[Bounty Hunter Wars] - 03(35)

“Good … shot …” With his heart and lungs laboring in his chest, Voss’on’t stood up, his wounded arm pressed tight against his side in a vain attempt to stanch the flow of blood. Dark red ribbons wound past the hip of his grease-stained uniform trousers and down his thigh. “But not… good enough…”

Boba Fett made no reply, but watched as the blaster pistol in Voss’on’t’s shaking hand drew down upon an invisible line to the center of his helmet.

“I might’ve … put you in the cage …” Voss’on’t grimaced with the effort of pulling in enough breath to remain conscious. Beneath the smoke and ash streaking his narrow face, the scarred and chiseled flesh was as pallid white as a sheet of flimsiplast. “And kept you… alive…” He held the blaster, unwavering now, straight out in front of him. “But I’ve changed my mind.”

Fire and a blinding glare erupted through Slave I’s cargo hold, overwhelming the single bolt that shot out from the muzzle of the blaster. Boba Fett felt himself being thrown backward as the hold’s grated flooring ripped into pieces from the explosion that pushed apart the ship’s bulkheads as though they were mere fluttering sheets of metallic cloth. He knew what had happened, even as he fell again, with one forearm protectively shielding his helmet’s visor. From somewhere in the airless distance outside, the other ship, his unidentified enemy, had taken aim and fired its laser cannon, scoring a direct hit on his own ship’s hull.

Another explosion rumbled from deep in the bowels of Slave I, in the main engine compartments. Fire, laced with electrical sparks, white-hot wasps swirling in dense clouds of oily smoke, leapt up through the chasms that had been driven through the flooring and bulkheads. The blood that had already been spilled now hissed into red steam as the remaining atmospheric content shimmered with the fierce heat from below.

There he is—

Boba Fett spotted the renegade stormtrooper behind a wall of flame and black, coiling smoke. Stunned by the impact of the laser-cannon bolt and the catastrophic systems failure it had triggered, Voss’on’t had fallen to his knees and now-empty hands, his head lowered as though to preserve the last flickerings of consciousness inside his oxygen-starved brain.

At the same time, the ship’s alarm systems overrode the muting command that Boba Fett had given them. A chorded electronic wail sounded both inside his helmet and through the diminished air, as though the damage suffered by Slave I had given it a shrill, ululating voice, one with which it could keen its own death.

Tendrils of smoke streamed past Boba Fett like elongated ghosts as he strode through the flames; the ship’s hull had been breached in enough places that the vacuum outside had begun sucking out the remaining oxygen in the cargo hold. The fire from the main engine compartments had begun to diminish, but still remained high enough that its bright tongues lapped past Fett’s knees.

“Let’s go.” Boba Fett reached down through a wash of smoke and grabbed Voss’on’t underneath one arm. He lifted the stormtrooper up onto his wobbling legs.

Voss’on’t’s head lolled back, as though the bones had been surgically extracted from his neck. The fire’s heat had cauterized his wounded arm, stopping the flow of blood, but a thinner red line trickled from the corner of his mouth. The close impact of the laser-cannon bolt had taken him closer to death than any of Boba Fett’s weapons could have.

“Go ahead …” Voss’on’t’s eyelids were barely able to drag back above his unfocused sight. There was barely enough breath left in his lungs for his voice to be emitted as a dry, forceless whisper. “Finish … me off…”

“I told you before.” The other man was taller than Fett; he had to lift Voss’on’t higher and brace him against his chest, then step backward to pull him away from the flames and smoke. “You’re too valuable to let die.” Boba Fett took one hand away from where he had clutched the torn front of the stormtrooper’s insignia-less uniform, and prodded his gloved fingertips up underneath the edge of his own armor’s helmet. He took one

last, lung-filling inhalation from the helmet’s air supply, then tugged and ripped the breathing tube out beneath the helmet’s lower edge. The tube extended only a few inches from the helmet; Boba Fett had to bring the stormtrooper’s face up close to his own, foreheads separated only by the dark visor, in order the thrust the end of the tube into Voss’on’t’s mouth.

The minute flow of oxygen from the helmet’s air supply triggered an automatic response in Voss’on’t. His back arched as his lungs filled reflexively, drawing deep from what little remained in the tiny canister inside the helmet. Voss’on’t coughed, expelling the tube.