Being back inside his own ship would be as much a relief as being out in the emptiness between the stars. He would be alone there, sealed off from all the others, living and dead… .
That was what he needed. He pushed the rough wooden door shut behind himself and strode down the corridor, beneath the flickering light of the torches. Anywhere but here, thought Boba Fett. The tunnel stretched out before him. Above him, the invisible weight of rock and stone pressed down, like the tomb he hadn’t earned yet.
12
NOW
“You were saying things.” Dengar handed the figure on the pallet a metal cup filled with water. “In your sleep.”
Sleep was the wrong word, he knew. Dying would have been more accurate. Except that Boba Fett hadn’t died, after all. After everything.
“Is that so?” Even unhelmeted, Boba Fett had a gaze that was as cold and exterminating as anything that had looked out from the black, narrow visor. Lying on the improvised bed in the hiding place’s smallest subchamber, Fett’s lethal potential appeared undiminished, as though his ravaged flesh were only a temporary costume, less real than the ragged battle-gear stacked up in the corner. “What did I say?”
“Nothing important,” replied Dengar. He knew better than
to
have told the truth, if Fett’s drugged, unconscious mutterings had amounted to anything. This barve lives by secrets, thought Dengar. To get inside any of those secrets would be like stealing something from him. And the consequences of that, Dengar was well aware, would not be pretty. “Something about not liking so many sentient creatures around you. Stuff like that.”
“Ah.” Boba Fett raised his head and managed to sip the water he’d been given. His smile looked like a blade wound in the abraded skin of his face. “I still don’t like it.”
“Please do not agitate the patient.” The taller of the two medical droids scolded Dengar. The droid and its shorter partner were busily changing the dressings around Boba Fett’s torso. Bloodied rags and sterile gel sheets were peeled away from the raw flesh beneath. Wounds such as Fett’s took a long time to heal; the Sarlacc’s gastric secretions were like acid creeping toward the bone, long after the beast itself was dead. “If I had the authority to do so,” continued SHS1-B, “I would order you out of this area immediately.”
“But you don’t.” Dengar leaned back against the subchamber’s crumbling rock wall. The air inside the hiding place was as hot and desiccating as the interior of one of the ancient burial mounds that studded the farther reaches of the Dune Sea, where Tatooine’s double suns turned corpses into withered leather. “Besides,” said Dengar, “if you two haven’t killed him by now, nothing will.”
“Sarcasm.”
le-XE
spoke as it
readied
another combination
of
opiates
and
antiseptics. “Nonappreciation.”
“There’s someone else in this place, isn’t there?” Boba Fett had drawn his head back from the metal cup that Dengar had held out to him. The mere effort of his words sent his chest laboring, the dials and readouts on the surrounding equipment blipping into the red. “A female.”
Dengar said nothing. He placed the half-empty cup on top of one of the sighing machines that the two medical droids tended. He had other things to take care of, other things to do besides talk with the sinister figure lying on the pallet, a little farther away from death’s shores than Fett had been even a couple of days ago. One of the hiding place’s power generators had conked out, spewing white sparks and a dense cloud of greasy smoke. That had necessitated shutting down all but the minimum air recyclers, resulting in the hot, thick miasma bound inside the hiding place. Dengar could more profitably take care of the generator, getting it up and back on-line, rather than staying here at Boba Fett’s bedside. But the other man’s cold gaze held him as tight as the curved hook of a gaffstick.
“There’s no need to lie to me about it,” said Boba Fett. His words were as cold and unemotional as the gaze from his eyes. “I saw her. She came in here. Yesterday, I suppose. It’s still hard for me to tell about these things. But it was dark, and she must have thought I was asleep. Or that I had died, perhaps.”
“Please,” said SHSl-B. It fussed with the tubes running between the machines and Boba Fett’s body. “You’re making our job considerably more difficult.”
Dengar ignored the medical droid. He was about to answer Fett, to tell the bounty hunter who the female was, when the bombs hit. Real bombs.