The Ruins of Dantooine

by Voronica Whitney-Robinson

  “Piket longhorn,” Dusque whispered to Finn.

  The ground rumbled under them when one of the animals decided to lie down for a nap. It ungracefully tumbled onto its side, as though dead.

  “They’re not going anywhere now,” Dusque commented.

  “Are they aggressive?” Finn asked.

  “Not normally. Occasionally there is the rogue one to worry about, but mostly they’re peaceful grazers.”

  “Big grazers,” Finn corrected, and she saw he had regained his dry humor.

  “Very big,” she agreed. “But if they’re staying, we are going to need to move around them. And we need to watch for other, deadlier creatures. Believe it or not, these guys are the prey, not the predators.”

  “Great,” Finn replied, raising and lowering his eyebrows. “I’d hate to see whatever it is that eats them.”

  As they moved quietly back down the hill, the thunder grew much closer. The sounds helped mask any noise they might have made. As they ran back up the opposite side of the gully, Dusque and Finn saw another herd of piket ahead of them. Off to their left was a long, narrow lake that went on for a fair distance, and they both realized they had no choice. They secured their gear and dived in.

  Once a little way out from the piket, Finn pulled on Dusque’s arm to get her attention. She turned around fearfully, treading water, and they looked at each other.

  “Let’s cross over to the other side,” he said, pointing away from the piket.

  Sputtering water, Dusque said, “But if we go on like this, hugging the shore, we can get past them and not lose too much ground.”

  “I know,” Finn replied, “but getting out sooner makes more sense.”

  “Don’t do it just for me,” she argued, paddling about awkwardly.

  “We won’t lose that much time,” he assured her. Without waiting for an answer, he started to swim to the other side.

  Dusque shook her head angrily and followed him, frustrated with herself for letting him take over, and with him, for taking over.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled after he gave her a hand out of the water.

  “You save us from stumbling into a pack of very large animals and you apologize?” He grinned. “So we take the scenic route, so what?”

  They started up again, although they had to veer to the west because of the lake. The rain started to slow, but the sky was still an ominous gray, blending into the lavender hills. For a brief time, Dusque and Finn did not come across any other living thing, and the only sound that disturbed the silence was the soggy squish their boots made in the soft ground. Soon enough, though, several forms started to separate themselves from the misty hillside.

  Dusque recognized the grazers immediately. Thune, they were called. There were five of them. Each was the size of a small shuttle, with a massive head and legs and gray hide that appeared wrinkled and hard. One lifted its head and looked directly at the two humans, and Dusque could hear Finn’s sharp intake of breath. From the center of the thune’s face swung a huge, noselike appendage; thin, full ears circled its head like a halo or a collar.

  Dusque touched Finn’s arm. “It should be okay to move through them, provided we don’t make any quick movements,” she whispered.

  Finn eyed the beasts warily, especially noting their very large feet. “You sure?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “We’ll be fine so long as they don’t stampede.”

  “Terrific,” he muttered under his breath.

  With caution, they started to walk slowly through the group of five individuals. Dusque couldn’t keep from smiling. She had never had the opportunity to observe these magnificent creatures up close. The temptation to touch one of them was overwhelming. She reached out a hand and lightly trailed her fingers against the thune’s tough hide. The creature didn’t even seem to know that something had touched it.

  Suddenly, one of the other thune began flapping the collar of its ears rapidly back and forth.

  Finn moved up beside Dusque and gripped her arm. She could tell he was tensing to bolt.

  “It’s okay,” she told him. “That’s not a threatening gesture. She’s just trying to cool herself down.”

  “She’s fanning herself?” he asked in disbelief.

  “Sort of,” Dusque replied. “Her ears are filled with thousands of blood vessels, and as you can see, the skin is fairly thin there. By flapping her ears, she cools the blood in that area and then that blood courses through the rest of her body, lowering her overall temperature.”

  “Oh.” Finn sounded only marginally convinced.

  Dusque laughed gently. “Come on, it’s safe. See?” She pointed to the largest thune. “The matriarch is moving them away from us.”

  Together they walked through the herd’s territory and kept going, trying to regain the ground they had lost. Suddenly, Finn grabbed Dusque’s arm.

  “Down!” he whispered urgently, and yanked her into some bushes.

  She looked at him in surprise, and he raised his finger to his lip, signaling for quiet. She watched as he drew his blaster and started to crawl along, low to the ground. When he waved at her to follow, she pulled out the heavy blaster she had brought with her and crept after him. She was rewarded by a look of surprise.

  “Where’d that come from?” he asked. “What happened to the small one?”

  Dusque shook her head. “A woman’s got to have some secrets.”

  Finn’s mouth turned up in a smirk, despite the situation. But his good humor faded as soon as he turned his attention to what was just below the hill. He motioned for Dusque to take a look. Down in the small valley below, there were humanoids moving about.

  There were about seven that she could see, and all but one were male. Larger and more brutish looking than the average humanoid, they were covered in thick, dark hair and wore simple animal hides and furs. They carried about only the most rudimentary tools—clubs and stone-head axes—and they were hunting.

  “It might get a little rough here,” Finn warned.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “We’ve lost some time because of our detour; we can’t afford to lose any more, with what’s in the balance.” He started to take aim.

  Dusque pushed his barrel aside. “We can’t. Those are Dantari. From the few accounts that exist, they are peaceful, simple people.”

  Finn regarded her for a moment. “Are those few worth all the many lives that are at stake?” he asked with deadly seriousness.

  After brief deliberation, she said carefully, “I think that if we were to hurt these people, we would be no better than those who serve the Empire. The people on that list want to help the Rebel Alliance, and that means that they are willing to risk their lives for complete strangers, no matter what the species. These are exactly the lives that they are willing to sacrifice themselves for.”

  Finn slowly lowered his gun. “I guess you’re right.” He sounded sheepish. “I just want to get that device and blast out of here.”

  “I know,” she answered. “So do I. But I don’t want it this badly.”

  Finn nodded, but he looked frustrated. Turning away from her, he began crawling back the way they had come, and Dusque followed in silence. Neither spoke until both were certain they were downwind of the Dantari.

  “We’re going to have to go farther north than we planned and then cut eastward,” Finn whispered at last.

  “We’ll need to keep our eyes out for any more of those people. Normally, they just range along the ocean,” Dusque told him, trying to recall what she had learned of the Dantari in her studies. “If they’ve come this far in to hunt, they may be part of a larger group.”

  He nodded but did not reply. Dusque wondered if he was angry with her for telling him what to do, or angry at himself for not thinking things through more on his own. He remained silent as they rushed to detour around the Dantari and start regaining the ground they had lost. The rain tapered off, but the skies stayed overcast. Dusque, uncertain how to mend what felt like a bre
ach between them, left him to his silence. But when she saw something decidedly unnatural in the distance, she spoke without thinking.

  “What’s that?” It looked like a flat object on a hill. As they crept closer they saw, rising out of the mist like some mythical creature rising from its own ashes, a modular structure.

  “Well, I’ll be …” Finn exhaled.

  “What is it?” Dusque asked again, more nervous now that she could see several other, similar structures beyond the first one.

  “It’s the old Rebel base,” he told her. When he saw her unease, he added, “It’s been abandoned for almost two years. Come on.”

  “I thought we needed to make up for lost time,” she reminded him.

  “I just want to make a quick check that nothing was left behind,” he explained, starting to run up the hill toward the base.

  “But Leia said that the Imperials were already here. Don’t you think they would’ve found anything if it had been left behind?” Dusque asked, jogging along beside him.

  “They don’t always know where to look,” he told her.

  “What happened here?” she asked as they arrived at the outer walls of what she was beginning to realize was quite a substantial base.

  “I only heard the story secondhand, but I’ll tell you what I know.” He seemed about to go on when he stopped and turned to the right. Dusque looked past him to see a long canine-type creature pacing back and forth. Either it hadn’t smelled them yet, or it didn’t care.

  “What is it?” Finn asked.

  Dusque squinted to try to make out the creature. “I think it’s a huurton. Probably a huntress, if she’s on her own. Umm, maybe we should put a little distance between us,” she suggested. “She could be very deadly.”

  “Right,” he replied, and he led the way to an opening in the wall.

  Once inside the old base, Dusque saw that it was a huge facility. In the structures closest to them, some of the windows were smashed and doors were ajar. Plants had started to grow over the buildings, and the whole area was desolate and somber. She wondered what it must have been like when it was alive with people.

  “What happened?” she asked Finn again.

  “As I understand it, this base was quite successful for many years,” he began as they walked slowly through the facility, “most likely because of its remote location. I don’t know how it happened or even how the Rebel soldier found it, but about a year and a half ago, someone slipped an Imperial tracking device into a cargo shipment.

  “By some good fortune, it was discovered and the word went out to evacuate. These structures—” He stopped to tap on the wall of the one that they were passing on their left. “—are put together out of temporary, self-constructing modules. They were crafted to be movable at a moment’s notice.”

  “Then if they left them behind, the Rebels must have had to flee really quickly,” Dusque mused.

  “As I understand it,” Finn replied, “they all got out within a day.”

  Dusque inhaled deeply, trying to picture the hundreds, if not thousands, of troops who must have streamed out of the buildings. “I guess they made it just in time,” she said.

  “Supposedly, the Imperials didn’t find them until Leia told them about the base,” he added.

  Dusque stared at him in shock. “What? Leia would never betray anyone!” She told herself she couldn’t be that certain about someone she barely knew, but somehow she had absolutely no doubts about Princess Leia’s personal strength and commitment to the cause.

  “She was a prisoner on the Emperor’s Death Star,” he told her gravely. “From what she told me, they tortured her and used mind probes, but she didn’t give them the location of the Rebel base. Then they tried a different ploy: they threatened to destroy her home planet. So she gave up the location here”—he waved an arm to indicate the ruined base around them—“on Dantooine.”

  “I guess I can understand …,” Dusque said. “But the fact that she betrayed the others still seems … inhuman.”

  “No, no, you’ve got it wrong! She already knew that the base had been evacuated. It was only a matter of time before the Imperials would have raided it.”

  Now the story was beginning to make some sense. “She thought it would buy her more time.”

  “Yes, but they destroyed Alderaan anyway.”

  Dusque nodded in understanding. When she thought back on it, she remembered hearing that scientists from a different department had been working on a project of some magnitude a year or so before the destruction of Alderaan. Some of those same scientists had disappeared from their regular labs, and rumor had said that they’d been sequestered for some special project. She wondered …

  “Would it have been so bad,” Finn asked her quietly, interrupting her musings, “if she had betrayed the Alliance for those she loved?”

  “I don’t know,” Dusque answered honestly. “I can’t say with any certainty what I would do, in a similar situation. But I think we follow this cause because it’s the right thing to do. And I think that has to come before any of our personal loves. While dreamers may die, the dream lives on.”

  Finn fell silent. She wondered if he had been asking more about her than about Leia’s choices. Perhaps, she thought, he wondered if she would betray the Rebel Alliance for him. Once more, she felt as if she were being tested, and was afraid she had failed.

  “Let’s take a quick pass through the command center,” Finn suggested, “and then keep going.”

  “All right,” Dusque agreed, “but we should be really careful. If there was one huurton here, there are probably others.”

  “Right,” he agreed. Then he looked at her. “I see that you were an even better choice to work with than I originally thought,” he said. “It never even occurred to me to consider your expertise with animals.”

  “That’s why they call me a bioengineer,” she said lightly, trying not to smile too widely at his compliment. But she had a feeling he could tell she was pleased, because he flashed her a grin before turning to move on.

  They passed a series of smaller structures all in a row before climbing a set of stairs that led them to the command center. A glance inside each open door showed that the smaller buildings were barracks—and that they had been pretty well ransacked by the Imperial soldiers who had searched the place. The state of the barracks did not bode well for what they might find in the command center, but it was still worth a look, Finn explained.

  At the next level, they encountered a huurton mother and her pups. Seeing her, Finn paused and looked at Dusque.

  “As long as we steer clear of her,” she assured him, “we should be fine. She’ll probably herd her brood away from us.”

  “Got it,” Finn acknowledged.

  Carefully sketching a large circle around the huurtons, they entered what had been the heart of the former base. Dusque was overwhelmed by the damage that had been done to it. Curious, she approached a series of control panels that seemed to have been looted, but not destroyed.

  “Finn,” she called, “take a look at this.”

  He trotted over to her and studied what was left of the equipment.

  “Would the Imperials have done this?” she asked.

  “No,” Finn answered slowly. “They wouldn’t have had any interest in looting. Not to this degree, at any rate.”

  “Then who?”

  Finn thought for a moment and then said, “Remember, that officer said they had been having problems with smugglers.”

  “You’re right,” she said then. “I think he called them the Gray Talon. You think it was them?”

  “Either them or someone else in the same profession. I saw more evidence of that over here.” He indicated a smaller chamber. Dusque poked her head in and saw that it was a room that had probably been occupied by a higher-ranking officer. There was a long table that had been knocked over and shattered, the pieces scattered across the remains of a woven floor covering. The walls were bare, with the exception of on
e picture that was hanging askew. Dusque shivered, although the air in the base was not cold.

  “What’s the matter?” Finn asked as he stood next to her. “Cold?”

  “No, I just want to get out of here,” she told him. She felt as though a grave site had been desecrated, although as far as she knew, no one had died.

  Finn nodded in silent understanding. “Just let me make one quick pass and then we’ll leave, okay?”

  “All right,” she agreed, “but I’m going to wait outside. Call me on the comlink if you need me.” As she left, she made sure to turn on the small, handheld communication device attached to her belt.

  Outside, she made her way onto the observation platform. From there, she could see that several groups of huurtons had made their homes in and around the abandoned base. In a way, she found the sight oddly comforting. It was almost as though the fearsome predators were guarding the remains of the place so that no one else would defile it.

  The rain had stopped completely, but darkness was growing as night approached. She worried that Finn had been right, that taking the longer route had been a mistake. Now they would reach the Jedi ruins in the dead of night, at the earliest. Not only would that make their search that much more challenging, but it would mean the night predators would be awake and on the prowl.

  Finn came out of the command center and walked over to her. “Nothing,” he said, in response to her quizzical look. “We might as well keep moving.”

  “Mm-hmm,” she agreed. “But take a look: there’s a good view from up here.” She pointed to the lower levels. “See? There are huurtons over in the eastern and northern quadrants of the base. We’ll need to avoid those areas when we leave. It’s getting dark, too,” she added, voicing the obvious.

  “Yes, it is.” He glanced up. “At least the rain’s stopped.”

  She smiled. “What I meant was, I’m sorry my delay cost us the daylight hours.”

  Finn was silent for a moment. “Don’t be,” he finally told her. “Besides, it was my choice to take the time to explore this base,” he added. “So we share the responsibility for the delay, and cancel each other out, right?” His grin made her feel a lot better.