"Notify the bridge," instructed Prince Xizor. "I'll be there directly. Have them bring all weapons systems to full operational capacity—immediately." He didn't want to take any chances on not having enough firepower for Boba Fett. "Have all target-accessing controls keyed to my command." Xizor glanced over his shoulder, display-ing a thin, cold smile to the comm specialist. "This is one that I wish to take care of personally."
5
The first hit was nearly the last one.
Boba Fett didn't even see it coming. The first indica-tion that Slave I had come under attack was the sudden burst of light that flared across the cockpit's viewport, as though the ship had struck the heart of some hidden sun. He would have been permanently blinded if the optical filters in his helmet's visor hadn't flashed opaque, pro-tecting his eyes. Fett's own quick instincts had snapped him away from the searing glare, raising a forearm across the front of the helmet as he had twisted about in the pi-lot's chair, away from the navigation controls and the obliterated view of stars he had seen only a fraction of a second before.
The impact of the laser-cannon bolt struck the ship's frame and his contorted spine simultaneously, throwing him from the pilot's seat and sprawling him out across the bare durasteel floor of the cockpit, his arms barely able to brace himself and catch the rush of the bulkhead near the hatchway. Past the roar of the explosion shud-dering through Slave I's hull and into the core beams run-ning from forward sensor antennae to the shielded engine compartments, Boba Fett could hear the high-therm welds of the bulkhead panels ripping free from one an-other. A metal edge as viciously sharp as a vibroblade's business end peeled upward from the cockpit's floor, com-ing within a centimeter of slashing through the heavy collar of his Mandalorian battle armor and across his throat. All that prevented a slashed jugular vein and sub-sequent death was a tight ducking of his head against one shoulder, so that the ripped durasteel panel caught one side of his helmet instead. The left side of the helmet blunted the cutting strike, adding another mark of vio-lence to the other dents and scrapes gathered in combat.
Rumbling downward in pitch, the sound of the laser-cannon bolt and its concussive hammer-blow against the ship faded enough that the wails and shrieks of the ship's alarm systems became audible to Boba Fett. He may have escaped death—for the moment—but Slave I had been mortally wounded; the ear-shredding, electronic screech was its death cry.
"Mute alarms." Fett spoke the command into the microphone of his helmet. "Switch to optical status report." As the high-pitched notes fell to ominous silence, a row of minuscule lights appeared at the limit of Boba Fett's peripheral vision. He knew what each glowing dot meant, which of the ship's systems was represented by vertical rank order, and what conditions were indicated by the lights' colors. Right now, they were all red, with a few of them pulsing at various speeds. That wasn't good; the only thing that could have been worse would be if one or more had gone to black and out, the indicator of a complete systemic failure. The topmost dot of light in the row was for Slave I's structure-envelope integrity, mea-sured in atmospheric-maintenance capability. If that one blinked out—and at the moment it was flickering faster than Boba Fett's own pulse rate—it would mean that the ship was breaking into fragments, the hull's durasteel sheath delaminating away from the broken internal frame and scattering into empty space like the silvery ashes from an extinguished groundfire. It would also be a sight that Boba Fett wouldn't live to see; the loss of the ship's air when the hull was breached would be an event with a survival rate of zero for any living creatures aboard.
Fett rolled onto his side, away from the sharp edge of the bulkhead that would have at least given him a quick death, and pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. He shook away the last bit of dazing fog from the blow to the battle armor's helmet. The now-silent alarms hadn't informed him of anything that he couldn't discern by other means. With the fragile condition that the ship had already been in, a direct hit by a Destroyer-grade laser cannon was bound to have a significant—and close to catastrophic—effect. After the stresses of jumping in and out of hyperspace, Slave I had barely been holding to-gether; that the vessel could have taken another blow on top of that without disintegrating was a tribute to the ex-tra armor and structural reinforcements that Boba Fett had ordered installed by Kuat Drive Yards. But there was a limit to how much damage those protective measures could soak up before collapsing along with the rest of the ship. When they went, his life span would be measurable in seconds; there was no emergency escape pod in which he could bail out.
Getting to his feet, the bounty hunter grabbed the back of the empty pilot's chair and pulled himself toward the cockpit controls. The panel's indicator signals and gauges were awash with pulsing red lights, telling him the same story he'd already surmised from the dots at the side of his helmet, bright as the ends of severed arteries.
Quickly, Boba Fett punched a gloved forefinger at the manual override command pad, inputting the code that would allow the ship's onboard computer to take over the navigational procedures.
"Randomize all maneuvers," he instructed. "Calculate and implement nonpredictive evasion pattern." Even before he took his hand away from the pad, Slave 7's docking-correction rockets burned on hard, twisting the ship out of its previous slow course and slamming Fett against the side of the cockpit; another burn, close to ninety degrees off the first one, would have sent him sprawling again if he hadn't kept a tight hold on the back of the pilot's chair.
The evasive maneuver was just in time: a second laser-cannon bolt shot cometlike past the curve of the forward viewport, coming close enough for Boba Fett to feel its heat through the clear transparisteel. Fading to a dull red, the bolt trailed away, leaving a bright afterimage in Fett's vision, but without hitting the ship's hull.
Another warning sound became audible as the stressed frame groaned from the transmitted force of the rockets. No electronic sensors were needed to register what was happening; Boba Fett could feel the chill of falling tem-perature through his battle armor, and hear the sibilant hiss of dwindling atmospheric pressure. The reserve oxygen tanks' emitters kicked in, attempting futilely to overcome the loss from the ship's main cabin areas. The evasive maneuver initiated by the onboard computer had wrenched some part of the hull loose, already weakened by the first laser-cannon hit. Slave I might be able to dodge most, and perhaps even all, of the coruscating bolts being aimed its way—Boba Fett had personally programmed in the randomizing algorithms—but it would be a process equally fatal, and rapidly so, as the quick, darting shifts in direction and acceleration tore at the ship's damaged fabric.
Boba Fett leaned over the back of the pilot's chair, scanning the forward viewport for any sign of the enemy that had opened fire on him. It didn't matter who it might be—he figured that he had enough enemies, from his years in the bounty hunter trade, that at any given moment there would be someone yearning to take a shot at him. For all he knew, it might have been possible that Bossk had already found some way to catch up with him; what the Trandoshan lacked in smarts, he made up in tenacity and the ability to carry a grudge.
All that mattered right now was where the laser-cannon's bolts had come from. Slave I had a deep arsenal of long-range weaponry itself; if Boba Fett could get a fix on the other ship, he would be able to bring his own laser cannons to bear on the target. That would be a calcu-lated gamble on his part: setting up and holding position long enough to return fire would increase the enemy's tar-geting ability, and the laser cannons' drain upon Slave I's rapidly dwindling power resources, as well as the struc-tural shock from firing the weapons, could very likely de-stroy rather than save the ship and its occupants. Two shots, calculated Boba Fett as he looked out across the field of stars. Maybe three. His instinctive connection with the ship he mastered told him that that would be the limit of its endurance. If he wasn't able to take out his enemy that quickly, any further action, including the resuming of evasive maneuvers, would leave him as a lung-emptied corpse drifting amid his own ship's debris.