by Ben Acker
They went over the last hummock, and the transport ships came into view. So did Lorica, who stood on the boarding ramp of one of the ships with her boot in her hand. She was scraping it on the edge of the ramp. They parked their bikes and walked toward the ship.
“There’s muck on my boot,” she told them as they approached.
“I know how it feels,” Dec said.
Lorica stopped scraping and glared at them. She pulled her boot back on. “You’re not supposed to be on the ships. None of us are. I’m not even supposed to be here, which is why I’m about to bike back out onto this garbage planet and look for, I don’t know, some half-deteriorated Y-wing.” She shook her head, focusing. “Anyway, you’ll get in more trouble.”
“We couldn’t possibly get in more trouble,” Sari countered.
“You’ll get me in more trouble, I mean,” Lorica clarified.
Dec sneered. “We have to contact the base. You wouldn’t understand.”
“I understand a lot,” she said. The statement seemed loaded with meaning.
“Can you just trust us?” Mattis asked.
Lorica barked a laugh.
Mattis tried complete honesty. “Jo is a traitor.”
Lorica shook her head. “What are you talking about?”
“Aygee saw him,” Mattis said.
“How do you know? Wait, you fixed him?” Lorica asked Sari.
“Dec did,” AG said.
“Good. That wasn’t right, what Jo did, but that doesn’t make him a traitor. What if you’re wrong?” she asked AG.
“I ain’t.”
“But what if you are?”
“I ain’t.”
“Can you allow for the possibility?”
AG considered that. “Naw,” he said.
“Permission to board?” Dec said wryly as he, AG, and Sari headed up the boarding ramp and inside. Lorica grabbed Mattis by the arm. He felt that same floating-and-sinking sensation in his gut, like he might cry or laugh or do both.
“Mattis, make sense for a second.” She was grave. “If you take this to Ackbar and you’re wrong—you can’t just run around the Resistance base yelling ‘traitor.’ People like Ackbar take that really seriously.”
“It is serious,” Mattis countered.
“But if you’re wrong…you’ve made accusations. You’ve thrown things into upset. You could be in more trouble than you are now. I don’t think there’s any coming back from this accusation. You could get us all kicked out.”
“Aygee isn’t wrong,” Mattis said, though a bit uncertainly. “He can’t be.”
“He could be,” she reasoned. “Maybe Jo’s doing something for General Organa. Who knows? Jo wouldn’t betray the Resistance. Jo loves the Resistance.” She didn’t let go of his arm, but she softened her grip. “You understand that, Mattis. He needs the Resistance just like you do. Just like I do.”
Mattis’s head dropped. She had that effect on him. She weakened his resolve every time. It was because he knew she was smarter and more accomplished than he was. He trusted Lorica, despite the fact that she didn’t seem to like him very much. Maybe he trusted her because of that. He wished having the Force meant he could resist her sway.
“I’ll get them to talk to Jo first,” he said.
“Good enough,” she agreed.
Mattis hurried into the ship. He made his case with the others. They knew what AG had seen. They owed it to Jo to hear him out. Dec waved that away, but Mattis insisted. If Jo hadn’t judged Dec and AG instantly and regarded them as trouble, if he hadn’t decided that Sari was just muscle, wouldn’t they all have been better off? Wouldn’t they have been a more cohesive unit? Well, there they were, judging Jo just as rashly. They owed it to him to confront him and find out if there was any explanation. Mattis promised Dec that he could punch Jo really hard if they were right. Dec agreed to those terms, and moments later, they were all, including Lorica, biking through the swamp to confront Jo.
THEY FOUND JO in a clearing on a surprisingly lush piece of dry land, staring out into distant space. They got off their bikes. Mattis felt as if he were intruding. But this wasn’t Jo’s home or secret sanctum. He had received the same punishment they all had. Based on what AG had told them, he should receive even more. So why was Mattis unsure, all of a sudden?
Dec obviously had no such pause in his convictions. He marched up to Jo and cuffed him on his shoulder. “Finding it hard to do your dirty work out here, chief?”
“It’s all dirty work out here,” Jo said, sighing.
Dec was taken aback. “Did you—I’m sorry, did you just make a joke?”
Lorica told Jo, “This may not be the best time for jokes.”
Dec said, “Aw, don’t dash his dreams, Lor. It’s his first joke!”
“Don’t call me Lor,” she snapped at Dec.
“Why aren’t you all scavenging?” Jo asked, shaking off whatever reverie he’d been in.
“’Cause we gotta talk to you,” Dec said. He poked Jo in the chest.
“Knock it off, Hansen. Get back out into the bog.”
Mattis and Sari stood slightly apart from the others. Sari was peering up at the nearby treetops, chewing on her bottom lip.
“I got your clamp off my brother. We’re here to give you a chance to explain before we report you.”
“You don’t want to do that, Hansen,” Jo warned.
“Personally, I hope you don’t explain yourself.” On don’t, he went to poke Jo again. Jo was prepared. He grabbed Dec’s wrist and held it so firmly that his knuckles turned white. “Let me go,” Dec said hoarsely.
“What’s your problem, Hansen?” Jo asked. “You’re the one got us sent to this backwater rock. You have no call to come after me about it.”
“He thinks you’re a traitor, Jo,” Lorica explained. “Tell him you’re not.”
Jo wasn’t listening to her, though. He was too mad. “You probably feel right at home here,” he said to Dec. “It’s all sludge and—and nothing. Is this why you joined up, Hansen? To wade through muck and scrap broken-down landspeeders? Couldn’t you have just done that back on your bog-trash home planet?”
Dec fumed. He wrenched himself free from Jo’s grip, and both of them stumbled back. Jo knocked into AG, sending him sprawling to the ground. AG’s landing made a squishing noise that got Sari’s attention for a moment before she looked back up to the nearby trees.
“You knock my brother down?” Dec hollered at Jo.
“He didn’t mean to!” Lorica shouted.
Dec didn’t care. “You try to wipe him? You threaten him? And then you knock him down?” He charged at Jo and dragged him into the mud. They, too, landed with a quaggy sound. It really was a fight now. Sari and Mattis were on the outside of it. Sari was trying to figure out how to get in the middle of it, and whether she wanted to. She hated to fight. Mattis was distracted by, of all things, a bird circling overhead. It had three dark purple spots on its chest and Mattis felt like it was important in that moment to recall what kind of bird it was. Typical, Mattis thought. Rather than take action, I’m birdwatching. I’m no hero. He, like Sari, tried to figure out how he could help his friends.
Dec and Jo grappled on the ground, throwing punches and calling each other names through clenched teeth. AG tried to right himself nearby.
“You’ve had this coming,” Jo said, and walloped Dec in the jaw. Dec fell forward onto Jo, elbowing him in the chest, hard.
Lorica threw herself into it. Mattis didn’t know what side she was on. It seemed that she was only trying to break up the tussle. She kicked Dec off of Jo. When Dec scrabbled backward, Jo rolled, knocking Lorica into the mud, too. She threw an elbow into the side of his face. And again, Mattis was distracted by that bird, circling slowly, drifting in the air currents. If he could identify what kind of bird it was, he would stop being distracted. Why couldn’t he think of it? Why did it seem so important?
Sari was no longer at his side. How long had he been staring into the sky? It was ha
rd to tell how long anything had been happening. Had the fight lasted seconds? Minutes? Sari was edging around the side of the thatch of brambles on which they fought. She wasn’t looking to get into the fight herself, but Mattis could see she desperately wanted to pull someone, anyone, out of the fray.
A few meters from them, Dec and Lorica rolled in the muddy thicket. Jo was pulling Dec off of her. Dec was covered in grime; he probably didn’t even know whom he was fighting anymore. Not that that stopped him. Just behind Jo, AG stood, wobbled on his feet, then got knocked down again as Jo backed into him. He made a startled whooping noise.
Oh, no. All at once, Mattis remembered the name of the bird circling them. The duns thackston. He prayed all the Phirmist prayers he could remember that he was wrong.
“Sari,” Mattis said. “Tell me that’s not a duns thackston.” Mattis pointed up at the bird, which cawed as if it were greeting the two people looking up at it.
The color drained from Sari’s face. “Three purple dots.” She looked at the bird then down at the fracas.
“The duns thackston.” Mattis swallowed.
No one heard him.
“The duns thackston!” he shouted now. “They build their nests!” Dec, Lorica, and Jo were apart now, panting. But they were focused on each other. “Guys!” At least Lorica looked at him. “They build their nests!”
“What are you talking about, Mattis?” Lorica snarled.
“The duns thackston!”
“What—oof!” She was blown over by Dec, who grabbed her and threw her to the ground. “Get off!”
Jo gave Dec a good kick in the side, and as Dec went over, he grabbed on to Jo’s leg, pulling him down, too.
“It builds a strong covering of branches and mud and stuff over a sinkhole, you guys!” Mattis tried to warn them, but they really weren’t listening. “Sari—get them out.”
Sari took a step toward the fighters. Mattis kept trying to explain.
“If there were just a hole in the ground, no animals would…They’d go around.”
“Shut up about holes, Banz!” Jo barked.
“The duns thackston builds a kind of nest out of sticks and mud over the hole so that animals will think it’s just more ground and walk over it and fall through. They’re symbiotic!”
Sari took another step toward them.
“The duns thackston picks clean the bones of whatever they don’t finish.”
“Of whatever what don’t finish?” asked Dec.
“Duns thackstons have a symbiotic relationship with sarlaccs!” Mattis shouted, and everybody froze. They were standing above a sarlacc pit? The fight was over.
Sari reached out. “Don’t move. Take my hand, Dec.”
“I have to move to take your hand,” he said, reaching for her. Everyone could feel the ground beneath them giving a little with every shift of weight. The sarlacc’s prey tended to be larger than humans, so the nest had lasted so far, but from the sound of it, it wouldn’t last much longer.
“Dec, pull Jo with you. You can reach him,” Lorica called out.
Dec looked to Jo and then to AG, who had been knocked aside. “Explain yourself, Jo.”
Everyone groaned.
“This isn’t the time or the place!” Sari yelled. “Let’s get out of danger first and do the rest somewhere else, far, far away.”
“Tell us what you’re up to, Jo. I got all day,” Dec said, reaching out for Jo.
“You smirking muck-dweller,” Jo yelled, leaping at Dec, tackling him, and pulling Sari onto the thatch, too. The nest cracked and buckled, and as a purple-spotted duns thackston cawed eagerly overhead, Mattis watched his friends crash into the sarlacc pit.
MATTIS GRABBED LORICA’S hand as she fell. The force of it wrenched his shoulder and pulled him to the ground, where he laid at the lip of the pit. He took her other hand and tried to pull her up and out, but to no avail. He started to scoot backward, but he felt his shoulder scream in pain.
“You’re not going to be able to pull me out of here,” she told him with more calm than he could find in himself.
“Then climb up. Do something!” Mattis panicked.
“There are only teeth under me,” she told him, as if that was something he already knew but didn’t want to admit. “You have to let me go, Mattis.”
“What? No!” he cried.
She kicked at a tentacle grabbing for her foot. The sounds of their friends echoed off the walls.
“Do you hear that?” Lorica asked. “The others are down there fighting for their lives. That means the fall didn’t kill them. Now let me go help them fight and buy you the time to save us all.”
“How am I going to do that?” Mattis asked.
“By getting us all out of there,” she told him matter-of-factly.
“How am I going to do that?” Mattis asked, his grip slipping.
“Figure it out!” she yelled as she fell.
A tentacle grabbed her in the air and pulled her out of sight.
Mattis looked around for any sort of rope. A vine would do. Anything that he could lower into the pit and use to pull them out. He scanned the trees. No vines. Plenty of moss. No help. He tossed aside pieces of the duns thackston’s remaining nest in case there were any sizable sticks that could reach. Nothing. He wished those speeder bikes had side bags packed with emergency kits for such a situation, and that’s when he realized that the answer had been in plain sight the whole time. He climbed onto the speeder bike, pushed it to the edge of the sarlacc pit, and rode it into the humid maw.
Mattis had never wasted an opportunity to go as fast as he was allowed on a speeder bike. He wished they’d trained him for this kind of slow vertical descent. It was more like riding a roto-cropper than a speeder bike, he thought as he realized that he’d performed that action hundreds of times back on Durkteel. Confidence he’d never felt surged through him as he went past the downward-facing teeth that prevented escape. He beamed as he saw his friends, the dregs of J-Squadron, all armed with sticks from the nest, fighting as a team for the first time.
They were standing on soft tissue through which the mostly digested remains of a rancor emerged. A duns thackston picked at the giant creature and cawed angrily at the disturbance.
“Anybody need a ride?” Mattis asked as a tentacle whipped the speeder bike, knocking him onto the ground and covering him with digestive goo. The sarlacc’s beaked tongue snatched at Mattis. As it closed around his head, Sari shoved a thick branch into the tender inside of the mandible.
Dec grabbed Mattis by the ankles and pulled him out just as the sarlacc snapped the branch into pieces. “You owe me one, Mattis.” Sari winked. “That was my best twig.”
She helped Mattis up and he gagged on the rancid breath of the gaping gullet surrounding them. AG gave them sticks to bat the tentacles away and they did.
“I thought the planet stank out there,” muttered Mattis.
The sound of the speeder bike powering up drew their attention to Jo and Lorica, who were flying up and out of the pit.
“Just when you think someone has your back, because he literally had your back against this hole-in-the-ground monster, he goes and does a thing like that!” Dec said, taking his frustration out on the sarlacc. “If this thing doesn’t kill me, I swear, I’ll kill them.”
Three tentacles whipped around Dec, and that beaked tongue shot out again. “Sari! Help him!” AG yelled, trying to pull the tentacles off his brother. Sari didn’t respond; she couldn’t. Tentacles held her tight. Mattis whacked at the tentacles as hard as he could until he felt another one wrap around his foot and flip him upside down. He saw two more pulling at AG, trying to rip him in half. The beaked tongue weaved, pointing to Mattis as if deciding whom to eat first.
It didn’t get the chance. Lorica and Jo flew back in on a pair of speeder bikes and dragged their hot engines along the walls of the sarlacc, burning it. The creature bellowed in pain all around them, and its tentacles loosened, then went for Lorica and Jo.
&nbs
p; Despite the fear and danger all around them, Mattis felt like they were doing maneuvers they’d practiced a thousand times. Lorica and Jo crisscrossed in the narrow wet space, using a flight pattern that the angry mouth in which they flew couldn’t comprehend. Mattis and Dec stood back to back with Sari and AG, turning, defending, reporting status. Lorica and Jo called for the pairs to disengage and separate. Each bike drove between a pair and with a “Now!” familiar from countless evac drills, they mounted the moving speeders and crisscrossed out again. Their momentum shattered the teeth in their path. The bikes took some damage, but not as much as the sarlacc.
The two bikes, with all of J-Squadron clinging to them, spit out into the swamp. The speeder bikes shuddered and died. Mattis and his friends fell into a heap, one on top of the other, all of them covered in mud, all of them bloodied and used up, and all of them laughing, just happy to be alive, together.
A crashing noise came from the brush behind them, and though they were drained, all six of them strained to their feet and took a defensive position. Where one ended and the next began must have been difficult to discern, so caked in mud and sticks and gunk were they. Which explained why, as he burst out of the brush on his speeder bike, Klimo cried out in horror.
Seeing it was them, he said, “Friends! What did I miss?”
BY EVENING, they’d traded the mud- and gloop-crusted clothing for clean jumpsuits that they found on the transport shuttles. Those got fairly muck-covered, too—that was inevitable on Vodran—but at least there was no sarlacc goo on them.
While the rest of them were falling into and climbing out of the sarlacc pit, Klimo had stumbled onto a small ridge. It was circled by creeping vegetation and shrouded by low-slung treetops, but its center was clear and somewhat dry. There they built a fire. They’d regret bringing piles of blankets out to the ridge, but the thought of sleeping in the transports reminded them too much of the claustrophobia of being inside the sarlacc’s mouth. Plus, Dec snored. Out there, his sleep snorts would be just one instrument in the orchestra of animal noises surrounding them all night.