Star Wars Weary Hunting

In the utter cold silence of vacuum, a ship hung motionless and scarred, a piece of spacejunk marked by collisions with asteroids, carbon- scored from countless blaster bolts, dented and crumpled and dead. Below, the vast curve of a desert planet slowly turned, paying no attention to this relic of a life spent fast and furiously.  
Inside the darkened cockpit, something moved; distant starglow caught the curve of a battered helmet, glinted from a dark and impersonal visor. The ship's occupant appeared to be as worn-out and scarred as his vessel. In both cases, appearances were deceptive.  
  
Boba Fett watched the slow drift of stars across the viewport, waiting. Slave I's systems were ramped down to the point at which only a very powerful scan could detect any energy flow within the ship; for all intents and purposes he was dead in space. However, when the time came, one flick of a switch would bring all systems to battle-readiness at once; his prey would have to cross this sector of space in order to make planetfall on time, and he would be there, waiting.  
It had taken a great deal of time and energy to retrieve the ship after the Alliance had found it drifting and abandoned above this very planet, when he had captured Bossk's ship the Hound's Tooth and sent its owner fleeing down to Tatooine. There had been a lot of work to be done on Slave I when he finally got it back, too. Kuat Drive Yards had built it to his specifications-originally a basic Kuat Systems Firespray-class, but almost unrecognizable once he'd had his modifications completed.  
Now the ship was refitted inside with several new advances-the merchandise cages were cast solid, so even hull warping would not allow the bars to come free from the floor of the cargo bay, as had happened with the Voss'on't job. He had several new backup propulsion and weapons systems, and the lifeplant had been upgraded. None of this showed on the outside, however; he had been very clear about that when he brought the ship in for retrofits. The new head of KDY had wanted to know why he wanted Slave I to continue looking like a piece of spacejunk, and he had looked at her with his helmet tilted slightly to one side and said "Do you have to ask?"  
Fett shifted slightly in the pilot's chair, his scars aching as they always did in the cold of space. He knew perfectly well that the Sarlacc would kill him in the end, despite the fact that he'd escaped its gut by blowing it to shreds; the poisons in its digestive juices remained in his body, even after his skin healed and his strength returned. He didn't know exactly how many years it had taken off his life, but he had the feeling it wouldn't be long before he found out.  
He pushed the thought away, as he always did. It didn't matter, and it wouldn't serve his purposes to dwell on his own mortality. He just had to be a little more careful now, a little more aware of his own limitations. The body under the armor was as scarred and battered as the armor itself, but-like the armor-still quite functional.  
  
A red light blinked on the systems-status display inside his helmet: the prey was coming into range. A moment later he made visual contact with the ship, a point of light moving faster than the other stars drifting across the empty sector of space. He let it approach, closing the distance: soon the shape of the vessel was apparent, one of the old-style angular Dagol Systems C-87 starfighters.  
Fett's left hand reached out and flicked a switch above the main thruster controls, and Slave I came to sudden, humming life. The green cockpit lights came on one by one, illuminating a visor as cold and merciless as the vacuum outside. The pilot of the C-87 approached blithely, unaware of the peril he was flying straight towards, and Fett sighed inside his helmet as he hit the thrusters and sent Slave I hurtling towards his prey. It was too easy these days.  
The C-87 finally realized it was being tailed, and sped up; but the old Dagol engines were no match for Fett's ship, and he drew in closer before aiming his laser cannons and sending a warning shot past his prey. In the C-87, the fugitive Falth R'han zigged clumsily to avoid it, and left himself open for one neat laserbolt shot straight into his main thruster housing. There was an explosion, but not much of one; R'han must have worn his thruster cores almost dead in his desperate bid to escape his other pursuers. Much good it's done him, Fett thought dryly, and slid Slave I up beside the now-helpless C-87. R'han got off a few shots from his bow cannons, but Fett took care of those with another well-placed blast, and drew in to dock.  
  
Much later, once Falth R'han was safely locked into a cage in Slave I's cargo hold, and had been sedated to stop his hoarse cries for help, Fett made the jump to hyperspace and leaned back in the pilot's chair, slipping off his helmet.  
The face underneath was just as cold and just as emotionless as the famous T-shaped visor itself; pale scars from the Sarlacc's acid drew interesting lines down his cheekbones and throat, hard lines edged his thin mouth. His hair was an uninteresting shade of brown, now streaked with grey, cropped short in a spacer's cut; his eyes were the hard dark-gold of tempered nionisteel, allowing no glimpses into the mind behind them. There was nothing in Fett's face to suggest he had ever been anything other than what he was: a weapon, for sale to the highest bidder-and a dangerous one.  
More and more, though, as the Sarlacc's poisons slowly ate away at him, he was remembering the times before. He had begun to dream, for the first time in thirty-some years; he had excised that part of himself when he had embarked on his career, and thought it was gone for good. He remembered what Kuat of Kuat had said, back in the inferno of the disintegrating shipyards: Are you getting soft, Fett?  
I'm getting old.  
How many more times could he die and come back, he wondered absently, regarding the dented Mandalorian helmet. How many more times could he escape?  
This kind of thinking was useless, of course. He had realized back on Tatooine that he did not want to die; it had been a strange revelation for him, and a shaming one. Better to die than to fear death, he thought again, tracing the acid scars on his face. Better to die than to grow old and feeble, clinging to what I used to be.  
He had been many things, of course. The tiny world of Concord Dawn had seen a few of his iterations, under different names, and he had never been back after his banishment; there was nothing for him there. His brief foray into stormtrooper training had taught him the folly of mindless obedience. His life had been simpler after that; he had served his credo of justice. Now things were getting more complicated again.  
Fett sighed, rubbing at his temples, and put the helmet back on; his world looked more familiar seen through the optics of his visor, more real, as if his unguarded eyes couldn't quite see as far. He set in the coordinates for the jump to sublight space and leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes.  
  
A different dawn, lemon skies fading to pale green as the sun rose over the horizon. The air was thinner here, sharp, tasting of salt; he would always associate it with frustration, with the need for escape, for justice. It was cold in the mornings here, cold enough for him to need the heavy standard-issue cloak over his uniform. He pulled it tighter around his shoulders, waiting for the day to arrive, and with it his orders.  
And time shifted, and moved away as it does in dreams, and he was flying a ship that was not his through space he did not recognize, and feeling a strange warmth under his breastbone; later he would come to identify it as happiness, but at the time it was as alien to him as the controls beneath his hands. Faces drifted through his memory: a woman with dark hair, a man in the rigid uniform of the Protectors of Concord Dawn; an empty helmet with a dark T-shaped visor, looking like the skull of some long-dead predator; the aristocratic features of Kateel of Kuhlvult, who had been called Neelah in her days as a memory-wiped dancing girl in Jabba's palace, who had saved his life, and who had been one of the very few people who had ever been able to get the drop on him; the dark helmet of Vader, long-gone and dead by his master's own hand.  
Then, as it always did, the dream faded into the mind-burning agony of the Sarlacc, the slow erosion cell by cell of his body, the dissolution of skin and muscle and self-respect. There had been voices in that red darkness as well, the voices of the other victims the Sarlacc had digested over the years; he hung in the void, feeling his own blood drizzling like a warm rain down what was left of his skin, wondering just how much longer it was going to take him to die.  
And later, under the white heat of Tatooine's twin suns, lying crumpled in the featureless Dune Sea, how strange it felt to hear his own voice ask for help-weak, almost too weak to be heard, but his voice nonetheless.  
  
Boba Fett awoke in the dimness of Slave I's cockpit, still feeling the burning sand against his skin for a few moments before he forced himself to control the memory and push it away. Other memories flickered in his consciousness, like the warning telltales of his helmet's status displays: a thousand grubby meetings in a thousand horrible cantinas; brilliant soundless explosions in space; the yellow sky of his homeworld, the burning brass bowl of Tatooine's midday heat; the woman Leia Organa clutching a sheet to cover her nakedness in the room in Jabba's palace, and the strange look in her eyes when he had turned his back; red warning lights illuminating another ship's cockpit, and his own imminent doom.  
He shook away the flickering images and queried Slave 1's computers: they were almost ready to make the jump to sublight space and rendezvous with his client, where he would hand over Falth R'han and pocket the fifty thousand credits his ex-employer thought he was worth. From what Fett could make out, it wasn't so much R'han as the trade secrets embedded in the microchip in his spinal column that his client was interested in, but it made little difference to Fett: R'han was hard merchandise, nothing more. He felt a dim sense of satisfaction in having captured his prey without having to expend undue energy or credits, but something was still lacking. He thought perhaps it was the thrill of the chase.  
  
Slave 1 winked into sublight existence outside the shipping lanes of the planet Morva, and received clearance to approach. In the cockpit, Fett guided his ship down towards his payment, as he had done countless times before. And as it always had, the anticipation of receiving payment for a job well done drove the shreds of dream away, focused him once more, allowed him to function as the cold and efficient machine he had always been. As he set Slave I down on the landing pad and marched R'han out of the ship, he was again Boba Fett, entirely; Jaster Mereel was dead.  
Until the next time he found himself alone among the stars. 


End file.
