Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [108]
“Thank goodness we’ve finally contacted someone in authority!” cried Threepio gratefully, unhooking the straps of his mask and pulling free the blond wig. “You have no idea …”
He found himself looking down the barrels of two blasters and a disruptor.
“Don’t come any closer, droid,” snapped the captain. “Tuuve, get a restraining bolt for this one.”
“But you don’t understand!” protested Threepio. “You must communicate with the New Republic Council immediately! Her Excellency, Chief of State Leia Organa Solo, has been kidnapped! You must …”
“Not another one,” muttered the Chief Medical Officer to her captain. “What was the last one? A wrecked shipload of Carosi pups with two hours’ oxygen left? And how much tenho-root extract did that one have stashed in its casing?”
“I beg your pardon!” Threepio drew himself up to his full height, though he had been carefully engineered to be nonthreatening to a wide spectrum of sentient species, Gotals among them. “I am a certified protocol droid belonging to Her Excellency herself! The very idea that I would be programmed to smuggle illicit drugs …”
“Whoever programmed this one picked a doozy of a cover story,” remarked the captain. She nodded to the Sullustan engineer who had come up behind Threepio with a couple of restraining bolts. “Get His Excellency down to the impound hold and go over him good. And take down the serial numbers.”
She rubbed her eyes. Her thin, fleshless lips were gray with fatigue and the soft tissue around her eyes was swollen. When he considered it, Threepio supposed that operating a quarantine enforcement vessel along the perimeter of a sector involved in half a dozen separate revolts—without any centralized authority to back up her decisions—must be an extremely wearing task.
“We’ll put Enforcement on whoever he really belongs to after this is all over, but for now, tag anything you find hidden in the casings and send the microprocessors down to the lab. We need them bad. They need wiring in Maintenance, too.”
“I protest!” cried Threepio, as the Sullustan troopers laid hold of his arms. “Her Excellency has been kidnapped and …”
“Her Excellency, for your information, my friend,” said the Gotal, with a weary, gritting edge to her voice, “just transmitted authorization for our mission in this sector, under her personal seal. I’ve just spoken to her.”
“She left authorized holograms of herself for contingency purposes before she left on the secret mission!” cried Threepio. “That’s standard procedure. Of course they would need her authorization to establish a quarantine zone, but she isn’t really there! My counterpart and I are the only ones who know her true whereabouts!”
The two Gotals—members of a species notoriously distrustful of droids, an understandable prejudice given the sensitivity of their sensory organs—exchanged an eloquent glance.
“But I tell you I was there! Two battle cruisers disappeared! The Borealis and the Adamantine …”
The surgeon frowned. “Your cousin’s on the Adamantine, isn’t he, Captain?”
The captain nodded. “And the Adamantine left for Celanon at the beginning of the week.”
“That was only a cover story!” wailed Threepio, as the guards pulled him in the direction of the doors. “Her mission in this sector was top secret! The Adamantine was destroyed …”
The captain’s eyes hardened to steel. “Get him out of here,” she said softly to the guards. “Get that R2 as well, would you? You tell them in Impound to flush those microprocessors good.”
The guard saluted, and asked, “What about the Chadra-Fan they came on board with?”
The Gotal captain fished in her pocket for a slip of pink flimsiplast. Threepio thought it was a message slip of some kind, but there was no official heading,