Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights 01_ Jedi Twilight - Michael Reaves [31]
I-Five started toward a drop-tube. “Whoa,” Den said, hurrying after him and grabbing his arm. “That one’ll drop you into the street.”
“I know,” the droid replied, shaking off his friend’s grip and continuing toward the tube.
Den stared. “Then why are you—”
“I like the nightlife,” I-Five replied as he stepped into the tube. The repulsor field lowered him quickly from sight.
Den groaned. A human standing nearby glanced at him. Den quickly sized him up out of the corner of his eye—his peripheral vision was better than most species’ frontal sight. The human’s hair was dyed a deep magenta and electrostatically charged, standing a good ten centimeters above his scalp, and his muscular arms were decorated with glow-tats. A floating advert-sphere blinking the words gang member in red letters, with an arrow pointing at him, would have been more subtle.
To Den, this was the sort of being who took the life out of nightlife, usually with great glee and expertise. The Sullustan started walking toward the drop-tube by which I-Five had exited.
The human didn’t follow, much to his relief. The field lowered Den gently but swiftly toward the street.
Humans, he thought. Everywhere you go, humans. And humanoids. It was interesting that natural selection had favored the upright, bipedal form in which to package intelligence on so many different worlds. Den, himself, was an example of that. One of the things he disliked most about humans was that they all seemed to be smugly taking credit for it, as if they’d pioneered the whole thing.
He stepped out of the durasteel tube, momentarily absorbed in his musings about humans, and was nearly bowled over by a Kubaz on a weaver. The small, one-being transport was living up to its name as its long-nosed rider maneuvered it through the crowd. Den sincerely hoped the bug-eater would hit an oil slick that the weaver’s gyroscopic sensors couldn’t compensate for quickly enough.
He looked for I-Five, and realized he had a problem. While Sullustans weren’t as short as Jawas or Chadra-Fan, they weren’t exactly able to spit in a Wookiee’s eye, either. Den was only waist-high to most of the known species, which meant his chances of spotting I-Five were slim indeed.
He couldn’t believe the droid would leave him behind. Even as he thought that, a metallic arm reached between a Quara and a Duros and grabbed his collar, pulling him out of the crowd and up against the side of a building.
“Miss me?” the droid asked.
“Give me a blaster and I won’t next time. What—”
“We’re waiting for someone.”
“Anyone in particular, or are we just lonely?”
“I am,” I-Five muttered, just loud enough for Den to hear. The reporter grinned. He wasn’t sure what peculiar combination of circuitry had resulted in the acerbic side of I-Five’s personality, but it never ceased to amuse him.
“Be nice to me,” he warned the droid. “Who’s your master?”
I-Five gave him a look that made Den thankful the droid’s lasers were in his fingers instead of his photoreceptors. A teasing reminder of I-Five’s supposed property status was always sure to get a rise out of him. Lorn Pavan had considered him an equal, not a piece of equipment that could talk. According to the droid, Lorn had rescued I-Five from the not-so-tender attentions of a family of rich and spoiled children who liked to order their “toys” to jump off roofs and make bets on which ones would wind up scrap metal. Must’ve gone through a lot of droids that way, the Sullustan thought. During their time on Coruscant the droid and the Corellian had been a team, aiding and abetting the flow of black- and gray-market information through various underworld channels. They’d made a decent living at it, according to I-Five, until they’d come into possession of a certain Neimoidian holocron and realized too late that the stakes had suddenly become much, much higher than they were used to dealing with.
I-Five had never elaborated much