The fat slug had been correct about that, to a degree; the dying man had to admit it. Or was he already dead?-he couldn't tell. This fate, the infinitely slow etching away, molecule by molecule, of epidermis and nerve endings, had been intended for someone else. It struck the dying man as no more unjust than all the rest of the universe's workings that he should suffer it instead.
Or have suffered it. Because the Hutt seemed to have been misinformed about how long the dissolution and torment would last. A few seconds had been more than adequate for pain's new meaning to have become clear, as the enfolding darkness's acids had seeped through uniform and armament, touching skin like the fire of a thousand commingled suns. And those few seconds, and the minutes and hours-days, years?-that followed had indeed seemed to stretch out to eternity...
But they had ended. That pain, beyond anything he had ever endured or inflicted, had come to a stop, replaced by the simpler and duller ebbing away of life force. By comparison, that was a comfort like drifting asleep on pillows of satin filled with downy feathers. Even the blindness, the perfect acidic night, had been broken by a muted dawn. The dying man still could not see, but he could sense, through the T-shaped visor of his helmet and the wet rags swaddling him, the unmistakable photonic warmth of suns against his face and the eroded skin of his chest. Perhaps, the dying man thought, it reached up into the sky and swallowed them, too. The giant mouth, when he'd fallen down its ranks of razor teeth, had seemed that big.
But now he felt gravel and sand beneath his spine, and his own blood miring him to the ground. That had to be some kind of a tactile hallucination. He had no gods to thank, but was grateful anyway for the blessings of madness…
The light on his face dimmed; the differential in temperature was enough that he could just make out the blurred edges of shadow falling upon him. He wondered what new vision his agony-fractured brain was about to conjure up. There were others, he knew, here in the belly of the beast; he had seen them fall and be swallowed up. A little company, the dying man decided. He might as well hallucinate voices, from those about to be digested; it would help pass the long endless hours before his own body's atoms floated free from one another.
One of the voices he heard was his own. "Help …."
"What happened?"
He could almost have laughed, if any twitch of his raw muscles hadn't hurt so much, pushing him toward unconscious oblivion. Shouldn't hallucinations know these things?
"Sarlacc…swallowed me." The words seemed to come of their own volition. "I killed it…blew it up …."
He heard another voice, a female's. "He's dying." The man's voice spoke again, in hushed tones.
"Manaroo-do you know who this is?"
"I don't care. Help me get him inside." The female's shadow fell across him.
Suddenly he felt himself rising, dirt and grit fall ing from his mangled form. The next sensation was that of being thrown across someone's broad shoulder, an arm encircling his waist to steady him. A sense of shame filled the dying man. There had been so many times when he had faced his own extinction-painful or otherwise-the contemplation of his death, and the dismissal of it as being of no concern, had given him strength. And now some weak part of him had summoned up this pitiful fantasy of rescue. Better to die, he thought, than to fear dying.
"Hang on," came the hallucinated voice. "I'll get you someplace safe."
The man called Boba Fett felt the jostle of the other's footsteps, the motion of being carried across the stony ground. For a moment his vision cleared, the blindness dissipating enough that he could see his own hand flopping limp and disjointed, leaving a trail of spattered blood on the sand ….
That was when he knew that what he saw and felt was real. And that he was still alive.
2
A small object, moving by its own power through the cold expanses between the stars, had finally breached a planet's sensory perimeter. Kuat of Kuat had felt the hyperspace messenger pod's approach even before his own corporate security chief came to tell him that it had been intercepted. He had a fine-tuned awareness of machines, from the smallest nano-sporoids to constructions capable of annihilating worlds. It was a family trait, something encoded deep within the Kuat blood for generations.
"Excuse me, Technician"-an obsequious voice came from behind him-"but you asked to be notified as the outer comm units picked up any traces. Of your…package." Kuat of Kuat turned away from the great domed viewport and its vistas of emptiness studded with light. Far beyond the expanded orbit of the planet that bore the name identical to his, the hazy arm of one of the galaxy's more aesthetically pleasing spiral nebulae was about to rise into sight. He tried not to miss things like that; they served to remind him that the universe and all its interconnected workings was, in its essence, a machine like other machines. Even its constituent atoms, beyond the confusion of uncertainty principles and observer effects, ticked like ancient, primitive chrono gears. And finer things than that, Kuat of Kuat told himself, not for the first time. Such as men's spirits. Those were machines as well, however ineffable their substance.
"Very well." He stroked the silky fur of the felinx cradled in his arms; the animal made a deep, barely audible sound of contentment as his long, precise fingers found a specific zone behind the triangular ears. "That's just what I've been expecting." Machines, even the ones built in the Kuat Drive Yards, did not always function as intended; there were random variables that sometimes deposited metaphorical sand in the gears. It was a pleasure-frequent, but still undiminished-when things did work according to plan. "Has there been any readout on the contents?"
"Not yet." Fenald, the security chief, was dressed in the standard Kuat Drive Yards worksuit, devoid of any emblem of rank except for the variable-dispersion blaster slung conspicuously at his hip. "There's a full crew working on it, but"-a wry smile lifted a corner of his mouth-"the encryption codes are rather tight."
"They're meant to be." Kuat of Kuat would not be disappointed if the KDY employees weren't able to crack them; he had designed and implemented them himself. Setting Security's info-analysis division to work on them was a mere test, to see how well he'd done. "I don't care for anyone else reading my mail."
"Of course not." A slight nod in acknowledgment; despite the importance of Kuat Drive Yards as the elite and most powerful contractor of engineering and construction services to the Empire, the formalities of KDY headquarters were minimal, and had been for generations. Pomp and show and courtly flourishes were for those who didn't understand where true power came from. Fenald gestured toward the viewport, its hexagonal strutwork curving three times higher than his boss's imposing two-meter height. "I doubt if anyone has." The felinx purred louder in Kuat of Kuat's arms; he'd found the exact spot wired into its pleasure centers. Born that way; a good amount of the minimal brain mass in the animal's excessively narrow skull-a trait of its inbred species-he'd had to replace with biosimulation circuits, to keep it from bumping into walls and gnawing raw the flesh beneath its fur. His fingertips felt the edge of the cut into the animal's skull as he stroked it. Transmuted even this far into a true machine, the animal was much more satisfactory, and-in ways Kuat of Kuat appreciated-even more beautiful.
A single bell note sounded in the spacious office suite of KDY's hereditary CEO. Kuat of Kuat turned back to gaze at the viewport's limitless vista as his security chief leaned the side of his head against the small transponder embedded in his palm. The felinx had closed its eyes in ecstasy; it didn't see the rising edge of the far-distant nebula, like luminous smoke against black.