Alinka hopped off the sofa and grabbed a little book from a table as she walked over to Mayv.
“Look, Mayv, we found that book you were interested in.”
“Yes! That’s it!” said Mayv excitedly, letting go of the tooka to reach for the book. In a flash, the tooka was scrambling back up Chewbacca again, this time perching on the Wookiee’s shoulders and turning to hiss at its keeper.
“Perhaps I’d better hold on to the book for now,” said Alinka, “for safekeeping…until you get back.”
“I’m sure that’s not necessary, Your Highness.”
“I’m sure it is.”
The dark looks that passed between the two young women would have tipped off Han and Chewie that something was wrong. But Han and Chewie were busy having their own argument.
“MWGGRRRRR GRRRRNGH!”
“What do you mean you don’t like the job?” whispered Han. “It’s twenty thousand credits. You’ll be back in no time, and we’ll be spending this money for years!”
“MWGGGRRR MYURRRR!”
“Nobody says you have to like the cats!”
“MWGGGRRRRR RRRROKSHHH!”
“Nobody says you have to like the keeper.”
“MWGGHHHRRRR WHUUUG!”
“Keep it down! We keep things nice and friendly and we may get more jobs like this. That’s why I’m staying…to keep things nice and friendly.” “RILLLGGG!”
“Yes, I know I said strictly business. This will be, you know…nice, friendly business.”
“WLURF!”
“Would you relax? If anything happens, I’ll come get you in the Falcon. But what could go wrong? It’s just a pet-sitting job.”
Well, we’ve already established that it wasn’t really a pet-sitting job and that the tooka cats were all part of the trick.
But they were also part of the problem. A noisy problem.
Bumps, bangs, and screeches were coming from the cargo hold.
“MRRUFF,” complained Chewie. Mayv went to investigate.
“The cargo has escaped from the cargo hold,” reported K-2SB, a tall grumpy cargo droid. “Requesting permission to use deadly force.”
“What?” yelled Mayv. “Deadly force on the tookas? No way! Don’t use any force!”
“But I want to,” replied the droid. After being stuck in cramped crates, a herd of tooka cats was now stampeding around and around the cargo hold, bouncing off the walls, the crates, the equipment, each other, and mostly, the droid. Every attempt the droid made to grab one of the creatures just seemed to make the whole pack angrier.
“Look, uh, what is your name again?” asked Mayv.
“I am class nine Imperial cargo droid Kay-Tuessbee,” he replied. “To save you, the user, time, I have been programmed to respond to the call sign Kay-Tu.”
“Okay, great, so, Kay-Tu, could you just—”
THWONK!
So many tookas had been jumping on the droid from so many different directions that he toppled to the floor and lay there wriggling his arms and legs helplessly. The whole pack immediately piled on as if this was the greatest toy they’d ever had a chance to paw, claw, scratch, and gnaw.
“Repeating request to use deadly f—”
“YYYUURRRRRRUUUNGHH!”
Chewie was standing in the hatchway roaring. A rough translation would be: “What the Hutt is going on in here and who do I have to whomp to make it stop?”
Everyone, even the tookas, froze.
There was a moment of near silence. The only sounds were a sensor beeping in the cockpit and the scuffle of Mayv’s boots as she backed away from the enraged Wookiee. Trust me, you would have backed away, too.
Then a mighty purring began and the tooka cats dashed toward Chewie with big toothy grins. It was like a laser blast of furry, clumsy love, and it almost knocked the mighty Wookiee over.
Chewie’d had enough trouble with just the one cat earlier. Now the whole pack was trying to scramble up to his head at the same time, and they didn’t hesitate to use their claws to do so. The golden one with the bejeweled collar had gotten to the top of Chewie’s head and was hissing and snarling to protect its spot. Chewie could only look pleadingly at Mayv and groan piteously.
“I’d be laughing right now,” said Mayv, “but I read in a book once that Wookiees don’t always see the humor in certain situations.”
“GWRRRHHRR!” This meant that she was right.
“Thank you for your assistance,” said the cargo droid, springing back to his feet and zipping through a hatchway. “The problem with the cargo has been resolved.”
Can you handle a big secret? I feel like I have to tell you now, because if I wait until later to tell you, you’ll be mad that I didn’t tell you sooner.
The cargo droid wasn’t a cargo droid.
K-2SB was really…K-2SO.
Yes, that K-2SO: the Imperial droid that rebel spy Cassian Andor stole and reprogrammed. He wasn’t a cargo droid at all but a deadly KX-model security droid. Extremely dangerous!
And not only was K-2SO a rebel spy, he was on a mission right then!
His mission was to help Cassian stop the work of Sim Aloo. The rebels believed Sim Aloo and his daughter had been collecting Sith artifacts from across the galaxy to help the Emperor, who liked to employ Sith as inquisitors and enforcers.
So Cassian sent K-2SO to Coruscant to work undercover as an Imperial security droid. That’s why he was using the code name K-2SB.
You might not think that changing just one letter would make a very good code name, but the truth was that the Empire was so big and had so many droids it worked just fine.
When Cassian heard that the Aloos were up to something, he ordered K-2 to report for duty on the ship as a cargo droid. He guessed, rightly, that people like the Aloos didn’t pay attention to droids as long as they did what they were told.
For K-2, the hard part about pretending to be a cargo droid was remembering to act stupid. Sometimes he forgot to act stupid, then remembered and forced himself to do something extra stupid to make up for it. Like letting a bunch of tookas knock him over.
He didn’t like acting stupid and even suffered the droid equivalent of embarrassment, but Cassian had programmed him to do anything for the Rebellion.
Anything.
For now, he simply extended an antenna and tuned in to the listening device he had planted in the cockpit earlier so he could listen in on what Chewie and Mayv were about to say.
Mayv solved Chewie’s tooka problem by opening several thermocans of tooka food.
The tookas were street cats that one of Alinka’s servants had rounded up as props for tricking Han and Chewie. They had never eaten proper food in their lives.
Once the smell of roasted pik-pok fish reached them, they acted like excited pets in a holovid commercial. As they swarmed around the food, Chewie and Mayv snuck back through the hatchway into the cockpit and closed the door. But one tooka, the golden one, slipped through to join them.
“Whew,” said Mayv. “I am really, really glad that dealing with those cats isn’t actually the mission.”
“MRUGGHHH?”
“Are you asking what the mission actually is?”
“RUNF!”
“I’ve been wondering that, too. Alinka wouldn’t tell me ahead of time. She said to call in once we were on our way. So…”
Mayv pulled a vidscroll from her tool belt. Chewie raised an eyebrow at the obsolete technology.
“It’s old,” explained Mayv, “but this one’s never let me down. I’ve got a lot of stuff stored on here….”
She spread the vidscroll’s two handgrips apart and a screen lit up between them. Tapping controls, she flipped through a few files and found the number she was looking for. With a whir, the vidscroll rerolled itself, and with a clack, she returned it to the magnetic gripslot on her belt.
Mayv tapped the number into the ship’s holovid, and after a short delay, a small and staticky green hologram of Alinka Aloo appeared in the cockpit.
“La
dy Aloo? Mayv here. We’re on our way and ready to hear what you want us to do.”
An even more staticky voice came back from the planet they had just left.
“Wonderful!” answered Alinka. “You’ve got the Wookiee there with you?”
“HARRRRGRGHHHH!”
“I’ll have to ask you not to yell,” came the reply. “It might startle one of my bodyguards. I have about twenty of them in the room now…and they’re all pointing their blasters at your little friend. Isn’t that so, Captain Solo?”
“You were right about this one, pal,” came Han’s voice.
“MYURRRR!”
“I know! I know! But listen…she says she’ll still pay for the job. She’s got the creds sitting right here on the table.”
“Of course I will!” said Alinka. “The money means nothing to me…but neither does your friend’s life. If you bring back what I want, you get both. Fail and you get nothing but a blaster bolt. The same goes for you, girl.”
“Okay, Your Highness,” said Mayv. “We understand. Tell us what you want.”
“The cargo droid has a chip with all the information we have about the planet Ushruu. It doesn’t have people anymore. I think they all got eaten or something. It’s mostly trees now, which is why we hired a Wookiee.
“Before the people got eaten,” continued Alinka, as if people getting eaten was only a minor annoyance, “some of them built a temple for their weird local religion. And my father learned that they left behind a book in this temple. Well, I say ‘book’ but we have no idea what it looks like. Could be a holocron, a droid’s memory bank, or a data cylinder…but it was a primitive planet, so more likely it’s something made out of a dead tree, like a book or a scroll.”
“Wait,” said Mayv, “you’re sending us to look for something and you don’t even know what it is exactly?”
“Correct. That’s why we’ve got you, Mayv. You’re a librarian, right?”
“Uh…bounty hunter slash librarian…”
“Right, whatever, so the chip has the coordinates for some kind of temple that a mining team found. Pretty sure that’s where you’re going to find it. Like I said, we don’t know exactly what it is or how big it is, so we sent that cargo droid with you to carry it.”
“I don’t get it,” said Mayv. “Why not send in a whole team of mercenaries to get what you want?”
“That was tried. They ran into…difficulties.”
“What kind of difficulties? I mean, I think it would help us if we knew—”
“They were eaten,” said Alinka with a dismissive wave of her hand.
“Oh, great…”
“GRRRRRUNPH!”
“Alinka, I’ve looked around the shuttle and haven’t seen any weapons,” said Mayv. “Where are they?”
“Well, I couldn’t really give you weapons, could I? You might have done something silly, like try to use them on me.”
“So you sent us out here with no weapons even though something ate the last people you sent?” exclaimed Mayv.
“I didn’t say this would be an easy job! I wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble to send a Wookiee if it was going to be easy!”
“HRRRUMP!”
“Look, Chewie, don’t get yourself killed for this,” said Han, pushing his way into the hologram. “I can get myself out of—”
One of the bodyguards whacked Han on the head with the stock of his blaster, and Han slumped to the floor and out of the hologram.
“No,” said Alinka, “he can’t get himself out of here. Only you and the girl can do that! Understand?”
“MRRRUUGGHHHH!” yelled Chewie.
“Good. Good-bye.”
You might expect Chewbacca to be furious, to go back to ripping the controls out of the wall—or at least to do a lot of bellowing, possibly at Mayv.
If your best friend were kidnapped and you had to go steal something from a dangerous planet to free him, you’d be freaking out. At least I would.
But Chewie and Han were pretty used to getting double-crossed. It was part of the job. I mean, how many nice, honest people hire smugglers? It does happen sometimes, but smugglers are much more likely to get hired by not-nice, not-honest crime lords.
Han in particular seemed to walk into traps more than most smugglers. What made Han a great smuggler was that he was so good at getting out of those traps.
Sometimes, Chewbacca had learned, it was better just to get it all out in the open early, rather than spend half the job worrying about when the double cross was going to happen.
Rather than a RAWWWWRRRR, Chewie turned to Mayv and gave a questioning grunt.
“GRMFF?”
“I guess you’re wondering why I told you I was a bounty hunter but Alinka said I was a librarian.”
“YURF…”
“Well, I’m not really either, I guess, but I’m also kind of both. Do you want to hear my story? It looks like we’ve got time.”
Chewie swiveled the pilot’s seat around to face her. He stretched out his legs to get comfortable, and the golden tooka cat immediately pounced onto his lap. One tooka, he decided, wasn’t as bad as a whole pack, and he soon found himself scratching it between its fuzzy ear cones as they both listened to Mayv’s story. (K-2SO listened, too, of course.)
You know, if you’re in a hurry to get to the action, you can skip this.
Mayv’s story is a big deal to her, but it’s nothing new. You’ve heard it all before. Just another kid beaten down by the Empire, trying to survive and resist at the same time.
So if you want to skip ahead, all you need to know is that the Empire took everything from Mayv and she wanted one thing back more than anything—even more than her parents—she wanted that book Alinka had.
Of course, if you want to know why she wanted it so bad, then don’t skip this part.
“I was born during the Dennig-Far,” began Mayv. “That means ‘false hope.’ That’s what my people, the Oktarians, call the time after the clone troopers left but before the stormtroopers arrived.
“Oktaro was a battleground during the Clone Wars. Imperial history books say it was just a skirmish, but I grew up in the rubble, and believe me, it was more than a skirmish to us.
“Separatist droid armies stomped through our cities, blasting and bombing. They seemed to have no purpose. Just to destroy things. Everything they could.”
“MRRURM MRRURMM…” Chewbacca muttered sympathetically. Her story sounded a lot like what had happened to his home planet, Kashyyyk.
“We had an army of our own, of course,” said Mayv, “but they were beaten quickly. There seemed to be an endless supply of those robots, but not of us. Even when we stopped fighting back, the droids just kept marching and destroying.
“And then the Republic clone troopers came and destroyed the droid armies. They were heroes!
“And then they were gone. Off to fight the next ‘skirmish.’ That’s when the Dennig-Far began. The time when hope drove all of my people to rebuild our world. Well, not all of them. Many were too angry to hope. They left Oktaro and never came back.
“But those that stayed succeeded. They did rebuild…not just towns and cities, but the ways and wisdom of the Oktarians as set down in our ancient and sacred book, the Mola Oktaro.
“My parents were part of this. Before the war, they had been librarians, but their library was bombed. During the Dennig-Far, they devoted their whole lives to rebuilding the central library in the capital city, New Tobura.
“By the time I was old enough to understand all this, it was easy to hope. There was no war, just hard work. I gladly joined my parents in sorting through debris and trash piles to find documents, books, music, artwork…anything that could be restored and preserved.
“These were carefully catalogued and stored in a new library so that all the Oktarians could share our history and culture, especially our most treasured book, the Mola Oktaro.
“And then, just three years ago, the stormtroopers came.”
“MWA
RRRRGHH!” Chewie knew how the story would end, and he did not like it.
“Yes…troopers returned to Oktaro, but now they were with the Empire. We were told by Imperial diplomats that the troopers were there to protect us. And they looked a lot like the clone troopers who had protected us once before.
“So there were no battles. No war. They were welcomed. Some Oktarians even wanted to join the stormtroopers, but that wasn’t allowed.
“So the time of false hope continued…but not for long. Our leaders were no longer in charge. Decisions were made by the Empire on a faraway planet—Coruscant—and those decisions all seemed to benefit the Empire but not us.
“They wouldn’t even call our planet by its name! To them Oktar was just Geethree-four-seven-seven!”
“GRUMMMMK,” growled Chewie, who remembered his own anger at hearing Imperials call his home planet a number as if Kashyyyk was just another item in their inventory.
“We Oktarians were forced to stop rebuilding our cities and start building Imperial bases and mining operations. My people were driven from the coastal areas where they had always lived into the deserts where the Empire wanted to dig. Thousands died pointlessly just because the Empire didn’t know or care how toxic the sand in Oktarian deserts is.
“When we tried to protest, we discovered that our right to protest was gone.”
“WUHHHHHHRRRRYYYOR!” moaned Chewbacca, who remembered when the same fate had befallen the Wookiees of Kashyyyk.
“So we tried to fight. There were battles, but we lost them all almost as soon as we started. There were stormtroopers and Imperial war machines everywhere.
“Unlike the Separatist droids, the stormtroopers did not just destroy whatever was closest. They had a strategy. They took things over instead.
“Our holonet stations began to broadcast only Imperial news.
“One day I went to school and found the teachers had been replaced with holovids showing only what the Empire wanted us to learn, which wasn’t much.
“And the museums and libraries were closed. Everywhere that our history was preserved was shut down, starting with the central library my parents had devoted so many years to restoring. The only way to get any information was on our vidscrolls.