Tales From Jabbas Palace (Kevin Anderson) (40 page)

He looks across the pit at her. She tells me later that he is not wearing his helmet, and she has never seen a man look so frightened before or since. Personally I hope never to see that kind of fear.

The Sarlacc’s tongues, in the meanwhile, continue to quest around the sandy surface of the pit for potential food. One brushes over Shaara’s leg and keeps moving—and then it comes back.

Shaara screams, and the Imp does what is perhaps the most surprising thing in this entire story. He pulls his personal vibroblade from his boot and throws it at the tentacle that has hold of her.

The tentacle lets go, but two others snap up immediately, and half a dozen more begin groping up the side where the blade has come from.

At this point the Imp’s courage fails entirely. He begins to claw his way up the walls of the Great Pit of Carkoon. This seals his doom.

One of the tentacles grasps Shaara’s metal-wrapped leg, while two others grab the Imp and tear him in half as they drag him in. Shaara says she thinks he died quickly. I hope that she is right.

Then the tentacle that has hold of Shaara picks her up, coils down toward the Sarlacc’s mouth—and uncoils most violently, throwing her out of the Pit of Carkoon entirely. The family landspeeder is a total loss but its comm unit works well enough that she can send out a call for help, and she does so.

Ah, look. We are getting near the Pit. of Carkoon.

Come this way, please.

Why does the Sarlacc let her go? That is a very interesting question, Mister Boba Fett. First of all, I wish to point out that it does not let her go, it makes her go. I do not know why it does this, but I have given it much thought over the years and I have several theories on the subject.

Perhaps it has had enough food for now, and it throws the excess back.

Shaara does not like this theory, and neither do I. I have seen it eat much more than this at one time.

Shaara thinks that the tentacles are tongues indeed and have a sense of taste. She thinks that the Sarlacc decides, based on the metallic taste of her suit, that she is not edible. I do not think this is true myself, for I have seen the Sarlacc swallow some things which could not possibly have tasted like organic matter, and the armor of the Imps did not seem to bother it at all.

What I personally think is this. Nobody really knows anything about the Sarlacc. It seems to be the only one of its kind, but creatures simply do not evolve as individuals in such a manner. And it is very old. We assume that it is not intelligent, but perhaps it is.

Perhaps it just has a slower kind of intelligence which takes years to think a single thought. And maybe, just maybe, it Knew what it was doing.

I do not know why the Sarlacc saved my sister, and that is really all there is to say about it. My parents say that they have never heard of the Sarlacc eating anyone who had not done something to deserve it, but if so we are undoubtedly all Sarlacc food in the final analysis.

Ah. Here we are. This is the best place to watch from, even better than Jabba the Hutt’s throne. Stay right here in the skiff and I can promise you a truly amazing view. You may even see what few have seen and lived: the Sarlacc’s belly.

A Barve Like That: The Tale of Boba Fett

by J. D. Montgomery

With the passage of the years he had learned to recognize certain things.

When he first returned to awareness he knew that he was on the surface of a planet. Artificial gravity shimmers at the boundaries of perception; on a ship under thrust the engines, however well damped, vibrate; and gravity provided by angular momentum causes a Coriolis effect that a human who has trained himself can recognize.

But that was all that he knew when the voice out of the darkness said, You are Boba Fett.

Fett’s head jerked up and he stared into—Nothing.

He reached for his rifle—and did not move. His arms and legs were firmly restrained. Fett hung in darkness, feet not touching the ground.

He heard a distant crack followed by the same noise again, rather more close. His head was not restrained but the rest of his body felt as though it had been wrapped in-He stuck out his tongue and flipped the switch that turned on his helmet’s macrobinoculars.

You are Boba Fett.

Even with the macrobinoculars, translating up out of the infrared and down from the ultraviolet, there was not much to see. Fett hung against the wall of a tunnel—a tunnel not of stone or any artificial material, but soft and yielding, spongelike, ridged and corded as though the tunnel had grown into its current shape. He could turn his head just enough to see that the tunnel curved sharply out of sight a few meters to his left and right.

Screams in the distance.

A whistling crack.

The voice said after a long pause, curiously, You are Boba Fett?

It came back in a rush—Tatooine, the sail barge, Skywalker and Solo, and with a rush of horror that stilled every other thought fighting for his attention it came to him where he was, in the belly of the Sarlacc-Being digested.

Most of those who dealt with Fett over the course of the decades did not consider him a man of much feeling.

This was accurate. He was not.

Leaving Bespin, though, he was filled by a certain fondness for Han Solo. Do not misunderstand—he did not approve of the man—but it was rare to receive two bounties for the same acquisition. But Vader had paid well and the Hutt would pay nearly as well again,The Hutt had promised a bounty of a hundred thousand credits. A respectable amount, though not as good as some Fett had earned. He had once received a bounty of a hundred and fifty thousand credits for the pirate Feldrall Okor; and on a memorable occasion, half a million credits for the delivery of Nivek’Yppiks, an incautious Ffib heretic who had fled his homeworld of Lorahns, and the religious oligarchy that controlled it.

Fett did not imagine he would ever come to like religious autarchies; they reminded him of his youth. But he had come to appreciate them.

They paid exquisitely well and their “criminals” were intellectuals who talked too much and rarely shot back.

Fett’s fee for the Solo acquisition was, though the Hutt did not know it yet, about to be increased. Fett did not imagine he would be able to push Jabba to half a million credits—the Hutt was a business creature, not a religious fanatic—but the Hutt was among other things an art collector.

Han Solo, encased in carbonite, had to be worth more than Han Solo alive or dead.

By the time he got done, counting both his fee from the Empire and his fee from the Hutt, Fett fully intended to better the half million he had received on that Yppiks fool.

Fett slept sitting up in the pilot’s chair, which made a more comfortable bed than some Fett had known, while the Slave 1 made the last jump to Tatooine.

Hyperspace transit was as a rule the only place Fett felt safe enough to sleep soundly. He did not dream, at least nothing he remembered; his sleep was peaceful and uninterrupted. One might have called it the sleep of a just man.

He awakened not long before hyperspace breakout.

No device awakened him; he had decided to awake at the correct time, and he did. He awoke alert, scanning the Control board. All seemed well.

Minutes later the hyperspace tunnel fragmented around him. Stars appeared in the viewplate—and a klaxon shrilled through the ship.

Bad news and Fett took it calmly enough, under the circumstances: a beacon had activated itself down in the hold, announcing Fett’s arrival insystem to whoever was listening on that frequency. Fett’s deduction was instantaneous and correct; another hunter had planted the beacon during his stay on Cloud City. Fett slapped the autopilot control and sprinted below deck.

Another hunter, looking for the Hutt’s bounty on Solo. It was the only answer that made sense, and Fett damned himself for a fool for not checking his ship when he had the chance. Basics, basics, you ignore the basics and you deserve what happens to you. Fett unslung the flame-thrower as he ran, rounded the last corridor before the cargo bay, to the stretch of corridor where the sensors showed the beacon originating, and let loose. He cooked the bulkhead until the metal glowed and the air around him burned hot and stank with ozone, brought the flame tracking upward-The klaxon ceased and Fett left the Slave’s maintenance droid to deal with the fire he’d started, and ran back to control.

He slid into his seat. The Slave 1 had continued to head insystem at high speed, Tatooine growing large in the viewscreen. The local shipping did not seem to be taking notice of Fett, which was all to the good, but somebody out there knew he’d arrived. Fett fed figures to the autopilot, had it calculate a hyperspace jump back out of the system, started another thread, and set a portion of the computer to performing diagnostics on ship functions.

He did not worry about his weapons systems, nor his deflectors; they were either ready, or sabotaged probably ready. Planting a beacon was one thing, and impressive enough; fooling the ship’s on-board diagnostics quite another.

So deep in a planet’s gravity well, calculating a new hyperspace jump took time, even for a computer as bright as the one Fett had running the Slave 1. Even so, it had nearly completed the calculations when the subject became moot: A needle of a ship came up over Tatooine’s horizon.

The IG-2000. It was instantly recognizable, and it told Fettjust how very bad the problem was. The ship belonged to the assassin droid IG-88, the second-best bounty hunter in the galaxy, and studying hard to be number one. Fett’s fingers danced across the controls and the Slave 1 braked savagely, dropping into a lower orbit. Fett focused and fired his fore blasters as the two ships closed.

The IG-2000 exploded instantly, went up in a burst of superheated metal and expanding plasma.

?????? tantly, Bad decoy. That assassin droid would never make a mistake like-The Slave’s sensors went wild. A ship was leaving hyperspace only a few klicks away—and then the Slave 1 shuddered all about Fett as blaster fire struck it aft.

The aft holocams showed it all clearly. The IG-2000, the real one, no decoy, breaking out of hyperspace with blasters lit, coming up above and behind Fett, pinning the Slave 1 between the IG-2000 and Tatooine.

It was a brilliant maneuver that only the assassin droid, with its droid’s reflexes, could have planned and carried out.

The Slave 1 dove for atmosphere, the IG-2000 following at high speed, as the comm unit came alive.

IG-88’s voice lacked intonation: “Surrender your prisoner and you have a thirty-percent probability of surviving this encounter.”

Fett ignored the droid, fingers flying across his control panel.

The droid said something else then, that Boba Fett never heard. He routed what power he could spare to the rear deflectors, sent another round of blaster fire aft to keep IG-88 occupied, and then ruined his own ship.

He turned the inertial damper on.

For most of a second the Slave 1 went dark as the inertial damper drew current, shields dropping, weapons going dead for that second, when a single blaster bolt would have destroyed the entire ship-and then the inertial damper came online.

Dual explosions came from below deck, the inertial damper destroying itself as it did its job, and probably taking the hyperdrive with it.

Half the indicators on the main board went red, the ship’s superstructure screamed with the sound of tearing metal, as the ship lost ninety percent of its velocity in the quantum instant it took an electron to descend from one atomic orbital shell to another.

Power returned to what was left of the Slave 1 as the IG-2000 hurtled past Fett at high speed. Fett calmly did all the obvious things, using the ion cannon to destroy the IG-2000’s rear deflector array before IG-88 could bring it online, followed by taking out the fore deflector array.

He clamped a tractor beam onto the IG-2000 long enough to keep it from fleeing, and sent a missile down to finish the business off.

Inside the Sarlacc, Fett said aloud, “Shouldn’t have named it that.”

The voice said politely, Indeed?

“The Slave 1. It was a mistake, that. It gave away information, told people I owned more…” Fett’s voice trailed off. He hung against a wall, in darkness, his extremities numbed. He could not feel his hands or his feet, and his skin was burning, and worst of all he was not aboard the Slave 1, not at all-He whispered, “How did you do that to me?”

He had the brief impression of amusement. It was easy. No—you were easy. You live strongly.

A chill descended upon Fett, and he shivered fiercely, there in the darkness, with the near and distant popping sounds. “Who are you?”

A fair enough question, it said, and the dark amusement was unmistakable this time. As you are my past, Boba Fett… I am your destiny.

“The grimace is quite wonderful,” said the Hutt. “We are impressed with your efforts, and we are pleased to pay seventy-five thousand credits for the person of Han Solo.”

Fett shook his head. “Jabba”—and he heard the stir that went through the room at the familiarity—”we’re not dealing here with the person of Captain Solo—who I recall had a bounty on him of one hundred thousand credits.”

Jabba’s tail twitched and his voice deepened into a dangerous near-growl. “This is not Solo?”

“This?” said Fett, as courteously as he was able—it was not his strong suit. He had not been raised speaking Basic, and his voice and diction tended toward a certain harshness when he used it. “This finely rendered carbonite sculpture, the person of Han Solo?

No. What I brought you today is art. Art created by the Dark Lord that happened to use Han Solo as material, like another artist might shape clay.” He shrugged. “I tell you what, I’ve gotten attached to it during my journey here. It has a presence to it, don’t you think?”

The Hutt said slowly, “The grimace is… quite wonderful.”

“And the hands,” said Fett, pushing it. “Let’s us two admire the hands together. I like them, they show the quality of the Dark Lord’s work-“

“Rather,” the Hutt murmured in a bass rumble, “rather. One sees Solo’s final moments of fear in them.” He examined Boba Fett, standing beside the carbonite-encased Han Solo; both Fett and the piece of art under discussion were well back from the trapdoor before Jabba’s throne.