We were functionally on the deck, skimming only thirty meters above the surface of the water and moving slowly. The scanner showed additional ships coming from the rendezvous coordinates to the east—slower and bulkier than the first two but no doubt also piloted by bounty hunters. Regardless of whether they wanted to destroy us or capture us, I began to feel like we were being followed by a flock of carrion birds.
The needle ship fired at me again from its dense battery of cannons, and as it did the flying toast unloaded on the needle, and I thought perhaps I understood why. The needle pilot didn’t want to capture us so much as deny our capture to all the others—but especially to the pilot of the toast. There was an internecine rivalry there, and the needle pilot was not playing to win but rather playing to make everyone lose.
We would lose the most. Though I avoided the majority of the bolts, a few landed and overwhelmed our shields, and after that another one struck and damaged our port engine. The ship rocked, and the smoke trail I thought should have been there earlier finally appeared.
I thought that would be the end of us, but the needle’s shields dissolved under withering bombardment from the other bounty hunter, and then it was shot down, trailing fiery wreckage into the water. It was a welcome if temporary reprieve, for we looked to share a similar fate. Most of our speed had leached away, and all I could do was fight to keep the nose up and minimize the angle of our dive. I thought of restarting the starboard engine but didn’t want the fire to spread there, as well.
“We’re going down!” I said.
“Coming!” Nakari said.
I didn’t know why she’d be coming forward if the landing ramp was behind the cockpit, but there was no time to argue. I fought the stick and the failing engine as much as possible so that we skipped across the surface once before plowing into the still green waters of the lagoon. Cries of alarm erupted from Nakari, Artoo, and Drusil as they all pitched forward from the impact and joined me in the cockpit. Nakari was carrying in front of her the Kelen Biolabs Emergency Aquatic Something Something—I couldn’t catch it all—and it saved her from cracking her head against the dome of the cockpit. She grunted at the collision but then told me to unbuckle as we began to sink into the dark waters of the lagoon that now appeared to be quite deep, even though it was a sheltered cove.
“Don’t touch the landing ramp!” she said, tossing me a water filter for my nostrils. She had her slugthrower strapped to her back and her jacket zipped up tight. “We’re getting out this way, but we have to do it before we sink too deep.”
“How?”
“Manual release and mechanical ejection of the viewport. It’ll slide up and away, water will pour in, we grab Artoo and clear the ship, deploy the raft underneath him, ride it to the surface.” She twisted black dials and pulled levers in sequence at three points along the outside edge of the cockpit on the copilot’s side. “You gotta turn these right and then pull down on your side, too,” she said.
I hadn’t noticed them before, but the dials and levers were there, blending into the trim of the window. Presumably they released the airtight—and watertight—seal. The atmosphere in the ship had given it a modicum of buoyancy, but we’d be ruining that in a moment and we’d sink faster. I flipped and pulled until a trickle of water began to seep through the edges.
“Ready? Got your breather in? Crouch down by Artoo and we’ll do this. Drusil?”
“Ready,” the Givin said. She didn’t have a breathing apparatus attached to her nose, but any being that could survive in vacuum for a day could survive the water for a few minutes. She was braced against the bulkhead, anticipating the incoming rush of water. Her slicing hardware was slipped into her carry-sack, presumably waterproof, which she slung over her shoulders. I squatted next to Artoo, feet planted wide to brace myself, and Nakari yanked down on a larger lever located above the viewport in the center. The ship shuddered, a metallic clang reverberated around us, and then a loud hiss and foosh announced the ejection of the transparisteel from its casing and the concomitant deluge of seawater into the ship. Artoo bleeped in alarm, and I gasped at the shock of cold and threw my arms around the droid to steady both of us.
The cockpit glass slid away as Nakari had said it would, and the ship began to sink more rapidly into darkness as the Desert Jewel filled with water. Nakari joined me on the other side of Artoo, her damaged left hand overlapping mine, and together we pushed off from the deck and escaped the ship in a fountain of bubbles.
Unlike said bubbles, we didn’t rise. Artoo’s weight was dragging us down despite my frantic kicking. Nakari placed her right hand, which held the emergency raft, directly under Artoo and activated its automatic inflation. The compressed canister inside released its gases and a large raft billowed underneath us, folding my legs underneath me and supporting Artoo and Nakari, as well. Our descent halted, turned into a slow ascent, and quickened to an alarming pace as the raft inflated fully. Halfway to the surface, I realized that Drusil wasn’t on the raft with us. And a moment later I realized that breaking the surface wouldn’t be a gentle exercise. We shot out of the sea and I was thrown several meters in the air. Artoo stayed put, being so much heavier and centered on the raft, but Nakari flew even higher than I did. We both landed back in the sea, leaving Artoo temporarily alone on the raft. A hand grabbed my tunic and lifted as I kicked for the surface; it was Drusil. We emerged next to the raft and held on, and I smiled in relief when I saw Nakari surface a moment later. She returned my grin and pulled herself up into the raft.
“Good flying, pilot.”
“Hey, now.”
“I mean it. We’re still alive and close to shore.” She scrambled over to our side and helped us aboard.
“Yeah, but we have no way to get to the rendezvous point.”
“One thing at a time. Getting to shore is all I need right now, and I have a chance of making it, so I am content. We made it, Luke.”
A low, throbbing whine from above directed our eyes to the sky, where we saw the black flying-toast ship descend on its repulsors and hover perhaps four meters above the center of the lagoon, water rippling underneath it. It was a safe distance away from us—we couldn’t get to it without a pair of oars and tremendous effort, while all its pilot had to do to us was pull the trigger. The cockpit of the ship was barely discernible, tinted as black as the rest of it. Even if Nakari was to get her slugthrower into position for a shot, she wouldn’t know where to aim—and the bounty hunter was sure to have shields up anyway.
“Every time you say ‘We made it,’ something bad happens,” I said.
“Correlation isn’t causation,” she replied. “But yeah. Damn.”
A flat mechanical voice broadcast from the black ship. “Do not touch your weapons,” it said. “You will proceed to the shore, where the Givin—”
Without warning, something truly massive erupted from the lagoon underneath the ship, jaws yawning wide and treating the bounty hunter’s ship precisely like the toast it resembled by engulfing it. We heard a squawk from the bounty hunter over his speakers and saw a belated attempt to escape, but the ambush was perfect and he disappeared into the maw of a beast that appeared to be an eel of epic proportions. We could tell that he had begun to fire his blasters before the creature plunged back into the depths, but he would never be able to escape that carcass even if he killed the monster from the inside.
Admiral Ackbar’s warnings about the planet were well founded. Our crash landing and subsequent ejection had no doubt attracted the attention of the predator.
A side effect of the beast’s appearance was two impressive waves—one for its emergence, and another following afterward caused by its reentry. Both of them lifted us and propelled us toward the shore. Nakari’s eyes danced and her eyebrows waggled at me as we cruised onto the beach, but she kept her lips pressed together tightly in a barely stifled smile as we helped Artoo onto the sand.
Once we all had our feet firmly planted on the shore, she said, “What did I say, Luke?
”
I stretched out my arm in panic. “No, no, don’t say it again—”
Nakari pumped her fist and shouted, “We made it! Wooo!”
And that’s when the slower ships I had seen on the scanner before our crash arrived in the sky above the lagoon, searching for us and banking around, their wings bristling with weapons. There were six of them.
NAKARI AND I RAN for the tree line right away, making the strategic decision to let Drusil trail behind. We were expendable to the bounty hunters but she was not; from this angle the ships couldn’t fire at us without a risk of hitting her first. She effectively served as a shield and allowed us to reach cover. The bounty hunters would have to land and come after us on foot, which would not be as easy.
When we reached the cover of the canopy, Nakari removed her slugthrower from her back and checked to make sure it was still functional after the dunk in the lagoon. Satisfied, she drew her blaster and tossed it to Drusil.
“I think you should stay with Drusil and head for the high ground there,” she said, pointing to a promontory to the south. “I’ll flank out to your side and take shots at whoever follows you.”
“But what if they follow you?” I asked.
“I’m taking the droid and our tracks will make that clear. They’d never believe we’d split up and put their big-money target under the protection of an astromech, right? So they’ll chase you, and I’ll pick them off. You just move as fast as you can.”
I nodded. “Right,” I said, and we both took a couple of steps in different directions, thinking only of the mission. But then we stopped, thinking of each other, turned back, and froze. Both of us waited for the other to speak first, and we each made one or two halting starts, simultaneously, which caused us to stop and wait for the other to continue, and the awkwardness escalated with every fraction of a second—not to mention the terror. I was mortified that whatever I said next would be precisely the wrong thing—either too much or too little, just wholly inappropriate and not what she wanted to hear. Nakari must have been feeling something similar, and I wanted to say she didn’t need to worry, she could say anything to me, but even that would probably be wrong.
“What is happening?” Drusil asked. “I am unfamiliar with this kind of human behavior. Have you lost the power of speech?”
“No,” Nakari said, and she closed the distance between us in three long strides. Her head darted forward, lips kissing mine briefly, and then our gazes met. “Be safe, Luke.”
It was a very safe thing to say compared to all the other phrases I had been considering, so I nodded with some relief and replied, “You, too.”
“That was astoundingly straightforward,” Drusil commented, her confusion clear. “What was the difficulty that prevented you from expressing such commonplace wishes?”
The Givin’s words evoked embarrassed smiles from both of us, but I was grateful to Drusil for saying them anyway. Nakari’s eyes spoke volumes to me, and I hope mine communicated as much to her. What I said, however, was “No time to explain,” and I broke eye contact with Nakari to witness the landing of the first of the bounty hunters on the beach. “We have to go.” Thinking of the extensive catalog offered by Utheel Outfitters on Rodia, as well as many other such businesses throughout the galaxy, I gave some final instructions to my droid.
“Artoo, make sure you’re scanning in the infrared and other channels besides the visual and let Nakari know if you see something she doesn’t. These bounty hunters are sure to have some tricks in their arsenal.”
He acknowledged with a short electronic burp, and his dome rotated to face the lagoon.
We truly did part after that, and Drusil followed behind me as I picked a path through the trees toward the southern hill. I hoped we weren’t rushing to the edge of a cliff; having so many other things demanding my attention on our flight, I hadn’t committed the topography of the island to memory—I hadn’t even gotten a very good look at it, beyond tagging it as an emergency landing spot.
While we headed due south, Nakari and Artoo swung southeast. In space, that can magnify quickly into vast distances, but on foot on a small island it was only the difference of a hundred meters. Nakari was silent in the forest, but Artoo made enough noise for both of them. Astromechs are the opposite of stealthy and are ill suited to moving cross-country across a largely rocky island covered with a thin layer of fern-dusted soil. The trees were unable to send roots deeply into the stone, so those roots trailed like wooden snakes above the ground, ready to trip us up and slow the progress of rolling droids. Their white trunks were understandably thin, but their canopies of broad leaves cast ample shade.
When I took a brief moment to check my trail, I saw that Drusil’s head was in constant motion, small jerks like those of a bird.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Gathering data.”
A mechanical whine announced the approach of a swoop bike. One of the bounty hunters must have unloaded one from his ship, thinking to get to us first. The question of when precisely the newer arrivals would turn on one another was a good one; I hoped it would be sooner rather than later. If they focused on getting us first and then fighting through their competition, that would be to our detriment. Far better for them to cannibalize early and reduce their numbers.
“Incoming,” I told Drusil, halting for the moment and turning around. “Use a tree for shelter and minimize your profile. I’ll present myself as a target.” I took a step to the right and spied the skimmer cutting through the trees toward us. It was piloted by a human with goggles strapped to his head, a dark cloak streaming behind him.
“My friend, there is no need,” Drusil said.
“What do you mean?”
A crack sounded and the bounty hunter tumbled from the skimmer, sending the vehicle into an uncontrolled dive that resulted in a loud collision with the ground that was half crunching metal and half cracking bones and pulped tissue. A secondary explosion of startled birds from the nearby trees shuddered the air.
“Your mate is an exceedingly good sniper,” Drusil said. “The odds were high she would eliminate the threat before we had cause to worry.”
“My mate?” I said, spinning on my heel to resume running for high ground.
“Are you not mated?”
“I don’t know—whatever we are, just don’t call it that, okay? I think that might be the worst possible word to describe a human relationship.” I picked up my pace as if I could put physical distance between myself and her word choice.
“The definition has been quite clear in Basic for many years,” Drusil persisted, close on my heels. “Is there another word that humans use among themselves?”
“Yeah—pretty much anything else.”
“My sincerest apologies,” Drusil said, her tone solicitous. “I was unaware of that word’s potential to cause psychological trauma in your species.”
“It’s fine, let’s just move on. There are still five bounty hunters, and we have a hill to climb.”
“There is little cover beyond the thin trunks of the trees and the occasional flowering shrub,” Drusil observed. “These ferns do not even rise to our knees, attractive as they may be.”
“We’ll have to take what advantage we can of the trees,” I said. “And I want you flat on the ground when the shooting starts. Disappear into the ferns.”
She didn’t answer, probably because the exertion of jogging uphill had us both winded. When we did achieve the summit, I noted with satisfaction that it wasn’t the edge of the island; the hill sloped back down to the water on the other side.
There was also an outcropping of boulders nearby that might serve as cover should we need to retreat that way. I didn’t want to head there now, however; we had a good field of vision from this spot and little chance of the bounty hunters flanking us from behind. This island was unfamiliar terrain to them, as well.
“Let’s set ourselves up behind some trees here,” I said, moving to one nearby that afforded a good
view down the slope.
“It would be preferable to choose one a little lower,” Drusil said.
“Why?”
“Your … Nakari Kelen’s field of fire would be clearer there.”
“How would you know? You don’t even know where she is.” Nakari had taken cover along with Artoo somewhere off to our right and presumably downhill from our location.
“I do not need that information to decide where to place ourselves. Plot the trees or obstructions on a grid, calculate vectors—taking into account variations in elevation, of course—and it becomes clear that a small descent on our part will maximize her efficacy.”
“All right, then. Tell me where we should take cover.”
Instead of answering verbally, Drusil picked her way downhill perhaps ten meters and knelt behind a white-barked tree with black spots of old fallen branches, against which her pale head was perfectly camouflaged. She pointed to one immediately adjacent, indicating that I should plant myself there.
Crouching down as I moved, I confirmed visually that we could see the lower ground to our right a bit better from here—and presumably Nakari could see us a little better, too, and anyone approaching our position.
The air grew still. The birds had already taken flight, presumably to a quieter patch of the island or to another island entirely, and even the drone of insects tapered off. I didn’t think there were any mammals either to disturb us or be disturbed; I doubted there was a source of fresh water on the island except whatever rain fell.
The hush and tension of a hunt is the wrong kind of excitement when you’re the one being hunted. There had to be at least one bounty hunter approaching us now on foot, if not more, but I saw no movement in the trees and heard nothing but the faint hum of ships powering down in the lagoon or else idling their engines, ready for a quick takeoff.