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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,