[Han Solo] - 03(70)

She shrugged. “Just business associates,” she said. “Feldron is my agent, and Renkov is my business manager.”

“I see,” Lando said, secretly delighted. It was obvious that she was serious that neither of them was any kind of romantic interest. “So .

. .

do you want to have a drink, perhaps? Somewhere a bit more …

private?”

She gave him an assessing glance, then nodded and stepped back, out of his arms. “All right. I’d like that. We can talk about …

mutual acquaintances.”

Lando reached for her hand, then raised it to his lips. “Mutual acquaintances it is,” he said.

“My stateroom, number 112, in, say, thirty minutes?” she said.

“Thirty minutes,” Lando said. “I will be counting them, every one.”

She smiled at him, a smile that held rueful amusement as well as pleasure, and turned and left Lando standing on the edge of the dance floor. He watched her walk away, a pleasant occupation. She reached the portal of the lounge, brushed past an Anomid who was loitering there, watching the dancing and listening to the music, then disappeared from sight.

Lando smiled. Now to find the best bottle of wine in this ship, and some flowers, he thought, and headed briskly for the bar. Twenty-nine minutes and counting…

Bria told herself to settle down as she hurried down the corridor toward her stateroom. But she was excited, realizing that she was finally going to get news of Han! Lando Calrissian was obviously more than just a casual friend. Bria was so eager to reach her stateroom that she was almost jogging as she approached the door of 112. At last! Someone who knows him well, who can tell me how he’s doing, what he’s been doing … where he is!

Just as Bria reached the door to her cabin, she had the sudden thought that perhaps Han was on Nar Shaddaa, her ultimate destination. Was it possible that in forty-eight hours or so, she’d actually get to see him?

The thought excited her, even as it filled her with trepidation. After more than nine years, what would it be like to be close to him?

As she unlocked her stateroom door, her hands were shaking. She was so absorbed in memories of Han that she had no warning, no warning at all.

One moment the door was opening before her, and the next a powerful thrust propelled her through the portal and into the living room of the suite with such force that she didn’t even have breath to cry out.

Her high-heeled slippers skidded on the polished floor, and she tripped, trying to catch herself. Just as she started to fall, Bria felt something sharp sting her back.

She had only an instant to realize that she’d been shot with some kind of knockout drug. As she fell, she managed with the last of her strength to turn slightly, and saw a strange Anomid standing behind her in the doorway. Bria managed a soft, choked cry of warning to her friends before everything around her faded, faded … Faded …

And went black.

Boba Fett watched the Tharen woman sag to the floor, then lie there, motionless. Quickly he shut the door to the corridor behind him, and started forward—just as the older men Tharen had been traveling with rushed out of the sleeping cabin on the right.

Boba Fett extended his arm, flexed his hand, and a deadly dart (unlike the soporific one that had felled the woman) shot toward the older of the two Resistance officers and embedded itself in his throat. The man had time for one strangled gasp, and was dead before he hit the floor.

The other man did not hesitate, but came straight in. Boba Fett swept aside the Anomid cape and stood poised as the man, with a wordless yell, attacked.

The Rebel leader might have been a decent officer in planning strategy and attacks, but he was no expert at unarmed combat. Boba Fett blocked his blow with one forearm, then came in with a hard, lethal blow that crushed the Corellian’s larynx.

Fett watched dispassionately as the Rebel officer died. It took no more than a minute.

He bent over the dead man, planning to drag him and his fellow off to the corner of the room and throw some sheets over them—more to muffle the stench of voiding from the suddenly deceased bodies than from any sense of decorum.

Boba Fett’s peripheral vision was compromised by the mask he was wearing.

Without his Mandalorian helmet with its special sensors, the bounty hunter had only an instant’s warning of danger. He dodged just as the Rebel bodyguard struck, silent and with the expertise the two older men had lacked.

The bounty hunter whirled away from the younger man, and as he did so, Fett whipped off the Anomid’s heavy cloak and flung it into the bodyguard’s face. With one smooth movement, his opponent disentangled himself and came in again. He was perhaps in his early thirties, and was bare-chested, barefoot, and wearing only shorts. The man had evidently been asleep in the other room when his officers had made their illfated attack.