Tales of the Bounty Hunters

by Kevin Anderson

  The Aruzans were also a soft people, unwilling or unable to do violence. And once they entered Kritkeen’s estate, they’d fall on their knees and begin begging some favor, seeking mercy for their people, and then they would leave with Kritkeen’s promise to “look into the matter,” or his solemn-sounding vow to “do my best.”

  Little did Kritkeen know that tonight, once his guests had left, he would be paid a visit by one final caller. The impoverished citizens of Aruza, as peaceful as they were, had paid Dengar the pittance of a thousand credits to end Kritkeen’s tyranny.

  It was a kilometer to Kritkeen’s mansion. Even with his boosted auditory system Dengar could not have overheard Kritkeen’s conversations. But Dengar had set up spy equipment on a tripod to aid him in his surveillance. A laser beam was trained on the glass above one large rear office window, and by measuring the vibrations of sound waves as they beat against the window, Dengar was able to make a perfect recording of Kritkeen’s final words. Dengar listened to them on a small speaker that played beneath the tripod.

  Aruza’s five moons, each in pale shades of tan, silver and green, hung low over the mountains on the horizon like ornamental lights. And out over the valleys, on the warm skies of Aruza’s summer night, farrow birds would dive, letting their bioluminescent chests phosphoresce in brilliant flashes that confused and blinded small flying mammals long enough for the farrows to make an easy catch. The flashes of the farrow birds looked almost like lighting, Dengar thought, or more like fighter ships as they dove down on their targets, firing their lasers.

  And because of the birds diving and lighting the air with their chests, Dengar pulled out his heavy blaster pistol, set it to kill. On most worlds he would have hesitated to assassinate a dignitary with a blaster. But somehow here on Aruza, it seemed right. Kilometers away, people would see gunfire here on the hill, and they would imagine that it was only farrow birds feeding.

  Dengar listened to Kritkeen’s conversation with a little man named Abano.

  “O Affluent One, O Moderate One,” Abano, one of the poor Aruzan land barons was saying loudly, desperately, “I implore you. My daughter is fragile. She is much needed and much loved by her mother, and by her friends. Yet tomorrow, she is scheduled for Imperial processing in the hospital at Bukeen. You cannot let this terrible thing happen!”

  “But what can I do?” Kritkeen asked, and he moved to his desk beside the window. Dengar had his cybernetic eyes set at 64X magnification, and he could see Kritkeen clearly. The man was tall, with a lean build and thick brown hair. He was perhaps a bit stockier than Han Solo, and he had a hatchet nose, but he looked enough like Solo. “I, like you, have others above me that I must serve,” Kritkeen said reasonably. “I would love to save your daughter from the processors, but even if I could rescue her, who would I send in her place? No, her number was chosen. She must be processed.”

  “But, my daughter is a lovely child,” Abano pleaded. “She is gentle. She is a jewel among women. It is said that the processors will cut into her brain, remove all kindness from her, so that if she survives the hospital at all, she will come out vicious.”

  “True,” Kritkeen said. “Men like me and you, we cannot understand how the Empire would want vicious servants. But what can we do?” Dengar wondered at Kritkeen, wondered why he feigned a lack of power. It must have satisfied his sick sense of humor. COMPNOR—The Commission for the Preservation of the New Order—had sent Kritkeen to Aruza as a planetary chief of “Redesign,” with the mission of implementing “precessional orientation experiments” that would lead to “cultural mass edification” that would make Aruza “a viable social force within the New Order.” Dengar had seen Kritkeen’s orders to report, though at first he had had some initial difficulty puzzling them out. But one thing Dengar knew: On this planet, Kritkeen was god. He took orders from no one, and his orders were followed explicitly. And if Kritkeen could not edify the planet to the point that it became a “viable social force,” then the planet was to be, as the hazy orders put it, “alleviated of the potential for further evolution.” Over the weeks of travel, Dengar had finally made sense of the orders: “Round up these pacifists and turn them into a war machine. If they refuse, fry this planet until even the worms choke on the ashes.”

  And so, Dengar wondered why Kritkeen played games with the locals. Kritkeen sat facing Abano and said solmenly, as if to console the little man, “I wish I could help you. But is it not better to have a daughter who is feral and alive, than one who is virtuous … and dead?”

  “I would give anything to you,” Abano cried. “Anything. My daughter, Manaroo, is lovely, more beautiful than any other in the valley. She dances, and when she moves, she moves as fluidly as water under moonlight. She is more than a woman, she is a treasure. If you saw her dance, you would not send her to the processor!”

  “What?” Kritkeen asked. “You would give me your daughter to be my lover?”

  There was the sound of indrawn breath, the local man trying to speak his horror, for the gentle Aruzan would never think of such a thing, and when Kritkeen understood that this was indeed not what Abano was offering, he tapped three times on his desk with his right index finger. It was a standard code in Imperial Intelligence. It was an order for the guards to terminate the conversation.

  “Come this way!” a stormtrooper’s voice cut in, and moments later Dengar saw the exterior lights of the mansion come on, lighting the white columns and the graceful blue inderrin trees. Two stormtroopers dragged Abano, kicking and shouting, out to his speeder. The man climbed in fearfully, fumbling for the speeder controls.

  One of the stormtroopers raised his blaster rifle, fired at Abano’s head, but missed by a span. The little man suddenly found the controls for his speeder and raced away, heading downhill.

  When the stormtroopers re-entered the house, Kritkeen growled at them angrily. “You didn’t get gobbets of flesh all over the lawn, did you?”

  “No, Your Excellency!” one of the stormtroopers said.

  “Good,” Kritkeen said. “It attracts bomats, and I can’t abide the pests. They’re worse than these damned Aruzans.”

  “We let the man escape,” the stormtrooper explained, as if unsure whether Kritkeen would be angered by the news.

  “Good riddance,” Kritkeen said with a bitter scowl and a wave of the hand. “Refuse any more appointments for the night. I grow weary of their sad-eyed appeals, their whining pleas, and their repititious petitions.”

  He waved at his stormtroopers, as if asking them to leave, but then thought better of it. He looked around his room. “Go to the city and bring Abano’s daughter to me. I want to see if she is as beautiful as he says. I will have her dance. And after you have brought her, tell my wife that I will be working late.”

  “What if she refuses to come?” one stormtrooper asked.

  “She won’t. You know these locals, so trusting and full of hope. She can’t imagine that we would do any harm to her.”

  “Very well,” the stormtroopers said, and they left out the front door.

  Kritkeen hurried after them and stood in the lighted arch of the doorway, his hands behind his back, his charcoal-gray uniform looking impeccably clean. He had a firm jaw, a hatchet face. “In the morning you will come back for the woman, and take her to the processors. Find out when she will be released, and then give her a week at home, so that her family can see how the Empire has retrained their daughter. Then take Abano and his wife into the mountains, and dispose of them. I won’t have him importuning upon these premises again.”

  “Yes, Your Excellency,” the guards said, and moments later they were on their own speeder, heading out.

  Kritkeen walked out over his lawn to stand beside a perfectly oval reflecting pool, gazing out at the colored moons. It was a peaceful night, the sounds of trees sighing, the whistle of insects. It was a peaceful world. According to records, the people of Aruza had not had a murder on their planet in over a hundred of their years. They had forgotten how,
grown soft. Through technology, they had created neural jacks that allowed them to both send and receive thoughts and emotions to one another, becoming technological empaths, sharing something of a limited group consciousness.

  And so security here was lax. Kritkeen had some limited defense systems within his home—weapons, surveillance equipment, communicators that could call more guards. But he never had needed them here. None of the gentle people of Aruza had ever challenged him. And so Kritkeen felt safe even while unguarded, standing in the open on his stately grounds.

  Dengar jumped up and hurried down the mountain trail, watching in the dark, careful not to snap a branch or dislodge a rock. He ran with long strides, with incredible swiftness. The Empire had enhanced him physically, designed him for great deeds. Dengar was stronger than other men, faster. He saw better, heard much that was inaudible to men with lesser ears.

  And he felt … almost nothing. Little pain. Little fear. No guilt. No love.

  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.