Tales From Jabbas Palace (Kevin Anderson) (36 page)

As he passed Jabba’s throne room, he noticed Yarna, Jabba’s fat dancer, a woman with six large breasts, reach into a secret compartment of Jabba’s throne and stuff some small gems into her bra. She saw him, stopped in the act, and stared.

“Please,” she whispered in Huttese. “It’s not for me. It’s for my cubs. I’m leaving, and I won’t be back.”

For half a moment Tessek halted, thinking that if he turned the woman in, he would appear to be more faithful in Jabba’s eyes.

Instead, he shrugged at the woman, then proceeded to the motor pool.

The great hall was alive with dozens of creatures preparing the weapons, chefs bringing food to the vehicles.

Normally, Barada’s droids kept a keen watch on the bay, but it was a madhouse at the moment, lit by the ship’s running lights.

Sauntering over to the swoop bikes under the shadow of Jabba’s sail barge, Tessek knelt to inspect each one. The swoops were little more than heavy repulsorlift engines on a frame just big enough to support some stabilizers. They could travel fast and far, but offered no protection from the elements or offensive weaponry. But at the moment, Tessek wanted only speed.

He found what looked to be the fastest bike, then switched fuel rods so that he had a full supply. He straddled it and looked at the big heavy blast doors.

He would need to get them open in order to make an escape, butJabba would never open the doors until he was ready to go. Opening those wide doors was the surest way to leave the palace exposed to attack. Yet it took a skilled operator sitting in the control room to open the door, someone who knew the proper codes to disengage the locks.

Barada could open them, but if he did, Jabba would have the creature killed. Tessek sat and considered what type of bribes he might offer for such assistance.

“Tessek? Tessek? Where are you?” It was Ortugg, the Gamorrean guard, sent to keep watch on Tessek.

Tessek could not leave, so he hurried the bike under the shadows of the sail barge. Ortugg grunted, and the guard’s mail rattled as he circled the sail barge—by far the biggest vehicle in the motor pool.

“Come now,” Ortugg growled. “You wouldn’t be trying to hide from His Majesty, would you?”

The sounds of droids at work came from inside the sail barge.

Tessek looked at one of the side panels behind the barge’s kitchens, noticed that it was unlatched.

It gave Tessek an idea. Perhaps he could escape from the barge itself.

Certainly, there would be enough of a commotion as the Rebel heroes suffered their torture.

Lifting the swoop, TesSek stuffed it into the hold of the barge.

He was just locking the panel down when Ortugg growled at his back.

“Aaargh. What are you up to?”

“We’re preparing to leave,” Tessek said, turning to face the Gamorrean.

“i came down here to board the barge, but apparently no one else is ready to go yet.”

Ortugg’s red eyes narrowed. “Not go for an hour.

You come with me,” Ortugg growled, clutching Tessek’s arm. “Jabba not want you slinking around down here.”

Tessek did not try to shake the guard’s hand off his arm. Ortugg was notorious for his strength, and the big Gamorrean simply pulled hard enough so that Tessek could either follow or be dragged.

Ortugg pulled him up into the sail barge, then sat with him next to Jabba’s throne. It was dark in the barge, and it smelled faintly of mold and disuse.

Tessek gulped hard, noticed the knot in his stomach.

He hadn’t eaten dinner yet, and he thought longingly of the mollusks stored in his room, imagined prying them open with his four feelers.

Ortugg pulled out his own heavy blaster and began cleaning the carbonized scoring that had built up on its barrel tip. When he was done, he pointed the barrel at Tessek’s right eye and asked, “How clean that look?”

“Clean. Very clean,” Tessek said.

Ortugg held the blaster pointed at Tessek’s face for a long time.

“Jabba no trust you,” he said finally, as he laid the gun on his lap.

“That too bad for you.”

“Jabba will find out just how loyal I really am soon enough,” Tessek said.

“Too bad for you,” Ortugg grunted again.

Tessek sat, lost in reverie for the next hour as the sail barge began to fill to overflowing. Half a dozen of Jabba’s most trusted henchmen took seats within reach of Tessek. Last of all, Jabba himself came in, dragging Princess Leia in her chains. Jabba sat himself on his dais, and almost immediately the barge lurched into action while the band struck up a loud tune.

The barge floated out over the dunes, bouncing over hills like a ship dipping in the troughs of mountainous waves. As the barge continued to heat up, Jabba had his men open some of the side panels so that brilliant yellow light from Tatooine’s twin suns lit the interior.

Hot, dry air wafted through the rooms.

Tessek didn’t speak, hardly thought. He had nothing to say to the monsterJabba or to his other captors.

Instead, he was filled with fear, like a cup that is overflowing, until the fear seemed to leak out in his scent, in the ink that dripped from the corner of his mouth, in every nervous tremor.

As the craft warmed, Tessek’s skin began to itch and crack, drying him in odd spots—between the feelers at his mouth, over the ridges on his face. The normal healthy gray skin blanched to white. Sickly dark blue blotches began appearing at the back of his palms.

Strictly speaking, Tessek’s closest biological relatives were clams and slugs. But the Quarren species had long ago adapted to spending time on land, at least on a limited basis. Still, he needed water to keep himself pliant. Otherwise, his skin would crack and bleed—so that he would lose moisture even faster—and given enough time under such circumstances, he would die.

Yet Tessek didn’t worry about succumbing slowly to moisture loss by degrees. He worried instead about the look in Leia’s eyes: there was a fierceness there, a confidence that had been lacking the day before.

Even (did he only imagine it?) a restrained anger.

Surely, Leia had not succumbed to Jabba’s ministrations.

She had not lost her spirit. Even now, she was holding herself in check, waiting for rescue.

As Tessek watched her, he became more certain: the Rebel Alliance would ambush the sail barge soon.

Jabba was feasting on live creatures, smoking a giant hookah, his eyes pleasantly glazed. His henchmen leaned in close.

Tessek wanted suddenly to speak to Leia, let her know that he was an ally, yet he dared speak only with discretion. “Great Jabba,” he began.

Jabba regarded Tessek with narrowed eyes. “I am afraid that I will be no good to you if I dehydrate further. May I retire to the kitchens for a quick sponge bath?”

Jabba ogled him with obscene interest, relishing Tessek’s suffering.

“Stay here beside me,” Jabba said.

“Prove your loyalty.”

“Oh, Master, you can be assured of my loyalty: if trouble comes, I will take the place of honor—guarding your back!”

“Ho, ho, ho, ho,” Jabba chuckled quietly, then drew a long breath from his hookah, closing his eyes in ecstasy. In that moment, Tessek looked deep into Leia’s eyes, trying to bore his traitorous intent into her.

Surprisingly, her eyes suddenly widened, as if she understood completely. She nodded her chin, then turned away.

In another hour, Tessek felt frail as they reached the Great Pit of Carkoon. The suns of Tatooine beat down mercilessly. Tessek’s breath came shallow, and as Jabba eagerly leaned forward to watch the execution of Luke Skywalker, Tessek surreptitiously reached into one of the henchmen’s drinks and rubbed the ice over his face.

Jabba’s protocol droid read the death sentence to Luke Skywalker and the Rebel heroes, then asked for any last words. Han Solo retorted with curses designed to be especially offensive to those of Huttese descent, while Skywalker simply offered Jabba one last chance to surrender.

Tessek scanned the larboard horizon, certain that a phalanx of Rebel fighters must be screaming toward them. Confused, he turned and looked out the starboard side of the sail barge, then he looked up at Tatooine’s blinding double suns. Still no sign of enemy craft.

“Throw them in!” Jabba shouted, and his men pushed Luke Skywalker into the pit. But the young Jedi used the plank as a springboard—twisting in midair to land back on the vehicle, and someone on the sail barge tossed him a weapon. Within seconds, the Jedi was chopping up Jabba’s men.

“Get him! Get him!” Jabba shouted, and several henchmen began shooting at the Rebel heroes despite the fact that stray shots were as likely to hit their own comrades. They knew that Jabba would well reward the one who brought the Jedi down.

For one slim moment, Tessek had to wonder when the Alliance aid would come. Han Solo and the heroes of the Rebel Alliance were fighting the best they could, but most of them seemed to be nothing more than a bunch of bunglers. One of them fell to the edge of the Great Pit of Carkoon, and the others rushed to his aid, leaving only the young Jedi to withstand the might of all of Jabba’s forces.

Tessek pulled out his own blaster, and stood at Jabba’s back. All of Jabba’s henchmen were rushing to the larboard side of the ship, trying to shoot Luke Skywalker and the other Rebels. Tessek suddenly had a clean shot to Jabba’s head.

But even as he considered whether to shoot, Leia jumped up and wrapped her chains around Jabba’s throat, strangling him. Tessek could no longer get a clean shot atJabba’s head, so he faded back two paces into the shadows, watching to see ifJabba’s henchmen would notice Leia’s move, wondering at the balance of this battle: would the Rebel Alliance come soon?

Would Jabba’s men shoot the Rebel heroes down?

One of the Weequays—Tessek’s own henchman—turned and saw Leia, began to raise a shout. Tessek fired into the man’s throat. In all of the commotion, no one seemed to notice.

Within seconds, one of the skiffs exploded his own bomb, he supposed and half of Jabba’s men were dead. Leia finished off the Hutt, and Tessek, who had kept waiting for the Rebel attack, suddenly realized that there would be no phalanx of fighters. These - - apparently bungling—Rebels were tearing Jabba’s trained mercenaries apart. Their Wookiee fired a cannonade into the sail barge—causing it to list and whine complaining under Tessek’s feet—then the Wookiee tried to rescue Han Solo.

Tessek turned and fled for his life. He leaped through the kitchens, snagging a jug of water as he ran, found his swoop, unlatched an escape panel, and shot out over the sands at top speed.

As he cleared the sail barge, a mushroom cloud rose up behind, a fiery testimonial to the end of Jabba’s reign.

Tessek drank deeply and poured the water over his skin, then wrapped his cloaks tightly about him as he headed home, considering how he might consolidate his forces at what once was Jabba’s palace.

He felt dry. The desert wind burned his face, sucked the moisture from him. He hated how he felt so dry, hated the hot knives of wind that sliced away at him, paring him down to the bone. But as the swoop soared over sand hills, dipped into shallows, Tessek realized that he felt light. For the first time in his life, he felt light and free…

“I’m free. I’m free!” Tessek began gibbering. He dreamed of Jabba’s wealth, lying about in unprotected heaps, and of the greater wealth carefully concealed in numbered accounts and prudently invested in businesses throughout the galaxy.

Tessek reached Jabba’s stronghold at nightfall, when the lights normally shone from the guard towers and the worrts in the pools around the palace croaked out in terrible song.

The palace was dark, empty, and Tessek feared that he would be left stranded outside to die in the darkness.

Yet as his swoop drew near, whining across the still-hot sand like some flying insect, Tessek noticed burning torches at the front gate.

“I’d better alert them that Jabba’s dead and I’m now in command.”

After he delivered his dire news, though, he fled the chaos to someplace dark, quiet, safe. He took the swoop around back to the motor pool. As he approached, the plasteel door slid open.

Barada. Good, faithful Barada, Tessek thought. He glided into the motor pool, and immediately knew that something was wrong. At the very least, maintenance droids should have been working, lighting the bay with their glowing eyes.

But the motor pool was silent, dark as a tomb. The doors slid closed behind him, and Tessek let himself drop from the swoop, too weary and ill to walk.

“Barada? Barada? Bring me water, please…” he cried. Then he remembered. Barada was dead, killed on the sail barge. He wouldn’t bring water, and it couldn’t have been he who opened the doors.

Tessek looked about the dark, empty rooms, wondering who had let him in.

Tessek hated his body, his frail body that could not take the desert heat of Tatooine, that constantly threatened to blow away like sand. He cursed silently when no one answered his call.

He crawled to a nearby sink in Barada’s quarters, watered his skin and drank heartily, then staggered into the palace to tell the others that Jabba was dead.

His news caused no small stir, and Tessek hurried to his upper rooms to pack water and food while he plotted how to remove as much of Jabba’s wealth as possible.

The corridors of the palace were dark, cloistered, with all of Jabba’s soldiers gone. In some ways, the place seemed darker, more sinister, than at any time when Jabba had reigned here.

After he had thrown together his belongings, Tessek left his quarters, realizing with relief that he would never have to come back.

He heard a snickety sound from the far wall of the corridor, and the clicking sound of an approaching droid as it scrabbled across the dark floor, its footsteps echoing dully.

Tessek looked down the hall. A great black spiderlike brain walker crawled toward him, twin lights shining like dull eyes in the darkness.

Behind it marched another, and another—coming toward him through the hallways in all directions. The B’omarr monks.

“Greetings, Acolyte Tessek,” the first of the monks whispered.

“Go away,” Tessek pleaded, and in his’ weakened state, he leaned his back against a wall and slid down, collapsing in fear and weariness.