“It’s pretty small, from the looks of it. And fast. Maybe …” Quickly, Dengar punched up the approaching craft’s ID profile. “It’s him,” said Dengar, dropping his tensed shoulders in relief. “It’s that Headhunter ship of N’dru Suhlak’s. So Boba Fett has to be aboard it, right?” Smiling, Dengar glanced over his shoulder at Neelah. “I mean, it stands to reason-Suhlak wouldn’t have come here to rendezvous with us without Fett, would he?”
“No-” Neelah shook her head. “He wouldn’t have any reason to.” So that set of possibilities, of the total that she had been obsessing over, was ruled out. At least Boba Fett hadn’t abandoned them; she and Dengar were still part of whatever plans he was pursuing. “Now all we have to see is whether he found what he went to Tatooine for.”
“We’ll have to do a running transfer, in order to get him aboard.” Dengar pointed to the image from the rear scanner. The cruiser from the Kuat Drive Yards’ security division was still the same distance behind the Hound’s Tooth. “If we come to a halt, even for a couple of minutes, they’ll be on top of us.”
“Can we do that?”
“It’s tricky, but possible.” The comm unit mike was already in Dengar’s hand. “Suhlak’s Headhunter is coming within range. I’ll get the details worked out with Boba Fett. You’ll need to run the controls here in the cockpit while I man the transfer hatchway.”
She listened as first Suhlak’s, then Boba Fett’s voice came over the cockpit speaker. As Dengar and Fett quickly calculated the necessary matching velocities for the ships, Neelah fought the impulse to ask-demand, rather-what had been found and brought back from Tatooine.
You’ve waited this long, she scolded herself. You can wait a few moments longer.
Left by herself in the Hound’s cockpit, Neelah kept her hands poised on the thruster engine controls. Suhlak had brought the Z-95 Headhunter up alongside the Hound’s Tooth, carefully modulating his speed and narrowing the gap between the two ships’ hulls. A muted thump sounded through the frame, followed by the sharper vibrations of the transfer hatchway locking into place.
The three men showed up in the cockpit area at last, with Suhlak trailing behind the bounty hunters. “I got a stake in this now,” Suhlak said to Neelah with a grin. “I didn’t want to miss any of the show.”
“You found it,” said Neelah. She had spotted the object, a black rectangle a few inches thick, in one of Boba Fett’s hands. The data recording unit trailed a few loose connectors, as though Fett had been working on it while en route. “You got it from Bossk.”
“That poor guy.” Dengar shook his head pityingly. “I hope Bossk was smart enough not to put up too much of a fight. What kind of condition did you leave him in? Or is he even still alive?”
“When I left him,” said Boba Fett, “he still was. And not in too bad a shape.”
“Who cares about him?” Neelah could conceal her impatience no longer. “You got it-that’s all that matters.”
“Correction.” Suhlak pointed to the rear scanner display. “You’ve still got a KDY security cruiser on your tail. And”-he leaned toward the control panel, peering at the image-“it’s gaining on us.”
“I’ll take care of that.” Boba Fett took over the pilot’s chair from Neelah. She stood back and watched as the bounty hunter’s hands fastened onto the thruster
engine
controls.
With
his
hands
inside
the Trandoshan-sized grooves on the panel, Fett slammed the controls to their maximum—
And nothing happened.
“The engines have cut out,” said Dengar. Reaching past Boba Fett, he tapped a forefinger against the power consumption gauges. “Take a look at that.” The glowing red digits had dwindled to zero. He pointed to the indicator lights for the navigational jets. “Everything’s gone down. This ship’s not going anywhere.”
“What’s happening?” Neelah looked from the image on the rear scanner display, showing the KDY cruiser rapidly approaching, to the bounty hunters’ faces. “What’s gone wrong?”
“Good question,” said Boba Fett. “If it was just the main thruster engines going dead, or the navigational jets by themselves, it could be a simple systems malfunction. But for all of them to go out at once-something else did that to them. And deliberately.”
“Like what?”
“Right now, I don’t know-but let’s take a look at the comm unit log.” With a couple more commands tapped out inside the control grooves, Boba Fett brought a different set of data scrolling across the smaller display screen. “There’s part of the explanation.” He pointed to the last line of digits and letters. “A coded pulse was received from the vector directly behind us-obviously, from the KDY cruiser. We didn’t hear anything on the comm unit speakers because the pulse didn’t include a transceive request. So the pulse was picked up and acted upon by some other part of the Hound’s operational circuitry.”