The Ruins of Dantooine (24 page)

“Are ya deaf?” he demanded. “Whatever you two got while you were in there is the property of the Gray Talon. Now hand it over.”

One of the others moved up to cover Finn, who gave Dusque a helpless look.

“You heard him,” the one beside Finn shouted.

“This is our planet and what’s here is ours.”

“I’ll one ask you one more time,” the leader said, “before I go ahead and take what I want. Hand over your treasure. I don’t take kindly to the idea that someone would want to rob me.”

“Okay,” Dusque replied, not trying to hide the
quiver in her voice. “Just don’t shoot.” She proceeded to root around in her bag.

“Hurry,” the leader ordered her. He seemed to be enjoying her fright. “If you do, I promise I’ll kill you quickly. If not, I can make you suffer for days. I’d like that,” he said softly, “but you wouldn’t. Pretty thing like you shouldn’t have to suffer.”

Dusque poked around frantically in her pack and then her fingers closed around what she had been searching for. When she stopped moving, the Gray Talon member with the two blasters flicked one of his weapons in Finn’s direction.

“If you don’t give it to me, I’ll have my partner kill him right in front of your lovely eyes.”

As she pulled the container out of her bag, she popped the cap with her thumb.

“Here it is,” she shouted, and tossed the vial of quenker bile directly into the pirate’s face.

Screaming in rage and pain, he dropped his blasters and clawed at his eyes. Dusque, seeing him double over in agony, grabbed him by his vest and pulled him close. She reached down with one hand and pulled her sporting blaster free. Using the leader’s body as a shield, she started shooting at the two men who were still closest to the waterfall. She managed to kill one of the two pirates with her first shot. She missed the second, and he charged at her, knocking her under the water.

Finn used Dusque’s distraction to the fullest. Swinging his right arm up, he triggered the mechanism in
his sleeve that released a deadly knife into his hand. In one motion, he brought that hand straight up and under the pirate’s rib cage. The Gray Talon member was dead before Finn had resheathed the bloody weapon. Then he turned and saw that the last pirate was straddling Dusque’s motionless form, and that her head was completely submerged in the cascade from the waterfall.

“Get away from her,” he screamed, launching himself onto the pirate’s back.

Locking an arm around the pirate’s neck, he wrenched him off Dusque. They both tumbled into the water, and a weapon fired once before everything became silent.

Dusque realized vaguely that she could stand up. Somewhere in the distance, she heard the whine of a blaster, but it was hard to make out over the pounding in her own ears. She staggered to her feet, drenched and sputtering. Disoriented, she couldn’t tell what was going on. As she slowly regained her senses, she saw that the cave entrance was littered with bodies. She seemed to be the only one left standing. But where was Finn?

Turning, she saw him lying partially in the water, facedown, along with one of the Gray Talon members. That sight snapped Dusque out of her stupor and galvanized her into action. She ran to Finn on wobbly legs and pulled him from the water. She could see that he had a severe burn on his left leg, but otherwise he appeared uninjured. Struggling
with his inert weight, she dragged him up onto the rocky ledge of the cave entrance and dug the medkit out of her sack.

She examined his burned leg and was relieved to see that it didn’t look that bad. She used a bulb of antiseptic wash to irrigate the wound, then applied a small bacta patch on the most severe section of injured tissue. She was almost done when he began to rouse.

“Wh-what?” he asked, sounding confused. When he struggled to rise, Dusque held him down.

“Hold still for a few more moments,” she told him gently.

He winced as she pressed the bandage to his wound. “Have you still got the holocron?”

Dusque realized she hadn’t even thought to check for the device. She placed her hand in her pack and felt its now familiar sharp edges. “Yes, it’s fine,” she soothed.

“Get out of here,” he ordered her, pain evident in his voice.

“No.” She grabbed a stimpak. “This will help you get moving in a minute or so,” she explained, as she injected him in his upper arm with a stim-shot.

“We don’t know how many more of these guys might be lurking around.” His voice sounded stronger, the stimulant already starting to take effect. “You need to get out of here now. Take the holocron and get out.”

“Not a chance,” she said again. “Don’t go and
turn into a martyr on me now,” she joked, hoping to distract him from his pain.

He stared at her with clouded eyes. “No chance of that ever happening.”

Dusque chuckled, but he remained silent.

“Better give me another shot,” he finally told her, “if you’re going to waste your time waiting for me.”

She adjusted the stimpak and treated him again. “I don’t want to give you too much more,” she told him. “The more I give you now, the harder you’re going to crash later.”

“If you don’t treat me now and get moving, we won’t have to worry about later,” he told her, struggling to his feet.

Dusque could tell by the set of his jaw it was useless to argue. She put her right arm around his waist to steady him. She knew he was still in pain when he didn’t protest her assistance.

“Okay,” she told him, “one step at a time.”

They hobbled over to the water and waded in together, like two creatures clumsily joined at the waist. Finn hissed as the cold water made contact with his leg.

“Should we stop?” Dusque asked him.

“No,” he said firmly. “Actually feels kind of good against the burn.”

She thought he was probably lying to humor her. The least she could do, she thought, was not slow them down further by trying to stop him every few
meters. She guided him through the water as carefully as she could, desperately afraid that she might slip and lose her footing.

“Don’t forget your weapon,” Finn reminded her before they ducked under the waterfall.

“Right,” she said, mentally berating herself for focusing so hard on Finn that she had already forgotten about potential danger. She pulled out her heavy blaster with her left hand, and Finn did the same with his right. With every step, he grew stronger—thanks to the effects of the stimpak—so that when they came through the falls, he was able to hobble about unaided. Keeping their backs to each other, they turned about and scanned the area.

“Looks clear,” Dusque said guardedly.

“For now,” Finn agreed. They walked slowly across the ancient courtyard, their steps the only sound in the night. The clouds had completely cleared, and Dusque could see a moon over the horizon. She tried to remember how many moons Dantooine had, but couldn’t. The stars were brilliant, as they always were without the lights of civilization to compete with. She allowed herself to look up for a moment and take it all in.

When she lowered her head, she saw that Finn was also regarding the stars, but his expression was intensely serious. He seemed to be concentrating hard. Finally he turned to her and said, “This way,” cocking his head toward the left.

Dusque was a little embarrassed that she’d been wasting time stargazing while he, the wounded one,
was working on figuring out their position. She wondered if she could ever hope to live up to Finn’s—and Leia’s—confidence in her.

They walked slowly at first, to accommodate Finn’s injury. The longer they continued, however, the better he was able to pick up the pace and walk more sure-footedly. Dusque listened carefully for sounds of animals or other people. Hearing none, she took the chance of initiating a conversation.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Sorry about what?” he asked, obviously surprised.

“For what happened before,” she told him, not wanting to elaborate any more than necessary.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “Why would you be sorry?”

She sighed. “For what happened back at the waterfall. You tried to give me a signal and I missed it.”

He continued to look at her blankly.

“When you said that you were sorry,” she explained. “You know, when you tried to warn me about the Gray Talon and I didn’t get it. I let you down. I’m sorry.”

Finn didn’t reply. Dusque wished she knew what he was thinking—if he was trying to think of a gentle way to reprimand her, or if he might tell her that it didn’t matter. She was pretty sure he was disappointed, though. When he finally spoke, she wasn’t reassured.

“Let’s not talk about that,” he said shortly. “We’ve
got a ways to go yet and I don’t want to dwell on that. It’s best forgotten.”

Dusque would have liked him to explain her mistake in specific terms, so she could learn from it and not repeat it, but it seemed she had no choice but to let it go.
For now
, she amended silently. She would ask him about it later, when they had more time and were out of danger.

The weather continued to hold as they walked on. There were only a few purple-streaked clouds to compete with the brilliant stars, and neither Dusque nor Finn felt the need to illuminate their halo lamps. Gradually the steep hills gave way to gentler, rolling hills. The ferns and mountain flowers, conifers and evergreens melted into the large fields of lavender grass, and the spiky biba trees started to reappear. Dusque knew they were nearing the Imperial base.

A loud tearing sound startled them. Weary and ill equipped for another battle, Dusque and Finn looked around for a place to hide. A small rocky outcropping was all they could find. Dropping to the ground behind it, they drew their weapons and steeled themselves for whatever might be out there.

The roar grew louder, and a huge lizard, longer than several humans laid end to end, burst out of the brush. It snarled and shook its head violently from side to side, something clenched in its teeth. Dusque recognized the lizard as a bol pack runner. It looked malnourished and sickly, and at first she
thought that they were safe, because it had obviously caught something … until she realized that what it had in its maw was a juvenile bol.

It thrashed the baby around a few more times and then threw it to the ground. The wounded juvenile emitted a weak call and tried to drag itself away. The adult charged at it, spearing it with one of its two curved horns. Raising the now dead juvenile in the air, the adult flicked its head to one side and tossed the carcass into a heap of plants.

“Are they cannibals?” Finn whispered to Dusque, as the adult bol stood there huffing.

“No, not even during the worst periods of famine,” she replied. “That female is not going to eat her baby. She’s using it for bait. Watch.”

The bol huffed once more, then thudded off a short distance, just past the rise in the hill. The air was heavy with the scent of blood. Soon enough, another creature came out of the brush, drawn by the smell.

It was a lone huurton. It approached slowly, cautiously, but then put on a burst of speed and ran up to the fresh kill. Noisily, it ripped hunks of flesh free with its sharp canines. The adult bol came crashing out of her hiding spot, grabbed the huurton by the back, and shook it in almost the exact fashion that she had her infant. The huurton bleated in agony as it was tossed from one side to the other. The powerful incisors of the bol cut through the thick, woolly hide in a matter of moments. Finally, the huurton went limp in the bol’s huge jaws. The lizard flipped
the lifeless body to the ground and began to devour it.

Finn and Dusque watched the feeding for a while without saying a word. Eventually, Finn turned to Dusque and asked, “Why did she do that?”

“Because she was dying and her infant was, too,” she explained.

“So she killed her infant?” he asked with a trace of disgust.

“Obviously the feeding has been scarce around here lately. The adult bol looked thin and her infant was emaciated. She couldn’t feed her baby; that much is certain. Rather than let it face a miserable death by starvation, she killed it.”

“But she deliberately used it as bait!”

“Even stronger than her desire to save her offspring from suffering is her instinct to survive. It makes sense for the preservation of the species. She did what she had to, sacrificed what she had to in order to save herself.” She stopped briefly, suddenly thinking of the Rebels she had encountered—which reminded her that they still had a mission to complete.

“Come on,” she told him. “While she’s feeding, we should be able to slip past her.”

They maneuvered around the feeding bol without alerting her to their presence. Dusque noticed that Finn remained quiet for some time after they had left the scene of feeding carnage behind.

“It still bothers you, doesn’t it?” she asked, breaking the heavy silence between them.

“She killed her own offspring,” he replied. “I can’t think of a more horrendous betrayal.”

“But that’s where you’re wrong,” she said gently. “It was an act of survival. For it to be betrayal, there would have to have been malice involved. Malice and planning,” she added.

Dusque’s comments only seemed to darken his mood. She wished she knew what was bothering him so much; she wanted to help, but he seemed to want to be left to his thoughts. They walked for some distance without saying another word. It wasn’t much longer before a distant glow appeared, close to the horizon. They were almost back to the Imperial base.

Finn slowed to a halt and turned to Dusque. “Make sure your weapons are ready,” he said shortly.

“Why?” she asked. “We had no difficulty when we entered the base. Why should it be any different now?”

“We thought we were alone by the waterfall, too, didn’t we?”

Dusque fell silent at that. Apparently, her failure at the waterfall had changed his opinion of her abilities. She couldn’t bear that thought, and realizing how much his opinion had come to mean to her scared her even more than the evidence of her insecurity.

“What I mean to say is that some time has passed since we passed through there,” he explained in a kinder tone. “Something you need to remember is
not to count on anything to remain static. Get comfortable with a situation and you can get complacent. In this business, that is the fastest route to dying. Don’t trust anything.” He said nothing more, but turned to busy himself with his weapon.