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By Root 1353 0

term having to do with excessive flatulence. When the last snicker had died away in the audience chamber, the mystified Partold envoy had found himself face to fang with the ever-obliging rancor beast. The next day, when the Partold tithes were not paid by a justifiably upset delegation, the mistranslation was revealed and the protocol droid was disintegrated circuit by circuit over the course of the next ten shifts, all the time protesting indignantly that it had been reprogrammed! by a palace guard.

Ninedenine didn’t quite know what to make of the droid’s reprogramming story. Jabba had discounted it. And Ninedenine had heard many strange things herself while she had disassembled still-functioning droids—though mostly they had been stories of a light and a tunnel, which she attributed to the standard, random cross-connection of failing circuits. Why would a palace guard reprogram a protocol droid to make it mistranslate compliments? Ninedenine could see no logic in it.

She next called up the case of the bartender droid required on Jabba’s sail barge—the position to which the R2 unit had just been assigned with a noticeable lack of protest.

Again the data Ninedenine accumulated were unusual. She recalled the previous bartender had been a barely sentient C5 unit, one wheel, five arms, and a single optic scanner on a stalk. It had had trouble keeping its balance and mixing a clarified bantha-blood fizz at the same time. But Salacious Crumb had enjoyed riding it during festivities, so Jabba had kept it around despite its shortcomings.

Then another watch report of considerably more interest flashed up from the console. Not five cycles ago, that same bartending C5 unit had been found in a little-used corridor in the west wing with its power circuits yanked out, beyond repair. It appeared someone had purposely terminated the bartender droid, but what could a C5 unit have done to merit such a fate? It was in no way clever enough to have made enemies of its own.

Ninedenine tapped command after command into the console, activating worm programs long dormant in Jabba’s main household system. Her logic filters detected anomalies here and she would not reduce her clock rate until she had isolated and understood them.

More watch reports flashed by on the console, followed by surveillance records; accounts owed, paid, and stolen; personnel assignments; nonvoluntary organ transplants—

Ninedenine suddenly paused, then rekeyed her previous request and backed up to the personnel records again. A palace guard had been fined five credits for being late to report for duty in the same service cycle in which the C5 unit had been terminated.

Ninedenine’s processors moved into a hyperaccelerated phase, examining each datum on a bit-by-bit basis.

Datum: Two terminated droids whose work duties exactly matched the two new prisoners brought in today.

Datum: A palace guard circumstantially connected to both terminations.

Inference: Coincidences were rarely computable.

Conclusion: But conspiracies were.

Ninedenine swiftly accessed the name of the guard who had been late for duty. Tamtel Skreej. He had been with the palace force for less than a season. His background ID had been found to be forged, though according to his duty file that was taken to be a good sign by his commander. Ninedenine didn’t like the way the data were sorting themselves. She called up Skreej’s identity file. A humanoid organic face began to form on the console display: a dark outer covering, a narrow ridge of fur above his ingestion/communication orifice, a—

Ninedenine’s internal processors missed a refresh cycle.

She recognized the organic’s face.

Baron-Administrator Lando Calrissian of Cloud City.

Ninedenine gripped the side of the command console as her gyros momentarily precessed and threw her off balance.

Those two new droids were in no way part of some unknown conspiracy against Jabba the Hutt.

They could only be part of Calrissian’s plot to recapture EV-9D9.

The logic of it was unassailable. There was no other possible reason why Calrissian and those