Maze of Deception Read online

  Copyright © 2003 Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or TM. All rights reserved.

  Cover art and design by Louise Bova

  Illustration by Peter Bollinger

  Published by Disney • Lucasfilm Press, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney • Lucasfilm Press, 1101 Flower Street, Glendale, California, 91201.

  ISBN 978-1-4847-1992-3

  Visit www.starwars.com

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  For my son, Tristan

  —EH

  PROLOGUE

  The Dream is always the same. Boba Fett always thinks of it as The Dream, because it’s the only one he ever remembers. The only dream he ever wants to remember.

  In The Dream, his father, Jango Fett, is alive. He is showing Boba how to handle a blaster. The dull gray weapon is much heavier than Boba thought it would be.

  “Like this,” Jango says. He is not wearing his Mandalorian helmet, so Boba can see his father’s brown eyes, coolly intelligent but not cold, not when he is looking at his son. When his father holds the blaster it looks weightless, a deadly extension of Jango’s own hand. He hands the weapon to Boba, who tries hard to keep his hand steady as he holsters it.

  “Always make certain your grip is tight,” Jango goes on, “or else an enemy can knock it from you. Like this—”

  A quick motion and the blaster falls from Boba’s hand. Boba looks up in dismay, expecting a reprimand, but his father is smiling. “Remember, son—trust no one, but use everyone.”

  That’s when Boba wakes up. Sometimes his father’s message is different, and sometimes the weapon is different. A dartshooter, say, or a missile. But one thing never changes.

  Boba always wakes from The Dream. And his father is still dead.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Boba! Downtime’s over! I need you—we’re in final approach.”

  Boba looked up groggily from where he’d been asleep in Slave I’s cockpit. Beside him, where once his father would have sat at the starship’s controls, the bounty hunter Aurra Sing was hunched over the console. She was staring at the screen. It was filled with symbols that were meaningless to Boba Fett—the coordinates of their precise destination remained scrambled.

  “Yes!” Aurra Sing murmured triumphantly. “We’re almost there.”

  She looked aside at Boba. Quickly he turned away. He wasn’t supposed to know where they were going.

  That was part of the deal. Aurra Sing would bring the two of them here, following the coordinates she had discovered in Slave I’s databank. The coordinates were part of a complex system—a treasure map, really—that detailed where Boba’s father had stored a vast fortune in credits and precious metals, all across the galaxy.

  Jango Fett had been a bounty hunter—an extremely successful bounty hunter. He had been an extremely clever one, too. Trained as a great Mandalorian warrior, Jango had learned the most important lesson of all: Prepare for the worst. And so he had made certain that his young son, Boba, would have access to his fortune after his death. The fortune could never be obtained by anyone else, because the access code was programmed so that only Boba’s retinal scan and DNA could obtain it. Since Boba was the sole unaltered clone of his father, he and he alone shared Jango’s pure genetic material.

  But Boba did not know where the fortune was. Only Aurra Sing knew that, because she had accessed the records on his father’s ship. The ship that should have been Boba Fett’s now.

  Boba looked warily at the person next to him. Her topknot of flaming red hair brilliant against dead-white skin. Her eyes blazing as twin suns.

  “She is one of the deadliest fighters I have ever known,” Jango had told Boba once, years before. “She was trained as a Jedi, but for some reason she hates them more than she hates anyone in the galaxy—and that’s saying something! Don’t ever cross her, son. And above all, don’t ever trust her.”

  Boba Fett certainly didn’t trust her. Who would? Aurra Sing was as thin and muscular and fine-boned as a Kuat aristocrat, but as deadly as a Mentellian savrip. She was a solitary hunter and a lethal predator.

  Like my father. Like I could be, Boba thought. His glance turned admiring—though he was too smart to let Aurra Sing see that!

  “Get ready for descent,” she snapped as she punched in the final landing codes. “Soon you’ll start making yourself useful to me, kid!”

  The coordinates were still scrambled. But earlier, while Aurra Sing was momentarily distracted, Boba had peeked at the screen and stolen a glimpse of the itinerary data. They were somewhere in the Core Worlds. A long way from Bespin and Cloud City, where he’d met up with Aurra. Boba knew about the Core Worlds from overhearing his father’s conversations. It was a good place to buy weapons—a good place to buy anything, now that he thought about it. Maybe a good place to outfit Slave I—once he got rid of Aurra Sing.

  He didn’t know the name of their actual destination, and he couldn’t read the planet’s coordinates, but he could see it on the monitor. A medium-sized planet, as gleaming and faceted as a green-and-gold jewel. He glanced at Aurra Sing, but she was busy with the landing program. He looked back at the planet on the screen. A string of unintelligible numbers and letters scrolled across it, and then a single phrase that he could understand.

  AARGAU. LANDING ACCESS GRANTED.

  Aargau. So that’s where they were going.

  Too bad I’ve never heard of it. Boba sighed. The landing restraints chafed his arms. When he tried to get more comfortable, Aurra Sing glared at him.

  “You want to get out now?” she said, and gestured at the dumping bay. “It can be arranged!”

  Boba gritted his teeth, forcing himself to smile apologetically. “Sorry.”

  Don’t trust her, his father had said. But Boba had struck a deal with her. He had agreed—reluctantly—to split the treasure with her, fifty-fifty.

  He had no choice. He had no money, no credits, no possessions except for his flight bag, his father’s Mandalorian helmet, and Slave I. He had no friends out here, wherever here was. And he had no friends anywhere. Even when he had the chance of having a friend, he soon lost it.

  He had only himself to rely on: an eleven-year-old with his father’s training, his father’s split-second reflexes, his father’s fighting instincts—and his own talent for survival.

  “Ready?” barked Aurra Sing. It was a command, not a question.

  “Ready,” said Boba, and he readied himself for their final descent to Aargau.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Aargau wasn’t the first planet Boba Fett had ever visited, or even the second. For a kid, Boba had seen a lot of planets in a short time. There was gray, cloud-swept Kamino, his homeworld, where months could pass and you’d never see anything but sheets of silvery rain, and hear nothing but the pounding of wind and water. There was Geonosi
s, a vast desert planet that glowed beneath its orange rings, where Boba had buried his father; and Bogden, a small planet orbited by so many moons it looked like part of a gigantic game of Wuur-marbles.

  And there was the Candaserri. The Republic troopship Candaserri wasn’t a planet, of course, but it had seemed almost as big as one to Boba. On Candaserri he’d run into the hated Jedi, though not Mace Windu, the Jedi Knight who had killed Boba’s father.

  Still, except for the Jedi, Candaserri hadn’t been so bad. It certainly wasn’t as disgusting as Raxus Prime, the galaxy’s toxic dumping ground, where Boba Fett had last encountered the Count. He always thought of him as “the Count,” because the Count had two names—Tyranus and Dooku. Boba’s father had always told his son, “If anything should happen to me, find the Count. He’ll know how to help you.”

  As it turned out, the Count had found Boba first. The Count hired Aurra Sing to bring Jango Fett’s son to him—for safekeeping, the Count assured Boba. Aurra Sing had kept Slave I as part of her payment, which Boba didn’t think was fair—it had been his father’s ship, and by rights it should be Boba’s ship now.

  But you didn’t argue with the Count, any more than you argued with Aurra Sing.

  Not if you expected to live, anyhow, Boba thought as he waited for Slave I to make its landing on Aargau. The Count was a tall, imperious man with icy eyes. Like Aurra Sing, he had been trained as a Jedi—although unlike Aurra Sing, the Count had finished his training and had once been a Master—which made him even more dangerous. And like Aurra Sing, the Count now hated the Jedi. When Boba first heard his father talk about the Count, Jango referred to him as Tyranus. It was Tyranus who had recruited Jango Fett as the source for the great clone army created on Kamino. In appearance, every clone trooper resembled Jango Fett as an adult.

  But only Boba Fett resembled his father as a real boy. Unlike the clone troopers, Boba’s DNA had not been genetically enhanced. He grew at a normal rate, not at the accelerated rate that the clones did. Boba thought the clones were sort of creepy. They were cool, because they could fight better than any droid army, but they were strange, too, because they looked so much like his father.

  The Count was even creepier. Especially since Boba knew the Count had two identities.

  Tyranus had created the clone troopers now used by the Republic, while Dooku was on the side of the Republic’s enemies: the Separatists. Two men on opposing sides—but they were both the same person!

  And only Boba Fett knew that. He smiled now, thinking of it. Knowing a secret is power, his father had always told him. But only if it remains your secret.

  “Ready,” muttered Aurra Sing. Around them the starship shuddered with the force of reentry. “And—now!”

  Through the screen in front of them he had his first glimpse of Aargau. The planet’s surface was invisible. All he could see was one single, impossibly huge pyramid, rising like an enormous shining steel spike from the mists of cloud far, far below.

  “What’s that?” asked Boba in awe. He had never seen an artifact that vast. “Is it—is that where people live?”

  Aurra nodded. “Yes. Aargau is run by the InterGalactic Banking Clan. They’re sticklers for organization and control. So a large part of the habitable portion of the planet is one gigantic pyramid. It’s divided into seven levels. The upper level is the smallest, of course, so security can check all visitors coming and going. Then as you go down, you find administration, then the banks and vaults and treasuries. The merchant and living levels are below these.”

  Boba peered down. He could see lines zigzagging across the stepped levels of the pyramid. There were blinking lights, glowing canyons, and brilliantly colored tunnels everywhere across the pyramid’s surface.

  “Wow! It’s like a big maze,” he said admiringly.

  “That’s right. Droids are programmed to find their way around all the levels, but people can spend years memorizing the access codes and charts, and still get lost. They say that if you get off on the wrong level, you can spend your entire life wandering around and never find your way back to where you started.”

  Cool! thought Boba. He glanced furtively at Aurra Sing. Once he had his share of his father’s fortune, maybe he could lose Aurra in this planetary labyrinth, regain control of Slave I—and regain his freedom, too. He felt in his pocket for the book his father had left him. It was the possession that Boba treasured above all else, except for his father’s Mandalorian helmet.

  The helmet was safe in Boba’s sleeping area. But the book he had recently decided to keep with him always. It contained information and advice that his father had recorded for him. In a way, it was like having a link to his father, even though Jango Fett was dead.

  But Boba didn’t want to think about that. Once he had made certain the book was where it should be, he turned his attention back to the screen.

  Slave I was approaching the top of the glittering pyramid. Far below, Boba could see flickers of light, green and red and blue. It made everything look like part of a gigantic circuit board. He pointed to where the deepest reaches of the planet sparkled brilliantly.

  “What’s down there?” he asked. “At the very lowest level?”

  “That’s the Undercity, kid. They say that anything goes down there—if you can find your way.”

  She leaned back in the command seat, grinning as the ship’s computer finally made contact with the planet’s security force. On the screen in front of her, green letters scrolled—not the scrambled coordinates, but letters that Boba could read clearly.

  WELCOME TO AARGAU

  YOU ARE NOW ENTERING A NEUTRAL ZONE

  “Hah!” said Aurra Sing. She unfastened her safety harness and stood, shaking back her topknot mane of red hair. “Neutral zone! No such thing!”

  “What do you mean?” asked Boba. He slid from his chair and followed her to Slave I’s docking bay.

  “I mean nobody’s ever neutral. Not really. Everyone and everything has a price—you just have to figure what it is.” Reflexively she checked her weapons, then glanced at Boba. “I guess you’re ready—all we need is you, after all. Let the bank check your identity and hand over the money!”

  She grinned, then punched in the code to open the starship’s outer doors. “Come on, kid—let’s go get rich!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Boba quickly decided that Aargau was definitely the cleanest planet he’d ever been on. The docking zone was like the inside of a gigantic holoscreen, with flashing lights and low, brightly colored buildings. The streets were broad and empty of any vehicles, except for a couple other airspeeders that had recently landed. There were few people or droids that he could see. Not even his father’s spartan apartment on Kamino had been as clean as this!

  And everything was bathed in red light—a harsh light that made Boba’s eyes sting.

  “Is the atmosphere this color?” he wondered.

  Aurra Sing shook her head. “No. That’s from special infrared rays,” she explained, as they clambered out of Slave I. “Aargau has human-standard atmosphere. Every level is color-coded. It’s supposed to make it easier to find your way around. It gives me a headache.”

  “Me, too.” Boba rubbed his eyes. “So this level is red?”

  “That’s right. Infrared rays help disinfect incoming ships—and visitors. Aargau has a lot of rules.”

  Several uniformed soldiers walked among the other ships at the docking site. Even in uniform, with their faces hidden by their helmets, Boba recognized them. They were clone troopers, members of the clone army created by Count Tyranus. Aargau was part of the Republic, which would explain why the clones were here. In one of the other docking bays, Boba recognized a Republic gunship. That was where the clone troopers would have come from.

  But why was a gunship here? Was it refueling?

  Boba watched as the troopers drew nearer. It was a weird feeling, seeing the clones again. Boba knew that every one of them had his father’s face. His father’s eyes, his father’
s mouth—but not his father’s smile. Because the clones rarely if ever smiled.

  Boba could see Aurra Sing tensing as the troopers approached them. But they only nodded politely. They gave a cursory look at Slave I, then moved on.

  “They didn’t search us,” said Boba in surprise. He glanced back at the troopers. “Or the ship.”

  Aurra shrugged. “Not really their job. They’re fighting battles, not checking cargo. Anyway, nobody bothers smuggling anything into Aargau. Too affluent. They’ve got a saying—‘Better poor on Aargau than wealthy anywhere else.’ This is the bank for the whole galaxy. There’s enough precious metals in vaults on Aargau to outfit an entire army a thousand times over.”

  “Really?” Boba grinned slyly to himself. If the bank here was that rich, would it even notice if a few bars of gold were missing?

  As though she could read his thoughts, Aurra Sing added, “It’s easy getting onto Aargau. Getting off is more difficult—you don’t want to know what they do to people they catch trying to smuggle stuff off-planet.” She turned and gave him a nasty grin. “Don’t even think of double-crossing me, kid. All they have to do is suspect you of smuggling, and you’re history. ’Cause who is an officer going to believe? An adult or a kid?”

  Not just a kid—a bounty hunter’s kid, thought Boba, and scowled. But he said nothing.

  “So just you stay with me,” Aurra Sing hissed as they headed toward a large, shining console desk. An immense holosign flickered in the air above it. The holosign had a scrolled message that repeated itself over and over and over again in a hundred different languages.

  WELCOME TO AARGAU,

  JEWEL OF THE ZUG SYSTEM!

  OBSERVE THE FOLLOWING RULES:

  I. NO UNLAWFUL REMOVAL OF PRECIOUS METALS

  II. NO POSSESSION OF WEAPONS EXCEPT BY AARGAU CITIZENS

  III. NO WILLFUL CONSPIRACY TO DEFRAUD, DISCREDIT, OR DECEIVE THE BANK OF AARGAU

  THE ABOVE CRIMES ARE PUNISHABLE BY IMMEDIATE EXECUTION