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So it was that Dengar found himself in a card game with a clean woman (a rarity in the mining camp), dressed in a nice jumpsuit.

They sat in a Whiphid hut made of leather sewn over the rib cage of some giant beast. The female Whiphids were singing around a roaring fire, while the smaller males were roasting snow demons, basting them with some sweet-smelling sauce made from lichen. The oily smoke hung overhead like clouds.

Dengar’s card partner, a sharp-faced woman with blond hair and searching eyes, leaned forward during the game and whispered, “I don’t understand, Payback. You’re an Imperially trained assassin, so why have you turned against the Empire, knowing that they’ll kill you?”

Dengar sighed, as he had a hundred times in the past few months. “It’s the right thing to do. I have to stand against the Empire, even if I do it alone.

“I think …” Dengar said, embellishing his tale for the first time, “that I decided I had to quit when they asked me to kill the holy children at Asrat.”

“And they are …?”

“Orphans who live in a temple, their lives dedicated to good. They denounced the Emperor, and vowed to ‘deny him love and sustenance,’ as they put it. They were trying to formally withdraw from the Empire. And in the Empire, rebellion—even from children—is not tolerated.

“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