R2-D2 rotated his domed head to see C-3PO walking away from him. He beeped again, trying to convince C-3PO to come with him.
“No more adventures,” C-3PO shouted back as he continued walking. “I’m not going that way.”
R2-D2 rotated his head to look away from C-3PO’s departing figure, then rotated for another look at C-3PO’s back. The astromech let out a forlorn, whimpering beep, then waited a moment longer. But when he realized C-3PO was determined to go his own way, R2-D2 turned his dome in the other direction and moved off, heading for the rock mesa.
“That malfunctioning little twerp,” C-3PO muttered to himself several hours after parting ways with R2-D2. “This is all his fault! He tricked me into going this way, but he’ll do no better.”
Tatooine’s skies had turned cloudy, but C-3PO could still feel the heat from the planet’s two suns. He walked past the skeletal remains of a large, long-necked creature, and trembled at the thought that the deceased might have any living relatives nearby.
C-3PO noticed a metal O-ring was missing from his left knee joint, and realized it must have jarred loose. He knew there was no chance he’d ever find the disc-shaped piece of metal again. With each step, his sand-clogged gears made horrid grinding sounds. He was ready to give up.
Then he saw something on the horizon.
“Wait, what’s that?” he said. It was an angular shape with a winking light. Despite the distance, the droid could tell he was looking at a large vehicle. “A transport! I’m saved!” In his loudest voice, he shouted, “Over here! Hey! Hey!” He continued shouting and waving his arms. “Help! Please, help!”
At first, he felt relief when he saw the transport turn and move in his direction. But after it arrived and C-3PO met the transport’s drivers, he wished he’d gone with R2-D2 after all.
As Tatooine’s two suns set, the temperature dropped. And from every shadowy hole and crevice that lined the canyon walls, nocturnal animals chirped and croaked and hissed in appreciation of the cool air that came with darkness.
R2-D2 had never been so spooked in his life.
He had already evaded sandpits, traversed circuit-jarring terrain, and boldly descended a high cliff to arrive at the canyon floor. However, these accomplishments had been merely challenges to overcome, and they did not bolster R2-D2’s sense of courage. In his experience, dealing with nature was one thing, and dealing with organic creatures was something entirely different, especially when one was a stranger in their territory. Even though his primary photoreceptor was equipped with radar and allowed him to see in the dark, it didn’t change the fact that nightfall was—for some large predators—the preferred time for scavenging.
Despite his wariness, R2-D2 kept moving. He was on a mission, and no one could ever call R2-D2 disloyal. And so he rolled forward on his treads, proceeding cautiously through the rock canyon.
A pair of lights flickered between two boulders, then winked off. R2-D2 paused. Using his sensors, the astromech detected a number of life-forms in this area. As he wondered if the lights on his own domed head might have attracted the life-forms, he heard some rocks fall. They were just small rocks, pebbles mostly, but R2-D2 knew that rocks usually didn’t fall on their own.
Then he saw a small, dark form dart behind a boulder. R2-D2 couldn’t help but emit a whimpering beep. He started moving forward again, hoping that the life-forms would stay where they were and allow him to pass.
Suddenly, a squat, hooded figure with glowing eyes jumped out from the shadows, shouted in an alien language, and fired an ionization blaster at R2-D2. The astromech shrieked as rippling charges of electricity traveled over and through his body. He didn’t stop screaming until the charges crackled and died. Then his dome lights dimmed, and he pitched forward and crashed against the hard ground.
The shooter lowered his blaster. He called out to the surrounding shadows, and seven more hooded figures scurried out from their hiding places. All were short, most no taller than R2-D2 when standing. Like the shooter, they were completely shrouded in dark brown robes made of heavy cloth. Their only visible facial features were their glowing eyes: two bright yellow lights staring out from the darkness of their cloaked heads.
They chittered at one another with delight as they stepped up to examine the fallen droid. The shooter holstered his blaster, then directed his fellows to lift the R2 unit. They picked him up and carried him off to their waiting transport.
The transport was an enormous rust-covered vehicle with a high, sharply angled prow that appeared to cut into the night sky. The transport rested on four massive treads that elevated the hull from the ground. The hooded figures carried the deactivated R2 unit under the transport and set him on his feet, positioning him under an extensible repulsorlift tube. As the tube was lowered a short distance above the droid’s head, one hooded figure quickly welded a restraining bolt to a panel on the front of the droid’s cylindrical body. After the restraining bolt was secured, the repulsor switched on, and R2-D2 was sucked up into the transport. Having made their catch, the hooded figures entered the transport via a landing ramp.
R2-D2 reactivated to find himself in a scrap heap in a cramped, low-ceilinged chamber. Durasteel shavings had come to rest upon his head, but they fell away as he leaned away from a metal wall. Pushing various bits of scrap aside, he moved out of the heap, then rotated his dome to study his cluttered surroundings. He was surprised to see an old RA-7 servant droid nearby, seated with his back against a metal wall. The RA-7 gave R2-D2 a dismissive glance.
R2-D2 heard an electronic voice, and turned to face a red R5 astromech against another wall; the R5 rotated its characteristic head—shaped like an inverted cup—in greeting. Then R2-D2 spotted a binocular-eyed Treadwell droid and a box-shaped GNK power droid.
Curious, R2-D2 moved up a narrow aisle to explore the chamber. As he passed an ancient CZ secretary droid that was swaying back and forth amidst a pile of scrap, he heard a familiar voice call out, “Artoo?”
It was C-3PO. The golden droid had been hunched down against a wall, but seeing his friend, he struggled to his feet. “Artoo! It is you!” he cried happily. “It is you!”
R2-D2 beeped in salutation at C-3PO, who also had a restraining bolt secured to his chest. Both droids nearly stumbled when the transport suddenly lurched forward. Under the star-filled sky, the transport chugged off and headed out of the canyon.
The next morning, a squad of Imperial stormtroopers found the abandoned escape pod half buried in the sand. A Sentinel-class landing craft had delivered the stormtroopers to Tatooine, where they’d appropriated dewbacks—large four-legged reptiles—from the local authorities. The landing craft lifted away from the escape pod’s impact site, leaving the stormtroopers and their dewbacks to search for any sign of the pod’s passengers.
In addition to their standard armor and survival gear, the stormtroopers wore pauldrons—protective shoulder armor—over their right shoulders. All the pauldrons were black except for the orange one worn by the squad leader, Captain Mod Terrik.
Through the lenses of his stormtrooper helmet, Terrik looked from the open pod to the surrounding sand, searching for any signs of passengers. Because of winds and shifting sand, footprints didn’t last long on Tatooine, so he considered himself lucky when he spotted the tracks.
“Someone was in the pod,” Terrik announced to the other stormtroopers. He raised a pair of macrobinoculars to his helmet’s lenses and scanned the desert, then added, “The tracks go off in this direction.”
Near Captain Terrik, stormtrooper Davin Felth bent down to lift a shiny metal disk from the sand. Holding it up for Terrik’s inspection, the stormtrooper said, “Look, sir—droids.”
“Wake up! Wake up!” C-3PO said to R2-D2 as the transport came to a stop. R2-D2 had switched himself off, but—at C-3PO’s urging—his dome’s lights activated and he was immediately alert. Other droids were beeping and whirring nervously. Behind the protocol droid, a wide hatch opened and filled the cramped chamber with
blinding bright light.
“We’re doomed,” C-3PO said.
After their reunion, C-3PO had told R2-D2 everything he’d learned about their short, hooded captors since they’d picked him up in the desert. They were Jawas, natives of Tatooine. They scavenged the desert for machinery, which they repaired, utilized, and sometimes sold to moisture farmers or other inhabitants. Even their transport—called a sandcrawler—was a scavenged item, a relic from the era of Tatooine’s mining boom. The sandcrawler was large enough to serve as a mobile home for an entire clan of Jawas. It also was an autonomous mineral processing facility, equipped with ore crushers, a superheated smelter, and metal compactors. Being trapped in a vehicle with all these features was more than C-3PO could stand.
Jawas appeared at the open hatch, and a power droid tried to retreat into the chamber. C-3PO glanced at the Jawas, then back at R2-D2 and said, “Do you think they’ll melt us down?”
R2-D2 beeped as a Jawa stepped up behind C-3PO.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” the droid yelped. To R2-D2, he whimpered, “Will this never end?”
The Jawas herded C-3PO, R2-D2, and several other selected droids down the sandcrawler’s main ramp. They had arrived at a salt flat, on which stood a domed structure and an evenly spaced series of five-meter-tall spires. The spires were vaporators, used to extract moisture from Tatooine’s arid atmosphere. The place was a moisture farm.
Both R2-D2 and C-3PO had spent time on this same moisture farm before, a long time ago. From the astromech’s perspective, the place hadn’t changed much, but he refused to let old memories distract him from his current mission. As for the protocol droid, his memory was not what it had once been.
A Jawa nudged C-3PO, guiding him to take his place in line with the other droids beside the sandcrawler. A hulking R1 reactor drone stood to C-3PO’s right, and a multiarmed Treadwell to his left. R2-D2 stood between the Treadwell and the red R2-5 astromech. Beyond the R2-5, a dome-bodied armored LIN mining droid hugged the ground at the end of the line.
R2-D2 and the R2-5 unit rotated their heads and glanced at each other. Besides their respective colors and head shapes, the two astromechs differed in cost and utility: R2-5 was substantially cheaper but R2-D2 could store more sets of hyperspace coordinates in active memory. Starpilots commonly referred to R2‑5 units as R2s, but neither astromech took it personally.
Two human males—one old, one young—stepped out of one of the domed structures and approached the sandcrawler. The elder had grizzled hair and haggard features, and wore a sand-dusted robe over his farm tunic. The young man beside him had blond hair and wore a white tunic with a dark leather utility belt.
At the sight of the humans, most of the Jawas became so anxious that they ran off and hid behind the sandcrawler’s treads. The Jawas’ leader didn’t run, but instead walked directly to the haggard-faced man and gibbered an enthusiastic sales pitch.
“Yeah, all right, fine,” the older man said to the Jawa. “Let’s go.”
They’d only taken a few steps forward when a woman’s voice called out, “Luke! Luke!”
The young man, Luke Skywalker, turned and trotted past some fusion generator supply tanks to arrive at the edge of a huge, deep hole. The hole was an open courtyard with arched doors and rounded windows set into its high mud-packed walls. Owned by the Lars family for two generations, the compound had been Luke’s home for as long as he could remember. Luke leaned over the hole’s edge and looked down. Two domestic vaporators extended up from the courtyard floor, and near them stood Luke’s aunt Beru.
“Luke,” Beru called up to him, “tell Uncle, if he gets a translator, be sure it speaks Bocce.”
“Doesn’t look like we have much of a choice,” Luke said, “but I’ll remind him.” He turned and trotted back after the old man, his uncle Owen. Owen was looking at the red R2-5 unit in the droid lineup. The Jawa leader gibbered at Owen, who answered, “Yeah, I’ll take that red one.”
The Jawa leader yapped a sharp command and the other Jawas scurried out from behind the sandcrawler’s treads to dust off the R2-5. Then, catching Owen’s eye, the Jawa leader made encouraging gestures at the blue-domed R2 unit.
“No, not that one,” Owen said, rejecting R2-D2. While Luke inspected the R2-5, Owen stepped past the Treadwell, then stopped to face the golden protocol droid. An almost identical droid had served on the Lars family farm a few decades back, so Owen recognized the model as a protocol droid. If Owen had had a curious nature or dwelled on the past, he might have wondered if he were looking at the same droid, but on this day, which followed many hard days, his only interest in droids was whether they would be useful to him on the farm. Giving the golden droid a quick study, he said, “You—I suppose you’re programmed for etiquette and protocol?”
“Protocol?” C-3PO said. “Why it’s my primary function, sir. I am well versed in all the customs—”
“I have no need for a protocol droid,” Owen said, looking away. The golden droid’s voice was vaguely familiar, but in Owen’s limited experience, he figured all protocol droids sounded alike.
Thinking fast, C-3PO said, “Of course you haven’t, sir—not in an environment such as this—that’s why I have been programmed—”
Owen interrupted, “What I really need is a droid who understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.”
“Vaporators!” C-3PO said as if it were the most wonderful word in the galaxy. “Sir—my first job was programming binary load lifters…very similar to your vaporators in most respects.…”
“Can you speak Bocce?” Owen asked.
“Of course I can, sir,” C-3PO answered with pride. “It’s like a second language to me…I’m as fluent in—”
“All right; shut up!” Owen indicated the protocol droid to the Jawa and said, “I’ll take this one.”
“Shutting up, sir,” C-3PO muttered.
“Luke!” Owen shouted. Luke ran over. Owen gestured at the protocol droid and the R2-5 unit, then said, “Take these two over to the garage, will you? I want them cleaned up before dinner.”
“But I was going into Toshe Station to pick up some power converters…” Luke whined.
“You can waste time with your friends when your chores are done,” Owen said. “Now, come on, get to it!”
“All right, come on,” Luke said to the protocol droid.
C-3PO glanced at R2-D2. The astromech emitted a whimpering whistle.
Luke glanced at the R2-5, who was getting a final dusting from some Jawas. Luke said, “And the red one, come on.”
The R2-5 hesitated and stayed beside R2-D2, who let out a pathetic beep and began trembling.
“Well, come on, Red,” Luke said. “Let’s go.”
The R2-5 rolled after Luke and C-3PO. R2-D2 started shaking so hard that he attracted the attention of a Jawa technician, who turned and zapped the droid with a control box. R2-D2 went suddenly silent and stood still.
The R2-5 was still rolling along when its top suddenly exploded, launching small parts all over the ground. As smoke poured upward from the R2-5’s ruptured head, Luke called out, “Uncle Owen…”
“Yeah?” Owen answered, turning from his financial transaction with the Jawa leader.
“This Artoo unit has a bad motivator,” Luke said, gesturing at the smoldering R2-5. “Look!”
Owen spun on the Jawa and bellowed, “Hey, what’re you trying to push on us?”
C-3PO noticed the Jawa technician had reactivated R2-D2, and that R2-D2 was now practically jumping up and down, trying to attract attention so he wouldn’t be left behind. C-3PO tapped Luke’s shoulder, then pointed to R2-D2 and said, “Excuse me, sir, but that Artoo unit is in prime condition. A real bargain.”
Luke said, “Uncle Owen…”
Owen looked away from the Jawa. “Yeah?”
Luke pointed at R2-D2. “What about that one?”
Turning back to the Jawa, Owen said, “What about that blue one? We’ll take that one.”
; A few shy Jawas trudged up to the R2-5 unit, then glanced at Luke, waiting for his permission before they hauled off the droid. Luke waved his hand to fan away the smoke that was still coming out of the R2‑5’s head, then said, “Yeah, take this away.”
C-3PO beamed at R2-D2, then turned to Luke and said, “I’m quite sure you’ll be very pleased with that one, sir. He really is in first-class condition. I’ve worked with him before. Here he comes.”
R2-D2 scooted away from the sandcrawler and headed for C-3PO and Luke. Luke said, “Okay, let’s go.” He turned and walked toward the domed structure, the main entrance to the Lars family homestead.
C-3PO moved close to R2-D2 and said in a low voice, “Now, don’t you forget this! Why I should stick my neck out for you is quite beyond my capacity!”
The droids followed Luke into the entrance dome—their new home.
“Thank the maker!” C-3PO exclaimed with delight as he descended into a large tub. “This oil bath is going to feel so good. I’ve got such a bad case of dust contamination, I can barely move!”
C-3PO was with Luke and R2-D2 in the homestead’s cluttered garage, which doubled as Luke’s workshop. R2-D2 rested on a large battery. Luke sat on a bench, lost in thought as he played with a scale model of a T-16 skyhopper. He owned a real T-16, but he’d ripped its stabilizer while racing with friends through Beggar’s Canyon, an ancient riverbed that had once been part of the Mos Espa Podrace circuit. Owen had been so angry with Luke that he’d grounded him for the season.
Another lost season.
“It just isn’t fair,” Luke said in frustration, tossing the model T-16 onto a table. “Oh, Biggs is right. I’m never gonna get out of here!”
C-3PO had never heard of Biggs, and didn’t know why Luke was so upset, but he said, “Is there anything I might do to help?”
Star Wars Trilogy Page 2
