"Burn them out." Ranma snapped. Since starting this project he'd wanted to confirm or not one of the few theories regarding these sarlaccs. They could survive virtually anywhere and lived forever, practically. They also reproduced by spore clouds. Why, then, wasn't the universe filled with them?
Perhaps it was, out in unexplored regions, but locally they were quite rare. Few indeed had seen one and lived.
One theory was the creature's long lifespan served against that. They postulated that the sarlacc biology only reproduced at death. Since they didn't seem to die naturally, they had to be killed. Since he was in the act of killing one, he didn't want this thing spraying the planet with thousands or even millions of offspring. One was bad enough.
"Gizzard encountered. Bypassing." Multiple gullet reports had came in across multiple fronts in different parts of the outraged Sarlacc.
Ranma expected that also. This thing ate whatever fell into it, including metal and speeders, armored victims were the same tasty snacks as unarmored ones, and so forth. It'd eat a Jawa sandcrawler as soon as a stray bantha. There had to be some way to grind up all of that metal inside it so it could digest the mess. The acid hadn't seemed calibrated for that, so a gizzard was the reasonable alternative choice. Just a muscled sack that endlessly ground the ingested metal pieces against each other, reducing them to a fine powder over ages.
That also explained the high metal content in the tissues foiling his scanners from any kind of deep penetration, and the scattered comlink interference.
Right then the Sarlacc began writhing like a pumping heart, except the scale was not to be believed.
"Another cryo-spray!" Ranma commanded sharply to the droids at those weapon stations. They responded with blanketing the exposed flesh of the creature with another layer of gas turning it into instant fleshy ice, which broke away as the Sarlacc struggled.
"Again!"
The spray nozzles shot forth their freezing gasses again, and this time the Sarlacc quieted. Apparently pain was not its choice of sensations. Its own pain, that is. The shattered layers of sarlacc flesh fell and were cleared away so the insertion teams could continue their rescue work.
The trick to cleaning out that creature was not to ever get too far inside where it had the advantage of all its myriad ways of keeping victims in its vast stomach docile and securely contained. Once they had cleared away an outer layer of defenses, rescued the digested remains that exposed they'd start on the next, never leaving an intact tentacle behind. Cutting away at the beast's flesh was just one way of securing that. Once there were no more people to rescue in a section, there was no further reason for that section to exist. Freezing and breaking off those emptied areas gave the sarlacc something to mourn over instead of its rapidly emptying stomach.
The Jawas should be all over this area when they were done. Scraps of metal and machine parts a thousand years forgotten were piling up in massive slag heaps as the droids went on with their business. Frozen gullets fell out and shattered, leaving piles of broken metal they just left there.
They were after people.
The chance of there being anything usable in those piles was vanishingly small, and there wasn't time or opportunity to take everything. Besides, in their initial seismic and sonic scans of the surrounding area they'd discovered an astonishing number of hidden supply caches. Anyone employed even briefly by Jabba the Hutt, or anyone with any brains, knew that the sordid environment the crime lord liked wasn't exactly conducive to health, and with all of the schemers and plotters and backbiters it was going to happen, sooner or later they'd be on the run, or dead. So thousands of henchmen through the years had carved out their own hidey holes and stocked them with goods they'd need to survive and escape.
Most of those henchmen never lived long enough to take advantage of those caches. The oldest they discovered hadn't been visited in over a hundred years. There were still lights on, dust covering the glittering piles of steadily pilfered corusca stones and other gems, the stealing of which had probably led directly to the thief's death.
Stealing from a Hutt was about as safe as giving Palpatine a wedgie.
Actually, Jabba himself had several hidden vaults around here that were loaded with an appalling display of ostentatious wealth. Since the crime lord wasn't around to contest their action, the droids emptied them at once. The Jedi could use the boost to their coffers. The other supply caches Ranma was allowing his demolitions droids to test their new programs by removing the bombs, coded auto-destructs, and other booby-traps from the various vaults and caches, accumulating what they found in a waiting pair of freighters.
Already it had grown to an amazing collection of weapons, armor and other gear, not to mention food, generators and household supplies. They'd found and recovered two full sets of Mandalorian armor, heavily modified, that had so intrigued Ranma he'd resolved to look at those later. They appeared to be the same style, possibly modified by the same guy who was smart enough to guess he could need more than one hidey hole stocked and ready.
If that was so, it was an interesting study in paranoia, because the droids just comlinked to him they'd uncovered yet a third set of the same, under similar yet different booby traps. The coding access to break the auto-destructs on them were fiendishly hard, and relished by his demolitions squad troopers, who kept wanting to stress test their new algorithms for breaking exactly those kind of locks.
Well, and some of that junk had to be worth something, right? Even small scraps of money helped, and many of those caches contained fortunes stashed safely away to aid the safe escape of creatures who'd never lived to reach their hoards. The weapons were staggering in their variety, all so many different types and styles he could claim to be a galactic-level collector of rare and exotic methods for dealing mayhem, if he'd wanted, just on this stuff alone.
On that note he called in an extra two ore freighters. They'd load up the partially digested metal from the sarlacc's gizzards around the discovered assortments of bounty hunter, mercenary and outlaw gear, using the excess metal to hide any transmitters or signaling devices that might well be hidden in some of those stashes. Having an exclusive hold on operating holonet transmissions was proving a great advantage already, and he'd used that to call for the Victory and modified bulk freighter with equipment to start this operation. But even a short range transmitter could potentially cause problems moving this through galactic scape.
This whole mining and salvage effort was disguised as an Imperial sanctioned university research project studying the Sarlacc, and to add credence to this soon they'd have xenobiologists from all over crawling a safe distance away from the work site, after the creature was dead, hopefully.
Having found how terrible a torture this was, Ranma was taking his own data sheets away and erasing most clues behind him lest the Empire get ideas. This stuff was foul and nasty beyond most beings' ability to comprehend.
"Ranma! We've got the Jedi!" Ranko called excitedly over the din of working.
Rushing thought the dust clouds, Ranma called ahead. "So who have we got?" Arriving, the perfect lack of clothes made the gender obvious - female.
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(Posted Tue, 01 Jun 2004 23:05)
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