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“You’re a feisty little one,” she told the R2 unit, “but you’ll soon learn some respect. I have need for you on the master’s sail barge, and I think you’ll fill in nicely.” As if to underscore Ninedenine’s pronouncement, the GNK sent out another series of circuit-melting, high-pitched squeaks as its cooling system was cruelly challenged again. Then the R2 unit silently rolled away with the second guard to the workshop, to be fitted with its own restraining bolt. Ninedenine paused as she watched the little droid roll through the doorway, puzzled that after such a strong first response, it had said nothing more in protest or in insult. Almost as if it wanted to be assigned to Jabba’s sail barge …

Ninedenine’s central processors accelerated their clock rate to sift through the data again. Her third optic scanner blinked erratically as all possible probability permutations were analyzed.

It was, she at last concluded, almost as if the R2 unit had expected to be assigned to Jabba’s sail barge.

Ninedenine shut all the doors to her dungeon. She needed time to consider this most unexpected development as her self-preservation programming loops began to run through several of her peripheral co-processors, letting their presence be known. She even filtered out the seductive distractions of the dangling courier droid as she tapped precise commands into her console, rescanning the duty-roster listing for any sign of tampering. As far as she knew, there were at present fifteen separate conspiracies under way with the goal of eliminating Jabba the Hutt as Tatooine’s preeminent ganglord, though none of them was Ninedenine’s concern. In truth, the season’s total for attempts against Jabba’s life was down a bit from previous years, perhaps a distressing sign that the blubbery green slug was slowing down in his old age and just wasn’t inspiring the manic blood feuds of old. In any event, as long as whoever replaced Jabba continued to allow Ninedenine unrestricted dominion over the droids of the palace, as any replacement was sure to do, Ninedenine simply recorded the plots against her employer and did nothing to interfere with them. This new playground she had come to was the perfect place for her, and she did not wish to jeopardize her position or her work by becoming involved in palace intrigue.

However, her heuristic subroutines had long ago learned that she must constantly be on guard for threats against her own existence. The incident in the mining colony on Bespin had taught her to pay even closer attention to seemingly inconsequential anomalies. In an organic life-form, the tendency might be called paranoia. But in Ninedenine, it was simply efficient programming, and she played that program over and over, just to be sure that someone wasn’t after her.

Ninedenine reran the roster list, expanding the data contained in it to see who among Jabba’s court had entered specific staff requests. Then she correlated those entries against staff vacancies caused by all the usual means—murder, unexplained fatal accident, ceremonial limb deletions, rancor-taunting, incendiary devices, food poisoning, and Jabba’s own whimsical sense of humor and pranks. A separate search function pulled up droid deactivations as well, of which there were many. Not all of them were the result of Ninedenine’s private explorations, either.

Ninedenine reviewed what the search revealed, then tapped a manipulatory extension against the side of her console, deep in data processing. Quite clearly, Jabba had a habit of disintegrating his protocol droids.

Some time ago, Jabba’s protocol droid had been involved in a scheme with a pair of petty thieves, which had resulted in the burning of Jabba’s Mos Eisley town house. That droid had been punished. Severely.

Then, just last season, its replacement had suffered a similar fate. From the watch report, it appeared the droid had mistranslated a Partold envoy’s compliment about Jabba being a constant giver of immense charity, confusing the ritual Partold greeting with a Huttese medical