Tales of the Bounty Hunters by Kevin J. Anderson Page A

a moment, then looked down to the gun in his own hand as if afraid to touch it. Dengar knew what he was thinking. He was wondering if he could draw on the assassin, but Kritkeen would remember Dengar’s speed, and he would opt to run instead.
    Dengar stepped back two paces, lowered his own blaster so that the barrel pointed at his feet, and watched Kritkeen curiously for a long moment. “Go ahead. Shoot me. I’ve got nothing to lose.” Dengar said.
    And it was true. He had no family, no home. He had no money, no honor. He had no friends, few emotions. Rage was one of them, one of the few feelings the Empire had left Dengar to remind him that he’d once been human.
    He was what the Empire had made of him: an assassin without any ties. An assassin incapable of loyalty, who today for the first time, would be killing one of his own employers.
    Dengar remembered emotions enough to know that it should have felt good. It should have felt right and sweet. But he felt only emptiness.
    Kritkeen looked into Dengar’s dark eyes and asked, “Who are you?”
    “My birth name was Dengar on Corellia. But in this sector, I go by another name. I’m called ‘Payback.’ ”
    Kritkeen’s hand began shaking, and he stepped back in horror, shuddering at recognizing the name. He dropped the blaster to the ground. “I—I—I’ve heard of you!”
    Dengar glanced meaningfully at the weapon. “You’ve lost twenty seconds. At the end of those three minutes, I’m going to kill you, whether you’re armed or not.”
    “Wait, please—Payback. I—heard that you’re just a little crazy. I heard that you’re a little out of control. Dropping assignments … choosing odd jobs. You hit only those people you want to hit. So why me?”
    Dengar looked at Kritkeen in the moonlight. His brown hair was impeccably trim. If he were a little thinner, he’d look more like Han Solo. But in the darkness, it was close enough. And this man deserved to die, Dengar was sure of that.
    His breathing stilled imperceptibly, and Dengar said evenly, “Why? Because you are who you are, and I am what you’ve made me.”
    “I … I have never done anything!” Kritkeen objected, opening his arms wide. Then he looked out over vast plains of Aruza, where lights from the city shone like gold and blue gems, and his mouth closed.
    “Run,” Dengar said. “Payback comes for you in two minutes.”
    Kritkeen shrank back a step, two, three. He still watched Dengar, not realizing that once he’d taken that first step, his subconscious had already chosen for him. He’d begun to run.
    In another few seconds, his conscious mind recognized this, and bent down slowly, scrabbled in the dark for his blaster. Then he turned and fled with his whole might, heading down into the dense forested slopes below the mansion, rushing blindly.
    Dengar stood, listening, watching down over the valleys with their myriad lights—the diving of farrow birds, the winking lights of the city, the colored moons. He breathed the still air, took in the sounds of insects chirping. He would miss this world. It had been a pleasant place once, but the Imperial Redesign teams would turn it into an inferno soon enough.
    There were cracking sounds as Kritkeen broke through some brush, a wailing shriek of alarm from a rupin tree as Kritkeen stumbled against it. After three minutes, Kritkeen shambled into the base of the small valley, then began running back uphill more stealthily, heading back toward his mansion—undoubtedly with the idea of retrieving a heavier weapon, or calling stormtroopers.
    Dengar let the man run, let him weary himself. It would be dangerous to attack him while he was still fresh.
    Dengar walked a hundred meters to a small but steep ravine. The trail Kritkeen was following would lead himhere, Dengar decided. Sure enough, in a couple of minutes he heard Kritkeen’s labored breathing, and Dengar had only to stand behind a bush until Kritkeen came flailing up the trail,