Star Wars the Truce at Bakura - Kathy Tyers [11]
Entechment work never ended. Life energy, like any other, could be stored in the right kind of battery. But brain wavelength electrical activity, which accompanied life energy into the droid charges, eventually set up destructive harmonics. The droids’ vital control circuits “died” of fatal psychosis.
Still, human energies lasted longer than any other species in entechment, whether slaved to shipboard circuits or motivating battle droids.
Deck 16 of the huge battle cruiser finally whistled an answer. Firwirrung pressed his three-fingered foreclaw against a button. The catchment arc fell silent. The lucky human’s life energy was even now sparking in a reservoir coil behind one small pyramidal battle droid’s sensor clusters. Now he’d be able to see at additional wavelengths and in all directions. He would never again need oxygen or temperature control, nourishment or sleep. Free from the awkward necessity of will, of ever making his own decisions, his new housing would respond to all Ssi-ruuvi orders.
Perfect obedience. Dev bowed his head, wishing it were him. Droid ships suffered no sadness or pain. A glorious metamorphosis, until one day enemy laser fire destroyed the coil … or those destructive psychotic harmonics unlinked it from control circuits.
Firwirrung retracted catchment arc, IVs, and restraints. Dev pulled the body husk off the chair and slid it into a hexagonal deck chute. It thumped away into blackness.
Tail-down relaxed, Firwirrung swept away from the table. He poured a cup of red ksaa while Dev brought down a nozzle arm and sprayed the chair several times. Biological byproducts flushed harmlessly through drains in the center of the seat.
Dev raised the spray arm, locked it at standby, then waved at a switch for the chair to warm itself dry. “Ready,” he whistled. Eagerly he turned to the hatchway.
Two small, young P’w’ecks brought in the next prisoner, a wrinkled human with eight closely spaced red and blue rectangles on the breast of his green-gray Imperial tunic, and a disarrayed shock of white hair. He struggled to wrench his arms out of his guards’ foreclaws. The tunic provided pitifully little protection. Red human blood welled through his skin and torn sleeves.
If only he knew how unnecessary all this resistance was. Dev stepped forward. “It’s all right.” He held his paddle-shaped ion beamer—a medical instrument that could double as a safe shipboard weapon—in the blue-and-green side stripes of his long tunic. “It’s not what you think, not at all.”
The man’s eyes opened so wide that obscene white sclerae showed all around the irises. “What do I think?” the man demanded, his feelings a Force-swirl of panic. “Who are you? What are you doing here? Wait—you’re the one …”
“I’m your friend.” Keeping his own eyes half closed to hide the sclerae (he had only two eyelids, unlike his masters’ three), Dev rested his right hand on the man’s shoulder. “And I’m here to help you. Don’t be afraid.” Please, he added silently. It hurts when you fear me. And you’re so lucky. We’ll be quick. He pressed his beamer to the back of the prisoner’s neck. Still gripping the activator, he ran it swiftly down the man’s spine.
The Imperial officer’s muscles loosened. His servant-race guards let him fall to the tiled gray deck. “Clumsy!” Firwirrung sprang forward on massive hind legs, tail stiff as he railed at the smaller P’w’ecks. Other than size and drabness, they looked almost like the masterly Ssi-ruuk … from a distance. “Respect the prisoners,” Firwirrung sang. He might be young for command rank duty, but he demanded deference.
Dev helped the three lift and position the smelly, perspiring human. Fully conscious—the catchment arc would not operate otherwise—the man wobbled off the chair. Dev caught him by both shoulders, wrenching his own back. “Relax,” Dev murmured. “It’s all right.”
“Don’t