Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters (11 page)

They’d sought to make him a perfect assassin, and so when he was a youth—nearly killed in a fateful accident on a swoop—the Empire’s surgeons had cut away his hypothalamus and put in its place the circuitry for his enhanced auditory and visual systems.

Dengar knew well what the Imperial processors had in store for the hapless inhabitants of Aruza. Dengar had already been through the operation almost twenty years earlier.

In but a few seconds, he rushed up behind Kritkeen, found the man still standing with hands folded. As he watched the moons, he breathed in the sweet night air.

“It’s a nice night to die, isn’t it?” Dengar said softly, standing in the shadow thrown by one of the mansion’s pillars.

Kritkeen startled, turned, looking for him in the dark.

“Here I am,” Dengar said, taking a step into a shaft of light.

“Who are you?” Kritkeen said, shaken, demanding. He reached down to his hip, to press a portable alarm that would call more stormtroopers.

Before he could blink, Dengar crossed ten paces of ground, then reached down and snapped Kritkeen’s index finger. Dengar pulled the alarm from Kritkeen’s belt, placed it in his own pocket. Then Dengar pulled
his blaster with one hand and shoved the barrel into Kritkeen’s mouth until it clicked against the enamel of his teeth. All of these actions took him less than a second, and Kritkeen stood with his mouth open, dumbfounded by Dengar’s speed.

“This is to be a routine assassination. By the book. You may already know the routine,” Dengar said, and he moved slowly now, a deliberate slowness that he’d acquired only after years of practice. He needed the rest, for it was easy to overtax his system if he moved too quickly. “Under Section 2127 of the Imperial Code, I am required to notify you that I have been hired to conduct a legal assassination in order to atone for crimes against humanity committed by you.”

“Wha—?” Kritkeen began to cry out.

“Don’t pretend that you don’t know what crimes. I have been recording your actions for the past twelve days. Now, the assassination will be carried out shortly. I have brought you a blaster, since you have the legal right to defend yourself. If I kill you, the injured parties will file documents with the Empire showing why they chose assassination as a recourse.

“But, if you kill me, …” Dengar breathed threateningly, “well, that’s not going to happen.”

Kritkeen backed up an inch, so that Dengar’s blaster wavered near his lips. “Wait a minute!”

Dengar shoved a blaster into Kritkeen’s hand, stepped back a pace. “I’ll wait for three minutes,” Dengar said. “That’s the law. I must give you opportunity to escape. You have three minutes to run, any direction you want—as long as you don’t go back to your precious stormtroopers. Then the hunt begins.”

Kritkeen stared at Dengar for a moment, then looked down to the gun in his own hand as if afraid to touch it. Dengar knew what he was thinking. He was wondering if he could draw on the assassin, but Kritkeen would remember Dengar’s speed, and he would opt to run instead.

Dengar stepped back two paces, lowered his own blaster so that the barrel pointed at his feet, and watched Kritkeen curiously for a long moment. “Go ahead. Shoot me. I’ve got nothing to lose.” Dengar said.

And it was true. He had no family, no home. He had no money, no honor. He had no friends, few emotions. Rage was one of them, one of the few feelings the Empire had left Dengar to remind him that he’d once been human.

He was what the Empire had made of him: an assassin without any ties. An assassin incapable of loyalty, who today for the first time, would be killing one of his own employers.

Dengar remembered emotions enough to know that it should have felt good. It should have felt right and sweet. But he felt only emptiness.

Kritkeen looked into Dengar’s dark eyes and asked, “Who are you?”

“My birth name was Dengar on Corellia. But in this sector, I go by another name. I’m called ‘Payback.’ ”

Kritkeen’s hand began shaking, and he stepped back in horror, shuddering at recognizing the name. He dropped the blaster to the ground. “I—I—I’ve heard of you!”

Dengar glanced meaningfully at the weapon. “You’ve lost twenty seconds. At the end of those three minutes, I’m going to kill you, whether you’re armed or not.”

“Wait, please—Payback. I—heard that you’re just a little crazy. I heard that you’re a little out of control. Dropping assignments … choosing odd jobs. You hit only those people you want to hit. So why me?”

Dengar looked at Kritkeen in the moonlight. His brown hair was impeccably trim. If he were a little thinner, he’d look more like Han Solo. But in the darkness, it was close enough. And this man deserved to die, Dengar was sure of that.

His breathing stilled imperceptibly, and Dengar said evenly, “Why? Because you are who you are, and I am what you’ve made me.”

“I … I have never done anything!” Kritkeen objected, opening his arms wide. Then he looked out over vast plains of Aruza, where lights from the city shone like gold and blue gems, and his mouth closed.

“Run,” Dengar said. “Payback comes for you in two minutes.”

Kritkeen shrank back a step, two, three. He still watched Dengar, not realizing that once he’d taken that first step, his subconscious had already chosen for him. He’d begun to run.

In another few seconds, his conscious mind recognized this, and bent down slowly, scrabbled in the dark for his blaster. Then he turned and fled with his whole might, heading down into the dense forested slopes below the mansion, rushing blindly.

Dengar stood, listening, watching down over the valleys with their myriad lights—the diving of farrow birds, the winking lights of the city, the colored moons. He breathed the still air, took in the sounds of insects chirping. He would miss this world. It had been a pleasant place once, but the Imperial Redesign teams would turn it into an inferno soon enough.

There were cracking sounds as Kritkeen broke through some brush, a wailing shriek of alarm from a rupin tree as Kritkeen stumbled against it. After three minutes, Kritkeen shambled into the base of the small valley, then began running back uphill more stealthily, heading back toward his mansion—undoubtedly with the idea of retrieving a heavier weapon, or calling stormtroopers.

Dengar let the man run, let him weary himself. It would be dangerous to attack him while he was still fresh.

Dengar walked a hundred meters to a small but steep ravine. The trail Kritkeen was following would lead him
here, Dengar decided. Sure enough, in a couple of minutes he heard Kritkeen’s labored breathing, and Dengar had only to stand behind a bush until Kritkeen came flailing up the trail, gasping, sweat pouring from his face. He gaped about, wide eyes shining in the moonlight. He warily panned his weapon across the open space.

“Did you have a good run?” Dengar asked.

Kritkeen swiveled his weapon, fired.

Dengar watched the barrel, calculated where the shot would hit, and found that he had to step aside to avoid taking a blast in the chest. The white-hot blaster fire sizzled past him, and Dengar moved back into place so quickly that Kritkeen cried out in shock, believing that the blaster bolt had somehow gone
through
Dengar.

Dengar stepped forward, pulled the blaster from Kritkeen’s hands, and lifted the man off the ground with one hand. Dengar squinted in the darkness, holding his prize, gazing at him.

The world seemed to twist under Dengar, as if reality were a slippery thing, a tentacle on some giant beast that he was riding.

He held Kritkeen in the air, high over his head, and twisted him until he looked him in the face in the moonlight, in just the right angle, until he could really see.…

“Thought you could run from me, hey, Solo?” Dengar said. “Hop on your speeder and leave me choking in your exhaust?”

“What?” Kritkeen cried, trying to wriggle free from Dengar’s grasp. But the Empire had boosted Dengar’s strength. Any struggle was futile. Dengar shook him till he quit struggling.

Then Han’s voice came to him, but it was distant, faraway. “Hey, friend, it was a fair race, and the better man won—me!”

“A fair race!” Dengar shouted, recalling their deadly swoop race through the crystal swamps of Agrilat.

The whole Corellian system had been watching the two teenagers in the deadliest challenge match ever. Their course through the swamps had been perilous—with hot springs creating deadly updrafts, geysers spouting boiling water without notice, the sheer blades of gray crystalline underbrush threatening to slice them like sabers.

The crystal swamps were no place to ride swoops, much less race them. Yet they tore through the underbrush, over the scalding water. In places, they had cruelly jockeyed for position, shoving and kicking at one another, as if they were both immortals. Dengar had heard the screams of applause from the crowds, and for a few brief minutes he felt invincible, racing beside the great Han Solo, a man who like himself had never been beaten.

On the last stretch of the race, both men had opted to take low approaches through the brush over the water, hoping to boost their speed. Dengar had hunched down, smokey-white crystal blades ripping past him in a blur, the water before him bubbling and steaming, the smell of sulfur rising to his nostrils, hoping that no geysers would spout open before him to boil him alive. He dodged one crystalline blade too late, and it pricked his ear, slicing off the tip so that blood dribbled down his neck.

Then Dengar came screaming out of the underbrush and saw that Han Solo was neither in front of him nor to either side, and Dengar’s heart soared with elation in the hopes of winning—just as Han Solo’s swoop dropped from above, slamming the stabilizer fin into the back of Dengar’s head, washing Dengar’s face in the flames of Solo’s engines.

Dengar’s own swoop dove nose first into the water,
throwing Dengar free. His last memory of the incident was watching himself, gliding over the blue steaming waters, head-first toward the blades of a crystal tree.

I’m dead
, he’d realized too late.

The doctors said that his helmet had saved him. It had snapped off most of the crystal blades that otherwise would have skewed him through the brain. As it was, only one blade had made that fateful entrance. The health corp workers had pulled him from the brush, punctured with a dozen wounds.

They had operated. His wounds were so grievous, that only the Empire could have restored him so well. But they judged the risky operations to be a good investment. Dengar had superb reflexes, which could well be put to the service of the Empire.

So they closed his brain, removing those parts that he would no longer need. They’d sewn the punctures closed in his torso, inserting new neural nets in the arms and legs. They grew new skin to cover what he’d lost on his face. They gave him new eyes to see with, new ears to hear. All of the news nets proclaimed his recovery “miraculous.”

And after he’d healed, they began training him to become an assassin, using dangerous mnemiotic drugs that left him with a flawless memory while being susceptible to hallucinations.

Dengar shook the frightened little man over his head, shouted, “You call that fair? You call this fair?”

“No!” Solo shouted, but Dengar didn’t believe that he’d had a change of heart. “No, please!”

“Shut your mouth!” Dengar growled, then carried the man a hundred meters to a steeper embankment. He pulled a concussion grenade from the clip at his belt, shoved it in Solo’s gaping mouth, and pressed the detonate button.

For ten seconds, he held Solo, frozen.

Then he ran and tossed him over the cliff, thinking, I
want you to see how it feels, to go flying helplessly to your death
.

He pulled his blaster, shot Solo twice in midair.

The concussion grenade exploded before Solo hit the ground, and if anyone from the valleys saw it, they would have thought it was only the light from a farrow bird as it swooped on its prey.

Dengar stood for a long moment, breathing the air, letting his head clear. It seemed to him that a fog was lifting, that confusion was draining from him. For a moment he’d been dazed. For a moment he thought he’d killed Han Solo, but now he realized that no, it wasn’t, it couldn’t have been Solo—just another imposter.

A landspeeder crested a hill, its engines suddenly growling loud. Either Dengar hadn’t been paying attention or the sound of the landspeeder’s engines had been almost completely cut off by the mountains.

Dengar suddenly realized that he must have lost track of time. He must have been standing there for at least half an hour. That often happened to him after assassinations. In any case, the two stormtroopers had returned, bringing the dancer.

Before the speeder could stop, one of the stormtroopers jumped out, reaching for his sidearm as he watched Dengar.

Dengar pulled his own heavy blaster and aimed at the stormtrooper. “I wouldn’t try that—not if I wanted to live.”

“Identify yourself!” the stormtrooper said, his voice comm making it sound as if he were talking into a box. His hand remained near his weapon.

“They call me Payback,” Dengar said, using the nickname he thought would be most familiar around here. “Imperial Assassin, Grade One. Now put your hands on your head.”

The stormtrooper put his hands on his head, while
the other shut down the speeder and got out. Dengar motioned them both to stand together.

The stormtroopers seemed calm even while surrendering, and Dengar wondered if their faces would look so calm if they were unmasked.

The dancing girl, Manaroo, was indeed lovely. In the console lights of the speeder, he could see her well. She wore a silky outfit of silver over her light blue skin, and luminous tattoos of moons and stars glowed on her wrists and ankles. Her eyes shone in the darkness.

“Who is your target?” one of the stormtroopers asked, obviously thinking that this was an Imperially sanctioned hit.

Dengar wanted them to keep that impression. “Kritkeen. The hit has already been carried out, so there’s nothing you can do to save him.”

“Kritkeen is a COMPNOR officer!” one of the stormtroopers protested. “The Empire wouldn’t sanction such a hit! Where did you get your orders?”