“Mess.” le-XE rotated the top dome of its cylinder back and forth. “Disgust.”
There wasn’t time to consider her decision. “Open the hatch,” said Neelah, pointing to the magnetically sealed disk, the coded digits still blinking in its readout panel. “I want to go inside.”
“Dengar told us not to let-” The taller of the two droids caught the look in Neelah’s eyes. “All right, all right; I’m opening it.”
The tunnel on the other side of the hatch descended at close to a forty-five-degree angle. Heading down it, with the droids clunking behind her, Neelah felt a claustrophobic panic crawling along her spine.
The darkness and the close, scarcely ventilated air felt like the tunnel through which she’d crawled to escape from Jabba’s palace. After what had happened to her poor friend Oola, any risk had seemed preferable to winding up as rancor food.
Though her own death had almost found her, before she had gotten away. The scything blade of a Gamorrean perimeter guard’s pikestaff had slashed the raw-edged wound on her face. She’d left the blade buried halfway through the guard’s throat; Jabba had always made the mistake of hiring thugs who were bigger than they were fast. She’d only felt fear afterward, as she’d stepped over the widening pool of blood, then ran into the desert.
In this dimly lit space, she was finally able to stand upright in a central chamber. “Where’s the other one?” She glanced over her shoulder at the two medical droids as they emerged from the tunnel and clicked back into their normal positions. “The one you’re taking care of?”
“Dengar told us-” SHS1-B’s voice snapped silent. “Over here,” it said grudgingly. The taller droid led Neelah past disorganized stacks of weapons and ammunition modules,
mixed
with
the discarded
wrappings
of autothermal field-ration containers. “It’s not really suitable-this patient should’ve been medevac’d to a hospital immediately-but we’ve done the best we can… .”
Neelah tuned out the droid’s words. At the low, rounded entrance to the side chamber, she halted and peered inside. “Is he … is he awake?” A dim glow filled the space; a black cable ran from a shielded worklight to a fuel-cell power generator in the middle of the main chamber’s clutter. “Can he see me?”
“Not with what we gave him.” SHSl-B stood just behind her. “I prescribed a five-percent obliviane solution from le-XE’s anesthetic stocks. On a constant basis, too; the patient’s injuries are unusually severe. That was one of the reasons we had to go back to the palace, to try and find more. But if we didn’t, the pain from this kind of trauma could go into a feedback loop and completely burn out the patient’s central nervous system.”
She stepped into the chamber, ducking under the doorway. An improvised bed, polyfoam stuffed inside flexible freight sheathing, left only a small space between the unconscious man and the medical droids’ intravenous units and monitoring equipment. She squeezed past the humming machines, dials, and tiny screens ticking with slow pulses of light, and stood looking down at someone whose face she had never seen before.
One of her hands reached to touch him, but stopped a few centimeters away from his brow. He looks worse than I do, thought Neelah. The man’s flesh looked as raw as it had when she’d found him the first time, out in the desert; the skin that he had lost in the Sarlacc’s digestive tract was replaced now with a transparent membrane, linked to tubes trickling fluids from the wall of machines alongside the bed. “What’s this?” She touched the clear substance; it felt cold and slick.
“Sterile nutrient casing.” SHS1-B reached out and made
a slight adjustment to one of the equipment controls. “It’s what we normally use on severe burn victims, when there has been major epidermal loss. When we were in the service of the late Jabba the Hutt, we saw and treated a lot of burns.”
“Explosions,” said le-XE.
“Just so.” SHSl-B lifted part of its carapace in an approximation of a humanoid shrug. “The kind of persons who
worked
for
Jabba-the rougher
sort
of
his employees-they were always blowing themselves up, one way or another.”
“Turnover. High rate.”
“That’s true; there were always some we just couldn’t put back together. But le-XE did get rather skilled at burn-treatment
protocols. This individual’s
somatic trauma, however, is a little different.” SHS1-B scanned over the unconscious figure. “No one, as far as can be recalled from our memory banks, has ever survived even temporary ingestion by a Sarlacc. So we’re doing the best we can, with what we’ve got.”