Under pouring rain, the port of Bagsho on Nim Drovis crawled with troops.

Han had alerted the Med Center from orbit that he had fifteen critical cases of radiation sickness on board. Ism Oolos, the Ho'Din physician he'd talked to over subs.p.a.ce, awaited him in the docking bay with an emergency team, surrounded by a squad of uniformed Drovians who seized Han's arms the minute he came down the Falcon's ramp, shoved him up against the nearest wall, and searched him none too gently.

"Is this really necessary?" demanded Dr. Oolos indignantly; Han also expressed himself to the head of the Drovian squad along the same lines but with considerably greater emphasis.

"Doc, if you'd seen some of the armaments coming in for the Gopso'o tribes, you wouldn't be asking that." The Drovian sergeant pulled out its esophageal plug to make the remark, and shoved it back in with a squish.

Since the onset of high-tech civilization in the wake of Old Republic military bases, most Drovians-who had been a pastoral network of tribes when contacted-had acquired the habit of sucking zwil-a cake-flavoring agent common to Algarine cuisine-through the mucous membranes of their breathing tubes via fist-size spongy plugs saturated with the stuff.

Four-fifths of the soldiers wore plugs of various sizes and the air was thick with the dreamy, cinnamon-vanilla scent, where it wasn't heavy with the odors of wet vegetation, mildews inadvertently imported from every corner of the galaxy, and the oily smoke of burning.

"You must excuse us." Dr. Oolos ducked his bright-tentacled head as he accompanied Han, the sergeant, two troopers, and the med team back up the ramp. "The Gopso'o have been restless for months-ances-tral enemies of the Drovians..." He lowered his soft voice and his twenty-five-meter height to speak without the sergeant hearing. "Not a particle of difference between them, you understand, except that they have been at blood feud for, literally, centuries. I have heard the original issue was whether the root word for truth is in the singular case or the plural, but so many atrocities were committed on both sides that, of course, it barely matters now. The Drovians were the ones who made interstellar contact first, so, of course, they're the dominant tribe, but..."

"They're killing each other over a festering grammatical construction?"

Han couldn't keep his voice down. Dr. Oolos winced and gestured him quiet, but it was too late. The Drovian sergeant grabbed Han's arm in a viselike pincer: "I'm killin' those moldsp.a.w.ns because they killed my family, see? Because they disemboweled Garnu Hral Eschen, because they tore the flesh off the bones of the children of Ethras, because they..."

"All right," said Han hastily, as the sergeant was dragging him closer and closer to the muzzle of its gun. "Uh-Chewie..." He turned just in time to make it appear to the Wookiee, emerging from the door of the bridge, that he was in no actual danger and manufactured a cheerful grin.

"Chewie, this is Sergeant..."

"Sergeant Knezex Hral Piksoar." The sergeant shoved its plug back into its breathing apparatus again; a little thread of greenish mucus squirted out around the side to join the glistening crust that caked the lower part of its face.

"it's necessary that they be permitted to search the ship," the Ho'Din informed them gently. "It's purely a formality. With local unrest as violent as it has been, and with forty deaths from the plague so far on the Republic base..."

"Forty?" Han stared up at the willowy form towering over him, aghast.

"I fear so. It's why I questioned you so closely before I was permitted to give you medical clearance to make planetfall.

Authorities here have put the whole base under quarantine."

Hral Piksoar allowed them into the first of the several storage holds Han had converted to emergency sick bays. It held its weapons trained in four directions while Dr. Oolos and his team pa.s.sed swiftly from victim to victim, injecting antishock and stabilizers, transferring the suppurating, hairless, muttering forms to stasis boxes on antigrav tables. The other two troopers disappeared down the hallways to continue their search for illegal weaponry. Han felt the back of his neck p.r.i.c.kle at this violation, but knew that a Donnybrook at this point would result in not only himself, Lando, and Chewie spending the night in the local ohokey, but these fifteen survivors in all probability continuing for hours longer in their nightmare pain.

For himself, he'd have taken a poke at Hral Piksoar in a heartbeat, the minute the goon laid a pincer on him. But he'd been through two pa.r.s.ees of hypers.p.a.ce hearing the feeble whispers of agony from the men and women hooked up to makeshift life support every time he walked down these corridors.

Maybe he was learning something from Leia, he thought, willing the flush of anger from his face.

"What's the story?" he asked softly, as the treelike physician ducked through into the next hold. "You tell me there's forty guys down with the plague on the base here; we get attacked by something I've never seen anywhere out there a partisan revolt on Durren-somebody sure shot down these poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds..."

"Galactic Med Central is trying to contain the plague," said Dr. Oolos worriedly. "Trying hard." His head tendrils flexed uneasily, a hundred shades of crimson and scarlet ribbed and straked with violet; his dark eyes were filled with concern. "They bring them to us dying of no perceptible ailment-no virus, no bacteria, no poison, no allergy. Bacta-tank therapy only seems to accelerate the progress of the slow bleeding away of life."

He shook his head, and glanced across at Sergeant Hral Piksoar, who was peering paranoically around the corner and into the hall. "With Gopso'o raids on the suburbs-bombings of public buildings-they've seized one minor s.p.a.ceport already-the atmosphere here has been terrible, unbelievable." He touched a gas mask hanging from his belt, and followed his team back into the corridor with the last of the victims, Han striding in his wake. "Take one of these with you if you plan to leave the vessel for any reason. The Gopso'o are rumored to be using bilal and rush gas in their attacks, though we haven't had any doc.u.mented cases yet at the center."

"Think again if you think we're gonna leave this vessel." Lando Calrissian stepped through the door of the bridge as they pa.s.sed it, dark face taut with anger but fear in his eyes. "My advice to you, old buddy, is to seal and lift."

"Not without finding out something about what's out there." Leaving Lando and Dr. Oolos in the corridor, Han ducked back onto the bridge and scooped up the five wafers onto which he'd downloaded the unfortunate Corbantis's log. "Can you get me an unscrambler for this, Doc? I need to know what and who axed that ship and anything else they might have seen out there before it happened. "

"I'll certainly try." Dr. Oolos held out his hand for the wafers-Han glanced at Sergeant Hral Piksoar, coming down the corridor toward them, and simply pocketed the information himself. Through the Falcon's open boarding ramp the sound of shots could be clearly heard, the heavy, percussive cough of ion cannons almost drowning the harsher zap of blasters.

To Lando he whispered, "Don't take the engines all the way down and keep an eye on the lift-off window. I'll be back in two hours."

Lando followed them to the doorway. The med team made a little caravan across the rain-pocked permacrete of the bay, water sluicing off the mist-filled coffins of the stasis boxes. Drovian guards surrounded them, weapons at the ready, as if they expected the burned, pain-racked husks inside to leap out with guns blazing in the cause of the Gopso'o tribe.

"And what if you're not?"

Han ducked his head against the rain, which was as warm as bathwater as he stepped out into it. "If I haven't linked with you by then," he said, feeling for the comlink in his pocket, "take off. Tell Chewie whatever you have to, to keep him from coming to look for me." By the sound of it the shots were closer, and a confusion of voices.

The wet air was rank with smoke. "But find Leia. Whatever it costs."

Human beings were most odd.

Given the capabilities of a high-quality' protocol unit to reproduce any given language, complete with its inflections and tonalities, See-Threepio could, of course, duplicate nearly any of the thirty thousand songs popular in the Core Worlds over the past seventy-five standard years verbatim, note by note and tone for tone. It was not a function he filled particularly often, for there were automatons and semianimates with larger speaker units and better ba.s.s range who could do the job more efficiently, but he could do it. Postulating that on a relatively backward world such as Nim Drovis those in quest of entertainment would pay a certain amount per song (with the appropriate royalty percentage figured for members of the Galactic Society of Recording Artists), he had calculated that even in such a moderate establishment as the Wookiee's Codpiece he and Artoo-Detoo should be able to earn enough in an evening to defray the costs of third-cla.s.s pa.s.sage to Cybloc XII.

But, as the a.s.sistant manager of that pink plush-lined cavern had phrased it, "You sound like a festerin' j.i.z.z-box. I got a festerin' j.i.z.z-box right over there in that corner."

And Threepio, even had his programming permitted him to argue with a human, would have been hard put to find grounds for disagreement.

Before seeking another resort of public entertainment, therefore, he gave the matter some thought.

It was, as usual for Nim Drovis, pouring rain, and those citizens for whom consumption of liquid befuddlement took precedence over defending their homes and families, if any, from the street fighting in sporadic progress all over the city were scarcely a promising lot. The denizens of the Chug 'n' Chuck seemed to consist mostly of Drovian soldiers on three-hour furlough, professional mold-and-fungus removers-a hard-bitten lot with their flame and acid throwers slung over their backs, Drovian molds and fungi being what they were-a scattering of the small-time providers of goods and services prohibited at the more polite levels of society; and the joy-boys and lollygirls a.s.sociated with every species represented on the planet, together with their forbidding looking business managers.

Given their wholesale absorption of alcohol, sundry chemicals, and spice, Threepio did not hold high hopes for his and Attoo's success in this venue, either, but he was surprised.

Entertainment, he had long ago deduced, seemed (as far as he could judge) to be based on random mixtures of incongruous elements.

Therefore, taking into account the words of the a.s.sistant manager of the Wookiee's Codpiece, he had acquired a concertinium, a set of violion twitch bells capable of activation through one of his chest jacks, and a drum for Artoo. Randomly digitalizing patterns of notes for every one of those thirty thousand songs popular in the Core Worlds over the past seventy-five years for reproduction on these three instruments and recalibrating his voice circuits to reproduce the tones of such luminaries as Framjan Spathen and Razzledy Croom, he was able to produce quite pa.s.sable music, although Artoo, as a result of the switch boxes and Pure Sabacc's computer circuits still taped and jacked and wired into him, was a little eccentric as far as the rhythm line was concerned. Threepio was quite proud of the result; and had his audience been sober, he was sure they would have appreciated just how good the entertainment was.

And indeed, the one individual in the C'hug 'n' Chuck not engaged either in boozing himself into insensibility or behaving toward the opposite s.e.x in a manner usually reserved for one's honeymoon did applaud Threepio's rendition of Gayman Neeloid's "The Sound of Her Wings" and tossed a credit piece into the basket perched, hatlike, on Attoo's domed cap.

"Can you play Mondegrene's Fugue in K?" he asked, naming a cla.s.sical piece of great antiquity and grandeur, which Threepio had only heard performed by full orchestra with thunder cannons and a dual-spectrum light organ.

It was one of Threepio's favorites, the mathematical complexity of it a source of endless delight to his logic circuits. He leaned a little over Artoo's ba.s.s percussion. "In its entirety? he inquired hopefully.

His audience, a st.u.r.dy little Chadra-Fan whose silky golden fur could have been much improved by a session in one of the s.p.a.ceport's grooming parlors had any been open, nodded enthusiastically. He signaled the bartender for a refill on his megavegiton ale. "Do you have it all in your programming?"

"Hey," grunted the bartender. "You ain't playin' none of that sithfesterin' cla.s.sical chunder in here."

The Chadra-Fan turned indignantly on his seat, and waved an expansive little paw at the other five patrons of the bar. "You think they're going to care All of you!" He raised his voice to a sharp tenor shout.

Fifteen a.s.sorted eyes focused briefly on him, with a certain degree of effort. "I propose to buy from you all rights to the time and talents of these good musicians for the price of a drink apiece. Done?" He whipped a handful of credits from the sporran at his silken belt, slapped them down on the bar.

"Festerin' cla.s.sical chunder," groused the barkeep, lumbering back to her ale taps but pocketing the credits.

The Chadra-Fan signaled Threepio with a peremptory wave of his paw and settled back in his chair, eyes shut, all his silk-fringed nostrils quivering. "Maestro, overwhelm me."

The swelling strains of Mondegrene's Fugue had the effect of emptying the bar of all customers still clearheaded enough to walk, but Threepio didn't care. Even on the concertinium and twitch bells-with Artoo's enthusiastic if inaccurate a.s.sistance on the drum-the Fugue in K was an intellectual masterpiece, like a closely reasoned philosophical argument, and the transposition to the unfamiliar instruments added, in an odd way, to Threepio's understanding and appreciation of the complex structure of the piece. The barkeep, with no customers to claim her attention, leaned back against the corner of the bar sucking plug after plug of zwil, listening to the wide-ranging variety with skepticism that, Threepio felt, was slowly turning into something else. Respect, perhaps.

Appreciation of his capabilities. Maybe even a dawning enthusiasm for cla.s.sical music.

Or maybe not. At the conclusion of the piece she crossed the room to them, hands tucked through the heavy leather of her belt, blue eyes sharp and calculating under their (to Threepio's mind) excessive maquillage of blue-and-gold paint and all the diamond rings through her snout twinkling in the bar's intestinal light. She looked down into the basket on Artoo's cap and said, "Ten creds. You boys ain't half bad."

"Why, thank you, Madame." Threepio removed the violion jack from his chest so the bells wouldn't jingle an accompaniment to his speech.

"Your boss going to be by here later? Maybe he and I could work out a deal of some kind."

"Oh, we don't have a boss, Madame. Our master is..."

"Now, don't confuse the poor lady, Threesie."

Threepio turned in complete astonishment as the Chadra-Fan-who had at the conclusion of the Fugue in K gone to the doorway to listen to such street noises as were audible above the steady patter of the rain and to sniff at the dark moving air of the coming night-came padding back.

"Igpek Droon-he's a buddy of mine on the Antemeridian route-he hates to have even his droids call him 'boss."" the Chadra-Fan went on, looking up at the barkeep with his sharp little black-coal eyes.

"Spent a pile reprogramming every droid on his ship to call him 'friend'

and 'comrade." He was raised by Agro-Militants-would you believe it? - - and he says it's just sand in his gills to have anything subordinate to him. Has a terrible time whenever he gets a Gamorrean or a Griddek in his crew, spends the whole time arguing with them over what they're going to call him. I'll be heading back with these boys..." He slapped Threepio with one hand, Artoo with the other, with a familiarity the protocol droid found more than a little offensive, "... to Pekkie's ship, just to make sure they get there okay and don't get picked up."

"I beg your pardon," protested Threepio. "But do I...?"

"Sure you remember the way," cut in the Chadra-Fan, and the next moment snapped at him in the meeping, flutrying speech of Chad's indigenous inhabitants, "Go along with me, you silly pile of tin! You want to end up playing sparkle-bop at this meat market for the next thirty-five years?

She's trying to steal you!"

Threepio squeaked, "What?" in the tongue in which he had been addressed.

"Steal us?"

The Chadra-Fan rolled his eyes, turned back to the barkeep, and said with a laugh, "d.a.m.n technical sticklers, these See-Three units.

They'll give you an argument over which side of the street they're programmed to walk down. Let's go, uh-" He glanced quickly and un.o.btrusively at Attoo's serial numbers, "Let's go, Artie. Pekkie said you had to be back before full dark, and it's close to that now."

He put a furry little paw behind Threepio's golden elbow and tugged, and so disoriented was he that Threepio followed, trying hard to frame his objections to the deception. Artoo rolled obediently in their wake, leaving the barkeep squinting suspiciously after them, fingering her snout rings and twitching her ears.

"I'm terribly sorry," said Threepio, once they were in the rain-slick street. "I have reviewed all my files and I can find neither your name nor your likeness in any of my records."

"Yarbolk Yemm. Reporter for the TriNebulon News. Not that it'd be in any of your circuits, Threesie-where is your boss?"

"My counterpart and I are the property of... Artoo, what are you doing?"

The little astromech swung sharply around in a ninety-degree turn, banging his golden counterpart with the drum that was still attached, like a mammoth mechanical pregnancy, to his leading surface.

Artoo followed up the a.s.sault with a trilling obbligato of beeps, tweeps, and wibbles, to the effect that it would not be a particularly good idea to inform a reporter for TriNebulon of their mission, goals, or concerns.

And there was much, Threepio had to admit, in what he said.

"Our master is waiting for us on Cybloc XII," explained Threepio, after considerable thought that fortunately took place so quickly as to make the remark have the promptness of truth. "Through a shipping error my counterpart and I were dispatched to Nim Drovis instead, and we have been unable to get in touch with our master to arrange for our transport. It is vitally important that we rejoin our master with the utmost speed.

Hence the regrettable exigency of acquiring sufficient funds by these means." He gestured to the concertinium, folded into a neat red lacquer box and hanging by its straps from his chest, and to Attoo's drum. They stood on one of the myriad little bridges that led from the Old Town to the New, the lightening rain flecking the brown water beneath them and trickling down the two droids' casings and the Chadra-Fan's black-wet silk tunic. Across the ca.n.a.l, rising commotion and the sound of shots grew louder, voices shouted orders, feet splashed through the puddles.

Yarbolk turned his head sharply, long ears twitching; then he looked back at the droids with speculation in his black little shoe-b.u.t.ton eyes.

"Cybloc XII, eh. There's been no word out of there in thirty hours, from everything I've heard. They sent out two cruisers to deal with the wildcat pirate fleet out of Budpock-the lihor Lad), and the Empyrean.

n.o.body's heard word of them, either. Now the talk all around the bars here is that somebody's supplying the Gopso'o with weapons, and promising them the guard stations on the roads are going to be down-and aren't they just, tonight. You boys be careful," he said, pulling up the wet silk hood over his head. "There are laws governing ownership of droids, but I've yet to see them enforced, anywhere, and anyway they're only as good as the last memory flush.

There's any number of people in this town who'd welcome a windfall like a free See-Three unit and an astromech with n.o.body's name on them."

He fished in his sporran again, and brought out a red-burnished twenty-credit cylinder, which he dropped into the half-full basket of credits on top of Artoo's cap. "Buy your tickets in a human name-Igpek Droon really is a small-time trader, if you want to use his-and get yourselves out of here. Good luck. Thanks for the music."

There was another crescendo of mayhem, closer this time, and with it the ba.s.s roar of ion cannons. Yarbolk Yemm shifted to the front of his belt the small recording devices he wore, and scampered off across the bridge in the direction of the noise, a bright, wet little form of pink-and-blue silk and matted fur. A moment later combatants came pouring out of the narrow street visible some twenty meters farther down the ca.n.a.l, a knot of uniformed Drovians, a couple of humans, and a Ho'Din all defending themselves against a much larger contingent of differently uniformed Drovians, whose shaved crania bore long topknots in which random shapes of colored plastic and rubber had been braided-animal totems, Threepio's programming informed him, and a lively trade item from the larger interplanetary corporations seeking to purchase the bulk protein from the Gopso'o slug ranches.

"Good gracious!" exclaimed the protocol droid. "Artoo, that's Captain Solo!"

Heavily armed and aided by strategic betrayals of the outlying guard stations, the Gopso'o clansmen poured into the town. In the enclaves within Bagsho itself where the Gopso'o lived in low-paid, ill-educated obscurity, they emerged from their foul-water tenements with new weapons in their hands, shouting the names of their murdered ancestors and of the Twenty-Five Personifications of Virtue and firing on their oppressors and anyone they a.s.sociated with their oppressors.

"Stinkin' sc.u.mtoes," growled Sergeant Hral Piksoar, voice nasal and bubbly around the zwil plug because its pincers were fully occupied with the ion cannon it was trying to site. "Well, you better be proud of your handiwork, Solo..."

"Me proud?" yelped Solo, and flattened behind the corner of an alley wall to return fire. "I never even heard of Nim Drovis until last week!" Down in this district the ca.n.a.ls hadn't been disinfected for weeks. At the sound of voices and the trample of feet, the sc.u.mmy, rain-pocked waters bulged and surged, and Han could see the molds beginning to emerge, glistening vilely in the dim reflection of street-lamps blocks away.

"Republic'll send us troops, they said. No need to have big standing armies. The festerin' Republic will help out if there's need. Well, we sent for troops, pal..."

"Captain Solo had nothing to do with the dispatch of emergency forces,"

put in Dr. Oolos severely. He leaned a long viridian arm around the corner and popped off four or five shots at almost complete ran-dom-Han guessed the physician had never had a weapon in his hands in his life-and ducked back under a storm of return fire. "There is a prague in the military bases of this sector..."

"All I know is your festerin' Republic said they'd be here, and they festerin' ain't." Hral Piksoar cursed as laser fire clipped the back of its rearmost tentacle. "And where have your patrols been that that kind of armament's gettin' through, hanh? Those maggot suckers got canister guns, for the love of Truth and Beauty!" It spit a yellowish stream of zwil.

"Lando!" Han thumbed the toggle on the comlink, keeping a worried eye on the molds creeping toward them in a s...o...b..ring orange line.

"We're on our way back. The Gopso'o are overrunning this whole sector.

Alert the port guards if they don't know already and tell 'em we're coming through. Have the Falcon ready for liftoff the minute we're on board."

"What the blue blazes is goin' on." yelled Lando's distracted voice back.

"We already know about the Gopso'o, old buddy, we just got done drivin'

'em off the docking pads. You better get here in the next ten minutes or there ain't gonna be liftoff."

Solo cursed, and fired a blast of hot plasma at the oncoming molds, which melted in an unbelievably foul-smelling sizzle under the blast itself and kept right on coming. At the head of the alley, Hral Piksoar and its fellow troopers were holding their own, though two were down, Dr. Oolos plastering in synthflesh and cauterizing arteries with grim speed. It would be fairly simple, thought Han, for himself or the long-legged Ho'Din to dash, jump, and spring through the mottled field of advancing molds-they moved in clumps, and an agile human could get through between them if he or she kept moving-leaving the bottom-heavy Drovians behind.

By the same token, once they were through the molds and across the ca.n.a.l-there was a ramshackle plank bridge about ten meters farther down-the oncoming Gopso'o would be too slow and heavyset to pursue through the molds.

His eyes went immediately to the high walls that hemmed them in.

Since from time immemorial there had never been a day on Nim Drovis without torrential rain, the architecture of Bagsho was of a solid order, heavy stone walls broken by lines of the thick timbers that supported additional floors. Even in these shoddy tenement districts by the Thousand Stinking Ditches, this type of building prevailed, the residents using the round, projecting ends of the floor timbers as fastening points for balconies, plank gardens, and bird traps. Han tore the length of emergency cable from his belt, primed the stubby firing tube, and shot the cable hook upward, to lodge in a timber some five meters down the alley and nearly that distance above the mold-crawling pavement.

"Can you swing?" he yelled to Hral Piksoar, pointing to the low balcony above the ca.n.a.l bank beyond the advancing molds and close to the plank bridge.