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By Root 666 0

were no place to ride swoops, much less race them. Yet they tore through the underbrush, over the scalding water. In places, they had cruelly jockeyed for position, shoving and kicking at one another, as if they were both immortals. Dengar had heard the screams of applause from the crowds, and for a few brief minutes he felt invincible, racing beside the great Han Solo, a man who like himself had never been beaten.

On the last stretch of the race, both men had opted to take low approaches through the brush over the water, hoping to boost their speed. Dengar had hunched down, smokey-white crystal blades ripping past him in a blur, the water before him bubbling and steaming, the smell of sulfur rising to his nostrils, hoping that no geysers would spout open before him to boil him alive. He dodged one crystalline blade too late, and it pricked his ear, slicing off the tip so that blood dribbled down his neck.

Then Dengar came screaming out of the underbrush and saw that Han Solo was neither in front of him nor to either side, and Dengar’s heart soared with elation in the hopes of winning—just as Han Solo’s swoop dropped from above, slamming the stabilizer fin into the back of Dengar’s head, washing Dengar’s face in the flames of Solo’s engines.

Dengar’s own swoop dove nose first into the water, throwing Dengar free. His last memory of the incident was watching himself, gliding over the blue steaming waters, head-first toward the blades of a crystal tree.

I’m dead, he’d realized too late.

The doctors said that his helmet had saved him. It had snapped off most of the crystal blades that otherwise would have skewed him through the brain. As it was, only one blade had made that fateful entrance. The health corp workers had pulled him from the brush, punctured with a dozen wounds.

They had operated. His wounds were so grievous, that only the Empire could have restored him so well. But they judged the risky operations to be a good investment. Dengar had superb reflexes, which could well be put to the service of the Empire.

So they closed his brain, removing those parts that he would no longer need. They’d sewn the punctures closed in his torso, inserting new neural nets in the arms and legs. They grew new skin to cover what he’d lost on his face. They gave him new eyes to see with, new ears to hear. All of the news nets proclaimed his recovery “miraculous.”

And after he’d healed, they began training him to become an assassin, using dangerous mnemiotic drugs that left him with a flawless memory while being susceptible to hallucinations.

Dengar shook the frightened little man over his head, shouted, “You call that fair? You call this fair?”

“No!” Solo shouted, but Dengar didn’t believe that he’d had a change of heart. “No, please!”

“Shut your mouth!” Dengar growled, then carried the man a hundred meters to a steeper embankment. He pulled a concussion grenade from the clip at his belt, shoved it in Solo’s gaping mouth, and pressed the detonate button.

For ten seconds, he held Solo, frozen.

Then he ran and tossed him over the cliff, thinking, I want you to see how it feels, to go flying helplessly to your death.

He pulled his blaster, shot Solo twice in midair.

The concussion grenade exploded before Solo hit the ground, and if anyone from the valleys saw it, they would have thought it was only the light from a farrow bird as it swooped on its prey.

Dengar stood for a long moment, breathing the air, letting his head clear. It seemed to him that a fog was lifting, that confusion was draining from him. For a moment he’d been dazed. For a moment he thought he’d killed Han Solo, but now he realized that no, it wasn’t, it couldn’t have been Solo—just another imposter.

A landspeeder crested a hill, its engines suddenly growling loud. Either Dengar hadn’t been paying attention or the sound of the landspeeder’s engines had been almost completely cut off by the mountains.

Dengar suddenly realized that he must have lost track of time. He must have been standing there for at least half an hour. That often happened to him after