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.