by K. W. Jeter
glowing red, showed on the panel embedded in the
magnetically reinforced durasteel. "Don't move. I promise
I won't hurt you-but do n't move."
"Are you frightened?" The taller of the two medical
droids, a basic MD5 general-practitioner model, scanned
her against the hole's rough circle of evening sky. "Your
pulse is quite elevated for a standard hu-manoid form.
Plus"-a tiny grid irised open on the droid's dark-
enameled head, drawing in an air sample-"your
perspiration contains significant levels of hormones
indicating an emotionally agitated state."
"Shut up. I also want you to do that." Rocks slid
loose beneath her as she scrambled down toward the
droids. "Just shut up."
"Did you hear that?" The taller droid swiveled its
multilensed gaze toward its companion, a white-banded MD3
pharmaceutical model. "She's telling us to be quiet."
"Rudeness." Dust sifted from the shorter one as it
tucked its syringes and dispensing appendages closer to
itself. "Foresight of difficulties."
"Great-" Anger spurred her heart even faster. "Then
you can't say you didn't know this was coming." She
grabbed a vital-signs monitor sticking out antennalike
from the taller one's head and slammed the droid against
the dirt wall of the warren entrance, hard enough to send
the lights dancing across its front display panel.
Another pull in the opposite direction sent it crashing
into the other droid; that one squealed as it toppled
over, exposing the wheeled traction devices below the
lower rim of its cylindrical body. "Now, how about
shutting up?"
"It seems like a very good idea." The taller droid
retreated, flattening itself against the unopened secu
rity hatch.
She gulped down a deep breath, trying through sheer
willpower to slow down her heartbeat and still the
trembling in her hands. Few violent acts had been
required in her life-as far as she knew; she had no
memories of any life before finding herself at Jabba's
palace-and even as something as minor as banging a little
sense into the medical droids' heads was enough to dizzy
her. Get used to it, she sternly told herself. The
realization had already come to her that a lot more scary
things were going to happen. That was all right; at least
she was alive. Others in her position hadn't been so
fortunate. The memory was still vivid inside her, of
seeing the other dancing girl falling into the pit
beneath Jabba's palace. That memory ended with screams,
and the slavering growls of Jabba's pet rancor.
"Excuse me, your ladyship . . ."
That puzzled her. Neither Jabba the Hutt nor any of
the others at his court had ever called her anything like
that.
"But you require medical attention." The taller droid
kept its speech mechanism at minimal volume. A handlike
examination module, with a fiber-optic light source
mounted at the wrist, reached tentatively toward her
face. "That's a very bad wound. . . ."
She slapped away the droid's hand, before it could
touch the edges of the jagged line running down one side
of her face. "It'll heal."
"With a scar." The taller droid shone the beam of its
handlight lower, down to where the wound, the physical
memory of a Gamorrean pikestaff, ended below her throat.
"We could do something about that. To make it better."
"Why bother?" Other memories, nearly as unpleasant as
those from the pit, flooded her thoughts. Whatever her
life might have been before, the time in Jabba's palace
had been enough to convince her that beauty was a
dangerous thing to possess. It'd been just enough to
entice Jabba's sticky hands-and the hands of those
underlings who had been his current favorites-but not
enough to protect her when the Hutt grew bored with her
charms. "I can do without it," she said bitterly.
"Anger," noted the other medical droid. Need
lessly-the scent of negative emotion was almost palpable
in the warren hole's entrance. "Treatment
inadvisability."
"I remember seeing you." The taller droid's low,
soothing voice continued. "At Jabba's palace." The
handlight beam moved across her face. "You were part of
the entertainment."
"I was-" She glanced over her shoulder toward the
warren's darkening entrance, to make sure no one was
approaching, then turned back toward the droids. "But not
now."
"Oh?" An inquiring gaze seemed to move behind the
droid's optic receptors. "Then what are you?"
"I ... I don't know. . . ."
"Name," spoke the shorter of the two droids.
"Designation."
"They called me ... Jabba called me Neelah." She
frowned. Something-the absence of memory, rather than
anything she could actually recall-told her that wasn't
right. That name's a lie, she thought. "But . . . that's
what they called me. . . ."
"There's worse names." Voice brightening, the taller
droid tried to comfort her. "Consider my own subidentity
coding-" Its complicated hand pointed to a data readout
on the front of its dark metallic body. "SHS1-B. Most
sentient creatures can't even pronounce it. This one's
luckier."
"1e-XE." The shorter droid extruded a pill-dispensing
module and gently tapped the back of her hand with it.
"Acquaintance; pleasure."
They're working on me, thought Neelah. She knew
enough about medical droids-from where?- to be aware of
the soothing effects they were designed to provoke in
their patients. Anesthetic radiation; she could feel a
low-level electromagnetic field locking into sync with
the neurons inside her head, drawing out the lulling
endorphins. . . .
"Knock it off," she growled. She shook her head,
snapping herself free of the droids' influence. "I don't
need that, either. Not now." Neelah drew one hand back in
a small but effective fist. "If I have to whack you
again, I will."
Like extinguishing a torch, the field abruptly cut
out. "As you wish," said SHS1-B. "We're only trying to
help."
"You can do that by telling me where he is." The
wound across her face stung once more, but she ignored
it.
"Who?"
She nodded toward the security hatch. "The bounty
hunter. The one whose hiding place this is."
"Dengar?" One of SHS1-B's metallic hands pointed
toward the warren opening behind her. "He's back at
Jabba's palace."
"Supplies," noted le-XE. "Various."
"That's right." SHS1-B opened a small cargo pod
bolted to the side of its body. "He sent us back here
with what we required. As you see-antibiotics, metabolic
accelerators, sterile gel dressings-"
"Fine." Neelah interrupted the droid's inventory of
its contents. "But Dengar-he's still back at the palace?"
find one of Jabba's caches of off-planet edibles. That
might take some time, though-the palace has been very
badly looted by the Hutt's former employees."
"Mess." le-XE rotated the top dome of its cylinder
back and forth. "Disgust."
There wasn't time to consider her decision. "Open the
hatch," said Neelah, pointing to the magnetically sealed
disk, the coded digits still blinking in its readout
panel. "I want to go inside."
"Dengar told us not to let-" The taller of the two
droids caught the look in Neelah's eyes. "All right, all
right; I'm opening it."
The tunnel on the other side of the hatch descended
at close to a forty-five-degree angle. Heading down it,
with the droids clunking behind her, Neelah felt a
claustrophobic panic crawling along her spine. The
darkness and the close, scarcely ventilated air felt like
the tunnel through which she'd crawled to escape from
Jabba's palace. After what had happened to her poor
friend Oola, any risk had seemed preferable to winding up
as rancor food.
Though her own death had almost found her, before she
had gotten away. The scything blade of a Gamorrean
perimeter guard's pikestaff had slashed the raw-edged
wound on her face. She'd left the blade buried halfway
through the guard's throat; Jabba had always made the
mistake of hiring thugs who were bigger than they were
fast. She'd only felt fear afterward, as she'd stepped
over the widening pool of blood, then ran into the
desert.
In this dimly lit space, she was finally able to
stand upright in a central chamber. "Where's the other
one?" She glanced over her shoulder at the two medical
droids as they emerged from the tunnel and clicked back
into their normal positions. "The one you're taking care
of?"
"Dengar told us-" SHS1-B's voice snapped silent.
"Over here," it said grudgingly. The taller droid led
Neelah past disorganized stacks of weapons and ammunition
modules, mixed with the discarded wrappings of
autothermal field-ration containers. "It's not really
suitable-this patient should've been medevac'd to a
hospital immediately-but we've done the best we can. . .
."
Neelah tuned out the droid's words. At the low,
rounded entrance to the side chamber, she halted and
peered inside. "Is he ... is he awake?" A dim glow filled
the space; a black cable ran from a shielded worklight to
a fuel-cell power generator in the middle of the main
chamber's clutter. "Can he see me?"
"Not with what we gave him." SHSl-B stood just behind
her. "I prescribed a five-percent obliviane solution from
le-XE's anesthetic stocks. On a constant basis, too; the
patient's injuries are unusually severe. That was one of
the reasons we had to go back to the palace, to try and
find more. But if we didn't, the pain from this kind of
trauma could go into a feedback loop and completely burn
out th e patient's central nervous system."
She stepped into the chamber, ducking under the
doorway. An improvised bed, polyfoam stuffed inside
flexible freight sheathing, left only a small space
between the unconscious man and the medical droids'
intravenous units and monitoring equipment. She squeezed
past the humming machines, dials, and tiny screens
ticking with slow pulses of light, and stood looking down
at someone whose face she had never seen before.
One of her hands reached to touch him, but stopped a
few centimeters away from his brow. He looks worse than I
do, thought Neelah. The man's flesh looked as raw as it
had when she'd found him the first time, out in the
desert; the skin that he had lost in the Sarlacc's
digestive tract was replaced now with a transparent
membrane, linked to tubes trickling fluids from the wall
of machines alongside the bed. "What's this?" She touched
the clear substance; it felt cold and slick.
"Sterile nutrient casing." SHS1-B reached out and
made a slight adjustment to one of the equipment
controls. "It's what we normally use on severe burn
victims, when there has been major epidermal loss. When
we were in the service of the late Jabba the Hutt, we saw
and treated a lot of burns."
"Explosions," said le-XE.
"Just so." SHSl-B lifted part of its carapace in an
approximation of a humanoid shrug. "The kind of persons
who worked for Jabba-the rougher sort of his
employees-they were always blowing themselves up, one way
or another."
"Turnover. High rate."
"That's true; there were always some we just couldn't
put back together. But le-XE did get rather skilled at
burn-treatment protocols. This individual's somatic
trauma, however, is a little different." SHS1-B scanned
over the unconscious figure. "No one, as far as can be
recalled from our memory banks, has ever survived even
temporary ingestion by a Sarlacc. So we're doing the best
we can, with what we've got."
Neelah glanced over at the medical droid. "Is he
going to live?"
"Hard to tell. An exact prognosis for this patient is
difficult to make, due to both the severity and the
unusual nature of his injuries. It's not just the epider
mal loss; le-XE and I have determined that there was also
exposure to unknown toxins while he was in the Sarlacc's
gut. We've attempted to counteract the effects of those
substances, but the results are uncertain. If we had
access to records of other such humanoid-Sarlacc
encounters, the probability of his survival could be
calculated. But we don't. Though just on a personal
basis"-SHSl-B's voice lowered, a simulation of
confidentiality-"I'm surprised that this individual is
still alive at all. Something else must be keeping him
going. Something inside him."
The droid's words puzzled her. "Like what?"
"I don't know," replied SHS1-B. "Some things are not
a matter of medical knowledge. Not the kind I have, at
any rate."
She looked back at the figure on the bed. Even like,
this, with his mere human face exposed and unconscious
beneath the machines' care, his presence brought a
chilling unease around her own heart. There's something,
thought Neelah, between us. Some invisible connection,
that she had caught the tiniest glimpse of back in
Jabba's palace. When she had looked up to the gallery and
she had seen this man, unmistakable even when masked;
seen him and felt the touch of fear. Not because of what
she'd remembered at that moment, but because of what she
couldn't remember. If this man stood somewhere in her
past, he stood in shadows, stretching back farther and
deeper than any mere rancor pit.
"What about Dengar?" With another effort of will,
Neelah brought herself bac
k to the present. "Why's he
doing this? Taking care of him?"
"I have no idea." SHS1-B's optic receptors gazed at
her blankly. "He didn't tell us, when he came to the
palace and found us. And frankly, that's not a matter of
concern to us."
"Unimportance," said le-XE.
"We're programmed to provide medical care. After
Jabba the Hutt's death, we were just glad to be provided
with an opportunity to do that."
That left the other bounty hunter's agenda as a
mystery to her. She'd taken a chance when she left this
one out on the desert sands, where Dengar would find him.
She'd been horrified by the extent of his injuries; there
would have been no way she could have taken care of the
rawly bleeding man. In Jabba's palace, she had seen
enough to be aware of the enmity, the professional
rivalry and personal hatred, that existed among all
bounty hunters-but then, this one would have been no more
dead if Dengar had found him, then gone ahead and stood
on his throat until he'd stopped moving. Instead, a
certain strange sense of relief had stirred in her as
she'd crouched behind an outcropping and had witnessed
Dengar examining the injured man. That same inexplicable
emotion had risen when she'd followed the medical droids
to this hiding place and had found the man still alive. .
. .
There wasn't time to ponder what that meant. You've
been here long enough, she warned herself. Whatever
Dengar's motives might be for keeping his rival alive, he
might not be so charitably inclined toward her. Bounty
hunters were secretive creatures; they had to be, in
their trade. Dengar might not be happy to find that
someone else was aware of not only his hiding place, but
what-and who-was inside it.
"I'm going to leave now," Neelah told the droids.
"You carry on with your work. This man must stay alive-do
you understand that?"
"We'll do our best. That's what we were created for."
"And-you're not to tell Dengar anything about me.
About my being here at all."
"But he might ask," said SHSl-B. "Whether somebody
had been here or not. We're programmed to be truthful."
"Let's put it this way." Neelah leaned her scarred
face closer to the droid's optics. "If you tell Dengar
about me, I'll come back here and take you apart, and
I'll scatter your pieces all across the Dune Sea. Both of
you. And then you won't be able to do your jobs, will
