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—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