“Yes, sir,” the dockmaster said, signaling his work crew to move the ship into an empty berth.
Dengar stepped into the gleaming corridors of Cloud City, made his way to the upper gambling chambers, where most of the city’s real business was conducted.
If Han Solo was still here, Dengar imagined that he would find it hard to ignore the luxurious dining halls and exalted atmosphere of the casinos.
The main casino was an enormous affair with thousands of guests from hundreds of worlds. Imperial officials, smugglers, wealthy business persons, holovid celebrities—all of them were gathered here to pursue their mutual passions.
A band played in the main hall—giant orange-skinned Turans with base nose flutes, electric harps, and soft percussion drums were playing an insistent, exhilarating tune that somehow stirred Dengar deeply.
A troupe of dancers was on stage, swirling madly—small men and women of yellow skin, wearing golden strips of cloth on their arms and legs. At their center was a beautiful young woman with blue skin and dark blue hair. He recognized her—the Aruzan dancer, Manaroo.
She whirled across the floor, gazing intently into the eyes of her audience—peoples of many species, who sat at their dining and gambling tables. In her hands she had colored stones that glowed brightly, like the moons of Aruza, and she juggled and threw them in intricate patterns that drew the eye.
There was nothing frantic in her dance. Instead it was peaceful, mesmerizing, like the flow of waves across some empty beach, or like the movement of birds across the sky. For a moment she seemed to not be like a woman at all, but more like a force of nature. Irresistible, self-contained, like a sun that holds the worlds around it in sway.
Everyone focused on her, and Dengar found himself fumbling to a table, where he ordered dinner and a pleasant wine.
The band struck up a new tune, and a repulsorlift field was generated before them. Inside the field, glass gems were shooting up through a pump, so that the gems swirled in the air under the lights like some magic fountain of violet, green, and gold. Two of the dancers leapt into the field, tumbling weightlessly in dance.
With her dance finished, Manaroo came to Dengar’s table, sat beside him.
“I should have known I’d find you in a place like this, out where the Imperials don’t pay much attention,” Dengar said.
Manaroo, who had just performed so flawlessly, looked down at her hands folded in her lap, and there was a tenseness in her voice. “I needed to get away from the Empire,” she said. “Only now, they’re here. They caught that man you were looking for—Han Solo. I heard it from one of the security guards.”
Dengar found himself a bit surprised. Sometimes it seemed that those who had not ingested mnemiotic drugs were … well, stupid. “You remembered Solo’s name? After all this time?”
“I wanted to help you find him,” Manaroo said. “I wanted to repay you. I’ve been looking for him, too.” This surprised Dengar even more, seeing how one small deed of kindness almost paid off big. “But I didn’t find out he was here until after they caught him. I heard about it from a security guard. Now the Empire has promised to turn Han Solo over to another bounty hunter who followed him here, a man named Boba Fett.”
“Do you know where Boba Fett is?”
The dancer shook her head.
Dengar considered. “A man like Boba Fett doesn’t like to leave his quarry. He’ll want to get Solo safely stored on his ship, and then he’ll be off.”
Dengar was tempted to bushwhack Boba Fett and steal his prize, but the fact was that over the past couple of days, his anger had eased. True, Boba Fett had bombed Dengar’s ship, but he’d done it in such a way as to leave Dengar alive with the probability of making it to safety. It was a nice gesture, and an unnecessary one.
So Dengar wanted to return the favor. True, he wanted to steal Han Solo—since if not for Boba Fett, Dengar would have made the capture—but he also wanted to leave Boba Fett in something approximating an ambulatory state. Managing both tasks simultaneously would take some doing.
“So what will you do?” Manaroo asked.
“If the Imperials haven’t released Han Solo to Boba Fett,” Dengar considered, “then it means they’re still questioning him. It may be a few days before they’re done with him.”
A waiter came, and Dengar let Manaroo order dinner on his tab. Afterward he settled back, regarding her closely. She seemed nervous still, apologetic, as if she’d failed him, when in reality she’d surprised him with her persistence. To top it off, ferreting sensitive information from a security guard might not have been easy for her. He suddenly wondered about the possibility of recruiting her as a partner.
“Did you enjoy my dance?” she said.
“You were very good. In fact, I’ve never seen anyone as good,” Dengar said. “How did you learn to dance like that?”
“It’s easy,” Manaroo said. “On Aruza, we use our cybernetic links to share our feelings. We’re tech-empaths. When I dance, I know what pleases my watchers, and so I practice those moves they love best.”
“But you can’t give yourself to them fully,” Dengar said.
“Why do you say that?”
Dengar struggled for the words. “Because, when you danced, I wished that you were dancing for me alone. I assume that every man must feel that way about you.”
Manaroo smiled, looked up into his eyes. Her own eyes were so rich, so black, that he could see the glow globes that hovered near the ceiling reflecting in them. “You’re right. I always dance for my audience as if all that I did were to please them, but inside, I dance only for myself.”
She surprised him by reaching out to take his broad hand, and he was embarrassed. His hands were so large, so powerful, that he felt as if they were paws, and he were some huge, alien animal beside her.
“You seem to be doing well here,” Dengar said.
“Do I?” she whispered, and once again Dengar was surprised at how rough and husky her voice could be. “I’m not. I’m terribly alone. I’ve never felt so … empty.”
“How can that be?” Dengar asked. “I’m sure that there are many men who would seek you out.”
“Of course, there are many men who want me,” Manaroo said, “but few are willing to share themselves with me fully. I feel that we are all strangers, encased in our shells.” She squeezed Dengar’s hands tightly, desperately. “On my world, when two people love each other, they share more than their bodies. They do more than take pleasure with each other. They bond with the Attanni, sharing their thoughts and emotions completely, sharing their memories and their knowledge. All of the subterfuges between them are stripped away, and they become one person. On Aruza I was bonded to three good friends, but now …”
Dengar found his heart beating more rapidly, for he could see the hunger in her, the need for this, and he knew she wanted it from him. “I’m afraid that you won’t find people here who are willing to bond with you that way. Our thoughts and emotions are frightening things, and so we conceal them, hoping that potential lovers will never uncover our weaknesses.”
“But you have no emotions to conceal. You told me on your ship that you have no emotions, that the capacity was cut out of you by the Empire.”
Dengar indeed remembered having told her, one night as they ate in his stateroom. Manaroo had seemed curious about the concept, seemed to feel that it would be like sleeping, a comfortable emptiness. But Dengar did not see it that way. Instead, it was an inconvenience. He sometimes did not know if his words or actions would offend or annoy others. Indeed, his solitary life was not something that he’d sought. He lived alone on his ship because few others could endure his presence, his demanding ways. He’d told her this.
“I sense few emotions,” Dengar said. “Rage, hope, one other.” She looked at him quizzically, as if demanding to know what other emotion held him sway, but he shrugged her question aside. “That is all the Empire left me. But what of my memories? What of my deeds? I suspect that you would
find them … monstrous.”
She searched his face for a long moment. “Bonding with you would make me more like you. Perhaps I need that to survive, here in your world.”
Dengar considered, looked away out the window to the billowing Tibanna gas clouds. Bonding with him would teach her much that no one should know. It would open her to all of the pain and madness he’d lived through since the Empire first began molding him into an assassin. “I would rather spare you that.”
They ate a leisurely dinner, made Smalltalk, and Manaroo excused herself, went backstage.
Dengar sat alone and wondered. With Solo captured, would Vader come after him? Dengar doubted it. The Dark Lord of the Sith had his own political agenda, men to command, an Empire to run. Dengar was almost beneath his notice. But Dengar didn’t want to cross paths with him again.
Over the loudspeakers, the city administrator, Lando Calrissian, announced that Imperial troops were taking over the station, and suggested that all personnel evacuate immediately.
Around Dengar, the gamblers and citizenry of Cloud City broke into an uproar. People began running for exits.
Dengar finished his drink, stood, and noted to the empty air, “It seems that everywhere I go lately, people are evacuating.”
Stormtroopers appeared at one door on the mezzanine above him. Someone, perhaps an undercover security guard or a patron of the casino, pulled a heavy blaster, and a firefight erupted.
Dengar glanced out the window. Boba Fett’s ship was arcing off through the clouds, and Dengar knew intuitively that the bounty hunter would not have left without his prey.
He cursed under his breath, watching the tail fire of Boba Fett’s ship. It seemed that that was all he ever saw of Han Solo.
The firefight at the far end of the room was becoming rather heated, and smoke now filled the air.
Dengar sighed, looked at his chronometer. The port authorities may have had time to fix his ship, but he doubted it. The new engines were probably laid in, but he doubted that all of the electronic connections were made. He got up, stretched, decided to go search for Manaroo.
He rushed through a curtain of shimmering lights, found himself in a corridor that led to a larger room.
In it, two stormtroopers stood guard over half a dozen performers who sat on the floor, hands clasped over their heads. Manaroo was with them.
Dengar called to the stormtroopers, “Excuse me, gentleman, but the dancer is coming with me.”
The stormtroopers swiveled their heavy blasters toward Dengar, and one shouted, “Put your hands on your head.”
Dengar watched them for a half a second, then took one step to his left, pulled his blaster, and killed both men.
“Make me,” he said, as they dropped to the ground.
Manaroo sat on the floor, mouth wide in shock. Dengar went to her, took her hand, and pulled her to her feet. The other performers scurried off without any urging.
“Let’s get out of here while we still can,” Dengar grunted.
“Where to?” she stammered.
“Tatooine,” Dengar said. “Boba Fett is taking Han Solo to Tatooine.”
Fortunately, when Dengar reached the repair docks, his ship was already out of the repair bay and sat gleaming on the launch field. The dockmaster had gone beyond repairing the ship, and had actually cleaned the exterior, filling the micrometeor pits and applying a fresh coat of protective paint. Too bad no one was here to collect for the repairs.
Unfortunately, half a dozen stormtroopers sat at the launch pad beside a light cannon. Dengar and Manaroo were hiding in a repair hangar, behind an old freighter. The sounds of fighting and explosions echoed all around Cloud City.
Dengar watched the stormtroopers all positioned in a tight knot, and grumbled to himself, “This is what grenades are for.” These must have been fresh troops, lacking basic training.
He reached into the leg pouch on his body armor, pulled a grenade, armed it, and hurled it twenty meters till it popped a stormtrooper on the helmet and exploded.
At the sounds of running feet, Dengar looked down a side passage. Several stormtroopers, in company with Darth Vader, ran past in an adjoining corridor.
Instinctively, Dengar ducked. He really didn’t want to draw attention to himself.
When the stormtroopers passed, he took Manaroo’s hand, rushed to his ship, and in half a moment, blasted off through the clouds.
Signal jammers were screaming all across the spectrum, and Dengar couldn’t get a fix on any other vessels in the area, but his rear viewer showed a trio of TIE fighters swooping down from a towering cloud behind him.
Dengar dove into the cover of a nearby cloud, spiraled down, turning back the way he had come, then opened his engines, blasting up on a new trajectory, firing all guns, just in case one of those Imperial fighters crossed his plane.
Within seconds they were out of the Tibanna gas clouds, heading for the stars, and when the navicomputer laid in his course, he blurred into hyperspace.
Dengar lay back in his chair. It was true that he could not feel many emotions, could not register them with his mind, but his body registered them sometimes. His hands were shaking now, and his brow was covered in sweat. His throat was dry.
Yet when he felt inside himself, he could not detect any sense of panic.
But Manaroo stood behind his pilot’s seat, hands clutching the back of his chair, her mouth frozen open in terror.
“We’re all right now,” Dengar said, hoping to comfort her.
“Why, why are you still following Han Solo?” she asked. “He’s already been captured!”
Dengar hesitated, trying to find the right words to answer. He had no hopes of catching up with Boba Fett. The bounty hunter’s ship was too fast, and he’d likely land right at Jabba’s palace, so there would be no opportunity to bushwhack Boba Fett in any case. No, he needed something else. “I want to catch up to him for once,” he said. “I want to touch him, just once.
“Besides, Solo has friends in high places in the Rebellion,” Dengar said, trying to voice a nagging suspicion. “I figure they’ll come to break him out—if Jabba the Hutt doesn’t kill him first. And when they do, I want to be there, to catch him all over again.” Dengar had made up that excuse impromptu, but it had a ring of truth to it. Somehow, he found that Han Solo was achieving mythical proportions. Just as Dengar seemed doomed to forever be but half a man, he had also begun to feel that Han Solo would forever be elusive, an uncatchable nemesis.
And somehow, somehow, Dengar knew he had to break the cycle. It was a wild hope, half conceived. He had to find himself again, just as he had to catch Han Solo.
Three: The Loneliness
Over the next few days, Dengar spent a great deal of time with Manaroo, just talking. She told him of her life on Aruza, being raised on a farm by a mother who made clay diningware and a father who worked as a petty bureaucrat. On their farm, Manaroo had learned early how to coax flowers from the near-sentient dola trees, and the thick juice that these flowers exuded made a potent antibiotic syrup, often prescribed by Aruza’s physicians.
At the age of three, Manaroo had begun dancing, and by nine she was winning interstellar competitions. Dengar had imagined her to be some local girl, little traveled, with no real living experience. But she told him tales of rafting through dark storms upon the water world of Bengat, of living through a pirate raid on a starliner.
And sometimes she talked about the experiences of her friends, those with whom she’d shared the Attanni, as if such experiences were her own. The list of people that she considered to be friends and family was enormous, and the pain she’d suffered in sharing those lives was equally enormous, for each of her friends had also shared their memories with others through the Attanni, so that all of them were but motes in some vast net.
Dengar had thought her to be only a young woman, but he found that she was much more mature than he’d imagined, far stronger than he could have guessed.
For his part, Deng
ar told her of his life on Corellia, where he’d begun repairing swoops with his father as a child, and had begun racing in his early teens. He did not tell her how he’d lived in Han’s shadow in those years, did not explain how it was during a race with Han Solo that he’d been wounded. Instead, he told only of the surgeries the Empire had performed, how between threats of death and promises that they would someday restore his ability to feel, they had bullied him into becoming an assassin.
Yet Dengar had always chosen his victims, harvesting only those he felt deserved to die.
Inevitably, Manaroo voiced the question, “And why is it that Han Solo deserves to die?”
Dengar was forced to admit, “I’m not sure he does. But he almost killed me once. I want to catch him, force him to tell me why he did it. Then I’ll decide whether to let him live.”
The next evening, they were almost to Tatooine, and Dengar went to the pilot’s console to check his systems.
Manaroo came up behind him. “Hmmm …” she said, and she began massaging his neck muscles. “You’re tight.” He eased back, enjoying the sensation. “You know, this is twice you’ve saved my life. I owe you something. Close your eyes.”
Her hand slipped under the twisted bandages that covered his neck, touched his cybernetic interface jack. He felt her connect something to his jack, and he sat upright.
“What’s that?” he said, turning around.
She held up a small golden ring, threaded so that it could fit into an interface socket. “It’s part of an Attanni,” she said, “so that you can receive me, feel what I feel. I won’t be able to read your thoughts or emotions, or access your memories.”
He let her put the ring into his jack, twirl it till it fit in tight. Suddenly he could hear through her ears, see through her eyes. He felt the intensity of her emotions.
Manaroo was afraid, and her fear knotted her belly. She watched him with calculation. “Close your eyes, so that you don’t see overlapping images,” she said, but Dengar didn’t respond immediately.
Her fear washed through him, a cold fire, and to him it seemed the most intense emotion he’d ever felt. At first he imagined it was like water to a man who has thirsted for days, to feel this again, but something in him knew that people seldom felt fear quite as intense as this. He wondered why she was afraid.
Tales of the Bounty Hunters Page 11