by Troy Denning
The droid squatted on the datapad. “I’m programmed to self-destruct upon capture—but it doesn’t have to come to that. I can get you out of this place alive.”
“That implies you will be leaving—and the only way that will happen is slung over my back.” Chewbacca eased forward and began to inspect its casing. “What model are you? ISB-one-twenty?”
“One-twenty?” the droid scoffed. “Don’t insult me. My processor speed is fifty-point-three-two times faster than the one-twenty’s.”
“Then you must have the GwendoLyn Six,” Chewbacca said.
“That’s right,” the droid said proudly. “Tachyon processing bands, quantum RAM, biocell storage.”
“Nice chip,” Chewbacca observed. It was also one that the maker, the Imperial droid supplier MerenData, had developed in the last two years. “You must have set Ysanne Isard back the price of an entire assault company.”
“I wouldn’t know,” the droid replied—clearly oblivious, despite its processing power, to how much it had just revealed about itself. “Cost has never been one of my operational parameters.”
Chewbacca smiled at the droid’s tacit admission. The former director of Imperial Intelligence, Ysanne Isard had—for a time—been the glue holding the Empire together in Palpatine’s absence. Fortunately for the New Republic, she had perished a year and a half earlier, when her shuttle exploded near the end of the Bacta War.
As Chewbacca was puzzling out the details of the plot, he heard a gentle thump behind him—it was probably just a granite slug falling off a wall. The important thing was that he now understood the basics of Isard’s plan: send a slicer to update the programming of an IT droid still lurking in one of the Empire’s secret detention centers, then sit back and watch as it executed its new prime directive—to destroy the government of the fledgling New Republic.
“I have heard that Ysanne Isard never worried about cost,” Chewbacca said, still holding his blaster on the slicer. “How—”
Chewbacca dropped the question when he felt the muzzle of blaster touch the small of his back.
“I think you two have done enough talking,” a raspy voice said.
“I agree.”
Chewbacca pulled the trigger—slagging the slicer droid, the datapad, and much of the desk—then spun on his ambusher, pivoting his body aside and bringing one arm around to knock the blaster away. He made contact with his elbow and felt the cracking of a brittle skull—then found himself looking down the barrel of a second underdweller’s weapon.
This one was a human female, just as gaunt and pale as the others, but taller, with a sharp nose and icy white eyes. She gestured at the blaster in Chewbacca’s hands.
“Drop it.” Behind her, two furry figures appeared at the top of the stairs and began to stalk silently toward her.
Chewbacca shook his head.
“I won’t ask again.”
He dropped the blaster at his feet.
“Good. Where are the other two?”
Chewbacca shrugged.
The woman’s eyes narrowed, and she pointed her blaster at his head. “Then I guess there’s no reason—”
She was interrupted by the IT droid’s sharp voice, coming from a comlink on her belt. “Report. I saw blaster flashes.”
Being careful not to aim her blaster away from Chewbacca’s head, she raised the comlink to her lips. It was one of the short-range, direct-beam models, ideal for conditions this deep in the city.
“You were right,” the woman said. “The Wookiee went straight for that slicer droid. He slagged it.”
Malla took advantage of the woman’s distraction to slip the last two paces forward. Nonetheless, Chewbacca began to have the sinking feeling that he had fallen into another trap. Silently, he begged the woman to mention Princess Leia’s datapad, to say that it was slag, too.
Instead, she glanced down at her unconscious partner, then added, “So’s Rath.”
“No matter,” the IT said. “ISBy’s work is complete. I can handle the interface with the Princess’s datapad. Have you eliminated the Wookiees?”
“Not yet.”
Malla reached over the woman’s shoulder and plucked the blaster away, at the same time using the other hand to cover her mouth. The underdweller started to struggle, but quickly stopped when Chewbacca wagged a finger at her. Lumpy followed a moment later, carrying her partner’s blaster.
“What are you waiting for?” the IT demanded. “Am I going to have to burn you again?”
Chewbacca pointed at the blaster rifle in his son’s hand and raised three fingers. Lumpy fired three shots into a nearby desk, and Chewbacca began to groan as though in pain.
“Much better,” the IT said. “Make sure they are dead, then return to the garage. The underdwellers’ time is at hand. When the Rebels are gone, your loyalty will be richly rewarded.”
Chewbacca sneered in disgust, then took the woman’s comlink and snapped it between his fingers.
“Fear and hope.” Chewbacca extended a knuckle and struck the woman beneath the ear, knocking her instantly unconscious. “They are the tools of the torturer and the tyrant. When you hear them together, it is time to reach for your bowcaster.”
Lumpy nodded, still staring at the floor.
Chewbacca frowned. “What is this? If you are angry, at least have the courage to look me in the eyes.”
“I’m not angry.” Lumpy met Chewbacca’s eyes, but there was no flash of defiance in them, only apology . . . and perhaps even embarrassment. “I just wanted to show you. That’s all.”
“Show me?”
“That I can handle myself,” Lumpy said. “Like you and Han.”
“Ah.”
Chewbacca shook his head in surprise. Malla was right after all—Lumpy’s rebellious streak had more to do with trying to please his father than with asserting himself. That did not bode well for his rrakktorr in a few years, but it did mean that Lumpy had a generous heart—and that would carry him safely down more dark paths than any amount of rrakktorr.
Chewbacca ruffled Lumpy’s head fur. “My son, you truly are confused. This isn’t your fault.”
“It isn’t?” Lumpy and Malla asked this at the same time.
“Did you steal Princess Leia’s datapad?” Chewbacca asked. “This is just how things happen around the Solos. If you hadn’t gone after that thief, the situation would have been a lot worse. We might have lost the whole Provisional Government.”
This thought seemed to please Lumpy enormously. “So I kind of saved the New Republic?”
Chewbacca smiled. “Not yet.” He checked his comlink and, still not finding a signal, started for the front observation wall. “First we have to steal an airspeeder and get out of here.”
Malla cast a longing eye on the broken turbolift. “Couldn’t we just climb?”
“I wish we could,” Chewbacca said. “But even if we knew our way around, it would take hours—and this is a detention center. It probably doesn’t even open into the floors above.”
“And we have to get Princess Leia’s datapad back,” Lumpy added.
“If we can,” Malla said. “There’s only so much—”
“No, we have to,” Lumpy said, peering through a blast hole. “They’re already loading the zemex.”
Chewbacca’s throat went dry. “Zemex?”
Lumpy turned to face him. “I forgot—as we were coming down the tunnel, the IT droid told one of the underdwellers to ready the zemex for loading.”
Malla joined Chewbacca at the wall. “That’s bad?”
Chewbacca nodded. “Imperial nerve agent.”
He found a blast hole and peered down into the garage. In a work area near the center of the floor, several underdwellers were removing the seats from the passengers’ box of one of their black-armored airspeeders. Closer to the command deck, a dozen of their fellows were carefully ferrying durasteel zemex canisters to the edge of a loading dock. With a rounded nose and four fins to keep them standing upright, the cylind
ers had the look of primitive bombs.
A small droid was supervising the operation closely, Princess Leia’s datapad clutched in its grasping claw. Its body was the same glossy, sensor-studded orb of the standard IT-O Imperial interrogator droid, but it carried the tools of its trade—needles, torches, and laser scalpels—on long multijointed limbs that resembled insect legs.
Malla sighed and glanced over at Chewbacca. “I take it the fate of the New Republic rests in our hands?”
“Yes.” It was an answer that frightened Chewbacca, but there was really no other choice. He had to stop the droid, and that meant his family had to help him; as unfamiliar as Malla and Lumpy were with Coruscant’s particular kind of forest, he did not think they would make it back to the civilized layers without him. “And Han’s life, too. He will be at that banquet.”
Malla nodded. “I suppose we must.”
“IT is our problem,” Chewbacca said. “We can’t give the droid a chance to activate the garage defenses again.”
“Why not just blast the thing now?” Malla asked.
“Because getting home is the most important part of the mission,” Lumpy said, “unless you’re dumb enough to play an Imperial.”
Malla looked to Chewbacca for a translation.
“We don’t want to be trapped up here,” Chewbacca said. “We have to be closer to that airspeeder when the fighting starts.”
Everyone was quiet for a moment, then Lumpy said, “I can get us there.”
Chewbacca listened—patiently, he thought—while Lumpy explained how he could draw the IT droid into a trap of their own for a change.
When the cub finished, Chewbacca shook his head. “Absolutely not,” he said. “I thought you were through playing hero.”
Lumpy’s expression fell, but he lowered his head and said, “I am. It kind of scared me anyway.”
“Good,” Chewbacca said.
Malla thought for a moment, then said to Chewbacca, “That must mean you have a better idea.”
They were all silent while Chewbacca tried to think of one.
Finally, Malla said, “I thought so.” She turned to Lumpy. “Go ahead. It’s the one thing the droid will never expect.”
Lumpy’s eyes grew nervous. “Really?”
When Malla nodded, Lumpy turned to Chewbacca.
Chewbacca glanced at Malla, then grunted his permission. “I have no better ideas, so it seems I am outvoted.”
Lumpy rose and stepped over to a sizable blast hole above the loading bay. “Then I’ll see you in a minute.”
“I’ll be covering you,” Chewbacca answered. “If you get trapped—”
“I know. Don’t grovel,” Lumpy finished. “Interrogation droids aren’t any different from some of the Wookiee bullies I know. Things go worse if you give them what they want.”
With that, Lumpy turned to climb through the blast hole. Neither Chewbacca nor Malla embraced him; nor did they tell him how much they loved him. That would have implied they did not think they would be seeing him again. They simply took a position ten meters away at a much smaller hole, where they were less likely to be seen, and watched as Lumpy carefully began to lower himself.
The sight of his young son taking such a risk was almost more than Chewbacca could bear, and it only made matters worse that even Malla had agreed that it was necessary to prevent a devastating blow to the New Republic. How often, he wondered, would he find himself in a similar position over the next year or two? When it was only his own life he was risking, his thoughts remained focused and his nerves steady. Now his mind was racing, looking for another option long after the time for such decisions had passed. His hands were trembling so badly that he had to move his finger away from his blaster’s trigger for fear of firing it accidentally.
Chewbacca started to speak at the same time as Malla.
“You first,” he said.
“Just a question,” she said. “How often does this sort of thing happen?”
“Around the Solos?” Though Chewbacca’s next words were painful, he spoke them without hesitation. “Too often for Lumpy to stay.”
Malla took his hand. “Thank you for being the one to say it.”
“But he still needs to learn to clench fight,” Chewbacca said, grinning. “When we are done here, I will see about coming home to Kashyyyk for a few weeks so I can teach him. Han can stay out of trouble that long—I hope.”
Malla smiled. “Okay. Home it is, then.”
Lumpy’s rear claws screaled on the transparisteel as he felt for the seam at the bottom of the observation wall, startling the underdwellers so badly that one group nearly dropped a canister of zemex. All eyes turned toward the noise. Lumpy found the seam he was seeking and reached down to hook his hand claws into the gap.
The IT droid yelled, “Stop!”
Lumpy swung out of sight beneath the deck.
“Time to go,” Malla said.
They rushed out of the room and clambered down the broken turbolift, then went to the nearest door and, finding it still locked, stood waiting. A moment later, they began to hear Lumpy’s frightened voice echoing from the other side, too muffled to be intelligible. The IT droid answered in a wheedling tone, Lumpy growled rather unconvincingly, and the door slid open.
Malla pulled him back through the doorway. Chewbacca opened fire, and half a dozen underdwellers tumbled back onto the loading dock. The IT droid went bouncing along the low ceiling, sparks and smoke pouring from a gaping hole in its side, then reached the high spaces in the main part of the garage and floated into the rafters, still clutching Princess Leia’s datapad.
Chewbacca led the charge through the door, taking the underdwellers so completely by surprise that those who did not scatter quickly enough simply died. He glimpsed the IT droid weaving and bobbing its way out over the loading bay and blasted it again, sending casing shards, scalpel arms, and electroshockers flying in all directions. He did not see any datapad parts.
A stream of blaster bolts erupted from the work area. Chewbacca returned fire, losing sight of the IT droid, but reducing the dangerous stream to an inaccurate dribble. With Malla and Lumpy close behind, he darted across the loading bay and took shelter behind the zemex canisters.
The underdwellers ceased firing altogether.
“Like the mallakin that hides behind the katarn,” Malla observed. “But how do we escape the nest?”
Chewbacca stuck his head up. Ten meters away, the barrels of half a dozen blasters were pointed in their direction over the airspeeder the underdwellers had been working on.
“We take the nest with us.” Chewbacca passed his blaster to Malla and said, “Just shoot at the floor and scare them.”
“What about the datapad?” Lumpy asked. “As long as we don’t have that—”
“The IT will come to us,” Chewbacca said. “We’re threats to its primary objective. It won’t let us leave here alive.”
“I wish you had put that another way,” Malla said.
Chewbacca picked up one of the heavy zemex canisters and cradled it across his arms. The thing weighed as much as a speeder bike, but he was halfway to a battle rage and had no trouble carrying it.
“Follow . . . me.”
Chewbacca started toward the airspeeder at a trot, Malla and Lumpy to either side of him, hiding behind the canister.
The horrified underdwellers remained behind the airspeeder, watching him approach with gape-mouthed expressions of disbelief. When Malla began to spray bolts in their direction, they snapped out of their trance and fled for the exit.
As Chewbacca and the others approached the airspeeder, IT—or rather, what remained of IT—floated over and settled on the neck of the canister. It still had three limbs, one of them clutching Leia’s datapad. But most of its outer casing was missing, leaving burned wires and fused circuit boards to dangle unceremoniously outside its body.
The droid turned its visual input eye on Chewbacca and, in a barely comprehensible croak, said, “You used him for
bait . . . your own offspring?”
Chewbacca stopped at the back door of the airspeeder and, keeping a close eye on the droid, nodded.
“I didn’t expect . . . that.” As it spoke, it was drawing one of its remaining limbs back toward its body. “And you won’t expect—”
But Chewbacca was expecting it; he had already noticed the heat rings inside the leg’s hollow tip. As the tiny fusioncutter flickered to life, he dropped the canister and lashed out, catching the droid by the base of its cutting arm and smashing it against the frame of the airspeeder.
The IT brought its fusioncutter around and burned a long, deep gash across the back of Chewbacca’s wrist. Chewbacca’s hand opened of its own accord, but he was already sweeping the other down to recapture the droid as it sank toward the zemex cylinder. This time, he caught it by the grasping claw.
“Hold steady,” Malla said.
She jammed the blaster barrel through the droid’s shattered body casing and squeezed the trigger. The IT vanished in crackling blue flash that left Chewbacca blinking the spots from his eyes . . . and trying to slap embers out of his smoldering arm fur.
“Didn’t you hear me tell Lumpy to never do that?” he complained.
“Unless he had to,” Malla corrected. She pulled the grasping claw—still clutching Princess Leia’s datapad—from his hand and tossed it into the front of the airspeeder. “And I had to. Now stop complaining and take us home.” She pushed Lumpy to the airspeeder and climbed in after him.
“Home.” Chewbacca crawled into the driver’s seat and started the speeder, accelerating into the exit tunnel so fast he had to roll the floater pads up at the crash-corners and bank off the walls. “Home it is.”
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