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“Solo was here, you know,” Dengar said. “You lost him.”

“We haven’t lost him yet,” Vader said. “At this very moment, he has taken refuge in an asteroid field, and our ships are searching for him. You will go into the asteroid field and hunt him. And if you fail me in this, …” Vader made a crushing gesture with his fist.

“Yes … sir,” Dengar said, not sure whether he should use the proper form of military address.

“Yes, my lord,” Vader corrected.

Dengar took a deep breath. “Yes, my lord.”

Vader strode forward, clapped him on the shoulder and stared in his face threateningly. “Do not fail me.”

Vader turned, and the prison door came open. A lieutenant stood just outside the door in his crisp Imperial uniform. Vader left, and as the door closed, Dengar heard him speaking to the lieutenant. “This chance encounter has given me an idea. We will assemble a team of bounty hunters to assist in our operation.…”

“Bounty hunters! We don’t need that scum!” one of the deck officers grumbled to his companions. Dengar stood on a platform while Darth Vader paced back and forth, inspecting the mercenaries who had gathered, giving them their final orders.

The bounty hunters were a motley array, and despite their small number, they were also very dangerous. Certainly the IG-88 assassin droid bothered Dengar a great deal, but Lord Vader had also brought on Boba Fett, who not moments before had complained loudly to Vader about the other bounty hunters—loudly enough so that it appeared that Fett’s rage came from an underlying paranoia rather than about any concerns that he had over competition.

“I want them alive,” Vader was saying of Solo. “No disintegrations!”

“As you wish,” Boba Fett grumbled.

There was some scurrying at the communications console as the watch commander called to Vader, “Lord Vader, we have them now!”

Dengar’s heart sank. If Han Solo were captured by the Imperials, then Vader would renege on his offer of leniency. He’d carry out the death warrant.

For a few moments, several bounty hunters stood on deck, listening breathlessly to Captain Needa shout orders as his Star Destroyer pursued the Millennium Falcon. Boba Fett spun away at a run, and Dengar listened for fifteen seconds before he realized that Boba Fett was scrambling to his own ship, hoping to join the chase.

By the time Dengar reached the Punishing One in launch bay twelve, Boba Fett was checking his own ship, a Kuat Systems Firespray-class vehicle renowned for its speed and firepower. He was circling, as if to see if someone had tampered with it. He stepped close, and a warning alarm blared. Dengar saw that Boba Fett was indeed paranoid, setting alarms on his own ship to make certain that no one approached it.

Dengar rushed into his much bulkier and more mundane ship, checked the systems quickly. The Imperials had depolarized the controls, reversing the ionization damage. He blasted off, headed toward the asteroid field. He could hear the Imperial comm chatter. The Star Destroyer had already lost Han Solo and was scrambling fighters to search for him. Solo’s last maneuver had been to strafe the Star Destroyer. Then he’d gone off the scopes.

Dengar figured Solo must have gone back into the asteroid field. Perhaps Solo had shut down systems for a bit, so that his own ship seemed no more than an asteroid, but as Dengar sped into the asteroid field himself, he saw that even Solo wasn’t crazy enough to risk such a maneuver. Rocks the size of his ship hurtled toward him, and these weren’t the soft carbonaceous chondrites that his weapons might punch a hole through—these were nickel-iron rocks that could smash him to pieces.

Dengar was forced to keep his concussion shields at maximum power, dodging those asteroids that he could, blasting those that he couldn’t.

Some of the asteroids were the size of a small moon. All of the metal in the sky fouled communications, jammed sensors.

Dengar began dropping sensor beacons onto the larger rocks, hoping that they’d be able