The Bounty Hunter Wars 1 The Mandalorian Armor

by Timothy Zahn

  The stench of decay grew worse, as though the vibration of the surface bombing had shaken open a buried pustule. Neelah's face paled, then she quickly scrambled to her knees and hurried to a farther bend of the tunnel.

  The sounds of gagging and retching traveled back to Dengar.

  She's not used to this sort of thing, mused Dengar.

  Or some part of her wasn't; something held in the darkness and hidden memory inside her. That intrigued him. A mere dancing girl, a pretty servant in the court of Jabba the Hutt, would have gotten accustomed to the smell of death quickly enough; it had pervaded the walls of Jabba's palace, seeping up from the rancor pit beneath the throne room. Hutts in general liked that smell; it was one of the more loathsome characteristics of their species to revel in a constant olfactory reminder that they were alive and their enemies, and the objects of their lethal amusements, were dead and rotting beneath them. That, among other things, was why Dengar had considered employment with the late Jabba or any of the other members of his clan as a choice of last resort.

  Especially so after Dengar had found Manaroo-and his love for her. How could one return to that being who represented one's essence, an almost forgotten purity and grace, with the stink of dead, defeated flesh wrapped around oneself? It was impossible.

  It seemed impossible for this Neelah to endure as well. She had the temperament of one born to the galaxy's nobility, a bloodline accustomed to command and the obedience of others. Dengar had noted that, just from the way she had faced him down in their first encounter.

  Anyone else who had gone through the unsavory rigors of Jabba's court, followed by unprotected exposure to the Dune Sea, would have quailed before the obvious superiority of Dengar's strength and weaponry. But some spark of courage inside Neelah had burned even brighter under those conditions, fierce enough to have burned his outstretched hand, if he had dared to touch her.

  That aristocratic strain was apparent in the female's face as well, even darkened and toughened as it was by the lash of the double suns and the scouring of the Dune Sea's hot, razorlike winds. She'll be trouble, Dengar already knew. He'd had enough on his hands before she had come along, but with her presence added to the equation, the result was increased exponentially.

  Neelah returned, face even paler in the glow from the single lantern. "I'm sorry," she said.

  "Don't be." Dengar gave a shrug. "I'll be the first to admit that this isn't the most pleasant neighborhood."

  He got to his feet. "We might as well see what kind of shape we're in."

  The two medical droids were stationed on either side of Boba Fett's pallet.

  "How's the patient?"

  SHS1-B glanced back at Dengar. "As well as can be expected," the droid said irritably. "Given the dis turbance he's been put through."

  "Hey-" Dengar poked himself in the chest. "Did I order a bombing raid to start up? Don't blame everything on me."

  "That's not a bad question." Standing beside him, Neelah glanced over the unconscious form of the bounty hunter. "Who did order it?"

  "Who knows?" Dengar set the lamp on a shoulder-high outcropping. "This guy's got major enemies. It was probably one of them."

  "Then that would mean somebody knows that he's alive.

  Somebody besides us."

  That realization snapped together in Dengar's brain, like a pair of wires that had become disconnected during the tumult. She's right-somehow the word must've gotten out, to somebody for whom it was an important piece of information, that Boba Fett hadn't died; that breath, however shallow, was still going in and out of his body. Someone wasn't happy about that. Someone who would send out sufficient explosive force to pulverize an army, just to make sure that there wouldn't be enough left of Boba Fett to take a breath.

  "Somebody was spying on us," said Dengar. He had already eliminated himself as the source of the leak, and he had sworn Manaroo to secrecy. Neelah wasn't a likely suspect; there had been no place for her to go, no one for her to talk to while she'd been out in the Dune Sea.

  And she hadn't left the hiding place since Dengar had taken her in. Maybe somebody from Jabba's palace, he thought. There had been plenty of scoundrels there, even after Jabba's death, with the necessary skills for staying unseen while watching the comings and goings out in the wastelands. Especially after losing a lucrative gig with the Hutt, any one of them would be motivated to sell valuable info to the highest bidder. To some agent of the Empire or anybody else who had a big enough grudge against Boba Fett. "That must have been what happened."

  Dengar nodded slowly. "Somebody saw me taking Fett down into my hiding place."

  "Don't be stupid." Neelah shook her head. "If somebody knew exactly where Fett had been taken, they wouldn't bother blowing up everything within sight of the Great Pit of Carkoon. One missile, straight down the tunnel entrance, would've done the job. Simple and clean." She pointed toward the silent form on the pallet.

  "If that's all it took to kill him off, they would have done it the easy way. And the quiet way."

  She had a point, Dengar admitted to himself. Boba Fett wasn't the only one who lived by secrets; the kind of clients he'd had, and enemies he'd made, were the same way. A surgical strike would have eliminated Fett without the risk of drawing attention that a bombing raid entailed. Dengar had heard nothing the last time he'd been talking to his own information sources in Mos Eisley about a contract being put out on Boba Fett. So if anybody was actively gunning for him, they were definitely keeping it quiet.

  "Unless," said Dengar, "there's some other reason for the raid... ."

  Neelah gave him a withering look. "Do you think there's some other reason?"

  He didn't bother to answer. Silence filled the tunnel as he looked upward, listening and waiting. "I think we're all clear now."

  "We can go back up?"

  "Are you kidding?" Dengar shook his head, then picked up the lantern and directed its light toward the tunnel they had come down. The light picked up the jumbled shapes of the rubble filling the passageway. "We're blocked off. Even if there's anything left of my hiding place-which is a big if, given the pounding that was going on up there-we couldn't get to it now. We'll have to push on, and see if there's some other way of getting out to the surface."

  A shiver of disgust ran across Neelah's shoulders.

  The smell of rot was noticeably stronger toward the tunnel's unlit end.

  "Can he travel?" Dengar pointed toward Boba Fett.

  "It would be better," said SHSl-B, "from a ther apeutic standpoint, if he were left undisturbed."

  "That's not what I asked."

  "I don't know why you bothered to inquire at all."

  SHSl-B's tone was distinctly haughty. "I imagine you'll do whatever you're planning on, no matter what le-XE and I tell you."

  "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 w
here 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 previously 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!" 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.