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 back 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 you?"
SHS1-B appeared to mull over her statement for only a few seconds. "That certainly overrides the truthfulness programming."
"Silence," interjected le-XE hastily. "Completeness."
"Good." She glanced around the chamber to see if she'd left any telltale sign of her visit. Against the base of the rough-surfaced wall was something she hadn't spotted before. She stepped closer to it and saw that it was a pile of rags, the tattered shreds that she'd found still clinging, wet with the Sarlacc's digestive fluids, to the injured man's torso. On top of the pile was another object, not rags but metal, etched by its time in the beast's gut, but still recognizable. Neelah leaned down and picked up the helmet with its unmistakably narrow, T-shaped visor.
That was what she had seen before. In Jabba's palace-the helmet's mask was a cruel, implacable face in itself, the gaze hidden inside as sharp as any cutting blade. Neelah grasped the helmet in both hands, holding it before her, like a skull or part of a dead machine. Even empty, it looked back at her in silence-and she was afraid.
Boba Fett…
The name sounded in her thoughts, though not spoken by her. That was what he'd been called. She knew that much; she'd heard the name whispered, by those who'd both hated and dreaded him.
"You'd better go now." The medical droid's voice broke into her thoughts. "It won't be long before Dengar returns."
Her hands trembled as she set the helmet back down on the pile of rags. At the chamber's entrance, she stopped and looked back at the figure on the bed. A thread of something almost like pity crept into the knot of fear inside her.
She turned and hurried away, toward the slanting tunnel that would lead her to the more comforting darkness outside.
There had been voices. He'd heard them, from some where on the other side of a blind sea.
He supposed, in a still-functioning area of his brain, that that was part of dying. In a cortical nexus lying under the weight of pain and blurry not-pain, the remains of his mind and spirit picked over the few scraps of sensory data that impinged upon the living corpse that his body had become. They were like messages from another world, frustratingly incomplete and mysterious. Of all the voices he'd heard, only one had been a woman's. Not the same one as before, which he could remember being addressed as Manaroo; he had still been lying out on the desert, vomited up by the Sarlacc, when he had heard that one.
But that had been the past; now he heard another woman's voice. That was the one that tormented him, that made the sleep of his dying a place where memories rose out of the darkness.
His eyelids had fluttered open, or had tried to; they were mired in some pliable substance clinging tightly to his face. As weak as he was, the stuff bound him as tightly as Han Solo had been in the block of carbonite he'd delivered to Jabba the Hutt. But he'd managed to raise his eyelids just enough, a fraction of a centimeter, that he'd been able to catch an unfocused glimpse of the female. She had been there in Jabba's palace, a simple dancing girl-but he knew she was something more than that. Much more. Jabba had called her…Neelah. That w as it; he could remember that much. But that wasn't her real name. Her real name…Fragments of memory touched, then drifted apart, as the effort of vision took him back beneath the lightless weight pressing upon him.
There, he dreamed without sleeping, died yet still lived.
And remembered.
4
"Stick with me," Bossk told the new Guild member.
"And I'll show you how it's done."
He could feel the other's rising anger, like the radiation from a reactor-core meltdown. That was exactly the response he wanted, that his comments were designed to evoke. There wasn't the tiniest segment of a standard time cycle that Bossk wasn't angry to some degree. He even slept angry, the way all Trandoshans did, dreaming of their razor fangs locked on the throats of their reptilian species' ancient enemies. Rage and blood lust were good things in the Trandoshan galaxy-view. That was how things got done.