Quicksand. That seemed like the most realistic solution: if I was going to defeat this droid, I was going to have to trap him in quicksand.
I could fill my daily melon quota in only a few hours, leaving me with sufficient time each day to wonder about the desert. Reader, where did you think all that time went? Did you imagine I wandered aimlessly with no purpose? No. I scouted. I planned. In the months I had spent in that slave camp, I found every quicksand location about the camp.
This one, I decided fairly early on, was the best. The problem with quicksand is that, to trap someone in it, many things need to happen just right. Implicitly, you are counting that someone will approach you from a certain angle. When the encounter comes, how do you ensure that? It is almost impossible: too many variables cannot be controlled ahead of time. I found a lot of quicksand locations throughout the desert but could not think of how to structure a confrontation around them.
But this location was promising: here the quicksand was at the very mouth of the cave. Unless the droid crept up along the walls of the cave, as we did when we entered, he would surely fall through. There remained the possibility that he would simply bring his speeder into the cave, flying over the quicksand; but the outcropping of rocks at the entrance made that difficult. As you might guess, it was no natural outcropping. I had carried some sizeable boulders here across the desert, in an effort that took weeks of work, and partially buried them in the sand so that they looked natural.
It worked like a hitch, almost.
The droid had indeed fallen into the sand - and it was, as I verified many times, a particularly deep bout of quicksand, many yard-sticks in length. He was not climbing out anytime soon. But our shock collars were still on and we were still writing in pain on the ground. Still, I knew what I had to do.
I should explain that the transmitter used to activate the shock collars was an old, decrepit looking thing. Clearly, the sand people had scrimped when it came to acquiring modern tech. In fact, it is a minor mystery how such an advanced-looking droid was working for them to begin with. Likely, it was the possibility of torturing the prisoners that attracted him. All I had to do was get away from there and, with the dampening effects of the many layers of sand, we'd soon be out of range; without the transmitter's signal, the collars would shut off. I had originally planned to run, thinking we'd make it to Anchorhead on foot before the sand people would come to learn something was wrong; but the speeder was still turned on, and right there, hovering in the air at the entrance of the cave.
I just needed to get to it.
The next five minutes were the longest of my life. I do not remember much. Most of what I remember is the pain, with the occasional picture of what I must have been doing. It's all very vague as if there is a sort of mist over the memory. And yet, somehow, over the next few minutes, I managed to crawl out, sticking to one of the walls of the cave to avoid falling into the quicksand myself, and found myself on my knees in front of the speeder, only to discover that Bastila had beaten me to it. She pulled me up and had the presence of mind to turn the speeder around and press on the pedal.
I cannot describe the feeling that came over me when the pain went away. It was as if the world snapped into place again after being upside down. I vowed to myself to never put myself in that position again - though, looking back on it now, the vow did not last long.