“There’s something down here!” Neelah’s shout echoed off the curved walls of crumbling stone. Her next words were tinged with sudden fear. “Something big!”
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Dengar managed to twist himself around so he could see what she was talking about. A raw laugh burst from his throat as he recognized the mottled surface, rounded and stretching higher than even the tallest humanoid’s stature.
“It’s the Sarlacc,” said Dengar. “Or part of it, at least.” From his precarious hold on the rock outcropping, he watched as Neelah played the light across the immense serpentine form, its bulk sealing off the far end of the cavern. There was no sign of the creature’s head or tail, as the segment made visible by the lantern lay immobile. “That’s why it smells so bad in here, remember? There’s probably pieces of it scattered all through
these tunnels, or whatever’s left of them.”
Nose wrinkling in disgust, Neelah stepped a little closer to the giant form. Enough light bounced off its scales, made shinier by patches of decay and the dried ichor of its blood, that the pallet with Boba Fett on it could be seen several meters away. The two medical droids, the readouts on their torsos blinking, regarded Neelah’s investigations with only mild curiosity.
Dengar turned back to his work on their escape route. “Get that light beam up here-“
“It’s alive!”
The force of Neelah’s shout came close to knocking Dengar loose from the outcropping. “What’re you talking about?” He pulled himself farther up on the stone before looking back down. “You can smell that the thing’s deader than-“
“It moved!” With her voice a mixture of fury and alarm, Neelah pointed at the bulk of the Sarlacc segment. “I saw it just now. When I poked at it.”
“Nothing to worry about,” said Dengar. His arm, where it crossed over the stone’s corner ridge, was starting to go
numb. “Probably just part of the decomposition process. You must’ve disturbed some gas bubble inside the tissues. It’s probably going to get a lot worse smelling in here real soon-“
His words turned to silence as a visible shiver ran across the towering convex wall of the Sarlacc segment. Dengar could easily see the motion, like a peristaltic wave traveling across the scales and crusted decay patches.
“There!” Neelah kept the lantern beam directed at the glistening bulk. “That’s what it did before! I thought you said this thing was dead!”
It’d better be, thought Dengar. A sense of foreboding moved up from the base of his stomach and into his throat. Boba Fett had killed the damn thing; he’d blown his way out of its gut. From trauma like that, ‘the Sarlacc had to have died; there was no other possibility. Nonethe word looped inside Dengar’s head with a touch of panic.
That fear rose out of his dark, unbidden wondering. No one had ever seen the Sarlacc entire; it had lain buried in its nest in the Great Pit of Carkoon before there had ever been sentient beings on the planet of Tatooine. The Tusken Raiders, who had ridden their shaggy bantha mounts across the Dune Sea wastes for centuries untold, had ancient legends of the Sarlacc giving birth to itself at this world’s center in the days before the twin suns had split apart. Born and growing with the slow persistence of an eternal creature, digging and rooting itself in its tunnels beneath the sand and rocks, until the day would come when it had eaten everything else and would consume itself, continuing an endless cycle of destruction and rebirth.
It was all nonsense, Dengar knew. There was no point in paying attention to Tusken myths. But at the same time nobody on or off Tatooine had ever determined the exact physiology of the Sarlacc. Maybe it’s got more than one stomach, thought Dengar. Or it can regenerate itself, like a plant. Nice possibilities for it; too bad for anybody who might have foolishly wandered into its reach. Like usHis fears proved suddenly correct. The curving wall of the Sarlacc segment reared up, like a giant serpent uncoiling. It reached higher than Dengar’s hold on the outcropping, the scales dragging across the roof of the cavern several meters away from him. A shower of rocks and sharp-edged debris rained down as Neelah scrambled to temporary safety near the pallet and the two medical droids.
The interior of the cavern shook with seismic force as the Sarlacc’s writhing form crashed down again. Dengar gripped the outcropping tighter, trying to keep from being thrown loose from it. More rubble poured down the widened gap, with hot stones and sand falling across his shoulders and the side of his averted face.