Chapter 16

Complications

The sound of the speeder's engines faded into Jaster's cognitiance followed by the sound of his own breathing. Lifting his heavy head caused him to groan as he sat up in the passenger seat of the speeder. He brought heavily padded gloved hands up to his head where he felt the helmet over his face. He pulled it off, feeling a slight sting on his bruised and battered face from the coolness of the breeze of the air speeder. Sin sat at the pilot's seat, still in her guard's disguise.

"Good, you're up. Do you have any idea how hard it was carrying your sheb out of that ship?"

"Where are we?" Jaster groaned with puffy, split lips.

"Going back to your ship," she said.

Jaster struggled to catch up. "My ship? Right, my ship," he mumbled. His focus zeroed in as he became more and more aware. "Hos," he said abruptly. "What happened to H-"

"I got him," Sin cut in. "I disrupted the lock transmitter too. We need to get to that lock before they reestablish the connection again." The speeder approached the bunker control tower and Sin rounded to the landing pads in the back. "Put your helmet back on," she ordered. Jaster was too tired and sore to argue as he obeyed. Sin set the speeder down at the same landing pad as before as she cautiously scanned about for signs of more guards. She was the first to jump out with Jaster slowly climbing over the edge, stumbling on weak legs. By the time he made it to the landing pad where his Slave 1 had remained in wait, Sin was already prying the lock off of the entry console. Jaster paused before moving to the side of the ship. He approached the wing strut shroud and found the droid head he had stashed underneath. Jaster made his way back to the ramp where Sin stood in wait.

"Good, you still have it." Without a word, he stepped up to the console and keyed in the combination. The hatch folded open and he stumbled inside. Sin followed as he removed the guard's uniform and crawled through the hatches to the cockpit module. Jaster climbed into the pilot's seat and she took the passenger's seat at his side with the droids head rested on the seat opposite his. Jaster worked the controls and Slave 1 lifted from the landing pad, righting itself up before flying off away from the landing site and through the soup of orange clouds into space.

"Where are we going?" Sin asked.

"Who would have the equipment you need?"

"We need an analysis survey processor with a compatible interface. Any intelligence analytic location would do. You know, I bet any Imperial base would have one," she explained. "Let me see the droid head."

"No," Jaster snapped.

Sin frowned. "What? Let me see it."

"You're not taking the droid," he said as the ship emerged through the atmosphere.

"If I wanted to rip the droid off from you, I'd have done it already," she laughed awkwardly.

"Look, It's nothing personal. I don't trust anyone."

Sin sat back watching him closely. "Probably a smart move in our work," she shrugged. "But we're going to be working this job together, maybe we should start. Besides, I already saved your life," she added with a smug smile.

"What makes you think we're working together?"

"I'm not slicing the droid for free. I bet you don't have the credits to pay me now so I'm getting a cut for the bounty."

Jaster glanced to where she sat in the passenger seat. His cut lip curled. He couldn't find any other way out. "Fine," he sighed, too tired to argue.

"Good," she smiled again. Jaster rubbed his eyes. Was he really that tired, or was she not as annoying to him as before? Either way, he couldn't escape the fact that she was right, he had been as good as dead against Hos.

Jaster sighed again as he formulated the words he wanted to say in his mind. "Look," he paused feeling resistance from his mouth to form the words. "Uh, I uh, I appreciate, uh, your coming back… and not, uh, letting me die."

A grin spread on Sin's face as she stared him down. "What was that?" she laughed.

"What do you mean, what was that?" Jaster snapped.

"Have you never thanked anyone before?"

"I haven't had many people to thank."

His bitterness caught her off guard. "No one? Not even a family? Mum, dad, sister, brother?"

Jaster ignored her looking out to the swirl of gaseous fog ahead while she stared at him in wait. He set the external sensors on high alert to help him from colliding into anything solid. Autopilot would have been a much safer and easier option but he did anything to look busy.

"You don't talk too much, do you?" Sin asked.

"Its complicated," he muttered.

"No its not. Just ask me a question," Sin quipped. "Look either you learn how to talk, or its going to be a real long, quiet flight." Jaster her way to catch the waiting look on her face. It was relentless. He felt trapped in his own ship, a thought that he found annoying but also a little amusing.

"Where you from?" He asked half-heartedly.

"Kiffu. You?" She replied without pause. Jaster hesitated, again formulating in his mind what to say. "Oh come on, this is an easy one. One word answer!"

"You didn't give me time to answer."

"What time?" She laughed.

"I'm thinking."

"What's to think about? It's one place!"

"Its complicated," he said again.

"Where you grew up, where you were born, where your mum and dad live," she rattled off.

"I said, its complicated!"

She eyed him closely. "You're not very good at this."

"I was raised by bounty hunters, what do you expect?"

"So was I, that's not a good excuse," she said.

Jaster looked her way again, seeing the determined look in her eye. What was she so interested about? He could see that she wasn't about to let this go but he was growing desperate to change the subject. "What kind of name is 'Sin'?"

"Its only part of a name. Its short for Sintas Vel." She paused and grinned. "What's your name? I just realized that I never asked you."

He hesitated. "Jaster."

She raised her eyebrows. "Really?"

"What do you mean, really?"

"That's not your name," she grinned.

"Says who?"

"You, your eyes. You can tell. Nobody ever said so before because they probably just didn't care."

Again, she was right. Looking back, Bossk and Hondo knew him from his past. Qi'ra and Hos were both agents of Crimson Dawn – true identities were rare in the underworld. "Call me whatever you like, but that's what I got," he said.

"No its not."

He looked back to where she sat, where he used to sit. Then his gaze drifted over to Slave 1's controls, where Jango used to sit. The pilot's seat and the controls all felt natural to him, all within reach unlike the times he sat in it as a nine year-old boy. But now it was a good fit.

"The man that told me to call him dad, he called me Boba," he said.

"Boba," Sin echoed. "Yep, there it is," she smiled.

"You've got to be kidding me."

"No. That's it, I can tell. What? You think that just because I work with droids and computers I don't work well with people?" she quipped smugly. "So what, you were adopted?"

"Something like that."

"By who?"

"His name was Jango."

"Jango? Jango Fett?" she asked with excitement.

"So you know of him?"

"Of course!" she exclaimed. "See, what's so complicated about that?

He opened his mouth to answer but was interrupted. The ship shook and alarms blared. "What was that?"

He checked the systems reading on the control console. "Something hit us. Hyperdrive motivator's been jarred," he announced while activating the deflector shields.

"I'll take a look." Sin jumped from her seat and made her way to the ladder from behind. The controls beeped, calling his attention. The yellow light of an incoming transmission blinked on the console. He pressed the button, not sure whom to expect.

"It's a nice ship you got there," the chilling guttural voice spoke through the speaker grill.

"Cad Bane," he growled.

"Consider yourself lucky, boy. I only knocked out your hyperdrive. I've killed for a lot less. But now you won't be much competition anymore so, I'll be bidding you a farewell now."

"What, not going to finish me off yourself?"

"Oh you'll be plenty busy in a moment," Bane sneered. "So long."

Through the windshield the pair of another ship's sublight engines burned in the midst of the gas cloud. Their orange glow intensified then with a pop and a flash, they were gone. The communication cut to static before Sin's voice came through.

"I found the problem, easy fix," she said over the intercom.

Through the gas cloud, a shape started to form and close in. A pointed nose breached the cloud as the wedge shape of an Imperial Star Destroyer emerged through the smog.