• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Ninedenine shut down her paranoia loops. She didn’t need them anymore. Someone was out to get her.

It was time to move on again.

The GNK unit squealed a final time as it at last ceased functioning, but this time Ninedenine found no solace in its transmission. In fact, she knew the only thing that would give her solace now was removing the active circuits of the R2 unit, subprocessor by subprocessor, while the golden droid was forced to watch and upload his companion’s pain. And then, who knew? Perhaps the time had come to expand her artistic endeavors to disassembling an organic construction. Like Lando Calrissian.

Ninedenine got up from her console and walked past the smoking form of the motionless GNK unit. There was so much to do, and so few processing cycles to do it in.

Four levels down, through corridors twisted like the guts of the Sarlacc, greenly phosphorescent with drell slime, swirling with mist, and littered with the calcified, interior-support structures of organics long since deactivated, Ninedenine sought out the sanctuary of her real workshop.

There was another workshop, of course. Her public one. As much as anything in Jabba’s palace could be public. Up there, just off the main chamber, were long assembly tables and parts bins and archaic testing devices which not even a Jawa would bother to scavenge. In that workshop, the golden droid and the R2 unit would even now be having their restraining bolts installed. Though knowing Calrissian, Ninedenine assumed that the droids had already been covertly reconfigured so the bolts would have no effect. It could be done. Ninedenine had reconfigured herself in the same way.

But down here, whatever modifications those two droids might have would amount to nothing. For once droids entered this workshop, they never left. From time to time, Ninedenine thought it was unfortunate that no one else would ever appreciate what some of those droids would become down here, but what artistic achievement didn’t require sacrifice?

The entrance to the true workshop was hidden within an ancient stone wall that had once supported a palace far older than the one Jabba had made his own. How many such structures had once stood on this site, not even Ninedenine’s impressive processors had been able to compute. There was a narrow gap between two blocks of stone not native to Tatooine, where the crumbling mortar that contained traces of organic oxygen transport fluid had fallen free. Ninedenine now looked into that gap and made all three of her optic scanners blink with the appropriate code.

The wall trembled. Stone counterbalances shifted. The hidden doorway opened with a slow and echoing rumble.

Like an artist entering her studio, Ninedenine stepped into her inner sanctum.

Actual combustible torches sputtered along the drell-dripping walls of the great room, blackening the vaulted stone ceiling but ensuring that no household manager would ever detect an unauthorized use of palace power. To one side, the cages waited, and from within them came the rustlings and clankings of droids who had had their audio speakers cut out, rendering them mute, so their cries would not attract unwanted attention.

Ninedenine scanned the closest set of cages. In one, the torso of an LV3 had been cunningly severed and refitted with the manipulatory limbs of three discontinued B4Qs. The LV3’s processors could not keep up with the sensory positional demands of the extra limbs and so it constantly fell against the walls and iron bars of its cage, gears grinding out of control. From time to time, Ninedenine would activate the freakish construction’s pain-simulator button so she could appreciate the ceaseless output of disturbance and disorientation. It was like an anthem to Ninedenine, and its stirring chords brought forth associative files of her most grandiose plans for retooling whole work forces of droids, reconnecting limb after limb in a pattern of thousands to create vast undulating sheets of twisting, writhing, purposeless mechanistic movement,