by Troy Denning
“Good—and try to stick close. We won’t be hanging around long.” A low whir sounded from Lando’s chair as he turned it to face RN8. “Ornate, prepare an emergency jump to our last coordinates.”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible, Captain Calrissian,” the droid replied. “You gave standing orders to empty the nav computer’s memory after each jump.”
“What?” Lando’s anger was edging toward panic now. “How many other orders—no, forget it. Just countermand my previous commands.”
“All of them?”
“Yes!” Lando snapped. “No, wait …”
Jaina reached the hatchway and, not waiting to hear the rest of Lando’s order, raced down the rivet-studded corridor beyond. She still had no idea what the Sith were planning, but she was going to stop them—and not only because the Jedi Council needed to know everything she and Lando could tell them about the Lost Tribe of the Sith. Over the years, Lando had been as loyal a friend to the Jedi Order as he had to her parents, time after time risking his life, fortune, and freedom to help them resolve whatever crisis happened to be threatening the peace of the galaxy at the moment. He always claimed he was just repaying a favor, or protecting an investment, or maintaining a good business environment, but Jaina knew better. He was looking out for his friends, doing everything he could to help them survive—no matter what mess they had gotten themselves into.
Jaina reached the forward hangar bay. As the hatch opened in front of her, she was surprised to find a bank of floodlights already illuminating her battered StealthX. At first, she assumed Lando had ordered the hangar droid to ready the Rockhound’s fighter complement for launch.
Then she saw what was missing from her starfighter.
There were no weapons barrels extending from the wingtips. In fact—on the side facing her, at least—the cannons themselves were gone. She was so shocked that she found herself waiting for the rest of the hangar lights to activate, having forgotten for the moment that the Rockhound did not have automatic illumination. The whir of a pneumatic wrench sounded from the far side of the StealthX, and beneath the starfighter’s belly she noticed a cluster of telescoping droid legs straddling the actuator housing of a Taim & Bak KX12 laser cannon.
“What the …?”
Jaina snapped the lightsaber off her belt, then crossed twenty meters of tarnished deck in three quick Force bounds and sprang onto the fuselage of her StealthX. She could hardly believe what she saw. At the far end of the wing stood a spider-shaped BY2B maintenance droid, her thick cargo pedipalps clamped around the starfighter’s last laser cannon while her delicate tool arms released the mounting clips.
“ByTwoBee!” Jaina yelled. “What are you doing?”
The pneumatic wrench whined to a stop, and three of the droid’s photoreceptors swiveled toward Jaina’s face.
“I’m sorry, Jedi Solo. I thought you would know.” Like all droids aboard the Rockhound, BY2B’s voice was female and sultry. “I’m removing this laser cannon.”
“I can see that,” Jaina replied. “Why?”
“So I can take it to the maintenance shop,” BY2B replied. “Captain Calrissian requested it. Since your starfighter is unflyable anyway, he thought it would be a good time to rebuild the weapons systems.”
Jaina’s heart sank, but she wasted no time trying to convince BY2B she had been fooled. “When Lando issued this order, did you actually see him?”
“Oh, I rarely see the captain. I’m not one of his favorites.” BY2B swung her photoreceptors toward the hangar entrance, and a trio of red beams shot out to illuminate a grimy speaker hanging next to the hatchway. “The order came over the intercom.”
“Of course it did.” Jaina pointed her lightsaber at the nearly dismounted laser cannon. “Any chance you can reattach that and get it working in the next minute and a half?”
“No chance at all, Jedi Solo. Reattaching the power feeds alone would take ten times that long.”
“How’d I know you were going to say that?” Jaina growled. She turned away and hopped down onto the deck. “All right—finish removing it and prep the craft for launch.”
“I’m sorry, that’s impossible,” BY2B replied. “Even if we had the necessary parts, I’m not qualified to make repairs. The specifications for this craft weren’t included in my last service update.”
“I flew it in here, didn’t I?” Jaina retorted. “Just tell me you haven’t been mucking around with the torpedo launchers, too.”
“This craft has torpedo launchers?” BY2B asked. “I didn’t see any.”
Jaina rolled her eyes, wondering exactly when the droid’s last service update had been, then rushed over to a small locker area at the edge of the hangar. She activated the lighting, flipped the toggle switch on the ancient intercom unit in the wall, and stepped into the StealthX flight suit she had left hanging at launch-ready.
A moment later Lando’s voice crackled out of the tiny speaker. “Yes, Jaina? What can I do for you?”
Jaina frowned. The voice certainly sounded like Lando’s. “How about a status report?” she asked, pushing her arms through the suit sleeves. “My StealthX is really messed up. No use taking it out.”
“My that is too bad,” Lando’s voice said. “But don’t be concerned. Ar-en-eight has nearly sorted out the system problems.”
“Great.” Jaina sealed the flight suit’s front closure and stepped into her boots. “I’ll head aft and check out the hyperdrive.”
“Oh.” Lando’s voice seemed surprised. “That won’t be necessary. Ar-en-eight is running diagnostics now. I’m sure the Em-Nine-O and his crew can handle any necessary repairs.”
And his crew. If there had been any doubt before, now Jaina knew she was talking to an imposter. Not long ago, Lando had confided to Jaina that the only way he had survived all those solitary prospecting trips early in his career was to close his eyes whenever one of the Rockhound droids spoke and imagine she was a beautiful woman. He would never have referred to M-9EO as a male.
Jaina grabbed her helmet and gloves out of the locker, then said, “Okay. If you’ve got everything under control, I’m going to stop by my bunk and grab some shut-eye before my shift comes up.”
“Yes, why don’t you do that?” The voice sounded almost relieved. “I’ll wake you if anything comes up.”
“Sounds good. See you in four standard hours.”
Jaina flicked off the intercom switch, then started back toward her StealthX, securing her helmet and glove seals as she walked. Gullible, no Force presence, and a terrible liar—the Voice definitely belonged to a stowaway droid, probably one sent by the Sith. That made enough sense that Jaina felt vaguely guilty for not anticipating the tactic in time to prevent the sabotage. The only thing she didn’t understand was why the Sith hadn’t just rigged the fusion core to blow. A living stowaway, they might have valued enough to work out an escape plan—but a droid? She could not imagine that any Sith deserving of the name would give a second thought to sacrificing a droid.
Jaina reached her StealthX and found BY2B standing behind the far wing, holding the last laser cannon in her heavy cargo arms. Jaina made a quick visual inspection of the bedraggled starfighter, then asked, “Is she ready to fly?”
“Ready would be an overstatement,” BY2B answered. “But the craft is capable of launching. I do hope you checked your flight suit for vacuum hardiness.”
“No need—it’s not me that will be going EV.” Jaina ascended the short access ladder and climbed into the cockpit. As she buckled herself in, she asked, “ByTwoBee, have you seen any new droids around here lately?”
“No,” the droid said. “Not since departing Klatooine.”
“Klatooine?” Jaina’s stomach began to grow cold and heavy. “Then you did see a new droid before we left for the Maw?”
“Indeed, I did,” BY2B replied. “A Rebaxan MSE-Six.”
“A mouse droid?” Jaina gasped. “And you didn’t report it?”
“Of course not,” BY2B said. “
Captain Calrissian had warned me just a few minutes earlier to expect a courier shuttle carrying a new utility droid.”
Jaina groaned and hit the preignition engine heaters, then asked, “And I suppose he told you this over your internal comlink?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” BY2B replied. “How did you know?”
“Because that wasn’t Lando you heard,” Jaina said, speaking through clenched teeth. “It was a sabotage droid programmed with an impersonation protocol.”
“Sabotage?” BY2B sounded skeptical. “Why would anyone bother? We don’t even have an asteroid in tow.”
“It’s not an asteroid they’re after.” Jaina unfastened her flight suit just far enough to retrieve her comlink from her chest pocket, opened a secure channel to Lando, and demanded, “What was the last meal I ate before boarding the Exquisite Death?”
“You expect me to remember what you had for lunch thirteen years ago?” Lando replied, taking the verification query in stride. “But you didn’t have time to finish it. I remember that much.”
“Good enough,” Jaina said, satisfied that she was talking to the man and not the mouse. The meal to which she was referring had taken place aboard Lando’s yacht, the Lady Luck, shortly before he had tricked a Yuuzhan Vong boarding party into taking her and the rest of a Jedi strike team aboard their ship. “Did you buy an MSE-Six while we were back on Klatooine?”
“No … why?”
“Because ByTwoBee saw one come aboard,” Jaina replied. “Apparently, you told her to expect it.”
“I told her?” Lando fell silent while he digested Jaina’s meaning, then said, “Blast! Those aren’t Sith out there—they’re pirates!”
Jaina was skeptical. “What makes you think so?”
“Slipping a stowaway aboard is an old pirate trick,” Lando explained. “Only this time, they were creative, impersonating the captain instead of just blowing an air lock.”
“Maybe,” Jaina said, still not convinced. An alert tweetle sounded inside the cockpit, announcing that the StealthX was ready to launch. “Time to go. You handle the mouse, and I’ll take care of … whoever sent it.”
“Affirmative,” Lando said. “I’ll have ByTwoBee organize a hunt. Can you lend her your comlink?”
“Sure.” Jaina passed the comlink out to the droid. “Lando has a job for you.”
The droid extended one of her delicate tool arms to accept the comlink. “How do I know this is the real Captain Calrissian?”
“You’ll have to trust me on that.” Jaina closed her flight suit again, then added, “That’s an order, by the way.”
“Well …” A soft hydraulic hiss sounded beneath BY2B as she allowed her telescoping legs to compress. “If it’s an order.”
Jaina lowered the canopy and fired the engines, then slipped through the containment field and swung toward the stern, hanging tight beneath the asteroid tug to avoid silhouetting herself against the milky glow of Ashteri’s Cloud. With the Rockhound’s sensor suite temporarily disabled, any worthy captain would maneuver around behind the huge tug, then launch a first salvo from as close as possible, straight down the thrust nozzles.
Even at full acceleration, clearing the Rockhound took longer than Jaina would have liked. The asteroid tug was nearly two kilometers long, with a white, carbon-scorched belly pocked by rows of bantha-sized tractor beam projection wells. Around the perimeter dangled dozens of telescoping stabilizer legs, two hundred meters long even fully retracted. The stern of the ship was obscured by the glow of an efflux trail so enormous and bright that Jaina felt like she was flying into a comet’s tail.
Finally, the canopy’s blast-tinting darkened. Jaina dropped the nose of the StealthX and shot away from the Rockhound, counting on the brilliance of the vessel’s huge efflux spray to blind distant eyes to the silhouette of a departing starfighter.
“Okay, Rowdy,” Jaina said, addressing her astromech droid by the new nickname she had given him. “Bring up the passive scanners and prep the shadow bombs.”
A long whistle of inquiry filled the cockpit, and Jaina looked down to see a question scrolling across the primary display, SHADOW BOMBS? WHAT DID CAPTAIN CALRISSIAN SAY TO YOU?
“This is no time for jokes, Rowdy,” Jaina said. “Besides, your humor protocol is lame. Who installed it, anyway?”
Rowdy replied with a mocking tweedle. I WILL NEVER TELL.
Jaina chuckled. It was already an old joke between them, since she herself was the one who had designed and installed the protocol. During a recent bout of melancholy over ending her engagement to Jagged Fel, she had decided to spend a little downtime pursuing what had been one of her favorite teenage passions: tinkering with stuff. The result had been a new humor routine for her astromech droid—and one that had the unexpected benefit of reversing the R9 series’ tendency to self-enhance their preservation routines. The bolder version was a definite improvement, at least to Jaina’s way of thinking. But she still had not decided whether the lame jokes were a reflection of her rusty programming skills, or a subconscious effort to echo the bad jokes her brother Jacen used to tell back on Yavin 4—before he became Darth Caedus and she became his executioner.
An alert chime sounded from the cockpit speakers, and another message rolled across the display screen, BOGEYS COMING FAST.
The screen switched to a tactical map showing three generic starcraft symbols speeding toward the Rockhound’s tail. A fourth symbol, hanging at the top of the display, was not approaching at all.
“That doesn’t look like a turbolaser assault in the making,” Jaina observed. “Rowdy, how sure are you of your sensors?”
ALL SENSORS ARE FUNCTIONAL AND CONCORDANT, the R9 reported. WE HAVE FOUR POTENTIAL TARGETS, AND WE HAVE ONLY FOUR REMAINING SHADOW BOMBS AND NO LASER CANNONS. IF THAT IS NOT CHALLENGE ENOUGH, I CAN ALWAYS SHUT DOWN ANOTHER ENGINE.
“Very funny.” As Jaina spoke, she was watching data readouts appear beneath each of the symbols on the screen. “Didn’t I just say this is no time for jokes?”
WHO IS JOKING?
Jaina was too busy studying tonnage estimates to respond. The three craft approaching the Rockhound were carrying far too much mass to be starfighters, while the vessel hanging back was only about half the mass of the ChaseMaster frigates the Sith were using. In fact, its thermal profile lacked the high-output signature of military-grade engines at all, and there were no energy concentrations large enough to suggest a turbo-laser preparing to fire.
“Rowdy, give me more on those bogeys in the lead.” As Jaina spoke, she began to ease back on the control stick, bringing the StealthX up and pointing its nose toward the trio of tiny blue flickers still closing on the Rockhound. “They can’t be fighters, or they would have attacked by now.”
A magnified enhancement of the lead bogey appeared on Jaina’s display. The image suggested a blocky craft about twenty meters long, with a wedge-shaped bow and four undersized ion engines attached to the stern. Thermal imaging showed a main cabin packed with at least twenty beings, while a small energy concentration just beneath the roof seemed to suggest the presence of a cannon turret.
Jaina frowned. “Maybe Lando was right,” she said. “That looks like an assault shuttle.”
NEGATIVE. THE HULL ARMOR ON AN ASSAULT SHUTTLE WOULD DEFEAT OUR THERMAL IMAGING, Rowdy reported. IT IS SEVENTY-EIGHT PERCENT LIKELY THAT ALL THREE CRAFT ARE LIGHTLY MODIFIED BDY CREW SKIFFS.
“Okay … and I suppose the lightly modified means that cannon turret on the roof?” Jaina asked.
AFFIRMATIVE. BDY SKIFFS ARE NOT SOLD WITH ARMAMENT OPTIONS.
“And that’s why pirates love them.” As she spoke, Jaina was trying to recall the latest intelligence on the rash of pirate attacks that Jaden Korr was investigating. The last she’d heard, he was still focusing on the middle Hydian Way, which was a long way from the Maw. “Vessels without military-grade sensors usually can’t see a small cannon turret, so they don’t get too worried when they see a BDY skiff coming.”
SO WE ARE NOT BEING ATTACKED BY SITH?
“Apparently not,” Jaina said, feeling relieved. A Sith frigate would have been a problem. But three shuttle-loads of pirates? That, she could handle. “It looks like someone is trying to board us.”
The display returned to tactical scale, and Rowdy added a designator label beneath the large vessel, still hanging back at the top of the screen. AND THIS DAMORIAN S18 LIGHT FREIGHTER IS THE MOTHER SHIP?
“That’s right,” Jaina said. “Classic pirate tactics—get close and send over some fast shuttles.”
THEN THIS IS GOING TO BE MORE FUN THAN WE THOUGHT, Rowdy reported. A DAMORIAN S18 IS LARGE ENOUGH TO CARRY SIX BDY SKIFFS.
“Now you tell me.”
Just because an S18 could carry six skiffs didn’t mean it was, but Jaina had to assume the worst. She continued toward the approaching vessels, trying to think of a way to take out six shuttles and a mother ship with only four shadow bombs, and quickly realized there wasn’t one. Those pirates were no idiots. The three shuttles were staying at least a kilometer apart—well beyond the blast radius of a shadow bomb—and they were approaching in a staggered line.
“Rowdy, arm bomb three,” she said, designating number three because bomb racks one and two were empty. She continued to close on the lead shuttle until the tiny flicker of its efflux tail had stretched into a blue dagger as long as her arm, then ordered, “Activate our transceiver and open a hailing channel.”
A bleep of protest sounded over the cockpit speaker, and Jaina glanced down to find a message on the display. A STEALTHX EMITTING COMM WAVES IS NO LONGER A STEALTHX. IT IS JUST A POORLY ARMED, LIGHTLY ARMORED X-WING SAYING COME GET ME.
“We’re required to issue a warning before opening fire,” Jaina said. Her target was just visible to the naked eye, a tiny durasteel box with a wedge-shaped head, being pushed along by an efflux tail as long as a cannon barrel. “And you know how I feel about breaking the law.”
THERE IS AN EXCEPTION FOR CLEAR INTENT, Rowdy pointed out.
“Better safe than sorry,” Jaina said. “Besides, I want them thinking about us, not the Rockhound. Do I have that channel yet?”