Star Wars: Rise of the Battlemage - Chapter 224

The massive slug turned his head, breaking off from his shouting, watching me as I approached. There was a clear intelligence behind those eyes, I could feel the cold calculations as he analyzed me. After a moment, before I had even reached him, he began shouting again. 

“Coo Sa Uba, Coo Moocha Ma Bunky dunko, Killee Ma Shag, Killee Ma-”

The translation droid shifted slightly, its metal mouth moving as it prepared to begin translating. Rather than letting it continue, I raised my blaster pistol as I walked and fired, the bolt of blue plasma flying past Jabba's shoulder and slamming into the droid's forehead. In an instant, its head exploded, the rest of the body tumbling to the floor, landing by my feet, just a half dozen feet in front of the Hutt.

"Come on now, Jabba. I came all this way to meet you. The least you could do is speak my language," I commented, putting my hands on my belt like a gunslinger. "Don't be shy, I know you can."

I knew Hutts considered speaking anything other than Huttese distasteful and beneath them. Some even refused to speak anything else completely, and I was relatively certain Jabba was one of them. He stared at me, his grapefruit-sized eyeballs glaring at me with hate. After a full minute of silence, I shrugged and turned away. 

"Well, if you're not gonna talk, that means you're useless," I said with a shrug, looking over at Corvak. "Kill him. Use a grenade if you have to." 

I had taken exactly two steps, Corvak and his men raising their blasters before he finally spoke up.

"Who are you?" He asked in basic, his deep voice reverberating in the stone hallway. "What do you want?" 

"I am nobody," I explained. "And I want what all nobodies want. Your money." 

"You have made a grave mistake coming here! You think you can rob me!?" Jabba said with a growl, his long tail coiling angrily. "My men-"

"Are dying by the hundreds," I said, cutting him off with a wave of my hand. "Face it, Jabba, we kicked your slimy ass!"

"They will come for you! And when they do, I will enjoy making you beg for your life," he said, looking at me like he wanted to crush me with his mind. "I will hunt you to the ends of the galaxy! Nowhere will be safe!"

"Hmmm, maybe, maybe not. Maybe your people will show up… but they aren't here now," I pointed out with a smirk, though he couldn't see it through my helmet. "There is nobody here but you, me, and my friends here. If we decided that we wanted to force-feed you a live grenade, what's to stop us from doing so?" 

Again, the large slug alien stared at me, his rage boiling just beneath the surface of his thick, pebbly skin.

"What do you want?" he asked again. "What do you want from me?" 

"Well… Here is the deal. I want your stuff, and you want to live long enough for your forces to show up and save you," I pointed out. "So keep me happy, and I'll keep you alive. Waste my time or lie to me, and I'll kill you dead, long before your rescue party arrives."

Now the silence was heavy, the massive waste of space looking down on me like he was trying to intimidate me. He was so used to people bending to his whims, and now he was stuck at the whims of a nameless thief, who had cut through his Palace like a hot knife through butter. Finally, just before I gave up, he sagged, still clearly furious, but resigning himself to the humiliation of feeding us what we wanted to buy himself time.

"Good boy," I said with a smirk. "And, just to make things clear, we don't actually need you, you are just a convenience. So don't go thinking you can negotiate for your life or anything. Now, how about we start off with something simple…"

I asked the Hutt a few questions to get us started but ultimately left him with Corvak, who would continue to relay everything Jabba said to the rest of us. Meanwhile, I decided it was finally time to call in the freighters before meeting back up with my team. We split up and started patrolling the halls of the palace, locking it down as best we could. Within ten minutes, the four freighters landed around the Palace, and not a single shot was fired. The many weapon emplacements around the Palace stayed dormant, unmanned, and without power.

Once the freighters had landed, two by the main entrance and two by the hangar bay, their hatches opened up, and dozens of labor droids came marching out. Behind them were teams borrowed from the Salvage Fleet, people with basic combat experience but who specialized in breaking into things and making them ours. They were dressed in lightly modified phase II clone armor, which was worn over their woven beskar uniforms and painted with purple markings. In total, there were twenty-four specialists and forty droids. 

The group by the hangar bay used a portable generator to open the hangar door independently of any other system. No one was alive in the area to escape, but the freighters were armed enough that, should anyone try, they wouldn't exactly make it very far.

Once everyone was inside, all our forces, minus those who were watching Jabba, met up in a central hall. There, we split up the ground teams and newly arrived salvage experts and droids, creating twelve teams. We then spread out through the Palace, slowly but surely tearing through the massive space.

Our first find was one revealed by Jabba, a secure weapons room filled with both collectibles and powerful rare weapons. Some of them, like the crate of T-7 ion disruptors, would be carefully locked up back on Boxi's Fury, only to be used by approved personnel. They were too useful to just throw away, as a handheld weapon that could knock out starfighters and even small freighters in just a few shots was not something I could afford to throw to the side. Besides, persecuting a weapon because it was painful when technically misused was stupid. Getting slowly burned to death by a plasma torch would fucking suck, but no one was jumping up and down to ban them.

We stripped the weapons cache to the ground, finding more interesting things like a pair of ancient energy lances that Nal was pretty sure were from Mon Calamari. They would be studied by Miru before being sold or perhaps put on display. Several containers of thermal detonators were also carefully stored away, alongside weapons that were hundreds of years old, displayed in sealed cases. 

Nal estimated that even if we kept the useful bits, the collection would still be worth three or four million credits, assuming we could locate the right collectors. 

The looting continued, grabbing expensive furniture from some of the guest rooms, pulling down art, and carefully storing anything we found worth anything in our ships. On Jabba's suggestion, a labor droid ran some scans through one of the many kitchens, uncovering a secret cellar full of expensive wines and liquors. An hour later, the salvage expert overseeing the looting of the uncovered cellar discovered a secondary, hidden alcove filled with even more booze. Julus recognized one of the bottles from that and laughed for a full minute, before explaining it was a vintage of Whyren's reserve that was older than the whole crew combined and was worth at least a million credits on its own. 

A good chunk of the drinks were specific to Hutts and would kill quite a few different species if they drank it, but that didn't mean the good stuff wouldn't sell. 

Jabba was not happy when we discovered the hidden room.

Hours passed, and we continued to fill up the freighters, clearing out several more stashes of expensive goods. Despite that, I still had a feeling that we were missing something big. We had already cleared Jabba's private room, freeing the dozen slaves that were locked inside. 

Hell, Racer had even emptied out the Hutt's personal accounts, draining them and storing them temporarily in ready secondary locations. These accounts were relatively low for what you might expect from a kingpin as wealthy as Jabba, only containing several million credits, but it wasn't surprising that the slug didn't keep a lot of money attached directly to his name. No doubt, most of his liquid credits were locked away in a secure system, far from anywhere we had access to.  

Still, despite all we had stolen so far, I couldn't help but feel like there was something we had missed. It wasn't enough, there was still no huge vault, and there was no way that someone like Jabba would be able to resist the urge to build one. 

I was on the way to interrogate the man himself, when one of the slaves we had saved from Jabba's personal collection, a Pantoran marked with white scars along her neck and shoulders, reached out and grabbed the rags functioning as my disguise. I stopped and looked back at her, the woman flinching at my movement. She was barely dressed, with obvious dancer clothes covered by torn sheets and other linens. Behind her, a line of other dancers, as well as a few younger men and women, sat along the edge of the hallway.

Some of them were smiling, considering this the end of their torment, while most of them watched us with trepidation and uncertainty.

"What are you going to do with us?" The Pantoran woman asked, doing her best to push past her obvious fear. 

"Nothing. You are all free to go," I explained, turning to face her directly. "I would suggest heading towards the nearest city with some of the speeders in the hangar once we leave. We will be leaving the hangar doors open, so you'll be able to take the speeders out through there." 

"You… would leave us?" She asked, looking up at me and staring into my soul, despite my helmet being covered. "You would let us go free?"

"I have no interest in slaves. Take what you can for supplies and leave after we do. Help your fellow slaves if you can, otherwise, just take care of yourself," I explained, smiling gently even though she couldn't see it. "Do you have a slave implant?"

"N-no, Jabba kept us in line with… with violence… and worse," she explained. "Only general labor slaves got implants." 

"That's good, that will make it easier," I assured her. "Are you injured? We have some first aid…" 

"No… but what if I wanted a ride?" She asked, pulling herself together, her confidence growing in the face of my kindness. "I could help you, in exchange for getting my friends and I out of here."

"Are you sure? You understand that associating with us is probably not the best idea, correct?" I asked, watching her closely. "And that we would have to keep you from seeing our secrets." 

"I don't care. We can worry about that once we are off this wasteland of a planet," She explained, slowly standing up straight.

"Well, in that case, how exactly can you help us?" I asked. "We have plenty of labor…" 

"I can lead you to his vault. His personal vault," She explained. "I doubt your droids could scan for it, and I would think the slug would take its location to his grave." 

"That… would definitely earn you a trip off the planet, and a ride to anywhere you would like to go," I assured her, though internally, I doubted Jabba would prefer to die than keep his wealth. He was a coward at heart, after all. "You show me where to look, and I'll get you and everyone you want off this planet." 

I reached out with my hand, the blue-skinned woman looking at it for a moment before shaking it and sealing our deal. I commed Tatnia to send a few armed escorts to get her friends out of the dangerous areas of the palace before the Pantoran, Cheki, guided me through the palace halls, a team of droids and salvagers following behind us.

Slowly she led us down to Jabba's personal quarters, though we stayed outside of the actual room he slept in and "lived" in. Instead, we followed one side of an extra wide hallway to a series of doors, each one clearly designed to allow Hutts to pass through. Cheki stopped us at the third door. 

"These are supposed to be room for his… attendants," She explained, chewing the last words with disgust. "There are more on the other side, but no matter how many of us there were, we were always crammed in to fit on that side. Several girls have seen things getting loaded in and out of here, mostly by droids."

"Huh… alright, let's see what's behind door number three then," I said, gesturing to the workers that had accompanied us, stepping back to let them do their work. 

It was immediately apparent that while the door looked like a standard interior door, it was anything but. Popping off the control panel revealed an incredibly sophisticated-looking interior, which prompted our accompanying salvagers to shake their heads. So, I called Ahsoka and Racer down, the two making their way through to us after a few wrong turns. 

"I thought we weren't using my door openers," Ahsoka joked after she arrived, her hand on my shoulder so she wouldn't be heard by Cheki. 

"Those are a last resort. We have quite a few options before that," I insisted, watching Racer interface with the door controls. "Besides, as long as nobody sees it happen, we could always blame it on a plasma torch or something."

Thankfully, using Ahsoka's lightsaber turned out not to be necessary, as, after fifteen minutes of work, Racer broke through the security. After another moment, the door opened… revealing a normal-looking room. For a moment, all of us looked inside, minds running through what we were looking at. Thankfully, before I could express my disappointment, Racer rolled inside. The droid whistled sharply and stuck out his scomp link, connecting to a link I hadn't even seen. Just a few seconds later, the whole back half of the room slid by, revealing a new room. 

"Well… Looks like you get your ride to anywhere, Cheki," I said, stepping through the large door to get a better look at the newly revealed room. "Well done." 

The room was a massive chamber carved directly into the natural stone that made up this area of the palace. It was nearly eight meters wide and twenty meters deep, with enough headroom for Ahsoka to sit on my shoulder and not need to duck. Inside were hundreds of credit containers, bags of coins, stacks of ingots, sealed containers by the hundreds, at least one sack of precious stones, dozens of paintings, sculptures, and everything in between. Centuries of Jabba gathering loot, skimming credits, and taking tithes in the form of anything that caught his eye was now sitting in front of us. 

"Hell, for this, I'll give you a give you a whole fucking ship," I added, unable to stop myself from chuckling, looking over at Ahsoka and Cheki, both of them gobsmacked at what we had uncovered. "What do you think, Cinnamon? Did she earn a ship?"

"Yeah… I would think that she did."