The bounty hunter's parsimonious streak, though, was apparent to Neelah as she sat in the cache's opening-it had been hollowed out of a sheer rock face, then camouflaged-and watched Boba Fett reassembling himself, piece by piece. None of the weapons or components of his battle armor that had been damaged by the Sarlacc's digestive secretions was discarded until Fett had examined and judged it beyond repair. He had already salvaged most of the personal armaments with which Neelah had seen him equipped back at Jabba's palace; a small blaster pistol had been reduced in the Sarlacc's gut to a fused lump of metal, and the propulsive charges for some of the larger ammunition had leaked away, rendering the shells useless. Those were replaced with exact duplicates from the sealed containers that Fett had dragged out from the cache's deep interior.
Like watching a droid, thought Neelah, not for the first time. Or some piece of Imperial battle machinery, capable of making repairs to itself. She had wrapped her arms around her knees and continued to watch as the human elements of Boba Fett had been progressively submerged and hidden beneath the layers of armor and weaponry, the hard mechanicals seemingly replacing the soft, wounded tissue beneath. The narrow visor of his restored helmet took away the last vestiges of humanity, the gaze of eyes like any other man's, caught in acid-ravaged flesh, its fevered blood seeping through the pores. ...
"He's pushing himself past all therapeutic limits." SHS1-B's high-pitched voice fussed from a place just outside Neelah's awareness. "Both le-XE and I have tried communicating with him, in an effort to make him aware of the necessity for rest. Otherwise, the potential for a serious physiological relapse will escalate to a lifethreatening status." Neelah glanced over at the medical droid that had trundled up next to her. "Really?" The ends of the droid's jointed appendages clicked against each other, as though imitating a nervous reaction of living creatures.
"That's what you're all in a stew about?"
"Of course." SHSl-B turned the lenses of its di agnostician optics toward her. "That is our programmed function. If there was some way to initiate a change in our basic design, even by means of a complete memory wipe, you can be assured that le-XE and I would immediately submit to it, no matter now disorienting it might be. Patching up and mending supposedly sentient creatures, who continually insist upon placing themselves in dangerous situations, is a tiresome and never-ending occupation."
"Eternity," chimed in le-XE. The other droid had rolled up behind its companion. "Fatigue."
"Concisely put." SHSl-B'shead unit gave a nod. "I expect we will be applying sterile bandages and administering anesthetics until the teeth of our gears are worn to nubs."
"Deal with it," said Neelah. "As for our Boba Fett"-she tilted her head toward the bounty hunter, still working at cleaning the rocket launcher's innards-"I wouldn't worry about him. You took care of what was needed at the time. But now…" Her nod was one of reluctant but genuine admiration. "Now he's way beyond all your medicine."
"That is a diagnosis to which it is difficult to give credence." The medical droid's tone turned huffy. "The individual being discussed is made of flesh and bone like other creatures-"
"Is he?" Neelah knew that was true, even though, when she looked at Boba Fett, she couldn't help but wonder.
"Of course he is," replied the nettled SHS1-B. "And as such, there are limits to his endurance and capabilities."
"That's where you're wrong." Neelah leaned back against the stone of the cache's entrance. She hoped it wouldn't be too much longer before Dengar returned. For a lot of reasons. If the parties responsible for the bombing raid decided to come back and do a more thorough job on their targets, she was sure Boba Fett would survive, but her own chances would be considerably fewer. Fett had plans for getting her and Dengar, as well as himself, off Tatooine and out to interstellar space, where they would be safe for at least a little while. And long enough to set further plans into motion. The only obstacle lay in getting the comm equipment that Fett needed. He couldn't go into Mos Eisley to buy or steal it, not without raising a general alert that he was still alive; that was why Dengar had gone into the spaceport instead. But if he screws up, thought Neelah, then what? She and Fett would still be stuck out here, waiting not for Dengar, but for whatever the next attempt to elimi nate them would be.
In the meantime the medical droid persisted in its arguments. "How could I be wrong? I have been extensively programmed in the nature of humanoid physiology-"
"Then you're a slow learner." Neelah closed her eyes and tilted her head back against a pillow of rock. "When you're dealing with someone like Boba Fett, it's not the human parts that make the difference. It's the other parts."
The droid fell mercifully silent. It either knew when it was defeated or when further discussion was pointless. He left the swoop bike in the dry, dusty hills outside Mos Eisley, then walked the rest of the way into the spaceport. Dengar figured he'd draw less attention to himself that way. And right now creatures noticing him-the wrong creatures, at least-was the last thing he wanted.
Before heading in, along one of the old foot trails that led to Mos Eisley's back alleys, Dengar uprooted some dead scruff brush and hastily camouflaged the swoop with it. The stripped-down, one-person repulsorlift vehicle belonged to somebody else. Or used to-Big Gizz, the leader of one of Tatooine's toughest swoop gangs, had crashed and burned on this machine. Gizz had been hard and mean enough to have been one of Jabba the Hutt's most valuable employees, but that hadn't been enough to keep his leathery hide intact; creatures who worked for Jabba just naturally seemed to end up with short life expec tancies. If the work itself didn't wind up getting them killed, then their own violent natures brought about their fates. Dengar had never thought that the pay scale that Jabba offered was worth the risk. Big Gizz had been luckier than most; there had been enough of him left to scrape up and patch back together. Whatever he was up to these days, he had presumably gotten himself some new transportation to do it with.
The squat, indifferently maintained shapes of Mos Eisley came slowly into view as Dengar worked his way down the last, loose-graveled hillside. His on-foot progress wasn't much slower than the swoop had been, crossing the Dune Sea from where he had left Neelah and Boba Fett. The swoop had been unusable wreckage when Dengar had first found it, the bent and scattered pieces testifying to the way in which Big Gizz had ended that particular run. Dengar had pieced the vehicle back together, even buying and grafting on the bits of the repulsor-engine circuitry that were too burned out to be made functional again, then stashed it away near his main hiding place in the desert. A bounty hunter's life was one in which a working form of transport, no matter how banged up and slow, could be the difference between cashing in on valuable merchandise or winding up as bones being pecked at by the Dune Sea's scavengers. Tatooine's twin suns were smearing the sky dusky orange as Dengar approached the spaceport's ragged perimeter. Digging the swoop out from the bombing raid's aftermath, the tumbled rocks and displaced sand dunes, had taken a little while longer than he'd expected it to; the swoop had been buried nearly two meters deep, and he found it only because he'd had the foresight to tag it with a short-distance location beacon. Just my luck, he had thought sourly, when he'd finally managed to drag the swoop to the surface and start it up. The forward stabilizer blades had been bent almost double by the largest boulder that had crashed onto the minimal vehicle; any movement speedier than a relative crawl sent a spine-jarring shudder through the frame, quickly es calating to a rolling spin that would have crashed him to the ground if he hadn't backed off the throttle. The swoop's damaged condition had necessitated a more circuitous route across the Dune Sea wastes than he would have taken otherwise; he might have been able to outrun a Tusken Raider's bantha mount, but not a shot from one of their ancient but effective rifles.