"You got it, pal. He's obviously trying to get enough vector data on us to predict our path and speed. Which means"—Suhlak slammed the navigational controls hard to one side; the stars in the viewport blurred horizontally as the Z-95 Headhunter banked at close to a ninety-degree deflection from its original course—"we go an-other way."
The sharp maneuver had slammed Boba Fett against the pilot's chair. He braced himself, widening the stance of his boots and holding on tighter to the seat's back.
Suhlak glanced over his shoulder at his passenger. "You better sit back and strap yourself in. This might get a little raucous."
"And leave you running this show by yourself?" The lights from the control panel glinted on the dark visor of Boba Fett's helmet as he shook his head. "Don't worry— I can handle it."
"Suit yourself. Because it seems our friend has gotten in range of us." Suhlak pointed to the upper left quad-rant of the viewport. "There he is now. And it doesn't look like he just wants to say hello." Boosting the Head-hunter's main engines to full throttle, Suhlak threw the small ship into a looping spiral, piling on multiple g-forces. "Hold on—"
The first shot fired from the pursuer struck the Head-hunter's exterior hull, to the rear of the expanded pas-senger area. A burst of hot sparks rained across Boba Fett's back as a section of insulated circuitry overloaded and caught fire. Both he and Suhlak ignored the black smoke that started to fill the cockpit as the hunt saboteur pushed the thruster controls even farther forward, at the same time taking the craft into a wrenching counter-directional dive.
"There. That should've taken care of him." Suhlak pointed to the display from the rear scanner. "See? We've lost him." With one hand, Suhlak pulled back the en-gines' throttle. "Kinda disappointing, actually. I was hop-ing for a lot more fun from—" He suddenly fell silent, leaning forward and peering at the forward viewport. "What the..."
"Something wrong?"
"Yeah ... you could say that..." Suhlak slowly nod-ded, then raised his hand and pointed to the curved trans-paristeel in front of the control panel. "There he is ..."
At the center of the viewport, the pursuing ship sat waiting in the distance, engines dropped to standby as though its pilot was confident of there being no escape for its prey.
"Oh, great." Suhlak looked down at a smaller read-out on the control panel. "We finally got an ID code from this guy. Believe me, he's the last one I wanted to run into."
Boba Fett peered at the small bright image of the ship ahead. "Who is it?"
"Osss-10," said Suhlak, shoulders slumping. "Now I'm sure you're bad luck."
"Never heard of him."
"You wouldn't have." Disgust sounded in Suhlak's voice. "That's because you're an old story, and he's the latest thing. Don't you get it? This is all because of what you did when you broke up the old Bounty Hunters Guild. The old rule book's been thrown out, and there's enough chaos in the bounty-hunting environment for totally new ones to start up. New—and better." Suhlak pointed his thumb at the viewport. "I've never even seen this Osss-10 guy face-to-face, don't know where he comes from, but I've already had some real unpleasant encounters with him. Somebody with a lot of credits must be bankrolling him: he's got all the state-of-the-art equipment, plus he's a real genius at programming his onboard computers. He's got some kind of predictive al-gorithms wired into his gear that I've never encountered before. The more confrontations you have with him, the bigger operational database he has to extrapolate from about what your next moves are going to be—just like he did right now. If he gets much smarter, next he's going to be able to know what I'm going to do before I know!"
"So what are your plans?"
"What difference does it make?" Suhlak slumped down in defeat. "I already threw my best stuff at this guy. The only thing I can think of to do is ... give up."
"Right—" Boba Fett leaned past Suhlak and shoved the main thruster engine controls forward. The Z-95 Headhunter shot forward, rapidly accelerating toward the other craft in the distance.
"What're you doing?" Suhlak struggled against the forearm restraining him in the seat. "You'll get us killed!"
Fett said nothing, but pushed the thruster controls all the way to their limits.
The pursuer craft loomed larger in the center of the viewport as the Headhunter sped straight toward it. Sud-denly, the prow-mounted laser cannons began firing. Bolt after coruscating bolt struck the Headhunter, buf-feting the craft from side to side, as more sparks and smoke filled its interior as though it were in the middle of a planetary lightning storm. Boba Fett kept his grip locked upon the thruster controls. Shock and the force of accele-ration were enough to keep Suhlak pinned where he was, watching helplessly as Boba Fett made quick naviga-tional corrections with his other hand, maintaining their fiery course toward their opponent.
A final volley of laser-cannon fire burst across the viewport, blinding in its white-hot glare. The Head-hunter burst through it, finding the other craft now di rectly ahead. They were close enough to each other that Suhlak, opening his squeezed-shut eyes, had a momen-tary glimpse of a grimly intent face behind a curve of transparisteelThat was all he saw of Osss-10. Suhlak braced himself for the annihilating impact of the two ships crashing to-gether. Then suddenly he could see the rear of the other craft encircled with the flare from its own engines at full throttle. The cockpit through which he had glimpsed the pursuer's face swept upward and out of his vision; the bottom of the other ship's hull filled the viewport, near enough that Suhlak could have counted the thermal weld seams in the durasteel panels if they hadn't gone by so fast.
A scraping noise, metal against metal, sounded through the smoke roiling in the cockpit area as the underside of Osss-10's ship tore off one of the Z-95 Headhunter's sen-sor arrays. Then silence filled the space, broken only by the hissing of the automatic fire-control systems extin-guishing the burning circuitry.
Trembling, Suhlak leaned forward and checked the angle from his ship's rear scanner. The other ship was no-where to be seen. He punched up the rest of his detection monitors. They all told the same story: Osss-10 had van-ished from the sector as quickly as he had appeared.
Boba Fett had pushed himself back from the con-trol panel, leaving the Headhunter at cruising speed. In the forward viewport loomed the planet Tatooine, closer now.
"That... that was just insane ..." Suhlak shook his head, still seeing in his mind's eye the vision of the other ship coming within millimeters of a shattering crash with his own. "We were that close to being killed..."
"But we weren't," said Boba Fett. "So much for your new breed of bounty hunter. He might be able to predict what you're going to do—but he can't predict what I'm going to do. Nobody can."
Suhlak reached for the ship's controls and aimed toward the cloudless terrain of the Dune Sea. Predictions, he thought. I'll give you predictions. He had already de-cided, deep inside himself, that whatever amount of cred-its he was slated to get for this job— It wasn't going to be enough.
14
"I was wondering when you'd show up." Bossk's un-pleasant smile lit up in the shadows of the rear booth, the dim lights of the cantina glinting off the full array of his fangs. "I would've been real disappointed if you hadn't. I mean—disappointed in you."
Boba Fett slid into the opposite side of the booth. A few inquisitive faces had turned his way as he strode through the dimly lit space, but his visor-shielded glance over his shoulder had convinced them to limit their at-tention to their own business. "Hope you haven't been waiting." He set his gloved hands down flat on the ta-ble's damp-ringed surface.