Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [126]
The door of the warehouse hissed open. Artoo rolled immediately behind a gutted bale of dwimmery and, when Threepio showed no sign of following, reached out with his gripper arm and dragged the taller droid into concealment with him.
The creatures that entered the warehouse were unrecognizable in e-suits. They could have been anything from Sullustans to Ishi Tib, though one of them, by the nasal inflection of his voice, Threepio identified as a Rodian. What he said in that nasally voice was, “This must have come off that last ship.”
“Good,” rasped another voice, tinny through the e-suit’s voder circuit. “They haven’t been touched … no, fester it, looks like some of ’em have. Let’s see what we got.”
They entered, the tallest hauling an antigrav sledge behind him. The sodium light on the Rodian’s helmet made jarring white slices of glare, huge black rhomboids of shadow. Vermin scampered behind the crates. One of the invaders kicked aside the bodies of the dead, and while he and one comrade began systematically prying open every crate and parcel in the untouched corner, the third knelt by the bodies and checked their pockets.
“What you got there?”
“ ’Puter system. X-70.”
“Piece of garbage.” They loaded it onto the sledge nevertheless. “That silk there?”
“Yeah. What’s in the crate?”
“Looks like wafers. Company payroll records.”
“Take ’em. We’ll sell ’em wiped. What …”
The speaker turned quickly, as the door of the warehouse slid open again. Two low, blocky forms stood framed in the almost-total darkness outside—and whatever hour of the night it might be, Threepio knew that a working spaceport was never that dark. Gold rounds of light from their visual receptors identified the newcomers as droids. Both opened fire without hesitation or parlay on the looters, who fell in their tracks. The internal weapons had been reset—these droids had not fired to stun.
Threepio was so indignant he would have spoken out in protest, had not Artoo sent a quick subsonic prod with his welding arm into Threepio’s exposed wiring.
The two new droids wavered and hissed a report over their remote transmitters, then, receiving an answer, proceeded to take up where the human looters had left off, loading up the sledge with everything of value that had been in the Impardiac’s delivery, then stripping the e-suits off the looters before they left, silent as they had come.
“What in the name of the maker,” asked Threepio, “is going on?”
The streets of Cybloc XII’s main transit base were lightless, save for the occasional flicker of dying emergency circuits. Most of the docking bays were empty and dark, the buildings of its transport facilities a furtive whisper of scavengers, vermin, and occasional looters, the helmets of their e-suits glistening in the dark. The offices of the Port Authority contained horrors, bodies long dead and rotting in the alien bacteria that even the carefully controlled atmosphere of the domed facility could not completely exclude.
The Port Authority, the Republic Consular Offices, the fleet headquarters—all had been looted of their communications equipment. In the main infirmary of the base, bodies occupied every bed, every centimeter of spare floor space, every office and closet: bodies unmarked, rotting, curiously peaceful in aspect, as if they had all slipped into sleep and from there to dissolution. Those bodies, that is, that had not been turned over, tossed about, pockets and clothing checked for what they might contain. The medical equipment in every laboratory was gone or partially dismantled for its microprocessors and transistors. A couple of decapitated Two-Onebees remained in what had been the bacta-tank room—the tank drained of its fluid and bereft of its control panel—silent, their chest cavities open and dangling wires, like corpses themselves in the horrible