BOBA FETT

(Human male: Bounty Hunter)

A faceless enforcer, Boba Fett's distinctive armor strikes fear in the hearts of fugitives. He is a legendary bounty hunter, accepting warrants from both the Empire and the criminal underworld. He is all business, laconic, and deadly.

Little is known of Fett's past. His style of armor has gone unseen since the days of the Clone Wars, but whether Fett participated in that terrible scourge is unknown. Fett's armor is a battered weapon-covered spacesuit equipped with a rocketpack. His gauntlets contain a flamethrower, and a whipcord lanyard launcher. His kneepads conceal rocket dart launchers. Several ominous braids hang from his shoulder -- trophies from fallen prey -- which underscore this hunter's lethality.

Shortly after the Battle of Hoth, Darth Vader desperately wanted to capture the fugitive Rebel craft, the Millennium Falcon. To that end, he hired a motley assortment of bounty hunters, including the legendary Fett. Vader specifically pointed out to Fett that the Falcon's passengers were to be taken alive. "No disintegrations," rumbled the Dark Lord, obviously familiar with Fett's reputation.

It was Fett who successfully tracked the Falcon from Hoth to Bespin. Arriving at the gas giant before the Falcon, Fett and Vader sprung a trap on the ship's hapless crew. Fett, a shrewd negotiator, received his bounty for capturing the crew, but also was given custody of Han Solo. The bounty hunter was set to collect the reward on Solo's head placed there by the vile gangster Jabba the Hutt.

Whisking the carbonite-frozen form of Han Solo away from Bespin, Fett eventually arrived on Tatooine aboard his starship, the Slave I. Fett delivered Solo to Jabba, his some-time employer, and was many thousands of credits richer. Fett stayed at Jabba's palace, and was present when Solo's friends attempted to rescue the carbon-frozen smuggler.

Jabba, enraged at the attempted prison break, brought his captives out to the Tatooine desert, to execute them in the Great Pit of Carkoon. In the sandpit lay the immense Sarlacc, a vile creature that would digest its prey over thousands of years. Rather than let themselves be thrown in the Sarlacc's maw, Solo's friends, led by Luke Skywalker, fought against their captors. In the chaos that followed, Fett entered the fray.

Solo, free of the carbonite and suffering blindess from hibernation sickness, wildly swung a vibroax into an inattentive Fett's rocketpack. The pack activated, and the bounty hunter soared into the air, out of control. The airborne Fett slammed into the side of Jabba's sail barge before tumbling into the Sarlacc's mouth. With a sickly belch from the desert creature, it seemed as if Fett's career as the galaxy's most notorious bounty hunter was brought to an end.

EXPANDED UNIVERSE

Many legends propagate as to the origins of Boba Fett -- perhaps by design, since this uncertainty as to his true identity only adds to his mysterious and deadly aura. One tale tells of Fett being a failed stormtrooper who killed his commanding officer. Another has him being the commanding officer of a fabled group of warriors from Mandalore decimated by the Jedi Knights. A third account tells of a Journeyman Protector from Concord Dawn named Jaster Mereel who adopted the mask and guise when he was convicted of treason.

Among the first records of Fett's activities were during the early years of the Empire. Fett was hired by the gangster Sise Fromm to dispose of young speeder pilot Thall Joben and his friends. Though the Fromms were enemies of the Jabba the Hutt -- Fett's sometime employer -- the hunter took the contract to square off a favor he owed Fromm.

At the time, Fett owned a droid named BL-17, and used him to sew confusion among Joben's droids, R2-D2 and C-3PO. Unaware of a bomb planted on Joben's speeder, the White Witch, Fett entered his modified racer Silver Speeder in the Boonta speeder competition. During his attempt to capture Joben with a magnetic beam, Fett pulled the bomb onto his own speeder, and it was destroyed. Angered at the loss of his speeder and droid, Fett captured the Fromms to turn them over to Jabba the Hutt.

As a licensed law enforcer of the Empire, Fett worked for that oppressive government on numerous occasions. One report had him allowing Rebel agents to capture a mystical talisman infected with an Imperial sleeping virus, though records of this event remain classified and cannot be confirmed. Another report details that Fett was hired by Darth Vader to track down a Rebel agent known as "Mole" on the frozen world of Ota.

Shortly after the Battle of Yavin, a group of Jabba the Hutt's bounty hunters captured Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and Chewbacca in the Hoth system. These hunters were to deliver the Rebel trio to Ord Mantell, where Boba Fett was to take possession and continue the delivery to the Empire. One of the hunters, an arrogant tracker named Skorr, botched the operation and let the Rebels escape. Skorr was killed in the process and Fett was left empty-handed.

After Fett finally captured Solo and was set to deliver him to Jabba, he was attacked by the other hunters hired by Vader to bring in the Corellian prize. The assassin droid IG-88, aboard his ultra-sleek IG-2000 attacked the Slave I high over Tatooine. Though Fett destroyed the droid, the Slave I sustained serious damage. Unwilling to be caught defenseless, Fett laid low for a while, which prompted a concerted search by Solo's friends.

Fett dresses in fearsome armor of Mandalorian design. The battle-scarred suit's design heritage can be traced back 4,000 years, when clans of Mandalores fought against the Jedi during the Great Sith War. The armor is heavily modified with numerous hidden and deadly features. The T-shaped visor set in the helmet incorporates a macrobinocular viewplate. The rest of the helmet features a temple-mounted broad-band antenna, motion and sound sensors, an infrared device, and an internal comlink connected to his ship. Fett's weapon of choice is a sawed-off BlasTech EE-3 rifle.

Fett's armor and body were extremely battered by his ordeal in the Sarlacc. When he plunged into the beast, he was kept alive by numerous fibrous suckers which attached themselves to his body. This was part of the Sarlacc's horrible metabolic process; it would keep its prey alive for thousands of years, all the while slowly feeding off it. Fett almost lost his identity in the swirling dementia brought about by the Sarlacc's toxins. His resolve held, and he used his weapons to blast free of the beast.

Naked, wounded, and defenseless on the sands of Tatooine, Fett was rescued by his fellow hunter Dengar, who nursed him back to health. Fett reclaimed his armor and his reputation, returning from the "dead," and again taking on bounties. It wasn't until six years after the Battle of Endor that Han Solo learned his nemesis was still alive.

Although Fett still piloted his antiquated Slave I, he updated his arsenal with the ultrasleek Slave II. These were but the first two of his vessels, which would eventually number up to Slave VI.