Star Wars_ Tales of the Bounty Hunters - Kevin J. Anderson [49]
The next evening, they were almost to Tatooine, and Dengar went to the pilot’s console to check his systems.
Manaroo came up behind him. “Hmmm …” she said, and she began massaging his neck muscles. “You’re tight.” He eased back, enjoying the sensation. “You know, this is twice you’ve saved my life. I owe you something. Close your eyes.”
Her hand slipped under the twisted bandages that covered his neck, touched his cybernetic interface jack. He felt her connect something to his jack, and he sat upright.
“What’s that?” he said, turning around.
She held up a small golden ring, threaded so that it could fit into an interface socket. “It’s part of an Attanni,” she said, “so that you can receive me, feel what I feel. I won’t be able to read your thoughts or emotions, or access your memories.”
He let her put the ring into his jack, twirl it till it fit in tight. Suddenly he could hear through her ears, see through her eyes. He felt the intensity of her emotions.
Manaroo was afraid, and her fear knotted her belly. She watched him with calculation. “Close your eyes, so that you don’t see overlapping images,” she said, but Dengar didn’t respond immediately.
Her fear washed through him, a cold fire, and to him it seemed the most intense emotion he’d ever felt. At first he imagined it was like water to a man who has thirsted for days, to feel this again, but something in him knew that people seldom felt fear quite as intense as this. He wondered why she was afraid.
Manaroo was watching him, and she put one hand on each shoulder, kissed him, and he could feel her dry mouth, taste her hope and desire, and part of him was surprised at the intensity of her desire. Then he understood why she feared him. She was afraid he would reject her, turn her away. He could also feel her loneliness, an aching void within her. Each sensation from her came as if it were new, as if no one had ever discovered it before.
She felt comforted by his presence, protected, which helped explain some of her strong feelings for him. Dengar tried to search her mind, see just how deep her feelings for him went, but the Attanni she’d fitted to his implant could only receive the emotions she sent. It didn’t allow him to probe her thoughts or memories.
She kissed him tenderly on the forehead, and held him for a long time, and briefly she remembered her mother on Aruza, kissing her as a child, and there was such a pang of guilt and regret at having left her parents to die on Aruza, a pang so violent that Dengar gasped, and then Manaroo cried out, sorry to have caused him such pain, and she fumbled to remove the Attanni from his cranial jack.
Dengar sat panting, breathing heavily, sweat pouring down his brow. He’d not felt guilt, good clean guilt, in many years. He’d slaughtered decent people for the Empire just as easily as he’d abandoned Manaroo’s parents and friends without a thought.
Now he lay back panting and smiling at having felt remorse for the first time in decades.
“I’m sorry,” Manaroo gasped, fumbling to put the Attanni in a pocket.
“I know,” Dengar flashed her a small grin, and the words caught in his throat. He started to stand up, but found that these strong emotions had left him weak in the legs and left tears in his eyes. There was a time in his life when he’d have felt embarrassed to show such emotions. Now, he just sat back for a long time, relishing them.
When he could speak at all again, he said, “We’ll have to go back to Aruza, get your parents off planet—along with as many of your people as we can.”
“Why do you say that?” Manaroo blurted, for she’d not revealed her wish.
“Your … conscience … told me,” Dengar whispered, and he sat, realizing perhaps for the first time what the Empire had taken from him. He knew that they’d taken the capacity to feel joy, to feel love, to feel concern and guilt.
Over the past years, the desire to help another being had never entered him.