Part 46 (2/2)
”Dao Stryver, in the flesh. You looked better with your helmet on. ”
Stryver showed teeth in a way that might have been mistaken for a smile. ”In my culture, this expression is considered a challenge. ”
”Come on. I know you can take a joke. ” He pulled up a chair. ”Besides, you're obviously waiting for me. I reckon I'm safe at least until you tell me what you want. ”
”I've come for the droid. ”
Nebula raised an eyebrow. ”He's not for sale. ”
”I'm not offering you money. ”
Two tiny gla.s.ses clunked down between them. Stryver made no move to pay, and neither did he. He obviously had a tab.
”Good fortune in battle, ” Nebula toasted. ”May all your eggsp.a.w.n hatch as soldiers. ”
”You know about that, too?”
”I've got a good sense of smell. And I transported some life-paintings from Hoszh Iszhir once. You've a nice planet, there, if you breathe poisonous gas. ”
Stryver raised the other gla.s.s and tipped the fiery liquid down her throat.
”I was wrong to take you for granted, ” she said.
”It's not your fault. I go out of my way to give a certain impression. ”
”I am not apologizing. I am offering you a compliment. Few deceive me. ”
”We both have our masks. Do you keep your tail trimmed to fit into that armor or have you had it permanently removed?”
She shook her head, unwilling to be deflected. ”I've been looking for you ever since the Sebaddon affair. ”
”I'm gratified it's taken you so long to find me. ”
”The word on the grapevine is that you have been shopping technical data to the black market. What kind of data?”
He shrugged. ”Everything I had on the hexes, which wasn't much. Chemical a.n.a.lyses, video footage, a sample of their subs.p.a.ce code. I sold it as a job lot to a character called Shavak. Don't worry: there's nowhere near enough for him or anyone else to rebuild them. ”
She let him believe that this was her concern-if he did in fact believe it. He was a man of many masks. In Ta.s.saa Bareesh's palace he had been careful not to play things too smart lest he be considered a threat, while at the same time he was reinforcing his value as the man who found the Cinzia, and who might find other bounties like it, in order to avoid being conveniently disappeared. While the Hutts had been watching the envoys, the smuggler in their midst had kept his eyes and ears carefully open.
In the same way, he had pulled the strings of the Republic's puppet envoy, making certain the Xandret affair ended to his advantage. He might be doing much the same thing right now.
”You know, I'd make an excellent Mandalorian, ” Nebula said, ”were I that way inclined. ”
Stryver stiffened in her seat, resisting the urge to reach across the table and tear his puny head right off.
”Explain, ” she growled.
”We both have a sense of irony. ” He signaled at the bartender for another round of drinks. ”And our goals are the same. I mean, seriously. You engineered the whole Sebaddon thing from the start, right? You gave Xandret coordinates for a meeting that would take her through privateer-infested s.p.a.ce. You knew where the s.h.i.+p would end up once it was caught, and what the Hutts would probably do with it. Then you hopped around the Empire and the Republic, escalating the situation. You wanted people to think that you were chasing the Cinzia to stop it from falling into anyone else's hands, but in fact you were doing the exact opposite. That's why you didn't kill any of the players you came across. You wanted a fight over the hexes just as much as you wanted to erase your own involvement in it. ”
The drinks came. Stryver let hers sit untouched on the table as Nebula went on.
”You were testing the Empire's and the Republic's responses to the hexes. You wanted to see who has the edge, these days. Has the Republic recovered from the near-beating you gave them a decade ago? Has the Empire grown strong enough to be considered a serious contender in your next campaign? I'd say the results were tied, which suits me. What do you think? Who's Mandalore going to fight next, when he gets tired of working for everyone else? That's the question I bet every Jedi and Sith would like answered right now. ”
He skulled the contents of his gla.s.s without taking his eyes off her.
She was careful not to give him an answer. ”Where does the irony come into it?”
”We have no leader. Do you remember that? I'm sure you do, and I'm sure it struck a chord. Your kind is of a fairly individualistic bent, as is mine. We sympathize with Lema Xandret's desire to follow her own path, even if we don't share her methodology. After all, we don't have the army of droids that allowed her political indulgences-an army that was probably more about building and terraforming originally than fighting anyone, until we showed up. And that's where the irony lies.
”The Emperor certainly didn't endorse Xandret's egalitarian aspirations, and I'm positive the Supreme Chancellor would have disapproved, too. Empires and Republics dislike those with the capacity to overturn their regimes. In that sense, our two squabbling friends are more alike than they prefer to think-and Xandret's political meme might have been even more dangerous than her hexes, had it escaped. ”
Stryver nodded, thinking of the stratified hierarchies, bureaucracies, and undercla.s.ses she had witnessed in both Empire and Republic, all foaming with discontent, not all of it brought about by the cold war that had existed for more than a decade now. It wasn't impossible to imagine either regime being overturned by rebellion from within.
Just as dangerous, however-and for more important-was the possibility that the two rival factions might one day unite against a common enemy, as they had against the hexes. Keeping the two at each other's throats was therefore vital, from a Mandalorian perspective.
”Are you nodding off, ” Jet asked, ”or agreeing with me?”
Stryver focused her thoughts. ”I am thinking that the most dangerous thing in the galaxy is an ambitious serf. ”
”As every exploitative regime discovers to its cost, when those who do the work decide they want to keep the profits for themselves. ”
”What would happen if droids ever came to the same decision?”
”It would mean the end of civilization as we know it. Luckily, the hexes weren't ambitious per se-just badly programmed. ”
”I'm not talking about the hexes. I'm talking about Clunker. ”
Nebula showed enough teeth to suggest that his smile might be a threat, too. ”Don't you think we'd already be his slaves, if that's what he wanted?”
”You tell me what he wants. What motivates a machine that can take over Imperial and Republic s.h.i.+ps at will, and then just run away?”
”Not power or glory, obviously. Or profit, otherwise I'd be a trillionaire. Sometimes he does what I ask him to, and sometimes he doesn't, so it's not about obeying me. To be honest, I've been trying to figure him out for years and may be no closer to the answer than I was when I started. ”
”You didn't make him like this?”
”Not a chance. He was a mistake, some kind of factory error, and he'd been scheduled for melting when I found him. His brain had a reset problem, apparently. Every few minutes, he'd shut down and lose his memory. A droid with no capacity for storing incriminating evidence appealed to me, so I nicked him and patched him up as best I could. These days, he can manage days at a time without flatlining, but it still happens. The only things he remembers are me and the s.h.i.+p, I guess because we were where his life really started. ”
Stryver peered up at the stationary droid. ”So he won't remember Sebaddon and what happened there?”
”No. He's reset four times since then. I've come to think it's all connected-like his thoughts get too big for his brain to handle, so it shuts itself down periodically to stop him going crazy. After all, what could be worse than a droid with ambition, as you put it? You've seen what people do to them when they get ideas. ”
”And with good reason, when it came to the hexes. ”
”Clunker is no hex. He's just a damaged droid struggling to cope in a big, bad universe. ”
”Then perhaps the time has come to relieve him of his burden. ”
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