by K. W. Jeter
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!"
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
destruct
ion 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 us-
His 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 Sarlacc'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
weapo
n 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.
He saw something else then, something that had come
to life as unexpectedly as the buried Sarlacc. The sudden
drop of the line had snapped Boba Fett's head back, so
that his pale, unhelmeted visage was turned toward Dengar
and t he daylight spilling into the cavern from above. The
bounty hunter appeared dead, as though the medical
droids' disregarded warnings had proved true, after all;
it might as well have been a corpse that Dengar and
Neelah had carried through the underground tunnels, and
that now dangled unmoving in midair. . . .
Boba Fett's eyes opened, gazing directly into
Dengar's. Slow-motion time stopped entirely as Fett's
cold regard pierced the other bounty hunter's spirit.
Then time started up again, slamming into microsecond
events. One of Boba Fett's hands raised from his side,
shot out and caught the falling blaster, as sharply and
deftly as an uncoiling serpent striking its prey. The
weapon filled his grasp as though it were an extension of
his being, a part of him as much as the bones of his
spine.
Fett's gaze broke away. As Dengar watched from above,
Boba Fett scanned downward to where the great bulk of the
Sarlacc segment held Neelah trapped against the cavern's
floor. He extended his arm, the blaster's muzzle on the
same direct course as his sight, straight into the
massive curved flank of the Sarlacc.
The cavern filled with blade-edged shadows as the
blaster erupted into coruscating fire, its explosive
touch pulsing at a diagonal across the open space. Its
force was enough to deflect the rope line from vertical,
like a miniature rocket thrusting Boba Fett away from its
flaring burst. Fett kept the blaster's impact pouring
into the same spot on the curved surface of the Sarlacc
as a burning stench mingled with the thick odor of decay
that had already hung in the close, lung-oppressing air.
At the exact same moment the Sarlacc segment reared
upward, stung by the blaster's white-hot needle. Bits of
broken scales and charred flesh scattered across the
cavern; the creature's raw wound, cut deeper by the
continuing fire, sizzled beneath an acrid haze of black