Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters (29 page)

She was incompetent, 4-LOM reasoned. She should not be allowed to own things she would not care for. 4-LOM grew increasingly concerned for the Ankarres Sapphire: her most valuable jewel, and one that meant a great deal to many people. He calculated the likely time and place of the jewel’s theft, if it were to take place on this flight, then surreptitiously substituted a cheap synth-sapph with a tracking device embedded in it for the real jewel—moments before the theft took place. Two Corellian scoundrels did steal the “sapphire” exactly when 4-LOM calculated someone would, but the synth-sapph emitted an ultrasonic distress call that brought help—unwanted help—rushing to the Corellians.

Only then was the theft discovered. Dom Pricina never missed the Ankarres Sapphire till the captain of the
Kuari Princess
himself returned “it” to her. 4-LOM stood nearby, the real jewel suspended in a black pouch hung at his side. Dom Pricina recognized at once that the synth-sapph was a fake. She rushed to her room and discovered that the real jewel was missing. She sobbed and begged anyone who listened to help her find that jewel.

4-LOM reasoned that he should return the sapphire at once. He had, after all, stopped an unfortunate crime and thus successfully completed an entire program sequence of his own devising.

But other programs flooded into his brain: Dom Pricina
was
careless. Most humans were careless. They did not properly value or guard the wondrous things they could possess. Surely he should guard the sapphire a while longer. 4-LOM studied the sapphire whenever he found himself alone. Its facets intrigued him. They sparkled in the dimmest light. Once he touched the sapphire to his own forehead, but felt nothing unusual: it was a beautiful stone held against his metal faceplate, nothing more. It might cure sick humans, he reasoned, but he, a droid, could expect nothing from it.

Still, he did not return the jewel. It was never discovered. No one suspected 4-LOM of the theft. For months afterward, 4-LOM stole from the passengers he “served,” telling himself he had to help protect things of value. But he found the thefts exciting.

Thievery was a very human act, after all, and he suddenly understood its pleasures. Doing it required 4-LOM to create elegant, complicated programs that bypassed all his ethical—all his droid—programming. Little by little, 4-LOM reprogrammed himself to find crime exciting, to value the possession of things, to despise careless nonmechanical sentients. He soon grew bored with the now predictable options for crime aboard the
Kuari Princess
and jumped ship at Darlyn
Boda. In that planet’s steamy, criminal underground, 4-LOM sold most of the jewels he had stolen, left the others on consignment, and began a life devoted entirely to crime and its excitement.

He was so successful, he calculated, that an alliance with Jabba the Hutt became inevitable. When the offer did come, 4-LOM quickly accepted. Jabba had him fitted with deadly combat weapons and the programs that ran them in return for 4-LOM’s services as a bounty hunter. Working with Zuckuss was the next logical step. From a careful study of Zuckuss, 4-LOM planned to learn the ways of intuition.

He carefully stored all visual and auditory input from and around Zuckuss in the moments just before and after he fired the decisive shot at the retreating Rebel transport—the moments of intuition. 4-LOM would study them, with all the other data on Zuckuss’s intuition he had collected from years of observation.

It was more raw data obtained in his quest for understanding. Understanding would come to him, he believed. One day the methods of intuition would become apparent, and he would use them.

He wondered what new skill he would work to acquire then?

Darth Vader’s black ship, the
Executor
, came within visual range, and 4-LOM initiated docking procedures. Even as he worked, subprocessors in his artificial mind computed the answer to his last question. Suddenly he knew what skill he would pursue after he mastered intuition.

It was the only logical answer, after all.

He would learn the ways of the Force. Its dark side would be a great ally to him in his work.

Once away from 4-LOM, alone with his pain, Zuckuss stopped and held on to a handrail. The pain in his
lungs was growing much worse, more difficult to control. The oxygen burns could not heal.

He knew he had to hide this weakness from the other bounty hunters, and especially from Darth Vader. But, he realized standing there, not moving because of his pain—he was hiding the worsening extent of his injuries from 4-LOM, too.

Zuckuss was surprised 4-LOM had stayed with him at all after he got hurt. 4-LOM told him calmly one day, in his droid’s logical, unemotional voice, that he estimated other bounty hunters would take 1.5 minutes to complete plans to exploit Zuckuss’s weakness and draw off their clients—or attempt to steal their ship and equipment and any remnants of fortune—should they gain knowledge of Zuckuss’s troubles.

Zuckuss never asked, but he was sure the droid had also calculated their diminishing chances for success in Hunts for bounty—Hunts in which 4-LOM had to do more and more of the work. If they were not successful in this Hunt, if they did not get the necessary resources to buy new lungs, Zuckuss believed his injuries would finally become so debilitating that 4-LOM would calculate no further profit in maintaining their partnership. The droid would leave. On that day, Zuckuss told himself, he would ask 4-LOM to calculate his chances for survival alone. He would want to know the odds to prepare himself. He would have only days, perhaps, but it comforted him to think that, under those circumstances, the injuries that ate away at his life would never kill him.

Zuckuss made his way to his bunk and his medicines. He gave himself a shot of pain killer, then sat on his bunk. He felt the drug race through his system, numbing his chest and lungs. Suddenly he could breathe the sweet ammonia in his ship a little easier. How he missed the ammonia mists of his own gas planet. For three Standard centuries, his family had worked there as findsmen: bounty hunters who meditated on the location
of acquisitions and Hunted them in the swirling mists of Gand.

But the Empire took over Gand and brought in their excellent scanning equipment. It looked as if the time-honored tradition of findsmen would die. They were no longer needed. The Empire tracked acquisitions through the mists without help and without intuition.

But the profession did not die. Zuckuss and a few others took it off Gand into the wider galaxy—a place so wild, so vast, that intuition was all that could make a path across it to acquisitions no scanners could locate, all that could read the intentions of alien races, all that could give hints of the future and the rewards or trials its multitudinous paths led to, the ends everyone and everything rushed toward.

Zuckuss meditated, at times, on who would eventually kill him.

He knew it was a question of
who
would kill him, not what The mists surrounding his own mortality remained mostly unreadable, though in his meditations he had had hints—and none involved accident, or mechanical failure, or even the injuries to his lungs that brought him such pain. Another being would bring him death.

Zuckuss had ruled out 4-LOM. His long-standing partner did not want to kill him, and would not when they separated. But twice Zuckuss had sensed that Jabba the Hutt would grow impatient with his weakness, if he discovered it, and attempt to feed him to his Rancor. That was a future he preferred to avoid. He sensed that he would not be killed in the mists of his own world, however much he missed Gand and would have liked to die there. He would die somewhere else. He wondered for a time if Darth Vader would kill him, but he knew he had nothing to fear from Vader, at least for now.

When he could, Zuckuss stood up and injected himself with stimulants, then other drugs to boost the
quickness of his mind and counteract the dulling effects of the pain killer. He heard the first mechanical sounds of docking, and the ship jerked about.

He hurried to pull on the suit that protected him from oxygen and double-checked its seals. He could afford no more burns. He pulled on old robes, then hid knives in his boots, ammonia bombs—lethal to oxygen breathers—up his sleeves. He strapped a fully charged blaster at his side, in full view. Then he started for the hatch. He heard 4-LOM already walking toward it.

Zuckuss walked easier now. He breathed without pain. His stride soon carried him with all the seeming confidence and strength he had ever had, and for a moment he almost forgot the weakness he worked so hard to conceal.

He realized, then, walking toward the hatch and a meeting with Darth Vader, that he worked hard to hide his injuries and their implications from one other person.

He realized that, when he could, he hid them from himself.

When Toryn Farr regained consciousness, the transport was cold. Very cold.

But there was still air. They could still breathe.

For now.

Some of them would live, for a time.

Toryn pushed herself up off the deck and looked around. Dim emergency lights glowed from the ceiling above her, but stopped maybe three meters up the aisle from where she sat. It was dark past that point. The readouts of instrument panels glowed and blinked in that blackness. Out the viewport, she saw stars roll by. What was left of the
Bright Hope
was spinning out of control and heading for who knew what.

And there would be no rescue.

No one from the Rebellion could come back for them.

When the Empire realized there were survivors on this ship and came for them, they would be interrogated, tortured, and executed. The Empire would pull in every ship to take prisoners, access remaining computer systems to steal information: but especially to capture intact droids to download their databases. The Rebels did not have much time to find a way to save themselves, if they could, and to erase all computer systems and surviving droids if they could not.

Samoc moaned. She was still alive. A cupboard had broken away from the wall just ahead of them and smashed into the deck, spilling brown bantha-wool blankets and white pillows. Toryn took a blanket and wrapped Samoc in it. Samoc’s burns still had not been treated. She was shaking.

Shock, Toryn realized. Samoc was in shock.

“Hang on, Samoc,” Toryn said.

“This goes on and on,” Samoc whispered.

“What do you mean?” Toryn asked. She leaned closer to hear Samoc’s answer.

“We’re still alive. The Imperials are having a hard time killing us.”

They had downed Samoc’s snowspeeder, but she had lived. They barely missed shooting them in the hangar—then they blew up most of the transport, but still they were alive.

“I’m wondering how the Imperials will finally do it,” Samoc said.

Toryn stood up. She did not want to think about that. Soldiers in a war often die. Every Rebel knew that when he or she joined the Rebellion. Still, you always expected someone else to die: not your friends, not your sister—not you, yourself. Toryn and Samoc, for all their battles, had never been this close to death.

Toryn reached down to pull the blanket a little tighter around Samoc. “I’ll go look for something to
put on your burns,” she said. “And I’ll look for something we might do to save ourselves. Who knows?”

Samoc tried to smile.

Other people moaned around them. The ship had been so crowded. There were probably many survivors on it, Toryn thought. She took blankets to two other people, then hurried to the instruments she saw blinking in the darkness ahead of her. One was an old-model hacker droid, adapted to record freight shipped or unloaded. Now, though, it was connected to the central computer, if
that
still existed in any coherent state, and from the central computer she could get information she needed.

“Droid,” she addressed it, “access the central computer and determine whether we are in danger of further attack.”

“Access restricted. Prepare for retinal scan preauthorization,” the droid said.

Toryn stared into a bright light that shone out of the hacker droid’s face. She hoped the central computer’s memory was intact enough to recognize her, grant her the necessary authority, and do what she asked it to do.

“Authorization through level eight systems granted, Controller Toryn Farr,” the droid said. “But I cannot answer your question. Data on surrounding ships, if any, is unavailable.”

The scanners were destroyed or offline.

“How much of the ship is intact?” she asked.

“Freight decks one and two completely intact. Passenger deck one is 17.4 percent intact.”

“How many survivors are there?”

“Data on survivors is unavailable.”

“How long will air last on the intact decks?”

“Data on oxygen supplies is unavailable.”

“Are we on a collision course with—anything: other ships, Hoth, the star of this system?”

“Data on the ship’s present course is unavailable.”

So much that they needed—information, repair
equipment, air, probably—would be unavailable. Toryn thought for a moment for a question she could ask that the droid or the computer might be able to answer.

“Are any escape pods functional and accessible from the intact decks?” she asked.

“Three escape pods are accessible from the intact portion of passenger deck one; however, the pods cannot be fired.”

At last some information she could use. “Why can’t the pods be fired?”

“Data on why the pods cannot be fired is unavailable.”

She had to get up there to find out.

“Attempt to compute answers to all my previous questions,” she told the hacker droid. “I’m going to investigate the escape pods, and I will check in with you again shortly for answers.”

She had to take charge of the situation and start to marshal the resources at hand. It was Rebel procedure, in a situation like this, for anyone with rank to assume he or she was in command till they met someone with higher rank.

So she took charge.

For now, she thought. Just for now. Surely someone else with higher rank had survived to help find a way to save everyone alive on the ship.