Fett couldn't be sure how many ambushes he avoided on his way back to the spaceport. He skirted around several likely spots—places where he would have set-up an ambush, had he been hunting himself, and places that he judged a poor place for any ambush of his own but that appeared to offer a viable location for creatures with the capabilities of the thing he had just killed—but since he did not walk into any of those likely traps, it was impossible to say how many of them had actually been utilized by his enemies.

It was possible that none of them were. Fett had, on occasion, been accused by both clients and other bounty hunters of possessing a certain level of paranoia. He acknowledged that some of those accusations had some justification, but since many of the beings who had made those accusations were dead now he didn't think this penchant for paranoia was necessarily a detriment. There was a fine line between paranoia and vigilance, and Fett would much rather err on the side of coming out the other side of his fights alive and with his quarry in hand than either of the alternatives.

It was annoying that he couldn't find a setting on his helmet's scanners to detect the creatures that infested Cerita IV. Presumably they gave off body heat—although given their appearance, he wouldn't have been surprised either to discover that they were endothermic—but with all the cocoons full of doomed-but-still-breathing bodies that festooned the town's prefab walls, that possibility wasn't useful enough to be worth testing. Perhaps if he had been taking the same path back to the spaceport as the one he had walked initially, where he'd killed many of the cocooned victims and thus eliminated their heat signatures, it might have been worth investigating further, but as he had detoured down other streets to avoid potential ambushes, trying to determine which immobile splotches of heat were living incubators stuck to the walls and which were lurking enemies ready to pounce seemed liable to waste more time than it would save.

Bulvo Triffan wasn't likely to be going anywhere under his own power, but there was no telling when the creatures would discover the barve's hiding place. The possibility of having to search every cocoon on the planet, fending off attacks-of-opportunity from dozens of those things all the while, for the one that contained his quarry's body was an extremely irritating one that Fett was in no mood to entertain. Better to get back to Triffan while he was still in a known location.

Fett hated when other beings interfered with his hunts. At least these creatures weren't doing it on purpose. Bounty hunting was a business that by its nature regularly came with a number of complications, but few of those were as tedious as the parasites known as hunt saboteurs. Fett would take a dozen fights with these insectoid monstrosities over the annoyance of a single one of those moof-milkers.

That was perhaps a bad bargain to make, even in the solitary silence of his own head. Fett was paying attention, of course, to everything around him as he stalked back to the spaceport. That didn't make a difference. He still didn't see the next ambush until it unfolded around him.

Night was coming on, although it wasn't here yet. The light-gathering lenses in Fett's visor could compensate for darkness as easily as the phototropic shielding could protect his vision from eye-searing light, but the liminal space in between—the graying dusk that washed the world in patches of luminous dimness and muted dark—was more difficult for visual sensors to process. There was too much ambiguity in those shifting shadows.

Out of that ambiguity, long sharp black shapes stood up and stepped from broken doorways onto the bloodstained street.

Fett stopped. His hands were on his blaster rifle, but he did not shoot. Not yet. They weren't charging him: they were just standing there, silent. Surrounding him.

There were six, four in front and two behind. Until they moved, they had been perfectly, completely still, curled in the doorways like segmented landmines. He hadn't even noticed them breathing. Fett was certain he would have noticed them breathing.

Maybe they didn't breathe. That was potentially troubling.

As Fett stared at the chitinous things surrounding him, he realized that the one that had ambushed him outside the mining office had been small for its species—a juvenile, perhaps, or just a runt. That creature had stood a few centimeters shorter than he did in his full armor. There was a range of height in the beings he looked at now, but not much of one: they all stood more than two meters tall, even slightly crouched as they were. The tails made them seem taller yet.

Fett was 1.83 meters tall, well within the average range for Concord Dawn-born humans (which he wasn't, but his genetics were) which brought the top of his helmeted head roughly to the level of their ichor-dripping chins. That realization probably should have been more intimidating, but humans were as a species not considered to have many particular physical advantages over most of the other sentients with whom they shared this galaxy. And the bounty hunting profession was, at least in its upper echelons, largely staffed by the more dangerous breeds of beings, their natural capabilities leaving them more suited to its violent nature and thus more likely to take an interest in—and excel at—the deadly trade. Fett was thus used to entering most of his fights at a physical disadvantage and he wasn't overly disturbed by the possibility. Natural capabilities only went so far when stacked-up against training, armaments, wits, and willpower.

Being surrounded six to one didn't help, however. Nor did not knowing the precise limits and strengths of the creatures he was about to fight. Usually when Fett walked into a battle he was more aware of the capabilities of his enemies than they were themselves. That wasn't the case here, and that gap in his knowledge was much more intimidating than the minor detail of his enemies' height.

The tails were going to be a problem, though.

One of the creatures—slightly larger than the two behind and the one to his farthest right, although the two flanking it were bigger; Fett didn't know enough about this species' social habits to know if size impacted dominance or not—opened its dripping jaws and clicked at him. If it was a language, it wasn't one he knew nor one his helmet's onboard language banks could translate.

Fett said nothing.

The one to the left of the first opened its jaws even wider and hissed.

Fett wasn't much of a talker, but sometimes words could be useful. He figured he might as well give it a try. "I'm here only for Bulvo Triffan. I have no quarrel with you."

Of course, his having killed the creature that had attacked him—not to mention several dozens of their unborn young—meant they might well have a quarrel with him, but if so that was their choice. To Fett's eyes, none of this was personal.

Yet.

"I'm Boba Fett. I've no interest in fighting you. Unless you impede access to my quarry."

More chittering; more hissing. None of it intelligible. The one that had spoken first drew itself up to its full height and arched its tail and that body language needed no translation.

It was going to be a fight.

Fett didn't wait for the creatures to make the first move. He flung himself sideways towards the broken, half-open gap of the nearest prefab's doorway. If there was another creature in there waiting in the darkness, this would be a big mistake. But right now he had enemies on all sides and that wasn't a good place for enemies to be. If he could make it to the building—and there weren't other enemies already hidden inside—he would be able to shoot from cover while the six of them were out in the middle of the street with nothing to hide behind. He figured that even with their impressive speed, he'd be able to pick off two in the time it took them to scatter.

If he made it to the door.

He almost did.

{ TBC on AO3 }

You can find the rest of this chapter, and all subsequent updates, on Archive Of Our Own. Since the interest this story has garnered on FFnet appears to be mainly from outraged gatekeeper bullies laboring under the misapprehension that either I don't know the most basic elements of Fett's canon, or that my decision to rename his ship to something both more canonically fitting and less awkward irl means that I don't have two braincells to rub together—and that if they repeat their complaints often enough I'll capitulate to their wailing—I will not be bothering to continue updating this story here. I have no interest in feeding the trolls. As AO3 is considerably less of a cesspit, and also has a comment section that is vastly superior to FFnet's stunted reviews feature (which people insist on treating like a comments section rather than a reviews repository despite the utter lack of response-posting capability, especially to anonymous reviews), that is where I will be posting this story from now on. If you want to continue reading, that's where you'll find it.

For those who either didn't yet notice or who saw it and are curious wtf is going on: yes, Boba Fett's ship is not named Slave I in this story. Because firstly that is an uncomfortable and unpleasant name in general, and also because that name honestly stopped making sense canonically as soon as AOTC retconned the ship's original owner to be Jango, and we got his backstory of being shipped into slavery after Galidraan. Why would Jango want a constant reminder of one of the worst times of his life clawing at him like vibroblades every time he boards his own ship?

Yeah, the name really hasn't worked since 2002. So then what to now name the ship that has the same cold, unattached sense of disposability that Slave I through Slave IV did? Well, Firespray I is an option I suppose; I've seen that floated around and it does have the out-of-universe merit of sounding cool, as well as being a straightforward and obvious choice since it's the type of ship itself…

But I think we can do better. Because there's still a little too much individuality there. Choosing the name of a specific type of ship only works if you're planning on sticking to only flying the same sort of ship in the future, and I don't think Fett had any such intention. I think he's too pragmatic, too much of a practical man. We need a name that will work for the next ship too, after all; that's why it ends with a numeral. (In fact I think that having him return to piloting Slave I in later years was a mistake; I think it catered to the nostalgia of the fandom at the expense of the pragmatism of the character, and he should have been flying Slave VI by the time of LOTF instead.) Because this ship is disposable, and Fett expects that there will be a II someday. (As this story has been updated to reflect, since I decided to pin it down to a post-sarlacc setting.) We need to be a little more generic.

So, then: disposable, generic, detached. What name to choose?

Ship I.

And that's the name that I will be using in all my fics from here on out—or possibly Ship II, Ship III, Ship IV, and so on depending on time period. If you're not comfortable reading a story that has replaced Slave I with a better name, then please don't come find me on AO3 to continue reading this fic (or my others) because I'm thoroughly disinterested in your mewling rants on the subject. (Suggestions for alternative ship names will be considered, though.)

I promise all you gatekeepers, I know classic Boba Fett at least as well as if not better than all of you and there is nothing you can say about him that will be news to me or will change my mind about the fact that this is a superior name for his ship. Slave I worked for pre-AOTC Fett, but it doesn't work for the son of Jango. And there's absolutely no good reason for clinging to that pre-retcon name in the face of both a changed canon and the reality of the world we live in. Fiction does not exist in a vacuum even if that's where the ship flies. I remember wrestling as a child with the realization that putting SLAVEIV on my eventual license plate like I wanted to would not in fact convey what I wanted it to precisely because of that lack of vacuum. (And that was long before the retcon that undercut the ship's name in-universe too.) The name of Fett's ship was always an awkward, ugly thing, and every year of social evolution since 1980 has only made it more cringeworthy and unnecessary. It's past time to move on.

You can either accept that I'm calling it Ship I in my fics, or you can die mad about it. But know that Fett himself would be scornfully amused at your emotional weakness in caring so strongly about a thing that he himself considered entirely disposable.

Don't bother leaving reviews whining about this. I won't be reading them.

See the rest of you on AO3, I hope.