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“Who?” Gurdun said. He grabbed the haggard security guard by the collar, and the man dropped his weapon. The blaster rifle clattered on the pitted permacrete surface.

The pathetic guard raised his hands in surrender. “Don’t hurt me. All the others are dead. Don’t kill us, please!”

Gurdun said, “I’ll kill you if you don’t tell me what happened here!”

“Assassin droids,” the guard stammered and then gestured to the burned-out shell of the laboratory complex. “They went renegade! They broke loose. Everyone’s dead—scientists, technicians, guards—except for us two. We were on perimeter search, and we heard the fighting. We raced back, but by the time we got here the battle was over. The droids had escaped, and everyone else was murdered.”

“That is what assassin droids do, you know.” Gurdun released the security guard’s collar.

The man stumbled, then fell to his knees. “Take us out of here, please! They might return.”

Instead, Gurdun gestured toward the stormtrooper escort, who followed him reluctantly into the collapsing inner complex. The huge durasteel door had been completely torn from its socket and tossed across the computer-filled room. Nothing seemed to be functional. Bodies lay everywhere in darkening, drying pools of blood.

“Escaped,” Gurdun said clenching his teeth. He found what was left of the body of Chief Technician Loruss, and he raged down at the corpse. “But they were so expensive! We had a contract. You were to deliver those droids to me, not let them escape.” He growled and turned in circles, looking for some other way to vent his frustration.

Suddenly the reality of what had happened cracked through his dense wall of fantasies and self-preoccupation. “Oh, no—they’re loose!” he gasped.

The stormtroopers looked at him with their blank black eye-goggles as if Gurdun had suddenly gone stupid. “I mean they’re loose!” he said. “Do you realize what those assassin droids are capable of? They’re without programming restraints, and they’re running amok through the Empire!”

He slapped his forehead, groaning. “Somebody, find me a functional comm system. I need to send out an alert to all Imperial troops. The IG assassin droids must be dismantled on sight.”

III

Droids of all shapes, sizes, and purposes were ubiquitous across the Empire from the deepest Core Systems to the Outer Rim. Over the centuries numerous manufacturing planets had developed to fill the ever-growing demand for gigantic construction droids, heavy laborers, mechanical servants, and minuscule surveillance droids. The most important of all such droid production centers was the grim, smoke-laden world of Mechis III.

IG-88 decided the planet would be the perfect base of operations to begin a plan to transform the entire galaxy.…

The Holowan Laboratories’ courier ship streaked toward Mechis III. IG-88 and his counterparts had already studied and analyzed every system aboard the unarmed and unarmored vessel. Its designers had opted to focus on speed and evasion, rather than combat or defense. The ship was a machine, as the assassin droids themselves were, though it was simply an automated cluster of components with no hope of achieving sentience.

Nevertheless, the craft served its purpose, taking them to their destination in record time. The IG-88s knew exactly how far they could push the engines, riding the limits to structural tolerances rather than the arbitrary red lines established by human engineers. The courier ship’s sophisticated comm systems and stealth shielding allowed the droids to remain hidden on approach. Mechis III would be the first step in a grand plan.

As they shot toward orbit like a hurled javelin, the four identical IG-88s manned separate communications systems. Each knew the delegated steps for the takeover. Speed was the utmost requirement right now—and the IG-88 assassin droids were very good at speed.

IG-88C struck the first blow, sending a tight-beam transmission to Mechis III’s global defense network, requesting an override and a cancellation of all intruder alarms. The moment