but it would have attracted unwanted attention, and the Great God Quay
would probably have exacted some horrible punishment as well. The
president watched a gold-colored protocol droid in conversation with an
R2 model that was serving drinks.
"Mr. President," a low voice murmured.
The Weequay turned. His four fellows stood nearby.
One held something covered with a square of green satin.
"The . . . item?" whispered the president.
The other four Weequays nodded. The president lifted a corner of the
satin material and saw a thermal detonator. "We must disarm it.
Secretly. Silently."
The band tootled its horrible music. The guests milled about, unaware
of the danger in their midst.
Meanwhile, the five Weequays formed a tight huddle and worked feverishly
to dismantle the detonator. The Proper tools were available on the sail
barge, of course, but the problem was that two of the Weequays disagreed
on the disarming technique.
"Pull that circuit patch now," said the secretary.
"You'll kill us all," said the president. "Break the green and yellow
connections. Then pull the circuit patch."
"There is no green connection," insisted the secretary.
"There's a yellow one and a gray one."
"The problem is with your eyes," said the president.
"Hurry!" said one of the others.
"It is my responsibility," said the president. He took the detonator
and the tools. He broke first the green connector, then the yellow
connector, and then yanked out the circuit patch.
The Weequays said nothing. They hadn't realized that none of them had
even breathed for nearly a minute.
"You could have blown us to bits," the secretary accused. "You should
have consulted the Great God Quay before you acted."
"I forgot," said the president.
"Yet the bomb is dead!" said one of the others.
"We are victorious!" said another.
A loud, clear voice came from beyond the bulkhead.
"Jabba, this is your last chance! Free us or die!"
The Hutt responded with something in its own language.
"What is happening?" asked a Weequay.
The president turned around quickly. Panic and confusion were taking
over the sail barge. A human slave girl was strangling the great Jabba
with her own chains. There was the sound of shots being fired from
outside. One of the Weequays opened a shutter to peer out, and was
grabbed and pulled from the vessel, thrown down to the desert floor
below.
Clutching his force pike, the president led the remaining Weequays
toward what was now clearly a battle.
He jabbed upward with the pike, leading the others on deck. The
president arrived to see the black-clad human prisoner using a
lightsaber to clear the deck of Weequay guards and other defenders.
"Get the gun!" the human cried to the slave girl. "Point it at the
deck!"
"For the Great God Quay," murmured the president softly. Then he
advanced. At least they had disarmed the bomb, so the sail barge would
be safe.
Before he could attack, the human with the light-saber put an arm around
the slave girl, clutched a heavy rope, and kicked the firing mechanism
of the deck gun. Then he and the girl swung from the sail barge to a
small repulsor skiff hovering over the dreadful Great Pit of Carkoon,
where the Sarlacc dwelt.
The president watched them escape. Around him the sail barge was
burning and bursting into ruins, but unfortunately Weequays do not have
enough imagination to fear death, either. The president calmly clung to
a railing as another tremendous explosion ripped the sail barge to
pieces.
The last thing he saw was the glorious sight of the white ball of the
quay hurled into the air--the Great God Quay ascending to heaven.
A Bad Feeling:
The Tale of EV-9D9
Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens Like some great beast lurching toward
destruction, Cloud City shuddered, tilted, and began to fall.
Lando Calrissian heard the rising wail of the Ugnaughts and the others
of his domain who looked to him for safety and stability, and his heart
fell with his dying city. His blaster twisted from his hand as he
leaped for a pillar, as if a good grip might save him from that final
descent through Bespin's clouds. The weapon skittered along the wildly
angled decking, hit the rimguard, then bounced over its curving lip and
vanished into the rush of Tibanna-laden clouds that swirled by.
Alarms shrieked. The city pitched again, metal groaning. Calrissian
felt his grip weaken. The clouds reached out for him with sinuous,
fluttering tendrils. He closed his eyes in the force of the driving
wind. And he fell, too.
Lobot caught him.
Calrissian felt sudden, welcome pain as enhanced fingers dug into his
shoulder beneath his cloak, holding him in place as securely as if he
had been welded to the deck. He turned to see Lobot's cranial
attachments flickering as they probed all the communications channels
now in use. The city lurched again, but this time the angle of its fall
decreased. The cloud streamers slowed as the howl of the wind
diminished.
"Backups online, sir!" The reedy voice was Sarl Random's--the cheeks of
her ghost-white face splotched by red patches of fear, her ill-fitting
uniform bunched up and twisted from the struggle she had .just been
through, stained with hydraulic fluid, reeking of scorched circuitry.
She stumbled over to Calrissian under Lobot's watchful eyes. She held a
security display pad in her trembling hands. "She must have planted
charges by the main repulsorlift generators."
Even now, Calrissian still couldn't believe the nature of the intellect
they faced. It .was bad enough that the prisoner had circumvented all
the failsafes of the Security Tower, but the generators that kept this
facility aloft were supposed to be inviolable. Too many lives depended
upon them. "She wanted to destroy the entire city?"
Lobot angled his head at Random. She read the data he generated on her
pad. "Not all the generators were targeted, sir." Her voice could not
hide her puzzlement.
"A diversion?"
Calrissian tugged his cloak more tightly around his shoulders. A
diversion he could understand. Misdirection.
Like noisily knocking over a pile of betting chits to disguise the
skillful pass that brought a winning gambling tab to the top of the
deck.
"Where's she headed?" Calrissian asked. The decking beneath him was
almost at a normal angle now, thrumming at the edge of perception with
the regular hum of the generators and the constant shifting of the
control surfaces that kept the floating city in trim.
But Sarl Random had no answer for him. She had only been acting
security chief for a single shift--ever since she had brought him the
evidence that revealed what his real security chief actually was. In
another mining colony, she might have been tossed over the rimguard
herself. But she was too inexperienced to know how dangerous
it could
be to expose corruption in a facility so small it was a law unto itself.
And she had taken her discovery to Baron-Administrator Calrissian
himself--in spite of all the stories told of him on a dozen worlds--a
man to whom the word "honor" still had meaning.
A communications panel chimed and Lobot punched the code that released
its speaker wand. He automatically handed it to Calrissian.
"This is the administrator. Go ahead."
A droid reported. "Traffic control, sir. One of the transport shuttles
has launched without clearance from the east platform."
Calrissian permitted himself a smile of relief. The prisoner had
finally made a mistake. "She can't get far in that." It was an orbital
transfer vehicle only, strictly intrasystem. "Scramble all the Twin
Pods. I want her brought back at once--still functioning--or know the
reason why."
"You should blow her out of the sky," the droid responded. Then quickly
added, "Sir."
Calrissian and Random exchanged a look of surprise.
Droids didn't talk that way.
"Who is this?" Calrissian demanded.
"Wuntoo Forcee Forwun. Sir. Traffic controller, second class."
Calrissian had been ready to reprimand the presumptuous droid, but
hesitated as he recognized the prefix code. Three other Wuntoo units,
all from the same manufacturing lot, had been found in the recycling
bay, bound for the furnace. At least, parts of them had been found
there, showing disturbing evidence that they had been taken apart while
they were still switched on. What had happened to the rest of them was
something only the former security chief knew, so Calrissian had some
understanding of what the droid must be feeling--if a droid could be
said to feel. Cloud City's baron-administrator had encountered enough
droids with such convincing emotional analogues that he often had cause
to question the common wisdom. And the processors used in the Wuntoo
units, which made them capable of tracking the complexities of this
facility's air and space traffic, certainly were elaborate enough to
allow unexpected behaviors to emerge.
"Listen to me, Forwun--this is no time for revenge.
Issue my orders directly to the patrol or stand down from duty.
Do you understand?"
There was a long pause, the hiss of static on an open channel.
Then the droid said, "Orders issued, sir."
Lobot nodded at Calrissian. He was monitoring the security channels.
"Patrols launched," Random confirmed, reading from her display pad.
Calrissian slipped the speaker wand back into the wall panel.
"This won't take long," he said to Random.
"That transport will be dragged back here before--" He didn't finish
because the air was viciously rent by a bone-jarring crack of thunder.
Calrissian, Lobot, and Random turned sharply to stare past the rimguard,
into the clouds.
The Iopene Princess emerged from the billows of Tibanna, its dull gray
finish bloodied by the ruby light of the setting primary.
"No," Calrissian whispered. It wasn't possible.
The Iopene Princess was a Mining Guild cutter, with bulbous,
state-of-the-art hyperdrive units, asymmetrical, bristling with scanners
and probes, designed for hard vacuum, not for atmosphere. And it wasn't
scheduled to leave until tomorrow, after Calrissian had made his annual
payment to keep the Guild from organizing his workers.
"She hijacked the Guild cutter . . . ?"
Lobot's attachments flickered crazily, then he looked away, unable to
meet Calrissian's eyes. That was exactly what had happened.
Stealing the transport shuttle had been another diversion.
Now the security patrols were too far gone to ever double back in time
to stop the Iopene Princess from leaving the atmosphere and making the
jump to hyperspace. No wonder the prisoner hadn't tried to destroy the
entire city. She needed time to make her escape. But not very much
time.
Somehow, in the tenth-of-a-shift cycle that had transpired since the
first alert had come from the Security Tower, the prisoner had managed
to override clearances on two flight platforms, remotely pilot a shuttle
to draw away the security patrol, and take over the most heavily secured
vessel in the city. What kind of a mind were they dealing with?
Then he remembered: the kind of mind that had
destroyed a quarter of Cloud City's droid population without falling
happened across the evidence--by accident.
Brilliant wasn't the word for it.
Neither was genius.
The only term that came to Calrissian's mind was: tortured. There was
no other word to describe what had happened to those droids, either.
Random moved to Calrissian's side. He could feel her shiver beside him,
though the rising night wind was warm.
"We'll never catch her, will we, sir?" she said.
Calrissian put his arm around her, for comfort, nothing more.
"No," he admitted. "But I'll put her I.D. all over the webs. Everyone
will know about her."
"You think no one else has tried that before?"
Calrissian knew Random was right. No doubt that's why the prisoner had
chosen Cloud City in the first place--a tiny mining colony, too small to
attract Imperial notice, too far off the beaten hyperlanes to have heard
the stories of a vicious, unknown force that had scourged a hundred
worlds before it. But perhaps that's where the prisoner's eventual
downfall would lie. Slowly the possibilities for where she could
operate unrecognized would dwindle. Eventually, she would have nowhere
to run. But that would be in the future.
For now, it was a big galaxy.
The cutter banked slowly by the edge of the city, as if deliberately
taunting Calrissian, then sped up on a rising arc, ripping through cloud
banks, leaving a vapor trail in the dusk like a stream of blood.
Calrissian turned back to the main portal. He had the guild council to
placate, the threat of a strike to avert. His former security chief was
gone and there was no telling where she would turn up next. Though
Calrissian was certain that wherever it was, if the universe had a
bright center, it would have to be the world farthest from it, because
only there would something as evil and as cunning as the droid EV-9D9
find a home. And wherever that world was, Calrissian hoped it was
somewhere he himself would never have to go.
He had a bad feeling about it.
Years later, at the edge of Tatooine's Dune Sea, deep in Jabba's
dungeon, EV-9D9 had a bad feeling, too.
And she welcomed it. For each stuttering squeal of despair from the GNK
Power Droid was like a surge of fresh current through EV-9D9's circuits.
Bad feelings were what she existed for.
The darkly colored humanoid droid, known here as Ninedenine, looked past
her command console in the dungeon's main hall to see the GNK unit
slowly rotated to expose the ventral surfaces of its ambulatory
appendages. The appendages readjusted their relative positions
f
uriously, uselessly, trying to reorient their center of gravity back to
an operational norm. And unlike any droid before or since, unlike any
behavior that could be predicted by a logical engineering assessment of
her technical specifications, Ninedenine felt a thrill of pleasure as
she watched the little droid's futile attempts to avoid damage.
The corridor barricade swept open and a snuffling Gamorrean guard
shuffled in with two new prisoners.
But that did not distract Ninedenine from hungrily observing what
happened as the glowing energy inducers were lowered onto the GNK's
appendages. In response to the sudden application of heat, coolant
fluid vaporized and the relief valves in the Power Droid's outer
covering bled off the resultant vapor with a satisfying hiss. Sensing
an impending loss of function, the GNK broadcast a futile,
wide-spectrum, multiband signal for assistance, some of it actually in
the audible frequencies to which most organic life-forms were limited.
It was programmed panic, pure and urgent. Like higher-dimensional music
to
Ninedenine's exquisitely tuned acoustic sensors.