Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “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.”

  He fired up the engines and took off, found that the coordinates led him to a small Rebel outpost where a motley team of military intelligence officials examined him for three days. Apparently he passed their tests and accepted an assignment.

  Like many Rebels he would be expected to be competent in several fields. The Rebel Alliance objected to the use of assassins on moral grounds, but he was allowed to help plan future raids, upgrade attack swoops, begin training teams of saboteurs how to knock out Imperial starship repair facilities.

  The newly formed outpost that he was assigned to lay in a star system called Hoth.

  Two: The Hope

  When Dengar exited hyperspace in the Hoth system, the Punishing One’s proximity indicators immediately blared in warning. The heads-up holo display showed an Imperial Super Star Destroyer directly ahead, with half a dozen other Star Destroyers acting as outriders. Attack frigates, TIE fighters, and personnel carriers filled the sky.

  Below them, against a background of stars, lay an icy white planet, like a pearl, whose surface was obscured by clouds and blowing snow.

  Dengar instantly changed transponder frequencies so that his little Corellian JumpMaster showed up as an Imperial Scout. It was an older frequency, one that he’d used legally months before, but Dengar couldn’t risk trying to shy away from the Imperial fleet. If he changed course and tried to skirt around them, he would look suspicious, so he headed straight into the fleet, hoping that no one would get a close enough view of his ship to notice that it wasn’t painted in Imperial colors.

  A fray was already in progress. Dengar watched as Rebel transports and fighters blasted off from the surface of Hoth under the cover of heavy ion cannons, while Star Destroyers scrambled to intercept the Rebels and shoot them down.

  Dengar whipped between two Star Destroyers, drew in behind a squadron of TIE fighters that was diving toward the planet’s surface.

  Dengar had come a long way to find Han Solo. If he was on Hoth, Dengar planned to get him this time.

  “Imperial Scout,” a voice called over Dengar’s receiver, “why are you tailing us?” It was from one of the TIE fighters.

  “I’ve been asked to do some on-site investigation of apparent power fluctuations outside the Rebel base,” Dengar lied easily. “Thought I might tag along behind you partway down, if you don’t mind.”

  “We haven’t been notified of your mission.”

  “I’m with Intelligence,” Dengar joked. “You know how it is: If anyone there notified you of my mission, I’d have to sew his lips shut when I got back.”

  His response apparently satisfied the squadron commander. They headed down steadily until a Rebel transport suddenly appeared racing toward them—a gleaming metal blimp. The TIE fighter squadron dove to intercept, and too late Dengar saw his mistake.

  A glowing ball of red energy burst up from the planet and Dengar accelerated the Punishing One and tried to turn away. The ion cloud washed over his ship with a noise like crackling gravel. Dengar could feel its electric charge raising the hair on his head, and suddenly every indicator light and monitor went dead. The cabin went cold and black. Even whirring fans cycling in oxygen from the life-support system droned to a stop.

  He began calling out “Distress,” over his comm, even though it was a useless gesture. With all shields down and his equipment polarized, he was floating dead in space. Fortunately, he’d pulled up enough so that his current trajectory was headed away from the planet.

  The TIE fighters below him had been accelerating toward the planet. Within moments they would flame and burn.

  Dengar’s ship sped upward, hurtling toward a Star Destroyer, and nearly hit it. He sat, unable to do anything but watch as he whirled past it toward the distant stars.

  Some alert Imperial officer must have seen his predicament, for he suddenly felt the Punishing One lurch and slow as the Star Destroyer grasped his vessel in its tractor beams.

  Dengar wondered what this would mean—capture by the Empire. He was a wanted man, and would get the death sentence.

  Dengar was watching the sleek gray lines of the Star Destroyer, trying to guess which docking bay he would be dragged into, when a Corellian light freighter screamed over the horizon, firing at the Star Destroyer’s gun emplacements, dodging laser blasts, three TIE fighters close on its tail.

  “Solo!” Dengar shouted as the Millennium Falcon drew into sight. Almost by reflex, Dengar fired his proton torpedoes, but his firing control was still out.

  The Millennium Falcon gyrated and spun past him, and Dengar ran to the rear viewport, hoping to see Solo’s ship.

  The Falcon and its attackers were just distant lights, blurring out among a field of stars. But the Empire had modified Dengar’s eyes. He magnified the image, watched the Falcon accelerate toward a trio of Star Destroyers, and head deeper into space beyond, until even his eyes could no longer track the receding grains of sand.

  Then the Punishing One was pulled into the Imperial Star Destroyer where it landed with a soft clank.

  A moment later, a few dozen stormtroopers blew open the door to his ship. Dengar grabbed a blaster in each hand and rushed toward the main access corridor, hoping to make them pay in advance for his death, just as a gas grenade landed a few meters in front of him.

  He tried to hold his breath, but he was too late. He staggered forward three steps, and suddenly it seemed as if his feet were pulled out from under him.

  Dengar landed with a thump in the corridor, lay looking groggily at the ground. He could see, hear. He just couldn’t move.

  In a few minutes, the stormtroopers dragged him to an interrogation cell.

  The Empire did not kill him immediately. Th
ey injected him with pain-enhancing drugs, fitted his head with a scrambler to reduce his resistance to their questions. They knew his name and much of his history. They were able to break into the logs on his ship, find out where he’d traveled. They read his credit chips, found out where his money came from, what he’d purchased.

  They questioned him about his work with the Rebellion, his motives for assassinating Imperial agents. They gave him the death sentence, and let him sit in his cell for a day, where he plotted his escape. Dengar vowed that they would not take him to the execution chambers easily. More than one of his captors would die in the attempt.

  And that night, as Dengar lay sleeping, he suddenly became aware of the sound of labored breathing through a respirator, a disturbing noise.

  He rolled over on his cot. A giant of a man stood wearing black robes and a black helmet that covered his face. Dengar had never met him before, but he knew the Dark Lord of the Sith by reputation.

  Darth Vader.

  The door to Dengar’s cell opened of its own accord, and Darth Vader stood alone in the entrance, breathing raspily. He seemed to be watching Dengar. More precisely, he seemed to be absorbing Dengar.

  Dengar studied the Dark Lord. He suspected that his executioner had come. It was time for desperate measures. With one lucky blow he might disable Lord Vader. If he was lucky, and quiet, he might be able to kill Vader, then run for it.

  Darth Vader raised a hand, and Dengar felt his throat constricting, tightening down as if it had been clamped. “Don’t even think about it,” Vader said.

  Dengar raised his hands in surrender, leaned back to the wall of his cell. The constriction released. “If you’re going to kill me, get it over with! I’ve got nothing to lose!” Dengar shouted. “But I won’t make it fun for you!”

  “I’m not the Emperor,” Vader said ominously. “I don’t kill for amusement—only when it serves my purposes.”

  Dengar smiled. “Well, then we have something in common.”

  “It appears that we have more than one thing in common—” Vader said, “we both want Han Solo.…

  “Unfortunately,” he continued, “I have an Imperial Death warrant against you. I cannot revoke that warrant, but I am willing to consider a reprieve.”

  “Under what conditions?” Dengar asked.

  “I will let you live, to hunt for Han Solo. Once you find him, you bring him and his friends back to me, alive. After that, if I am well pleased, I may spare you. But if I am not pleased by your performance, I will give you time to run. Then my hunt begins.”

  Darth Vader threw Dengar a blaster, just as Dengar had given one to Kritkeen. Vader’s meaning was clear. If Dengar failed in this hunt, Darth Vader would become the hunter. The monster who had destroyed the Jedi Knights would be on Dengar’s tail. Dengar licked his lips, thinking that if Vader hunted him, Dengar would at least show a good accounting of himself.

  “Solo was here, you know,” Dengar said. “You lost him.”

  “We haven’t lost him yet,” Vader said. “At this very moment, he has taken refuge in an asteroid field, and our ships are searching for him. You will go into the asteroid field and hunt him. And if you fail me in this, …” Vader made a crushing gesture with his fist.

  “Yes … sir,” Dengar said, not sure whether he should use the proper form of military address.

  “Yes, my lord,” Vader corrected.

  Dengar took a deep breath. “Yes, my lord.”

  Vader strode forward, clapped him on the shoulder and stared in his face threateningly. “Do not fail me.”

  Vader turned, and the prison door came open. A lieutenant stood just outside the door in his crisp Imperial uniform. Vader left, and as the door closed, Dengar heard him speaking to the lieutenant. “This chance encounter has given me an idea. We will assemble a team of bounty hunters to assist in our operation.…”

  “Bounty hunters! We don’t need that scum!” one of the deck officers grumbled to his companions. Dengar stood on a platform while Darth Vader paced back and forth, inspecting the mercenaries who had gathered, giving them their final orders.

  The bounty hunters were a motley array, and despite their small number, they were also very dangerous. Certainly the IG-88 assassin droid bothered Dengar a great deal, but Lord Vader had also brought on Boba Fett, who not moments before had complained loudly to Vader about the other bounty hunters—loudly enough so that it appeared that Fett’s rage came from an underlying paranoia rather than about any concerns that he had over competition.

  “I want them alive,” Vader was saying of Solo. “No disintegrations!”

  “As you wish,” Boba Fett grumbled.

  There was some scurrying at the communications console as the watch commander called to Vader, “Lord Vader, we have them now!”

  Dengar’s heart sank. If Han Solo were captured by the Imperials, then Vader would renege on his offer of leniency. He’d carry out the death warrant.

  For a few moments, several bounty hunters stood on deck, listening breathlessly to Captain Needa shout orders as his Star Destroyer pursued the Millennium Falcon. Boba Fett spun away at a run, and Dengar listened for fifteen seconds before he realized that Boba Fett was scrambling to his own ship, hoping to join the chase.

  By the time Dengar reached the Punishing One in launch bay twelve, Boba Fett was checking his own ship, a Kuat Systems Firespray-class vehicle renowned for its speed and firepower. He was circling, as if to see if someone had tampered with it. He stepped close, and a warning alarm blared. Dengar saw that Boba Fett was indeed paranoid, setting alarms on his own ship to make certain that no one approached it.

  Dengar rushed into his much bulkier and more mundane ship, checked the systems quickly. The Imperials had depolarized the controls, reversing the ionization damage. He blasted off, headed toward the asteroid field. He could hear the Imperial comm chatter. The Star Destroyer had already lost Han Solo and was scrambling fighters to search for him. Solo’s last maneuver had been to strafe the Star Destroyer. Then he’d gone off the scopes.

  Dengar figured Solo must have gone back into the asteroid field. Perhaps Solo had shut down systems for a bit, so that his own ship seemed no more than an asteroid, but as Dengar sped into the asteroid field himself, he saw that even Solo wasn’t crazy enough to risk such a maneuver. Rocks the size of his ship hurtled toward him, and these weren’t the soft carbonaceous chondrites that his weapons might punch a hole through—these were nickel-iron rocks that could smash him to pieces.

  Dengar was forced to keep his concussion shields at maximum power, dodging those asteroids that he could, blasting those that he couldn’t.

  Some of the asteroids were the size of a small moon. All of the metal in the sky fouled communications, jammed sensors.

  Dengar began dropping sensor beacons onto the larger rocks, hoping that they’d be able to relay any sign of movement. Fortunately, he had hundreds of such beacons on board. He let his sensors sweep across the frequencies, listening to the Imperials chatter as they prepared to depart the Hoth system.

  Sweat was running down Dengar’s face, and after only a couple of hours in the asteroid belt, his nerves were frayed. The Imperial fleet jumped to hyperspace, and Dengar kept up his work. He blocked out all sound, all thought, and simply tried to negotiate the asteroid field, content in the hunt.

  Then, several minutes later, perhaps as much as half an hour—one of his beacons flared to life, reporting movement. The departing ship was not broadcasting any transponder signal, and it was limping away at sublight speed.

  Dengar recorded its trajectory. He was well out of Solo’s sensor range, and he wanted to stay that way, but he immediately began edging out of the asteroid field.

  When he neared the edge of the field, his remote sensors suddenly picked up something else, something strange. A large meteor, or perhaps an ion storm, seemed to be trailing Solo’s ship, just out of the Falcon’s sensor range.

  Instinctively Dengar knew that it was another ship. A tigh
tbeam transmission suddenly hit him, and an image of Boba Fett appeared on Dengar’s monitors. Boba Fett’s face was hidden beneath his battered armor.

  “Sorry to do this, friend, but Solo is my trophy!” Boba Fett said, then there was the squeal of a binary code transmission.

  Immediately, Dengar suspected that it was an arming code, but the bomb on his ship exploded before he could do anything. A muffled thud sounded from the engine room, followed by a flash. Dengar ducked as flames billowed over the ceiling, then the automatic fire extinguishers belched to life.

  Dengar jumped from the command console, ran to the rear of his ship, and grabbed a manual extinguisher. He opened the door to the engine bay and found that his sublight engines lay in a charred heap of slag.

  The bomb had been expertly configured and carefully set to do some major damage—but only to neutralize the ship, not destroy it.

  Still, it would take him days to remove the fused parts, dump them, and put in replacements—if he had the necessary parts in stock. By then, Han Solo would be forever gone.

  Dengar hung his head, and his mind was just numb. He didn’t know where to begin. After some consideration, he went to his command console, checked the trajectory of Han Solo’s ship. He’d left a particle vapor trail that could be followed for several hours, or days, if he was lucky.

  He looked out into the blackness of space, where Boba Fett was chasing Han Solo. “Go ahead and blow me up,” Dengar muttered. “But someday, you’ll find out why they call me Payback.”

  Dengar got up from his console, and set to work.

  Sometime later, Dengar’s ship glided between the delicate Tibanna gas clouds of Bespin, past smooth mountains the colors of rose and peach, toward the setting sun.

  Cloud City lay straight ahead, its rust-colored towers shining dully. He circled the upper gambling casinos, and over the comm he asked the port authorities for permission to land at the nearest repair facility, then sent a false registry for his craft, not wanting to alert anyone to his presence.