Star Wars_ Tales of the Bounty Hunters - Kevin J. Anderson [33]
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.