Star Wars: Tales from Jabba's Palace

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Jabba the Hutt is extremely angry. I would also be angry if it was me in his position. The palace is not just a fortress, it is his home, and individuals take a certain particular kind of offense when they are annoyed in their own homes. So I am really not particularly surprised, you see, that he orders that they are to be given to the Sarlacc like this.

  And I might add it is a great honor to be permitted to accompany you like this. I am sure that Jabba the Hutt intends it as an honor to give you a personal guard. And besides, I can show you the best place to see the Sarlacc.

  Yes, Mister Boba Fett, we have always talked about it as “the” Sarlacc here on Tatooine. If there is another Sarlacc anywhere, I have certainly never heard about it. I like to think I would have done so, because I make the Sarlacc a sort of special interest of mine since I am only a child. You see, my sister Shaara is the only person I know of who has ever come out of the Great Pit of Carkoon alive. I once heard a story that Skywalker escaped the pit, but he is a notorious liar, as you can see for yourself. Jedi Knight? Why, he is not even carrying a lightsaber when Jabba the Hutt captures him.

  Oh, that is a long story. You do not want—You do want to hear it? Very well.

  It begins with the Imps, as so many things do these days. Imperial stormtroopers. Half a dozen of them decide to go for Shaara in a big way. She is three years older than I am, and I am twelve when all of this proceeds so she is fifteen. She is working in the floor show of a cantina out at the edge of Mos Eisley, doing a “droid” act whose redeeming social value is perhaps in question. But an act is all it is, my family being respectable moisture farmers who raised our girls properly and with none of this modern permissive stuff. She is an innocent in every sense of the word, I can assure you of that.

  The Imps on the other hand are not at all innocent. They never are innocent. I am thinking that the Empire must test them for basic cruelty before they even issue them their first armor. So these Imps come into the cantina one evening and they see Shaara doing her act, and they decide that they would like to see for themselves what she looks like under the metal, and perhaps a few other things above and beyond seeing.

  So they convince the owner of this cantina, an unpleasant character who rejoices in the name of Dakkar the Distant, to let them go and visit her backstage after the show is over. I do not like to think about what might occur if she is actually in her dressing room when they arrive. She is not there, however, being as she is chatting with the band leader about some changes in the musical arrangement for the next day. So they make themselves at home to wait for her.

  When she opens the door, still wrapped up neatly in bronze-colored kelsh metal, she sees them removing their armor and going through her things, so she wisely makes like the Kandos shuttle and departs ahead of schedule. They follow her. Why should they not follow her? They are after all the law, and nobody is going to interfere with them.

  So a few minutes later, Shaara comes running into the dome of our parents’ farm, still dressed in her droid costume. She barely has time to blurt out what has happened before they land on our puk garden. They have picked up their transport, but as they have not bothered to replace the various pieces of armor they had removed, they are an interesting sight. The front door does not slow them down even a little.

  My older brother Kamma tries to stop them. I no longer have a brother Kamma. I am watching this, a frightened twelve-year-old, from behind a partition. I think that this is when I first begin to not like the Imps so much, as a result of which I am now gainfully employed in the service of Jabba the Hutt. Kamma does not stop them any better than the door does, but he does succeed in slowing them down a little, during which delay my sister jumps into the family landspeeder and vacates the premises.

  As you may have seen when you arrived on Tatooine, Mos Eisley is near the edge of the Dune Sea, and Shaara heads for the sands. She is not really paying a great deal of attention to where she is going, and before long she is very near to the Great Pit of Carkoon.

  The Imps are right behind her. Their transport is more powerful than the landspeeder, but it is laden down with six of them while Shaara is alone and quite light, so they gain very slowly. They are still a few seconds behind Shaara as she flashes toward the pit. She tells me later that she is crying at this point, and I think she is telling me the truth about this.

  She is now desperate. She pulls the family punch gun out of its rack where it is kept in case of trouble and she points it at the hull of the Imps’ transport.

  Shaara has been a good shot from childhood, and I think the Force must guide her hand on this particular day, because she puts a hole right through to the transport’s engine. The resulting explosion should kill the Imps right then, but they all have been pulling their armor back on. None of them is fully dressed, and the driver is still down to his bodyglove, but they also seem to have an unusual amount of luck at that moment.

  I say seem because although the explosion does not kill them it pitches them into the air just in time for all of them to land in the Pit of Carkoon, which I would consider to be a good thing indeed if it were not that the blast also sends the landspeeder tumbling, and Shaara is also dumped into the pit.

  For a moment the seven of them lie there stunned. Then, and this is the part I always have trouble believing, two of the Imps begin crawling around the pit toward her.

  They must surely know where they are. Even the Imperial Army must tell their troopers the basic hazards of the land before sending them out. Yet there they are right on the Sarlacc’s doorstep and they are more intent on finishing what they have planned for my poor sister than they are in saving their own miserable lives.

  Well, of course all this movement gets the Sarlacc good and active, and its tongue-tentacles begin to poke around. It grabs one unconscious Imp and drags him in without a sound. Shaara sees this and lets out a screaming noise, but I guess the two Imps following her think that she is screaming at them.

  Then a tentacle gets hold of the foot of another Imp who is awake, and now he begins to scream. This causes the others to sit up and take notice, all but one who never wakes up at all but falls into the mouth of the Sarlacc because of the shifting sands caused by those questing tongues. I do not know whether you have been keeping count, Mister Boba Fett, but this leaves only three Imps in the Great Pit of Carkoon but outside of the Sarlacc, along with my sister.

  The two who have been creeping around the pit now cease creeping around it and begin frantically crawling in a direction away from the mouth of the Sarlacc, which of course does them no good whatsoever and only makes the sand under them shift downward faster than they can climb up it. This shifting attracts the attention of the Sarlacc, who immediately grabs them both and drags them screaming to their doom. I do not know whether the story Jabba the Hutt likes to tell is true, that you spend a thousand years being slowly digested in the Sarlacc’s belly, but I am frankly all in favor of the idea in the case of these two, though Shaara says she hopes they died quickly. Perhaps it is that she is of a more delicate nature, or maybe she just wishes that they are dead.

  This leaves just Shaara and one stormtrooper staring across the Great Pit of Carkoon at each other and down at the tongue-tentacles of the Sarlacc. This Imp seems to be more sensible than the others, and he holds very still and does not send sand down the pit to let the Sarlacc know where he is. Neither does Shaara. 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 s
nap 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 I 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 I’s maintenance droid to deal with the fire he’d started, and ran back to control.

  He slid into his seat. The Slave I 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 I. 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 Fett just 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 I 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.

  Fett thought instantly, Bad decoy. That assassin droid would never make a mistake like—

  The Slave I’s sensors went wild—a ship was leaving hyperspace only a few klicks away—and then the Slave I 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 I 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.