Xizor had already made a mental note as to what instructions he would give to Kreet'ah. He expected no objection from the Kian'tharan; it was more a matter of standard operating procedure than anything else. Standard. . . and familiar. A smile played at the corner of his mouth. Even, thought Xizor to himself, somewhat enjoyable.
That was his one regret about sparing Kreet'ah's life. Now he wouldn't have the pleasure of taking it.
7
A moment comes, when a target is sighted and locked upon, and all one has to do is press the trigger stud underneath one's thumb. Boba Fett had had many such moments in his career, enough so that there was no longer any physiological response, no speeding of the pulse, no tightening of the breath beneath his dark-visored helmet, no trickle of adrenaline into the veins of the body that bore the Mandalorian battle armor. . .
But there was still a deep sense of satisfaction, an almost spiritual glow at the core of his being. It was what he lived for, even more than the credits that all his hard work brought in.
In the cockpit of Slave I, Boba Fett's gloved hands moved swiftly across the navigation controls. The ship's velocity was already max'ed out, the thrust from the custom-designed-and expensive-Mandal Motors engines ramped to overload. A shimmering vibration traveled through Slave I's structural frame, blurring the gauges and readouts beneath Boba Fett's fingers. In the cockpit's viewport, against a backdrop of unwavering stars, could be seen the trailing jets of the ship that Fett pursued. He's good, Boba Fett thought grudgingly. But not good enough.
The other ship, an Incom Corporation Z-95 Headhunter, was perfectly suited for just such highspeed chase and evasion maneuvers. This particular one had been modified with an additional passenger area, reaching from an expanded cockpit and along the main fuselage. The ungainly structural addition would create a negative aerodynamic drag inside a planet's atmosphere, but in the vacuum of space there was little effect on the craft's speed. Boba Fett knew who the pilot was, a free-lance hunt saboteur named N'dru Suhlak; a kid who had washed out of the Rebel Alliance's Tierfon Fighter Base not for lack of flying skills, but an excess of insubordination. The expertise and training that Suhlak had picked up while he was hanging out with ace pilots like Jek Porkins and Wes Janson, plus his own natural abilities-there were just some things in this galaxy that you had to be born with-had quickly gotten him to the top of his chosen speciality. It was one for which he commanded top credits: a hunt saboteur's trade was essentially the secure transport and delivery of hard merchandise, one creature at a time. Suhlak made the claim that he could get any sentient creature with a bounty posted on its head-that was what" hard merchandise" meant, in bounty hunter jargon-from Point A to Point B without getting intercepted, no matter who was gunning for the cargo.
Big talk, thought Boba Fett as he punched in another course micro-correction to stay on the Z-95's tail. But the kid had proved he had the pilot chops, getting past even the few other bounty hunters for which Fett had any respect at all. IG-88, the droid bounty hunter, had been blitzed so fast that the optical processors inside its durasteel head hadn't even spotted Suhlak getting past its interceptor stakeout point. Most of the other bounty hunters, even before the Bounty Hunters Guild had split up into its two main factions, had made it a general rule not to pursue Suhlak's ship, the pursuit being a waste of time and fueland one's life. Not all of Suhlak's escape maneuvers were based on speed alone.
Boba Fett punched in an override command, diverting Slave I's excess atmospheric-maintenance functions to the cooling system for the main thrust engine. If there had been anyone in the holding cages below the cockpit area, they would have been asphyxiated in a few Standard Time Units. But Slave I wasn't carrying any passengers, willing or unwilling, right now. Fett's ship had been lurking in the debris shadow cast by a ring of wrecked and stripped star freighters above the toxic atmosphere of the planet Uhltenden; he had been waiting, with all propulsion systems in abeyance-trigger mode, for Suhlak's Z-95 to show up. When it had, the chase was on.
N'dru Suhlak had been either lucky or smart so far not to have crossed Boba Fett's path. The merchandise that Suhlak had ferried had all been below Fett's threshold of interest. Letting the kid get away with it, for as long as there was no impact on Fett's business interests, had been a good way of letting Suhlak grow overconfident. Any misestimation of one's skills-or one's luck-was a fatal error when Boba Fett was involved. You've made your mistake now, Fett silently told the ship speeding through the vacuum ahead.
He kept one gloved hand hovering close to Slave I's hyperdrive controls. No astrogation coordinates had been read out of the navicomputer and locked in yet, but the tracking devices and targeting computer were ready to go. If Suhlak had made one more mistake, that of taking the little Z-95 into hyperspace, he would have found Slave I right on top of him when he emerged back into realspace. Nobody escaped from Boba Fett
that easily. He must know it's me, thought Fett, right behind him. The helmet of the Mandalorian armor nodded slowly as its bearer gazed out the cockpit viewport. His nod indicated both satisfaction and anticipation; the pursuit and the inevitable capture would be all the better now.
The Z-95 suddenly disappeared from sight.
Fett's hand darted closer to the hyperdrive controls, stopping a fraction of a centimeter before hitting them. The tracker lock-on signals hadn't flared red yet. He's still here. Boba Fett leaned forward in the pilot's chair, bringing his visored sight closer to the cockpit's forward viewport. His appreciation for Suhlak's skills had gone up a notch. It'd been a smooth maneuver, and one that Fett hadn't encountered before. If he'd been fooled into jumping into hyperspace, even for a moment, by the time he'd gotten Slave I back out to this navigational sector, Suhlak could easily have gotten an insurmountable lead. Or if not insurmountable-Fett didn't admit that possibility; it hadn't happened yet-then one that would have taken a lot more work and time to overcome. That cut into his profits, a notion that was the only one that could evoke his anger.
He quickly scanned the bank of tracking indicators, while pushing forward the linear aperture control from near vicinity to far. The thermal and radiation trackers showed no sudden bump in the emission profile of Suhlak's Z-95; if he had taken some sharp vector away from his previous course, those trackers would have picked up the additional thrust necessary, even if Suhlak had been able to conceal the visual flare from his ship's engines.
The puzzle of N'dru Suhlak's sudden disappearance, along with the hard merchandise he was carrying aboard his ship, intrigued Boba Fett on a coldly rational basis. He wasn't concerned-yet-whether he'd figure out the answer in time to catch the fleeing hunt saboteur. If he's here-and Suhlak had to be-then I'll find him. . .
It wouldn't do to overshoot whatever hiding place the Z-95 had found. Boba Fett reached over and damped the main thrust engine. The slight vibration in Slave 7's frame ceased as the ship immediately lost speed.
That was what saved him.
At the upper edge of the viewport, Boba Fett saw one of the visible stars shimmer momentarily, vanish, and then reappear in the same location. Without conscious thought, but only pure reaction, his hand flew from the engine controls to the reverse thrusters. His palm hammered flat the thruster controls, giving them maximum power.
A split second later, Slave I hit the invisible object whose presence Fett had barely managed to detect.
The impact tore him from the pilot's chair, sending him tumbling across the curved bank of the cockpit controls. His spine struck the clear transparisteel of the viewport, a blow hard enough to send a shock of pain into the center of his skull, blinding him. If he had still been carrying the back-mounted weapons he wore when outside the ship, their sharper edges would have crushed his cervical vertebrae and left him paralyzed, helpless against whatever happened next.