Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters (3 page)

He made a mental list of all the VIPs to whom he would show his precious new assassin droids.

Gurdun’s breathing came in short, shallow gasps, but that was primarily a function of the tightly cinched girdle at his waist, which he used to hold in his distended gut. The padded shoulders of his supervisor’s uniform protruded far beyond their actual dimensions, making Gurdun an imposing figure—or so he hoped.

His eyes were widely set, and blinked often. With his large nose and vanishingly small chin, Gurdun’s face had an outward similarity to a battleship, especially in silhouette. He used perfumed oils to grease his black hair into a neatly sculpted helmet that prevented anyone even from
thinking
about mussing it up.

“Arriving at the Holowan Laboratories, Supervisor Gurdun,” the pilot said over the cabin intercom.

His stormtrooper escort sat rigidly and looked about in nervous doubt through their white helmets. These were not the crack battle-trained stormtroopers Gurdun had requested; instead, he had been given unseasoned trainees whose aptitude skills had scored
them higher in clerking than in hand-to-hand combat. But Gurdun wouldn’t need much of a military escort—especially once he had the shiny, new IG assassin droids in his keeping. He couldn’t conceive of a more powerful set of companions.

The specially commissioned droids had been built with money Gurdun had expertly skimmed from the gray budgets of other military programs—a process that had become more and more difficult as the Empire engaged in massively expensive debacles. But Gurdun had recently managed to liberate a few meager crumbs, enough to fund Holowan Laboratories to produce a much smaller but more precise, more deadly fighting force. The IG assassin droids would march in and annihilate targets, whichever targets Gurdun chose.

Closing his eyes, he pictured one of the IG assassin droids, a lone mechanical man, waltzing through the defenses surrounding a fortified Rebel base, blasting its way through armored doors and slaughtering single-handed all the traitors to the Empire.

Oh, it would be grand! He hoped against hope that Chief Technician Loruss had managed to incorporate a mission-recording holocam into the design so Gurdun could watch the entire devastating battle in the comfort of his own office.

The assassin droids would take a heavy toll on the Rebels, and Gurdun would be sure to make a delicious accounting, reporting it to Imperial higher-ups, even to Lord Vader himself. If the assassin droids performed as expected—and Gurdun had no reason to think otherwise—even Vader was bound to notice. Then Gurdun was sure to get the promotion he so richly deserved … which would in turn allow him finally to get the delicate surgery he so desperately needed.

“Excuse me, Supervisor Gurdun,” the pilot said, interrupting his daydreams.

“What is it?”

“There seems to be a problem, sir. We are coming in for a landing, but the Holowan Laboratories’ receiving grid does not respond. There appears to be some damage to the complex.” The pilot paused a moment. “Er, it appears to be
significant
damage, sir.”

The stormtroopers beside him in the passenger compartment fidgeted nervously.

Gurdun sighed. “Can’t everything just
go right
for once? Why do I always have to deal with such problems?”

But when the shuttle landed amidst the wreckage of the ultra-secure Holowan Laboratories—the Friendly Technology People—even Gurdun was not prepared for the devastation. His initial thought was that the Rebels had attacked. A fire had raged through the buildings. Ships were smashed on the landing grid. Some had exploded, others scored with precision blaster bolts.

As they disembarked from the shuttle, Gurdun trudged forward, looking right and left. He was dismayed to see that his stormtrooper bodyguards hung behind him. They looked around, apparently ready to bolt the moment they heard a loud noise.

Suddenly, two grimy and pale-faced security guards climbed from hiding places in the wreckage. They carried blaster rifles, but their expressions were transfixed with shock. “Help us!” the security guards wailed, rushing toward the Imperial shuttle. “Take us out of here before they come back!”

“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.”

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 the observation network responded with a query, IG-88C was able to delve deep into the code and effect his own request before the automated sensing grid could report their presence to the few human operators.

The individual IG-88s kept their computer minds linked as the plan proceeded. The defense systems of Mechis III were antiquated, installed long before the droid world became too important a commercial enterprise for anyone to consider sabotage or destruction—but IG-88’s needs were of a different order entirely.

Using the newly forged connection to the global security systems, IG-88D instantly downloaded full details of Mechis III: the industrial complexes, the assembly factories, the amount of human interference, a map of the planetary surface in various portions of the electromagnetic spectrum and, most important, a complete linear mapping—like a neural diagram—of the brainwork of the computer systems that ran Mechis III.

IG-88A took the lead and transmitted his self-replicating sentience programming into the main hubs on Mechis III, secretly taking over the vast electronic complexes and giving the immensely powerful computers something they had never conceived before—self-awareness … and loyalty.

Less than a minute after their arrival in the system, IG-88 was pleased to see that the groundwork for his total takeover had been laid.

•   •   •

The assembly line was boring as usual.

A career worker on Mechis III, Kalebb Orn had never understood why a human presence was required
here
, of all places. It seemed to serve no purpose. The droid manufacturing lines had gone without a glitch for at least the last century, but still company mandates required a human operator in some small percentage of the operations. Such as this one, chosen at random.

Kalebb Orn watched the big robotic crane arms moving, ratcheting from side to side and picking up heavy components with grasping electromagnetic claws. Everything from sheet metal and bulky armor plate to precise microchip motivators emerged from other parts of the kilometers-long facility, endlessly manufactured to never-changing specifications.

The self-designing assembly lines had grown so vast over centuries of operation, with new subsystems added, old ones enhanced, new models introduced into the production schedules and old obsolete versions phased out. Kalebb Orn did not have the mental capacity to comprehend all the manufacturing systems on Mechis III. He wasn’t sure anyone did.

For the last seventeen years he had watched bulky worker droids being assembled by the thousands. Heavy-duty engines strapped to moveable arms and legs, worker droids required nothing more than a hulking torso, a not-too-bright droid brain, and immensely strong arms. The squarish droids were amazingly strong, but after all this time Kalebb Orn was no longer impressed. He just wanted his shift to end so he could go back to his quarters, have a large meal, and relax.

Kalebb Orn’s shift ended early—but not in the way he had hoped.

Receiving a mysterious independent signal, four new worker droids, freshly lubricated and with sharp serial numbers emblazoned on their sides, rose up from the storage corral at the end of the assembly line. They
used their enormous pincer claws to rip apart the corral walls.

At his supervisory station Kalebb Orn sat up, surprised and confused. He was ostensibly here to take action in case anything unusual happened—but nothing unusual had ever occurred before, and he wasn’t sure what to do.

The renegade droids plodded across the floor, their heavy footpads thundering with their enormous weight. Their squarish heads and torsos pivoted from side to side, searching for something.

Searching for him.

“Uh … stop where you are,” Kalebb Orn said when the worker droids stomped toward him, extending their bulky metal arms and clamping pincer claws. He dug through his workstation, looking for a manual that might tell him what to do next. When he couldn’t find the manual, he decided to run.

But over seventeen years Kalebb Orn had done so little exercise that his flabby legs did not carry him far before he was out of breath.

Other worker droids came alive of their own accord from different parts of the assembly line, and soon twelve of them had surrounded Kalebb Orn, deadly arms extended. They closed on him, their pincer claws clacking with a shower of blue sparks, their tiny optical sensors glowing red.

The pincers grabbed his arms and legs and even the top of his head with a prickly electric grip. As the massive worker droids began to pull him in all different directions, disassembling the biological components, Kalebb Orn’s last thought was that the assembly line work had, in the end, not been so boring after all.…

The administration office on Mechis III was at the top rotunda of a gleaming crystal and durasteel tower, providing a view across the industrial wasteland. The corporation
thought that managerial offices were supposed to tower high above other buildings, but otherwise its height served no purpose.

Inside an office filled with plush furniture, entertainment devices, and scenic images of tourist spots that no Mechis III administrator had ever seen, Hekis Durumm Perdo Kolokk Baldikarr Thun—the current administrator—twiddled his fingers and waited for his beloved afternoon summary report.

Though operations on Mechis III virtually never changed, and every day the afternoon report listed the same production numbers, the same lists of quotas fulfilled, the same quantities of droids shipped, Administrator Hekis looked at each report with a studied interest. He took his job very seriously. It weighed heavy on a man to know that he lorded over one of the most important commercial centers in the industrialized galaxy—even if he was only one of seventy-three humans on the entire planet.

During each work shift he attended to his job diligently hunched over his desk; in the evenings, back in his private quarters, he spent most of his relaxation hours waiting for the next shift to begin and to relieve the onerous burden of free time. At every opportunity Hekis sent reports back to company superiors, to Imperial inspectors, and to commercial scouts, anyone he could think of. Every time he felt underappreciated or insignificant in the grand scheme of things, Hekis Durumm Perdo Kolokk Baldikarr Thun indulged himself by adding another mythical title to his name so that when he signed documents with a flourish, the signature looked more and more impressive.