Read Online Tales from Jabba's Palace by Kevin J. Anderson - Free Book Online Page B

But the bars dropped like a guillotine, their pointed ends driving like spears through the rancor’s skull.
    The beast made a dreadful sound, and fell limp.
    In the startled silence of the criminals around him, Porcellus could hear, from the deeps of the pit, Malakili’s frantic wail, “ NOOOOO …!!! ”
    Porcellus was safe.
    He straightened up, feeling oddly light-headed. For five years Jabba had threatened to throw him to the rancor … and now the rancor was dead. He felt bad for Malakili, hurting with the echoes of that terrible cry, but in the first dizzying flush of relief it was hard to sympathize with his bereft friend. The rancor was dead …
    Guards were dragging the smuggler Solo, the giant Wookiee behind him, into the audience hall. Solo was still blind from hibernation sickness, but noticeably stronger—Porcellus hoped desperately nobody would ask who’d been feeding him. They were thrust before the dais of the Bloated One.
    “His High Exaltedness has decreed you are to be terminated,” said the translator droid C-3PO, rather shakily. He looked a little the worse for his few days in Jabba’s palace, stained with the Bloated One’s slimy green exudations and fragments of sandmaggot kidney. “You are to be taken to the Dune Sea, and cast into the Pit of Carkoon, the abode of the Sarlacc. In his belly you will find new definitions of pain and suffering as you are digested over the course of a thousand years.”
    “You should have bargained, Jabba,” said Skywalker quietly. The guards shoved him, Solo, and the Wookiee toward the door; Leia, on the dais, half started up with anguish in her face, but the Huttdragged her back by her chain. “That’s the last mistake you’ll ever make …”
    Porcellus leaned against the archway in which he stood, knees trembling with reaction and relief. Whatever else happened, the rancor was dead. The threat which had hovered over him for all those years …
    “And you!” Jabba turned suddenly on his dais, his copper-red eyes seeming to skewer Porcellus where he stood. Drool dripped from his enormous mouth and he pointed one finger. “You also are to die …”
    “What?” screamed Porcellus.
    “You cannot now deny putting fierfek into my food. Take him away!” Jabba beckoned to the few guards remaining in the room. “Take him to the deepest dungeon. When my sail barge returns from carrying me to watch the deaths of Skywalker and Solo, then I shall have the leisure to deal with you!”
    “But nobody who ate your food died of poison!” wailed Porcellus, as the guards closed in around him. “Jubnuk … and Oola … You can’t—”
    “Oh, fierfek doesn’t mean ‘poison.’ ” C-3PO bustled officiously down from the dais. “It’s extremely difficult to poison a Hutt, of course. But all Huttese words derive from food imagery, you see. Fierfek simply means a hex, a death curse … and you can’t deny that Jubnuk, and the unfortunate Oola, both succumbed quite soon after sampling your meals. It’s a natural misunderstanding.”
    And so it was, but Porcellus derived little comfort from the fact as he was dragged away screaming to a cell to await his doom.

That’s Entertainment: The Tale of Salacious Crumb
by Esther M. Friesner

    M elvosh Bloor had no spectacles to adjust, so he contented himself with polishing the screen of his datapad whenever he felt flustered. Like all good academics, one of his primary reactions to prolonged contact with the real world was to fidget. However, as with all things in his life (so he told himself), it must be fidgeting with a purpose. Melvosh Bloor did nothing without a purpose.
    On the face of things, one would imagine that his purpose in infiltrating the lair of the notorious crimelord Jabba the Hutt was a simple one: he wanted to die but lacked the strength of will to kill himself. This, of course, would be dead wrong. Then again, dead wrong might be a pretty good prediction for the fate of Melvosh