Beware the Power of the Dark Side!

by Tom Angleberger

  The game is set now. Has he been overconfident? Are the odds too high even for a Jedi? And is he really a Jedi now?

  All this must be pushed from his mind. He must focus and allow the power of the Force to flow through him.

  And then he flicks his hand in a signal to R2. The droid begins making calculations.

  Even as Jabba is roaring out the order to push him in, Luke steps off the plank.

  A great cheer goes up from the barge, but it doesn’t last long….

  Luke spins as he falls. He catches the end of the plank with his hands. It bends and then springs him back up.

  Meanwhile, back on the sail barge, R2 fires a small metal cylinder into the air.

  PIFWOOOOO…

  For an instant, the cylinder and Luke are both in the air at the same time. The cylinder in a high, perfectly calculated arc; Luke making an equally perfect flip to land back on the end of the plank.

  He opens his hand.

  The cylinder drops into it.

  It is his lightsaber and even as he’s catching it, he’s switching it on.

  ZZRRRRAAAPPPP!

  And now, Jabba, the game really begins.

  INSTANTLY, Luke and his deadly green blade are whirling through the air, slicing into the closest guard, the leathery one, sending him tumbling into the pit.

  The other guards on the skiff rush forward…all except two: the one who is really Lando and the one Lando now has in a chokehold.

  Jabba sees it all from his sail barge and bellows with rage!

  “AH MAH KUTTA DA BLASTAH!”

  He yells curse-filled commands and his underlings scramble to obey.

  Lightsaber roaring and slashing, Luke sends another sluggish, rodentlike guard over the edge and into the pit. That one was easy, but now Luke faces the second of the leather-faced guards, a seasoned warrior who is now enraged by the death of his brother. He jabs expertly with a cruel-looking ax, but with the lightning speed of a Jedi, Luke has already stepped aside, spun around, and delivered a fatal lunge with his lightsaber.

  The guard crumples to the deck and Luke leaps across the body to his friends. Quickly he begins to remove the chains from Chewbacca, who has been guarding Han but is eager to join the fight.

  “Easy, Chewie!”

  But now a blast hits the skiff! Jabba’s gunners are firing the sail barge’s side laser cannon. The second shot hits the tail of the skiff and it rocks so violently that Chewie clutches Han to keep him from spilling over the rail.

  Lando, however, does go over the side! But he manages to clutch a cable as he plummets.

  “Whoa! Whoa!” he yells, dangling over the pit with hungry tentacles slithering toward him.

  Luke’s heart sinks. This wasn’t part of the plan. It’s not going right. These thoughts eat away at his focus.

  On the deck of the sail barge, Boba Fett has been trying to decide if it’s worth his while to get involved. The risk means nothing to him, but the size of the reward means everything.

  If there was time, he’d negotiate a deal with Jabba, but with things happening so fast, he decides to save the day first and strike a bargain later.

  Tapping the control module on his armored glove, he activates his rocket pack, making a graceful leap from one skiff to the other.

  Luke, distracted by the chaos and busy freeing Han, hasn’t seen him come. But just as Boba raises his blaster to take an easy shot, Luke senses the danger and spins around, his whirling lightsaber slicing right through Boba’s blaster.

  Before either can react, another blast from the barge cannon hits the skiff’s deck, sending up a spray of metal shards and flinging Han and Chewie against the rail.

  Chewbacca’s been hit by the shrapnel and howls in pain.

  “Chewie! You okay?” yells Han. “Where is he?”

  Luke glances over to see, giving Boba the time he needs to push a button on his other glove. This time a metal cable snakes out, wrapping around Luke and pinning his arms to his side.

  But it’s been a long time since Boba tangled with a Jedi, and his tricks aren’t good enough. Luke is able to bend one wrist enough to use his lightsaber to sever the cable.

  Another laser blast hits the skiff. This one knocks Boba Fett to the deck where he lays, seemingly unconscious or even dead.

  A bit of luck for our heroes? Not really, since the same blast nearly shakes Lando off the cable and into the pit. His grip is slipping….

  “Han! Chewie?” he calls out in desperation.

  With Boba and the guards beaten, they should now be able to pull Lando to safety. But here comes the other skiff! And it’s full of fresh guards!

  This is where fear might take control of a lesser hero.

  The Force is strong within Luke, but he must turn away from fear and focus as his masters have taught him.

  There is no time for him to think about this. No time to make a decision.

  He either is a Jedi or he isn’t.

  And now he’s in the air again.

  Leaping an impossible distance high over the Sarlacc.

  Landing on the incoming skiff before the guards can react.

  Swirling and striking. A blur of motion. His lightsaber whirring and whirling.

  He’s killed two guards almost before they realize he’s on board.

  The other guards open fire with their blasters, but Luke blocks each shot with a sweep of his lightsaber and presses the attack.

  Now it is the guards who know fear.

  They are no match for a Jedi Knight.

  Back on the other skiff, Boba Fett1 climbs to his feet and fixes his glare on Luke, only a few yards away on the other skiff.

  He raises his armored glove yet again and aims it at Luke, who is too busy avoiding blaster fire to sense it this time.

  Chewie sees the danger, but he is too hurt to stop Boba.

  “GRRWWWWWWH!” he howls at Han.

  “Boba Fett? Boba Fett? Where?”

  “WWWGRRH!”

  Han, brandishing a deadly electro-spear dropped by one of the guards, steps forward, swinging it wildly.

  Many skilled fighters, even Jedi, have tried to fight Boba Fett before. And they’ve all failed.

  Han Solo on his best day wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Fett is too good. Too careful. Too cunning. He could never be beaten by skill.

  But dumb luck? That’s where Solo has always excelled.

  The electro-spear hits Boba Fett in the back, sending a wallop of electricity into his jet pack. It ignites instantly.

  Boba rockets through the air. He grabs uselessly at the short-circuited controls of the rocket. He has just enough time to think of how silly he must look before he slams into the side of the sail barge and then falls, arms flailing, past the skiffs, past Lando, past the tentacles and the teeth…and into the belly of the Sarlacc.

  “WURGHRRR!” cheers Chewie.

  ON THE SAIL BARGE, Fett’s fate goes unnoticed by Jabba, who is busy being strangled to death by Leia.

  The princess is still chained to the monstrous crime lord, but she secretly gathered up enough of the chain to loop around his neck and yank.

  With all his guards busy and his toadies looking for the exit, Jabba is left to defend himself. Faced at last with a true threat to his life, he puts up a mighty struggle. His thick hide and mounds and mounds of fat make him hard to kill.

  Leia throws all her weight against the chain, then, bracing her legs against his bloated belly, and begins to pull it slowly tighter and tighter.

  Like Luke, Leia is now beyond fear. And even beyond anger. Jabba simply must die!

  A grim power flows through her. Jabba thought she was a plaything. But he underestimated this princess.

  His great orange eyes bulge from their greasy sockets. His scum-coated tongue lolls out of his grimacing mouth. His tiny hands pull pathetically at the chain.

  And at last his tail flops wildly as the last of his life is wrung out of him.

  Surely we can we take a moment, eve
n as the battle rages outside, to mark the death of this great villain? A crime lord who cheated and robbed, murdered and plundered for decades. A creature whose greed and cunning were so great that even the Jedi Council had to appease him at times. A criminal who took more pleasure from the crime than the ill-gotten rewards.

  This great slug has left behind a mucus trail of pain and ruined lives that will not soon be repaired. But at least it ends here, by the hand of a woman he tried to enslave.

  Leia has no time to think of all this. Defenseless in her slave dancer’s outfit and still chained to Jabba, she is in great danger.

  And so is Lando!

  Han, leaning recklessly over the edge of the skiff, holds out the deactivated electro-spear for him to grab.

  “Lower it!” Lando yells.

  “I’m trying,” Han yells back.

  Closer…closer…and—

  Another blast from the barge’s cannon! And this one takes out the anti-grav propellers on one side of the skiff—the same side Lando is dangling from!

  Instantly, this half of the skiff falls. The whole deck tilts wildly. Boxes, tools, a dead guard, and almost everything else in the skiff slides over the side—including Han! Only a quick grab by Chewbacca keeps him from tumbling into the pit with the rest.

  The violent motion breaks Lando’s grip on the cable and he drops to the sand. He’d be safe here, several meters from the Sarlacc’s open maw…if not for the tentacles already writhing forward to grab him and pull him in.

  Han hangs upside down from the side of the damaged skiff. Chewie has a tight grip on his feet and could pull him up…but Han isn’t ready to give up on his old friend Lando just yet.

  “Grab it! Lando, grab it!” he yells stretching out blindly with the spear. At last Lando catches ahold of it, but before Chewbacca can begin to pull them up another blast hits the skiff, rocking it and pulling the spear just out of reach.

  On the other skiff, Luke realizes that the barge’s cannon must be stopped immediately before it scores a direct hit on one of his friends—or destroys their skiff and sends them all to their doom!

  In one sudden movement, he lunges forward, slicing the last of the guards in two and jumping over the edge of the skiff onto the steep, nearly vertical side of the sail barge. At first he slides down the metal surface but soon finds a finger hold, stops his slide, and—again calling on his Jedi training—begins to climb.

  A hatch pops open to his right and a barge guard leans out to fire a blaster pistol. But Luke seizes his arm and pulls—dragging the unbalanced guard through the window and to his death in the pit.

  At last, Lando has a good grip on the spear.

  “Gently now,” says Han. “All right. Now easy, easy. Hold tight, Chewie.”

  But now one of the thrashing tentacles has reached Lando and wraps itself around his ankle.

  “It’s got me,” screams Lando in pain as powerful suckers grip his leg and the tentacle begins to pull.

  “Chewie! Chewie! Give me a gun,” shouts Han, reaching back to Chewie, who hands him a blaster he pulled from a guard’s dead hands earlier.

  Han grabs it and aims it at what he thinks looks like a tentacle.

  “No, wait!” yells Lando, looking directly into the barrel of the blaster. “I thought you were blind!”

  “It’s all right. Trust me. Don’t move.”

  “All right,” concedes Lando. “But, a little higher. Just a little higher!”

  Han raises the pistol slightly, Lando ducks, and—PEW!—a direct hit. The tentacle releases Lando, and Chewie immediately begins to haul them back on board.

  But the barge cannon is charged and ready to fire again. One last shot should finish off the skiff, the gunner thinks, wrapping a scaly claw around the trigger.

  He hears a noise, looks up, sees Luke, sees Luke’s lightsaber…and never has a chance to pull the trigger.

  More guards are surging up the ramp, including the reptilian thug Klaatu.

  Luke prepares for the battle, then sees a bigger problem. At the other end of the deck is a far larger gun, with several gunners scurrying to get it charged and ready. One blast from this gun will take out the skiff once and for all.

  He rushes for it, using his lightsaber to deflect Klaatu’s blaster fire and mow down a Gamorrean just before the brute can swing its ax.

  Belowdecks, R2 has found Leia. He extends one of his astromech tools and slices through her chains.

  “Come on!” she urges. “We’ve got to get out of here quick!”

  She heads for the ramp, but R2 hears C-3PO calling.

  “Artoo! Help! Quickly, Artoo!”

  R2 speeds to the spot to find Salacious Crumb cheerfully pecking out one of C-3PO’s eyes.

  “Oooh! You beast! Not my eyes!” cries C-3PO, flailing his golden arms helplessly.

  Again, R2 uses the astromech welding tool. There’s a quick zap and then a long screaming howl as Crumb launches himself as far away from the little droid as he can get. Hanging from the ceiling he screeches at them in fury. His tiny brain can’t quite realize that his doom is upon him.

  C-3PO begins to complain about his treatment, but R2 cuts him off with a “Blee-deep!”

  “Abandon ship?” questions C-3PO. “I’ve heard no such order.”

  “BLEE-DEEEP!” insists R2 and heads up the ramp with C-3PO stumbling along behind, one electronic eyeball dangling from its socket by a wire.

  UP ON DECK, Leia finds Luke fighting off a small cluster of guards, deflecting blaster shots, and waiting for a chance to lunge forward and strike down each enemy in turn.

  “Luke!”

  “Leia!” he cries, circling toward her. “You got away from Jabba!”

  “But he didn’t get away from me!”

  Klaatu gets her joke and wonders if Jabba could really be in danger….Perhaps he should go back down and protect his master, he thinks. Or perhaps he should see if he can switch sides before it’s too late….

  BZZZRAP!

  It’s too late.

  Luke’s lightsaber has ended the wicked life of Klaatu and with a loud whirr spins past him to deal with a charging Gamorrean.

  But this gives the last guard—a tusk-toothed Snivvian who had hung back while his comrades died—a chance to get off a good shot with his blaster.

  PffTHEWW!

  The laser bolt hits Luke’s hand. He feels the impact, but no pain. He looks at it in surprise, then realizes that it’s his artificial hand. The polymer skin has been torn away, revealing damaged servomotors and wires inside.

  Luckily, it still works well enough for him to keep his grip on the lightsaber and parry a second blast from the Snivvian guard. This fight is wearing him down…and he knows there may be more thugs and ruffians below deck who will want to take a shot, too.1 He can’t fight the whole barge-load one by one.

  “Get the gun!” he calls to Leia. “The big gun! Point it at the deck.”

  Leia quickly climbs up to the gunner’s platform. It only takes her a second to figure out the workings of the gun. It’s not too different from some of the Rebel Alliance’s older equipment. She checks the charge level and reaches for the targeting controls. The great gun turns slowly toward the deck of the sail barge.

  Nearby, R2 is trying to keep C-3PO moving.

  “Artoo, where are we going?”

  “Blip-whirr!”

  “Oh, no!” cries C-3PO, coming to a sudden halt on the very edge of the deck and looking down at the sand ten meters below.

  “Blee-deep!”

  “Oh, no! I couldn’t possibly jump!”

  R2 doesn’t argue but simply rams himself into C-3PO, sending the protocol droid toppling over the edge. Then he rolls forward and tumbles2 after C-3PO.

  Luke runs to join Leia on the gunner’s platform, whirling to dodge or deflect blaster fire as he goes.

  Leaping up to the platform, he slices a cable that runs up one of the sail barge’s masts. He gets a firm grip on the end of the cable with his uninjured hand, wraps a
n arm around Leia, kicks the trigger on the big cannon, and jumps.

  They swing out over the Sarlacc pit.

  KRRRKAKLAPP! FOOM!

  Behind them, the cannon’s blast rips through the barge, sending up a storm of metal shrapnel and triggering a series of explosions in the fuel cells.

  FOOM! FOOM! FOOM!

  Luke lets go of the cable and for a moment they fall forward in a perfectly timed arc to land neatly on the surviving sand skiff. Chewie, Han, and Lando are helping each other clamber over from the barely floating remains of the other skiff.

  Behind them the entire barge is now on fire. As the anti-grav propellers fail in succession, it pitches to one side, splits in two, and slowly crashes into the pit.

  “Let’s go,” calls Luke triumphantly. “And don’t forget the droids!”

  “We’re on our way!” yells Lando, stepping over a dead guard to get to the controls.

  Moments later he is lowering the skiff’s cargo-magnets to pull the droids out of a sand dune.

  And then they’re away, zooming across the dunes to safety! A final explosion erupts behind them as the sail barge—and a great deal of evil—disappears in a massive fireball.

  ALL THAT ACTION on Tatooine may seem like a clear victory for our heroes, but—alas!—it was not.

  For while they’ve been plotting and planning and risking their lives to defeat Jabba, the real villains—the Emperor and his Empire of evil—have not been waiting for them to catch up.

  Just think of this: if Vader had simply killed Han Solo in Cloud City, then Luke and his friends would have jumped right back into battle…and with new determination.

  But by handing Han over to Boba Fett and Jabba, Vader created a costly distraction.

  Vader didn’t quite realize this, but his master, the evil Emperor Palpatine, had foreseen it. It wasn’t really necessary to his plans, but it pleased him to think of all the time and effort Luke would waste on Jabba.