Star Wars_ Tales of the Bounty Hunters - Kevin J. Anderson [35]
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.
The crystal swamps