Tales From Jabbas Palace (Kevin Anderson) (16 page)

“I’m glad,” Mara breathed. “Thank you—I feel much better.”

“My pleasure.”

She smiled at him and moved away. So Boushh was indeed a man. Or at least, the real Boushh was.

So who was this woman? One of Skywalker’s allies?

Or someone from the Fringe trying to make a name for herself, and the Wookiee had just gotten careless?

It almost didn’t matter. Mara was here to get Skywalker, and Skywalker alone. Anyone else was just clutter; and Jabba’s people ought to be capable of handling clutter. A quiet word about this Boushh impostor in the Hutt’s ear should do the trick.

Eventually, when he ran out of allies and droids, Skywalker would have to come himself.

He came a day later in the morning, at the break of dawn, as Jabba and his entourage were still snoring away the aftereffects of their late-night celebration over the unmasking and capture of Princess Leia Or-gana.

Mara’s danger sense gave her advance warning. To her surprise, it was all the warning anyone got. Without a whisper of noise or trouble from the supposedly alert guards outside, Skywalker was suddenly there in the throne room, Jabba’s Twi’lek majordomo docilely leading him in.

Skywalker’s holo had prepared Mara for an achievement of this caliber.

Even so, she was impressed.

Some of the guards were beginning to move into positions around Skywalker as the Twi’lek stepped to his master’s side and murmured in his ear. Jabba came awake with a jerk, his huge bleary eyes blinking as he took stock of the situation. He looked at the Twi’lek and at Skywalker.

And then he laughed.

The deep rumbling echoed through the throne room, rousing the rest of the company into a sleep-fogged scramble for consciousness and their feet. A few blasters appeared, but most weapons stayed in their holsters as brain-fuzzed courtiers tried to figure out whether this silent figure in hooded cloak was a friend or some unlikely foe.

It was the moment Mara had been waiting for: quiet confusion, no one quite sure what was happening, no one quite sure where anyone else was.

The moment to strike. Danger sense still tingling, she took a silent step to her right, to where one of Jabba’s younger human guards was gripping his force pike and trying mightily to make sense of the situation. His. blaster rested ignored in its holster. Reaching smoothly around behind him, Mara got a grip on it-And froze as a hard object jabbed firmly into the small’ of her back.

She’d been wrong. That tingle of danger hadn’t been coming from Skywalker.

“Nice and easy,” Melina Carniss murmured in her ear. “Let’s just ease our way back down the tunnel.

Unless you’d rather die right here.”

Silently, furious with herself, Mara let Melina guide her backward out of the throne room. A quiet security guard. One of many, probably, forming an extra barrier between Jabba and his enemies. She should have known such a layer would exist in a place like this, and been watching for it. Concentrating exclusively on Skywalker and his friends instead, she’d been sloppy.

From the throne came a sudden commotion, and a single blaster shot. Mara craned her neck, but they were too far away for her to see what was happening.

“Curious, huh?” Melina commented. “Was he one of yours? Turn here—very carefully.”

Mara did as ordered, studying Melina out of the corner of her eye as she turned and stared down the indicated tunnel. Melina had the blaster; but she, Mara, had the training, with the Emperor’s strength and will to drive it. If she reached out through the Force right now and snatched the blaster away…

She glanced down at Melina’s hand. No. Not from a grip that tight. Not without the other getting at least one shot off first.

Mind tricks, then? There were several ways to soothe or confuse or just plain incapacitate an enemy by jabbing with the Force directly into the victim’s mind.

But all the techniques required at least a little time to take effect, and in Melina’s alert state of mind there was a good chance she’d again get off that one shot.

“You’re being awfully quiet,” Melina commented as they walked.

“That’s because I don’t have any idea what’s going on,” Mara told her.

“I haven’t done anything.”

“Sure you haven’t,” Melina said grimly. “You haven’t infiltrated here under false pretenses. Or lied about who and what you are. Or conspired with the Lady Valarian to assassinate Jabba.” She jabbed the blaster muzzle again into Mara’s back. “Have you?”

Mara blinked. An assassination plot? Here? And without her even noticing? That wasn’t just sloppy, that was embarrassing. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she protested, trying one last time.

“I have nothing against Jabba. Really.”

“Sure you haven’t. You just wanted that guard’s blaster as a souvenir.” Melina jabbed again. “In here.”

It was another tunnel, this one slanting sharply downward before leveling out and bending away out of sight. Loitering just inside the tunnel entrance were a pair of Gamorrean guards, leaning casually on their force pikes and grunting quietly to each other. “What in blazes are you two doing here?” Melina snarled at them. “Straighten up.

Now.”

Slowly, obviously bewildered as to why a lowly dance designer should be giving them orders, they pulled themselves a little more upright.

“That’s better,” Melina growled. “But just marginally. Who do you think you are anyway, the Imperial Royal Guard? Get off your rears and take this woman down to the dungeons for me.”

She gave Mara a shove toward them. “Get going. Be a good girl and maybe I’ll ask Jabba to let you die quickly.”

“I appreciate it,” Mara said, looking back over her shoulder. She still couldn’t safely snatch the blaster from Melina’s grip. But what she could do…

Reaching out with the Force, she gave the muzzle a sharp twist to the right. There was a flash as Melina reflexively fired, the blast sounding twice as loud as usual in the confines of the tunnel.

It was followed by a grunt of pain and rage from the Gamorrean Melina had just shot. The other Gamorrean grunted, too, and the two of them lowered their force pikes and lumbered toward this human who had unreasonably attacked them.

Melina’s expression at what she’d just done was priceless, but Mara didn’t have time to enjoy it. With her captor’s attention distracted, now was the time to act. Ducking between the Gamorreans, she sprinted down the tunnel.

“Stop her!” Melina shouted. But the guards paid no attention. A pair of quick shots lit up the tunnel, scattering rock chips and spurts of dust.

And then it was just the grunts of the slug-brained Gamorreans and Melina’s angry and increasingly frantic shouts. Mara kept running, hoping she could get out of the line of fire before they got things straightened out up there. Near the bottom of the tunnel came her first opportunity: a curved and highly odoriferous cross tunnel that branched off to the left.

Throwing a last glance back at the noisy confrontation, she ducked down it.

It was short—no more than twenty meters—and was almost a dead end.

Almost. At the end was a rock wall with a half-meter-square ventilation grating cut into it, a grating that was literally shaking with the growls of something behind it. Cautiously, she stepped up to it and looked in.

The roaring was coming from probably the largest and ugliest biped creature she’d ever seen. A creature which, judging from the number of bones lying around the stinking filth of the pit, was both carnivorous and ravenous.

And which at the moment seemed intent on making a snack out of Luke Skywalker.

Pressing her face against the grating, the stench forgotten, Mara watched as Skywalker scrambled out from beneath a small ledge and dashed between the creature’s legs toward a tunnel-shaped area of the pit she couldn’t see into from her angle. This was perfect.

The creature would make short work of Skywalker, in front of the dozens of witnesses she could hear cheering it on, and without a single link Vader could backtrack to either her or the Emperor. And if for some reason the creature needed help, well, she was right here to give it.

The creature had turned around now and was thudding its way in pursuit.

Skywalker himself was out of sight, but from the noise coming from that direction she could tell that Jabba’s people were blocking his escape.

It should be over quickly.

And then, without warning, something small came flying through the air right at the edge of her vision, slamming into a control panel set into the stone wall.

There was a flash of sparks—the creak of released machineryAnd a heavy, serrated-bottom door dropped out of the ceiling, catching the creature across the back of its massive neck and driving it to the floor. It growled one last whimper and lay still.

Mara stared at the hulk, not believing it. Skywalker had killed it.

Alone, unarmed, he’d actually killed it.

And judging from the tone of the Huttese words rumbling down through the stunned silence from above, Jabba wasn’t at all happy about it.

Mara took a deep breath of the fetid air. All right.

Fine. So the creature hadn’t killed Skywalker; but now Jabba would.

Probably viciously too, if even half the stories about the Hutt were true. Served Skywalker right. He had to have been grossly stupid and grossly overconfident both to have come here alone and unarmed this way-The stinking air seemed to freeze in her throat, two mental images abruptly superimposing themselves on the scene in front of her.

Skywalker running away from the creature; Skywalker delivering his holo message to Jabba.

His new lightsaber. He hadn’t brought it with him.

Or rather, he hadn’t brought it himself.

The Wookiee didn’t have it—he would have nowhere to hide it. The protocol droid didn’t have it.

Leia Organa certainly didn’t have it.

The astromech droid.

She cursed under her breath. No, it wasn’t Skywalker who was being overconfident. It was Jabba.

And suddenly this whole thing was up to her again.

Stepping back from the grating, she looked for some kind of opening mechanism-Her danger sense triggered a split second before she heard the shuffling behind her on the tunnel floor. She spun around, dropping into combat stance.

The Gamorrean guards she’d left at the top of the tunnel had caught up with her. And they’d brought a half-dozen friends with them.

Two by two, blocking her exit with their bulk, they started toward her.

Mara didn’t have time for this, and she wasn’t in the mood for it anyway. Reaching Out with the Force, she jabbed hard at the minds of the first two guards. They stopped short, quivered for a moment on their thick legs, their long force pikes dropping with a clatter from limp hands. Then, to the obvious consternation of those behind them, they collapsed.

Mara had one of the force pikes in her hands before they hit the floor.

Swinging it expertly around in the confines of the tunnel, she feinted past the weapons of the second row of guards and slashed the deadly power tip across their faces. They staggered, clutching their wounds, and fell back against the third row. Jumping up on the backs of the first downed Gamorreans, Mara again jabbed past the momentary tangle to cut into the next row.

A brief minute later, it was over.

Breathing heavily, she turned back to the grating.

The force pike’s vibroblade made a fair racket as it cut through the metal, but there was probably enough of a ruckus coming down from Jabba’s throne room to cover it. Pitching the force pike through the opening, she squirmed her way into the pit.

The place was even more disgusting than it had looked from the outside.

The door that had killed the creature was blocking any exit in that direction, but there was a small round hatchway partway up the opposite wall. The force pike made quick work of the hatchway, revealing a steep but climbable slide behind it. Probably the end of the route that started atJabba’s trapdoor. Grabbing a nearby bone that was slightly longer than the slide’s width, she wedged it into the opening and pulled herself inside. Alternating her bracing between the bone and her own leg, she started up.

She came out a couple of meters short, the section directly beneath the trapdoor turning out to be a wide, straight drop that funneled the victim into the slide. Wedging the bone against the slide opening, she eased her way up to a precarious standing position. A small connection box was set into the wall; a careful prodding of the right connector, and the two sections of the trapdoor dropped open above her.

No one fell through or peered down at her. In fact, what conversation she could hear sounded distant.

Grimacing to herself, hoping she wasn’t too late, she got a grip on the edge of one of the trapdoors and started climbing.

The throne room was empty as she pulled herself over the edge, but the rapidly fading noise showed her which way they’d all gone.

Following the sounds, watching for guards who may have been alerted about her, she headed in pursuit. Skywalker was out there somewhere; with luck and the Force—maybe she could still catch up with him.

Beyond the milling crowd in the vast vehicle hangar was a large sail barge, busily taking on passengers. To one side a pair of skiffs were similarly being loaded.

Guards were everywhere: human, Gamorrean, a half-dozen other species; on the skiffs, on the sail barge, roughly controlling the crowd as they weeded out those apparently not invited to go along.

Wherever Skywalker was in all that—assuming he was there at all - - Mara couldn’t spot him.

But she could see Jabba. He was on his float, surrounded by guards and lackeys, being maneuvered toward the sail barge’s lift.

Pushing through the crowd, she hurried toward him.

The guards were watching as she approached, but she couldn’t read anything but normal caution in their faces and stances. Apparently, word of her alleged involvement with this Lady Valarian hadn’t gotten to them yet. “Your Exaltedness?” she called, stopping just short of the warning ring of weapons.

“Your Exaltedness? Please?”

Jabba turned his head toward her. “I’m Arica, Your Exaltedness,” she called. “One of your dancers.