• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The klaxon ceased and Fett left the Slave I’s maintenance droid to deal with the fire he’d started, and ran back to control.

He slid into his seat. The Slave I had continued to head insystem at high speed, Tatooine growing large in the viewscreen. The local shipping did not seem to be taking notice of Fett, which was all to the good, but somebody out there knew he’d arrived. Fett fed figures to the autopilot, had it calculate a hyperspace jump back out of the system, started another thread, and set a portion of the computer to performing diagnostics on ship functions.

He did not worry about his weapons systems, nor his deflectors; they were either ready, or sabotaged—probably ready. Planting a beacon was one thing, and impressive enough; fooling the ship’s on-board diagnostics quite another.

So deep in a planet’s gravity well, calculating a new hyperspace jump took time, even for a computer as bright as the one Fett had running the Slave I. Even so, it had nearly completed the calculations when the subject became moot:

A needle of a ship came up over Tatooine’s horizon.

The IG-2000. It was instantly recognizable, and it told Fett just how very bad the problem was. The ship belonged to the assassin droid IG-88, the second-best bounty hunter in the galaxy, and studying hard to be number one. Fett’s fingers danced across the controls and the Slave I braked savagely, dropping into a lower orbit. Fett focused and fired his fore blasters as the two ships closed—

The IG-2000 exploded instantly, went up in a burst of superheated metal and expanding plasma.

Fett thought instantly, Bad decoy. That assassin droid would never make a mistake like—

The Slave I’s sensors went wild—a ship was leaving hyperspace only a few klicks away—and then the Slave I shuddered all about Fett as blaster fire struck it aft. The aft holocams showed it all clearly. The IG-2000, the real one, no decoy, breaking out of hyperspace with blasters lit, coming up above and behind Fett, pinning the Slave I between the IG-2000 and Tatooine. It was a brilliant maneuver that only the assassin droid, with its droid’s reflexes, could have planned and carried out.

The Slave I dove for atmosphere, the IG-2000 following at high speed, as the comm unit came alive. IG-88’s voice lacked intonation: “Surrender your prisoner and you have a thirty-percent probability of surviving this encounter.”

Fett ignored the droid, fingers flying across his control panel. The droid said something else then, that Boba Fett never heard. He routed what power he could spare to the rear deflectors, sent another round of blaster fire aft to keep IG-88 occupied, and then ruined his own ship—

He turned the inertial damper on.

For most of a second the Slave I went dark as the inertial damper drew current, shields dropping, weapons going dead for that second, when a single blaster bolt would have destroyed the entire ship—and then the inertial damper came online.

Dual explosions came from below deck, the inertial damper destroying itself as it did its job, and probably taking the hyperdrive with it. Half the indicators on the main board went red, the ship’s superstructure screamed with the sound of tearing metal, as the ship lost ninety percent of its velocity in the quantum instant it took an electron to descend from one atomic orbital shell to another.

Power returned to what was left of the Slave I as the IG-2000 hurtled past Fett at high speed. Fett calmly did all the obvious things, using the ion cannon to destroy the IG-2000’s rear deflector array before IG-88 could bring it online, followed by taking out the fore deflector array. He clamped a tractor beam onto the IG-2000 long enough to keep it from fleeing, and sent a missile down to finish the business off.

• • •

Inside the Sarlacc, Fett said aloud, “Shouldn’t have named it that.”

The voice said politely, Indeed?

“The Slave I. It was a mistake, that. It gave away information, told people I owned more …” Fett’s voice trailed off. He hung against a wall, in darkness, his extremities numbed.