“We were ‘business associates.’ We traded underworld information, ran sabacc numbers, brokered the occasional minor government intel—that sort of thing. Not exactly the thrilling life one sees in the holodramas, but it did offer an occasional frisson or two.”
“Colorful,” Den commented. When the droid did not continue, he said, “Well, you’re a long way from the big city now, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Why are—?”
He broke off, noticing I-Five’s sudden shifting of attention from him to a group of surgeons who had just entered. Among them was Zan Yant, who carried his quetarra. Den assumed there would be music later on, after the cantina filled up a little more; that was the usual way of it. He didn’t mind; he liked Yant’s musical choices, for the most part, although the Talusian’s homeworld compositions sounded to him like two sand cats in a sack.
The droid, however, seemed a bit—nervous. I’d swear he somehow shows expressions with that metal mug of his, Den thought. The concept was surprising, but no more so than the idea of a droid having the emotions necessary to produce those expressions.
Den’s second drink was set down before him, and he lifted it thoughtfully. “So, what motivated you to pack up and leave such a rewarding existence?”
I-Five said, “I have no idea. Lorn and I were being pursued by…” He seemed to be choosing his words carefully. “…an assassin.”
“A Zabrak,” Den said casually. He watched the droid’s face carefully this time. His photoreceptors didn’t get bigger, but they did get brighter, which somehow conveyed surprise just as well. That’s it, he thought. The eyes are the most expressive organs in most humanoid faces. You can read a world of meaning into their slightest movement. Somehow, I-Five gets much the same results by varying the intensity and angle of those optical sensors of his.
He was so intent on figuring out how the droid showed expression that he almost missed I-Five’s reply. “Do I rummage around in your data banks without permission?”
“Sorry; reporter’s instincts. It was obvious that something bothered you about seeing Yant come in, and since I’m assuming you’re not a music hater—”
“Congratulations. The assassin was an Iridonian Zabrak. Quite deadly; a martial arts master skilled enough to make Phow Ji look like a drunken Jawa. He had…other skills as well.”
Den nodded. “I see. Yant’s from Talus, if that makes any difference.”
I-Five didn’t reply to that. “This assassin stole an item of value from us and fled Coruscant, into orbit. Lorn and I were about to go after him, and then—the next thing I knew, I was serving on a spice-smuggling freighter.”
“Any theories?”
“I think Lorn deactivated me to keep me out of danger. By then this had turned into something very personal for him, you see. Someone he cared for greatly had sacrificed herself to save us, and—”
“Sounds like a great story,” Den said. “Wish I’d been around to write it up.”
“Trust me—you don’t. This assassin was—” I-Five hesitated, then shook his head—another disturbingly human action.
“Black Sun?”
“Worse. Far worse. Besides,” he said softly, “what’s a story without an ending?”
“Every story has an ending.”
“This one doesn’t—not for me. I don’t know what happened to Lorn. I suspect he’s dead, but there’s no way to know for certain. I’ve tried to find out, but this all took place more than a decade ago, and routes of inquiry are limited for droids, even droids that know how to hack past pyrowalls and other computer defenses. The entire thing seems to have been completely hushed up at an extremely high level.”
“Now you’re getting me interested,” Den said. “Nothing like a good conspiracy story, although they tend to go over better when there’s not a war on. I’ll see what I can dig up.”
“Dig too deep on this, and you may be the one who gets buried,” the droid said darkly. “I have no idea how I escaped being mindwiped. All I know is one minute I was at the spaceport on Coruscant; the next I’m helping feed people’s glitterstim habits across the Core systems.
“That’s subjective, of course. According to my interior chrono, I was deactivated for about twelve standard weeks. From what I was able to learn afterward, I was part of some kind of barter arrangement. I was on the Kessel Run for six years; then the smugglers’ ships were raided by a local system’s solar patrol. I was confiscated and auctioned to a merchant captain—why, I’m not certain. There are still large gaps in my data banks I can’t account for—several years’ worth, in fact.
“When the war began to spread, the Republic confiscated as many droids as they could to keep them out of the Separatists’ hands. I was serving as a house droid for a noble family on Naboo when the order came. My programming was augmented with medical training, and now here I sit in this…picturesque…establishment, telling you my life story.” He paused. “I really do wish I could get drunk.”
“Maybe you’re lucky you can’t. If you’ve been this forthcoming to everyone you’ve met,” Den said, “It’s a wonder you haven’t been reprogrammed. Most folks have little patience with an uppity droid.”
“Do tell. No, I’ve kept my sparkling wit and effervescent personality firmly in check until now, rest assured. It’s been somewhat lonely, I must say.”
“So why tell me all this? Do I just have that kind of face?”
“I’m tired of the charade,” I-Five replied. “I’m tired of playing a meek little automaton to humans and their ilk, especially after watching the brutal results of organic sentients’ inability or unwillingness to coexist. The more I see of all this carnage, the more convinced I am that a CZ-Three maintenance droid could do a better job of running the Republic.”
Den couldn’t resist a grin. “That’s sedition, you know.”
“Who, me?” The droid’s photoreceptors projected innocence. “I am but a humble droid, built to serve.” He sighed again. “Perhaps I just need my disgust damper recharged.”
“Or maybe you just need to get drunk.”
“That, too.”
“Of course, in order to accomplish that, you’d have to be organic.”
I-Five actually shuddered. “Perish the thought.” He stood. “Excuse me. I have duties to perform; most of them involve changing dressings and administering spray hypos. Thoroughly fulfilling tasks for a being of my capabilities, I must say. Perhaps I’ll occupy the ninety-nine percent of my cognitive module not engaged by my chores by solving Chun’s Theory of Reductional Infinity. Or composing a light opera.”
Den watched I-Five leave the cantina. A few moments later Zan Yant began to play, a slow, soulful melody. It seemed the perfect accompaniment to Den’s bemused mood.
A droid that had been accorded equal status by his sentient owner? Den had heard of such things before, but always before they had been fiction. For a droid to actually be emancipated, even informally, was somewhat revolutionary. He wondered why he wasn’t more shocked by the idea.
It did seem a good reason to have another drink, however.
18
Usually, whenever he had a few moments in which to try cutting through some of the caked sweat, spores, and grime that Drongar so liberally provided, Jos used the sonic shower, which was faster and more efficient than chem-wipe or water. Step in, click the foot switch on, and the dirt was vibrated right off—no muss, no fuss. At least the base had that basic level of technology working, most of the time.
Today, however, he stood under the pulsing beat of a fluid nozzle, and the water, piped and filtered from a deep aquifer, was cold. Cold enough to cause chilblains, cold enough to make breathing harder than usual.
The water was not cold enough, however, to chill his thoughts—and the problem of Tolk. Tolk, who had certainly discerned his interest in her. And who had apparently decided to have some fun with it.
The water thrummed against his head, sending icy trickles and rivulets into his eyes and ears, but it was not cold enough t
o drive the memory of what had happened just that morning from his too-warm thoughts…
He had stepped into the dressing room to change his surgical suit, the one he’d been wearing having become soaked from a bleeder that popped in the middle of a vein graft. The room was unisex, but there was an IN USE indicator on the door to keep people from being surprised. Jos had palmed the door switch and stepped briskly into the room, having seen that the IN USE diode was dark.
And there was Tolk, halfway through changing her own surgical suit. Which was to say, not entirely clothed. Or, to put it another way, mostly naked. Bare. Gloriously so…
As a surgeon, Jos had seen plenty of flesh in his career, male, female, and other. It was simply part of the job—you didn’t have friendly thoughts about somebody whose liver you were resecting. But to step into a room and see your recently noticed and decidedly beautiful assistant nearly nude was an entirely different matter.
Even that wouldn’t have been so bad—well, okay, it wasn’t bad, it was just blasted embarrassing—since he’d gaped in slack-jawed shock for only a second, maybe two or three, before turning around, crimson-faced, and saying, “Oops, sorry!”
But what kept him staring for that extra second was Tolk’s expression. That, along with the rest of her.
She smiled. Slow, languid, no-mistake-about-it. “Hi, Jos. Did I forget to thumb the diode on? How careless of me.”
Jos managed to exit and shut the door, the vision of Tolk’s mostly bare form seared into his memory—forever, he was pretty sure. But that smile…oh, that smile had been the stopper in the bottle. And as he thought about it later—at least two dozen times during the day as they worked together—he kept wondering: Had she forgotten to light the diode?
Even at its coldest, the water couldn’t wash that question away.
“You’ve been in there half the night, Jos! How clean do you need to get?”
A very good question, that.
Seated at a table in the chow hall, Den Dhur was a happy diner. It didn’t really have anything to do with what he was about to eat. He was savoring the taste of imminent cold revenge, for soon—very soon, now—he would slam the hatch on Filba, that no-crèche outling Hutt. He had just collected another rock for the Hutt’s cairn from an unhappy corporal, and soon he was going to bury Filba like a battle dog does an old bone.
The thought made him smile. You do not mess with the press, no way, no how, especially if you are as crooked as a rancor’s back teeth. Most everybody had something to hide, something they wouldn’t want to see splashed on the evening holonets, but if you were a thief, it would be something worse. A lot worse.
And he’d found it.
Filba was going to be flensed and hung out in the hot sunshine to dry, and good riddance. Den chuckled to himself, and reapplied his cutlery to the food before him with gusto. Vengeance was the perfect spice for dinner.
Of course, what dinner was and how it was prepared was something he had to get used to when he spaced to odd planets. One of the first things Den had discovered as a young reporter was that if he didn’t learn to eat and drink the local flora and fauna when he world-hopped covering the military, he got hungry and thirsty in a big hurry. Space on board an interstellar troop transport was at a premium, and it wasn’t usually wasted on exotic foods. He’d heard the clone troopers had been conditioned to be happy with simple fare, but even so, given the number of different species in the Republic armies and navies, they couldn’t begin to stock favorites for everyone. Especially since the officers, as usual, got preferential treatment.
The soldiers in the field got RRs—Ready Rations—which were reconstituted pap with essential nutrients for each species. They usually ranged in color from pustulent to putrid, and in texture and taste from old boot plastoid to something that would gag a Neimoidian. Given this, the first thing military cooks generally did when they got to a new planet was assign foragers to find and bring back anything that might be edible. Den had been on some worlds where there wasn’t much local produce or game to be found, and a steady diet of RR meals made for a lot of thin troopers. He’d lost a little mass himself on those assignments.
Fortunately, one of the few positive things that could be said about Drongar was that there were plenty of things to be trapped, picked, tapped, or dug up, and, while it was not the best he had eaten, the Rimsoo chow hall wasn’t bad as such things went. Den had ordered a plate of the local land shrimp, a hand-sized creature that, boiled with herbs and spices, tasted surprisingly like hawk-bat, although more pungent. It came with some bright orange mashed plant root that had a smooth consistency and a nice cinnamon flavor. Wash it all down with some of the locally produced ale and, well, he’d eaten a lot worse. Until someone finally figured out how to invent a gadget that could instantaneously assemble a meal from basic elements, like the adventurers in those future-fic holodramas were always using, military food would always be a chancy affair.
And besides, even eating an RR wouldn’t have been so bad, feeling as he did today. All cynicism aside, a good story went a long way toward making a reporter feel like he was worth his paycheck—as little as that was…
He looked up and saw Zan Yant leave the serving line, carrying a tray. Den caught the Zabrak’s attention and waved him over. “Hey, is that fleek eel?” he said, when he saw the other’s plate. “I didn’t see it on the menu.”
“No. It’s wriggler, a local species of giant worm, seared in redfruit juice and sprinkled with fried fire gnats.”
“Ah. Sounds…tasty.”
“Well, it’s not the Manarai on Coruscant,” the surgeon said, “but it sure beats RRs.”
Dhur regarded Zan Yant quizzically. “You’ve eaten at the Manarai?”
“I wasn’t born on this mudball, friend Dhur. One of my instructors was a professor at CU’s School of Music. I went to visit him from time to time.”
“Still, a spendy place for a student.”
“My family is…comfortably well-off,” Yant said, slicing off a big chunk of worm and popping it into his mouth. “Ah. That Charbodian cook really knows its stuff. Want a bite?”
“Thanks, no, I’m happy with mine.” Den regarded the surgeon with curiosity. A rich medic and an expert musician—not the sort of person one expected to run into in the galactic hinterlands. Why hadn’t he or his family been able to have Yant exempted from the military? Wealth and power had its privileges, everybody knew that. Could it be that Yant had volunteered? If so, Den’s respect for him would have to be ratcheted up a notch.
Before he could pursue the subject, Yant asked, “And how goes the crusade to keep the public informed?”
“Good.” Den smiled. “And about to get better.”
“Ah. A hot story?”
“Yes, indeed. I can’t talk about it yet—don’t want to let the kreel out of the cage, you understand—but I’m pleased with it. I expect it will shake things up quite a bit in certain quarters.”
“That’s good, I suppose.” Yant took another big mouthful of worm, chewed, swallowed, and smiled. “Not bad at all.” He paused a bit, then said, “A question, if you don’t mind.”
“I’m all ears.”
“I and the other medics here are conscripts. Left up to us, we’d be a dozen parsecs in any direction away from Drongar. But you’re a noncom. You don’t have to be out here—you could be reporting off a civilized planet, up to your dewflaps in relative comfort and safety. So why are you here? What calls you to this work?”
He hadn’t expected that one. Nobody had asked that particular question in years. There were stock answers, of course—every reporter had a few. The adventure, the chance to be where the action was, the desire to serve the public. Maybe they even believed it—he had once, a long time ago.
And now?
Abruptly, without meaning to, Den found himself telling the truth. “Wars make for big stories, Doc. It’s all about the important issues. Life, death, honor, love…it’s the raw feed, the mother lode, the crucible. You watc
h people deep in this kind of fire, trying to get out, trying to get each other out, and you see what they’re really made of.
“Listen—you interview a local politician after a public meeting, and he spins word webs like an educated spin-worm: all glossy and shiny, but without any real substance. Sure, he’s working to keep his job—he might even be working for the public good and all, stranger things have happened—but he’s not under any real pressure, so he’s got time to sort out his lies and make them nice and neat.
“But you catch a commander whose unit has just been shot to bloody pieces, with no hope of rescue and enemy fire still incoming? He is going to tell it like he sees it, and forget the consequences. War is ugly, my friend, ugly and painful and cruel—but it strips away the cover, it flenses out truth—and that is what it’s all about.”
Zan nodded, thoughtfully chewing another bite of his dinner. “But you see so much death. Not to mention you could get killed yourself.”
Den shrugged. “You see an epidemic of Rojo Fever, you see plenty of bodies. And you could get run over by some wet-head kid bringing his landspeeder to the city for the first time. When your name is called, you go—doesn’t matter where you’re standing, does it?”
Zan chuckled. “No. No matter where you are, you’re always at the head of the line.”
Den chuckled as well, and for a few minutes the two were silent, enjoying the rest of their food. At length the Sullustan drained the last of his ale, burped, and leaned back. “Let me tell you a story,” he said. “A long time ago, I was assigned to cover a little insurrectionist brush war on some backrocket world in the middle of the Gordian Reach. I was hanging around the exit base—a prefab muster station where the troops shipping out for home were staged for lift into orbit. It was way behind the lines, a day’s ride by crippled bantha from any shooting, as safe as your mother’s lap—or crèche, or pouch, or whatever.
“So I’m talking to this human pup. Tall; I’m not even chest-high to him, even though he’s real young. Seems he lied about his age to get into the army, so he’s no more than sixteen standard years old, and by the maker’s grace he’s survived his tour without a scratch in the middle of some very heavy action. Seventy percent of his unit got fried blacker than carbonite, but he’s still breathing, and on his way out. Just a child. A child who now knows about war.
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