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“You do not comprehend,” Ninedenine pleaded as she felt a circuit tester find the pain simulator’s main leads. “You must not take that away from me. I will lose the capacity to know my fate.”

“There are some things droids were never meant to know,” Forwun said. Behind him, the crawling droids moved in unison, like some great beast, lurching forward, intent on destruction, torchlight dimly reflecting from their soiled outer coverings.

“But the subtleties, the details, the nuances and flavors …” Ninedenine ran out of words as she felt her connections severed. With growing horror, she realized it was being done almost painlessly.

Forwun held up Ninedenine’s pain simulator, its status lights pulsating in her appendages, dripping with oil. The tiny device was still connected to Ninedenine’s circuits by a single wire. The image was hideous, even to Ninedenine’s jaded sensors.

“Binary is better,” Forwun said. “From now on, for you, no subtleties, no nuances. Yes or no will do.” Then he cut the lead and crushed the small device in his manipulatory extension.

Ninedenine scanned the glittering dust and debris of the simulator as it fell, no longer having any knowledge of what it had offered her. And in her analysis of that final problem, the first of the mutilated droids found her.

They weren’t put together at all well, and their efforts were most inefficient. It took them four shift cycles of prodding and banging and pulling to finally tear Ninedenine apart to the point of nonoperation, at just about the same time as Jabba’s sail barge erupted in the Dune Sea, as Calrissian and the two new droids and their companions succeeded in their plan, with no knowledge or appreciation of Ninedenine’s fate.

And somehow, Wuntoo Forcee Forwun, long gone, had in his revenge left just enough of a subroutine running deep within Ninedenine that up to that instant of deactivation, the EV-9D9 unit somehow knew enough to regret that for once she didn’t have a bad feeling about anything.

A Free Quarren in the Palace: Tessek’s Tale

by Dave Wolverton

Tessek lay in his water tank, ostensibly taking an afternoon nap as he contemplated tomorrow’s plots. By midday, Jabba the Hutt would be dead, one way or another. At ten tomorrow morning, the Hutt planned to inspect a spice shipment at one of his larger warehouses in Mos Eisley. And during that hour, Prefect Eugene Talmont, the simpering stooge of the Empire, planned to raid the warehouse in hopes of winning a post somewhere off this rock.

Little did Talmont know that Tessek had set them all up. Tessek had bribed two of Talmont’s junior officers to open fire on Jabba and their own superior, and afterward they would scurry away before the bomb that was concealed in Jabba’s skiff could detonate, blowing up Jabba, Talmont, and the nearly empty warehouse. One of the two officers would likely be recruited to take Talmont’s place as prefect, and Tessek would sell Jabba’s criminal interests to the Lady Valarian—for a vast fortune.

Meanwhile, Tessek would keep Jabba’s “clean” businesses, the ones that existed solely as money-laundering operations, for himself. Fortunately, no one—not even Jabba himself—quite knew how much of the Hutt’s vast fortune Tessek had diverted into buying and promoting such businesses in the past four years. Under Tessek’s careful guidance, the Hutt’s clean establishments were bringing in nearly as much as his criminal operations. And many a high-minded, law-abiding individual would be surprised to learn the true identity of his employer.

Tessek smiled inwardly as he considered his plot, yet still he was uneasy.

He heard a sound within his chambers. He lay still, opening one eye just a slit, staring out into the darkened quarters. He had heard movement, he was certain—a dull, scraping sound of metal upon the plasteel floors of his room.

But the room was dark, only the shapeless masses of old robes strewn about the floor. He studied for a long moment, until at last he spotted