[Bounty Hunter Wars] - 03(31)

5


The first hit was nearly the last one.

Boba Fett didn’t even see it coming. The first indication that Slave I had come under attack was the sudden burst of light that flared across the cockpit’s viewport, as though the ship had struck the heart of some hidden sun. He would have been permanently blinded if the optical filters in his helmet’s visor hadn’t flashed opaque, protecting his eyes. Fett’s own quick instincts had snapped him away from the searing glare, raising a forearm across the front of the helmet as he had twisted about in the pilot’s chair, away from the navigation controls and the obliterated view of stars he had seen only a fraction of a second before.

The impact of the laser-cannon bolt struck the ship’s frame and his contorted spine simultaneously, throwing him from the pilot’s seat and sprawling him out across the bare durasteel floor of the cockpit, his arms barely able to brace himself and catch the rush of the bulkhead near the hatchway. Past the roar of the explosion shuddering through Slave I’s hull and into the core beams running from forward sensor antennae to the shielded engine compartments, Boba Fett could hear the high-therm welds of the bulkhead panels ripping free from one another. A metal edge as viciously sharp as a vibroblade’s business end peeled upward from the cockpit’s floor, coming within a centimeter of slashing through the heavy collar of his Mandalorian battle armor and across his throat. All that prevented a slashed jugular vein and subsequent death was a tight ducking of his head against one shoulder, so that the ripped durasteel panel caught one side of his helmet instead. The left side of the helmet blunted the cutting strike, adding another mark of violence to the other dents and scrapes gathered in combat.

Rumbling downward in pitch, the sound of the laser-cannon bolt and its concussive hammer-blow against the ship faded enough that the wails and shrieks of the ship’s alarm systems became audible to Boba Fett. He may have escaped death-for the moment-but Slave I had been mortally wounded; the ear-shredding, electronic screech was its death cry.

“Mute alarms.” Fett spoke the command into the microphone of his helmet. “Switch to optical status report.” As the high-pitched notes fell to ominous silence, a row of minuscule lights appeared at the limit of Boba Fett’s peripheral vision. He knew what each glowing dot meant, which of the ship’s systems was represented by vertical rank order, and what conditions were indicated by the lights’ colors. Right now, they were all red, with a few of them pulsing at various speeds. That wasn’t good; the only thing that could have been worse would be if one or more had gone to black and out, the indicator of a complete systemic failure. The topmost dot of light in the row was for Slave

I’s

structure-envelope

integrity,

measured

in atmospheric-maintenance capability. If that one blinked out-and at the moment it was flickering faster than Boba Fett’s own pulse rate-it would mean that the ship was breaking into fragments, the hull’s durasteel sheath delaminating away from the broken internal frame and scattering into empty space like the silvery ashes from an extinguished groundfire. It would also be a sight that Boba Fett wouldn’t live to see; the loss of the ship’s air when the hull was breached would be an event with a survival rate of zero for any living creatures aboard.

Fett rolled onto his side, away from the sharp edge of the bulkhead that would have at least given him a quick death, and pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. He shook away the last bit of dazing fog from the blow to the battle armor’s helmet. The now-silent alarms hadn’t informed him of anything that he couldn’t discern by other means. With the fragile condition that the ship had already been in, a direct hit by a Destroyer-grade laser cannon was bound to have a significant-and close to catastrophic-effect. After the stresses of jumping in and out of hyperspace, Slave I had barely been holding together; that the vessel could have taken another blow on top of that without disintegrating was a tribute to the extra armor and structural reinforcements that Boba Fett had ordered installed by Kuat Drive Yards. But there was a limit to how much damage those protective measures could soak up before collapsing along with the rest of the ship. When they went, his life span would be measurable in seconds; there was no emergency escape pod in which he could bail out.

Getting to his feet, the bounty hunter grabbed the back of the empty pilot’s chair and pulled himself toward the cockpit controls. The panel’s indicator signals and gauges were awash with pulsing red lights, telling him the same story he’d already surmised from the dots at the side of his helmet, bright as the ends of severed arteries.