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Now the other small hooded forms looked down upon the broad bowl-shaped valley among the dunes. Het Nkik elbowed his way to one of the overturned metal boxes so he could step up and look out across the gathering place. Though this was his third season as an adult on the scavenger hunts, Het Nkik still found the swap-meet site breathtaking.

He stared across the dazzling sand as the twin suns shone down on a swarm of sandcrawlers like a herd of metallic beasts gathered in a circle. The vehicles looked similar, though over the decades Jawa mechanics had attached modifications, subtle differences in armor and patchwork.

Originally the sandcrawlers had been huge ore haulers brought to Tatooine by hopeful human miners who had expected to make a fortune exploiting the baked wastelands; but the mineral content of Tatooine’s desert was as bleak and unappealing as the landscape itself. The miners had abandoned their ore haulers, and the rodentlike Jawa scavengers had seized them and put them to use, wandering the Dune Sea and the Jundland Wastes in search of salvageable debris. After more than a century, the sandcrawler hulls had been oxidized to a dull brown and pitted by the abrasive desert winds.

Their sandcrawler had arrived late, as Het Nkik had feared. Two days ago the pilot had taken them deep into a box-ended offshoot of Beggar’s Canyon where the metal detectors had found a slight trace of something that might have been the framework of a crashed fighter’s hull. But instead they had found only a few girders rusted away to flakes of powder. The oxidized debris was worthless, but before the Jawas could leave the narrow canyon, an early-season sandwhirl had whipped up, trapping them in a blinding cyclone of sand and wind. Strapped to the walls of their living cubicles, the Jawas had waited for the storm to blow over, and then used the powerful engines to plow through the drifted sand.

Though they had arrived at the swap meet late, there still seemed to be a bustling business. Far below, other Jawas scurried about like insects setting up the bazaar. Het Nkik hoped he could still find something worthwhile to trade.

Standing on their metal stools, the pilot and the chief lookout called across to each other, discussing the final sandcrawler count. Het Nkik calculated quickly with his darting yellow eyes and saw that they were not the last to arrive. One of the other vehicles was missing. Some of the Jawas around him speculated on what misfortune might have overtaken their brethren, while others consoled themselves by pointing out that even if the goods had already been picked over, they would have a new batch to inspect when the final vehicle arrived.

As the pilot guided the sandcrawler over the lip of the dunes in a switchback path down into the flat meeting area, the Jawas scurried back to their living cubicles to prep their own wares. His body wiry beneath the heavy robes, Het Nkik had no difficulty scrambling down fifteen decks to reach the stuffy cubicles.

Het Nkik slept in an empty upright shipping pod, rectangular and scarred with corrosion, barely large enough to step inside and turn around. During sleeping cycles he buckled himself to the wall and relaxed against the belt restraints where he could stare at his prized possessions stashed in pockets, magnetic drawers, and field jars. Now he grabbed the accumulated credit chips and barter notes he had earned during their great scavenger hunt and darted toward the main egress doors.

Faced with the magnitude of the great bazaar, the Jawas worked together as an efficient team. They had set up their merchandise dozens of times during their half-year trek, stopping at every moisture farmer’s residence, every smuggler’s den, even Jabba the Hutt’s palace. Jawas didn’t care where they sold their wares.

Down in the bowels of the sandcrawler, Het Nkik scurried among the merchandise, tweaking the barely functional droids and servo apparatus. Jawas had an instinctive feel for machinery and electronics, knowing how to get a piece of equipment functioning just well enough