Hunter, Hunted
The mining colony of Cerita IV was small, but not so small that they shouldn't have had someone answering the spaceport's comms, even if he had to wait for them to run over to the communication terminal from whatever their regular job was. But wait though Boba Fett did, no one responded to his hails.
Fett brought his ship in anyway, but he kept his approach slow and non-threatening…or as non-threatening as an approach by a heavily armed and even more heavily modified MandalMotors Pursuer-class enforcement craft could be. Ship II* was hardly a battle cruiser or a dreadnought, but it was a dangerous vessel for its size—and more dangerous than its specs showed. Fett had paid a lot of money to have his ship upgraded and augmented until it was an even deadlier vessel than the first of its name, and almost as much money to keep some of those upgrades hidden from Imperial databanks and scanners.
Some of those upgrades were very effective, very illegal stealth fields and sensor bafflers strong enough that on a busy world, he could be reasonably sure of slipping in without being noticed unless their starport had the most modern and advanced sensor tech or an extremely alert airspace controllers paranoid enough to flag every apparent systems glitch or flicker for further investigation. Cerita IV certainly didn't have advanced sensors, but they also had absolutely no other traffic either landing or departing that might have masked his sensor presence. He shouldn't have been able to sneak in unnoticed, especially since he had none of his stealth protocols engaged.
He did anyway, landing without so much as an automated beacon to direct him to an unoccupied platform.
Fortunately there were plenty of empty landing bays to choose from, so the lack of ground personnel wasn't a problem. It was enough to raise Fett's armored hackles. He didn't know what, but he was sure that something was wrong on Cerita IV.
When he stepped off his ship, the impression only deepened.
The spaceport was absolutely silent. Even on a small, backwater world like this there should have been some activity. Mechanics making slapdash repairs to the colony's antiquated vessels; down-on-their-luck merchants loading cargo; beggars flocking to the newly arrived ships more out of habit than hope; rusting maintenance droids plodding along on their too-well-worn paths…
There wasn't even the low rumble of fuel processors turning over or water tanks gurgling. The glowpanels were all dark. Between the grimy light of Cerita IV's sun and the inbuilt light-gathering macrobinoculars of Fett's visor that wasn't a problem, but it wasn't normal either. The spaceport must have suffered some kind of power outage, although the rest of the sprawling mining encampment and cramped company town around the port had registered expected power usage and light pollution on his orbital scans. Whatever had severed the port's connection from the power grid explained the lack of answer on the comm, at least. His requests for permission to land hadn't been answered because the colony had no way of receiving or transmitting messages with their main spaceport comm tower inactive.
He wondered that there were no maintenance workers scurrying about trying to fix it. He wondered even more about the lack of backup generators. Even on an as out-of-the-way world as this small moon, keeping their spaceport operating was surely a priority. How else would they get supplies delivered or ship their ore offworld?
Perhaps the problem was with the generator itself, or some connector or relay closer to the power plant, and everyone who normally worked in the spaceport had flocked there to fix it. Perhaps that explained the absence of any detectable life forms in his vicinity.
Or perhaps something else did.
Fett increased the scan settings on his helmet's sensors and checked the tibanna levels of his oversized BlasTech DLT-19 for a third time, just in case. Every instinct that he had honed over a lifetime of hunting bounties screamed at him that something was very, very wrong here.
He still had a bounty to catch, though, and all the intelligence he'd gathered indicated that Bulvo Triffan was here.
Fett adjusted his grip on the heavy blaster rifle, made sure his regular EE-3 carbine was still secure over his shoulder—normally that was the only blaster he would have bothered to carry on an easy hunt like this, but the lack of response from spaceport ground control had left him uneasy enough that he'd elected to pull out heavier weaponry—and started forward through the empty corridors.
His helmet's filters scrubbed the local air for him in order to keep out toxins, poisons, or other detrimental fumes so he didn't smell the blood until he was almost upon it. As the door to the main port throughway hissed open, the sharp coppery smell flooded his nose and a few seconds later, filled his eyes.
Fett flung himself sideways out of the targeting brackets of the entrance and pushed his jetpack-laden back against the wall, freezing in place for several tense seconds. While he waited to see if his aborted entrance engendered any response, he reviewed the footage his helmet's recorders had captured of the carnage.
A few things became quickly clear to his experienced eye. One: it had been a one-sided blaster fight, with all the shots—at least all those that had missed their targets—having been aimed in the general direction of the outer doors, excepting a few wild shots that had struck the ceiling. Two: most of the blood spilled was in the iron-heavy reddish brown that was common to the majority of warm-blooded humanoid bipeds. Three: some kind of acid spatter weapon had been deployed, possibly grenades, although they didn't seem to have been used with much efficiency based on the resulting damage. And four: there weren't enough bodies.
Fett knew something about the results of one-sided battles like that, and there should have been more corpses.
The three he saw—and there were only three visible from where he'd stood in the open doorway, although there were bits and pieces from several more scattered around—were nowhere near enough to match the amount of blasterfire discharged in there. They also shouldn't have looked so…eaten.
Fett ran through all the likely suspects for a scene like that, and came up empty. Not even a clan of Trandoshan hunters would explain what he was seeing. They might well have snacked on their victims, but they would have taken trophies too. Trandoshans were obsessed with trophies. They never would have left an Aqualish with her tusks, or a Human with a braid like that. Whatever he was dealing with, it wasn't a species he knew.
The galaxy was full of such beings, of course; not even the most generously educated xenobiologist could know every creature that called their galaxy home. But Fett's career had given him a wider exposure than most to the more dangerous species out there, and none of them fit the profile for this slaughter.
He was glad he'd brought the DLT-19. It was heavier than his usual EE-3, but it had more stopping power too. He had a feeling he was going to need that.
Since nothing seemed to be moving out there, Fett stepped away from the wall and eased his way back around the edge of the doorframe. He held the rifle out, ready to fire, and moved slowly, scanning every centimeter of the motionless room before him with both eyes and sensors before he stepped forward.
The blood was dry, at least, so he didn't need to worry about stepping in it and leaving a trail behind him. He still skirted the smears and puddles as best he could. It wasn't squeamishness (although Fett was squeamish by some people's standards, he knew his armor's seals well and wasn't worried about anything as ordinary as blood and viscera eating through them) but practicality: if whatever beings had killed the spaceport crew tracked their quarry by scent, even dried blood might draw their attention.
(That was one reason for Fett's squeamishness. His armor got blood—and all sorts of other substances—splattered across it regularly. Scouring it antiseptically clean after every hunt kept those fluids from causing complications later.)
The outer door hadn't quite sealed. It had closed—possibly automatically—either sometime before the power went out, or in response to the power outage, but the metal was deformed enough that the two halves hadn't managed to fully line-up again when they did. Fett sidled up to the gap and peered out, letting his sight and sensors drink in a long view of the narrow strip of world beyond.
The carnage within continued outside, although it was less concentrated than it was in this enclosed space. Fett stood there for a long time, utterly motionless, scanning for any signs of life and gathering as much data as he could from the bloody sight.
Then he switched the heavy blaster rifle to one hand and slowly, carefully, pushed the less damaged half of the door open. It screeched a few times, quietly, as the stressed metal protested being made to move, and it stuck for good several centimeters out from the wall where a portion of the thick panel was too buckled for it to fit back into its slot, but the spaceport doors had been built for cargo as much as for people. Even opening only one half, even partway, still gave him plenty of clearance on either side of his armored pauldrons.
He could have slipped through a much smaller gap, but since there was no way he'd be able to close the bent and unpowered door again in a hurry anyway he decided that leaving himself plenty of room for a quick escape was the more prudent choice than trying to limit the passage of other potential threats behind him.
He also could have left, returning to his ship and leaving Cerita IV to its troubles. That would have been an even more prudent choice. But there was a bounty on this world, and Fett intended to claim it.
Fortunately Bulvo Triffan was worth as much dead as alive, so this carnage wasn't much of a problem. All Fett had to do now was find the barve—or his body.
*Since the new canon has largely abandoned using the ship's original canon name but has yet to give it a suitable replacement, I've elected to manufacture one myself under the premise that when Fett was forced to give the ship a name (for identity transponder or registration purposes, perhaps), he would have chosen something exactly as soulless and uncreative as this. And would utterly fail to understand why other sentients sighed, stared, or rolled their eyes at the uninspired choice. It's disposable and unsentimental, just the way he views his ships. And since the AOTC retcon has the ship belonging to Jango originally, with what he went through after Galidraan the old name really no longer fits. So Ship II it is, and if that bothers you, kindly kiss my shebs.