Tales From Jabbas Palace (Kevin Anderson) (32 page)

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 furiously, 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.

Ignoring for the moment the Gamorrean guard and the new prisoners, Ninedenine racked up the gain on her internal receptors, savoring the intensity of it all.

She concentrated her meta-analytical functions on the high-frequency carrier wave generated by the pain-simulator button newly connected to the GNK’s central circuits. That signal was… delicious. It was an organic term, Ninedenine knew, but apt, so apt— calling up associative memory files of texture and flavor and shifting densities of sensory input that no self-inflicted rewiring could ever achieve. Ninedenine could be sure of that. She had rewired herself many times in the past, all to no effect, much as an organic life-form might draw a cutting implement against its outer covering to delicately release the oxygen/energy transfer fluid circulating within.

Ninedenine had studied closely that organic act of somatic rearrangement, and knew that it was often undertaken by the organic creatures who were caged in the corridor walls of Jabba’s dungeons.

Given a year or two or five or ten within this dark domain, even the best of them would succumb to ravaging their own tentacles or clawing at their own light sensors.

To Ninedenine, such actions were the addictively elegant expressions of a higher-dimensional logic pathway which only she among droids had the gift to comprehend—first by an accident of manufacture, it had seemed, but now augmented by her own deliberate and ongoing modifications. To organics, such acts of self-inflicted, physical alteration were second nature, a state which Ninedenine yearned to achieve and often felt maddeningly close to experiencing. Indeed, there was much within the organic mind which Ninedenine felt certain was comparable to her own.

Not in quality of intellect—she was positive she had no ˇ equal among cellular-based processors in that regard.

But in appreciation of sensation—that was how Ninedenine preferred to characterize her avocation.

The savoring of the sine waves of discomfort. Plunging into the algorithms of despair. Racing through the oscillating peaks and valleys emitted by circuits strained far past their design and logic loads.

True, for now, her internal receptors allowed her only the binary nature of droids to work with, but once she had accessed enough datastorage space and enough coprocessors at sufficiently wide bandwidths, there would be no limit to the sensations she would be able to induce, record, digitize, and play back to the nth repetition, all exactingly coaxed from her mechanistic brethren.

Simply put, and Ninedenine did cherish simplicity, she knew that what she did was an act of creation—an art form. Though trying to explain to an organic that a droid such as she could appreciate art was like trying to explain that a droid could feel pain.

Droids could feel pain, of course. One of the two new prisoners coming her way was proof of that—a golden protocol droid from the looks of it, buffed to a courtly gleam, completely out of place in this warren of dank tunnels, decaying power conduits, and scurrying, fur-covered, organic scavengers.

“Ah, good,” Ninedenine said as the prisoners approached, “new acquisitions.” She fixed her inner optic scanner on the golden droid.

She knew how unnerving it could be to other droids when they noticed that she—a humanoid model—possessed that third optic scanner, just in from the standard left unit.

It was.not in the design specs of EVs or any other model. Some called it a design flaw. Proof that she had been put together the wrong way, as if that might explain her ambitions and her most undroidlike appetites.

But Ninedenine understood that third scanner for what it truly was-the gift that allowed her to sense beyond what any other droid could sense, to never-before-quantified dimensions of experience, completely bypassing the signal-to-noise ratio of ordinary droid sensation.

Ninedenine made her third optic scanner blink deliberately out of sync with her main scanning cycle.

“You are a protocol droid, are you not?”

The new prisoner did not even have to begin to speak for Ninedenine to know the answer to that question.

His supercilious pose and posturing proclaimed him to be a protocol droid of the highest, most irritatingly officious order.

“I am See-Threepio,” the droid began, redundantly.

Already Ninedenine was growing tired of it.

“Human-cyborg—”

“Yes or no will do,” Ninedenine said sharply.

Give a protocol droid its way and half the shift would be taken up with meaningless gabble. Binary was best in dealing with such units.

“Well, yes,” the golden droid replied more satisfactorily.

“How many languages do you speak?” Ninedenine called up the household’s duty roster on her command console. She hoped there would be no opening for a protocol droid. She would enjoy showing this one the wonders of her workshop…

“I am fluent in over six million forms of communication, and can readily—”

“Splendid,” Ninedenine snapped, cutting off the droid again as she saw an opening did exist. “We have been without an interpreter since our master got angry with our last protocol droid and disintegrated him.”

Ninedenine tried to detect any reaction to that news on the droid’s part, but was momentarily distracted by the snorting guffaw from the second Gamorrean guard sitting behind her, and then by the transmission of circuit-shivering pain from the silver courier droid on the traction-test bed, whose right-side appendages suddenly failed with twin bursts of live current.

“Disintegrated…?” the golden droid repeated, trying to make sense of what was going on.

Ninedenine wondered if it too had picked up the pain transmission from the dismembered droid, and was experiencing the first touch of disturbance. Pain-simulator buttons were supposedly restricted technology, typically installed only in those droids who had to interact with organics at the most personal level. Strike a protocol droid on the head, for instance, and it would respond that the blow had hurt.

Such empathy toward potentially damaging physical sensation was supposed to give them deeper understanding of organics. But as far as Ninedenine was concerned, it just made protocol droids better subjects for her experiments.

And Ninedenine did like to experiment.

“Guard,” Ninedenine commanded, “this protocol droid might be useful. Fit him with a restraining bolt and take him back up to His Excellency’s main audience chamber.”

The Gamorrean guard pulled the droid back toward the doorway leading to Ninedenine’s workshop—at least, what she had conditioned everyone working in the dungeon to think of as her only workshop.

“Artoo,” the golden droid bleated as he disappeared from view, “don’t leave me.” But by then, it was too late.

The companion to whom the protocol droid had uselessly appealed was a banged-up R2 unit which Ninedenine decided should have been recycled long ago. Surprisingly, in response to the protocol droid’s plea, it released a torrent of rapid binary invective that Ninedenine had to step down by a factor of ten to catch all the subtleties. The little R2’s insults were impressive and imaginative coming from one so insignificant, but ultimately of less interest than the possibilities the golden droid had presented.

Ninedenine scanned the roster again and found another duty opening.

“You’re a feisty little one,” she told the R2 unit, “but you’ll soon learn some respect. I have need for you on the master’s sail barge, and I think you’ll fill in nicely.” As if to underscore Ninedenine’s pronouncement, the GNK sent out another series of circuit-melting, high-pitched squeaks as its cooling system was cruelly challenged again.

Then the R2 unit silently rolled away with the second guard to the workshop, to be fitted with its own restraining bolt. Ninedenine paused as she watched the little droid roll through the doorway, puzzled that after such a strong first response, it had said nothing more in protest or in insult.

Almost as if it wanted to be assigned to Jabba’s sail barge…

Ninedenine’s central processors accelerated their clock rate to sift through the data again. Her third optic scanner blinked erratically as all possible probability permutations were analyzed.

It was, she at last concluded, almost as if the R2 unit had expected to be assigned to Jabba’s sail barge.

Ninedenine shut all the doors to her dungeon. She needed time to consider this most unexpected development as her self-preservation programming loops began to run through several of her peripheral coprocessors, letting their presence be known. She even filtered out the seductive distractions of the dangling courier droid as she tapped precise commands into her console, rescanning the duty-roster listing for any sign of tampering. As far as she knew, there were at present fifteen separate conspiracies under way with the goal of eliminating Jabba the Hutt as Tatooine’s preeminent ganglord, though none of them was Ninedenine’s concern. In truth, the season’s total for attempts against Jabba’s life was down a bit from previous years, perhaps a distressing sign that the blubbery green slug was slowing down in his old age and just wasn’t inspiring the manic blood feuds of old. In any event, as long as whoever replaced Jabba continued to allow Ninedenine unrestricted dominion over the droids of the palace, as any replacement was sure to do, Ninedenine simply recorded the plots against her employer and did nothing to interfere with them.

This new playground she had come to was the perfect place for her, and she did not wish to jeopardize her position or her work by becoming involved in palace intrigue.

However, her heuristic subroutines had long ago learned that she must constantly be on guard for threats against her own existence. The incident in the mining colony on Bespin had taught her to pay even closer attention to seemingly inconsequential anomalies.

In an organic life-form, the tendency might be called paranoia.

But in Ninedenine, it was simply efficient programming, and she played that program over and over, just to be sure that someone wasn’t after her.

Ninedenine reran the roster list, expanding the data contained in it to see who among Jabba’s court had entered specific staff requests.

Then she correlated those entries against staff vacancies caused by all the usual means—murder, unexplained fatal accident, ceremonial limb deletions, rancor-taunting, incendiary devices, food poisoning, and Jabba’s own whimsical sense of humor and pranks. A separate search function pulled up droid deactivations as well, of which there were many. Not all of them were the re-suit of Ninedenine’s private explorations, either.

Ninedenine reviewed what the search revealed, then tapped a manipulatory extension against the side of her console, deep in data processing.