“NURRGGGH…”
“And what if it’s like a Sith training book or something? Maybe Alinka and her father don’t want it for their collection….Maybe they want it for the Emperor!”
“WRRHHHHUUUGHH!” groaned Chewie. He didn’t like the idea of taking the Emperor a Sith handbook one bit.
K-2 was thinking, I can’t believe you’re just now figuring this out, but for once he was able to not say anything. A simple cargo droid, he reminded himself. You’re a simple cargo droid.
“So what do we do now?” asked Mayv. “Do we do something that might help the Empire?”
“WHUGGGGGG,” groaned Chewbacca. This sort of thing made his head hurt. He liked it better when he knew whom to punch and whom to rescue.
“I guess we don’t really have a choice, though, do we?” said Mayv. “That’s why they went to so much trouble to force us into this job. So we couldn’t just decide not to do it. You have to save your friend, and I have to save the Mola Oktaro for my people…right?”
“HWWWWRUNGGHHH,” agreed Chewie, though not as enthusiastically as he would have just five minutes earlier.
“There is one problem with your plan,” said K-2, trying to get the mission back on track. “How can you steal something from a temple when there is no temple here?”
“Let me see how close we are to the coordinates Alinka gave us,” said Mayv, flipping open her vidscroll.
“It looks like we’re about—”
“Point two five one klicks away,” interrupted K-2. “The actual spot would be right there.”
He pointed at a spot farther along the edge of the chasm. There was too much murk, gloom, and creepy green mist to see what was there.
“All right, let’s go take a look,” said Mayv.
“Wait,” said K-2. The antenna popped out of his head again, and he was still for a moment. “My sensors indicate that there is a large rock there but no temple.”
“Well, anything that’s not either a happy fungus tree or evil dirt or a snarler or a big tongue is worth checking out,” said Mayv. “In fact, since the sniffers don’t seem to be able to sniff you, maybe you should go have a look around. Chewie and I could still use a few minutes to recover! We’re not droids, you know.”
“Unfortunately not,” said K-2, then turned and trotted off into the gloom.
“Listen, Chewie,” said Mayv when she thought—incorrectly—K-2 was out of earshot. “I wanted to talk to you without the droid around. I’m worried about him! Where did he get that blaster?”
“NHURRRM GRUMM,” said Chewie, gesturing to show how the droid had pulled the blaster from inside his body.
“That is weird,” said Mayv, “but what I mean is: why does a cargo droid even have a blaster? Alinka was so careful to make sure that we didn’t have any weapons. Why would she give the droid one? And like I’ve been saying all along, that droid just doesn’t act like a cargo droid.”
“DRUUWHHLA MYURGGRRR! DRUHHHR CHURRRBRRR.” Chewie was trying to explain that he was pretty sure K-2 was an Imperial security droid, not a cargo droid, but the language barrier was too much. So he ended up just nodding to show that he agreed they should keep a very close eye on K-2.
K-2, hearing their conversation, reminded himself to try to act more like a dumb cargo droid. But it was hard.
Meanwhile, he had checked out the rock he had detected with his sensors and was back to tell them about it.
“I found the rock,” he announced.
“What was it?”
“A rock.”
“What did it look like?”
“A rock.”
“That’s the only thing you can say about it?”
“Yes. Would you like to look at a holovid of it?”
“Yes, can you send it to my vidscroll?”
K-2 didn’t answer.
“I said, ‘Can you send it to my vidscroll?’”
“I have done that.”
“Oh…couldn’t you beep or something to let me know?”
“Beep,” the droid said slowly.
Mayv mumbled something rude, then pulled her vidscroll open and saw a horrifying image.
It was the creature! The mountainous mouth beast that had sniffers for tongues and had almost eaten her!
“This is the monster,” she told K-2.
“No, it’s a rock.”
“Wait…the rock looks like the monster?”
“Yes.”
“So it’s a statue? That’s got to be it! It must mark the entrance to the temple!”
“I did not see an—”
“HYYARMMMMUK!”
Chewie was trying to tell K-2 and Mayv to stop yakking because one of the actual creature’s mouths had just opened, and another tongue was emerging and seemed to have smelled them and was heading their way. The important thing, though, was that he pointed and both K-2 and Mayv saw what was happening.
“Oh, no!” moaned Mayv. “I hate to run away now, when it seems like we’re so close to finding an entrance to the temple!”
“NYRRRRNYRRRR! GRONNNNNNDA MURRRRRG HHHUURRHUURR!” insisted Chewie, with more waving and pointing. If only Mayv spoke Shyriiwook she’d have known that Chewie was trying to say, “Look at the holovid. There’s clearly a door built into the statue. We just need to get there and get inside before the worm grabs us again!”
But that was a lot of information to get across with grunts and growls and waving big furry arms around. Mayv and K-2 had no idea what he was saying.
And the more other people don’t understand them, the louder Wookiees get.
“GRONNNNDA MURRRRG! GRONNNNDA MURRRRGHHH!”
“The Wookiee has become deranged,” said K-2.
“He seems to be worked up about that statue!” said Mayv. “Can you take us there?”
Without saying a word, K-2 turned around and ran back toward the trees.
“RUPPRUG,” said Chewie approvingly, and ran after him.
Mayv and Goldie followed Chewie, and unfortunately, the sniffer followed all of them.
K-2 flawlessly retraced his steps, and in a moment they were at the statue, just as he had shown them but much bigger than Mayv had realized. And uglier.
The creature was terrifying to begin with, but whoever had carved the statue had clearly wanted to make it look even scarier and possibly even supernatural.
“This looks like a religious artifact,” said Mayv. “Like the people who built it worshipped the creature! So maybe the temple is around here. We just need to find the door in a hurry! Let’s split up and look for it.”
“NYRRR! RUMK NYRR!” said Chewie. That meant, “No, just hold on for a minute,” and he said it with so much authority that Mayv, Goldie, and K-2 all stopped to watch what he did next.
Chewie ran to the base of the statue and pointed out the tall narrow panel that was likely a door.
He pushed, shoved, and pounded at it, but it didn’t open. He began wedging his fingers into the crack, trying to pull it open.
Mayv rushed forward to help but couldn’t fit the fingers of her exo-glove into the narrow gap.
“Perhaps you should both step back,” said K-2 calmly. He slid his narrow fingers into the crack. Servomotors began to whine and then groan as he pulled his long arms in opposite directions.
“MEWOOWYYR!”
Goldie was sounding the alarm. The sniffer had caught up with them.
Chewie turned and roared at it, a roar that would have made almost any creature think twice, but the sniffer didn’t even think once. It just sniffed and crept on toward them.
And then there was a mighty crack. The door was open.
“I’ll just wait inside, shall I?” asked K-2.
Goldie jumped through the dark doorway first.
“MYROWL!”
If this actually meant something in words, it would mean, “I’ve made a huge mistake! There’s no floor, just a vast empty space! I’ve got to go back!”
Twisting in midair, she tried to reach back and catch her claw
s on the edge of the doorway. But no, she had jumped too far. She couldn’t reach. She was falling.
And then a big hairy Wookiee arm was scooping her up.
“RGGHHRRRM!” said Chewie, lifting her back up to his shoulder.
“Hrrrmmmmm,” hummed Goldie.
The dark doorway lit up as Mayv activated the built-in lights on her exo-glove. She pointed the light down into the void. The beam went a long way before disappearing into green mist.
“I was hoping the mist wouldn’t be as thick inside,” she said. “Of course, I was also hoping there’d be a floor.”
K-2 looked over the edge, turning up the light output from his eyes.
“My sensors indicate that there is a floor down there. Approximately sixty-three point six meters below us.”
“The cable’s that long, right?”
“It is fifty meters.”
“That leaves a long drop,” said Mayv, hesitating. She heard a loud sniff over her shoulder. “But it’s better than being eaten, right? So who goes first?”
“HYARL!” roared Chewie, passing one end of the cable to Mayv while standing protectively between her and the sniffer, which was now just a few meters away, its hook hands wriggling in anticipation.
“Me?” said Mayv, looking down into the green mist. She was terrified, but there was no time to do anything but say “Oktar grisbit” and go for it.
She clamped the exo-glove tightly around the cable and let Chewie lower her down into darkness. With a nudge from Chewie, Goldie jumped from his shoulder to Mayv’s.
“Thanks for coming,” Mayv told the tooka. “I’d pet you but I’m afraid to let go.”
“Mrurrrrr,” agreed Goldie.
The sniffer just kept coming. That was how it hunted. Not with speed but with stubbornness.
And now it sniffed and knew its prey was within reach.
It didn’t know why the prey had stopped running. It knew nothing about the door or the long drop or the girl and tooka that were hanging from a cable. It just knew that something that smelled good was finally close enough to grab.
A hook hand whipped out and wrapped around Chewie’s arm.
“GRANNNNK,” bellowed Chewie, and with strength that could belong only to an enraged Wookiee, he ripped his arm loose.
“WRHHHAAAHHHHHHH!”
The pain was incredible. Worse than a blaster bolt. The hook hand had sliced him to the bone.
And in that second, he let the cable slip.
Below, in the darkness, Mayv couldn’t see what had happened. But she heard the howl, then felt herself falling. She was still holding on to the cable, but it was falling, too.
She turned her light down to see where she would land. But the floor was still far out of sight.
“YOWWWR!” Goldie yowled, wishing she had stayed with the Wookiee.
And then the cable stopped falling. K-2 had managed to grab it. But Mayv didn’t know that, either. When the cable jerked tight, she was caught off guard and her hand slipped out of the exo-glove.
There was only time for a few sensations. Falling. Hitting. Crumpling. Collapsing. The tooka yowling.
Then her head struck the floor.
K-2 saw the girl disappear into the green and heard her hit bottom.
A quick calculation told him how far she had fallen and how likely it was that a human would survive a fall like that.
There was hope, he decided, but they needed to get down there fast.
“Go,” he told Chewie. “I’ve got the cable.”
“RHHUNG,” answered Chewie. He pulled a light out of his bag and clipped it to his bandolier, then jumped through the doorway and grabbed on to the rope. The gash in his arm screamed with pain, but there was no time to go easy on it now. He scrambled down the cable into the gloom to find Mayv.
K-2 started to look around for a good place to attach the cable. The sniffer, confused by the sudden lack of proper food, kept sniffing K-2 and tapping at him with its hook hands. But it knew better than to grab anything metal, which would only upset its faraway stomach later.
“You really are annoying,” K-2 told it. “I will ask Cassian if we can blast you with a proton torpedo when he gets here. In the meantime, shoo.”
The sniffer just kept sniffing.
Once K-2 had the cable tied around part of the base of the statue he stepped through the doorway and descended, somewhat awkwardly since he had to use one arm to pull the antigrav crate down with him and one arm to try to close the remains of the door behind him.
The sniffer butted its “head” against the door a few times, then gave up and slithered away mindlessly to find something else to sniff.
“MURWWWWRRH! MURWRHUH!”
Wookiees don’t have to apologize very often, but when they do it is very sincere.
K-2 found Chewie and Goldie crouched on the ground next to Mayv. The girl wasn’t moving. The mighty Wookiee was petting her head and moaning out his apology over and over. The tooka was mewing piteously. In the cavernous space it all echoed several times, making the whole thing that much more irritating to K-2.
“I brought the crate,” he told the Wookiee.
“RHHUMN GRAA!” snarled Chewie.
“I will overlook your rude behavior,” said K-2, “and remind you that there is a medkit in the crate.”
Chewie leapt up, rummaged in the crate for the medkit, and immediately put it to use on Mayv.
There in that strange underground space, vast and seemingly empty except for green mist and an unpleasant smell, the two giants—one hairy and one metal—leaned over the girl and waited silently for the medkit’s report.
Why was it taking so long? Was it even working? Had the Aloos sent them to that deadly planet without even a working medkit? What could—
And then the medkit’s screen lit up and a green icon appeared. Mayv was alive and not too badly injured.
“NYUURRRUHH!” roared Chewie with relief.
K-2 straightened up and tried to act as if the matter was of no concern to him.
“Perhaps making loud noises is not the best idea since we don’t know—”
“RGGGRHHARRRRGG!”
“Or you could continue making loud noises if you prefer.”
Chewie ignored the droid and bent over the medkit to read the tiny screen. Various icons lit up on the medkit, and K-2 interpreted.
“The medkit can help, but she’s going to need some time to recover before she can continue,” he told Chewie. “Maybe an hour or more.”
“HRUMM HRUMMM,” muttered Chewie, fussing over Mayv.
“You will need to use the medkit on yourself first,” said K-2.
“NURRRRHHHH!” Chewie tried to explain that he wanted to help Mayv first.
“You are wrong,” K-2 told him. “You must use the medkit on yourself now. At the rate you are bleeding, you’ll be too weak to complete the mission if you wait. Also, all that blood is making a mess.”
Chewie looked at his arm and saw that K-2 was right. There was a lot of blood and it wasn’t stopping…and he was feeling a bit weak.
K-2 grabbed the medkit and pushed it against Chewie’s arm.
“HHGRRUUPH!” Chewie winced, but he did not resist.
The medkit buzzed and beeped and flashed red warning icons, then squirted a fast-drying adhesive into the gash. It stung like a buzz-bug bite!
Chewie bared his fangs. He hated using medkits. They were typically designed for humans by humans, who couldn’t seem to remember that not every species was as relatively hairless as they were. Now he had a big clump of matted, gloopy hair on his arm.
But the bleeding had stopped. So he grabbed the medkit from K-2 and reset it to get back to work helping Mayv. Then he settled in to wait.
K-2 looked around and quickly discovered that they were in one of many underground rooms. Tunnels led in several directions.
“I’ll go ahead and begin mapping the area,” he told Chewie, who grunted in agreement. What he did not tell Chewie was what he was planning
to do if he found the object they were looking for.
Chewie opened a pack of ration sticks and offered some to the tooka. After a meal of delicious glorbs, Goldie turned up her nose at the dry sticks but did take some water. Chewie forced down a couple of the sticks and recalled wistfully his recent meal of fried nerf nuggets.
When Mayv stirred and woke up, he fussed over her like a mother porg would, moving the medkit gingerly from her head to her other injuries and trying to make her comfortable. For his sake, she pretended she was.
She had a few ration sticks, too, while Chewie tried to explain what had happened and, of course, say how sorry he was.
“MURWWWWRRH MURWRHUH!”
“I get it. I get it,” she assured him. “But if you hadn’t saved me several times already, I wouldn’t have even gotten this far.”
When the medkit finally beeped that it was finished, she got up and walked stiffly around the room with Chewie’s light.
She shone it straight up but couldn’t even make out the door they had entered through. She could see her exo-glove, still clamped to the end of the cable high above the floor. She shuddered as she realized how far she had fallen.
And then she shuddered again thinking about going back up the cable on the way out.
“Oktar lokwa,” she groaned. “I hope there’s another exit. Otherwise, it’s going to be tough to get back up there.”
“MGHHHURRR,” agreed Chewie. He’d had more than enough cable climbing and cable pulling for one day. And nobody had really noticed how many times he had rolled, unrolled, and rerolled the cable that day, and it had gotten old fast.
Mayv walked ahead until her light lit up a wall. She was hoping to find something along the lines of a staircase with a safety rail. But the wall was just a wall. Except that it wasn’t. The light picked out thousands, probably millions, of thin lines etched into the stone.
At first she couldn’t tell what they were; then she realized that the lines formed a work of art like the statue they had seen above ground. A sacred likeness of the awful tongue beast that had come so close to eating her.