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Contract labor. That sounded like the Corporate Sector Authority was involved. But though the Authority had been known to use contract hoaxes and deceptive recruitment, Han found it hard to believe that it would be so bold as to practice out-and-out slavery, particularly raiding a planet outside its own boundaries. That was something even the Empire couldn’t afford to ignore.

“Your board looks good to me, Solo,” Zlarb commented, studying the console. “Raise ship.”

As Han, Chewbacca, and the slavers left the passageway, Bollux still stood precisely where he had been deactivated near the ramp’s head. The restraining bolt had interdicted all his control centers, immobilizing him.

But hidden within the labor ’droid’s thorax, still functioning off his own independent power supply, Blue Max was assessing his situation. Though he realized that the emergency might mean disaster for the Falcon’s entire complement, the undersized computer probe could see little he could do to change the situation. He had no motor capability of his own and contained no communications equipment except his vocoder and various computer-tap adaptors. Moreover, Max’s own power source was minuscule in comparison to Bollux’s, and he couldn’t possibly move the labor ’droid’s body far enough or fast enough to do any good before exhausting himself.

Blue Max wished he could at least talk to his friend, but the restraining bolt’s interdiction extended to all of Bollux’s brain functions. The computer, who had seldom been separated from Bollux’s host body, felt very much alone.

Then he remembered the short bleep emitted by Bollux just before he’d been immobilized. Max ran the bleep back, slowing it by a high factor and finding, as he had thought, that it was a squirt, a burst transmission. It was garbled; Bollux had been dealing with a number of things at the time. But at length Max made sense of it and saw what the labor ’droid had been trying to do.

Blue Max linked himself in carefully with some of Bollux’s motor circuitry, prepared to withdraw and close off instantly if the bolt’s influence threatened to impair him.

But it didn’t. The restraining bolt worked against Bollux’s command and control centers, not his actual circuitry and servomotors. Still, Max knew he had a very difficult task, one that would have been impossible if Bollux hadn’t repositioned his feet at the last instant before being paralyzed.

The computer lacked the power to make Bollux’s body take more than a few steps but he did have enough to effect a single servo. Though it drained him dangerously, Max fed all the power he could into the knee joint of his companion’s left leg. The knee flexed and the labor ’droid’s body tilted. Max, trying desperately to gauge the unfamiliar leverages and angles, stopped for a moment and redirected his efforts toward the central torsion hookup in Bollux’s midsection, turning him a little to the left. That demanded so much of his scant power that Max had to pause for a moment and let his reserves build a bit.

He shut down all nonvital parts of himself to hoard the energy he needed, then addressed himself to the knee joint once more as the roar of the Millennium Falcon’s warming engines made the deckplates chatter and filled the passageway with a hollow rumble.

The ’droid’s balance passed the critical point; he tottered, then toppled to the left, landing with a clamorous din. Bollux’s body ended up resting on its left arm and side, barely stabilized by its right foot, which also touched the deck.

Max found that, with the body in this position, he couldn’t get both chest panels open, but that hardly mattered since he lacked the power to do so anyway. As it was, he had to stop twice in working the right panel outward, wait for his reserves to build up, then channel power into the panel servo. He stopped when the right panel was open sufficiently for him to see his objective.

The last move was the hardest. Max extended an adaptor to the exposed fluidics systems on which he and Bollux had been working