Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters (12 page)

“This isn’t an Imperially sanctioned hit,” Dengar admitted, since the stormtrooper had asked. “I took this job freelance. My employer said he represented a consortium of free beings who wanted to put a stop to the COMPNOR Redesign efforts. I’ve been hired to eradicate ten of your COMPNOR officers.”

The stormtroopers looked at one another, and Dengar saw them tense, ready to spring. He wondered if his threat sounded as ludicrous to them as it did to him. If he really had planned to kill ten COMPNOR officers, he never would have let
them
know of the threat, but now that he’d spoken the lie, Dengar saw that it would make the Empire worry. They’d have to put some effort into hunting Dengar down. Just as he wanted.

“Now, remove your helmets and toss them into the speeder, then throw in your weapons.”

Both stormtroopers complied. Once they were disarmed and could no longer call for backup, Dengar waved his blaster at them, urging them toward the
steep-sided valley below. “Go over the edge, down there, and keep running!”

The stormtroopers hesitated, perhaps fearing that he’d shoot them in the back, so he fired at their feet, sent them running.

He went to the speeder. The dancing girl, Manaroo, watched him with terrified eyes. Her hands were cuffed in front of her. Dengar lifted her hands in the air, held his blaster to the crude chain links, and fired.

“You killed him? You killed Kritkeen?” Manaroo asked. Her voice was strong and gravelly, and seemed strange coming from a woman with such delicate grace.

“He’s dead,” Dengar said, hopping into the driver’s seat of the speeder. He fired the engines, swung the speeder around, and headed back toward the city.

“Then COMPNOR will leave? Abandon their Redesign efforts?” she sounded hopeful.

“No,” Dengar said. He realized that the peaceful people of Aruza had no experience with armies or war. “It doesn’t work that way. When the Empire learns of Kritkeen’s assassination, the next man in line for command will assume his duties, until the Empire sends a new officer. You’ll have another general, harder than Kritkeen, here within a few weeks.”

“Then what can we do?” she asked.

Dengar considered. These people had no weapons, no skill in fighting. “Flee the planet. You’re scheduled for processing tomorrow. Flee the planet tonight.”

“But the Empire has destroyed our ships! There’s no escape!”

He looked back, saw her watching him. There was a look of awe in her eyes, a look of respect for him that he hadn’t seen in anyone’s face for years. “You could save me,” she said. “You could take me where you are going.” She studied his face. “Are you a good man?”

It was an odd question, one Dengar had never been asked before. There was a time in his life when he would have said yes. But the Empire had cut away part
of his brain, the part that let him distinguish good from evil, and he wondered … He reached up, unconsciously pulling the wraps up above his neck—not to hide the scars from his burns, but to make sure that his cybernetic links were covered. “Ma’am, how could I be a good man? I’m not even sure if I’m a
man
anymore.”

Dengar crested the hill, hit the next valley, turned off the road toward a stand of trees. His own ship was secreted ahead, up through the brush. He’d known he’d have to evacuate quickly.

He’d planned to just drop this woman off in the brush. To do anything more would be inconvenient. But his ship—an old Corellian JumpMaster 5000—did have some extra space. He
could
drop her off somewhere, if it was worth the effort.

He pulled up behind a screen of trees. His ship,
Punishing One
, sat in the dark under the limbs, sheltered by a camouflage net. The JumpMaster had been built as a scouting and service vehicle for untamed worlds. It was small—designed for a single pilot, with enough room for a passenger or a bit of freight. The U-shaped vessel had some decent weaponry—proton torpedoes, a quad blaster, and a mini ion cannon. Dengar had been flying it for ten years. For a long time he had imagined that he was used to being alone, and he often defended his solitary tendencies by claiming to himself that he was not fit company anyway. But right now he ached, and he realized that he would appreciate company.

“Let’s go,” Dengar said. “You’re coming with me.”

“Where?” she asked, looking for his ship, unable to spot it in the dark.

“Anywhere but here. We’ll figure it out later.”

He grabbed her wrist, hurried to the
Punishing One
. He didn’t bother ripping off the camouflage netting. Instead he dodged under it, opened a door, pulled the girl in with him. In a moment, he was at the controls. He had to break free of this planet’s gravity well with-getting
shot down. He hoped that no one knew of the assassination yet.

He fired his engines, screamed low over the trees, building speed. He checked the heads-up holo display. A single Star Destroyer sat in orbit, and he could see it up ahead over the horizon on his left. He accelerated away from it at full speed, ordered his navicomputer to set a course for his first jump.

“Better get back to the stateroom and buckle in,” Dengar said over his shoulder. “We could be in for a rough ride.”

The Star Destroyer sent a squadron of TIE interceptors scrambling after him, and Dengar raised his rear deflectors. But the
Punishing One
had more speed than outside appearances could account for, and he accelerated into the blue-white depths of hyperspace just as the TIE interceptors broke into firing range.

Then they were soaring free. Dengar went to the stateroom, found Manaroo on her knees, slumped halfway into her bunk. She was weeping.

Dengar stood watching her, testing himself for feeling, trying to remember why people cried. “There’s food and drink if you want them.” He waved toward the food unit and beverage dispenser.

“Can we call my parents? Tell them where I’ve gone?”

“Yes,” Dengar said.

He stood for a minute, thinking he should say more.

“Dengar,” she said, looking up at him curiously. Her face was round, and in the lights he saw that her skin and hair were a paler blue than most Aruzans’. Her tattoos still glittered, and she was lightly perfumed. Her body was a dancer’s body, lithe and strong. “Why did you kill Kritkeen tonight? If the Empire will keep on destroying our people, then what does this avail? It changes nothing.”

Dengar could think of a dozen reasons: He did it for the money he’d been paid. He did it because Kritkeen
was scum who deserved to die. He did it because the man looked like Han Solo. He chose to tell part of the truth, perhaps because he was so seldom free to do so. In his line of business, lying was a way of life. “I did it because I’m looking for a man, and this is the only way I know how to get close to him.”

“Who are you looking for?” Manaroo asked, her curiosity piqued.

“His name is Han Solo. Have you ever heard of him?”

There was a small chance that she’d ever heard of Han Solo on this backward world, but Dengar believed in taking chances. Still, he wasn’t surprised when she said, “No.”

“He’s a smuggler with a price on his head. He likes fast ships and heavy blasters. I’ve been hunting him for over a year. Twice—on Tatooine and then again on Ord Mantell—I caught up with him, just in time to see him fly off in his ship, the
Millennium Falcon
. I’m really tired of getting fried in his exhaust.”

“Do you think Kritkeen knew where he was?”

“No,” Dengar said. “But me and a lot of other bounty hunters set out on Solo’s trail a while back, and we haven’t found him anywhere in the galaxy.”

“So, you think he’s crashed on some unknown world, or hiding on an interdicted planet, like Aruza?”

“I heard a rumor about some hotshot Rebel pilot that blew up the Imperial Death Star. I checked the records. Solo’s ship, the
Millennium Falcon
, was there. He’s with the Rebellion, and he’s hiding from more than just us bounty hunters.”

“I still don’t understand. So you know where he is?”

“No,” Dengar said, and he wondered if he had revealed too much. He didn’t feel much fear anymore, not since the operations. Still, he was trained to silence, and he found that he’d been speaking perhaps too openly. But he’d already told her half his secrets, and if she revealed the rest, well, he could always kill her.
“Only the Rebellion knows where he is, and they’re protecting him. So I had to find a way to join them, but I doubt they’ll take me in too easily. I am an Imperial assassin. But Kritkeen has been one of the Rebellion’s most vexing foes, and there are plenty more like him that I can take care of. Once the Empire puts a bounty on my head and the Rebellion decides that I’m the Empire’s enemy, I suspect they’ll offer me asylum. And once I’m in the Rebellion, I’ll find Han Solo.”

“You’re sowing the seeds of your own destruction,” Manaroo said, and her bright black eyes looked frightened. “The Empire will hunt you down.”

Dengar laughed. “Well, I’ve got nothing to lose. Tell you what, why don’t you lie down in that bunk, get some sleep.” Dengar yawned. He’d become accustomed to Aruza’s night cycles, and right now, his body said it was past his bedtime.

A few days later he left Manaroo on some obscure backwater world, giving her a few hundred credits to buy passage wherever, and thought little more of her for the next few months. Though he flew the skies alone, for once he did not dwell upon his loneliness. He was consumed by his search for Han Solo. He cruised the rim of the galaxy looking for tough dives where smugglers and assassins did business, but he never caught wind of Solo. Twice he sent messages back to Jabba the Hutt on Tatooine to report his progress.

Five more COMPNOR Redesign officials met brutal ends. Four assassins tried to kill Dengar, and Dengar messed them up for it. Then things got quiet. No one would risk coming after him anymore.

The name “Payback” was mentioned in hushed whispers when he entered a casino, and often, on strange dirty little worlds, he would look down a street to find some mother and child staring at him, their eyes gleaming with respect. Sometimes, someone would
even call his name, cheering him, and he would look back at them blankly, in wonder.

The planet Toola was little more than a collection of mining camps, a dark place, cold, distant from its sun. The locals, a species called Whiphids, were large creatures covered with white fur in the winter which changed to brown in the summer. The huge Whiphids, with their gleaming tusks, had only the barest technology. The wilder ones still hunted with stone-bladed spears, while warriors closer to the mines sought out metal war axes and even vibroblades smuggled in from off-world. The Whiphids did most of the work in the mines by hand. They were a tough, independent, barbaric people. Dengar liked them.

So it was that Dengar found himself in a card game with a clean woman (a rarity in the mining camp), dressed in a nice jumpsuit.

They sat in a Whiphid hut made of leather sewn over the rib cage of some giant beast. The female Whiphids were singing around a roaring fire, while the smaller males were roasting snow demons, basting them with some sweet-smelling sauce made from lichen. The oily smoke hung overhead like clouds.

Dengar’s card partner, a sharp-faced woman with blond hair and searching eyes, leaned forward during the game and whispered, “I don’t understand, Payback. You’re an Imperially trained assassin, so why have you turned against the Empire, knowing that they’ll kill you?”

Dengar sighed, as he had a hundred times in the past few months. “It’s the right thing to do. I have to stand against the Empire, even if I do it alone.

“I think …” Dengar said, embellishing his tale for the first time, “that I decided I had to quit when they asked me to kill the holy children at Asrat.”

“And they are …?”

“Orphans who live in a temple, their lives dedicated to good. They denounced the Emperor, and vowed to ‘deny him love and sustenance,’ as they put it. They were trying to formally withdraw from the Empire. And in the Empire, rebellion—even from children—is not tolerated.

“So, I had to either kill the children or leave the Empire. I chose to leave.”

“And what of COMPNOR Redesign. Why do you fight it?” the woman asked.

“Because they are the most thoroughly evil branch of the Empire. Few men deserve a brutal end at an assassin’s hands, but many such deserving individuals can be found in Redesign.”

The woman studied his face. She had been careful all evening, maintaining a friendly demeanor, yet never had she identified herself. “But as an Imperial assassin, it is rumored that part of your brain has been removed. You have no emotions, no conscience. How do you measure good and evil?”

Dengar licked his lips. There were no ‘rumors’ about his lack of conscience. His surgeries had been performed secretly. This woman could only have heard such reports if she’d read his military files—and those would have been painfully hard to come by. Only an agent of the Rebel Alliance might have such information—or, of course, the original Imperial surgeons who’d operated on him. Dengar wondered what her gifts might be. He had planted enough seeds so that the Rebel Alliance should have contacted him long ago, but he believed that they might fear deception. They would have brought in a special interrogator, perhaps even someone with empathie or telepathic abilities. “I have memories,” Dengar said truthfully, knowing that his interrogator would feel the truth behind his words even if she weren’t telepathic. “I remember the difference between good and evil, even if I no longer see the difference very well.”

“You must be very frightened, very lonely,” she said, “fighting the Empire this way.”

“I no longer feel fear,” Dengar said. “Such capacity has been stripped away from me.” He dared not deny his loneliness.

“What of the Rebellion? Have you tried to join?”

“I do not believe they would have me,” Dengar laughed hollowly. “I’ve done enough evil, I think that they will see my death as just recompense.”

“Perhaps,” the woman said, as if turning the subject, and she resumed her card game.

At dawn when Dengar went to his ship, planning to leave Toola, he found that someone had programmed his navicomputer, charting a course for an unnamed star on the farthest rim of the galaxy. A message written in the dust accumulated on one of his monitors said, “Friends.”