet as he had twisted about in the pi­ lot's chair, away from the navigation controls and the obliterated view of stars he had seen only a fraction of a second before.

  The impact of the laser-cannon bolt struck the ship's frame and his contorted spine simultaneously, throwing him from the pilot's seat and sprawling him out across the bare durasteel floor of the cockpit, his arms barely able to brace himself and catch the rush of the bulkhead near the hatchway. Past the roar of the explosion shud­ dering through Slave I's hull and into the core beams run­ning from forward sensor antennae to the shielded engine

  compartments, Boba Fett could hear the high-therm welds of the bulkhead panels ripping free from one an­ other. A metal edge as viciously sharp as a vibroblade's business end peeled upward from the cockpit's floor, com­ ing within a centimeter of slashing through the heavy collar of his Mandalorian battle armor and across his throat. All that prevented a slashed jugular vein and sub­sequent death was a tight ducking of his head against one shoulder, so that the ripped durasteel panel caught one side of his helmet instead. The left side of the helmet blunted the cutting strike, adding another mark of vio­lence to the other dents and scrapes gathered in combat.

  Rumbling downward in pitch, the sound of the laser- cannon bolt and its concussive hammer-blow against the ship faded enough that the wails and shrieks of the ship's alarm systems became audible to Boba Fett. He may have escaped death—for the moment—but Slave I had been mortally wounded; the ear-shredding, electronic screech was its death cry.

  "Mute alarms." Fett spoke the command into the microphone of his helmet. "Switch to optical status re­ port." As the high-pitched notes fell to ominous silence, a row of minuscule lights appeared at the limit of Boba Fett's peripheral vision. He knew what each glowing dot meant, which of the ship's systems was represented by vertical rank order, and what conditions were indicated by the lights' colors. Right now, they were all red, with a few of them pulsing at various speeds. That wasn't good; the only thing that could have been worse would be if one or more had gone to black and out, the indicator of a complete systemic failure. The topmost dot of light in the row was for Slave I's structure-envelope integrity, mea­sured in atmospheric-maintenance capability. If that one blinked out—and at the moment it was flickering faster than Boba Fett's own pulse rate—it would mean that the ship was breaking into fragments, the hull's durasteel sheath delaminating away from the broken internal frame and scattering into empty space like the silvery ashes from an extinguished groundfire. It would also be

  a sight that Boba Fett wouldn't live to see; the loss of the ship's air when the hull was breached would be an event with a survival rate of zero for any living creatures aboard.

  Fett rolled onto his side, away from the sharp edge of the bulkhead that would have at least given him a quick death, and pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. He shook away the last bit of dazing fog from the blow to the battle armor's helmet. The now-silent alarms hadn't informed him of anything that he couldn't discern by other means. With the fragile condition that the ship had already been in, a direct hit by a Destroyer-grade laser cannon was bound to have a significant—and close to catastrophic—effect. After the stresses of jumping in and out of hyperspace, Slave I had barely been holding to­gether; that the vessel could have taken another blow on top of that without disintegrating was a tribute to the ex­ tra armor and structural reinforcements that Boba Fett had ordered installed by Kuat Drive Yards. But there was a limit to how much damage those protective measures could soak up before collapsing along with the rest of the ship. When they went, his life span would be measurable in seconds; there was no emergency escape pod in which he could bail out.

  Getting to his feet, the bounty hunter grabbed the back of the empty pilot's chair and pulled himself toward the cockpit controls. The panel's indicator signals and gauges were awash with pulsing red lights, telling him the same story he'd already surmised from the dots at the side of his helmet, bright as the ends of severed arteries.

  Quickly, Boba Fett punched a gloved forefinger at the manual override command pad, inputting the code that would allow the ship's onboard computer to take over the navigational procedures. "Randomize all maneuvers," he instructed. "Calculate and implement nonpredictive evasion pattern." Even before he took his hand away from the pad, Slave 7's docking-correction rockets burned on hard, twisting the ship out of its previous slow course and slamming Fett against the side of the cockpit; another

  burn, close to ninety degrees off the first one, would have sent him sprawling again if he hadn't kept a tight hold on the back of the pilot's chair.

  The evasive maneuver was just in time: a second laser- cannon bolt shot cometlike past the curve of the forward viewport, coming close enough for Boba Fett to feel its heat through the clear transparisteel. Fading to a dull red, the bolt trailed away, leaving a bright afterimage in Fett's vision, but w
ithout hitting the ship's hull.

  Another warning sound became audible as the stressed frame groaned from the transmitted force of the rockets. No electronic sensors were needed to register what was happening; Boba Fett could feel the chill of falling tem­ perature through his battle armor, and hear the sibilant hiss of dwindling atmospheric pressure. The reserve oxygen tanks' emitters kicked in, attempting futilely to overcome the loss from the ship's main cabin areas. The evasive maneuver initiated by the onboard computer had wrenched some part of the hull loose, already weakened by the first laser-cannon hit. Slave I might be able to dodge most, and perhaps even all, of the coruscating bolts being aimed its way—Boba Fett had personally programmed in the randomizing algorithms—but it would be a process equally fatal, and rapidly so, as the quick, darting shifts in direction and acceleration tore at the ship's damaged fabric.

  Boba Fett leaned over the back of the pilot's chair, scanning the forward viewport for any sign of the enemy that had opened fire on him. It didn't matter who it might be—he figured that he had enough enemies, from his years in the bounty hunter trade, that at any given moment there would be someone yearning to take a shot at him. For all he knew, it might have been possible that Bossk had already found some way to catch up with him; what the Trandoshan lacked in smarts, he made up in tenacity and the ability to carry a grudge.

  All that mattered right now was where the laser-cannon's bolts had come from. Slave I had a deep arsenal of long-range weaponry itself; if Boba Fett could get a fix

  on the other ship, he would be able to bring his own laser cannons to bear on the target. That would be a calcu­ lated gamble on his part: setting up and holding position long enough to return fire would increase the enemy's tar­ geting ability, and the laser cannons' drain upon Slave I's rapidly dwindling power resources, as well as the struc­ tural shock from firing the weapons, could very likely de­ stroy rather than save the ship and its occupants. Two shots, calculated Boba Fett as he looked out across the field of stars. Maybe three. His instinctive connection with the ship he mastered told him that that would be the limit of its endurance. If he wasn't able to take out his enemy that quickly, any further action, including the resuming of evasive maneuvers, would leave him as a lung-emptied corpse drifting amid his own ship's debris.

  The main engines came on again, a quick burst thrust­ ing Slave I away from its previous location. A trail of churning, fading light at the corner of the viewport indi­ cated the effectiveness of the onboard computer's ran­domizing program; the enemy's laser-cannon bolt had scorched past, only a few meters away from the ship's hull. Boba Fett leaned closer to the cockpit's forward viewport, balancing himself with one hand braced against the control panel's flashing red lights, scanning with a hunter's intent gaze for any sign of the opponent he faced. His enemy, whoever it might be, obviously was aware that its target would be doing exactly that, trying to lo­ cate the source of the bolts aimed toward him. That was the reason why the other ship wasn't sending out a steady stream of rapid-fire laser-cannon bolts; their fiery pas­ sage would have been a dead giveaway, negating the ad­ vantage it had at the moment, of mounting its offensive from some undetermined hiding place.

  Boba Fett's strategizing had been encompassed in mere milliseconds. Without warning, the computer's evasion program kicked in again, twisting Slave I into a full 360-degree looping spiral, the side-mounted rockets diverting the thrust of the main engines. It wasn't enough: Boba Fett's grip upon the back of the pilot's chair was torn loose

  as another laser-cannon bolt scored a direct hit upon the curved center of the hull. The impact sent him flying backward, landing sprawled on his back halfway through the cockpit's open hatchway. A torrent of sparks, blind­ ing gnatlike miniatures of the laser fire that had filled the viewport, lashed against his chest and helmet visor as the control panel's circuits overloaded and shorted out. The acrid smell of burning hard-wire insulation and frying silicon mixed with the hissing steam of the fire-extinguisher cylinders letting loose their contents beneath the panel's gauges and buttons.

  As the cockpit filled with smoke, Boba Fett grabbed the side of the hatchway and pulled himself upright. The louder hiss in his ears was the sound of oxygen venting from the ship's hull; the last laser-cannon bolt had done even more damage than the first that had hit Slave I.

  His helmet comlink had gone dead, as well as the red warning lights arrayed at the side of the visor. Fett pushed past the toppled pilot's chair, its pedestal stan­chion ripped loose from the buckling floor. The panel was slick with combustion-retardant foam and wet ash as he punched the computer's input microphone control. "Prepare to seal off cockpit area," he commanded. The only way to obtain a few precious minutes more of breathing time—and the chance, however slim, to sur­ vive beyond that—was to reduce the stress on Slave I's life-support systems to as close to zero as possible. Letting every other section of the ship go to complete vacuum would turn the cockpit into a temporary bubble of safety. Once it was set up, Boba Fett could override the com­ puter's evasion program and turn the underside of the craft toward the source of the laser-cannon bolts, so the inert metal would act as a shield for the cockpit's curve of transparisteel.

  The rest of the plan formulated itself in Fett's mind. He had limited options at this point, but there was still always the chance of outwitting his foe. Play dead, he told himself. That could work. The damage that Slave I

  had suffered would be obviously visible from the out­ side; with the engines shut down and all signs of onboard power switched off, his ship would look like a lifeless hulk drifting in space. That might be enough to get this unknown enemy to come close enough, imprudently within range of a sudden, unexpected volley from Boba Fett's own laser cannons. At that kind of distance, he could cripple or even destroy the other ship; either way, he'd then have the time to head for the safety of Kud'ar Mub'at's web, before the remaining store of oxygen aboard Slave I ran out.

  "Atmospheric lockdown procedures concluded," an­ nounced the onboard computer's voice, still emotionless though coarsened now with burring static. "Cockpit area ready to be sealed on your order."

  "Maintain status," said Fett. There were things he had to do before the cockpit's life-support systems were secured. "Standby until I return to this area." He pushed himself away from the control panel.

  From the cockpit area, Boba Fett quickly descended the metal treads of the ladder leading down to the main cargo hold. He still had hard merchandise aboard the ship that he intended to deliver and be paid for. The rene­ gade stormtrooper Trhin Voss'on't had to be alive in or­der for that to be accomplished.

  The air pressure in the cargo hold had dropped to a dizzying, heart-accelerating level. As he stepped from the last tread of the ladder, Boba Fett could see a swimming cluster of black dots form in his vision, a telltale sign of oxygen starvation. The spots quickly vanished as his bat­ tle armor's reserve oxygen supply kicked in. As useful as those reserves were in emergencies such as this, they were still limited; Fett knew that he would have to ac­ complish his mission here fast, and get back up to the cockpit with Voss'on't before they ran out. All his strate­gizing would do him little good if he was lying on the cargo hold's floor unconscious when the enemy ship approached.

  "I was . . . wondering . . . when you'd show up." Gasping for breath, eyes reddened from the smoke that filled the cargo area, Trhin Voss'on't held himself upright with both fists tightly clenched upon the holding cage's bars. "Figured ... maybe you were dead already ..."

  "Lucky for you that I'm not." The miniaturized secu­rity key was implanted in the fingertip of Boba Fett's gloved hand; the mere act of grabbing the pull-bar on the cage's door would unlock it and allow him to yank Voss'on't out. He could feel the renegade stormtrooper's hard gaze bearing down on him like two laser trackers as he stepped close and reached for the door. "Let's get going."

  Fett had already calculated that he didn't have time to render Voss'on't unconscious, or the strength, given the depleted
level of oxygen in the cargo hold, to drag the stormtrooper's limp body up the ladder to the cockpit. It would be better just to get him up there, with whatever degree of threats or personal violence was necessary, then knock him out so he wouldn't interfere with the rest of the operation.

  "Why should I?" Voss'on't hunched over, his head at a level with his hands gripping the bars, chest laboring to draw in enough breath to support life functions. "What... do I get.. .out of it?"

  That was one more thing he didn't have time for: one more argument from Voss'on't. The stormtrooper had never yet seemed to realize that Boba Fett wasn't inter­ested in his opinions on what to do next.

  "What you get," said Boba Fett as he pulled open the holding cage's door, "is a chance to go on living a little while longer. If that's not important to you—too bad. You don't get a vote on it."

  "I'll tell you... what's important to me ..." Voss'on't straightened up, pushing himself back from the vertical bars. "Giving you ... a little surprise ..." His voice was suddenly louder and more forceful, as though he were now expending a carefully husbanded store of vital en-

  ergy. Taking one step backward to brace himself, he swung the single bar that had somehow come loose from its mounting at both the top and bottom welded frames of the cage. The length of glistening metal moved through a flat horizontal arc, its end striking Boba Fett directly in his abdomen. The blow had all of Trhin Voss'on't's weight and strength behind it, hitting Fett with enough velocity to lift him for a moment off his feet and slam his spine back against the edge of the open cage doorway.