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“I’m going to feed your miserable hide to the rancor!”

You and what army, you filthy idiot?

Bubo had drawn the Grannish operative slowly from his quarters, dragging the bit of electronic machinery quickly out of reach. After toying with the inebriated Ree-Yees for almost an hour, he had withdrawn to this secure location.

As the Gran reached in with a long kitchen spoon, Bubo flicked his tongue out, picking up the little detonation link with his sticky fluids. Slowly and deliberately, he drew the part into his mouth and swallowed it with great relish.

In the throne room upstairs, Jabba and his court paused in their revelry for just a moment as an anguished howling filled the hallways. Then laughter and music reigned again.

As his own brain was placed in a nutrient-filled jar, Bubo mentally smiled as he heard the roaring laughter of his B’omarr mentor echoing off the cavern walls.

Yes, eternity with this marvelous intellect as a companion should be fun.

Out of the Closet: The Assassin’s Tale

by Jennifer Roberson

Heat.

And sun.

And sand.

And dead bodies. Or dying.

Bodies with blood yet in them, with none spilled into Tatooine dust, onto sun-flayed Mos Eisley brick, nor staining sweat-wet clothing bought a thousand planets from here. Not so much as a drop glistening upon flaccid lips, pooling from fragile throats, nor even a delicate tracery feathered at their nostrils.

For those of them who have such attributes as nostrils, or blood.

They need not be humanoid, none of them, for me to drink their soup. They need only have the chemistry to manufacture the substance within the brain beneath the skull, inside the carapace, the gelid, mucoid mass.

—pain/pleasure—

—pleasure/pain—

His/hers/its.

Mine also, always.

I take them in the city, in what is Jabba’s domain: this one, that one, another … and leave, as I always leave, no proof in the killing of them. No method, no means, no clues. Merely bodies, unmarked, empty of life, but worse: empty also of soup, of that which, when a brain is drained, leaves the body empty of its essence. Of the means to live.

It isn’t the essence I want, or blood, nor is it flesh, which is, after all, no more than cast-off casing. It is soup I want, I need; soup to save my spirit, to keep alive my casing.

I take them as I choose, with manifest efficiency, commendable in expediency: this one, that one, another; will you dance with me, and die?

But this time I do it for the death, for the cast-off casing; for more than soup this day, this place, this planet, even to save my spirit. They are beneath me, this dead and dying trio scattered across Mos Eisley spaceport—here, and there, and there—merely minions and not assassins, hollow, servile beings of weak and tasteless soup … but their deaths will serve a purpose if not my preferences. I want them dead of my hands with no mark at all upon them, for my kind leave no visible sign by which an entity might know.

But one entity will know, this time he will know—because I take pains that he must.

My employer, my betrayer.

“Anzati,” they will whisper. “Anzat, of the Anzati.”

—pain/pleasure—

—pleasure/pain—

I take them and others, all of them in his service, and leave them, derelicta, to be found. Where they are found, and reported. To Talmont, the Prefect; to Lady Valarian, the queen who wants to be king; to Jabba himself.

Talmont and Valarian rejoice: those I have killed were Jabba’s.

The Hutt himself will be irritated, is irritated—and is turning no doubt already to laying blame on the nearest of enemies; of impossibly innumerable enemies, conspiring against him more often and regularly than a humanoid draws breath.

But no blame on Dannik Jerriko. Not yet. Until I choose.

And I will choose. I must. So he will know.

Jabba.

Know, and be afraid.

By the time the bodies are found, are reported; by the time they are, at last, scanned for the truth, and the truth made into rumor, and rumor into romance,