• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

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