“Best Served Cold”

Boba Fett sat in the Mess Hall of U.S.S. Gabriel, watching warp space stream by through the windows. Though he'd never been one to let his attention become fixed on anything without deliberately focusing on it, warp space was very different to the eye than hyperspace, and it had a way of drawing him in the starlines flowed, sliding lazily past the eye as if in no particular hurry. It was much different from the frantically twisting light tunnel that was the visible manifestation of hyperspace. Without realizing it, his chin drifted forward to rest on his fist, and he began to relax.

SNAP SNAP! "Hey, you awake over there?" The new doctor, Heather Parks, was snapping her fingers at Fett. He blinked quickly and straightened in his chair. She'd asked him something, but Fett couldn't remember what. He'd zoned out for a minute, no doubt about it. He'™d have to watch that.

"Well? Did you?" She sat there, staring at him expectantly over a plate of manicotti. Next to her, Commander Lafou, the engineer, hid her smirk behind a napkin and studiously chewed her salad.

Fett had no clue what the doctor had asked him, but he wasn't about to admit to a lapse in attention. He figured he had a fifty-fifty chance of guessing the answer correctly, so, without hesitating further, replied, "No, I did not."

Dr. Parks nodded and took a sip of milk. "Uh-huh, I thought not," she said. "And since I don't have any kind of medical history on you, you're going to have to come down to Sickbay for a full physical as soon as your duty schedule permits. And I mean the whole 9 yards, mister: complete physiological, radiological, and hemaglobular rundown. I don'™t know what you did before you signed on with the captain, but from what I understand you got around a lot. That ship of yours down in the Shuttle Bay doesn't look like a pleasure cruiser. I expect to see you in my office. Soon." With that, she finished off the last of her dinner and wiped her mouth demurely. "Well, it's been grand, folks, but I've got a stack of personnel records about 2 feet high yet to go through. Tomorrow night, same time?"

Lafou smiled and nodded. Fett said nothing, just blinked. Once.

"Great! See you then!" And with that, she was gone.

Fett and Lafou stared at each other for a long moment, neither saying anything, one still working on her salad at a leisurely pace. Finally, thinking self-consciously that it was out of character for him, Fett broke the silence. "Is she always that direct?"

Lafou swallowed and seemed to consider that. "For as long as I've known her, yes."

Fett blinked again and asked the obvious. "And how long has that been?"

Lafou bit her lip to keep from smiling and said, "What day did we leave Mars again? Tuesday?"

###

Back in his quarters, Fett left the lights dim and stripped out of the Starfleet uniform, donning his personal underclothing. He wasn't really tired; it struck him that, while the life of an officer aboard this ship might be exciting at times, by and large it seemed to be rather routine. If he didn't watch himself, he might get a little soft around the middle. At the moment, he was bored. He was just considering heading down to the holodeck when he noticed the computer interface on the room's desk (he didn't consider it "his" yet) blinking.

Seating himself, he tapped the control. The computer's voice, a pleasant yet bland female one, managed to get out YOU HAVE M-- before he cut the sound. It was a text message, very simple. It read, "You thought you could hide with the Feds? Lowborn scum, you are mine."

Fett did some tracking, and was reasonably sure he'd been able to access the communications database without raising any red flags. He couldn't trace the message to its source, naturally, but he was able to track it back to its first relay station: Gateway Outpost, in orbit of the planet Jubilar.

Before he'd joined Starfleet, Boba Fett had rarely, in conversation with others, used two words when one would do. He didn't talk to himself, not ever. Bob Fett said, out loud, "One from the vaults."