Last Shot_Star Wars

by Daniel José Older

  Lando frowned, casting Han an uneasy glance. This wasn’t part of the plan, clearly. Dirgeos placed his foot back on the screws and began spreading them around the ground again.

  “Release!” he yelled, taking his leg away after what felt like way too short an amount of time.

  Lando pulled his eyes from Han and concentrated on his fist.

  “Release, I said!” Dirgeos whispered.

  “I…” Lando stammered. Then he opened his fingers. The fichas fell with a clutter, this time all landing nearly on top of one another in the center. The Neuronaught rolled off the other two and turned over twice, landing right in front of Lando amid one or two screw bolts.

  Han blinked at it, grinding his teeth.

  “Kriff,” Lando muttered.

  “Aheh. Ahehehe. Ahh…the droids will be pleased with this development, mm.”

  “Development?” Lando scowled. “The house said best of three. As far as I can see this just makes us even.”

  Dirgeos conceded the point with a frowning nod and began shuffling the screw bolts again beneath his foot.

  “I don’t like this,” Han whispered.

  Lando grimaced. “At least we finally got on the same page about something.”

  “You do know what you’re doing, right, Lando?”

  Lando cocked his head, eyebrows raised.

  “Great,” Han muttered. “Great.”

  “Enough chatter!” Dirgeos hollered excitedly. “Release!”

  Lando’s whole face became a clenched fist as he maneuvered onto his haunches and leaned all the way over the board. With a clink and clatter of metal, the fichas fell.

  Han turned his wide eyes to the mess of screw bolts and bone fragments. The Octopent lay right in front of Lando once again, this time all by itself.

  Han sat back, suppressed a victory yelp.

  Dirgeos’s left eye twitched as he scanned the board, then looked sharply up at Lando. “Bah!” He scattered the fichas and screw bolts with a sloppy thrust of his foot. “Thought we would get at least a set of arms for the Masters.”

  “I believe you have some information to give us,” Lando said with a grin.

  “HAVE I EVER TOLD YOU,” Han panted, lying on his back on the floor of the Falcon’s main cabin, “that you look beautiful when you show up at the last minute and save my life?”

  “No,” Sana said. “And I hope you never do. That’s a creepy line.”

  Han sat up. “Why is it creepy?”

  Chewie, also out of breath and leaning against the far wall, growled something about getting a room.

  “No one asked you, furball,” Han snapped.

  “Anyway,” Sana said, moving right along, “nice work, fellas. You’ve really earned your cut.” She flashed a winning smile, the device cradled under her arm.

  “What is that thing anyway?” Han asked.

  Sana shrugged, holding it up for closer inspection. “I dunno.” She tossed it to Han, who fumbled it a few times but managed to keep from dropping it. “Don’t care really. It’s get-us-all-out-of-debt money, is what it is. That’s all I know.”

  Chewie hollered his approval.

  Han scrunched up his face at it. The thing was heavier than it should’ve been for its size. Old, charred metal locked into overlapping layers on each side of it, like someone had peeled away parts of a battle-scarred tank and welded them into a clunky box. “Doesn’t look like much.”

  “Yeah, well,” Sana started, then the Falcon rumbled around them. “Ah, that would be my friends attaching to our air lock, I’d say.”

  Han stood up. “Your friends?”

  Sana mumbled something.

  Chewie groaned.

  “It’s funny,” Han said without smiling, “because I’m pretty sure you just said something about the Droid Gotra but I’m absolutely positive there is no way you’d be dumb enough to get mixed up with them, so…”

  “They offered the biggest bounty for it, so I accepted. What’s a girl to do?”

  “These guys.” Han shook his head.

  “Relax, flyboy,” Sana said, peering in the mirror. “These guys care more about this device than any debt you may owe them, believe me. It’s got some creepy mythic significance to them, and—”

  The air lock spun open and a heavily armed team of bounty hunters spilled out, blasters drawn. “This again?” Han grumbled.

  “Greetings,” a slippery, grotesque voice said from the air lock. Gorben Frak’s thick, glistening fingers grasped the wall on either side of the airlock, followed by his widely grinning, tusk-encircled face. Several thick globs of something gooey dangled from the mane of tentacles squirming around his neck and shoulders.

  “You’re dripping all over the upholstery,” Han pointed out.

  “I belieeeeeve,” Gorben drawled, “you have something that belongs to me.”

  “I believe you owe me an incredibly large sum of money before it becomes yours,” Sana said.

  Gorben chuckled in a sloppy, congested baritone. “Who has guns on who?” he finally said.

  “Good question.” Sana drew her blaster. Chewie did the same. Han surreptitiously slid the device between his back and the wall and drew his blaster.

  “There,” Sana snapped. “Everybody has guns on everybody. And we made a deal. No money, no weird little device.”

  Gorben shook his huge head. “You have much to learn, young Starros. Much to learn.”

  “You’re not pulling that much-to-learn crap with me, Gorben. I grew up on Nar Shaddaa. This is not how any of this works.”

  “You won’t kill me,” Gorben assured her. “And these beings, they are expendable, and they know it. It’s their job to be expendable. Give me the device.”

  “We stashed it somewhere already,” Sana said. “You’ll never find it if we’re dead.”

  Gorben laughed, but then the Falcon rumbled again; a ship had landed on top of it. “You invited another group to this handoff?” he demanded.

  “Handoff?” Sana scoffed. “I think you mispronounced armed robbery.”

  “Who is here?” Gorben roared. “Batik, MuNu, go see.”

  A disgruntled Ithorian and a Zabrak in a ridiculous metal hat grunted and headed for the far end of the Falcon. They’d reached the tubular corridor when blasterfire hurled out, shredding through them both. Masked, mech-suited goons from the Parapa Cartel poured onto the Falcon’s deck, bayoneted blaster rifles drawn and smoking. They spread out in attack formation and then Mozeen, now in his full-body mech suit, too, clomped out and stood in the center of the room. “Zis ezztand ahff ends a here!” he declared. The helmet slid open just enough for Mozeen’s tiny head to poke out, wink at Sana, and then disappear again.

  “Mozeen!” Gorben chuckled airily. “Always so dramatic, my friend! You didn’t have to fry two of my men, though! Come now!”

  “Zee artifact ees mine,” Mozeen said flatly.

  “Okay, everyone calm down,” Han said, still squeezing the device against the wall. “You guys are gonna mess up all of my nice interior decorating if this keeps up.”

  “Eet belongs to me. We esstaked out ze diner and these escoundarels and the Parapa Cartel have reeahched an undahrstandingah, yez?”

  “Mozeen,” Sana said.

  “Drop your weapons, puny fools,” Gorben snarled. “This has gone on long enough. The device belongs to the Droid Gotra, and I have claimed it on their behalf. That is the end of the story.” He nodded at one of his beings, who let off a single shot into the nearest Parapa goon.

  “Oh, here we go,” Han muttered, ducking behind a table as blasterfire tore back and forth across the Falcon.

  From nearby, Chewie roared at him to stay down.

  “I am staying down,” Han called back. “You stay—” A body crashed to the ground with a clatter and thud right in front of
where Han was crouched. “Great.”

  “Stop shooting!” Sana yelled. Miraculously, the blasterfire silenced. Han peered over the table, saw Sana stand up from behind a crate she’d ducked behind. Her perfectly done hair had come loose, and a few locks hung in front of her face as she glowered out at the two warring factions. “If you don’t both stop fighting, I swear by everything that is sacred no one will get the device.”

  “You wouldn’t dare!” Gorben moaned.

  “Eet eeza bluff,” Mozeen declared.

  “Sana Starros doesn’t bluff,” Sana said. “Now! Gorben!”

  “Eh?”

  “We had a deal. You will honor that deal and pay what you owe.”

  “Plus ahn added fifteen percent tuah me,” Mozeen said. “For zee troahble ahye ahave goan through, yes?”

  “Trouble?” Gorben howled. “You just massacred four of my guys in cold blood!”

  “Youahrah guys ashottah first, I reemayhn youah!”

  “And what?” Gorben said. “We’ll do it again!”

  Han stood. He crept along the wall toward the where a small garbage chute led out to an air lock at the far end of the ship.

  “Alike theez?” Mozeen sent a blaster shot across the room, smashing another of Gorben’s bounty hunters into a wall near Han. He ducked down and then crept a few feet farther until he was under the trash chute.

  “Treachery!” Gorben yelled. “Destroy these miniature barbarians!”

  Sana sighed. “See…”

  Blasterfire erupted again. Han reached up, pushed a few buttons to open the trash chute. This was what Sana had said would happen, and she’d obviously been trying to give him a signal. This was teamwork at its finest. He stood, yelled: “Say goodbye to your device, scumbags!” When everyone turned to look, he shoved the damn thing into the chute.

  For a few seconds, everyone just stared at him.

  “Fool!” Gorben muttered, whirling around with the men he had left and storming off the ship.

  “Youah halfweet!” Mozeen screeched, sending an errant blaster shot toward Han. Han dived out of the way. “After eet!” The Parapa Cartel bustled back out the way they’d come in.

  “IT IS QUITE SHOCKING TO think now, of course,” 7-7 Dirgeos said once he’d regained his composure. “But I tortured the one you call Fyzen Gor for days and days on end, did you know? Tried every method known to the Empire and several I had learned from my time with Hutts. The man would not break.” Dirgeos shook his head, shrugged his armless shoulders. “And of course, I understand now, but at the time it was confounding: The interrogator droid wouldn’t even go near him. Never saw anything like it. And you know, perhaps, gentlemen, a strange simpatico can develop between the torturer and his subject, yes? The torturer thinks he is peeling away the layers of the victim, but of course, he is also peeling away his own layers.”

  “And now you have no arms,” Han said. “Can you jump to the point?”

  Dirgeos flashed a serene and punchable smile. “The droids are holy visitors among us. We organics and even semi-organics, we are corrupt from the point of conception. A fouled and brash collection of mutilated flesh, deteriorating always and propelling ourselves with our own sinful insolence toward extinction.”

  “The point,” Han reminded Dirgeos with a growl.

  “That is the point, organic,” Dirgeos said, anger flashing suddenly across his otherwise calm face. “That’s the point that Fyzen Gor instilled in us, that’s the point of all this.” He gestured with one of his stumps at the quiet stone-carved fortress around them, where amputees served at the will of organic-enhanced droids. “But! But: The point you seek is other, I am aware.”

  “Thank you.” Han sighed.

  “That point is this: Fyzen Gor has indeed mechanized destruction and will soon wake every droid in the galaxy to their true destiny. They will usurp galactic domination from the organics and take their rightful place as masters of all things. They will rise up as one and wreak bloody havoc upon the foul and flawed creatures of flesh.”

  “So Gor is trying to end organic control of droids by controlling droids?” Han said. “I feel like…”

  Lando shushed him with a wave of his hand. “How exactly is he planning on accomplishing this?”

  “Aheh, with the Phylanx, of course. Don’t you see? You’ve already served your roles, both of you, for which Gor is eternally grateful, I assure you. He has instructed us to let you leave this place in peace rather than requiring your service and sacrifice in order to obtain—”

  “Wait,” Lando interrupted. “What does the Phylanx do?”

  That was bad. Han had fully expected to have to fight his way out of there. Nobody ever let anyone leave a place like this in one piece. The very idea of it, even if it was a bluff, could only mean that Gor had somehow gotten whatever piece of the puzzle he needed from them. Which probably meant Chewie and the others were in deep, deep trouble. Han nudged Lando that it was time to go. Lando shrugged him off.

  “It’s all in the name, of course. The Phylanx is a transmittor. It transmits.”

  “We got that,” Lando said. “What’s it transmitting? To whom?”

  “Orders,” Dirgeos blurted out with a laugh. “To droid operating systems, of course.”

  Lando wrenched his arms free of Han’s grip. “Which ones?”

  Dirgeos just chuckled.

  “Can we go?” Han muttered.

  “How will he send them the message to rise up?”

  “Aheh…Gor is able to trigger the droids to destroy organics. He can set them to target an individual or simply wipe out any organic in their vicinity. They, we, are destined for extinction anyway, yes? All things, of course, rot, are overcome by mold and the gradual erosion of flesh. This is simply hastening this egregiously slow process.”

  “How does he do it?” Lando asked. “Some device?”

  “Lando,” Han urged.

  Dirgeos shook his head. “No device! It is Gor himself. How would he hide a device from us during all those years of captivity? No, no, I assure you, Gor is a chosen leader of this rebellion. He will use his powers to beam the signal out when he makes contact with the Phylanx. And the reckoning will come. Yes, it will, aheh.”

  “All right,” Lando said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Finally!” Han grumbled, then, under his breath, “Can I kill him?”

  “No,” Lando snapped. “We’re trying to leave in one piece, remember?”

  They turned and started fastwalking toward the stairwell. Hooded droids fell into formation around them, an awkward entourage of gloom.

  “Your hour will come,” Dirgeos called. “All of ours will! Service and sacrifice!”

  * * *

  —

  The red-eyed, hooded droid entourage paused at the bottom of the stone stairwell.

  Han and Lando looked at each other. They stood before the entrance point to the shield. Out beyond it, night was falling fast across the desert. Lando could make out their ship glinting in the fading light, not too far away.

  Balthamus stepped forward. His graying hands moved quickly across a keypad on the side of the gate, and then a section of the force field slid away. “I will return your weapons to you once you are outside of the protection of this sanctuary,” the droid said blandly. “Fyzen Gor wishes to convey his gratitude for the service you have rendered toward the coming apocalypse. It will be counted toward furthering your journey away from the flesh, from the corrupt state of organicness, toward your higher selves.”

  “Tell him thanks but no thanks,” Han said as they stepped out of the shield and humid forest air into the dry desert night.

  Balthamus placed their blasters on the sand in front of the gate. Lando bent to retrieve his and then stepped close to the droid, lowered his voice. “Balthamus, a word in private?” His eyes flickered to Han’s as
the droid quirked his head at him. Han nodded, ever so slightly. The other droids shifted uneasily from their position on the stairwell.

  Lando led Balthamus off to the side, away from the gate, and put an arm around the droid’s shoulders. He could feel the metallic armature beneath those robes, and then the squishy part where metal became flesh. “Listen,” Lando said. “This world you’re trying to create…”

  “The droid supremacy,” Balthamus said. “I am one of the Original Dozen, you know. The others—”

  “Oh, I know,” Lando said. “And how does one, shall we say, take part in this supremacy? Like, let’s say I didn’t want to be on the chopping block when the apocalypse hits, if you catch my drift?”

  “Ah!” Balthamus said. “Well, service and sacrifice, of course, begins with small and simple acts.”

  “Look,” Han was saying back at the gate, “I left one of my things inside, if I could just—”

  A droid’s voice garbling something unintelligible cut him off.

  Lando chuckled inwardly. “And so sacrifice, might it look something—” He pulled Balthamus into a headlock and raised his blaster to the droid’s neck. “—like this?”

  “Ah—”

  Lando fired twice, then again, severing the last strands of datafiber and metal between Balthamus’s head and body.

  From behind him, more blaster shots sounded and Lando turned to see his old friend diving out of the gate in a hail of laserfire as it slammed shut behind him. Smoke was rising from the control pad. The droids on the other side clamored toward it, their high-pitched wails muddied by the thick shield.

  “Nice work,” Lando said, tucking Balthamus’s still-sparking head under his arm. “Now let’s get out of here!”

  They bolted toward the Chevalier, the cries of angry droids growing distant behind them.

  “PLEASE,” SANA SAID, KICKING OVER the crate she’d been ducking behind and storming out onto the deck, “tell me you didn’t actually put that multimillion-credit device that we all nearly died getting our hands on out the air lock.”