[Boba Fett] - 3
CHAPTER ONE
“Boba! Downtime’s over! I need you - we’re in final approach.”
Boba looked up groggily from where he d been asleep in Slave I’s cockpit. Beside him, where once his father would have sat at the starship’s controls, the bounty hunter, Aurra Sing was hunched over the console. She was staring at the Screen. It was filled with symbols that were meaningless to Boba Fett - - the coordinates of their precise destination remained scrambled.
“Yes!” Aurra! Sing murmured triumphantly. “We’re almost there.”
She looked aside at, Boba. Quickly he turned away. He wasn’t supposed to know where they were going.
That was part of the deal. Aurra Sing would bring the two of them here, following the coordinates she had discovered in Slave l’s databank. The coordinates were part of a complex system - a treasure map, really - that detailed where Boba’s father had stored a vast fortune in credits and precious metals, all across the galaxy.
Jango Fett had been a bounty hunter - an extremely successful bounty hunter. He had been an extremely clever one, too. Trained as a great Mandalorian warrior, Jango had learned the most important lesson of all: Prepare for the worst. And so he had made certain that his young son, Boba, would have access to his fortune after his death. The fortune could never be obtained by anyone else, because the access code was programmed so that only Boba’s retinal scan and DNA could obtain it. Since Boba was the sole unaltered clone of his father, he and he alone shared Jango’s pure genetic material.
But Boba did not know where the fortune was. Only Aurra Sing knew that, because she had accessed the records on his father’s ship. The ship that should have been Boba Fett’s now.
Boba looked warily at the person next to him. Her topknot of flaming red hair brilliant against dead-white skin. Her eyes blazing as twin suns.
“She is one of the deadliest fighters I have ever known,” Jango had told Boba once, years before. “She was trained as a Jedi, but for some reason she hates them more than she hates anyone in the galaxy - and that’s saying something! Don’t ever cross her, son. And above all, don’t ever trust her.”
Boba Fett certainly didn’t trust her. Who would? Aurra Sing was as thin and muscular and fine-boned as a Kuat aristocrat, but as deadly as a Mentellian savrip. She was a solitary hunter and a lethal predator.
Like my father. Like I could be, Boba thought. His glance turned admiring - though he was too smart to let Aurra Sing see that!
“Get ready for descent,” she snapped as she punched in the final landing codes. “Soon you’ll start making yourself useful to me, kid!”
The coordinates were still scrambled. But earlier, while Aurra Sing was momentarily distracted, Boba had peeked at the screen and stolen a glimpse of the itinerary data. They were somewhere in the Core Worlds. A long way from Bespin and Cloud City, where he’d met up with Aurra. Boba knew about the Core Worlds from overhearing his father’s conversations. It was a good place to buy weapons - a good place to buy anything, now that he thought about it. Maybe a good place to outfit Slave I - once he got rid of Aurra Sing.
He didn’t know the name of their actual destination, and he couldn’t read the planet’s coordinates, but he could see it on the monitor. A medium-sized planet, as gleaming and faceted as a green-and-gold jewel. He glanced at Aurra Sing, but she was busy with the landing program. He looked back at the planet on the screen. A string of unintelligible numbers and letters scrolled across it, and then a single phrase that he could understand.
AARGAU. LANDING ACCESS GRANTED.
Aargau. So that’s where they were going.
Too bad I’ve never heard of it. Boba sighed. The landing restraints chafed his arms. When he tried to get more comfortable, Aurra Sing glared at him.
“You want to get out now?” she said, and gestured at the dumping bay. “It can be arranged!”
Boba gritted his teeth, forcing himself to smile apologetically. “Sorry.”
Don’t trust her, his father had said. But Boba had struck a deal with her. He had agreed - reluctantly - to split the treasure with her, fifty-fifty.
He had no choice. He had no money, no credits, no possessions except for his flight bag, his father’s Mandalorian helmet, and Slave I. He had no friends out here, wherever here was. And he had no friends anywhere. Even when he had the chance of having a friend, he soon lost it.
He had only himself to rely on: an eleven-year-old with his father’s training, his father’s split-second reflexes, his father’s
fighting instincts - and his own talent for survival.
“Ready?” barked Aurra Sing. It was a command, not a question.