Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters (16 page)

Dengar entered the Hutt’s palace at night, when the inhabitants were most active, and knelt on one knee. Jabba was surrounded by his lackeys—nearly all of whom were required to sleep in his chamber, for the Hutt feared assassination and knew that the best way to thwart it was to keep all of the would-be assassins within sight. Dengar looked up, saw Boba Fett in the shadows off to Jabba’s right, nodded at the man.

“Why do you come before me?” Jabba grumbled in Huttese. “You did not bring me Han Solo. You can expect no reward!”

“I have heard that you have Han Solo captive,” Dengar said. “I came to see if it was true.”

“Ho, ho, ho,” Jabba laughed. “Behold for yourself!” A light switched on behind Dengar, and he turned. On the wall, in what Dengar had believed to be a decorative frieze, he could see the face and features of Han Solo, frozen in gray carbonite.

Dengar laughed, walked over to Solo, and grasped each side of the frame that held his frozen body. “Gotcha,” Dengar said. “At last.”

“Ho, ho,” Jabba laughed from deep in his belly, and his menagerie of murderers laughed with him. “You mean
I have him.
”

Dengar turned to look over his shoulder. “No,” Dengar said, staring into the Hutt’s eyes. “You only think you have him.” The Hutt frowned at this. “You cannot keep him in … this!” Dengar waved at the carbonite containment device. “Surely, he will escape.”

“Ho, ho, oh, hooo!” Jabba roared. “You think he can escape from there! You amuse me, assassin.”

Dengar turned to Jabba, folded his hands before
him. “Hear me, oh great Jabba,” Dengar warned. “I do indeed believe he will escape from you. And when he does, you will be the laughingstock of the underworld. But I can spare you from this fate. For I propose to remain here, to catch him once again. And when I do, I expect you to pay me twice what you have paid Boba Fett!”

“Do you intend to free him yourself?” Jabba roared, so that part of his retinue fell back, fearing his wrath.

“He will never be freed by my hand,” Dengar whispered.

“Do you suspect a plot?” Jabba asked, eyeing the cutthroats and hoodlums in his employment.

“His friends in the Rebellion will seek to free him,” Dengar answered earnestly.

“The Rebellion?” Jabba laughed. “I do not fear them. So it is agreed. You may stay and join my retainers. And if the Rebellion frees him and you manage to bring him back, I will pay you twice what I paid Boba Fett!”

Boba Fett stepped forward, brandishing his blaster rifle menacingly, and Jabba silenced him with a glare. He spoke with a low voice, “But if the Rebellion fails in its attempt to free Han Solo, then you will work for me for one year—scrubbing the royal toilets in company with the cleaning droids!” The Hutt broke into laughter.

Dengar returned to Mos Eisley at sunrise, planning to move his ship to Jabba’s palace where it would be handy in case of a Rebel attack.

But he was confused when he entered the ship and found Manaroo gone. He made a perfunctory search, found that she’d never returned from the cantina. At the cantina, the bartender said that she’d danced for a few credits, then “disappeared.”

Dengar considered the news, then remembered the
Attanni that Manaroo had given him. He went back to the ship, inserted the device into his cranial jack, then closed his eyes, trying to see what she saw, hear what she heard. But the Attanni gave off only a whisper of static.

Dengar left the device in, flew a quick grid low over the city, but never received her signal, so he headed back to Jabba’s palace, landed the
Punishing One
in Jabba’s secure hangars.

All through the trip back to the palace, he thought about Manaroo and wondered what had become of her. He found that he had become accustomed to her presence, even imagined that he felt comforted by it. Once, just a few nights before, she had demanded to know what other emotion the Empire had left him with besides his rage and his hope, and he had refused to tell her. Loneliness.

His loneliness served no purpose in the Empire’s designs, at least not that he could fathom. Dengar was not even certain that they had left him with that ability on purpose. Perhaps when they’d cut away the rest of his hypothalamus, they’d not even been aware of what they’d left him with.

But over the years, Dengar felt that it was not the rage or hope that had come to define him, but his loneliness, his knowledge that nowhere in the galaxy would he find someone who would love him, or approve of him.

It wasn’t until he was on his way back to Jabba’s throne room that Dengar suddenly felt a staggering wave of fear. He closed his eyes, listened with other ears.

“You got to dance your best for Jabba,” a fat woman was saying. “He gets his entertainment one way or another. If he don’t like how you dance, he’ll take great pleasure in watching you die.”

Dengar watched the fat woman through Manaroo’s eyes, saw three other dancers from various worlds all
lounging about on dark benches. They were in a damp-smelling cell, with thick steel bars. The air felt fetid, and one of Jabba’s guards was pacing outside the window to the door, occasionally poking his snout through the bars to leer at the dancers.

“What if he likes how I dance?” Manaroo asked.

“Then he’ll keep you longer. Maybe even set you free.”

“Ah, don’t try to give her hope,” another woman said from a far bench. “That only happened once.”

The fat dancer turned. “But it happened!”

“Look, girl—” the other dancer said from the far end of the room. “You either dance good, or you die.”

“But I already danced for Jabba,” Manaroo said, “when the slaver brought me in.”

“So you passed the audition,” the fat woman said. “That’s something.”

Dengar took off the Attanni, placed it in the bottom of his holster, beneath his blaster.

Jabba was a demanding creature. Once he’d paid money for anything—whether it be a slave or a drug shipment—he deeply resented losing that thing. And the Hutt took great pleasure in tormenting others. While Dengar could not sense a difference between good and evil, the Hutt took pleasure in evil.

Dengar knew that he wouldn’t get Manaroo back without a fight.

He squinted and considered the Hutt, tried to picture Jabba with dark brown hair and a lanky frame. But even with the greatest stretch of imagination, he couldn’t find much in the way of similarities between Jabba the Hutt and Han Solo.

“Ah, well,” Dengar groaned. “I’ll just have to kill him anyway.”

Fortunately, Dengar soon found that many of Jabba’s henchmen had reason to plot against their master.
Within three days Dengar was able to provide one of Jabba’s henchmen—the Quarren Tessek—with a bomb. Dengar made it from weapons stored in his ship, and he made it big enough to blow Jabba’s bloated corpse into orbit. Delivering the bomb was simple, since he only had to hand it over to one of Jabba’s most trusted servants, the head of the motor pool, Barada.

Unfortunately for Dengar, Jabba learned about the plot before the bomb was ever completed. Upon the rather prescient advice of Bib Fortuna, who assured Jabba that Dengar was making a bomb, Jabba assigned Boba Fett to watch Dengar.

Boba Fett was easily up to the task. A microtransmitter dropped into one of Dengar’s holsters performed the trick. When Dengar delivered the bomb to Barada, their words gave proof of the conspiracy.

When Boba Fett informed the Hutt that he had uncovered the plot, Boba Fett asked, “Do you want me to remove the bomb?”

The Hutt laughed, a deep and throaty laugh that shook his great belly. “You would deprive me of my amusement? No, I will have the bomb dismantled, and I will make certain that Tessek is with me when it is set to explode. I will enjoy watching him squirm. As for Barada—I will make him wait for a few weeks for his punishment.”

“What of Dengar?” Boba Fett asked. “You can’t toy with him. He’s too dangerous.”

Jabba squinted his huge dark eyes and looked narrowly at Boba Fett. “I will leave it to you to punish him, but do not give him an easy death.” Jabba brightened, and his eyes opened wide. “It has been a long time since I let one of my enemies feel the bite of the Teeth of Tatooine!”

Boba Fett nodded curtly. “As you will, my lord.”

•   •   •

That day was busy for Dengar. The surgeons who had operated on him so long ago had cut away his ability to feel fear, but at certain odd times he found that he moved with a new bit of energy, found his heart beating irregularly. It was, he knew, just a ghost of what others felt when they feared, but he found it invigorating. The bomb on Jabba’s skiff was set to go off early the next day, so Dengar became concerned that night when plans suddenly changed.

Dengar had been resting in his quarters when Luke Skywalker suddenly appeared at Jabba’s palace and attempted to rescue Han Solo. Jabba foiled the young Jedi’s attempt and threw Skywalker into a pit with Jabba’s pet monster, the Rancor. Skywalker surprised everyone by killing the beast.

The sound of the rancor’s death cry rattled the palace, waking Dengar, who hurried to Jabba’s throne room and reached the top of a small staircase in time to hear the sentence pronounced upon Han Solo and his friends. They were to die in the Great Pit of Carkoon.

The palace became a madhouse. Jabba’s henchmen ran about arming themselves, preparing vehicles. Two Gamorrean guards scrambled up the stairs past Dengar, and one grumbled, “Why we need hurry?”

The other guard backhanded him, sent him staggering against a wall. “Idiot! We no want Rebels come. If they learn Jabba wants to kill Skywalker and Leia, we in for big fight!”

Dengar looked for Tessek in the crowd below, trying to spot the gray-skinned Quarren’s mouth tentacles, wondering if this would change their plans.

But some of Jabba’s men already seemed to have the Quarren under guard. They were standing close at his back, and Dengar could only hear snatches of conversation. Tessek was begging Jabba for his life.

In a moment, Jabba sent the Quarren to pack, and Tessek scurried away through an exit in the far wall.

Dengar ducked back into the hall, into the safe shadows.
Had Jabba found the bomb? Obviously Jabba suspected something.…

But the Hutt hadn’t killed Tessek, and he hadn’t sent guards after Dengar. So Jabba couldn’t have had proof of the treason. Which suggested that the Hutt had merely heard rumors of their plans. Or perhaps Jabba had some other reason to threaten Tessek.

Still, Dengar didn’t want to be around here right at the moment. If Jabba found that bomb, heads would roll. Dengar didn’t want his head to be one of them.

There was still time to escape. It might well be that Jabba wouldn’t discover the bomb at all, and if that were the case, he might be on or near the skiff when it exploded. The plot might still succeed. In any case, whether it succeeded or failed, it would do so without further effort from Dengar.

But if Jabba did find the bomb too soon.…

Dengar decided it might be a good time to go into Mos Eisley for the day. If his plan worked, Jabba would die. If it didn’t—Dengar might still escape.

Dengar returned to his cramped quarters and began throwing his clothes and weapons into a bag. Among his effects he found the Attanni. He could not contact Manaroo with it—but Dengar could receive images, sounds, emotions.

And as he looked at the device, he recalled the hunger Manaroo had felt for his presence, her fears for her life. Sometimes he wondered how she could feel anything for him. In his own eyes he was broken, undeserving of her attention. Yet she’d stayed beside him even after he’d rescued her parents. He felt there was nothing left that he could give her, except perhaps a false sense of safety.

And by running out now, he would be denying her even that.

He unwrapped his neck, screwed the Attanni into the socket there.

And what he saw surprised him. Manaroo was dressing
for a performance, putting on leggings of some sheer material in softest violet, a top that revealed her ample breasts. She sorted through a bin of musical instruments—tambours, bells, cymbals—looking for something exotic, and decided to take a golden flute. To play it while dancing would be difficult, and to play it poorly would be to tempt fate. But Manaroo would be dancing for her life, and she needed to impress the Hutt.

She’d been commanded to dance before Jabba, and everyone in the room knew that he was in a foul mood because the rancor was dead. The other dancers sat huddled in a far corner and shot Manaroo pitying glances.

What amazed Dengar was her mood. She was almost numb with fear and had no recourse but to put her confidence in her abilities. These feelings lay heavily in the background of her mind.

And in the foreground, Manaroo was concentrating, trying to firm her resolve by playing mental games. Just as Dengar would psyche himself up for an assassination by imagining that he was killing Han Solo, Manaroo was playing similar games in her own mind.

She envisioned Jabba’s throne room, but instead of Jabba on the throne, she imagined Dengar there. He was watching her steadily, calling out “Dance, dance for your life!” as if it were some great jest.

And in her dreams, Manaroo danced lovingly, with her heart. She imagined each move, practiced over the years, and each spin and flourish was dedicated to Dengar. Each of them had been conceived and prepared for the man she loved, the man she hoped someday to meld minds with, so that they became one. And in her imaginings, as she danced gracefully before Dengar, she whispered, “If I please you
so much
, my lord, my love, then why don’t you please me in return? Why don’t you marry me?”

Dengar pulled off the Attanni in astonishment, and
knew that he could not leave now. The powerful feelings that washed through him when he was connected acted as a moral compass, telling him what to do. And like Han Solo, who sometimes seemed to suffer from a death wish, Dengar knew that he would have to turn his face to the storm.

He had to save her, but how?

Dengar was amazed that she would be preparing for a performance now, while the palace was in such disarray, and realized immediately that he would have to plan a diversion. To blindly go into the throne room and try to kill the Hutt would be insane, but over the past few days, there had been two murders in the palace.