by K. W. Jeter
"Come on." Dengar motioned Neelah over toward the pallet. "These droids don't know how tough this barve really is."
They managed to lift the pallet, with Dengar taking most of the unconscious figure's weight into his arms, until the loose gravel shifted under his feet and he saw how strong Neelah actually was; she braced herself and caught the load from toppling to one side. Dengar instructed one of the medical droids to loop the carrying strap of the pallet around his neck. With the lantern's beam wavering ahead of them, they started downward into the murk and stomach-churning smell.
"How do you know…" At the pallet's back end, Neelah gasped for breath. "How do you know we can get out this way?"
"I don't," said Dengar simply. "But there's an air current coming in from somewhere. You can feel it on your face." He glanced over his shoulder at her. The nauseated pallor had diminished slightly; she had gone numb to the smell of the decaying Sarlacc's carcass, buried beneath whatever was left of its nest under the Great Pit of Carkoon. Neelah took a deep breath, nostrils flared, and only gagged slightly. "Even with the stink," continued Dengar, "I can tell it's coming from somewhere outside of these tunnels. If we follow it to its source, we might find someplace where we can either crawl out or dig our way to the surface. Or…" He gave a shrug. "We won't. The bombing raid might have collapsed the rest of the tunnels with too much rubble for us to get through. In which case, it's pretty much over for all of us."
"You sound pretty calm about that possibility."
"What's my choices? I volunteered for this gig." One corner of Dengar's mouth lifted in a grim smile. "Later on, when I'm actually dying, I might let myself get a little more emotional about it. In the meantime we might as well save our strength for whatever digging we're going to have to do." He lifted his end of the pallet higher. "Come on. We might as well find out what it's going to be."
The two medical droids followed behind. "This goes against all sound therapeutic protocols." SHS1-B voiced its concern again. "We're not taking responsibility for whatever happens to our patient."
"Absolution." The shorter one trundled with dif ficulty over the tunnel's rough terrain. "Lack of blame."
"Yeah, right. Whatever." Dengar didn't look back at the complaining droids. "You're off the hook." The lantern's beam faded away into the darkness ahead of him.
"Just don't tell me about it."
"Do you think he'll be okay?" The worry in Neelah's voice was audible. "He's been jostled around quite a bit. Maybe we should let the droids take a look at him-"
"That's a good idea." Dengar kept on walking down the tunnel's slope, his hands gripping the corner of the pallet at his back. "That'll give whoever it is topside lots of time to take another pass at us."
"Oh." Neelah sounded abashed. "I guess you're right."
"About this one, I am. We'll all be better off the sooner we get out of here." He was already thinking about the next time he would see Manaroo. And if he would ever see her again. A lot of his recent decisions, his plans and schemes, were swiftly metamorphosing to regrets. And this could be the last one, he thought as the pallet's weight combined with that of its unconscious passenger to dig into Dengar's hands. Even his sensory perceptions-the tantalizing hint of fresh air against his sweating face-could have been lies and wishes, rather than the simple truth that he was walking through his own tomb. His doubts faded a bit when the tunnel's floor leveled beneath his feet; the slope he and Neelah had carried Boba Fett down had extended, through its various twists and turns, at least a hundred yards. That wasn't enough, Dengar knew, to take them out of the territory of another bombing raid. But he was familiar with the rocky outcroppings of the Dune Sea's surface all around what had been his hiding place's entrance; there was a good chance that they had reached a point where the ground's bones hadn't been completely atomized. The bombs' impact might even have created new passages to the oxygen above, untainted by the stench of the rotting Sarlacc. By now, the smell had gotten bad enough that Dengar could taste it, a nauseating film that had crept down the back of his tongue ….
"Look!" Neelah called out from behind him. Dengar glanced over his shoulder, then in the di rection in which her upraised hand pointed, as she balanced the corner of the pallet against her thigh. The lantern's beam swept across a slanting heap of broken stone. "I don't see anything …."
"Turn off the lantern," ordered Neelah. He thumbed off the power switch. The light had been dim enough that his eyes only took a few seconds to adjust to the darkness. Which wasn't complete a thread of daylight, clouded with dust motes, drew a jag-edged spot only a few inches from the toes of his boots. Dengar tilted his head back and spotted the cleft in the rocks overhead. The hole looked hardly bigger than the width of his hand.
"This'll take a little work." Dengar mulled over the situation. He and Neelah had lowered the pallet between themselves. With the lantern switched back on, he studied the wall of crumbled stone nearest the hole. "I can get up there, all right. And so can you; it doesn't look like that bad a climb." He pointed to Fett. "He's going to be the problem, though."
"You've got a line coil, don't you?" With a nod of her head, Neelah indicated one of the equipment pouches at Dengar's waist. "If you could get up there and pry the gap open wider-or if you could get out to the surface-then I could tie a loop around his chest and under his arms, and you could haul him up." Nothing had been heard from the medical droids for a while as they had straggled along behind Den-gar and Neelah. But now SHSl-B spoke up. "The patient," it protested loudly, "is not in any kind of condition for a maneuver as you've described. Very simply, you'll kill him if you try that."
"Yeah, and if we leave him down here, he'll be just as dead." Under the best of circumstances, Den-gar would have gotten tired of the droid's officious carping. He took out the line and fastened one end to his belt so his hands would be free for climbing. He gave the rest of the coil to Neelah, then nodded toward Boba Fett. "Pull him back a bit so the both of you will be out of the way of whatever I pull down." There was another possibility that Dengar had left unspoken. Specifically, that in trying to widen the light-spilling gap overhead, he'd bring down the entire roof of this underground space, burying himself and the others under a few tons of rock. The bomb ing raid had left the area in a state of fragile balance; even removing the smallest stone might trigger a collapse of everything surrounding it.
He left the lantern with Neelah, instructing her to point it toward the area around the bright crevice he'd be working on. As he started to climb, fingertips digging into the loose rock, he could hear her dragging the pallet over to the farthest angle of the space below him. One stone shifted as he put his hand's weight on it. The stone came free and tumbled away; he would have followed it, crashing hard down the slope he'd traversed so far, if he hadn't managed to loop one arm around a larger outcropping just above and to the side of his head. His feet dangled in air for a moment as more of the dislodged stones rattled and slid out from under his boot soles.
"Are you all right?" Dengar heard Neelah's voice from below as the lantern beam pinned his one hand straining to hold its grip on the outcropping and his other dug in next to it.
"Do I look all right?" The hazard annoyed Dengar more than alarmed him. Without turning his head, he shouted down to Neelah. "Move the light…over just a bit. .
. ."
The beam shifted as he managed to get more of his weight balanced on the outcropping, his chest pressing against its top ridge. He reached up and grasped the edge of the tiny gap he had spotted from the floor of the tunnel. With a push, it gave way; he flung the stone away as he turned his head to shield his eyes from the gravel and dust raining down.
More daylight spilled down from the Dune Sea's surface; Dengar could even see, as he tilted his head back, a patch of cloudless sky. We can make it, he thought with relief. Sweat trickled down his neck and across his chest as his free hand yanked out a few more stones jutting into the vertical opening. They fell into darkness, striking the others he had p
reviously torn loose. He was grateful for the fresh air, dry and hot as it was from the suns' pounding temperature, that flooded across his face and into his throat. Anything was better than the stink that filled the caverns and tunnels beneath the surface ….
The beam of light suddenly disappeared.
"Hey!" Dengar shouted to Neelah below him. "Swing that light back up here!" The glare of daylight coming down the widened hole wasn't enough for him to make out the details of the space's ceiling; he couldn't see which rock to grab and pull on next. "I still need it-"
"There's something down here!" Neelah's shout echoed off the curved walls of crumbling stone. Her next words were tinged with sudden fear. "Something big!"
13
Dengar managed to twist himself around so he could see what she was talking about. A raw laugh burst from his throat as he recognized the mottled surface, rounded and stretching higher than even the tallest humanoid's stature.
"It's the Sarlacc," said Dengar. "Or part of it, at least." From his precarious hold on the rock outcropping, he watched as Neelah played the light across the immense serpentine form, its bulk sealing off the far end of the cavern. There was no sign of the creature's head or tail, as the segment made visible by the lantern lay immobile.
"That's why it smells so bad in here, remember? There's probably pieces of it scattered all through these tunnels, or whatever's left of them."
Nose wrinkling in disgust, Neelah stepped a little closer to the giant form. Enough light bounced off its scales, made shinier by patches of decay and the dried ichor of its blood, that the pallet with Boba Fett on it could be seen several meters away. The two medical droids, the readouts o n their torsos blinking, regarded Neelah's investigations with only mild curiosity. Dengar turned back to his work on their escape route. "Get that light beam up here-"
"It's alive!"
The force of Neelah's shout came close to knocking Dengar loose from the outcropping. "What're you talking about?" He pulled himself farther up on the stone before looking back down. "You can smell that the thing's deader than-"
"It moved!" With her voice a mixture of fury and alarm, Neelah pointed at the bulk of the Sarlacc segment.
"I saw it just now. When I poked at it."
"Nothing to worry about," said Dengar. His arm, where it crossed over the stone's corner ridge, was starting to go numb. "Probably just part of the decomposition process. You must've disturbed some gas bubble inside the tissues. It's probably going to get a lot worse smelling in here real soon-"
His words turned to silence as a visible shiver ran across the towering convex wall of the Sarlacc segment. Dengar could easily see the motion, like a peristaltic wave traveling across the scales and crusted decay patches.
"There!" Neelah kept the lantern beam directed at the glistening bulk. "That's what it did before! I thought you said this thing was dead!"
It'd better be, thought Dengar. A sense of foreboding moved up from the base of his stomach and into his throat. Boba Fett had killed the damn thing; he'd blown his way out of its gut. From trauma like that, the Sarlacc had to have died; there was no other possibility. None-the word looped inside Dengar's head with a touch of panic.
That fear rose out of his dark, unbidden wondering. No one had ever seen the Sarlacc entire; it had lain buried in its nest in the Great Pit of Carkoon before there had ever been sentient beings on the planet of Tatooine. The Tusken Raiders, who had ridden their shaggy bantha mounts across the Dune Sea wastes for centuries untold, had ancient legends of the Sarlacc giving birth to itself at this world's center in the days before the twin suns had split apart. Born and growing with the slow persistence of an eternal creature, digging and rooting itself in its tunnels beneath the sand and rocks, until the day would come when it had eaten everything else and would consume itself, continuing an endless cycle of destruction and rebirth.
It was all nonsense, Dengar knew. There was no point in paying attention to Tusken myths. But at the same time nobody on or off Tatooine had ever determined the exact physiology of the Sarlacc. Maybe it's got more than one stomach, thought Dengar. Or it can regenerate itself, like a plant. Nice possibilities for it; too bad for anybody who might have foolishly wandered into its reach. Like usHis fears proved suddenly correct. The curving wall of the Sarlacc segment reared up, like a giant serpent uncoiling. It reached higher than Dengar's hold on the outcropping, the scales dragging across the roof of the cavern several meters away from him. A shower of rocks and sharp-edged debris rained down as Neelah scrambled to temporary safety near the pallet and the two medical droids.
The interior of the cavern shook with seismic force as the Sarlacc's writhing form crashed down again. Dengar gripped the outcropping tighter, trying to keep from being thrown loose from it. More rubble poured down the widened gap, with hot stones and sand falling across his shoulders and the side of his averted face.
Even before he could see what was happening down below, Dengar had gotten his end of the rope line around the outcropping and had knotted it fast. "Grab the line!" he shouted as the dust started to settle. "I'll pull you up!" , He could feel her tugging at the other end of the line. But when he could see below himself again, the space dimly illumined by a combination of the daylight from above and the beam of the lantern knocked on its side, he saw that Neelah had dragged the unconscious figure of Boba Fett from the pallet and had gotten him upright. Fett's weight was braced against her shoulder as she looped the line around his chest.
"There-" Neelah stepped back and shouted to Dengar.
"Take him up! Start pulling!"
Boba Fett's arms dangled at his side, the tautened rope all that kept his limp body from collapsing to the floor of the cavern. His head lolled forward, chin against his chest. The only sign of him still being alive was the slight motion of his ragged breath.
No point in arguing; Dengar knew that it would be a waste of time with the obstinate female. He clambered up onto the outcropping's top surface, then reached down and grabbed the line with both hands. His spine hit the rock wall behind him as he reared back and pulled. The body of the unconscious bounty hunter straightened, feet dangling clear of the ground, as Dengar drew Fett toward himself. The cavern shook as the Sarlacc segment, either in its death throes or from hunger spurred by its awareness of the humans' presence, convulsively lifted itself and slammed its length against the side of the cavern directly beneath Dengar. Beneath the pounding of his heart, the outcropping trembled and groaned, as though the larger stone it was part of was about to pull free from the upper reaches of the cavern wall. He reached down and grabbed another section of line, hauling Boba Fett higher into the open space; the Sarlacc segment came within inches of the bounty hunter's feet as it doubled upon itself in hissing agony.
Fett was still several meters away from Dengar's grasp as the Sarlacc segment crashed down toward the cavern floor once again. Its head and tail were still unseen, extending into the darkness at either end of the space. The echo of its impact against the ground rolled through the cavern like buried thunder; more sharp bits of rock pelted against Dengar's back. One side of the gap, the escape route to the surface he had been widening, sheered off and fell tumbling, inches away from the suspended figure of Boba Fett. The limp bounty hunter slowly revolved as Dengar strained to pull him higher. That was the only motion Fett showed, as though the loop around his chest had squeezed the last remaining life force from him.
Past Fett, Dengar could see the two medical droids scurrying to safety at the other side of the cavern as the Sarlacc segment twisted onto its side, scales crushing the rocks beneath it to powder. Neelah backed away, the lantern's beam widening against the Sarlacc's flank, then turned and ran as the towering curve gained speed, rolling toward her. As Dengar watched, the stone fragments slid out from beneath her feet, throwing her onto her hands and knees. The lantern clattered to a halt less than a meter away, its beam angling upward onto the bulk of the Sarlacc.
The glowing ellipse of light on the Sarlac
c's scales grew larger as the segment continued to twist about, like a hideous tidal wave of rough-edged armor and injured flesh. Neelah gave a cry of mingled pain and fear as the segment rolled onto her foot and lower leg, pinning her to the floor of the cavern. The Sarlacc segment halted its motion, as if some sense within it were aware of the captive it had made. Its convex mass loomed over Neelah as she twisted onto her side and pushed futilely at it with her bare hands. All that it would take to crush her into a lifeless and broken thing would be for the Sarlacc to continue its twisting, rolling motion, the heavy tide of its bulk sweeping through the cavern and obliterating everything in its path.
Dengar tugged the rope line high enough to loop it around the end of the outcropping, leaving the un conscious Boba Fett suspended above the Sarlacc segment. With one hand holding on, he dug with the other into the holster on his belt, caught between his own weight and the rock's surface. He managed to drag out his blaster, leaving abraded skin from the back of his hand across the rough stone. Dengar shifted his position on the outcropping, trying to line up a clear shot, past the dangling figure of Boba Fett and into the mass of the Sarlacc ….
That shifting of weight on the stone, plus the damage to the already precarious walls of the cavern caused by the Sarlacc's convulsive thrashing, was enough to break the outcropping free, a hairline crack just past Dengar's elbow splitting open with a puff of dust. The forward edge of the outcropping shot downward as he scrambled to keep hold of it. His teeth rattled in his head as the narrow point of stone jammed itself against the other side of the crevice, a meter below where the outcropping had been positioned before. The knot of the line fastened to Boba Fett slid down the outcropping and caught at the juncture of the stone and the crevice wall.
The sharp, sudden movement had knocked the blaster free from Dengar's grip. Clutching the stone, he watched helplessly, time expanding into slow motion, as the weapon spun in the air and choking dust near the cavern's ceiling, then fell. Grip and muzzle tumbled end over end, beyond any point where Dengar could have caught it, even if he'd been able to take one of his clawing hands away from the stone.
