Tales From Jabbas Palace (Kevin Anderson) (42 page)

The armor had held, and would hold; that much did not worry Fett. The digestive acid the Sarlacc used did worry him; it had already made its way through to his skin. Most of his body burned, chest and back and arms and legs. So far the acid had not made it through his helmet, and had not made it past the blast armor that covered his genitals; thank Providence for small favors.

He had access to the contents of his helmet. The comlink built into it was silent; he had scanned through all frequencies, and all he got was static, which might mean that there was nobody within range of the helmet’s comlink, about ninety klicks, or might mean that the bulk of the Sarlacc was blocking the signal, and finally might mean that the comlink itself was broken.

The Sarlacc wrenched violently at Fett’s left knee.

His armor held and Fett was yanked down the wall, the tentacles holding his upper body losing their grip slightly. He ended up hanging at an angle as the tentacles wrapped themselves about him again… and there was a pressure against the sole of his right foot.

He’d been dragged down far enough that his right foot was now in contact with the ground.

What good that did him—if any—Fett did not know. He flexed the foot to see if he could get a purchase; perhaps.

He relaxed and considered.

The sensors and computer built into his combat suit had continued to work, even after Fett had lost consciousness.

The computer responded to verbal commands; Fett had it play back the entire sequence of events that had landed him in the Great Pit of Carkoon, using the heads-up tac display in his helmet for video. The first time through the playback he had to switch it off after realizing that Solo had— accidentally! - - activated his jet pack. The holocam angle was terrible, but there was no question about it; that illegitimate Solo had sent him flying into the pit by chance.

It took him several minutes before he was able to try and watch it again.

He lifted up from the sail barge, dropping down onto the skiff, with the Jedi and Solo and Chewbacca.

And… yes. Right there; the butt of Solo’s spear had slammed into the emergency access panel, activating the jets.

The on-board computer couldn’t access the jet pack; they were not linked together. Fett couldn’t run diagnostics on the pack, had no idea whether the thing was working or not. The emergency access panel was behind him, to his right; if he’d been able to get his left hand free, he might have been able to reach it-If I could get my left hand free, thought Fett dryly, I could do a lot of things.

Using radar and sonar, Fett had mapped out a rough picture of the Sarlacc’s interior. Leading away from the main chamber were several dozen small tunnels, heading almost straight down into the earth. He was about ten meters away from the main chamber; and about forty meters beneath the ground. Even if the jet could take him out again, if he could move to activate it, even then he’d be stuck in the middle of nowhere, in the midst of a great desert-The tentacles holding Fett’s left leg tightened painfully, just above the knee.

Fett’s lips twisted in a snarl. “I swear by the soul I don’t have, I am going to kill you.”

Kill who? Susejo laughed. The one who’s talking to you?

Or the one who’s eating you?

“Either. Both.”

Ah. You have a very poor attitude, Boba Fett: I almost made it out, early on my second day in the pit.

I lay on my back on the bottom of the pit, in the acid, through the long night. The Sarlacc and I “talked” for a while; it’s very young and not very bright, and I feel sorry for it. It’s rare for a Sarlacci spore to survive a landing in a desert environment; they’re best suited to wet environments, though they can survive almost anywhere.! saw pictures once of a Sarlacc that had managed to survive on the surface of an airless moon; it was quite small, its aperture less than a meter in diameter, but the system it had ended up in was young, and heavy in cometary material.

Comets are principally made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen; this poor little Sarlacc was making do, out there in the vacuum. It had the most amazing root system; it was far more plant than animal.

This Sarlacc doesn’t have it that bad, tucked away out here in the desert. It’s not really aware that it exists; it has a neural system, but it’s not very well deveLoped, and not likely to become so in the desert.

Sarlacci do interesting things with messenger RNA: over the course of millennia, they can attain a sort of group consciousness, built out of the remains of people they’ve digested. I talked to such a Sarlacc, once a few decades ago. It was a thoroughly asocial creature that wondered, quite wistfully, whether a Jedi would taste better or worse than the other sentients it had eaten. I remember being amused by it, for I knew that I was not such a fool as to come within reach of its outer tentacles.

I walked right over this baby Sarlacc. It lay buried just beneath the sand, tentacles hidden in the drifts. It got me by the ankle and dragged me down into the pit, through a sand plug nearly a meter thick.

The sand plug came down right after me, right on top of me. I lay on the bottom of the pit, held in place by surprisingly strong tentacles, with sand all around me, looking up into the night sky. The Sarlacc’s digestive acid is weak, and the sand that came down with me has blotted up much of it. Nonetheless my clothing is already dissolving; if I do get out of here I’ll be a sight, a naked sixty-year-old Jedi with a rash trying to make it back to her survey ship.

Even diluted, the acid burns.

I do not blame the Sarlacc; it is behaving as its nature dictates.

It’s not very bright and it is very young—only five meters wide, and perhaps that deep as well.

Hard to say quite how deep underground I am, looking up into the night sky through what used to be the sand plug.

I may only be the second or third sentient it’s ever eaten. One of them is hanging, totally cocooned, on a wall in the chamber here with me; a Choi named Susejo who was mostly digested already when I fell into the pit. I can feel his thoughts; he’s mildly telepathic.

He’s very young, for a Choi, barely out of childhood, and very angry—he has not taken being eaten very well, and I feel rather sorry for him, too.

When morning came, the light filtered down around me, and I saw my chance; my only chance. My lightsaber had come down with me. I hadn’t been able to tell, there in the darkness; it no longer hung from my belt, and I hadn’t known whether I’d lost it up on the surface, or down here in the pit. It lay on its side in the acid a few feet away from me, and I turned my head to look at it.

It leaped across the pit and into my hand. I lit it and bent my hand back at the wrist, bringing the blade down as close to the tentacles holding my arm as I could get it, straining; the Sarlacc made a sound, a high-pitched squeal, and the tentacles holding that arm pulled free. I wrenched the arm free and sliced away at the other tendrils still holding me, cutting for just a few seconds until I was free, rolled off my back into a crouch, and then-Five meters is a long way up, even for a youngJedi. I raised the Force and leaped.

The tentacle caught my ankle in mid-leap. The Sarlacc broke my leg and two of my ribs pulling me back down. I lost the lightsaber again on the way down and by the time I had the presence of mind to look for it, it was gone for good. I don’t know what the Sarlacc did with it, but I never saw it again.

For the rest of the day the Sarlacc remained restless, tentacles waving aimlessly, twitching ceaselessly. It held me so tightly that the blood flow to my extremities was impaired. It was very upset by the whole thing.

I tried to tell it that I was sorry, that I would not have hurt her had I been able to avoid it.

That got a rise out of the Choi, hanging on the wall facing me—If you must chatter, it snapped, at least do it for the benefit of the one who can listen to you.

A slow death has a few things to recommend it; time to get your thoughts in order, at any rate. I blocked the pain radiating from my body, and frankly, after a few days I was bored, too.

Susejo, I said, why don’t we pass the time by telling each other stories?

Sweat trickled down Fett’s form, pooled beneath his armor, mixed with the burning acid that covered him.

An impossible kaleidoscope of lights danced in front of him, and for a moment he thought he might vomit into his helmet; that old Jedi woman had been real. Her thoughts still echoed away within him, mixed in with the thoughts of the Corellian gambler, and the quick bright flashes of a dozen other minds, the thoughts and hopes and desires of men and women dead years and centuries and millennia. They’d all died, every one of them, sunk down into the acid and let go of life.

I miss the Jedi, Susejo said. She was very kind to me. Susejo obviously had some level of contact with the Sarlacc; the Sarlacc had shivered, earlier, when Susejo felt happiness. Fett made a conscious decision, and let loose the anger that was never very far beneath the surface.

He snarled, “Then you shouldn’t have eaten her, you miserable wretch.”

The hatred in his voice and in his thoughts brought a response from Susejo, a flare of startled anger. The tentacles holding Fett tightened convulsively and Susejo snapped, I didn’t, the Sarlacc ate her.

Fett wished that the wall behind him were not quite so soft. “And you couldn’t have stopped it, you couldn’t have tried to help her, or anyone else, in four thousand years? You’re an ingrate, you pathetic excuse for a sentient being. You got taken down here as a child and everything that you know and everything that you are you owe to the people you let get eaten” - - and the Sarlacc’s tentacles spasmed around Fett, digging into him, hauling him back into the wall behind him—”and your feelings are hurt because I’ve told you so? You could have helped that Jedi, she’d have come back for you. Instead you spent the next four thousand years playing at philosophy, abusing the people who taught you to be what you are, never even dreaming that you had options, and why?” he screamed at Susejo, building up to it, blasting him with the rage and hatred he had spent a lifetime growing, the Sarlacc’s straining tentacles shaking against his body. “Because you’re stupid, a miserable mean wretch of an excuse for a sentient being without the imagination or the courage—” The tentacles slashed around him, a sound like a thousand whips cracking, drowning out Fett’s voice.

He shoved, got his right foot solidly against the ground and pushed upward.

The switch in the jet pack’s emergency access panel, digging into the soft wall behind him, was pushed down as Boba Fett pushed up.

Flame erupted in the enclosed space around them.

The Sarlacc itself shrieked in pain, a sound that echoed away down the tunnels, the hundreds of tentacles around Fett whipping themselves into a frenzy, those that held Fett constricting so tightly that for an instant he could not breathe-The jet pack had never been intended to be run in such tight quarters for any length of time.

It exploded.

It was his oldest possession; the Mandalorian combat armor that was almost as famous as he was, famous the galaxy wide. It had protected him, down the decades, from blaster fire and slugthrowers, explosions and knives, from all the various insults the universe was apt to throw at a man in his line of work. But not even Mandalorian combat armor, designed by the warriors who had fought, and sometimes defeated, Jedi Knights, had been intended to withstand an exploding jet pack in close quarters.

Fett could not have been unconscious for more than a few seconds; he came back to awareness unable to breathe. The jet pack’s fuel had splattered down the length of the corridor, and the corridor was burning, and so was Fett. The flame touched his skin in exposed places, on his arms and legs and stomach, and flames danced on the surface of his combat armor, the armor itself cracked, broken open by the force of the explosion, and everywhere the armor touched him the metal was scaldingly hot-Boba Fett surged to his feet. The ground beneath him shook, rolling as the Sarlacc’s flesh burned, and the Sarlacc fought against it. Fett reached back over his shoulder, unslung the deadliest weapon he carried.

Standing in the fire, burning alive, Boba Fett fired a concussion grenade into the ceiling thirty centimeters above his head, and threw himself down to the surface of the tunnel, into the flaming mixture of acid and fuel-The explosion tore apart the world. The concussion slammed Fett down into the flames, and his left arm, trapped beneath him at the wrong angle, snapped as he was smashed down atop it. A pain so great it was like a white light surrounded Boba Fett, and he knew that he was dying, that he had failed, like all the others before him, that he had traded a slow death by acid for a fast death by fire-Sand rained down upon him.

A long time later, Boba Fett became aware that he was still alive.

He forced himself up into a sitting position, looking around him.

Fires still burned, along the length of the corridor, and in the distance the sound of cracking tentacles was very loud.

It was quiet where he sat.

Fett’s left arm hung useless at his side, and he looked away down the tunnel; it was night, but he knew which direction he needed to go, to get back to the main pit, to the shaft that led back to the surface … to the main pit, where Susejo hung, where the enraged Sarlacc awaited him, tentacles lashing back and forth in anticipation.

Sand trickled down onto Fett’s helmet. He looked up.

Darkness.

Without moving from where he sat, Boba Fett made a long arm, and retrieved the grenade launcher. It carried three grenades; and he’d already fired one of them.

He raised the launcher and fired it a second time, into the darkness above him, and then had to dig his way out of the avalanche of sand that came down upon him. He stood at the edge of a small hill of sand, looking upward into the darkness… and started to undress. The armor was useless at this point—acid-covered and cracked in places, which was an improvement on Fett having cracked in those same places—and his clothing disintegrated as he mOVed. He almost fainted while removing the upper body armor; his left arm was broken in at least two places, and he was covered with burns that were already starting to form blisters.