Tales From Jabbas Palace (Kevin Anderson) (31 page)

“O Great God Quay, what are you trying to tell us?”

The Weequay president rapped the oracle ball with an astonishing lack of piety. “‘W.’ Wookiee? Is that it?

The Wookiee is the assassin?”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” said the secretary.

“W—” said the quay.

“Weequay?” asked the president. “It cannot be! A Weequay, guilty of murder?”

A third Weequay listened to the exchange. “What is wrong here?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” said the president. “The Great God Quay is having some trouble communicating.”

“Whiphid?” asked the secretary.

“Without a doubt,” said the plastic ball at last.

“Ah,” said the president. “The mystery is solved.

The Whiphid planted the bomb on board.”

The five Weequays nodded, satisfied at last to know the truth.

They stood in Jabba’s privacy lounge, shifting their force pikes from one hand to the other. The president held the now-silent quay.

“Of course,” said the secretary slowly, “there is a bomb. And we will also be on board when it detonates. W e still must search for it.”

“Search for it!” cried one of the others.

“Yes,” said the president. “You four search the barge. I will consult the Great God Quay.”

Four of the Weequays began a frantic hunt for the hidden explosive. They threw open cabinets, upset furniture, damaged the bulkheads looking for secret panels and compartments. Meanwhile, the president sat at a table with the prophecy sphere and said, “Is the bomb under the purple cushion?”

“Very doubtful.”

“Is the bomb under the gold cushion?”

“Don’t count on it.”

“Is the bomb hidden in the pile of silks?” The president realized that he wasn’t making very good progress, but he didn’t know what else to do.

He was a good, honest, forthright Weequay, but he had Weequay limitations, after all.

An hour later, the Hutt’s guests and servants began to arrive, to prepare the sail barge for the day’s excursion.

Some of them gave the Weequays suspicious glances, but as the Weequays served as security guards on the barge, they were allowed to continue their search unhindered.

“Try to blend in,” the president whispered to his fellows. They were still tearing the barge apart from stern to bow, but now they tried to seem casual and unworried. The truth was that as the minutes passed, it became ever more likely that the bomb would go off and blow them all into constituent atoms. Even the Weequays understood that.

The order was given to cast off, and there had not yet been any evidence of the hidden threat. The party guests were enjoying themselves, eating the Hutt’s food and drinking the Hutt’s liquor, and generally making the search even more difficult. The Weequay president found himself staring into the malevolent three eyes of Ree-Yees, the Gran. The president turned back to the quay and asked, “Is the bomb in the control cockpit?”

Maddeningly, the white ball said, “Reply hazy. Try again.”

The Weequay wanted to throw the device against the wall in frustration, but it would have attracted unwanted attention, and the Great God Quay would probably have exacted some horrible punishment as well. The president watched a gold-colored protocol droid in conversation with an R2 model that was serving drinks.

“Mr. President,” a low voice murmured.

The Weequay turned. His four fellows stood nearby.

One held something covered with a square of green satin.

“The… item?” whispered the president.

The other four Weequays nodded. The president lifted a corner of the satin material and saw a thermal detonator. “We must disarm it.

Secretly. Silently.”

The band tootled its horrible music. The guests milled about, unaware of the danger in their midst.

Meanwhile, the five Weequays formed a tight huddle and worked feverishly to dismantle the detonator. The Proper tools were available on the sail barge, of course, but the problem was that two of the Weequays disagreed on the disarming technique.

“Pull that circuit patch now,” said the secretary.

“You’ll kill us all,” said the president. “Break the green and yellow connections. Then pull the circuit patch.”

“There is no green connection,” insisted the secretary.

“There’s a yellow one and a gray one.”

“The problem is with your eyes,” said the president.

“Hurry!” said one of the others.

“It is my responsibility,” said the president. He took the detonator and the tools. He broke first the green connector, then the yellow connector, and then yanked out the circuit patch.

The Weequays said nothing. They hadn’t realized that none of them had even breathed for nearly a minute.

“You could have blown us to bits,” the secretary accused. “You should have consulted the Great God Quay before you acted.”

“I forgot,” said the president.

“Yet the bomb is dead!” said one of the others.

“We are victorious!” said another.

A loud, clear voice came from beyond the bulkhead.

“Jabba, this is your last chance! Free us or die!”

The Hutt responded with something in its own language.

“What is happening?” asked a Weequay.

The president turned around quickly. Panic and confusion were taking over the sail barge. A human slave girl was strangling the great Jabba with her own chains. There was the sound of shots being fired from outside. One of the Weequays opened a shutter to peer out, and was grabbed and pulled from the vessel, thrown down to the desert floor below.

Clutching his force pike, the president led the remaining Weequays toward what was now clearly a battle.

He jabbed upward with the pike, leading the others on deck. The president arrived to see the black-clad human prisoner using a lightsaber to clear the deck of Weequay guards and other defenders.

“Get the gun!” the human cried to the slave girl. “Point it at the deck!”

“For the Great God Quay,” murmured the president softly. Then he advanced. At least they had disarmed the bomb, so the sail barge would be safe.

Before he could attack, the human with the lightsaber put an arm around the slave girl, clutched a heavy rope, and kicked the firing mechanism of the deck gun. Then he and the girl swung from the sail barge to a small repulsor skiff hovering over the dreadful Great Pit of Carkoon, where the Sarlacc dwelt.

The president watched them escape. Around him the sail barge was burning and bursting into ruins, but unfortunately Weequays do not have enough imagination to fear death, either. The president calmly clung to a railing as another tremendous explosion ripped the sail barge to pieces.

The last thing he saw was the glorious sight of the white ball of the quay hurled into the air—the Great God Quay ascending to heaven.

A Bad Feeling: The Tale of EV-9D9

by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens

Like some great beast lurching toward destruction, Cloud City shuddered, tilted, and began to fall.

Lando Calrissian heard the rising wail of the Ugnaughts and the others of his domain who looked to him for safety and stability, and his heart fell with his dying city. His blaster twisted from his hand as he leaped for a pillar, as if a good grip might save him from that final descent through Bespin’s clouds. The weapon skittered along the wildly angled decking, hit the rimguard, then bounced over its curving lip and vanished into the rush of Tibanna-laden clouds that swirled by.

Alarms shrieked. The city pitched again, metal groaning. Calrissian felt his grip weaken. The clouds reached out for him with sinuous, fluttering tendrils. He closed his eyes in the force of the driving wind. And he fell, too.

Lobot caught him.

Calrissian felt sudden, welcome pain as enhanced fingers dug into his shoulder beneath his cloak, holding him in place as securely as if he had been welded to the deck. He turned to see Lobot’s cranial attachments flickering as they probed all the communications channels now in use. The city lurched again, but this time the angle of its fall decreased. The cloud streamers slowed as the howl of the wind diminished.

“Backups online, sir!” The reedy voice was Sarl Random’s—the cheeks of her ghost-white face splotched by red patches of fear, her ill-fitting uniform bunched up and twisted from the struggle she had.just been through, stained with hydraulic fluid, reeking of scorched circuitry.

She stumbled over to Calrissian under Lobot’s watchful eyes. She held a security display pad in her trembling hands. “She must have planted charges by the main repulsorlift generators.”

Even now, Calrissian still couldn’t believe the nature of the intellect they faced. It.was bad enough that the prisoner had circumvented all the failsafes of the Security Tower, but the generators that kept this facility aloft were supposed to be inviolable. Too many lives depended upon them. “She wanted to destroy the entire city?”

Lobot angled his head at Random. She read the data he generated on her pad. “Not all the generators were targeted, sir.” Her voice could not hide her puzzlement.

“A diversion?”

Calrissian tugged his cloak more tightly around his shoulders. A diversion he could understand. Misdirection.

Like noisily knocking over a pile of betting chits to disguise the skillful pass that brought a winning gambling tab to the top of the deck.

“Where’s she headed?” Calrissian asked. The decking beneath him was almost at a normal angle now, thrumming at the edge of perception with the regular hum of the generators and the constant shifting of the control surfaces that kept the floating city in trim.

But Sarl Random had no answer for him. She had only been acting security chief for a single shift—ever since she had brought him the evidence that revealed what his real security chief actually was. In another mining colony, she might have been tossed over the rimguard herself. But she was too inexperienced to know how dangerous it could be to expose corruption in a facility so small it was a law unto itself.

And she had taken her discovery to Baron-Administrator Calrissian himself—in spite of all the stories told of him on a dozen worlds—a man to whom the word “honor” still had meaning.

A communications panel chimed and Lobot punched the code that released its speaker wand. He automatically handed it to Calrissian.

“This is the administrator. Go ahead.”

A droid reported. “Traffic control, sir. One of the transport shuttles has launched without clearance from the east platform.”

Calrissian permitted himself a smile of relief. The prisoner had finally made a mistake. “She can’t get far in that.” It was an orbital transfer vehicle only, strictly intrasystem. “Scramble all the Twin Pods. I want her brought back at once—still functioning—or know the reason why.”

“You should blow her out of the sky,” the droid responded. Then quickly added, “Sir.”

Calrissian and Random exchanged a look of surprise.

Droids didn’t talk that way.

“Who is this?” Calrissian demanded.

“Wuntoo Forcee Forwun. Sir. Traffic controller, second class.”

Calrissian had been ready to reprimand the presumptuous droid, but hesitated as he recognized the prefix code. Three other Wuntoo units, all from the same manufacturing lot, had been found in the recycling bay, bound for the furnace. At least, parts of them had been found there, showing disturbing evidence that they had been taken apart while they were still switched on. What had happened to the rest of them was something only the former security chief knew, so Calrissian had some understanding of what the droid must be feeling—if a droid could be said to feel. Cloud City’s baron-administrator had encountered enough droids with such convincing emotional analogues that he often had cause to question the common wisdom. And the processors used in the Wuntoo units, which made them capable of tracking the complexities of this facility’s air and space traffic, certainly were elaborate enough to allow unexpected behaviors to emerge.

“Listen to me, Forwun—this is no time for revenge.

Issue my orders directly to the patrol or stand down from duty.

Do you understand?”

There was a long pause, the hiss of static on an open channel.

Then the droid said, “Orders issued, sir.”

Lobot nodded at Calrissian. He was monitoring the security channels.

“Patrols launched,” Random confirmed, reading from her display pad.

Calrissian slipped the speaker wand back into the wall panel.

“This won’t take long,” he said to Random.

“That transport will be dragged back here before—” He didn’t finish because the air was viciously rent by a bone-jarring crack of thunder.

Calrissian, Lobot, and Random turned sharply to stare past the rimguard, into the clouds.

The Iopene Princess emerged from the billows of Tibanna, its dull gray finish bloodied by the ruby light of the setting primary.

“No,” Calrissian whispered. It wasn’t possible.

The Iopene Princess was a Mining Guild cutter, with bulbous, state-of-the-art hyperdrive units, asymmetrical, bristling with scanners and probes, designed for hard vacuum, not for atmosphere. And it wasn’t scheduled to leave until tomorrow, after Calrissian had made his annual payment to keep the Guild from organizing his workers.

“She hijacked the Guild cutter…?”

Lobot’s attachments flickered crazily, then he looked away, unable to meet Calrissian’s eyes. That was exactly what had happened.

Stealing the transport shuttle had been another diversion.

Now the security patrols were too far gone to ever double back in time to stop the Iopene Princess from leaving the atmosphere and making the jump to hyperspace. No wonder the prisoner hadn’t tried to destroy the entire city. She needed time to make her escape. But not very much time.

Somehow, in the tenth-of-a-shift cycle that had transpired since the first alert had come from the Security Tower, the prisoner had managed to override clearances on two flight platforms, remotely pilot a shuttle to draw away the security patrol, and take over the most heavily secured vessel in the city. What kind of a mind were they dealing with?

Then he remembered: the kind of mind that had destroyed a quarter of Cloud City’s droid population without falling under the slightest suspicion, until a junior security officer had just happened across the evidence—by accident.