Tales From Jabba's Palace

by Kevin J. Anderson

  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

  under the slightest suspicion, until a junior security officer had just

  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.