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What is he doing? she wanted to shriek aloud, but fear held her paralyzed. He can’t mean to try and fight that thing! The idea of a human, even armed with a blaster, taking on that huge mountain of an animal was ludicrous.

But that was plainly what Doallyn intended. The krayt dragon snorted, testing the air, and the finned tail lashed back and forth. The head swung slowly from one side to the other, with the horns lowered, as though the beast were using them to detect motion.

Doallyn was close, now, crouched only a few dozen meters from the beast. He checked the charge on his blaster. No! Yarna wanted to shriek. Let’s climb up the cliffs! It can’t follow us there! Doallyn, NO!

But no sound would emerge from her paralyzed throat. She could not move.

Coiling himself like a spring, Doallyn leaped to his feet, vaulted over the low barrier of rock, and raced straight toward the dragon.

His movement broke Yarna’s paralysis. “No!” she shrieked. The massive head swung toward the hunter, the jaws gaping, slavering, wide enough to swallow the landspeeder in two bites. “No, don’t!” she screamed, and moved. Darting out from behind her rock, she grabbed a chunk of sandstone from the riverbed and flung it at the creature.

The horned head swung toward her. Yarna skidded to a halt, and backpedaled frantically. Doallyn, taking advantage of the distraction, covered the distance between him and the dragon in two huge bounds. He leaped up, catching hold of the rightmost horn, hanging on as the beast’s head went skyward in a sickening rush. It roared, the sound deafening in the confines of the ravine.

Doallyn clung like an insect to the horn, then he threw himself forward, grabbing the middle horn. The beast swung its head in a sickening arc toward the cliff wall, plainly intending to crush the annoying creature against the stone surface. But before that arc could be completed, Yarna heard the whine and saw the flash of Doallyn’s blaster. He shot the beast right below the middle horn, between the eyes.

Air rushed out of the krayt dragon’s lungs with the force of a small explosion. As Yarna stood transfixed, the huge legs splayed outward, bonelessly, and the head dropped like a boulder, to crash against the rocky bed of the ravine. The impact flung Doallyn free, where he lay motionless.

He killed it, Yarna’s numbed brain realized, a second later. By the Moon Lady, he actually killed it!

But had Doallyn survived his victory?

With a muffled exclamation, Yarna ran forward to the sprawled body of the man. She crouched beside him, calling his name, for what seemed like an eternity—but was, in reality, only a moment or two—before he stirred, moved. She heard him gasp, then groan.

“Doallyn, are you hurt?”

His voice reached her, muffled by the helmet. “Breath … knocked out …” He struggled to raise himself, and, seeing that he moved freely, if stiffly, she helped him. He gasped for a moment, then said, in a more normal tone, “It’s dead?”

“As dead as Jabba,” Yarna said solemnly. “I can’t believe you killed that thing with one shot!”

“Vulnerable point … the sinus cavity leads directly into the brain … good thing I studied them.” Pushing Yarna’s supporting arms gently aside, Doallyn levered himself up until he was standing, surveying his kill. Yarna saw his shoulders straighten, and his whole body proclaimed the triumph he was feeling as he regarded the dead behemoth.

“I’ll have to get a trophy,” she heard him mutter. “No one will believe me, otherwise.”

“You are the best hunter in the entire galaxy,” Yarna said, and she believed every word of it. “I don’t think anyone else could have killed that thing.”

Doallyn’s helmeted head swung toward her, and he nodded. Without seeing his face, she knew that he was grinning exultantly. “But I couldn’t have done it without you, Yarna! If you hadn’t distracted him by moving at just the right instant, he’d have gotten me!”

The Askajian laughed out loud as some of his triumph was transmitted to her. Then, as she climbed to her feet, reality rushed back like a blow. “Doallyn,