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“I wish I knew how to pilot.”

Buoyed by the knowledge that they were rapidly approaching their goal, the two talked as they sped along. Doallyn described his searches for the krayt dragons that lived in the Jundland Wastes, and told Yarna that there was a surprising amount of life in the wilderness. Whole tribes of Sand People eked out an existence, even though there was almost no ground water, and they had only a few, stolen moisture vaporators and dew collectors.

“How do they survive?” she wondered.

“Hubba gourds,” he said, and told her about the round, yellowish fruits that grew in the shadows of the cliffs. The fruits held fluid in their tough, stringy inner fibers, liquid that could be sucked and squeezed out to keep life going.

He also described how vicious the Sand People were, how they would kill for no reason more than to steal one’s clothing. “The terrain is dangerous enough,” Doallyn said, “with wild banthas and poisonous lizards and sand pits to worry about … but the Sand People are even worse.”

Yarna shivered despite the heat, and peered at the navicomputer. “How much farther?”

“We passed Motesta nearly an hour ago.” Doallyn pointed at an orange dot on the screen. “We’re about fifty klicks from the outskirts of Mos Eisley. We’ll be there by—” He broke off in a strangled sound, half gasp, half scream, and the landspeeder swerved wildly.

Yarna had been watching Doallyn—she never saw it coming. All she knew was that one moment the speeder was gliding along, the next, it was struck so hard that it went spinning through the air like a child’s whirl-toy. Yarna screamed as centrifugal force clamped her into the seat like a giant hand. Then the nose of the speeder struck the rocks in front of them, and Doallyn went tumbling out.

Yarna screamed again as she caught a glimpse of a massive figure that loomed like a living, scaled mountain. She realized that the sound she’d been dimly aware of was a loud hissing, as though all the kettles in the world were spouting at once. The speeder’s tail went down in answer to another crushing blow, and then Yarna too was flung out. She landed half on a rock, half on sand, and felt the sand give way beneath her, sucking her leg down.

Sand pit! she thought, and desperately grabbed the rock, heaving herself free of the shifting pull. As she did so, she saw a dark shape that was already halfway buried and sinking fast. Oh, no! The landspeeder!

Yarna watched helplessly as their only transport was sucked down until it disappeared completely. Her attention was distracted by a roar that made the ground shake, and she glanced around. What hit us? She was dizzy, disoriented, as she wondered where Doallyn was. Stumbling, careful not to step on anything but the stone, she edged her way around the rocky buttress that had saved her, until she could see.

The sight that met her eyes was so overwhelming that her knees buckled, and she had to grab the rock wall for support. The thing that filled the ancient riverbed where they’d “landed” was huge—far bigger than the rancor. A krayt dragon—it had to be.

The creature was yellowish-brown in color, almost golden as its scaled back caught the suns’ rays. It had three huge horns, one above each eye and one in the middle of its forehead. Slitted nostrils flared above a mouthful of fangs nearly as long as Yarna’s arm. A ridge of dorsal spines studded its back from its neck to its spike-finned tail. The monster stood on four squat legs that were bowed outward from the huge mass of its body. The dragon’s eyes were greenish-yellow, with horizontally slitted pupils that glittered like sapphires.

Yarna stiffened as the massive head, many times the size of her own body, swung toward her. Then she heard Doallyn’s voice. “They hunt by sensing motion. Stand still!”

There was nothing else she could do. Yarna felt as though her feet had taken root, become part of the rocks beneath her. She rolled her eyes sideways in their sockets, and saw Doallyn. The hunter was crouched low, moving toward the dragon from behind a low ridge of rock.