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.
But Boba Fett had been fooled by that trick before, once. By now he had been in his line of work longer than most, and there were few enough ploys he hadn’t seen, once or twice or a dozen times. There was only one place they could be going, one place close enough for them to reach with their main hyperdrive disabled; Fett jumped for Cloud City, and there Lando Calrissian made the deal that delivered Solo to Fett.
With Han Solo as cargo, frozen in carbonite, Fett started for Tatooine. There, for the sculpture of Han Solo, and a few months of Fett’s time, not to mention a number of inconveniences on the way, Jabba the Hutt paid, not 100,000 credits, but a quarter of a million—
And not too long after that, the rescuers started arriving. Leia Organa, pretending to be a bounty hunter, arrived with Chewbacca in tow. She succeeded in releasing Solo from the carbonite. For the very death of him Fett could not imagine what she’d had in mind; whatever it was, it did not work. The Hutt put Solo down in the dungeon, with Chewbacca, and intended to execute them in the near future; and Leia Organa spent her days in chains at the foot of Jabba’s throne.
Fett lay on the bed in his darkened quarters deep inside Jabba’s Palace, wearing his armor, staring up into the darkness. His helmet was balanced on his stomach and cool air from the ventilators washed across him in rhythmic gusts.
A heavy pounding sounded at his door.
Fett sat up, donning his helmet and lifting his assault rifle; the movements were so automatic he did not even have to think about them. He threw the bolt on the door, took several steps backward and aimed the rifle. He did not turn on the room lights. “Come in.”
The door swung open with a reluctant creak. A pair of Gamorrean guards stood out in the passageway; Fett leveled his rifle at them. “What do you want?”
One of the guards stepped to the side, and a form—a human—was shoved into the room. Fett’s finger tightened reflexively on the trigger, but he held his fire.
“From Jabba,” the near guard grunted. “Enjoy her.”
Fett reached back with one hand and touched the control for the light fixtures; and under the cool white light that washed over the room, looked down on Leia Organa, Princess of Alderaan.
She scrambled to her feet and backed up into a corner of the room, breathing heavily. Fett imagined she had fought with the guards as they brought her down to him. “You touch me—” Her voice failed her, and she stood there, shivering, and finally said, “Touch me and one of us is going to die.”
He lowered the rifle slowly, and looked around the room. He had few enough possessions here with him in the palace; everything he owned, which was little enough, was aboard the Slave I. Finally he pointed at the thin sheet that covered the bed. “Cover yourself. I’m not going to touch you.”
Organa moved slightly to the side, leaned over and grabbed the sheet and wrapped it around herself and the brief costume Jabba had allowed her, and backed up again into the corner of the room that left her farthest away from Fett. “You’re not?”
Fett shook his head. He sat down in the corner facing hers, moving carefully, and propped his rifle across his knees. He had to move carefully; his knees had been getting worse in recent years. “Sex between those not married,” said Fett, “is immoral.”
“Yeah,” said Organa. “So’s rape.”
Fett nodded. “So is rape.” He sat in what was, for him, a comfortable silence, watching her. She settled down in the opposite corner, being careful of her covering; Fett approved of her modesty, but it did not prevent him from continuing to look at her. He had never so much as held a woman in his arms, Boba Fett, and the desire for a woman came to him less frequently, with the passage of the years; but in Fett’s mind his chastity made him no less a man, and she was worth looking at, still flushed from her struggles, with her dark hair cascading down over the pale sheet.
She adjusted the sheet around herself, pushing herself back into the corner for warmth. “You’re not going to call the guards to take me back to Jabba?”
“And insult Jabba? I don’t think so. He’d feed you to the Rancor, and hold a grudge against me. You can go back in the morning.”
Her breathing was quieting. “So we just sit here. All night.”
“The stones are cold. If you want to use the bed, you’re welcome to it.”
Organa’s skepticism was obvious. “And you’ll just sit there. All night.”
“I won’t hurt you. I won’t touch you. Sleep if you will. Or not; I do not care.”
Silence descended. Fett watched the woman as she leaned back against the stone wall; watched her as she collected herself; watched her as she watched him.
Time passed. Both of his eyes wer
e open, but he was only half awake when she burst out, “Why are you doing this? Why are you fighting for them?”
Fett stirred, stretching slightly. The rifle across his knees was steady as a rock. “Over half a million credits,” he informed her. “That’s what Vader and the Hutt have paid for my work.”
“Is it just money? We’ll pay you. Help us get out of here and we’ll pay you—”
“How much?”
“More than you can imagine.”
Fett was amused by the audacity she showed, trying to bribe him, here deep inside the Hutt’s castle. “I can imagine an awful lot.”
“You’ll get it.”
It was cruel to let the woman hope. “No. What you’re doing is morally wrong. The Rebels are in the wrong, and the Rebellion will fail—and it should.”
Leia Organa could not keep the outrage out of her voice. “Morally wrong? Us? We’re fighting for homes and our families and our loved ones, the ones who are still alive and the ones we’ve lost. The Empire destroyed my entire world, virtually everyone I ever knew as a child—”
Fett actually leaned forward slightly. “Those worlds rose in rebellion against the authority legally in place over them. The Emperor was within his rights to destroy them; they threatened the system of social justice that permits civilization to exist.” He paused. “I am sorry for the deaths of the innocent. But that happens in war, Leia Organa. The innocent die in wars, and your side should not have started this one.”
He shut up abruptly; all the talking was making his throat sore.
His comments appeared to render Organa speechless anyway; she looked off to the side, away from Fett, staring at the blank stone wall, for several minutes. When she finally spoke her voice was quiet and she still did not look at him. “It’s hard for me to believe that you can really think like this. I’ve heard Luke—Luke Skywalker, I know you’ve heard of him—I’ve heard him talk about the dark side—”
Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters Page 28