Tales From Jabbas Palace (Kevin Anderson) (11 page)

“Don’t be cowardly,” she whispered, but she couldn’t put any strength into her voice.

“He threatened to flush my memory. That would be even worse,” the droid whined.

“Nothing is final,” Oola murmured, trying to echo things she’d thought she believed in, before fear nibbled holes in her faith. “Not even death. It only frees your spirit from the confines of gravity, to dance—”

“You don’t understand.” Threepio lowered himself with a metallic squeak onto the chamber’s sandy floor.

“Even a partial memory wipe would be disastrous for a droid of my programming. I might have to start from basic imitative body movements.

I’m not even certain I. would retain my primary communications function.”

Whatever that means, she signed with her lekku. No non-Twi’lek could read lek gestures.

Surprising her again, he spread his metal hands. “It would mean doom,” he explained. Then he spoke again, almost shyly. “Might I offer condolences for your unhappy position, Miss Oola?”

Those were the first genteel words she’d heard in two days.

Regretting her bravado back at the town, when she could have escaped Master Fortuna, and then her obvious lack of courage in this place, she curled up into a tight little ball and cradled both lekku between her knees, “Thank you, See Pio,” she murmured. “Do you have any idea what’s happening?”

She indicated the other side of Jabba’s throne with a quick jerk of her head.

“Threepio,” he corrected, but he tried to be gallant.

“As I understand, His High Exaltedness is punishing a Jawa.

Someone he caught plotting against him, I suppose. Everyone here hopes to kill everyone else, so far as I can ascertain. I—oh!”

Another shriek cut him off. His head turned.

Oola nudged his hard, cool side with a bare elbow.

“Tell me about that… picture that the other droid projected this morning,” she said urgently. She needed to know now. She’d learned not to hope for second chances.

“What?” Threepio swiveled his head toward her.

“The… human.” Humans looked almost Twi’leki, but pitiably maimed… just as Jabba looked horribly mutated, one lek bloated to obscene proportions. “Who was it?”

Threepio’s tone brightened. “Oh! That is my—” He halted before saying “owner,” or “master”—he belonged to Jabba now—but his speech had clearly started to imply ownership.

She touched her collar in unexpected empathy. Ignoring his faltering, she said, “I’ve seen him.”

He drew up with a grandiose sweep of both arms. “I am afraid that’s impossible.”

“Is his name Luke?” Oola asked.

Threepio’s eyes glimmered in the dark, smoky air.

“My goodness. Yes. Yes, it is. Where was he?”

Mournfully, Oola explained.

Oola relaxed on her deceleration chair, relieved that her first spaceflight had ended smoothly. Jerris Rudd, Bib Fortuna’s employee and their pilot-escort on the short trip from Ryloth to Tatooine, had warned her that unexpected sandstorms or hostiles might agitate their landing.

Oola flexed her legs, eager to spring from this cramped cabin. At her twilit home on Ryloth, deep in underground warrens where eight hundred people acknowledged her father as clan chief, she’d been known as an exquisite dancer. The height of her kicks and the sensuous swing of her lekku had won dozens of admirers.

Four months ago, Bib Fortuna had coaxed her aboveground. He’d abducted her, instead of paying her father as custom dictated. He’d enslaved her—and another Twi’lek girl, even younger and more petite—at a complex on Ryloth where he’d once conducted a lucrative smuggling business. He’d bought them the most expensive training on six worlds: four months with Ryloth’s most elegant, experienced court dancers.

The older dancers disdained her clan’s quaint, primitive ways. To Oola’s way of thinking, her clan preserved faith and dignity that the rest of the world had lost in its rush to accommodate slavers and smugglers.

Expediency was a deadly god to serve.

Still, Oola rose to her training. She couldn’t escape, and she did love to dance. The twin temptations of power and fame set hooks in her soul.

Fortuna’s performers selected the girls’ dancing personae: Sienn would appear slightly younger, naive, and guileless; Oola would seem knowing, worldly-wise, and callous.

Sienn sat stoically as Fortuna’s grim groomers tattooed delicate floral chains up and down her nerve-laden lekku. Oola held Sienn’s hand and wiped her silent tears of pain.

Sienn was too young and vulnerable for work that made her beauty a commodity. Twi’leks called her kind a “morsel”—one gulp and a client could eat her.

Their aging head trainer, who still boasted some beauty, tried hardening Sienn. “Don’t play with that kind of appetite,” she’d warned. “Make them drool, butdon’t let them bite.”

Oola sleeked her lekku and shimmied her shoulders infinitesimally.

She and Sienn had been trained by the best. Groomed for the best.

Sienn sat in another deceleration chair, wearing a simple hooded coverallmlike Oola’s, but pale yellow instead of dark blue—and stroked her freshly tattooed lekku. “Do they still hurt?” Oola murmured.

“They’re fine,” insisted Sienn. “They—” The cabin door slid aside.

Jerris Rudd stepped through, one point seven meters of scum.

Rudd was the first human she’d met. Perhaps all humans dressed in baggy, torn clothing. Perhaps they all smelled this foul, with matted fur covering their heads (the worst of Rudd’s stench came from that fur). If so, humans were scum. In keeping with her worldly-wise role, Rudd had given her a tiny dagger. “Help Sienn,” he’d taunted, “if you can.” She’d bristled, but she’d made sure the dagger was sharp, then tucked it into her belt.

“Nice fly, girls?” Rudd rubbed his stained hands.

“Pretty good landing, I think. No boom.” He clapped his hands at Sienn’s face.

Sienn shrank into her chair. Evidently Rudd had tried to evaluate Sienn’s training during their hyperspace hop.

Oola could speak only a few hundred words of Basic, but her ear knew the way pidgin limped. It offended her. She could guess-translate most words in context. “It was a good landing,” she said firmly.

“Time to unbuckle”—he pantomimed releasing their harnesses—”and hit dirt. You’ll love Tatooine.”

Sienn touched a control on her seat. Her flight harness withdrew into its side. “What’s it like?” she asked.

“A little like Ryloth. You’ll see. Come on.”

They’d barely climbed down into the docking bay’s heat—and the sandy back lot was like Ryloth’s hot, perpetually uninhabitable bright side—when a metallic voice announced, “Hold it right there. Nobody moves.”

That voice had no music left in it. It grated in her ears like metal on slate. Oola did as it ordered.

The voice came from a human wearing white metal.

Oola stared. She’d seen tri-D images of Imperial stormtroopers.

Three of them stood between the battered fore pod of Rudd’s small transport and the only gate in the docking bay’s sandstone walls. One whiteskin marched up to Rudd. “Let’s see some identification.”

Oola had no trouble translating that word. Moving slowly and keeping his eye on the stormtroopers’ blast rifles, Rudd dug into his sweat-stained shoulder pouch: A stormtrooper grabbed it. Sienn stood still, trembling.

Eventually the whiteskin returned Rudd’s pouch.

His partners lowered their weapons. “This is a very common class of ship, ” he explained. “Just what we’d expect someone to use if they were trying to sneak past surveillance.”

“I,” said Rudd, “am a respectable escort. I—”

“Can it,” said the head stormtrooper. “We know your boss. Jabba’s in for a surprise.

Real soon.” The whiteskin beside him laughed.

The third stormtrooper kept his weapon up. “I say we search their ship,” he drawled.

“Not necessary,” Rudd insisted. “I’m clean. I’ve got an appointment in just a few minutes.”

Evidently that was the wrong thing to tell a stormtrooper.

Oola, Sienn, and Rudd spent the next hour under hnperial guard, cronched in marginal shade While two stormtroopers examined every square glekk of the shuttle. They emerged with officious shrugs.

“Move along,” said the head whiteskin. “No charges this time.”

“Thanks so much,” Rudd growled, but he said it softly. Whatever “charges” were, they scared him.

“Come on, girls.” Oola walked a little faster and so avoided letting his swat land. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Sienn wasn’t as quick.

“What are they looking for?” Oola asked as they hustled up a narrow alley.

“Not what. Who. From the way they searched us, they’re looking for a person.”

“Who?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care. Don’t ask. I’m off schedule now,” he grumbled, forgetting to condescend and speak pidgin. He bundled them into a wheelless craft with three aft-mounted engines. Oola claimed the back seat. “Fortuna’s going to be busy for more than an hour.

We’ll have to—” His testy words faded under engine noise.

Oola stared over the side of the craft as Rudd steered across the ugly little town. It was all aboveground, not sensibly nestled in Solid rock. Already she felt homesick. Debris lay heaped alongside square buildings the same ugly orange as Tatooine’s sand.

Rudd steered around several turns, until Oola would’ve gotten lost except for her unfailing sense of the suns. If you couldn’t orient yourself on Ryloth, you could die before your time. “Just a little farther.”

Rudd stroked Sienn’s leg as she sat in the front seat beside him.

“And we’ll—whoops.” He’d been decelerating.

Abruptly he sped up again and raced around a corner.

“What was that?” Oola asked. She craned her neck to look back.

Nothing interesting showed.

“Visitors outside Jabba’s town house. Not the kind I want to show you girls to. Let me think.” Moments later, he braked the craft beside a sizable pile of debris.

Metal spars and hull plates lay tangled with shredded cloth shrouds: evidently two airships had collided over Mos Eisley, crashed, and been preserved in Tatooine’s dryness… except for their removable parts.

Those were long scavenged, judging by the sand that drifted through holes in what remained. “Out,” said Rudd. “Out.”

“Here?” Sienn’s lekku wriggled in confusion. It was a natural gesture their teachers had taught her to emphasize, just as Oola had learned to swing her lekku in free, wild arcs.

“Yep.” Rudd gave Sienn a shove that sent her over the side. Oola vaulted down with a long, lazy flip.

Rudd followed. He poked at a long metal engine shield, slid a spar aside, and finally lifted a large sheet of yellowish cloth. It might have once served as a sail, attached to a long straight boom and ripped into weathered yellow strips at one end. “Climb under this.

Wait till I get back. Don’t make a sound. Mos Eisley is full of predators.” He mimed a toothy growl and pretended to claw her.

“Predators eat nice little girls. Put your hoods up.”

Sienn had already rolled into the sail’s stuffy shade.

“Get in here, Oola,” she whispered. “Hurry. Someone might see you.”

Oola crawled close, curling her lekku close to her neck inside the hood.

She couldn’t let sand scratch their sleek skin. That would hurt…

?????? and it would decrease her value to Bib’s famous employer.

It was finally sinking in: they were on the same world as the fabulous Jabba the Hutt. Master Bib Fortuna had spun mouth-watering tales of Jabba’s wealth and splendor—his legendary palace, his exquisite taste in food, females, and other luxuries. Oola imagined soft cushions and costumes that fluttered in every breeze, composed solely of artfully draped dancing veils. Her handsome new master would be suave, powerful, and very deeply impressed with her - . a station worth the insignificant price of the freedom she’d flung aside.

But she lay hiding in a pile of garbage. Sienn sniffled behind her.

Several minutes later, Oola blinked a runnel of sweat out of one eye.

She’d changed her mind about Tatooine: it was hotter than Ryloth.

Her vision blurred in heat that shimmered the air. An ill-defined shadow seemed to detach from the nearest building and flow toward the rubbish heap.

That was ridiculous. Even at midday, shadows didn’t-Sienn grabbed Oola’s leg. “Oola,” she whispered.

“What’s that?”

Oola blinked. It wasn’t an hallucination, but a black-robed… person. Mos Eisley is full of predators. Even Rudd traveled cantiously here. Oola toed Sienn’s shoulder. “Get deeper!” Once Sienn started to move, Oola wriggled backward. Hot, scratchy sand ground through her coverall against her knees, elbows, and belly, but she managed another meter deeper under cover.

The far edge of the sail lifted. The dark creature crouched on its heels, extending a hand as if to raise something… but his hand did not touch cloth or spar. A black cloak, hooded like theirs, draped his face.

Sienn whimpered. Oola scrabbled at her belt with sandy fingers, fulnbling for her decorative little dagger.

“Keep away,” she hissed and signed in Twi’leki.

The shrouded creature leaned onto one hand.

Deep under his hood, Oola caught a glimpse of chin and a glint of blue.

Twi’leks never had blue eyes.

“Keep away,” she repeated. The words didn’t sound as menacing in Basic.

The creature shed his cloak and edged forward. Human like Rudd, he had clean, tow-colored fur. Unlike Rudd’s kitchen-rag garb, his black undercloak clothing looked intact (although well worn) and tucked down.

If this was a predator, her impression of Rudd had been right: Rudd was scum, even among his own people. Bib Fortuna’s organization dropped in her estimation.

So did her decision to cooperate.

The human’s unnatural blue eyes glanced from Oola to Sienn, back to Oola. “I feel your fear,” he said softly. “Come with me. I’ve got a” He used several more words that she didn’t understand, but he finished with two that she did: “safe place.”

Oola laughed shortly. “No safe place on this world,” she guessed aloud.

It alarmed her that this human’s ‘way of speaking, whether or not she understood his words, dispelled her logical fear of him.