03ABY-04ABY: Payback: The Tale of Dengar by Dave Wolverton

Author:Dave Wolverton
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Hewlett-Packard
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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 to admit, “I’m not sure he does. But he almost killed me once. I want to catch him, force him to tell me why he did it. Then I’ll decide whether to let him live.”

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.

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