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The Iopene Princess was a Mining Guild cutter, with bulbous, state-of-the-art hyperdrive units, asymmetrical, bristling with scanners and probes, designed for hard vacuum, not for atmosphere. And it wasn’t scheduled to leave until tomorrow, after Calrissian had made his annual payment to keep the Guild from organizing his workers.

“She hijacked the Guild cutter …?”

Lobot’s attachments flickered crazily, then he looked away, unable to meet Calrissian’s eyes. That was exactly what had happened.

Stealing the transport shuttle had been another diversion. Now the security patrols were too far gone to ever double back in time to stop the Iopene Princess from leaving the atmosphere and making the jump to hyperspace. No wonder the prisoner hadn’t tried to destroy the entire city. She needed time to make her escape. But not very much time.

Somehow, in the tenth-of-a-shift cycle that had transpired since the first alert had come from the Security Tower, the prisoner had managed to override clearances on two flight platforms, remotely pilot a shuttle to draw away the security patrol, and take over the most heavily secured vessel in the city. What kind of a mind were they dealing with?

Then he remembered: the kind of mind that had destroyed a quarter of Cloud City’s droid population without falling under the slightest suspicion, until a junior security officer had just happened across the evidence—by accident.

Brilliant wasn’t the word for it.

Neither was genius.

The only term that came to Calrissian’s mind was: tortured. There was no other word to describe what had happened to those droids, either.

Random moved to Calrissian’s side. He could feel her shiver beside him, though the rising night wind was warm.

“We’ll never catch her, will we, sir?” she said.

Calrissian put his arm around her, for comfort, nothing more. “No,” he admitted. “But I’ll put her I.D. all over the webs. Everyone will know about her.”

“You think no one else has tried that before?”

Calrissian knew Random was right. No doubt that’s why the prisoner had chosen Cloud City in the first place—a tiny mining colony, too small to attract Imperial notice, too far off the beaten hyperlanes to have heard the stories of a vicious, unknown force that had scourged a hundred worlds before it. But perhaps that’s where the prisoner’s eventual downfall would lie. Slowly the possibilities for where she could operate unrecognized would dwindle. Eventually, she would have nowhere to run. But that would be in the future. For now, it was a big galaxy.

The cutter banked slowly by the edge of the city, as if deliberately taunting Calrissian, then sped up on a rising arc, ripping through cloud banks, leaving a vapor trail in the dusk like a stream of blood.

Calrissian turned back to the main portal. He had the guild council to placate, the threat of a strike to avert. His former security chief was gone and there was no telling where she would turn up next. Though Calrissian was certain that wherever it was, if the universe had a bright center, it would have to be the world farthest from it, because only there would something as evil and as cunning as the droid EV-9D9 find a home. And wherever that world was, Calrissian hoped it was somewhere he himself would never have to go.

He had a bad feeling about it.

Years later, at the edge of Tatooine’s Dune Sea, deep in Jabba’s dungeon, EV-9D9 had a bad feeling, too. And she welcomed it. For each stuttering squeal of despair from the GNK Power Droid was like a surge of fresh current through EV-9D9’s circuits. Bad feelings were what she existed for.

The darkly colored humanoid droid, known here as Ninedenine, looked past her command console in the dungeon’s main hall to see the GNK unit slowly rotated to expose the ventral surfaces of its ambulatory appendages. The appendages readjusted their relative positions furiously, uselessly, trying to reorient their center of gravity back to an operational norm. And unlike any droid before or since, unlike any behavior that could be predicted by a logical engineering