• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

He would hope.

The chamber contracted. The walls crushed Luke in on himself. An iron grip seized his lungs, squeezing out his last breath. This is it, he thought.

And then he felt himself rolling through the slimy darkness and was flung into the light.

The creature had vomited him up. Luke drew in a deep, heaving breath. He was lying on a flat bed of rock, coated with a sticky fluid. He was in a cave of some kind, with a deep pool at its center. The creature loomed over him, lips drawn back to reveal its jagged teeth. Luke whipped out his blaster and pulled the trigger. There was a soft pop, a fizzle of smoke—then nothing. He dropped the blaster and grabbed his lightsaber just as the creature shook its mighty head and slithered away. Before Luke could activate it, the beast had disappeared into the water.

Luke clipped the lightsaber back to his belt and climbed to his feet. He wasn't alone.

The remaining enemy pilot lay on his side, gasping and heaving. It sounded like he was coughing up his organs. Luke knelt by his side. "Are you all right?"

The man shook him off and pushed himself into a sitting position. "I've been swallowed by a giant…whatever-that-was and expelled into its blasted lair," he said in a rasping voice. He drew in a few more deep breaths, then stood up. "Does that seem all right to you?"

The cave was small and dark, with stalactites overhead that reminded Luke of the creature's jagged teeth. A foul stench clogged the air, but he couldn't be sure whether that was coming from the cave or from the slime that coated him from head to toe.

"The creature escaped through there," Luke said, pointing at the pool of water. "There must be some kind of opening to the outside." They didn't have much choice but to follow its example.

Luke jumped first, hoping the beast wouldn't be waiting for him. Holding his breath, he dived down through a wide underwater tunnel, trusting it would lead him back up to the surface. But instead, it released him into the open sea. Luke looked up, but he was too deep to even see the surface. Everywhere he looked, the world was only water.

A tightening in his chest made him realize he'd be out of air soon. He'd only recently learned how to swim. But even a champion swimmer wouldn't be able to hold his breath long enough to make it up to the surface. He had no choice but to turn back the way he'd come. Back to the cave.

Luke burst out of the water with no breath to spare. He drew in several lungfuls of the clammy cave air, grateful to breathe again. The pilot pulled himself back up onto the rocks next to Luke, not breathing nearly as hard. At least the water had washed away most of the slime.

"It must be an underwater sea cave," the pilot said. "An air pocket deep underwater.

No way we'll make it back up there on our own. Not alive, at least."

"So that's it?" Luke said, frustrated. "We're trapped here forever? Why didn't that thing just eat us? Why dump us here to wait for us to starve to death?"

"I don't know why we're here, but I think we have more pressing concerns."

"What?" Luke followed the pilot's gaze, hoping he'd found another way out.

But the pilot wasn't looking at an escape route. He was looking at a large pile wedged into a niche in the cave. It was a heap of garbage. Seaweed, decaying sea grass, rotted fruit cores, ragged strips of plasteel, and lying on top—

Luke looked away, horrified. "Is that…?"

"Grish B'reen," the pilot said. "Or at least…it was."

The Chistori was dead. His body, or what was left of it, had been torn to pieces. And it looked like they'd been partially… digested.

"I don't think that beast brought us here to die," the pilot said. "I think this is its nest and it's keeping us around until it's hungry again. Like the cavern spiders of Dathomir. I think it likes to snack. And that means when dinnertime comes around…"

"We better not be here anymore," Luke said, glancing back and forth between the water and the Chistori's remains. "One way or another."