“Everything is in order,” Jai suggested.
“Wow, imagine my relief,” the attendant said, handing the card back. “Put the droid on the scale next to your bags, please.”
Scout jumped at a touch on her shoulder and found herself facing the well-worn droid she had met on Reasonable Doubt. “Scuffy!” His head tilted back. “I mean, Solis!” Scout said. “Shipping out?”
“In a manner of speaking. Actually, I was wondering if you could do me a small favor,” the droid said. He pointed to the food court on the concourse above them. “I am supposed to meet a friend up there. It’s no more than a five-minute walk, but apparently there was a Trade Federation attack at the Greater Hub spaceport two days ago, and consequently the Phindians are taking security very seriously at the moment.” Scout looked blankly at him. “I would be traveling through the spaceport as an ‘unaccompanied droid,’” he explained.
“Oh!” Scout said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Phindar is notable for, among other things, the SPCB—Sentient Property Crime Bureau—given to the enthusiastic collection and resale of personality-bearing artifacts such as myself. As I would much rather not be seized and resold, I was wondering if you would walk with me to my rendezvous?”
Jai Maruk was busily lifting their indignant R2 onto the weigh scale at the ticket counter, but Scout caught Master Leem’s three eyes. “Go ahead,” the Gran said, smiling. “It will be your good deed for the day. And collect your brother on the way back, if you catch sight of him.”
Solis bowed. “I am greatly obliged.”
They set off at a brisk walk across the crowded concourse, Scout slipping through the throngs of Phindians with the droid at her side. “You’re the same model as the droid who claims to be Whie’s servant, aren’t you?”
“You have good eyes.”
“Did you—Wait a sec. Can droids get offended?”
“Not usually,” Solis said ambiguously.
“Mm.”
“Try me.”
“Well, I was just wondering if you got, um, scrapped by your owner, and that was why you didn’t have the shiny paint and so on. I have a morbid curiousity about this kind of thing,” she hurried on. “I very nearly got sent to—got kicked out of the school I go to,” she finished.
“I didn’t get scrapped. Though I suppose you could say I lost my job.” Solis indicated a flight of stairs, and together they started up. “We were both built as servant droids, Fidelis and I.”
“A gentleman’s personal gentlething,” Scout said, grinning. “Whie told us.”
“Just so. We were initially programmed to perform quite a wide range of…household duties. Makers of sentient property have typically found that if one has an intelligent model, equips it with a wide spectrum of skills and abilities, and sends it off into the world in a role requiring some foresight and initiative—if, in effect, one allows it to live—the property has a disconcerting habit of developing a personality and opinions of its own.”
Scout couldn’t be sure if that comment was supposed to be ironic.
“In our case, therefore, the bedrock of our programming was loyalty—a loyalty to our purchaser that was absolutely hardwired.”
“Only the loyalty didn’t run both ways,” Scout said. “Since I guess your family let you go.”
“In a manner of speaking,” Solis said, reaching the top of the stairs. “They were murdered.”
Scout didn’t know what to say.
“It was a small war. Soldiers had found their way into the house. My family intended to use a secret escape passage. My mistress sent me down to the safe room to get the family jewels. I said I thought I should stay and cover their retreat. My mistress called me a fool and invoked the override. I got the jewels. But the family had been betrayed, and the secret passage was not so secret. The soldiers caught them and shot them before I returned. By the time I got there, everyone was dead. I dropped the jewelry on the bodies and walked away.”
A tall, chitinous alien of indeterminate gender jostled Scout, who realized she had been standing, transfixed, at the top of the stairs. “Stars,” she murmured. “What happened to the soldiers? The ones who caught your family?”
“I don’t remember,” Solis said blandly.
Yeah, right, Scout thought. She gulped, wondering exactly how the rest of that story had gone. They started walking again, toward the food court, and she found herself eyeing the gouges and scuff marks on the droid’s metal body, wondering how many of them represented ordinary wear and tear, and how many more might have come from blasterfire, or needlers, or vibroblades.
“Fidelis still has a family, but other than that you’re pretty much the same?”
“Not at all. My family was killed more than two hundred standard years ago. If you had a twin sister—and you might, you know—how different might her life have already become from yours, in just a decade?”
“Two hundred years?” Scout said, goggling. “How old are you?”
“Younger than your artoo,” he said, with an uncomfortably penetrating glance. Scout felt suitably quelled, and not a little uneasy.
They came to the little circle of tables in the food court area. Whie, who was supposed to be off using the refresher, was instead sitting at a table with Fidelis, head down, listening intently. “Hey!” Scout said. “What are you doing here?”
Whie jerked around with a guilty start. “None of your business,” he said. “Talking. It’s allowed.”
“None of my business? Did I just hear that come out of Saint Whie’s mouth? It surely is my business if I catch you consorting with strangers and lying about it. Or have you forgotten who your real family is?” she said tight-lipped, jerking her head down at the concourse below, where Jai was laboriously counting out credits for their tickets to Vjun.
“From where I sit, it looks like we are consorting to the same degree,” Whie said, getting himself back under control.
A funny sort of control, though: still angry and defensive. As quick as Scout could be to take offense, something about the whole situation was so strange she couldn’t maintain the thread of her anger. “What is up with you today?” she said, genuinely puzzled. “You’ve been weird all day. I didn’t mean to rattle your cage—to tell the truth, I didn’t even know you could get rattled. I was just surprised, that’s all. What’s going on?”
“You’re late,” Fidelis said to Solis.
The unpainted droid shrugged. Late? Scout thought. Late for what?
A small platoon of armed Phindians in blue-and-white uniforms jogged into the food court carrying blaster rifles and grim expressions. The captain, a hard-faced Phindian with a rank badge on his shoulder, was the only one whose rifle was still slung on his back. “Stay perfectly calm,” he announced to the staring diners. “I am Major Quecks, Phindar Spaceport SPCB. We have received a report of an extremely dangerous unlicensed droid onstation,” he said, looking at Fidelis. “Make, model, and serial number, please.”
“Master?” Fidelis said, looking to Whie.
Whie goggled.
“Are you the owner of this droid?” the captain said sharply.
“Yes,” Fidelis said.
“No!” Whie said. “What is going on? Who are you?”
“Sentient Property Crime Bureau, Tactical Squad,” Solis remarked. “Carrying regulation blasters and neural-net erasers.” The attention of the Tactical Squad swung around and fixed on the battered, unpainted droid.
“This one’s with me,” Scout said.
“That remains to be determined. Are either of you carrying any weapons?” Major Quecks asked Whie.
Don’t look at me, Scout thought, knowing he was about to. Don’t look around, just lie.
Whie looked at her. “Scout?”
“You remembered to check your blaster cannon, didn’t you, bro?”
“I love your sense of humor,” Quecks remarked. “Those of us in security love jokes about blaster cannons from juvenile aliens traveling with dang
erous droids. It’s our favorite thing in the world.”
His soldiers gripped their rifles more tightly.
Scout made eye contact with the major and summoned the Force as best she could. “No, we aren’t carrying any weapons. Are we, Whie?”
Whie’s eyes widened, and he followed her lead. “Nosir. We’re just kids,” he explained—and even Scout, who knew perfectly well that she had a lightsaber hidden under her cloak, felt how absurd it was that the major should be bullying two such obviously innocent children. The eight soldiers behind him looked around and lowered their guns.
The Phindian slowly relaxed. His arms were so long that his hands, hanging at his side, nearly brushed his ankles. “Very good, then. Remain seated at this table with the droids, please, until we sound the all-clear.”
In the middle of the major’s last sentence, Fidelis cocked his head to one side, as if listening for something. An instant later Solis did the same thing.
“What?” Scout said urgently. “What’s going on?”
“The thing about spaceport security,” Solis remarked, “is that it’s designed to keep passengers from getting to ship personnel.” Now even Scout could hear distant blasterfire, and smell the lightning-burn of ozone in the air. “As opposed to the other way around,” the droid finished.
In a whirling blur of metal and high-tech ceramic, a platoon of battle droids came spinning down the corridors from the boarding area, blew through the security lines, and unpacked into full combat readiness with a deployed arsenal of blades, blasters, flechette launchers, and weapons Scout didn’t even recognize. The droids themselves were half again as big as a human, built like sharpened exoskeletons, their lean hatchet-faced heads swept back to a scything point. The fluorescent spaceport lights glittered off every lethal surface.
The mixed throng of native Phindians and traveling galactics just passing through the spaceport stood for a long moment, transfixed, staring at all the hardware of death that had opened suddenly on them. A series of tinny beeps broke the eerie silence. “Look at that,” Solis observed dryly. “They’ve set off the metal detectors.”
Then mayhem broke loose.
Twin blades of light appeared as Master Maruk and Master Leem swept out their lightsabers, ready to deflect the battle droids’ blaster bolts. So much for disguise, Jai Maruk thought. “DO NOT PANIC,” he bellowed, drawing the Force into his voice so it lashed out in a tone of absolute command. Right now, the civilians could be as dangerous to themselves as could the battle droids, depending on exactly what this little welcoming party was here for. A Dooku double cross, or just plain bad luck? “KEEP DOWN AND HEAD FOR THE EXITS.”
The terrified throng, held in some semblance of order by the force of his will, bent low and hurried like spider-roaches for the sides of the big main gallery, disappearing into duty-free gift shops, running for the turbolifts, or crushing into the refresher stations, searching for someplace to hide.
Six of the battle droids flanked out, knocking bodies out of their way, to take up crossfire positions on him and Master Leem. “Ohma-D’un super battle droids?” she asked.
Jai Maruk shook his head. “Confederacy assassin droids,” he bellowed, shouting to be heard over the din. He recognized them from Anakin Skywalker’s report on his mission to Jabiim. Anakin’s foes had featured fairly generic armament—usually one handheld blaster and a shoulder-mounted backup. This squad had a much more eclectic array of weapons—aside from their built-in blasters, he could see a couple of flechette launchers, sonic grenades, two flamethrowers, even two fat, hollow tubes that he was pretty sure were tactical tractor beam prototypes.
A custom outfitting job. Pretty much the stuff you might equip your battle droids with if you knew you were hunting Jedi and had heard they were good at deflecting blaster bolts, Jai thought grimly.
Two of the assassin droids held up and triggered what looked like small antenna dishes, no bigger than dinner plates. Sudden thunder burst in Jai’s skull—a keening explosion of sound, agonizingly loud, blew out his eardrums and dropped him to his knees. The noise was stupefying—loud enough to knock over the little R2 unit; so loud the sheer sonic assault hit Jai like an iron bar in the face. Maks Leem dropped her lightsaber. Her mouth was open and she was probably screaming, but Jai couldn’t hear it. He suspected he wasn’t going to be able to hear anything for a very long time.
Focus.
He couldn’t think. His head was coming apart in plates, the bones of his skull rattling like dropped china. Hard-sound guns—he’d read reports about them, but nothing had prepared him.
Something wet on his neck. Blood. Blood was pouring from his earholes.
Focus.
A crackle of energy passed between him and Maks Leem as the tactical tractor beam smacked the R2 unit into the air like a tin can blasted by a slugthrower bullet. Then the beam steadied and slammed hard to the floor, the R2 can clamped tight in an electromagnetic vise.
The droids knew Master Yoda was in there.
They were hunting him down.
Beside Jai, Master Leem held out her hand. Her lips were pulled back over her long, narrow jaw in a grimace of concentration. Her lightsaber flew into her hand. With one swing she cut the head off one of the little metal poles that held the line-divider ribbons. The chunk of metal went spinning into the air. The Gran grabbed it in her other hand, spun, and hurled it through one of the two hard-noise projector dishes. It exploded in a shower of sparks.
Jai couldn’t actually tell if the other one was still making noise. It was as if the auditory section of his brain had blown a fuse—everything happening fast, but soundlessly. Finally the rattling feeling inside his skull subsided, and he managed to find a still point, an almost peaceful center to the maelstrom. A lifetime of training took over, and he was running, leaping, twisting in the air through a slicing hail of flechettes that opened a dozens cuts on his body. Everything crystal clear and soundless, as if it were happening behind transparisteel. Curiously impersonal now: the last battle of his life.
He dropped in front of the droid with the second hard-sound projector, and his lightsaber carved it into smoking ruin.
The terminal was a pandemonium of screams and shouts. The crowd, seeing Jai drop to his knees with blood streaming from his ears, had lost its tenuous sense of order, and people were now scrambling witlessly through the spaceport concourse like mermyns running from a burning nest.
Up on the second level by the food court, Scout tore her eyes away from the madhouse and started thinking again. “Hey, Major!” she yelled at the SPCB commander. “That looks like some pretty dangerous Sentient Property down there. Start shooting!”
The men looked uncertainly at the indecisive Major Quecks. One SPCB trooper raised his blaster rifle and sighted down into the main concourse. A Confederacy assassin droid looked up, and half a second later the SPCB trooper toppled forward with a burn crater where his face had been.
Major Quecks stared at the body. “That’s it,” he said unsteadily. He drew the neural-net eraser from his side holster and covered Solis and Fidelis with a shaking hand. “Take these units into custody and retreat until reinforcements arrive.”
“That sounds like a good idea,” Solis said. “Except for the first part.” There was a brief blur of motion, inconceivably fast, like a repeating blaster striking, and suddenly the major was looking from the broken fingers of his right hand to the neural-net eraser now in Solis’s comfortable grip. “Do you want to live?” the droid asked.
“Y-y-yes!”
“Me, too,” the droid said, and he crushed the weapon into scrap. It wasn’t a slow squeeze, metal buckling and shrieking. It was instant and effortless, as if the eraser had fallen under the gigantic footpads of an AT-PT transport.
The SPCB troops broke and ran.
Another troop of assassin droids came down the walkway from the docking terminals. A few little sirens and blinking lights saluted them as they passed through the spaceport metal detectors in two groups of fo
ur. Between them paced a lithe bald woman with a tattooed skull. She was smiling as she came. It was not a pretty smile.
The eighteen assassin droids—the full complement that Last Call could carry in her outboard crèches—now split into four distinct groups. Four of the newcomers stayed with Asajj. Four others peeled off and headed upstairs to secure the food court area. Five were closely engaged with the two Jedi, where the one Jai had taken down lay in a heap of smoking metal. Two were operating the tactical tractor beam, holding the R2 unit pinned to the floor a safe distance away, while two others approached just close enough to pitch sonic grenades to within centimeters of the droid’s casing. The grenades went off with a churning, concussive vibration that buckled the floor underneath the R2 and made its casing writhe and ripple.
There was something anticlimactic about the business, Ventress felt. Part of her would far rather have taken on the old Jedi: Asajj Ventress and Master Yoda, lightsaber-to-lightsaber, winner take all. But Dooku, though an elegant man with a profound sense of the aesthetic, never confused flair with efficiency, and never accepted style in lieu of substance. Killing Yoda was the thing, and if it was messy and brutal and somehow perfunctory, it remained far better than giving him any chance to stay alive.
Still, it didn’t make the next part especially pleasant. Asajj was not squeamish by anyone’s standards, but she was not looking forward to seeing what a pair of high-decibel sonic grenades would have done to an old body trapped in such a metal shell—if indeed the little cripple had survived the opening blast of hard sound and subsequent tractor beam smack-around. But it had to be done. Flanked by her guard, Asajj approached the R2 unit, drew her twin lightsabers, and carved the metal canister opened with a flourish, so it fell slowly into pieces, like a flower shedding petals in the breeze.
It was a fine, dramatic moment, completely spoiled by the fact that the canister was empty.
Asajj blinked. There, where the bottom of the R2 unit should have been, was a neat circular hole. Yoda had carved an escape hatch through the floor and dropped into the dim ship’s parking level below.