Boba Fett, Unnatural Bounty
Normally, as a general policy, he didn't take jobs like this. He preferred hard merchandise that was, well, sentient. That might sound a little twisted and sadistic, but that wasn't his motivation. When it all came down to it, he simply was not a treasure hunter. Boba Fett was a bounty hunter.
Besides, when the hard merchandise was a person it was alright if they ended up disintegrated. They would still hold...sentimental value. He would still get paid. (Except, of course, for those who weren't going to part with any credits unless they got to personally torture their prisoner before disintegration. Namely, Lord Vader.) But if some valuable object got disintegrated, its charred remains weren't so easy to gloat over or flaunt around and were worth nothing.
This job, on the other hand, hadn't come from the dark lord of the Sith, or any of the other who usually hired him...
A gloved hand pulled back a lever. The massive engines shuddered. Outside the canopy, blurred light coalesced into stars. Power was routed from the hyperdrive into the laser turrets.
Behind a black visor, harsh eyes flicked between the navicomp screen and the realspace heads-up display. The navicomp showed a large blue-grey planet and the right co-ordinates, but realspace seemed to have forgotten the planet.
An alarm started to bleep, an instant before the whole ship shook from an impact somewhere aft.
"""direct hit"""
Little tactical icons flashed, most of them red. Through the canopy he saw a delta shape fly by from behind his ship. A sensor panel blipped; the other ship had a proton torpedo lock on the Slave III. He launched into heavy evasive maneuvers.
Boba Fett cursed in Huttese.
This was NOT how it was supposed to happen, not at all.
But, first things first.
At just the right point in the calculated/predicted trajectories in his head and on the tactical displays, the Slave III broke from evasive maneuvers and charged full tilt towards the delta-shaped starfighter, guns blazing. He was not going to be forced into a defensive position by the enemy's strafing runs. The Slave III's massive engines had no safeties and no buffers; the ship's speed almost always caught others by surprise, right before it overtook them. In a few seconds he was almost on the starfighter's tail.
The two spaceships twisted, looped, and juked through space, each trying to gain an above and behind position relative to the other, for a few quick, intense moments. All the while lasers were searing through space. The Slave III, despite its size, could fight like a snubfighter but with the firepower of a warship. And the skill of the best bounty hunter in the galaxy.
The offending delta shape waved in and out of Boba Fett's fields of fire in old patterns and, more often than not, almost before they came in to existence. It took him most of the battle to notice. Now, where had he seen that kind of impossibly precise seeming premonition, too accurate to be luck, before?
Suddenly, space in front of his canopy turned shearing white and billowing red and very violent. Another proton torpedo, just shy of a direct hit. He was jerked harshly in his flight harness. He didn't turn his head away from the blinding light, as the visor of his helmet automatically filtered it out.
Fett veered to port then pulled into a smuggler's loop that gave him a few good shots at the delta starfighter's tail, and was rewarded with a small explosion. The ship careened out of control, trailing smoke and little bits of debris. He moved in for the kill.
Well, his bounty was supposed to be on a planet, at these co-ordinates, but instead there was a ship here. So maybe his bounty was on the delta-shaped ship, or it would at least know where it was.
He brought the ion cannons fully to bear but right before they fired, something small glittered then the whole ship seemed to explode and then fade into a dense cloud of dust and debris.
Fett reacted. A gloved finger depressed the firing stud at the same instant the smoky dust and debris cloud seemed to coalesce. And then it was dispersing, orange energy racing through it. It left the snubfighter that had just a second ago been totally concealed by an explosion, accelerating through space until it disappeared into hyperspace.
Automatically Fett went about calculating all its possible destinations. It wouldn't get far because it was damaged.
"""calculating in-system microjump"""
All the while, in the back of his mind, he knew something about the starfighter with faint red paint just didn't fit. First of all, it had been waiting for him; it had known when and where he was coming. This was the most worrying. Then the pilot had amazing reactions, seeming to move away almost before Fett attacked. Almost.
If he hadn't fired the ion cannon at the last moment, the explosion would have kept him from seeing the ship escape into hyperspace and, supposedly, assume the whole thing had just exploded. He had seen that trick before, and Boba Fett was never fooled by the same thing twice.
His prey was hurt and running. In the face of such danger most ran to what was most valuable to them to try and save it from destruction and then run far far away. Fett was willing to bet that it would run and he could follow it to his bounty. The other pilot could not possibly know Fett had been able to find out where it had jumped.
He would not be ambushed again. It was time to hunt.
A gloved hand pushed forward a lever. The massive engines shuddered. Outside the canopy, the stars blurred into mottled streaks.
End Chapter One
Disclaimer: Nope, I am not George Lucas.
Author's Note: So...what do ya'll think? I decided to try and have a story with a lot more action and a little more subtle plot. What do you think's going to happen next? Any suspicions about the "enemy" starfighter? """hint"hint"""