“No time for that, either!” The guard shoved Scout toward line three. “And take the artoo with you.”
A couple more security guards stepped forward. Behind them, the crowd began to mutter darkly about the delay. The four Jedi exchanged glances, and split apart.
“May I ask why I am being subjected to this extra search,” Jai Maruk said icily.
“Random search, sir, completely random, completely for your protection,” said the guard on station number seven, a briskly competent middle-aged woman. “Plus you look like a Druckenwellian.”
“That’s because I was born on Druckenwell,” Jai grated.
“But Coruscant papers, I see. Neat trick,” the guard said.
“I’ve lived here all my life—”
“Except for the part where you were born there? In case you didn’t know, sir, Druckenwell is an avowed member of the Trade Federation, with which—perhaps this escaped your notice as well—we are currently at war. Oh ho!” she said, laying a hand on the hilt of his lightsaber. Instantly Maruk’s hand was covering hers, a dangerous light in his eye.
The guard met his glance. “Are you interfering with a security guard in the line of duty, sir?”
“I am a member of the Jedi Order,” Jai said quietly. “That is the handle of my lightsaber. I prefer others not touch it.”
“Should have packed it in your luggage then, shouldn’t you?” she said perkily.
“And if pirates were to attack the liner, I’m supposed to run to the cargo bay and find my weapon somewhere between my shirts and socks?” Maruk hissed.
The guard smiled at him indulgently. “Look, sir—you and I both know the Jedi Order has its very own starships. If you were really a Jedi Knight, you wouldn’t be flying out of Chance Palp, would you?”
“But—”
“You can always explain it to my manager. Rumor has it the wait is less than two hours!”
The guard at security point three was a dull-eyed young man with a lip full of Chugger’s Chaw. “Walk directly beneath the scanner beam with your hands at your sides,” he mumbled.
“Sure,” Scout said. She gave the R2 a little nudge and they went at the same time, Scout passing underneath the scanner while the R2 lurched uneasily around the outside.
No lights, no sirens. Whew, Scout thought. Glancing over at security point seven, she saw Jai getting a lecture from the security staff. He looked like he was going to pop a vein right there on the concourse. Scout congratulated herself once more on stashing her lightsaber in her luggage.
Her guard paused to eject a long string of brilliant green spit into an empty stimcaf cup. “Sorry, ma’am. The droid has to pass through the scanner, too.”
“The droid? He can’t,” Scout blurted.
The guard blinked. “Regulations, ma’am. The Trade Federation is spreading madware through our droids. We start letting them skip the cleaners, one day you’ll wake up in your very own home and find it’s been conquered by the smartvac and the laundry droid.”
“Are you serious?”
“They use microwaves,” the guard said, jetting another stream of spit gravely into his cup. “The artoo’s got to go through. Come on, little fella,” he said, making a chucking sound in his throat, as if calling a faithful hound.
The R2 gave a weird, croaking wheep and shook its head.
“He can’t go through,” Scout said desperately. “He’s afraid of scanners.”
“Afraid of scanners?”
“It’s his eyes. Video sensors, I mean. Very delicate, specialized,” she babbled. Next to her, Whie had breezed through line two. She gave him a beseeching look. “This little fellow actually belongs to my grandfather,” she said, giving the R2 another hollow-sounding slap on the carapace and then wishing she hadn’t. “He’s a Seeing Eye droid. That’s why his sensors are so, so…”
The guard’s mouth was hanging open, and a little line of spit was dangling from his lower lip. “Seeing Eye droid, my butt,” he said. His eyes narrowed. “Let me see those papers again, and get that tin can back behind the red line so he can go through the scanners proper!”
Whie picked up his carry-on and stepped over to rejoin Scout. “You don’t need to scan the artoo again,” he said casually.
The guard blinked.
“It went through with the girl,” Whie said. “They both checked out fine.”
Splotch. The trickle of green spit soaked slowly into the guard’s uniform shirt. He looked down at it and swore. “Git on,” he said, waving his hand irritably. “I don’t need to scan the artoo again.”
Scout looked from Whie to the guard. “So…we checked out all right?”
“You checked out fine. Now, git! Can’t you see I’m busy over here?”
“Yessir. Thank you, sir.” Scout walked quickly away from the guard station. Whie followed behind, checking the heft of the lightsaber on his hip and grinning at her.
“That was impressive,” Scout whispered. “Must be nice, to just make people do what you want.”
“It comes in useful every now and…” For some reason, looking at her, he trailed off, and the smile left his face.
“What’s up?” Scout said. And then, “Hey—aren’t we missing someone?”
In a crowded spaceport concourse, a standard R2 unit is easy to overlook. First, there is the issue of size. At just over one meter in height, an R2 is quickly obscured in a dense crowd of humans, Chagrians, Gran, and assorted other humanoids. Then, aside from a lack of physical height, there is the issue of a droid’s comparative lack of psychological size. To a sentient organic, another sentient organic is an object of great interest: will this new person be my friend or enemy, help me or harass me, thwart me or save me a place in the stimcaf line? Droids, on the other hand, occupy a spot in the consciousness of the average sentient being roughly analogous to, say, complicated and ingenious household appliances. A programmable food prep, for instance, or a smart bed. To a humanoid, a droid—unless it’s a battle droid approaching with laser cannons on autofire—just doesn’t matter very much.
To a droid, on the other hand, another droid is exactly life-sized.
Which might explain how it came to be that one little R2 unit, still in its original drab factory colors, could go lurching and wheeping through the dense crowds thronging Chancellor Palpatine’s Delta Concourse almost completely unnoticed, despite the fact that it kept banging into shins, walls, and water fountains as if, instead of sensors and a fine computer brain, it was being navigated from the inside by a hot, grumpy, and increasingly exasperated person with only four tiny eyeholes to look out of.
It might also explain why, in the midst of so much obliviousness, this same droid was being pursued, quite relentlessly, by a second R2, this one painted in the smart crimson color of the Republic, with the fine insignia of security painted on its carapace…
“Ma’am?” The guard on security point eleven was a perspiring middle-aged man with a double chin. His hair was grizzled black and white, cut to a military buzz under the sweat-stained edge of his uniform cap. “Ma’am, I’ll have to ask you to step to one side with me here.”
Master Leem’s jaw began to work. “But, why, Officer? Have I done—”
“Just step over here with me, please.”
With all three brows furrowing, Maks Leem followed the guard a few steps behind the scanner equipment. He stood with his back to the crowd. “Don’t look around, don’t look around. Just act natural. Make it look as if I’m going over your ID chip.”
Master Leem looked at him blankly.
“ID,” he said.
She handed it over.
He made a show of inserting it into his datapad. “Ma’am, sensors indicate that you are carrying a high-energy focused particle weapon on your person.”
“I can explain that—”
“Most of the guys here wouldn’t recognize that sensor signature,” the guard went on, voice still low. “Not me. I know what it is. I know what you are. There’s a group of u
s, we trade information, you know, but I never thought I’d actually see…”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Master Leem said.
“Don’t look around. Don’t look. Just act natural. I recognize the scanner sig,” he said huskily. “You’re Jedi, aren’t you? I mean, the real thing?”
Maks Leem chewed twice. Three times. “Yes. I am.”
“I knew it.” The guard’s voice was thick with emotion. “You’re undercover, aren’t you? People say the Jedi are only out for themselves now. They say they’re just the Chancellor’s secret police. I never bought that for a second. That’s not the Jedi way.”
“It most certainly isn’t,” Maks Leem said, genuinely shocked that anyone should think of the Order as the Chancellor’s private band of thugs.
“On a mission,” the guard said. “Don’t look, don’t look. Act natural. Just tell me what you need. I can help. Happy to help. Risk no object,” he said hoarsely.
“Truly, you are a friend of the Order,” Maks said.
“Tell me about it. You know how many times I’ve seen Jedi!—? Fifteen. Fifteen times. And I’m going with my nephew next week. Give me a mission. Just act natural and give me a mission,” he said. “Risk no object. Anything to help.”
“You’ve already done it,” Master Leem said gently. The guard blinked. “Did you think it was an accident that you were working security today?” she said. “Did you think I came to your line by chance?”
He looked at her, awestruck. “By the Force!” he whispered.
“We know who our friends are, Mister…Charpp,” she said, reading his name off his security badge. She tapped the handle of the lightsaber hidden under her cloak. “But remember, nobody must know. As far as everyone else is concerned, I’m just a humble traveler on her way out to Malastare to visit family. All you need to do now is act natural.”
“Act natural.” He nodded dutifully, making his chins wobble. “Of course, of course. But…” Here his voice grew very slightly wistful. “Is there anything else?”
“You could give me back my ID chip.”
“Oh. Right.” He shoved it back into her hands, the chip now liberally smirched with sweaty fingerprints.
“When the time comes, we will contact you,” Master Leem promised. “In the meanwhile: may the Force be with you!”
Leaving him standing there with tears brimming in his eyes, Master Leem hurried over to the two Padawans. “I’m glad to see you made it through. But where’s Jai?” she said. She frowned. “And where’s you know who?”
Evan Chan hated to fly. Oh, not in the atmosphere. Tooling around the atmosphere in a lightflier was fine. Also, boats were good. As an environmental hydrographer—or “water boy” as his class of professionals were known in the environmental impact biz—he spent lots of time zipping across planetary surfaces and sampling their oceans, rivers, and lakes. It was getting to other planets in the first place that was the problem.
The whole idea of the jump to hyperspace—the atom-juggling, light-smearing, molecule-twisting jump—made Evan queasy. Not just nauseous and sick to the stomach—though it did that, too—but spiritually uncomfortable. And yet there was no way to carry out his work as a government-certified pan-planetary water evaluator without jumping. Traveling to any planet outside the Coruscant system by sublight would take literally lifetimes.
Which is why he was in the men’s refresher of the Delta Concourse at Chance Palp, sipping discreetly from his precious hip flask of liquid courage—SomnaSkol Red, in the 0.1-liter travel size.
He studied himself in the mirror over the sink. To tell the truth, he didn’t look great. Faced with the prospect of a longer-than-usual hyperspace jaunt, he hadn’t slept much over the last three days. His eyes were hollow and bleary, a two-day stubble shadowed his face like an unpleasant mold, and his knees were feeling distinctly jellylike. He put his head in his hands and leaned forward over the hard white glare of the sink.
A droid came into the refresher, banging off one wall with the sound of a tin can hitting a ferrocrete sidewalk, and scooted into one of the privacy stalls.
Evan blinked. He was trying to remember if he’d ever seen a droid in a refresher before. Perhaps a custodial droid, but this had been an R2 unit, with no security insignia on it.
“Odd,” Evan said out loud. Or at least, that’s what he meant to say. As it turned out, the SomnaSkol had left his lips numb, and the word trailed out like the drool one got on oneself at the dentist when one’s mouth was frozen.
Another R2 raced into the refresher. This one was wearing Chance Palp colors, black and tan, with a security logo. Its small metal head swiveled aggressively, pointing its cam around the white-tiled room.
The cam froze, trained on the stall where the first droid had gone. The door was open just a crack.
The cam aperture narrowed appraisingly.
Evan Chan shut his eyes very hard, and then opened them. The second droid was still there.
He took another shot of the SomnaSkol.
The security droid now wheeled stealthily—there was no other word for it—toward the suspicious stall. It was one of the big multipurpose stalls, with a toilet, urinal, trough, collection rods, and a telescoping drain with suction action. With infinite care the little security droid reached out with one metal claw, clamped soundlessly on the handle, and tugged the door swiftly to the halfway-open position.
Lights flashed, and the little droid rocked back and forth, wheeping and borping in consternation. Evan squinted, staring at the scene reflected in the mirror. The security droid’s cam swept the floor of the stall. It was empty.
After a moment’s hesitation, it rolled inside: and as it did, Evan’s eye was caught by a flicker of motion in the mirror. The first droid was floating soundlessly over the top of the stall door.
Chirps and burbles of dismay. Most from the security droid, but some very definitely from Evan. He watched the first droid come floating noiselessly down behind the stall door. Now the two droids’ positions were reversed, with the security droid poking around the stall in a bewildered fashion, and the fugitive droid in the main part of the refresher, hidden behind the stall door.
The fugitive droid stuck out its little arms. The bolt on the stall door shot home with a crack like a blaster rifle pulse, and then squeaked in the most uncanny way, as if the transparisteel rod was being tied into knots.
The security droid went berserk, whooping and beeping and banging on the stall door. Colored lights flashed over the white tiles. For its part, the fugitive droid made an even more horrible sound: a strange, hollow cackle, horribly unsynthetic—the sound of a Kowakian monkey-lizard laughing inside a barrel, perhaps.
Then Evil R2, as Evan had come to think of it, spun and rolled clumsily from the room.
Evan stared at the shaking stall door. He listened to the frantic wails of the trapped security droid. And then, with trembling hands, he took out his flask of SomnaSkol Red and emptied every drop into the sink, swearing he would never touch the stuff again.
6
Ventress took the Jedi courier group just after they dropped into Ithorian local space. Last Call was rigged with the best tech Geonosis could supply, including a “gemcutter” prototype built from plans the good folks at Carbanti United Electronics didn’t even know had been stolen yet. The gemcutter had been built to counteract the cloaking effect of ships moving in hyperspace, so they couldn’t suddenly materialize in the middle of one’s fleet like a sand panther dropping from a tree onto the helpless herbivores below. Carbanti’s prototype acted like a seismograph, picking up the fault lines a ship tore in the space–time continuum as it prepared to drop out of hyperspace. The warning was usually less than five seconds, but those seconds could mean the difference between life and death.
And of course if one put the gemcutter on a ship as fast and lethal as Last Call, flown by a pilot faster and more lethal still, one could entirely reverse the equation, so that, to continue the metaphor, the would-be panther fo
und itself dropping onto a sharpened stake.
Beyond the last planet of the Ithorian system, space–time thinned; buckled; tore. Like a bead of dew condensing on a cold window, the first Republic fighter dropped through the rip and exited hyperspace. Asajj recognized it as an HKD Tavya-class armored picket, with an extra proton torpedo battery mounted on its undercarriage. Ignoring her tactical computer and Last Call’s HUD sighting reticle, she reached out with the Force, tenderly, entwining the picket like a lover in her embrace. She could see the pilot’s eyes go wide with shock; feel the wild rush of adrenaline go screaming through his blood as his sirens went off. She could taste the sudden clammy sweat around his mouth. “Last call, lover,” she whispered. “It’s closing time.”
Laser cannons glittered in the silent vastness of space, and the picket ship drifted into splinters, like a Dantooine dandelion head gone to seed and blown apart. It was always strange how quiet death was in space, with no air to carry the thunder of explosions or the screams of the doomed. Even in the Force, one puny life lost made little difference, and the pilot’s end came meekly, not with a roar in the mind’s ear, but a flickering absence, like a candle going out.
Yoda’s wingmates knew their business well enough. Two more pickets had crystallized in realspace. Instantly they understood they were under attack, and opened up with their forward cannons. They shot past Asajj on each flank, screaming insystem.
She tipped Last Call up and sent it tumbling, twisting between the deadly blinks of hardened light from the left Tavya’s laser cannon. The one on the right belched out two tracers—targeted proton torpedoes, moving nearly twice her current velocity.
Instantly Asajj juked and turned, forcing the torpedoes to bleed off speed in maneuvers. The harder she was to target, the more closely they would have to match her speed. She could sense their mindless little targeting computers, tirelessly reformulating interception angles with her every jerk and twist, and she laughed out loud, corkscrewing insystem after the first ship.