[Bounty Hunter Wars] - 01(4)

Wait a minute. The sprawled form filled the elec trobinoculars’ lenses. Maybe not exactly lethal, Dengar corrected himself. He could see the figure’s chest moving, a slight rise and fall, right on the edge of survival. The half-naked combatant, whoever it might be, was still alive. Or at least for the time being.



Now, that was worth checking out. Dengar slung the ‘binocs back onto his equipment belt. If only to satisfy his own curiosity-the distant figure looked as if he’d discovered a whole new way of getting killed. As a bounty hunter and general purveyor of violence, Dengar felt a professional interest in the matter.



He glanced over his shoulder and saw his own ship, the Punishing One, descending a few kilometers away, its landing gear extended. His bride-to-be, Manaroo, was at the ship’s controls. Good, thought Dengar. He’d be able to use her help, now that he had determined that there would be no immediate danger to her. He didn’t mind risking his own life, but hers was another matter.



Balancing himself with one hand held back against the slope of the dune, Dengar worked his way toward the humanoid-shaped mystery he’d spotted. He hoped the other man would still be alive by the time he got there.



This way of dying’s not so bad… .



Somewhere, past a jumble of disjointed thoughts and images, the oleaginous voice of Jabba the Hutt could be heard in memory, promising a new definition of pain, one that would last thousands of years, excruciating and never-ending.



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.