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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] 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. Page 75 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html 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. Dust sifted from the subchamber's ceiling, speckling the lenses of SHZl-B's head unit swiveling up toward the sound of thunder. Windstorms infrequently lashed the Dune Sea, floods of sand churning down the stone gulleys and vanishing just as quickly beneath the twin suns. Dengar had always thought that the hiding place he'd dug for himself was too far beneath the planet's surface to take any damage from mere weather. It'll take something stronger, he'd decided, to get in here. His own words were still looping around inside his head when the rocks fell, with even louder thunder from above, onto his face. He'd looked up, along with the two medical droids. He had a memory flash, of a Page 76 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html light sharp as blades against his eyes and brighter than Tatooine's suns combined into one. Then he was spitting out gravel and blood as he felt his arm being tugged by someone unseen. "Come on!" The voice was Neelah's; her hands gripped tight around his forearm and pulled. Rocks and sand poured off his chest as his scrabbling efforts, feeble at first and then made stronger by sudden desperation, combined with hers to extract him from the remains of the subchamber. "He's still in there!" She meant Boba Fett, of course. The hiding place's emergency lights flickered as the remaining generator came to life. Dengar could still hear thunder, receding into the distance up on the surface level. The thunder would return, he knew; he was familiar enough with saturation-bombing techniques to be aware that that was what was going on up there. One wave would be succeeded by [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |