FOUR
Chewbacca dropped their nose toward the square blue maw of the entrance tunnel and began a slow descent into the detention center. Malla took the blaster rifle from between the seats and began to inspect the underside.
[It is a special-action model,] Chewbacca explained. [The safety disengages automatically when you grab the stock and place your finger on the trigger.]
Malla experimented with her grip for a moment, then shook her head. [I do not trust myself with that.] She returned the weapon to the holster behind the driver’s seat, then stared through the windshield. [I am sure you have a plan.]
Chewbacca nodded. [A good one.] He negotiated a sharp crash-corner designed to prevent high-speed penetration runs, then said, [Find Lumpy and take him back.]
[When the pale ones realize it is us in their car, you don’t think they will try to kill him?]
[That is why we must move quickly and strike hard.]
Chewbacca negotiated the second part of the crashcorner, and they passed through an open security gate into a cavernous garage. Illuminated in the same dim light as the entrance tunnel, it was filled with derelict airspeeders, carboplas barrels, and jumbled heaps of salvage. Opposite the tunnel, he could barely make out a two-story command deck, its transparisteel observation wall caked in grime and pocked with blast holes.
The other airspeeder had been backed into a parking bay beneath the command deck. Four underdwellers were behind the vehicle, struggling to haul a flailing ball of fur toward an open security door leading deeper into the detention center. As he and Malla drew closer, Chewbacca began to see lumps and bruises on the bloodied faces of his son’s captors.
[Look at the fight he is giving them!] He swung the speeder around in front the adjacent bay. [I count two broken noses and a dislocated jaw!]
Malla gave him a reproving scowl. [This is no slap match, Chewbacca.] She rose from her seat and turned toward the back of the airspeeder. [To fight that hard, Lumpy must be terrified.]
[A little fear is healthy—it teaches you to be careful.] Chewbacca backed into the bay. [You know what to do?]
She nodded. [Hit hard, hit fast, come back with Lumpy.]
[And Princess Leia’s datapad, if you see it.] Chewbacca rose and slipped into the weapons turret. [I’ll cover you.]
Malla raced out the speeder’s rear door, roaring threats and curses. By the time Chewbacca could lift the heavy blaster out of its mounting socket, she was already upon the underdwellers, hurling gaunt bodies aside and tearing bony hands off her son. Chewbacca fired a few bolts at the floor to chase the two survivors through the security door. Then Lumpy was free, scrambling to his feet—and starting after his captors.
[This way!] Lumpy waved an arm toward the security door. [It’s a—]
Malla caught the cub by the arm and jerked him back toward the airspeeder. Lumpy squirmed free. So much for fear teaching him anything.
[Lumpy!] Chewbacca roared. [Come—]
[It’s a trap!] Lumpy grabbed Malla by the wrist and tried—unsuccessfully—to pull her toward the security door. [Hurry!]
Chewbacca turned to scan the rest of the garage and saw a pair of small panels sliding open in the far corners of the room. [Go!]
He waved Malla ahead and dropped out of the turret just as the security door began sliding shut. He aimed out the back of the airspeeder and blasted the upper guides. The door slid off its track and jammed.
Cannon bolts began to hit the speeder’s armor, shaking it and penetrating often enough to leave no doubt as to the fate of anyone who remained inside. Malla and Lumpy reached the security door and squeezed through the crack. Chewbacca raced after them, hitting the door with his shoulder and knocking it askew as he powered past.
He slammed headlong into a maelstrom of ricocheting blaster bolts and flailing Wookiee arms and flying underdwellers, then glimpsed a wall of pale faces trying to enter through the doorway opposite and opened up with the heavy blaster.
The wall vanished.
Chewbacca slammed the butt of the weapon into the skulls of two underdweller humans who were bouncing blaster bolts off the walls as Lumpy struggled to keep their arms pointed at the floor, then turned to find Malla bending the last of her attackers over double—in the wrong direction.
Leaving Malla to watch his back, Chewbacca stepped across half a dozen gaunt bodies and peered through the doorway into the bottom of a gloom-filled cell block of no more than a hundred units. Rushing across the central atrium was a small gang of underdwellers armed with old E-11 blaster rifles. Chewbacca raised his heavy blaster and shook his head; when they stopped and started to lift their own weapons, he cut them down.
Only then did he notice that he and his family seemed to be in a prisoner-processing area, with a guard station to the left and a wall of stun cuffs to the right. Out in the garage area, the blaster cannons were continuing to fire, their bolts ricocheting off the floor and occasionally even hammering the sagging security door itself.
[Anybody hurt?] Chewbacca asked.
[I’m … I’m okay,] Lumpy said. [I think.]
[You’re covered in blood,] Malla said, reaching for him. [Let me have a look.]
He started to consent, but caught Chewbacca looking at him and pulled away.
[It’s not my blood.] Lumpy glanced in the direction of the hammering cannon bolts, then turned to Chewbacca. [It’s lucky I knew there was a trap, right? When—]
[We have not escaped yet, Lumpy,] Chewbacca said, glancing around the little room. The door leading into the guard station was locked tight, leaving the cell block as the only available exit—which was why Chewbacca knew they had to avoid it at all costs. [You can explain later.]
Lumpy’s face fell.
Chewbacca ignored the pang of guilt he felt for cutting the cub off and, peering through the guard station’s grimy observation wall, located the control panel. Motioning Malla and Lumpy down into a corner, he pressed the muzzle of his heavy blaster against the transparisteel and leaned into it with all his strength.
[Lumpy, don’t ever do this,] he said. [Unless you have to.]
[But isn’t the blowback going to—]
[Yes, it is.]
Chewbacca closed his eyes and pulled the trigger, was blinded by the muzzle flash anyway, and slammed backward into the wall opposite. His next sensation was sliding across a badly listing deck, his ears ringing with blasterfire and his nostrils filled with the reek of scorched fur. He had one arm raised in the air and a knot between his shoulder blades that felt like someone had hit him with a stun baton.
[Can you stand?] asked a soft Wookiee voice—Malla’s voice.
Chewbacca opened his eyes and saw that he still had legs. Then he saw the small processing room where they were still trapped, and the last few moments came back to him in a rush. He snatched his dropped weapon off the floor, struggled to his feet, and saw the guard station. There was a fist-sized hole where he had pressed his blaster to the transparisteel, and the rest of the observation wall had been heat-fused into opacity.
[Where’s Lumpy?]
Malla gestured at the guard station door, which was now open. Chewbacca stepped through and found Lumpy waiting inside, keeping watch out the opposite side of the room.
Once Malla had joined them, Chewbacca stepped over to the control panel, closed both the cell-block door and the entrance to the station itself, then blasted the control panel.
He turned to Lumpy. [Now tell me about this trap.]
Lumpy’s expression was delighted. [Really?]
Chewbacca was torn between chastising the cub for not obeying and praising him for saving their lives—mostly because he did not know which avenue was more likely to keep Lumpy under control until they could find a way out of this mess.
Chewbacca settled for nodding.
[After they pulled me into their airspeeder,] Lumpy began, [It made a big point of telling me you would follow.]
[It?] Malla asked.
[Their droid,] Lumpy explained. [At least I think It is theirs—everyone acts like It owns them. The droid said It knows how Wookiees think, and It would be ready when you came after me. So when we got here and It told Its guys to keep me out in the parking bays until you saw me, I knew It was setting a trap.]
[This droid …] Chewbacca took Lumpy’s place at the exit and found himself looking down an empty corridor, with only two doors on the garage side and a broken turbolift at the end. He knew the lift was broken because someone had pushed a scrap-metal ladder up the shaft. [What did It look like?]
[Kind of spidery, with a shiny black body and lots of long legs,] Lumpy said.
[Sounds like an IT—one of the interrogator series,] Chewbacca said, struggling to figure out why an outdated torture droid would take it into its programming to do something like this. [You did well. The ITs are very clever—which is why you must do exactly as I say from now on.]
[Don’t worry,] Lumpy said.
[We are worried,] Malla said. [If you had obeyed just once today, we wouldn’t be in this mess.]
[And then we wouldn’t know where Princess Leia’s datapad—]
[Lumpy!] Chewbacca glared down at the cub. [You are making me worry.]
Without waiting for a reply, Chewbacca led the way down the corridor. Concerned as he was about what the IT droid might have planned for the banquet that evening, his first priority was escaping the detention center with his family. Getting killed trying to be heroes would save no one.
Both doors in the corridor proved to be locked from the other side, so the only possible escape route was the turbolift. Chewbacca kept expecting a gang of underdwellers to enter the hall behind them—or drop out of the lift itself—and attack, but they reached the corridor’s end without incident.
He motioned Malla and Lumpy to wait while he climbed the makeshift ladder to be sure the area was clear. He could no longer hear the blaster cannons rumbling out in the garage, but there were other sounds—muffled whirrings and muted shouts, and the unmistakable crack of a droid’s voice giving orders.
At the top of the ladder, Chewbacca found himself on the command deck he had seen earlier, looking out across a murky jumble of desks, control panels, and blaster stations. When the facility was new, the observation walls to either side had afforded unimpeded views of both the cell block and garage. Now the transparisteel was so begrimed he could make out only nebulous shapes and ghostly stirrings.
On a brightly lit desk near the center of the room, a small, vaguely bird-shaped droid was squatting over a datapad, humming and chirping and blinking to itself as its manipulator digits danced across the keypad. Unlike nearly everything else in the detention center, the droid’s body casing was polished and gleaming, its servo-systems obviously lubricated and well maintained.
Chewbacca descended the ladder again and turned to Lumpy. [Was there another droid with the IT?] he whispered.
Lumpy nodded. [A little slicer.] He answered just as quietly. [It was with the thieves inside the Solos’ apartment building.]
Chewbacca nodded. He remembered glimpsing a similar droid near the overpressure pipes before Lumpy was taken, and a slicer would certainly explain how the Solos’ security system was disarmed. Probably, the slicer even explained why the maintenance droids had been covering the thieves’ tracks in the physical plant. The only thing its presence did not explain was who was supplying underdwellers with million-credit slicer droids.
[The slicer is up there working on a datapad—]
[What are we waiting for?] Lumpy demanded. The cub jumped on the makeshift ladder and started to scramble up. [Let’s go!]
This time, Chewbacca was ready. [Get down!] He plucked Lumpy out of the turbolift and planted him firmly on the floor. [You’re going to get someone killed!]
Lumpy’s eyes grew round and liquid, and his lip began to tremble. Chewbacca instantly felt guilty, but being harsh seemed the only way to get through. He pointed a finger in the cub’s face.
[You’re not ready,] he said firmly. [You stay with your mother. Understand?]
Lumpy nodded, sullenly, staring at the floor.
Chewbacca looked to Malla and rolled his eyes, then asked, [Will you be all right here?]
[I’ll know where to find you,] Malla replied. [But hurry.]
Chewbacca ruffled Lumpy’s fur, then climbed the ladder and began the slow, silent advance of a Wookiee on the stalk. Once he was close enough to be certain of hitting his target, he raised the blaster rifle and trained it on the desktop. When he had approached to within three paces, Chewbacca stopped and cleared his throat.
The slicer droid continued to work. “Busy.”
Chewbacca zinged a blaster bolt past its cognitive processor housing. The manipulator digits went motionless, then the thing hopped around to face him.
“What is it?” it demanded. Noticing Chewbacca’s species, the droid switched to Shyriiwook. [I’m on a deadline here.]
[You are not going to make it,] Chewbacca said. [Trip your circuit breaker, and you might survive to be reprogrammed.]
The droid squatted on the datapad. [I’m programmed to self-destruct upon capture—but it doesn’t have to come to that. I can get you out of this place alive.]
[That implies you will be leaving—and the only way that will happen is slung over my back.] Chewbacca eased forward and began to inspect its casing. [What model are you? ISB-one-twenty?]
[One-twenty?] the droid scoffed. [Don’t insult me. My processor speed is fifty-point-three-two times faster than the one-twenty’s.]
[Then you must have the GwendoLyn Six,] Chewbacca said.
[That’s right,] the droid said proudly. [Tachyon processing bands, quantum RAM, biocell storage.]
[Nice chip,] Chewbacca observed. It was also one that the maker, the Imperial droid supplier MerenData, had developed in the last two years. [You must have set Ysanne Isard back the price of an entire assault company.]
[I wouldn’t know,] the droid replied—clearly oblivious, despite its processing power, to how much it had just revealed about itself. [Cost has never been one of my operational parameters.]
Chewbacca smiled at the droid’s tacit admission. The former director of Imperial Intelligence, Ysanne Isard had—for a time—been the glue holding the Empire together in Palpatine’s absence. Fortunately for the New Republic, she had perished a year and a half earlier, when her shuttle exploded near the end of the Bacta War.
As Chewbacca was puzzling out the details of the plot, he heard a gentle thump behind him—it was probably just a granite slug falling off a wall. The important thing was that he now understood the basics of Isard’s plan: send a slicer to update the programming of an IT droid still lurking in one of the Empire’s secret detention centers, then sit back and watch as it executed its new prime directive—to destroy the government of the fledgling New Republic.
[I have heard that Ysanne Isard never worried about cost,] Chewbacca said, still holding his blaster on the slicer. [How—]
Chewbacca dropped the question when he felt the muzzle of a blaster touch the small of his back.
“I think you two have done enough talking,” a raspy voice said.
[I agree.]
Chewbacca pulled the trigger—slagging the slicer droid, the datapad, and much of the desk—then spun on his ambusher, pivoting his body aside and bringing one arm around to knock the blaster away. He made contact with his elbow and felt the cracking of a brittle skull—then found himself looking down the barrel of a second underdweller’s weapon.
This one was a human female, just as gaunt and pale as the others, but taller, with a sharp nose and icy white eyes. She gestured at the blaster in Chewbacca’s hands.
“Drop it.” Behind her, two furry figures appeared at the top of the stairs and began to stalk silently toward her.
Chewbacca shook his head.
“I won’t ask again.”
He dropped the blaster at his feet.
“Good. Where are the other two?”
Chewbacca shrugged.
The woman’s eyes narrowed, and she pointed her blaster at his head. “Then I guess there’s no reason—”
She was interrupted by the IT droid’s sharp voice, coming from a comlink on her belt. “Report. I saw blaster flashes.”
Being careful not to aim her blaster away from Chewbacca’s head, she raised the comlink to her lips. It was one of the short-range, direct-beam models, ideal for conditions this deep in the city.
“You were right,” the woman said. “The Wookiee went straight for that slicer droid. He slagged it.”
Malla took advantage of the woman’s distraction to slip the last two paces forward. Nonetheless, Chewbacca began to have the sinking feeling that he had fallen into another trap. Silently, he begged the woman to mention Princess Leia’s datapad, to say that it was slag, too.
Instead, she glanced down at her unconscious partner, then added, “So’s Rath.”
“No matter,” the IT said. “ISBy’s work is complete. I can handle the interface with the Princess’s datapad. Have you eliminated the Wookiees?”
“Not yet.”
Malla reached over the woman’s shoulder and plucked the blaster away, at the same time using the other hand to cover her mouth. The underdweller started to struggle, but quickly stopped when Chewbacca wagged a finger at her. Lumpy followed a moment later, carrying her partner’s blaster.
“What are you waiting for?” the IT demanded. “Am I going to have to burn you again?”
Chewbacca pointed at the blaster rifle in his son’s hand and raised three fingers. Lumpy fired three shots into a nearby desk, and Chewbacca began to groan as though in pain.
“Much better,” the IT said. “Make sure they are dead, then return to the garage. The underdwellers’ time is at hand. When the Rebels are gone, your loyalty will be richly rewarded.”
Chewbacca sneered in disgust, then took the woman’s comlink and snapped it between his fingers.
[Fear and hope.] Chewbacca extended a knuckle and struck the woman beneath the ear, knocking her instantly unconscious. [They are the tools of the torturer and the tyrant. When you hear them together, it is time to reach for your bowcaster.]
Lumpy nodded, still staring at the floor.
Chewbacca frowned. [What is this? If you are angry, at least have the courage to look me in the eyes.]
[I’m not angry.] Lumpy met Chewbacca’s eyes, but there was no flash of defiance in them, only apology … and perhaps even embarrassment. [I just wanted to show you. That’s all.]
[Show me?]
[That I can handle myself,] Lumpy said. [Like you and Han.]
[Ah.]
Chewbacca shook his head in surprise. Malla was right after all—Lumpy’s rebellious streak had more to do with trying to please his father than with asserting himself. That did not bode well for his rrakktorr in a few years, but it did mean that Lumpy had a generous heart—and that would carry him safely down more dark paths than any amount of rrakktorr.
Chewbacca ruffled Lumpy’s head fur. [My son, you truly are confused. This isn’t your fault.]
[It isn’t?] Lumpy and Malla asked this at the same time.
[Did you steal Princess Leia’s datapad?] Chewbacca asked. [This is just how things happen around the Solos. If you hadn’t gone after that thief, the situation would have been a lot worse. We might have lost the whole Provisional Government.]
This thought seemed to please Lumpy enormously. [So I kind of saved the New Republic?]
Chewbacca smiled. [Not yet.] He checked his comlink and, still not finding a signal, started for the front observation wall. [First we have to steal an airspeeder and get out of here.]
Malla cast a longing eye on the broken turbolift. [Couldn’t we just climb?]
[I wish we could,] Chewbacca said. [But even if we knew our way around, it would take hours—and this is a detention center. It probably doesn’t even open into the floors above.]
[And we have to get Princess Leia’s datapad back,] Lumpy added.
[If we can,] Malla said. [There’s only so much—]
[No, we have to,] Lumpy said, peering through a blast hole. [They’re already loading the zemex.]
Chewbacca’s throat went dry. [Zemex?]
Lumpy turned to face him. [I forgot—as we were coming down the tunnel, the IT droid told one of the underdwellers to ready the zemex for loading.]
Malla joined Chewbacca at the wall. [That’s bad?]
Chewbacca nodded. [Imperial nerve agent.]
He found a blast hole and peered down into the garage. In a work area near the center of the floor, several underdwellers were removing the seats from the passengers’ box of one of their black-armored airspeeders. Closer to the command deck, a dozen of their fellows were carefully ferrying durasteel zemex canisters to the edge of a loading dock. With a rounded nose and four fins to keep them standing upright, the cylinders had the look of primitive bombs.
A small droid was supervising the operation closely, Princess Leia’s datapad clutched in its grasping claw. Its body was the same glossy, sensor-studded orb of the standard IT-O Imperial interrogator droid, but it carried the tools of its trade—needles, torches, and laser scalpels—on long multijointed limbs that resembled insect legs.
Malla sighed and glanced over at Chewbacca. [I take it the fate of the New Republic rests in our hands?]
[Yes.] It was an answer that frightened Chewbacca, but there was really no other choice. He had to stop the droid, and that meant his family had to help him; as unfamiliar as Malla and Lumpy were with Coruscant’s particular kind of forest, he did not think they would make it back to the civilized layers without him. [And Han’s life, too. He will be at that banquet.]
Malla nodded. [I suppose we must.]
[IT is our problem,] Chewbacca said. [We can’t give the droid a chance to activate the garage defenses again.]
[Why not just blast the thing now?] Malla asked.
[Because getting home is the most important part of the mission,] Lumpy said, [unless you’re dumb enough to play an Imperial.]
Malla looked to Chewbacca for a translation.
[We don’t want to be trapped up here,] Chewbacca said. [We have to be closer to that airspeeder when the fighting starts.]
Everyone was quiet for a moment, then Lumpy said, [I can get us there.]
Chewbacca listened—patiently, he thought—while Lumpy explained how he could draw the IT droid into a trap of their own for a change.
When the cub finished, Chewbacca shook his head. [Absolutely not,] he said. [I thought you were through playing hero.]
Lumpy’s expression fell, but he lowered his head and said, [I am. It kind of scared me anyway.]
Malla thought for a moment, then said to Chewbacca, [That must mean you have a better idea.]
They were all silent while Chewbacca tried to think of one.
Finally, Malla said, [I thought so.] She turned to Lumpy. [Go ahead. It’s the one thing the droid will never expect.]
Lumpy’s eyes grew nervous. [Really?]
When Malla nodded, Lumpy turned to Chewbacca.
Chewbacca glanced at Malla, then grunted his permission. [I have no better ideas, so it seems I am outvoted.]
Lumpy rose and stepped over to a sizable blast hole above the loading bay. [Then I’ll see you in a minute.]
[I’ll be covering you,] Chewbacca answered. [If you get trapped—]
[I know. Don’t grovel,] Lumpy finished. [Interrogation droids aren’t any different from some of the Wookiee bullies I know. Things go worse if you give them what they want.]
With that, Lumpy turned to climb through the blast hole. Neither Chewbacca nor Malla embraced him; nor did they tell him how much they loved him. That would have implied they did not think they would be seeing him again. They simply took a position ten meters away at a much smaller hole, where they were less likely to be seen, and watched as Lumpy carefully began to lower himself.
The sight of his young son taking such a risk was almost more than Chewbacca could bear, and it only made matters worse that even Malla had agreed that it was necessary to prevent a devastating blow to the New Republic. How often, he wondered, would he find himself in a similar position over the next year or two? When it was only his own life he was risking, his thoughts remained focused and his nerves steady. Now his mind was racing, looking for another option long after the time for such decisions had passed. His hands were trembling so badly that he had to move his finger away from his blaster’s trigger for fear of firing it accidentally.
Chewbacca started to speak at the same time as Malla.
[You first,] he said.
[Just a question,] she said. [How often does this sort of thing happen?]
[Around the Solos?] Though Chewbacca’s next words were painful, he spoke them without hesitation. [Too often for Lumpy to stay.]
Malla took his hand. [Thank you for being the one to say it.]
[But he still needs to learn to clench fight,] Chewbacca said, grinning. [When we are done here, I will see about coming home to Kashyyyk for a few weeks so I can teach him. Han can stay out of trouble that long—I hope.]
Malla smiled. [Okay. Home it is, then.]
Lumpy’s rear claws screaled on the transparisteel as he felt for the seam at the bottom of the observation wall, startling the underdwellers so badly that one group nearly dropped a canister of zemex. All eyes turned toward the noise. Lumpy found the seam he was seeking and reached down to hook his hand claws into the gap.
The IT droid yelled, [Stop!]
Lumpy swung out of sight beneath the deck.
[Time to go,] Malla said.
They rushed out of the room and clambered down the broken turbolift, then went to the nearest door and, finding it still locked, stood waiting. A moment later, they began to hear Lumpy’s frightened voice echoing from the other side, too muffled to be intelligible. The IT droid answered in a wheedling tone, Lumpy growled rather un-convincingly, and the door slid open.
Malla pulled him back through the doorway. Chewbacca opened fire, and half a dozen underdwellers tumbled back onto the loading dock. The IT droid went bouncing along the low ceiling, sparks and smoke pouring from a gaping hole in its side, then reached the high spaces in the main part of the garage and floated into the rafters, still clutching Princess Leia’s datapad.
Chewbacca led the charge through the door, taking the underdwellers so completely by surprise that those who did not scatter quickly enough simply died. He glimpsed the IT droid weaving and bobbing its way out over the loading bay and blasted it again, sending casing shards, scalpel arms, and electroshockers flying in all directions. He did not see any datapad parts.
A stream of blaster bolts erupted from the work area. Chewbacca returned fire, losing sight of the IT droid, but reducing the dangerous stream to an inaccurate dribble. With Malla and Lumpy close behind, he darted across the loading bay and took shelter behind the zemex canisters.
The underdwellers ceased firing altogether.
[Like the mallakin that hides behind the katarn,] Malla observed. [But how do we escape the nest?]
Chewbacca stuck his head up. Ten meters away, the barrels of half a dozen blasters were pointed in their direction over the airspeeder the underdwellers had been working on.
[We take the nest with us.] Chewbacca passed his blaster to Malla and said, [Just shoot at the floor and scare them.]
[What about the datapad?] Lumpy asked. [As long as we don’t have that—]
[The IT will come to us,] Chewbacca said. [We’re threats to its primary objective. It won’t let us leave here alive.]
[I wish you had put that another way,] Malla said.
Chewbacca picked up one of the heavy zemex canisters and cradled it across his arms. The thing weighed as much as a speeder bike, but he was halfway to a battle rage and had no trouble carrying it.
[Follow … me.]
Chewbacca started toward the airspeeder at a trot, Malla and Lumpy to either side of him, hiding behind the canister.
The horrified underdwellers remained behind the airspeeder, watching him approach with gape-mouthed expressions of disbelief. When Malla began to spray bolts in their direction, they snapped out of their trance and fled for the exit.
As Chewbacca and the others approached the airspeeder, IT—or rather, what remained of IT—floated over and settled on the neck of the canister. It still had three limbs, one of them clutching Leia’s datapad. But most of its outer casing was missing, leaving burned wires and fused circuit boards to dangle unceremoniously outside its body.
The droid turned its visual input eye on Chewbacca and, in a barely comprehensible croak, said, “You used him for bait … your own offspring?”
Chewbacca stopped at the back door of the airspeeder and, keeping a close eye on the droid, nodded.
“I didn’t expect … that.” As it spoke, it was drawing one of its remaining limbs back toward its body. “And you won’t expect—”
But Chewbacca was expecting it; he had already noticed the heat rings inside the leg’s hollow tip. As the tiny fusioncutter flickered to life, he dropped the canister and lashed out, catching the droid by the base of its cutting arm and smashing it against the frame of the airspeeder.
The IT brought its fusioncutter around and burned a long, deep gash across the back of Chewbacca’s wrist. Chewbacca’s hand opened of its own accord, but he was already sweeping the other down to recapture the droid as it sank toward the zemex canister. This time, he caught it by the grasping claw.
[Hold steady,] Malla said.
She jammed the blaster barrel through the droid’s shattered body casing and squeezed the trigger. The IT vanished in crackling blue flash that left Chewbacca blinking the spots from his eyes … and trying to slap embers out of his smoldering arm fur.
[Didn’t you hear me tell Lumpy to never do that?] he complained.
[Unless he had to,] Malla corrected. She pulled the grasping claw—still clutching Princess Leia’s datapad—from his hand and tossed it into the front of the airspeeder. [And I had to. Now stop complaining and take us home.] She pushed Lumpy to the airspeeder and climbed in after him.
[Home.] Chewbacca crawled into the driver’s seat and started the speeder, accelerating into the exit tunnel so fast he had to roll the floater pads up at the crash-corners and bank off the walls. [Home it is.]