| abstract | - Having outlived a large percentage of the galaxy’s meatbags, I've seen more than most sentients can brag about. Among my particular obsessions is the rise and fall of organic cultures and species. For example, the Spiners are a sentient species that have almost completely become extinct; perhaps a few dozen remain in the galaxy today. But I remember when they were quite numerous, before the destruction of their homeworld; in fact, I remember hunting a few on behalf of a long-dead Iodanese guy. The irony there is that the Iodanese are also a rapidly declining species now, though they will doubtlessly outlive the Spiners by centuries. And they still have a minute chance of making a comeback. Now, without further ado, here is my story: For twenty years, I had been back in the game of bounty hunters and assassins. I traveled to Tatooine, a world that has frequently been a popular shadowport for reasons far beyond even my advanced comprehension. This time, I was focusing more on bounty hunting than assassination so I had renamed my ship the Buddy Warren for a little joke. Most meatbags do not understand how deeply the gag runs in my programming but I refuse to explain it. Now this was thirty-nine years before the famous Jabba the Hutt had arrived and Tatooine was fairly unpopulated. I landed in Mos Groska, a small city that has been abandoned for two hundred seven years now, and I walked into a cantina owned by an exile from among the Sand People. Most people never saw one without all its wrappings so they did not know that he was from among the Tusken. Ubukko the Hutt had recommended that I look for work in this particular town so there I was, seeking employment. As I entered the cantina I walked up to the bar and conversed with the owner in his native tongue, I showed him the dragon pearls I had obtained in the hunt. He asked. He sighed. Then he switched to Basic and shouted into a backroom, “Kethrow! I found someone who might want to do that job you wanted.” A moment later, an Iodanese meatbag came stumbling up to the bar. His once grey fur was stained the color of sand and he was beginning to foam at the beak slightly. Less muscular than average, all four claws on each of his hands were broken and his fingers were swollen. Three of the twelve stubby tentacles on his head had been chopped off painfully close to his skull. He grinned a toothy grin and I saw that his beak was cracked and his gums were sickly yellow, a clear sign of fergessian rot. “Lorenzo Kethrow, a’ yer servish,” he leaned on the bar. “I ‘ear ya migh’ be lookin’ ta do shum work fer me. I’m a businesh guy sho I payz ya in ‘ever currenshy ya use. ‘Cause I do a good bankin’ on the shide. What’d I shay I’s gonna pay, Ruur?” “The value will be sixty thousand Republic credits in whatever currency you want,” the bartender answered. “And Kethrow will pay on time. He already raised the price as high as he will go so don’t bother trying to haggle with him.” “What’s the job?” I asked. “Damn Shpinersh, thet’s the job,” Kethrow was louder than a Corellian at a swoop race. “A bunsh a the guys made off wi’ me money an’ now I gotta hire a guy ta make e’ryone know ol’ Kethrow’s no pushover!” “Who are they and where are they?” “I’ll ‘ave Ruur git ya the details n all.” Ruur poured a drink for a hunchbacked Tiallan and then said to me, “There are about thirty Spiners led by a Captain Derooz and they call themselves the Arkanis Police Force. They have a frigate called the Terror of Arkanis which they use for piracy. Most of the time, they are located near Vactooine and they fly as far as twenty or thirty light years to catch a target. Recently, they robbed Kethrow as he passed through near Vactooine. He wants them to suffer for it. Besides that, they could damage his future investments in the Arkanis sector.” “I have to admit, Ruur, I thought the Spiner race was limited to Yablon-Worxer. When did they achieve spacetravel?” “They didn't. These Spiners you are hunting are the last remnants of the Devik family. They were transported off of their homeworld at the end of the last war as a last ditch effort to reinforce the Arkanis Declaration. Apparently Spiners are unable to continue their line off Yablon-Worxer and Derooz’s men are all that’s left of the Devik family.” “Interesting. And however I am paid is worth sixty thousand credits?” “It’s non-negotiable, a yes or no bounty.” “What currency will I be paid in?” “We’d prefer to pay you in dergennian unes.” “The value of the une is dropping too rapidly.” “But for the last four years—” “A spike before it collapses. I’ll take truguts. “But outside of Hutt Space they’re only valuable on the Old Corellian Run. And not even beyond Ryloth.” “They’re the only currency in the Outer Rim that’s on the rise and spreading. Within a century, I guarantee every sector in the Outer Rim between the Hydian Way and the Corellian Trade Spine will be using it. The Banking Clan has been using it already as far as the Gordian Reach.” “So you’ll do it? For truguts, I mean.” “Yes.” By this time Kethrow had slumped over on the bar so Ruur agreed to tell him I accepted when he awoke. I returned to Docking Bay 26 where I had left the Buddy Warren and paid the Anx owner to have his stubby human mechanic disguise the ship’s weapons. Then the ship and I took off and flew down The Crystal Passage toward Vactooine. I came out of hyperspace over the Wandering Moon of Sedition (which disappeared again four hundred sixty-three years ago). After double-checking my weapons, I sent out a request for aid in the offworld dialect of Chorrian, claiming that my pilot was too injured to fly and we had a cargo that urgently needed to be delivered to the new colony on Ulrooine. A friendly trader from Samaria radioed and said he would be able to arrive and help me within a standard day but he warned me to stop broadcasting. Knowing that the pirates would probably wait until help arrived in order to capture two prizes, I stopped broadcasting my signal. While I waited for the arrival of my assistance and the pirates show, I amused myself by working on a few upgrades for the Buddy Warren and dressing myself to look more like an old fashioned protocol droid. I placed all of my visible weapons inside one of the ship’s hidden compartments, though the number of concealed weapons I bore was exactly forty-six. My next task was to place various traps throughout my ship. Each of them would only be activated at my command of course; I had no desire to spoil a lovely surprise when the pirates boarded the ship by having my traps sprung too early. Unfortunately, I quickly completed my preparations, so to amuse myself I accessed an old protocol droid brain that I had purchased on Tatooine. There were sixteen languages on it that I had not yet learned. It took me eight seconds to download them and I spent the remainder of my time meditating on their cultures and learning about how the protocol droid had spent its brief nine years of activation on Uyter. The helpful trader arrived first, flying a beat-up and old but heavily armed freighter. Two triangular Spear-wing 19 fighters in moderate condition were escorting him. Part of me regretted that I was using the trader for bait. But, when I scanned the two fighters, I saw that one of the pilots was a bristly Spiner and the other was a blue-snouted Syboona and I knew the trader was either a traitor or had been duped. Personally, I really I had no preference as to which scenario I was dealing with. The trader contacted me before I had any time to compute more than about sixty-four thousand one hundred nine possible outcomes to my situation. I decided to accept that my odds of survival were average. “We don’t have much time,” the trader told me when I answered my communications console. “Piracy has been rampant of late and I have no doubt they’re on their way right now. What I’ll do is I’ll dock my ship with yours and send over my medical droid to help your pilot and my friend. He can pilot your ship to Vactooine for you. Then we’ll get out of here before the pirates arrive but if they do come before we’re outta here these guys in the Spear-wings are from all the way out on Mon Gazza and they fought against pirates in the Lambda Smuggling Crisis.” “Thank you,” I replied in a manner that I believed most meatbags would adopt with a savior while stranded in space. “I’ll have my protocol droid assist your friend in going over the systems as I’m afraid I haven’t a clue how most of this ship works. I’ll be in the medical bay with my pilot. Oh, I really appreciate this.” The friend sent over by the trader to pilot the Buddy Warren was a serpentine Sluissi whom I immediately directed to the cockpit, saying I would join him as soon as I directed the medical droid to the sickbay. The droid was a humanoid model, a U9-1A that thought I really was a protocol droid and attempted to engage me in an annoying conversation about Chancellor Edrium Tiong’s latest scandal. I hate droids that pretend they are interested in politics when, in reality, they just like to gloat over the fact that we droids never have scandalous behavior. Once we passed out of sight, I deactivated the droid and shoved it into a closet. Then I returned to the cockpit to find that the Sluissi was already figuring out the controls. For a few seconds, I was worried that he would be able to fly the ship rather quickly and I would have to find some way to delay until the pirates arrived. But, as I suspected, the two fighter pilots were with the pirates. As the trader and his Sluissi friend were about to disengage the two ships from each other, an ion blast from each fighter hit us. Playing my part, I let out an obnoxious, high pitched wail the way protocol droids tend to do in danger. If I ever wanted to do just one of the behaviors of sentients it would be to smirk because the irritated Sluissi reached around to deactivate me but he found that I had no deactivation switch. I was unsure if he was another pirate or if he just wanted to shut me up so I decided not to blast him. However, I hate it when sentients get in the way so stunned him. Then I walked over to other ship and stunned the trader from Samaria. Taking their unconscious bodies, I locked them in one of the ship’s secret compartments. Back then, the ion cannons on small fighters were only powerful enough to disable the average freighter for about twenty minutes. The Buddy Warren, of course, was equipped with special ion shielding and had been completely unaffected by the blast. All systems acted like they were shut down, though, as they were programmed to do in order to fool enemies attempting to capture us. As I expected, the wait for the arrival of all the pirates was less than three and a half minutes. Their frigate, the Terror of Arkanis, arrived surrounded by fourteen Spear-wing and older Mothtail fighters. The frigate was absurdly shaped like an egg with fins on the sides. Then I learned that it was not even equipped with a tractor beam because it fired tow cables at each of the freighters. A docking mechanism was attached to the trader’s ship as mine only had one compatible air-lock and it was already being used by the Samarian freighter. I decided to be present to greet the pirates when they boarded. There was a chance that the Spiners would simply attempt to blast me as soon as they saw me. In preparation for this possibility, I activated a small energy shield in my body that would protect me from one blast. My armor would protect me from five blasts in its weakest section but I had no desire to put any strain on it. By the time I reached their point of entry on the Samarian’s ship, a big Spiner had arrived with eight other pirates, all of them Spiners except for one lone five-horned Zabrak with a ridiculous, implanted moustache. “Greetings,” I could always play a protocol droid quite well. Perhaps when I retire I ought to join a theater. “My name is B-3PF and I am afraid that my master has sent me to discuss your demands and negotiate the return of his property.” “Go get your master,” the large Spiner demanded. “I’m afraid that will be quite impossible,” I tried to emanate the sheer modus operandi of protocol droids through my tone of voice. “You see—” The Spiner drew his blaster and pointed it my torso. “Not another word out of you. If you don’t go fetch your master, I’m going to blow your brains out, droid.” I cocked my head as if I really were a protocol droid that was out of my league, “My master said—” The Spiner stuck me with a backhand blow that would have sent a protocol droid reeling so I pretended to be knocked over. As I lay on the ground, the pirates simply walked over me and marched into the ship. Only a few seconds earlier, the trader ship’s systems had recovered from the ion blast. It took me a little over two point two seconds to remotely hack into the ship’s mainframe from my position on the floor and I commanded it to jettison all escape pods. Waiting about one minute, I launched a single escape pod from the Buddy Warren and hoped the pirates would notice and capture that one. Each of my escape pods carried its own booby trap and the one I launched would release a cloud of poisonous gas that would kill everyone nearby. The pirates had moved throughout the Samarian’s ship and, finding nothing, boarded the Buddy Warren. They spread out and stupidly crossed several of my booby traps but I chose not to activate any right away. I observed the entire process through my remote connection with the ship. After a few minutes, they began to feel secure and move toward the exit. It was then that I activated a lovely electricity trap that wiped out exactly two thirds of the group, including their leader and the single non-Spiner among them. The three survivors had already passed through the same room and were all shocked at the deaths of their comrades. They started running for the exit and I killed them with a trap that fired small bullets at nearly the speed of sound from tiny holes in the walls. The ambushes had not been nearly as entertaining as I planned. Ah well, I thought. Surly my escape pod trap had either passed or failed by now so I marched into the tube connecting to the pirate ship. Two Spiners guarded the entryway and I dispatched them simultaneously with a blade hidden inside each of my arms. Then I entered into a ballistic mode that I had downloaded several hundred years earlier on, I believe, the lovely little world of Arrgaw. It took me half an hour to destroy every pirate in the ship except for those in the areas leading up to the bridge and on the bridge itself. My escape pod had indeed been captured and I found a lovely dispersion of six corpses, all Spiners, dead from the quaint booby trap. In all, I had killed sixty-two Spiners and nineteen pirates of various other species by the time I began to approach the final leg to the bridge. One of the meatbags actually managed a heroic ambush against me as I entered the corridor to the bridge, which was packed with a maze of containers. The Spiner started shooting at me with a rapid-fire laser rifle and I barely managed to dive behind cover. Only one blast actually struck me but my armor absorbed it. Unfortunately, I was now pinned behind a crate and if I was to kill my foe I would need to dangerously expose myself. This was the only route to the bridge and going outside in the cold of space to walk across the ship in front of sixteen hostile starfighters was unappealing. Popping out from behind cover, I had a blaster in each hand. As I expected, he was shooting as soon as I was in sight but he made one fatal mistake. He shot my right arm off. Really, he should have blown off my head because, like most droids, I was designed by a short-sighted biped who was senseless enough to put most of my critical systems in my head. With the blaster in my left hand, I drilled him through the head. He dropped like a sack of jijiri’i bread. I proceeded down the passageway and blasted the single autoturret guarding the elevator door. Two more Spiners and an amphibious Rybet charged out of the elevator with their blasters firing wildly. Three clean shots from me dropped them all. Rather than ride the elevator to the bridge, I cut a hole in its ceiling and climbed on top of it. Then I severed all of its cables so that it remained stationary. Next, I scaled the elevator shaft up to the door to the bridge. After setting a small charge designed to blow the doors inward, I burst through them and into the bridge. Seven Spiners, Captain Derooz among them, and a few autoturrets were no match for me and in less than eight seconds all of my opposition were full of smoking holes. Now I had to deal with the enemy fighters, before they realized every single pirate inside their frigate was dead. Hacking into the main computer terminal was a task that took almost an entire minute. Once I was in, I seized control of every single turbolaser, missile launcher, and point-defense cannon the ship had to offer on its exterior. From them, I observed the movements of the enemy fighters, until I fired my first shot from a turbolaser which demolished the fighter furthest from the frigate. A mere eighth of a second later I had almost simultaneously fired every point-defense cannon on an enemy. Eight fighters remained and then six after two more fled straight away from the frigate only to be annihilated by two of my turbolasers. I managed to launch three missiles which destroyed three ships and the remaining three attacked the frigate only to be destroyed by the point-defense cannons. The entire affair lasted only a minute but it was a definite strain on my tactical battle programming which I had hardly used since my last memory wipe and I was uncertain if I had ever employed it to such a degree. It did not matter to me though because all of the Spiner pirates were dead. I had probably eliminated the entire “Arkanis Police Force” unless they had some secret base somewhere in the sector but without their frigate they would be just another one of many small, unthreatening pirate groups that flooded the Outer Rim in those days. I sold the frigate to a Hutt cartel operating on Cyborrea for a decent price and hired a Nimbanel spacer and her crew to fly the ship to Hutt Space for me. I followed in the Buddy Warren. On the way, I briefly stopped on Tatooine and received every trugut that the Iodanese businessbeing had promised me. Since neither one had any outstanding warrants, I left the Samarian trader and the Sluissi pilot aboard their freighter, groggy from being stunned and cramped into a concealed hold but able to fly themselves back to Vactooine. To this day I wonder if they were in with the pirates or if I had really just mixed a good Samarian into one of my jobs. I did leave him with a few credits to compensate him for his trip, though.
|
