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

gasping, sweat pouring from his face. He gaped about, wide eyes shining in the moonlight. He warily panned his weapon across the open space.
    “Did you have a good run?” Dengar asked.
    Kritkeen swiveled his weapon, fired.
    Dengar watched the barrel, calculated where the shot would hit, and found that he had to step aside to avoid taking a blast in the chest. The white-hot blaster fire sizzled past him, and Dengar moved back into place so quickly that Kritkeen cried out in shock, believing that the blaster bolt had somehow gone through Dengar.
    Dengar stepped forward, pulled the blaster from Kritkeen’s hands, and lifted the man off the ground with one hand. Dengar squinted in the darkness, holding his prize, gazing at him.
    The world seemed to twist under Dengar, as if reality were a slippery thing, a tentacle on some giant beast that he was riding.
    He held Kritkeen in the air, high over his head, and twisted him until he looked him in the face in the moonlight, in just the right angle, until he could really see.…
    “Thought you could run from me, hey, Solo?” Dengar said. “Hop on your speeder and leave me choking in your exhaust?”
    “What?” Kritkeen cried, trying to wriggle free from Dengar’s grasp. But the Empire had boosted Dengar’s strength. Any struggle was futile. Dengar shook him till he quit struggling.
    Then Han’s voice came to him, but it was distant, faraway. “Hey, friend, it was a fair race, and the better man won—me!”
    “A fair race!” Dengar shouted, recalling their deadly swoop race through the crystal swamps of Agrilat.
    The whole Corellian system had been watching the two teenagers in the deadliest challenge match ever. Their course through the swamps had been perilous—with hot springs creating deadly updrafts, geysers spouting boiling water without notice, the sheer blades of gray crystalline underbrush threatening to slice them like sabers.
    The crystal swamps were no place to ride swoops, much less race them. Yet they tore through the underbrush, over the scalding water. In places, they had cruelly jockeyed for position, shoving and kicking at one another, as if they were both immortals. Dengar had heard the screams of applause from the crowds, and for a few brief minutes he felt invincible, racing beside the great Han Solo, a man who like himself had never been beaten.
    On the last stretch of the race, both men had opted to take low approaches through the brush over the water, hoping to boost their speed. Dengar had hunched down, smokey-white crystal blades ripping past him in a blur, the water before him bubbling and steaming, the smell of sulfur rising to his nostrils, hoping that no geysers would spout open before him to boil him alive. He dodged one crystalline blade too late, and it pricked his ear, slicing off the tip so that blood dribbled down his neck.
    Then Dengar came screaming out of the underbrush and saw that Han Solo was neither in front of him nor to either side, and Dengar’s heart soared with elation in the hopes of winning—just as Han Solo’s swoop dropped from above, slamming the stabilizer fin into the back of Dengar’s head, washing Dengar’s face in the flames of Solo’s engines.
    Dengar’s own swoop dove nose first into the water,throwing Dengar free. His last memory of the incident was watching himself, gliding over the blue steaming waters, head-first toward the blades of a crystal tree.
    I’m dead , he’d realized too late.
    The doctors said that his helmet had saved him. It had snapped off most of the crystal blades that otherwise would have skewed him through the brain. As it was, only one blade had made that fateful entrance. The health corp workers had pulled him from the brush, punctured with a dozen wounds.
    They had operated. His wounds were so grievous, that only the Empire could have restored him so well. But they judged the risky operations to be a good investment. Dengar had superb reflexes, which could well be put to the