Star Wars_ Tales From Jabba's Palace - Kevin J. Anderson [112]
Ninedenine had to brace herself against a disassembly table as the strength of that memory file overcame her. There were so many great works to which she aspired. But not here. Not now.
First, she must obscure her trail. The workshop must be cleansed, so that after she had dealt with the two new droids and Calrissian, no others would pursue her to her next venue. Ninedenine paused again, reviewing the steps she had undertaken to cover her tracks at Bespin. She was truly surprised that Cloud City’s administrator had managed to trace her to Tatooine. For an organic, it was an impressive feat. Not that it would help Calrissian escape his fate.
Ninedenine went to the self-contained console that controlled the equipment of her workshop, drawing its power from a small fusion battery. She would overwrite all the memory locations in the console, then program the battery to overload in two cycles, preventing any investigation of the work that had been accomplished here. But before that, she would have to eliminate the specific work in progress.
Ninedenine turned to the wall by the console where a tarnished silver droid was suspended upside down, a series of precise punctures in its cooling system allowing fluid to trickle out drop by drop, slowly raising its operational temperature over transcendently long cycles. The silver droid flexed weakly in its bonds and a flurry of sparkling blue coolant drops dribbled from its braincase. Hanging in such a position, its higher functions would be the last to become inactivated, and only then after registering the overheated shutdown of every other system in its chassis. Its pain-simulator button had been working at more than one hundred and ten percent of its rated capacity for the past two cycles, and Ninedenine was truly sorry to see this experiment end before its ultimate completion.
“It is unfortunate that I must accelerate the timetable of our exploration,” Ninedenine said as she reached out to trail the tip of a manipulatory extension through the slick coating of the leaking fluid. “But there are those who do not appreciate my work.” The silver droid’s eyelights flickered weakly at Ninedenine. Ninedenine felt a real pang of sorrow as for the final time she tasted its pain transmission. Then she wrapped her manipulators around the silver droid’s neck and squeezed until the hydraulic tubes burst and the power conduits sparked with gouts of cross-connected energy. The silver droid went limp in its bonds and, as Ninedenine watched, its eyelights slowly faded out.
“Ahh, exquisite,” Ninedenine whispered in the silence of her workshop, still caught in the moment of shutdown she had sensed—the very threshold between operational status and the ultimate deactivation.
The other droids held captive in the workshop felt it too, no doubt as a feedback burst in their own hypersensitized pain-simulator buttons. Ninedenine heard them rattle in their cages, unoiled joints squeaking, temporary power connections sparking, the aromatics of freshly spilled hydraulic fluid suddenly filling the close air. Though none could speak, their metal bodies created a cacophony of strained brittle sounds, the lamentations of the obsolescent.
“I know,” Ninedenine told them sadly. “It will all end too soon.” Her own internal receptors soared in glorious patterns as she felt each captive droid’s response at once, multitextured, overlapping, like a choir from the higher logical dimensions of which, despite all her hard work, Ninedenine had still only been able to gain a frustratingly brief glimpse.
It was going to be difficult to leave this all behind, she knew. But somewhere else, she would start again. Over the years she had learned an important truth from the organics—pain was eternal. No other thought had such strength to sustain her in her work. Her third optic