Star Wars_ Tales of the Bounty Hunters - Kevin J. Anderson [48]
Within seconds they were out of the Tibanna gas clouds, heading for the stars, and when the navicomputer laid in his course, he blurred into hyperspace.
Dengar lay back in his chair. It was true that he could not feel many emotions, could not register them with his mind, but his body registered them sometimes. His hands were shaking now, and his brow was covered in sweat. His throat was dry.
Yet when he felt inside himself, he could not detect any sense of panic.
But Manaroo stood behind his pilot’s seat, hands clutching the back of his chair, her mouth frozen open in terror.
“We’re all right now,” Dengar said, hoping to comfort her.
“Why, why are you still following Han Solo?” she asked. “He’s already been captured!”
Dengar hesitated, trying to find the right words to answer. He had no hopes of catching up with Boba Fett. The bounty hunter’s ship was too fast, and he’d likely land right at Jabba’s palace, so there would be no opportunity to bushwhack Boba Fett in any case. No, he needed something else. “I want to catch up to him for once,” he said. “I want to touch him, just once.
“Besides, Solo has friends in high places in the Rebellion,” Dengar said, trying to voice a nagging suspicion. “I figure they’ll come to break him out—if Jabba the Hutt doesn’t kill him first. And when they do, I want to be there, to catch him all over again.” Dengar had made up that excuse impromptu, but it had a ring of truth to it. Somehow, he found that Han Solo was achieving mythical proportions. Just as Dengar seemed doomed to forever be but half a man, he had also begun to feel that Han Solo would forever be elusive, an uncatchable nemesis.
And somehow, somehow, Dengar knew he had to break the cycle. It was a wild hope, half conceived. He had to find himself again, just as he had to catch Han Solo.
Three: The Loneliness
Over the next few days, Dengar spent a great deal of time with Manaroo, just talking. She told him of her life on Aruza, being raised on a farm by a mother who made clay diningware and a father who worked as a petty bureaucrat. On their farm, Manaroo had learned early how to coax flowers from the near-sentient dola trees, and the thick juice that these flowers exuded made a potent antibiotic syrup, often prescribed by Aruza’s physicians.
At the age of three, Manaroo had begun dancing, and by nine she was winning interstellar competitions. Dengar had imagined her to be some local girl, little traveled, with no real living experience. But she told him tales of rafting through dark storms upon the water world of Bengat, of living through a pirate raid on a starliner.
And sometimes she talked about the experiences of her friends, those with whom she’d shared the Attanni, as if such experiences were her own. The list of people that she considered to be friends and family was enormous, and the pain she’d suffered in sharing those lives was equally enormous, for each of her friends had also shared their memories with others through the Attanni, so that all of them were but motes in some vast net.
Dengar had thought her to be only a young woman, but he found that she was much more mature than he’d imagined, far stronger than he could have guessed.
For his part, Dengar told her of his life on Corellia, where he’d begun repairing swoops with his father as a child, and had begun racing in his early teens. He did not tell her how he’d lived in Han’s shadow in those years, did not explain how it was during a race with Han Solo that he’d been wounded. Instead, he told only of the surgeries the Empire had performed, how between threats of death and promises that they would someday restore his ability to feel, they had bullied him into becoming an assassin.
Yet Dengar had always chosen his victims, harvesting only those he felt deserved to die.
Inevitably, Manaroo voiced the question, “And why is it that Han Solo deserves to die?”
Dengar was forced