• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Boba Fett

Book 3

Maze Of Deception

by Elizabeth Hand

PROLOGUE

The Dream is always the same. Boba Fett always thinks of it as The Dream, because it's the only one he ever remembers. The only dream he ever wants to remember.

In The Dream, his father, Jango Fett, is alive. He is showing Boba how to handle a blaster. The dull gray weapon is much heavier than Boba thought it would be.

"Like this," Jango Says. He is not wearing his Mandalorian helmet, so Boba can see his father's brown eyes, coolly intelligent but not cold, not when he is looking at his son. When his father holds the blaster it looks weightless, a deadly extension of Jango's own hand. He hands the weapon to Boba, who tries hard to keep his hand steady as he holsters it.

"Always make certain your grip is tight," Jango goes on, "or else an enemy can knock it from you. Like this - "

A quick motion and the blaster falls from Boba's hand. Boba looks up in dismay, expecting a reprimand, but his father is smiling.

"Remember, son - trust no one, but use everyone."

That's when Boba wakes up. Sometimes his father's message is different, and sometimes the weapon is different. A dartshooter, say, or a missile. But one thing never changes.

Boba always wakes from The Dream. And his father is still dead.

CHAPTER ONE

"Boba! Downtime's over! I need you - we're in final approach."

Boba looked up groggily from where he d been asleep in Slave I's cockpit. Beside him, where once his father would have sat at the starship's controls, the bounty hunter, Aurra Sing was hunched over the console. She was staring at the Screen. It was filled with symbols that were meaningless to Boba Fett - - the coordinates of their precise destination remained scrambled.

"Yes!" Aurra! Sing murmured triumphantly. "We're almost there."

She looked aside at, Boba. Quickly he turned away. He wasn't supposed to know where they were going.

That was part of the deal. Aurra Sing would bring the two of them here, following the coordinates she had discovered in Slave l's databank.

The coordinates were part of a complex system - a treasure map, really -

that detailed where Boba's father had stored a vast fortune in credits and precious metals, all across the galaxy.

Jango Fett had been a bounty hunter - an extremely successful bounty hunter. He had been an extremely clever one, too. Trained as a great Mandalorian warrior, Jango had learned the most important lesson of all: Prepare for the worst. And so he had made certain that his young son, Boba, would have access to his fortune after his death. The fortune could never be obtained by anyone else, because the access code was programmed so that only Boba's retinal scan and DNA could obtain it.

Since Boba was the sole unaltered clone of his father, he and he alone shared Jango's pure genetic material.

But Boba did not know where the fortune was. Only Aurra Sing knew that, because she had accessed the records on his father's ship. The ship that should have been Boba Fett's now.

Boba looked warily at the person next to him. Her topknot of flaming red hair brilliant against dead-white skin. Her eyes blazing as twin suns.

"She is one of the deadliest fighters I have ever known," Jango had told Boba once, years before. "She was trained as a Jedi, but for some reason she hates them more than she hates anyone in the galaxy - and that's saying something! Don't ever cross her, son. And above all, don't ever trust her."

Boba Fett certainly didn't trust her. Who would? Aurra Sing was as thin and muscular and fine-boned as a Kuat aristocrat, but as deadly as a Mentellian savrip. She was a solitary hunter and a lethal predator.

Like my father. Like I could be, Boba thought. His glance turned admiring - though he was too smart to let Aurra Sing see that!

"Get ready for descent," she snapped as she punched in the final landing codes. "Soon you'll start making yourself useful to me, kid!"

The coordinates were still scrambled. But earlier, while Aurra Sing