Star Wars_ Tales of the Bounty Hunters - Kevin J. Anderson [44]
Sweat was running down Dengar’s face, and after only a couple of hours in the asteroid belt, his nerves were frayed. The Imperial fleet jumped to hyperspace, and Dengar kept up his work. He blocked out all sound, all thought, and simply tried to negotiate the asteroid field, content in the hunt.
Then, several minutes later, perhaps as much as half an hour—one of his beacons flared to life, reporting movement. The departing ship was not broadcasting any transponder signal, and it was limping away at sublight speed.
Dengar recorded its trajectory. He was well out of Solo’s sensor range, and he wanted to stay that way, but he immediately began edging out of the asteroid field.
When he neared the edge of the field, his remote sensors suddenly picked up something else, something strange. A large meteor, or perhaps an ion storm, seemed to be trailing Solo’s ship, just out of the Falcon’s sensor range.
Instinctively Dengar knew that it was another ship. A tightbeam transmission suddenly hit him, and an image of Boba Fett appeared on Dengar’s monitors. Boba Fett’s face was hidden beneath his battered armor.
“Sorry to do this, friend, but Solo is my trophy!” Boba Fett said, then there was the squeal of a binary code transmission.
Immediately, Dengar suspected that it was an arming code, but the bomb on his ship exploded before he could do anything. A muffled thud sounded from the engine room, followed by a flash. Dengar ducked as flames billowed over the ceiling, then the automatic fire extinguishers belched to life.
Dengar jumped from the command console, ran to the rear of his ship, and grabbed a manual extinguisher. He opened the door to the engine bay and found that his sublight engines lay in a charred heap of slag.
The bomb had been expertly configured and carefully set to do some major damage—but only to neutralize the ship, not destroy it.
Still, it would take him days to remove the fused parts, dump them, and put in replacements—if he had the necessary parts in stock. By then, Han Solo would be forever gone.
Dengar hung his head, and his mind was just numb. He didn’t know where to begin. After some consideration, he went to his command console, checked the trajectory of Han Solo’s ship. He’d left a particle vapor trail that could be followed for several hours, or days, if he was lucky.
He looked out into the blackness of space, where Boba Fett was chasing Han Solo. “Go ahead and blow me up,” Dengar muttered. “But someday, you’ll find out why they call me Payback.”
Dengar got up from his console, and set to work.
Sometime later, Dengar’s ship glided between the delicate Tibanna gas clouds of Bespin, past smooth mountains the colors of rose and peach, toward the setting sun.
Cloud City lay straight ahead, its rust-colored towers shining dully. He circled the upper gambling casinos, and over the comm he asked the port authorities for permission to land at the nearest repair facility, then sent a false registry for his craft, not wanting to alert anyone to his presence.
He spotted the Millennium Falcon below him on a landing pad. His heart began racing.
The port authorities directed him to the proper landing field, and he touched ground, then slipped quietly into Cloud City.
Once inside its corridors, the dockmaster approached his ship. “I’ve got problems with my sublight drive and with my communications system. I’ll give you a hundred extra credits if the job is finished in two hours.”
“Yes, sir,” the dockmaster said, signaling his work crew to move the ship into an empty berth.
Dengar stepped into the gleaming corridors of Cloud City, made his way to the upper gambling chambers, where most of the city’s real business was conducted.
If Han Solo was still here, Dengar imagined that he would find it hard to ignore the luxurious dining halls and exalted atmosphere of the casinos.
The main casino