Star Wars - Tales Of The Bounty Hunters

by Tales of the Bounty Hunters (edited by Kevin J Anderson)

  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 ex-ploded.

  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 spec-trum, and Dengar couldn't get a fix on any other ves-sels 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, spi-raled 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 fight-ers crossed his plane.

  Within seconds they were out of the Tibanna gas clouds, heading for the stars, and when the navicom-puter 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 com-fort 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 Re-bellion," Dengar said, trying to voice a nagging suspi-don. "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 be-gun 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 wa-ter 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 enor-mous, 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 At-tanni, 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, Dengar 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 At-tanni," she said, "so that you can receive me, feel what I feel. I won't be able to read your thoughts or emo-tions, 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.

  Manaroo was watching him, and she put one hand on each shoulder, kissed him, and he could feel her dry mouth, taste her hope and desire, and part of him was surprised at the intensity of her desire. Then he understood why she feared him. She was afraid he would reject her, turn her away. He could also feel her loneliness, an aching void within her. Each sensation from her came as if it were new, as if no one had ever discovered it before.

  She felt comforted by his presence, protected, which helped explain some of her strong feelings for him. Dengar tried to search her mind, see just how deep her feelings for him went, but the Attanni she'd fitted to his implant could only receive the emotions she sent. It didn't allow him to probe her thoughts or memories.

  She kissed him tenderly on the forehead, and held him for a long time, and briefly she remembered her mother on Aruza, kissing her as a child, and there was such a pang of guilt and regret at having left her par-ents to die on Aruza, a pang so violent that Dengar gasped, and then Manaroo cried out, sorry to have caused him such pain, and she fumbled to remove the Attanni from his cranial jack.

  Dengar sat panting, breathing heavily, sweat pouring down his brow. He'd not felt guilt, good clean guilt, in many years. He'd slaughtered decent people for the Empire just as easily as he'd abandoned Manaroo's par-ents and friends without a thought.

  Now he lay back panting and smiling at having felt remorse for the first time in decades.

  "I'm sorry," Manaroo gasped, fumbling to put the Attanni in a pocket.

  "I know," Dengar flashed her a small grin, and the words caught in his throat. He started to stand up, but found that these strong emotions had lef
t him weak in the legs and left tears in his eyes. There was a time in his life when he'd have felt embarrassed to show such emotions. Now, he just sat back for a long time, relish-ing them.

  When he could speak at all again, he said, "We'll have to go back to Aruza, get your parents off planet- along with as many of your people as we can."

  "Why do you say that?" Manaroo blurted, for she'd not revealed her wish.

  "Your. conscience. told me," Dengar whis-pered, and he sat, realizing perhaps for the first time what the Empire had taken from him. He knew that they'd taken the capacity to feel joy, to feel love, to feel concern and guilt.

  Over the past years, the desire to help another being had never entered him.

  This is what it is to be human, he realized. To sit and know that on the far side of the galaxy, someone is in pain, someone hurts, and so it is my duty to go to them, regardless of the cost or risk, in order to free them from pain.

  It was a way of knowing that Dengar had too long found-inaccessible, so much so that he'd forgotten that it existed.

  Over the past months, as he'd hunted for Han Solo, Dengar had often puzzled over the trail. His nemesis would sometimes turn from an obvious route, such as an easy escape from the Empire, to rush headlong into battle. Such puzzling actions made it almost impossible for Dengar to calculate Solo's next move, for one never knew whether Solo would charge a battalion or strafe a Star Destroyer. It was rumored that on one occasion, Han Solo had had the audacity to call the Emperor, accusing him of dire crimes and challenging him to a boxing match! Dengar had doubted the rumor at the time, for it seemed so illogical, but now, he reconsid-ered.

  Finally Dengar saw why his race to capture Solo had been so fruitless: Han Solo had a conscience, and like a navicomputer it guided him on a certain course, a course that Dengar could not have hoped to under-stand-until now.

  "You and your Attanni could come in very handy," Dengar said, and he explained what he had just learned. "With you, perhaps I'd have had a chance at catching Han Solo."

  "And what would you do with him, then?" Manaroo whispered.

  Dengar considered. With a conscience, perhaps his work would also be hampered. Certainly, in his early years, he'd have spared some of the targets the Empire had him destroy. "I can't be sure," Dengar said.

  "When next you meet him," Manaroo said, slipping the Attanni into his palm, "Let's find out."

  Dengar began punching in new instructions on his navicomputer. "First, we must go to Aruza, and get your parents."

  Dengar finally returned to Tatooine. In the meantime, with the aid of Manaroo he posed as an Imperial Intelli-gence officer who was arranging to remove a large number of Aruzan diplomats to a "more secure facil-ity."

  With the help of the Rebel Alliance, he managed to steal a huge Imperial prison barge, large enough to remove a hundred thousand people from the planet, and he'd manned the ship with the appropriate Cor-rections officers, torturers, and other staff.

  It took little effort for the Rebel Alliance to send false orders for the new COMPNOR base commander to begin extracting prisoners and shuttling them up to the barge.

  The Imperial officers were well-trained, and brought up prisoners as fast as they were called for.

  Only once did anyone question Dengar-who had remained aloof from the dirty work and had stayed aboard his barge during the whole mission, personally "managing the incarceration."

  When the new COMPNOR base commander called on holovid just before Dengar's departure, asking Den-gar where the prisoners were being taken, Dengar just fixed the man with an icy glare and said, "You don't really want to know, do you?"

  There were rampant rumors of soft politicians, tech-nological geniuses, and pacifist industrialists who had disappeared from across the galaxy. It was said that prudent men didn't delve into such matters. The COMPNOR base commander fumbled for a quick apol-ogy-

  Dengar flipped off the holovid with feigned disdain.

  When Dengar's ship reached Tatooine, it landed in a dusty port called Mos Eisley, a city at the edge of a desert where twin suns burned vehemently.

  They landed at midday, when the city was perhaps its quietest, and Dengar led Manaroo to a small cantina where moisture farmers and criminals seemed to have gathered in equal numbers.

  Dengar went to speak privately with some old ac-quaintances, and in a matter of minutes he confirmed that Han Solo was still alive, kept prisoner at Jabba's palace. He left Manaroo with a few credit chips and said, "I'll be back when I'm back," then he took a rented swoop to Jabba's palace.

  That night, Manaroo returned to the cantina while it was busy and made a few credits dancing. Dengar had exhausted his wealth over the past few weeks, and Manaroo hoped at the very least to pay her own way. After her first dance, she went to a private booth to catch her breath.

  An alien came up to the booth, and stood, looking at her. The creature had dark brown fur, an enormously broad mouth that was wider than her shoulders, short legs, and long arms with claws that scraped the floor. The short horns on its head nearly scraped the ceiling. It stood looking at her for a moment from deep red eyes, then growled. "Your dance-good! Strong! Jabba will like! If he likes dance, you live. Come!"

  He grabbed her arm, and Manaroo looked at the creature uncomprehendingly. "I won't dance for Jabba!" she said.

  The creature glanced furtively both ways, then pulled at a flap of skin beneath its throat and lurched at her. For one moment she screamed as the beast grabbed her. Then she found herself sliding down into the crea-ture's belly pouch.

  There was little to breathe in there, and the air smelled of hair and putrid flesh. She struggled and kicked, but the creature's hide was very thick-if any-one noticed the odd-shaped bulge kicking at the crea-ture's stomach, they must have assumed the worst and did not want to become involved.

  Manaroo held her breath for a long time, as the crea-ture casually sauntered out of the cantina. Too soon the pouch began to feel hot, and the air failed her. With burning lungs she kicked and pummeled at the beast, but could not break free.

  Dengar entered the Hutt's palace at night, when the inhabitants were most active, and knelt on one knee. Jabba was surrounded by his lackeys-nearly all of whom were required to sleep in his chamber, for the Hutt feared assassination and knew that the best way to thwart it was to keep all of the would-be assassins within sight. Dengar looked up, saw Boba Fett in the shadows off to Jabba's right, nodded at the man.

  "Why do you come before me?" Jabba grumbled in Huttese. "You did not bring me Han Solo. You can expect no reward!"

  "I have heard that you have Han Solo captive," Den-gar said. "I came to see if it was true."

  "Ho, ho, ho, "Jabba laughed. "Behold for yourself!" A light switched on behind Dengar, and he turned. On the wall, in what Dengar had believed to be a decora-tive frieze, he could see the face and features of Han Solo, frozen in gray carbonite.

  Dengar laughed, walked over to Solo, and grasped each side of the frame that held his frozen body. "Gotcha," Dengar said. "At last."

  "Ho, ho," Jabba laughed from deep in his belly, and his menagerie of murderers laughed with him. "You mean / have him."

  Dengar turned to look over his shoulder. "No," Den-gar said, staring into the Hutt's eyes. "You only think you have him." The Hutt frowned at this. "You cannot keep him in. this!" Dengar waved at the carbonite containment device. "Surely, he will escape."

  "Ho, ho, oh, hooo!" Jabba roared. "You think he can escape from there! You amuse me, assassin."

  Dengar turned to Jabba, folded his hands before him. "Hear me, oh greatJabba," Dengar warned. "I do indeed believe he will escape from you. And when he does, you will be the laughingstock of the underworld. But I can spare you from this fate. For I propose to remain here, to catch him once again. And when I do, I expect you to pay me twice what you have paid Boba Fett!"

  "Do you intend to free him yourself?" Jabba roared, so that part of his retinue fell back, fearing his wrath.

  "He will never
be freed by my hand," Dengar whis-pered.

  "Do you suspect a plot?" Jabba asked, eyeing the cutthroats and hoodlums in his employment.

  "His friends in the Rebellion will seek to free him," Dengar answered earnestly.

  "The Rebellion?" Jabba laughed. "I do not fear them. So it is agreed. You may stay and join my retain-ers. And if the Rebellion frees him and you manage to bring him back, I will pay you twice what I paid Boba Fett!"

  Boba Fett stepped forward, brandishing his blaster rifle menacingly, and Jabba silenced him with a glare. He spoke with a low voice, "But if the Rebellion fails in its attempt to free Han Solo, then you will work for me for one year-scrubbing the royal toilets in com-pany with the cleaning droids!" The Hutt broke into laughter.

  Dengar returned to Mos Eisley at sunrise, planning to move his ship to Jabba's palace where it would be handy in case of a Rebel attack.