Tales From Jabbas Palace (Kevin Anderson) (33 page)

Quite clearly, Jabba had a habit of disintegrating his protocol droids.

Some time ago, Jabba’s protocol droid had been involved in a scheme with a pair of petty thieves, which had resulted in the burning ofJabba’s Mos Eisley town house. That droid had been punished.

Severely.

Then, just last season, its replacement had suffered a similar fate.

From the watch report, it appeared the droid had mistranslated a Partold envoys compliment about Jabba being a constant giver of immense charity, confusing the ritual Partold greeting with a Huttese medical term having to do with excessive flatulence. When the last snicker had died away in the audience chamber, the mystified Partold envoy had found himself face to fang with the ever-obliging rancor beast. The next day, when the Partold tithes were not paid by a justifiably upset delegation, the mistranslation was revealed and the protocol droid was disintegrated circuit by circuit over the course of the next ten shifts, all the time protesting indignantly that it had been reprogrammed by a palace guard.

Ninedenine didn’t quite know what to make of the droid’s reprogramming story. Jabba had discounted it.

And Ninedenine had heard many strange things herself while she had disassembled still-functioning droids-though mostly they had been stories of a light and a tunnel, which she attributed to the standard, random cross-connection of failing circuits. Why would a palace guard reprogram a protocol droid to make it mistranslate compliments?

Ninedenine could see no logic in it.

She next called up the case of the bartender droid required on Jabba’s sail barge—the position to which the R2 unit had just been assigned with a noticeable lack of protest.

Again the data Ninedenine accumulated were unusual.

She recalled the previous bartender had been a barely sentient C5 unit, one wheel, five arms, and a single optic scanner on a stalk. It had had trouble keeping its balance and mixing a clarified bantha-blood fizz at the same time. But Salacious Crumb had enjoyed riding it during festivities, so Jabba had kept it around despite its shortcomings.

Then another watch report of considerably more interest flashed up from the console. Not five cycles ago, that same bartending C5 unit had been found in a little-used corridor in the west wing with its power circuits yanked out, beyond repair. It appeared someone had purposely terminated the bartender droid, but what could a C5 unit have done to merit such a fate? It was in no way clever enough to have made enemies of its own.

Ninedenine tapped command after command into the console, activating worm programs long dormant in Jabba’s main household system.

Her logic filters detected anomalies here and she would not reduce her clock rate until she had isolated and understood them.

More watch reports flashed by on the console, followed by surveillance records; accounts owed, paid, and stolen; personnel assignments; nonvoluntary organ transplants-Ninedenine suddenly paused, then rekeyed her previous request and backed up to the personnel records again. A palace guard had been fined five credits for being late to report for duty in the same service cycle in which the C5 unit had been terminated.

Ninedenine’s processors moved into a hyperacceler-ated phase, examining each datum on a bit-by-bit basis.

Datum: Two terminated droids whose Work duties exactly matched the two new prisoners brought in today.

Datum: A palace guard circumstantially connected to both terminations.

Inference: Coincidences were rarely computable.

Conclusion: But conspiracies were.

Ninedenine swiftly accessed the name of the guard who had been late for duty. Tamtel Skreej. He had been with the palace force for less than a season. His background ID had been found to be forged, though according to his duty file that was taken to be a good sign by his commander.

Ninedenine didn’t like the way the data were sorting themselves. She called up Skreej’s identity file. A humanoid organic face began to form on the console display: a dark outer covering, a narrow ridge of fur above his ingestion/communication orifice, a-Ninedenine’s internal processors missed a refresh cycle.

She recognized the organic’s face.

Baron-Administrator Lando Calrissian of Cloud City.

Ninedenine gripped the side of the command console as her gyros momentarily precessed and threw her off balance.

Those two new droids were in no way part of some unknown conspiracy against Jabba the Hutt.

They could only be part of Calrissian’s plot to recapture EV-9D9.

The logic of it was unassailable. There was no other possible reason why Calrissian and those two droids would come to Tatooine and Jabba’s palace.

Ninedenine shut down her paranoia loops. She didn’t need them anymore.

Someone was out to get her.

It was time to move on again.

The GNK unit squealed a final time as it at last ceased functioning, but this time Ninedenine found no solace in its transmission. In fact, she knew the only thing that would give her solace now was removing the active circuits of the R2 unit, subprocessor by subprocessor, while the golden droid was forced to watch and upload his companion’s pain. And then, who knew? Perhaps the time had come to expand her artistic endeavors to disassembling an organic construction.

Like Lando Calrissian.

Ninedenine got up from her console and walked past the smoking form of the motionless GNK unit.

There was so much to do, and so few processing cycles to do it in.

Four levels down, through corridors twisted like the guts of the Sarlacc, greenly phosphorescent with drell slime, swirling with mist, and littered with the calcified, interior-support structures of organics long since deactivated, Ninedenine sought out the sanctuary of her real workshop.

There was another workshop, of course. Her public one. As much as anything in Jabba’s palace could be public. Up there, just off the main chamber, were long assembly tables and parts bins and archaic testing devices which not even a Jawa would bother to scavenge.

In that workshop, the golden droid and the R2 unit would even now be having their restraining bolts installed.

Though knowing Calrissian, Ninedenine assumed that the droids had already been covertly reconfigured so the bolts would have no effect.

It could be done. Ninedenine had reconfigured herself in the same way.

But down here, whatever modifications those two droids might have would amount to nothing. For once droids entered this workshop, they never left. From time to time, Ninedenine thought it was unfortunate that no one else would ever appreciate what some of those droids would become down here, but what artistic achievement didn’t require sacrifice?

The entrance to the true workshop was hidden within an ancient stone wall that had once supported a palace far older than the one Jabba had made his own. How many such structures had once stood on this site, not even Ninedenine’s impressive processors had been able to compute. There was a narrow gap between two blocks of stone not native to Tatooine, where the crumbling mortar that contained traces of organic oxygen transport fluid had fallen free.

Ninedenine now looked into that gap and made all three of her optic scanners blink with the appropriate code.

The wall trembled. Stone counterbalances shifted.

The hidden doorway opened with a slow and echoing rumble.

Like an artist entering her studio, Ninedenine stepped into her inner sanctum.

Actual combustible torches sputtered along the drell-dripping walls of the great room, blackening the vaulted stone ceiling but ensuring that no household manager would ever detect an unauthorized use of palace power. To one side, the cages waited, and from within them came the rustlings and clankings of droids who had had their audio speakers cut out, rendering them mute, so their cries would not attract unwanted attention.

Ninedenine scanned the closest set of cages. In one, the torso of an LV3 had been cunningly severed and refitted with the manipulatory limbs of three discontinued B4Qs. The LV3’s processors could not keep up with the sensory positional demands of the extra limbs and so it constantly fell against the walls and iron bars of its cage, gears grinding out of control. From time to time, Ninedenine would activate the freakish construction’s pain-simulator button so she could appreciate the ceaseless output of disturbance and disorientation. It was like an anthem to Ninedenine, and its stirring chords brought forth associative files of her most grandiose plans for retooling whole work forces of droids, reconnecting limb after limb in a pattern of thousands to create vast undulating sheets of twisting, writhing, purposeless mechanistic movement, augmented by pain-simulator buttons wired into feedback loops which would play their sensations not only for Ninedenine, but back into the droids who made up the fully active symphony of pain, intensifying the signals to inexpressible powers of delight.

Ninedenine had to brace herself against a disassembly table as the strength of that memory file overcame her. There were so many great works to which she aspired. But not here. Not now.

First, she must obscure her trail. The workshop must be cleansed, so that after she had dealt with the two new droids and Calrissian, no others would pursue her to her next venue. Ninedenine paused again, reviewing the steps she had undertaken to cover her tracks at Bespin.

She was truly Surprised that Cloud City’s administrator had managed to trace her to Tatooine. For an organic, it was an impressive feat.

Not that it Would help Calrissian escape his fate.

Ninedenine went to the self-contained console that controlled the equipment of her workshop, drawing its power from a small fusion battery. She would overwrite all the memory locations in the console, then program the battery to overload in two cycles, preventing any investigation of the work that had been accomplished here. But before that, she would have to eliminate the specific work in progress.

Ninedenine turned to the wall by the console where a tarnished silver droid was suspended upside down, a series of precise punctures in its cooling system allowing fluid to trickle out drop by drop, slowly raising its operational temperature over transcendently long cycles. The silver droid flexed weakly in its bonds and a flurry of sparkling blue coolant drops dribbled from its braincase. Hanging in such a position, its higher functions would be the last to become inactivated, and only then after rgistering the overheated shutdown of every other system in its chassis. Its pain-simulator button had been working at more than one hundred and ten percent of its rated capacity for the past two cycles, and Ninedenine was truly sorry to see this experiment end before its ultimate completion.

“It is unfortunate that I must accelerate the timetable of our exploration,” Ninedenine said as she reached out to trail the tip of a manipulatory extension through the slick coating of the leaking fluid.

“But there are those who do not appreciate my work.” The silver droid’s eyelights flickered weakly at Ninedenine. Ninedenine felt a real pang of sorrow as for the final time she tasted its pain transmission.

Then she wrapped her manipulators around the silver droid’s neck and squeezed until the hydraulic tubes burst and the power conduits sparked with gouts of cross-connected energy. The silver droid went limp in its bonds and, as Ninedenine watched, its eyelights slowly faded out.

“Ahh, exquisite,” Ninedenine whispered in the silence of her workshop, still caught in the moment of shutdown she had sensed–the very threshold between operational status and the ultimate deactivation.

The other droids held captive in the workshop felt it too, no doubt as a feedback burst in their own hy-persensitized pain-simulator buttons.

Ninedenine heard them rattle in their cages, unoiled joints squeaking, - temporary power connections sparking, the aromatics of freshly spilled hydraulic fluid suddenly filling the close air. Though none could speak, their metal bodies created a cacophony of strained brittle sounds, the lamentations of the obsolescent.

“I know,” Ninedenine told them sadly. “It will all end too soon.”

Her own internal receptors soared in glorious patterns as she felt each captive droid’s response at once, multitextured, overlapping, like a choir from the higher logical dimensions of which, despite all her hard work, Ninedenine had still only been able to gain a frustratingly brief glimpse.

It was going to be difficult to leave this all behind, she knew.

But somewhere else, she would start again.

Over the years she had learned an important truth from the organics—pain was eternal. No other thought had such strength to sustain her in her work.

Her third optic scanner glowed with the power of that knowledge.

Then suddenly the caged droids stopped as one.

For several refresh cycles, Ninedenine was at a loss to understand why.

But at last she processed what her acoustical sensors were registering.

Stone counterbalances shifting. A familiar, echoing rumble.

Someone else was entering her inner sanctum.

All the caged droids turned as one to scan the opening wall.

Ninedenine stood by her console, frozen for an instant by programming conflicts. She had been so certain that no one could ever find her here that she had prepared no behavioral options to branch to in advance.

She switched her optic scanners to high sensitivity and low contrast as the figure in the hidden opening became a black silhouette against the green glow of the corridor beyond. Eddies of mist swirled around its feet.

Humanoid, Ninedenine registered. She adjusted the gain on her scanners.

The humanoid stepped in, a cloak flowing behind it, a distinctive helmet with a faceplate of calcium tusks protecting its face.

Ninedenine recognized the coverings. A uniform.

For a palace guard.

Her logic circuits blazed with the only possible conclusion: Calrissian.

“So, Baron-Administrator, we meet again.”

Calrissian threw down a small device which held three blinking optic scanners in the same configuration as Ninedenine’s own. It clattered on the stone floor.