Ranko wanted to say many things, among them 'Are you out of your mind?' But she held her tongue. "How?" Was all she'd ask him. He'd be good for an explanation.
He shrugged again. "No one who goes in ever comes out, so that rules out the main entrance. I say we should open up a side route."
She lifted her chin in curiosity. "How?" She repeated, feeling more at ease this time.
In reply, he grinned.
=====
A project like this wasn't started on a whim. You jump inside with a rope around your waist and whatever is on the other end of that rope gets dragged in after you. No, hunters and daredevils had shunned the Sarlacc for millennia - and for good reason.
It was something that required an engineering touch.
First you prepare for success. According to legend the creature dissolved its prey over a thousand years. Anyone within was not likely to be healthy. A bulk freighter refitted with power to run the fifteen thousand medical stasis booths bolted inside of its hull set down on a rocky ledge above the great pit. Anything they rescued could be frozen between ticks of time while they figured out how to heal whatever damage had been done to it.
Second, you prepare for the dangers. A very simple screamer probe was dropped within. The high intensity burst transmission of the chemical composition of conditions within gave some of the first accurate data on what it was like inside. Acid was registered among potent neurotoxins and some deadly stuff more horrible than any bounty hunter or Imperial torture specialist had yet dreamed up.
Ranma resolved to keep these findings secret lest they try and duplicate that stuff.
Third, you go to work.
Sonics, tremorsensors and other means charted the size of the unseen behemoth lurking beneath those sands. Burrowing probes confirmed the data, though they also stumbled across a new danger - root tentacles protected the creature as well as securing it to the soil and rock below those sands.
Well, that was something they'd just have to remedy, wasn't it?
A tanker came in, dropping five thousand tons of beetle milk inside of the sarlacc's maw at high pressure, filling it up with white and sticky goodness. Acids could be canceled by an equal base, but most bases are just as caustic as acids. Milk, however, was not. It could be dumped inside with impunity, neutralizing the acid digestion of the sarlacc while they worked and hopefully deadening the pain for the victims while it gave the beast something else to nourish itself on.
As well as the fact that this particular brand of beetle milk was not only inexpensive, it was an intoxicant to a broad spectrum of lifeforms and incredibly unappetizing (the reason it was so cheap - but he'd never heard of salaccs being picky eaters). A drunken sarlacc ought to be less capable of realizing danger. Even if it wasn't, neutralizing the acid made the next stage less dangerous.
There is a simple beauty to work, and this was one of those times.
Strip mining was an old and effective corporate stratagem. And moving sand wasn't any great deal once you decided to. The sarlacc, immense as it was, couldn't yet fill the entire valley. So they chose a spot a safe distance away, opened up a deep pit, and began to very gradually shift more and more sand away making their pit both deeper and wider in the direction of the buried beast. They had to use fusion formers to create walls, turning the stray matter of loose sand into solid, permacite blocks and buttresses. Huge hoses sucked the sand up and deposited excess far away. Weather control machinery kept sandstorms and wind from refilling the hole, and guards kept the curious away. Every time they came across a root, turbolaser artillery took care of it.
The local crime lord, Jabaa the something-or-other sent word demanding they stop and tell him what they were doing. He wanted the sarlacc preserved for purposes he failed to divulge.
In response, they orbited a Victory Star Destroyer over his home and the next morning it wasn't there anymore. Just a huge crater searing with the heat of a thousand or so missile impacts. Whether he lived or died he stayed fairly quiet after that. No one else stood up to object, either, after Jabaa's palace became a smoldering hole in the ground.
You can be a crime lord all you like and it doesn't stop the advance a bit when an army comes to call.
On the second work day they'd stripped the last of the sand away, exposing an entire side of the massive sarlacc. It was a beast, looking like some huge, bloated, root-covered pod measuring as big around as some space stations. Flame projectors burned the roots off, to the ignored sounds of the beast's screaming. Then it was time for the real work.
Spraying the exterior with cryogas to freeze it (as effective as a quick dip in liquid nitrogen), they shattered the outside layers, and while droids cleared away the fragments against any lingering possibility they could be dangerous at thaw, small police surveillance droids flying on their own repulsorlifts so the creature couldn't touch and thereby sense them flooded into the exposed innards of the beast.
"That critter's tissues are com-resistant. Too much metal content, sensors are at greatly reduced range. This probe will take longer." Ranma concluded at the monitors. Inside, the tiny police surveillance probes zipped about recklessly, flowing down every gullet and tube, through every chamber and cataloging all they could see.
Once the probes were inside, frozen outer layer of sarlacc cleared away, and a scaffolding set up to reach for access all of the layers inside the exposed beast, a small army of battle droids lined up, their blasters replaced with sapping charges, fusion cutters, plasma torches and carrying flame projectors as their main weapons.
The march inside of the sarlacc commenced.
Actually, the data that came back to Ranma's control point was very interesting. That sarlacc had a greater profusion of intruder defense (or, he guessed rather, prey containment) tricks than he'd ever seen before. Toxic gasses, multitudes of tentacles, acid spurts (now rather weak with the acid biology of the creature severely weakened), a variable biology able to shift and change layout, and all that was just the beginning.
Toxic gasses hardly bothered the droids. Tentacles they suppressed with incendiary charges or bursts with their flame weapons. Acid spurts grew too weak to seriously damage the metal armored chassis of the droids, and the variable layout they just blew their way through with sapping charges. You want to be a wall? Fine. We can deal with walls.
Fusion cutters didn't much care if they faced starships hulls or nasty biological horrors.
Ranma was actually testing out some hostage rescue software he'd programmed for their battle droids, and so far it was working. Medic teams were already emerging in the hundreds from inside, carrying scarcely recognizable globs of tissue that had been identified as victims of the sarlacc, while equal or greater numbers of reinforcements flooded past them back into the monster.
The stasis booths in their bulk freighter immediately began to fill, and they were scarcely inside, hardly begun yet on the main task. Ranko gave the order to multiple occupy to make space in the stasis booths last farther.
it was a space that suspends time. it didn't much matter to the device if there was one critter inside or fourteen, it still just worked over its enclosed space.
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(Posted Mon, 31 May 2004 21:05)
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