"What in the name of goodness happened to you?"

"A little creative reprogramming, that's all." Captain Bortrek set down his laser extractor. "And I don't give a Ranat's sneeze who you're duly registered to, Goldie. You're mine now, like your little friend..." He jerked a grimy thumb at Artoo. "And I didn't call you here from the hold to quote me some pox-festering regulation, either, you understandS. A good See-Three unit's worth a pile even without provenante, but don't think I couldn't get almost as much for your chips and wiring."

Threepio considered the matter. "Actually, sir, See-Three units with specialized programming like myself sell for a minimum, used, at forty-three thousand standard credits, Blue Registry prices. The aggregate of my components would only bring in five thousand at the very most..."

"Shut up!"

"Yes, sir."

"And come with me down to the hold. I want you to give me a valuation on every piece of that garbage so I know Sandro the Hook isn't going to cheat me once we get to Celanon City."

"Are we going to Celanon, sir? A most pleasant planet, I've been told.

It isn't necessary to return to the hold, you know. While incarcerated there I took the opportunity to price your acquisitions to the best of my knowledge-which was updated only last week from the Corus-cant Index-and the information is still in my memory."

"No lie?" Captain Bortrek tongued his scarred lip, and studied the golden droid speculatively. In the background, Artoo-Detoo made soft whirring noises indicative of intensive activity, and the ship's core computer flashed and burbled replies. "i tell you what, then, Goldie.

You come with me and we'll get that stuff sorted out, and maybe when we get to Celanon I won't sell you to a travel agent for your programming."

He stood up, and pulled from a pocket of his embroidered leather vest a small flat silver flask, from which he took a drink. By his exhalation, as he walked past Threepio and preceded him out the door, the fluid within consisted of equal parts grain alcohol, synthetic gylocal stimulant, and hyperdrive coolant.

This was, Threepio learned, a constant in Captain Bortrek's life.

Over the next several hours, while Threepio shifted the booty in the ship's three holds into some semblance of order and Captain Bortrek made notes about market value, the human had frequent recourse to the flask, his speech becoming both increasingly slurred and increasingly scatological as the level of his blood alcohol rose.

The universe, it appeared, had never been kind to Captain Bortrek, conspiring against him in a fashion that Threepio privately considered unlikely given the man's relative unimportance. Knowing what he did about the Alderaan social structure, shipping regulations, the psychology of law enforcement agents, and the statistical behavior patterns of human females, Threepio was much inclined to doubt that so many hundreds of people would spend that much time thinking up ways to thwart and injure a small-time free-trader who was, by his own a.s.sertion, only trying to make a living.

Still, it was not for droids to contradict humans unless requested to do so for informational purposes, so he moved gold reliquaries, and held his peace.

"Now, is it likely-you tell me, Goldie-is it likely that the festering Rim Patrol would come after me the minute I showed up-the very festering minute! - - without provocation-if they hadn't been tipped off' by that festering witch-hag ex-wife of mine back on Algar, hunh?

Is it? I swear she What the stinkin' stang's goin' on with the stinkin'

lights, fester it?"

They had dimmed for perhaps the fifth time in an hour, one of several small fluctuations of power that Threepio had been aware of. Most of them-alterations in the temperature and mix of the atmosphere and shifts in the thrum of the Pure Sabacc's engines-had been below the level of human perception.

"I suspect, sir, that those are readjustments of the system as it accommodates Artoo-Detoo's presence as a central memory capacitor."

Captain Bortrek pettishly hurled a necklace of priceless flame opals against the opposite wall. "Festerin' droids," he muttered. "Blasted hunks of machinery. I was hopin' I'd run across one of them new droids, them synthdroids, on Durren. A hundred thousand credits they bring, and I wouldn't sell. You seen 'em, Goldie? Beat you by a kilometer."

He wagged an owlish finger at his unwilling a.s.sistant. His fair hair hung sweatily over his eyes now, and he had unlaced his red-and-gold leather doublet to expose an expanse of gold chains and chest hair.

"Centrally programmed. They do this crystal attunement stunt-CCIR-Centrally Controlled Independent Replicant." He p.r.o.nounced the words with great care, as if afraid of tripping over them. "None of this wired-brain stuff you got goin'. They leave their brain back in some central location and do what you festerin' tell 'em-six, eight, ten of 'em, however many of 'em you want. Central brain. You tell that brain what each of 'em should do, and they go do it without givin' you any festerin' lip about it, y'understan?"

"Yes, sir," agreed Threepio.

"Brain processes it all. Huge distances-you can leave the brain on your festerin' ship and go down to a planet with six or ten or however many of 'em, and you tell 'em, fetch me that, or paste that guy, and they do it.

They figure out how to do it without none of this, 'Oh, and how do I do that, sir?" His whiny voice took on a sarcastic inflection, imitating precise droid speech.

"And they can make 'em like a man or a woman or whatever. Doesn't matter.

They got a steel skeleton. They grow synthflesh over top of it, and as long as they got that little hunk of crystal in their skulls, that can listen to the Central Controller, they're yours. And boy, wouldn't I like to have one shaped like Amber Levanche." He named the newest holo star popular on Coruscant, a woman of whom Threepio had also heard Captain Solo speak highly, though to his knowledge Captain Solo had never met the young lady.

He proceeded to describe, in great anatomical detail, exactly what acts of s.e.xual congress he would have such a synthdroid perform, though Threepio was somewhat at a loss as to why any human would wish to couple with a machine, and went on to expound his philosophy of Man's Needs and Man's Rights-meaning, Threepio gathered, his own immediate desires irrespective of the wishes of the other party. His speech was deteriorating in both form and content all the while, but it wasn't until the man pitched forward onto his face that Threepio thought to take a sample of the cabin atmosphere, to discover that it consisted of nearly 12 percent carbon dioxide and not much oxygen at all.

"Good heavens!" he cried, and hastened to the comm port on the wall.

"Artoo! Artoo!"

A quick series of bleeps answered him. Threepio immediately obeyed, hurrying to the door and up the corridor toward the bridge. He had gone four or five steps when the door, which had closed automatically behind him as usual, emitted an ominous clank. The noise stopped the protocol droid in his tracks; then he sought the nearest comm port and flicked the toggle. "Artoo, now the doors of the hold have locked!"

A soothing warble. "Well, if you're sure it's all right," replied Threepio doubtfully, and continued his steps to the bridge.

He found Artoo still enmeshed in the console boards, the entire core system ablaze with lights like a Midwinter Festival tree and fluttering with the soft chatter of nev systems being installed or altered.

"Artoo, you really must do something about the cabin atmosphere in that hold!" said Threepio. "Humans do not do at all well in environments containing under twenty percent oxygen. Oh, you've taken care of it?

Well, it was very, very careless of you to permit the core system to make that alteration in the ventilation feeds. But if you've done that already, why ever did you request my presence on the bridge?"

Artoo explained. Rather typically of Artoo's explanations, it did not elaborate much.

"The toolkit? Oh... Under which hatch? I see." As he crossed back to his friend and opened the requested access cover, he added, "But i'm very sure Captain Bortrek would be much handier with this than I am. Oh, very well. Which activation switch? Oh, I see. A simple backup/overwrite of original motivator settings.

still don't see why Captain Bortrek couldn't reset your motivators. He's the one who altered them in the first place, you know."

Artoo tweeped apologetically. There were a few minutes of whirring while the motivator circuits reset, then the whole core system console began to wink and flash again as Artoo did something-it looked to Threepio like he was again rerouting instructional paths for data and commands.

"He's going to be very angry at being locked in the hold, you know,"

added Threepio. "You simply must learn to be more careful, Artoo. We aren't designed to... detach what? What switching box'."

Oh, that one... I'm sure Captain Bortrek would not approve."

Another line of wibbles and beeps.

"Well, on your head be it, but it appears to me he went to a great deal of trouble to adapt you as part of the central core. I'm doing it, I'm doing it," he added peevishly, bending awkwardly down and grasping the sonic extractor with gold fingers never designed for delicate manual work. "At least I think i'm doing it. I really think you ought to let Captain Bortrek out of the hold first, though. We're going to reach the hypers.p.a.ce target point in an hour, and we need him to take us out and navigate us into Celanon."

He obeyed another string of commands and unfastened the cable lines from the gray switching box s.p.a.ce taped to Artoo's side. "What do you mean, we're not going to Celanon? Of course we're going to Cela-non."

A pause for more instructions. The central core chattered and shifted data in waves of green and yellow lights.

"Nim Drovis? I'm sure he has no intention of returning to the Meridian sector. And no, I can't see the switches you're talking about.

Of course I'm looking!" He bent and squinched sideways as best he could, studying the switching box. "I don't see anything of the kind.

How should I know what a DINN looks like The only DINN I know about is the Horansi past participle of the verb adin, 'to clean one's toenails'; the Nalros word for 'small hard-sh.e.l.led insects'; the Gamor-rean adjective meaning 'inclined to drool excessively'; Gacerian for 'one who is always getting married and divorced'; Algar for....

Well, if you can't describe it any better than that I'm afraid that switching box is going to stay where it is."

Amid considerable bickering, the protocol droid laboriously followed Artoo's instructions for detaching him from the consoles, resetting certain switches in the consoles, and reattaching Artoo's legs.

Granted the astromech retained several extraneous parts like the switching box, which See-Threepio couldn't manage to disconnect, but at least, Threepio thought huffily, he hadn't left any bits of Artoo in the consoles.

"It's all very well to reroute your motivators through the central core to get around Captain Bortrek's commands," Threepio said when he was done. "You know perfectly well he's just going to hook you up again."

Experimentally, Artoo leaned forward on his third leg, and trundled, albeit with less than his customary speed and accuracy, toward the door.

Threepio followed. "You'll have to let him out, you know, if we're ever going to get out of hypers.p.a.ce. What?" Artoo had paused in the doorway to tweep a command. "Oh, very well." Threepio went back for the toolkit.

"It's not going to do you the slightest bit of good, you know. We're prisoners of a thief and a criminal and will end up peddled to spice-processing factories or cannibalized for spare parts the moment we reach Celanon. There's nothing else that can be done with black market stolen droids." He clanked down the corridor in the wire-trailing wake of his newly asymmetrical friend. "We're in the hands of cruel fate. We cannot escape it."

Artoo made no reply. Instead he made his way to the smaller of the two airlocks, where he issued a whole nev string of commands to Threepio involving the removal of another access hatch and the reat-tachment-by temporary clips, this time-of his data couplers and ports to the main trunkline of the central core.

"Artoo, what are you doing?" demanded Threepio irritably. "This is really outside of enough! Captain Bortrek will be awake by this time, if you restored the oxygen to his hold, and will be most displeased! I shouldn't be surprised if he sold you by the pound for sc.r.a.p."

Still no reply, except the heavy clank of the outer airlock door locking.

The small comm screen flickered, displaying a view of the empty bridge.

"Really, the ideas you get in your head..."

Threepio turned away, and tried the door. "What?" he demanded irritably, to Attoo's imperative beep. "Come back to the screen? If as you say you've let Captain Bortrek out, why would you need me to..."

On the main bridge, visible through the viewscreen, Captain Bor-trek came slamming through the doors in a violently disagreeable mood. At the sight of the patched-up wires and systems where Artoo had been he began to curse, with great vehemence and little imagination and continued to curse until, at Artoo's urging, Threepio called his name four or five times.

Swiveling where he stood, Bortrek faced the screen with eyes red and bulging with rage. "You stinkin' little garbage can!" he screamed.

"You don't think I can see where you are? I'm gonna come there and..."

He strode to the door and almost broke his nose on it when it would not open.

"Artoo!" cried Threepio. "Tell the core system to open that door for him at once!"

Artoo-Detoo made an apologetic noise, then issued another set of instructions.

"You want me to say what?

It took quite some time to get Captain Bortrek's attention; even more, to wait until he ran out of breath and ceased his wholly anthropomorphic remarks on the droids' parentage, ancestry, reproductive proclivities, and ultimate destination, in terms impossible to apply to droids and probably not even to the human-appearing synthdroids of which he had seemed so fond.

"Captain Bortrek, I am terribly, terribly sorry," said Threepio. "I apologize wholeheartedly for my counterpart here, and I am overcome with embarra.s.sment at his behavior. But he requests that when we emerge from hypers.p.a.ce, you..." He hesitated, knowing that the words would evoke yet another spate of furious imprecations. "He requests that when we emerge from hypers.p.a.ce you proceed by the most direct route to Nim Drovis, and there land and let us out."

Threepio found he was absolutely right about the effect of his words, though he felt that Captain Bortrek's commentary on himself was hardly fair, considering he was only Artoo's translator. A certain allowance should be made, of course, for the disinhibiting effects of alcohol, gylocal, and hyperdrive coolant on the human system.

"I'm terribly sorry, sir," he said, when the irritated captain had once again shouted himself breathless. "I simply don't know what's gotten into him. He says that if you do not comply, the moment we are clear of hypers.p.a.ce he will flood the entire ship with carbon dioxide again and, when you are unconscious, send out a distress signal to the Galactic Patrol. Those are his words, not mine," Threepio added, in the face of more unfair adjurations and implications. "None of this was my idea at all."

"You stinkin' hunks of sc.r.a.p metal!" screamed Captain Bortrek, whose face had returned to the rather livid hue of cyanosis despite the 20.78 percent oxygen present in the cabin. "You think you're gonna get the better of me?" I can rewire this crate in twenty-five minutes and pull the two of you out of there..."

"I'm sure you could, sir," said Threepio diffidently. "But according to the chronometer on the wall immediately to your left, the ship will reach the hypers.p.a.ce target zone in less than four minutes, and though I am myself not a pilot, I believe that if you miss the zone you will condemn us all to drifting forever in hypers.p.a.ce-a fate that would be fatal to you long before either one of us would even suffer boredom.

And your last remark," he added, finally stung, "is not only untrue but physiologically impossible for any nonorganic life form."

As if for emphasis, Artoo-Detoo did something that caused the lights to dim and the faint thrum of the central core readjusting itself to penetrate even to the secondary airlock, and a small puff of pink gas swirled out of the ventilator on the bridge. Captain Bortrek swung around, terror in his eyes at the sight of it. Then he veered back, screamed curses at both droids in the safety of their airlock for a few moments more, and threw himself into the pilot's seat to begin the procedures to take the ship out of hypers.p.a.ce on target.

He did not cease to blaspheme, however, and though he repeated himself frequently and never emerged from the realm of purely mundane and unimaginative scatology, he continued to relieve his emotions at the top of his lungs throughout the journey to Nim Drovis, during planetfall at a small smugglers' pad in the bayous south of the Bagsho s.p.a.ceport, and was still cursing when Artoo-Detoo jammed the airlock open on a timer, See-Threepio quickly disattached the temporary wiring, and the two droids hastened down the ramp. Extrapolating from statistical probability, Threepio a.s.sumed that Captain Bortrek was still cursing when the Pure Sabacc lifted off.

With the fading of the Sabacc's launch engines in the gluey warmth of the night, darkness settled around the two errant droids. In every direction around the wide, smoke-stained permacrete rectangle of the pad, hillocks of brush-furred mud alternated with forests of reeds whose thin heads rose no more than a few centimeters above the ambient water, a desolation of marsh-gunnies, gulpers, and the blinking green eyes of wadle-platts like ghost lights among the sedge. Against the dark hem of the sky, a sprinkling of lights marked Bagsho, largest of the planet's free ports, settled largely by Alderaan colonists but transformed in the past five years into a major crossroad between the New Republic and the neutral systems of the Meridian sector.

Had he been capable of doing so, See-Threepio would have heaved a sigh.

As it was he turned from the glimmer of the lights to regard his comrade and said, "Well, I hope you know what you've gotten us into."

Artoo whistled a sorry little whistle, dropped himself forward onto his roller-leg, and snapped on his headlamp. A trifle unsteadily-be-cause of the switching box still s.p.a.ce-taped to one side and the cl.u.s.ters of wires looped up from a jack on his back that hadn't been there before-he led the way across the permacrete pad to the narrow ribbon of trail that led toward the city, Threepio clanking resignedly in his wake.

"There," said Umolly Darm, sitting back in her chair and pecking through a save command on the ramshackle keyboard. "Eight and a half months ago, on Buwon Neb's run in from Durren. One human pa.s.senger, female, hundred and seventy-five centimeters tall-she's the only human female that height all year. Cleared port authority under the name Cray Mingla."

"That's her," Luke said in a breath. His whole body felt strange, tingling with pain and grief and joy. He was almost afraid to speak, in case the grimy orange lettering should be swallowed into the monitor's dark again. "Thank you."

"No occupation listed," went on Darm. Her violet eyes flicked kindly to his face, then away; she kept her voice matter-of-fact.

"Though in Hweg Shul... drat!" The screen fuzzed out. Luke felt as if he'd been knifed through the heart; a moment later, he was aware of the p.r.i.c.kling lift of the hair at his nape and turning quickly toward the window, saw the racing blue tentacles of ground lightning pouring across the gravel, writhing between the pylons of the Newcomer houses, crawling up the cable tethers of the antigrav b.a.l.l.s and the battered, pitted metal columns supporting towers where bransved and topato grew.

"Not a big one." Darm got up and crossed to the open door. "It'll pa.s.s in about ten minutes."

They stood together in the doorway, watching the electricity race and chitter under the pilings of the house, the light of it splashing like water up over their faces from the faceted gravel. Like most of the Newcomer buildings in Ruby Gulch, Darm's house doubled as her office, storeroom, and workshop-two rooms fabricated from recycled packing plastene and mounted on b.u.t.tonwood pilings a meter and a half tall.

Like most Newcomer buildings it stood just beyond the belt of terraformed land that followed the water seam, arable being too precious to waste, and its enormous transparisteel panels, double-glazed in an ineffective effort to keep the cold at bay, flooded the rooms with the harsh, broken, strangely colored sunlight reflected from below.

"What are they?" asked Luke, and Umolly shrugged, twisted her white hair up more firmly and reset its wooden combs.

"Exactly what they look like-ground lightning. They seem to start either in the mountains or from those crystal chimney formations-tsils, the Oldtimers call them-out on the wastelands. Couple of years ago one of 'em was strong enough to knock out Booldrum Caslo's computers, but they're usually not more than an inconvenience. I've been caught in them half a dozen times, out prospecting. It's like being knocked down and having your bones polished from the inside, and you're sick for a day and a half, Newcomers, anyway. The Oldtimers get over it faster. They don't even bother putting their houses on poles to avoid them, just pick themselves up afterward, dust off, and go about their business, though they do hang their kids' cradles from the ceilings to keep them clear. I used to hate 'em, but after that Force storm, if that's what it was, these don't look so bad."

The walls and furniture of Umolly Darm's little dwelling, like every other building Luke had been in since his arrival in Ruby Gulch last night, bore the marks of the maelstrom of poltergeist activity that had swept over them the very hour-Luke guessed the very minute-he had drawn on the power of the Force to confuse and distract the Theran raiders.

Dishes, tools, furniture, even transparisteel had been broken; walls were gouged where small farm machinery or implements had been hurled against them as if by a giant, invisible hand. Sheds and fences lay smashed on the ground and cupas, blerds, and grazers had scattered at large through the Oldtimers' standing crops. In many cases the blerds had mixed in with the Oldtimers' alcopays, which had also escaped in the confusion and which carried parasites inimical to the more fragile blerds; and on his way across to Umolly's place that afternoon Luke had witnessed a dozen altercations between the two factions in the little town.

Aunt Gin informed him that morning that the two men injured when their smelter leapt off its base were still in critical condition in the Hweg Shul hospital. A woman who'd been in the care of Ruby Gulch's Oldtimer Healer-who by the sound of it used the Force to effect her cures-had died gasping as all the gentle psionics of the Healer's art had been stripped away.

He had done that. The thought made him sick with guilt.

"You said the Oldtimers talked about Force storms."

"Only to say their granddads and grandmas spoke of 'em being common, way back in the days." The delicate little prospector seated herself gingerly on the top step, keeping warily ready to leap up should the lightning below show signs of crawling up the pilings; Luke sat down beside her.

"The last ones were two hundred and fifty, three hundred years ago, and even the Listeners don't have stories about how they started or what they really were. Except the Listeners say, there was a span of only about a hundred years when they took place. There weren't any before then, either."

Luke was silent, thinking about that. "Is there any chance...? Do the Oldtimers ever talk about there being some kind or-of beings living on this world? Invisible, maybe? Or hidden, back in the mountains Something that may be causing this?"

Umolly Darm chuckled. "Bless you, pilgrim, this planet was surveyed six ways from next week by the Grissmaths before they ever dropped a soul here. You can bet they'd never have set up a prison colony where there'd be the least chance of getting local help. I've been darn near all over this rock myself and never saw nor heard a thing.