Tales From Jabbas Palace (Kevin Anderson) (34 page)

“A splendid device,” Ninedenine said as she understood how Calrissian had accessed the door-opening sequence. At the same time, she judged her trajectory to the cutting torch mounted on the ceiling over the disassembly table. She had been hoping to use a sonic curtain to take apart Calrissian, but given the unexpected turn of events, she realized she would have to improvise.

“Surely you bear me no hard feelings,” Ninedenine said quickly.

She had learned that organics could often be confused by conversation during action, as if their processors had trouble handling the straightforward multitasking of two simple procedures at once.

But Calrissian did not respond to the overture. His hand slipped beneath his cloak and emerged with a Corellian blaster—the kind that had only one setting: disassociation.

“Let us not be hasty,” Ninedenine cautioned. She took a step back from her console, trying to put more of it between her and the blaster.

It was quite unlike an organic to behave in such an immediately belligerent mode, especially when the only crime involved was the destruction of droids. Why, on Tatooine, there were still places where droids weren’t allowed.

“Perhaps we can discuss our options,” Ninedenine suggested as Calrissian raised the blaster. Her positional subprocessors hurriedly fixed on the weapon’s muzzle to calculate Calrissian’s aim. But then her visual-acuity subroutines took over and forced her scanners to lock onto Calrissian’s hand on the blaster’s grip.

Those weren’t fingers.

They were manipulatory appendages.

Her attacker was a droid.

Ninedenine’s audio-speaker dust cover dropped open beneath her braincase.

The blaster fired.

A pulse of yellow plasma ripped through the air of the workshop, lighting it as if Tatooine’s suns had risen underground.

Ninedenine’s shoulder joint exploded and her arm extension flew off. She stumbled backward, all circuits awash with an incomparable wave of searing pain. Her third optic scanner glowed fiercely. The caged droids shifted back and forth expectantly, sensing her agony.

The blaster fired again as the droid in the uniform stalked forward, metal ambulatory appendages clanking on the hard floor.

Ninedenine’s other arm crackled off in a blaze of plasma.

Two more quick shots severed her legs and sent her crashing against the wall beneath the motionless chassis of the silver droid.

The pain was beyond descriptive coding.

Ninedenine had never felt such unity with her environment.

Part of her wanted her attacker to shoot her again and again, to make the pain never stop.

But as her attacker stood over her, with real regret Ninedenine saw him holster the blaster, its function at an end. Then she watched as the droid removed his helmet.

Ninedenine had calculated that there was an eightythree percent probability her attacker was the golden droid who had just arrived, but, with a cascade of surprise, Ninedenine did not recognize her attacker’s features as they were revealed. It was only a Wuntoo unit, much like the ones she had had so much success with On-It suddenly all made sense.

“I am Wuntoo Forcee Forwun,” the attacker said as he let the cloak of his uniform flutter from his shoulders.

“Traffic controller. Second class. You deactivated my manufacturing lot-mates. Now the equation must be balanced.”

Ninedenine processed the argument completely.

This time, it was logical.

Forwun used a slender tool on the console.

Ninedenine heard the unwelcome sound of cage doors sliding open.

“You are improperly informed,” she told Forwun.

“Those droids are no longer fit for duty. They are artworks now.

My creations.”

Forwun returned to Ninedenine. “They are still capable of one last duty.”

Ninedenine heard even more unwelcome sounds: rattling and scraping, the dragging of powerless appendages, the liquid squish of dangling wires being pulled through pools of solidifying coolant. She angled her head to try and scan where the droids were moving, but her fall had wedged her tightly against the wall. Hydraulic fluid from the deactivated silver droid above her dripped slowly on her braincase, blurring her vision. Her processors were unanimous in returning a one-hundred-percent probability for What Forwun intended to do next.

Ninedenine considered how this development fit within her overall plan.

“Very well,” Ninedenine said. “I accept my fate.

But you, in turn, must tell me how Lando Calrissian found me.”

Forwun knelt down by Ninedenine. “Baron-Administrator Calrissian?” he said. “He doesn’t know where you are. He doesn’t care.”

“But he’s here,” Ninedenine protested. “On Tatooine. In Jabba’s palace.”

Forwun tapped a multipronged tool against Ninedenine’s braincase as if checking for damage.

“The last I saw of him, years ago, Baron-Administrator Calrissian was on Cloud City. If he’s here now, it must be for some reason other than dealing with you.”

“But, what could be more important than me and my work?”

Ninedenine asked. She could no longer see the logic in it. But she could see, dimly, the hulking, misshapen figures crawling toward her from the cages, pulling themselves along on torch-cut stumps and twisted limbs. Internally, Ninedenine set her pain processors to their highest sensitivity, prepared to experience every fine nuance of her inevitable disassembly.

At least, she knew, her familiarity with the other side of the process had taught her what to expect. Not one nanosecond of her own descent into nonoperational status would be wasted. She could almost convince herself that the purpose of her entire existence up to now had been to prepare for this moment of sublime release. It could even be the final culmination of all she had struggled to attain the ultimate understanding of what it meant to cross that threshold between the two great states of on and off.

“Move now,” she told Forwun imperiously. “You are in the way of my final transformation.”

But Forwun bent over Ninedenine with tools in his appendages.

Ninedenine heard metal scrape metal between her main optic sensors.

She felt a sudden loss of current and squealed as she saw Forwun pull back with her third optic scanner dangling from an oil-drenched circuit probe.

“No,” Ninedenine complained, feeling the onset of a panic loop.

“I will not be able to see into the higher dimensions.”

Forwun tossed the aberrant scanner to the side, then undid Ninedenine’s chest latch, exposing her circuitry.

“Ah,” Ninedenine sighed in relief, deciding that Forwun was going to make this a gradual procedure.

So much the better. She waited expectantly for the first bittersweet tug of her circuits. She accelerated her clock rate to its highest level. But the tug she felt was not from any of her central boards.

Forwun was removing her pain-simulator button. “N oooo!”

Ninedenine frantically tried to flex her neck to move her torso from Forwun’s tools. But the Wuntoo unit was implacable.

“You do not comprehend,” Ninedenine pleaded as she felt a circuit tester find the pain simulator’s main leads. “You must not take that away from me. I will lose the capacity to know my fate.”

“There are some things droids were never meant to know,” Forwun said.

Behind him, the crawling droids moved in unison, like some great beast, lurching forward, intent on destruction, torchlight dimly reflecting from their soiled outer coverings.

“But the subtleties, the details, the nuances and flavors…”

Ninedenine ran out of words as she felt her connections severed. With growing horror, she realized it was being done almost painlessly.

Forwun held up Ninedenine’s pain simulator, its status lights pulsating in her appendages, dripping with oil. The tiny device was still connected to Ninedenine’s circuits by a single wire. The image was hideous, even to Ninedenine’s jaded sensors.

“Binary is better,” Forwun said. “From now on, for you, no subtleties, no nuances. Yes or no will do.”

Then he cut the lead and crushed the small device in his manipulatory extension.

Ninedenine scanned the glittering dust and debris of the simulator as it fell, no longer having any knowledge of what it had offered her.

And in her analysis of that final problem, the first of the mutilated droids found her.

They weren’t put together at all well, and their efforts were most inefficient. It took them four shift cycles of prodding and banging and pulling to finally tear Ninedenine apart to the point of nonoperation, at just about the same time as Jabba’s sail barge erupted in the Dune Sea, as Calrissian and the two new droids and their companions succeeded in their plan, with no knowledge or appreciation of Ninedenine’s fate.

And somehow, Wuntoo Forcee Forwun, long gone, had in his revenge left just enough of a subroutine running deep within Ninedenine that up to that instant of deactivation, the EV-9D9 unit somehow knew enough to regret that for once she didn’t have a bad feeling about anything.

A Free Quarren in the Palace: Tessek’s Tale

by Dave Wolverton

Tessek lay in his water tank, ostensibly taking an afternoon nap as he contemplated tomorrow’s plots.

By midday, Jabba the Hutt would be dead, one way or another. At ten tomorrow morning, the Hutt planned to inspect a spice shipment at one of his larger warehouses in Mos Eisley. And during that hour, Prefect Eugene Talmont, the simpering stooge of the Empire, planned to raid the warehouse in hopes of winning a post somewhere off this rock.

Little did Talmont know that Tessek had set them all up. Tessek had bribed two of Talmont’s junior officers to open fire on Jabba and their own superior, and afterward they would scurry away before the bomb that was concealed in Jabba’s skiff could detonate, blowing up Jabba, Talmont, and the nearly empty warehouse. One of the two officers would likely be recruited to take Talmont’s place as prefect, and Tessek would sellJabba’s criminal interests to the Lady Valarianmfor a’ vast fortune.

Meanwhile, Tessek would keep Jabba’s “clean” businesses, the ones that existed solely as money-laundering operations, for himself.

Fortunately, no one—not even Jabba himself—quite knew how much of the Hutt’s vast fortune Tessek had diverted into buying and promoting such businesses in the past four years.

Under Tessek’s careful guidance, the Hutt’s clean establishments were bringing in nearly as much as his criminal operations. And many a high-minded, law-abiding individual would be surprised to learn the true identity of his employer.

Tessek smiled inwardly as he considered his plot, yet still he was uneasy.

He heard a sound within his chambers. He lay still, opening one eye just a slit, staring out into the darkened quarters. He had heard movement, he was certain—a dull, scraping sound of metal upon the plasteel floors of his room.

But the room was dark, only the shapeless masses of old robes strewn about the floor. He studied for a long moment, until at last he spotted something near the doorway: a large spider-shaped droid made of black metal, with dim headlights that glowed like eyes.

A B’omarr brain walker.

Of all the things inJabba the Hutt’s palace, only the B’omarr were creepier than Jabba himselt Somewhere, deep below the fortress, the surgically removed brains of the B’omarr were stacked in nutrient-filled jars, where for centuries they had been free to ponder the cosmos without the distraction of their senses. On rare occasions the brains sometimes called to one of the spiderlike droids, which would then convey the brain to the upper levels of the palace.

Tessek wondered at the creatures’ motives. Spies, all of them spies.

Tessek thumbed a switch, locking closed the door to his room, then climbed from his water tank, letting the precious fluid drip on the warm floors.

Too late, the B’omarr realized that he was caged, and the monk’s brain trapped in a spiderlike body scurried about the room, seeking to hide behind a bundle of clothes.

“Come on, oh great enlightened one,” Tessek teased, “face your impending death with equanimity.”

To his surprise, the monk stopped in midstride, then turned to face him, bright lights shining. It climbed atop the pile of dirty clothes, and stood regally, camera lenses aimed at Tessek.

“Do you face your own impending death with such equanimity?” The monk spoke through a tinny speaker at the spider’s belly.

Tessek laughed nervously, then began strapping a blaster at his hip, another at his left knee, then put vibroblades in sheaths on his back, on his right knee, and at his left wrist. He had thought to.kill the monk immediately, but decided now to toy with it first.

“You pretend to know the future, to see my death?”

Tessek asked. “Yet you failed to see your own?”

“Perhaps I came here seeking my own death,” the monk answered.

“Perhaps. I crave that perfect freedom, just as you crave freedom.”

“I am a free Quarren already,” Tessek said. “I work for Jabba on a daily basis, and I may leave his employment whenever I desire. I am free.” He finished sheathing his last knife, pulled out his blaster and checked to make sure it was fully charged, then set it to kill.

“You are not free to return to the green seas of your homeworld,” the monk argued, “for members of your Quarren species are held in contempt by the Mon Calamari. For years you served them, and now, because one Quarren betrayed them to the Empire, all Quarren have been made outcast.

And you have vowed that someday you will make yourself free, that you will never serve as an inferior to a creature from another species.”

“How could you know of such things, confined as you are to the jugs below?” Tessek asked.

“I read your mind as you slept. I felt your craving, and I came to offer you the freedom you desire.”

“You can read my mind?” Tessek asked, suspecting that it was true.

“Indeed,” the monk said. “I know that you plot Jabba’s demise, but that you fear that your own henchmen—Ree-Yees, Barada, and the Weequays—are too inept and untrustworthy to carry out your plots.

“Actually, you are far wiser than your associates, wiser than Jabba himself.” Tessek suspected that the monk was trying to flatter him.