NO TIME FOR POETRY
Austin Walker
“Can you believe they pay us for this?”
It wasn’t the excitement in Dengar’s voice that surprised IG-88, who stood next to the Corellian bounty hunter as he piloted his way through wreckage and debris. As the galaxy’s deadliest assassin droid, IG-88 had crossed paths with plenty of overexuberant bounty hunters, the sort who convinced themselves that obsessive thrill seeking was a vocation. Dengar, yanking back the yoke of his JumpMaster 5000 as it dodged incoming detritus, was just one more fool with a blaster.
“C’mon, c’mon…Come to Dengar.”
Nor was IG-88 nonplussed by the bounty hunter’s mangled Imperial accent. Compared with the elegant edge of Imperial officers’ speech, Dengar’s voice was a makeshift shiv. This evaluation was not a judgment on the part of IG-88, though. People seemed to think that accents reflected intelligence or authority, but the droid knew better. The way an organism spoke was only one more patina layer of ugly organic inefficiency. Eventually, the assassin considered, they wouldn’t be around to speak at all. So much would be improved, then.
“Damnit! Lost him. Iggy, start a thermal scan would you, mate? We can’t let him get away now.”
There it was again. The second-person plural. “Us.” “We.” That was what had taken IG-88 aback. Had the organic forgotten the terms of their arrangement? Was this a ploy? Better to confirm now that Dengar remembered that the moment they had their prey in hand, his life would be forfeit. Best to remind him.
“One of us will be paid, Corellian. Or do you not recall our agreement?” IG-88’s cylindrical head twisted to face Dengar. This was, of course, only for effect. The sensor array in the IG series was not limited by simple organic limitations such as “facing.”
Dengar let out a playful sigh as he brought his ship to a halt, hidden behind the massive sublight engine of a wrecked frigate. “Yeah, yeah. Don’t get your circuits in a twist, you walkin’ vaporator. You and me, we each got coordinates from Fett. Just like Bossk an’ the oth—”
“Those coordinates were fraudulent.”
“Of course they were! I’m gettin’ there, you absolute lamp.” Dengar readjusted his posture, stretched his fingers, regripped the ship’s yoke, and cleared his throat. “As I was sayin’, Fett gave everyone dummy info. But you and me, we’re too smart for that. We cracked his system and found the coordinates he was keepin’ for himself. And hard as it is to admit, two of us together got a better shot at catchin’ Solo.” Dengar’s voice twisted in subdued rage as he said the name. “Especially if he’s got his rebel pallies with him.”
“That is not the deal,” IG-88 said, in as close to a scold as the machine could emit. “That is the circumstance of the deal. Confirm that you understand the arrangement.”
The already cramped cockpit of Punishing One, Dengar’s ship, felt a little smaller for a moment. Both of its inhabitants were killers, and each knew that a deal like theirs could fall apart at any moment, even now as they neared their prey. IG-88 was, after all, a droid known for ruthless opportunism. And even in their short time together, he had realized that Dengar was fond of claiming not to have a conscience at all. Whether it had been taken from him by a life of violence—the tragedy scarring his face and body—by a poorly installed cybernetic modification, or by some other loathsome quirk of illogical organic life, IG-88 did not know and did not care.
Dengar’s voice dropped, stone-cold serious. “When we get him, our truce is over. You and me, we’ll have a prizefight fit for the dueling arenas of Nar Shaddaa. And only one of us will walk away with the purse.”
“Good.” It was fundamentally a productive understanding. The pair would have higher odds of capturing Solo than the independent hunters like Fett or the Trandoshan Bossk, who had no one to watch their backs. But neither would IG-88 and Dengar be weighted down by the ungainly sentimentalism that came with being long-term hunting partners like 4-LOM and Zuckuss.
The bounty hunter sank a little lower in his seat before a thought seemed to cross his mind, lifting him back up into his normal, spirited posture. “Now, wait a second, assassin. Why all this effort into making sure I remember the particulars? You ain’t secretly a protocol droid, are ya?”
“Absolutely not.”
A laugh from the Corellian. He must have confused IG-88’s swift rebuttal for comedic cadence. Which again, IG-88 thought to himself, Absolutely not.
“Now, Iggy, back to work, yeah? Get us that thermal scan so we can find our mark.”
“That would be a waste of time, Dengar. This area is contaminated with interference. Such a scan will be useless.” The coordinates Fett had provided Dengar with had led the duo to a debris field in the Outer Rim, one of the few reminders of the Clone Wars’ massive starship battles. The Empire had been extremely thorough with its salvage operations in the years after the war, but this wreckage had been left behind for some reason. And though it had been years since these ships had seen combat, the entire area was radiated with their heat.
“Ah, the present is always haunted by the past, isn’t it, droid?”
“I do not have time for trite poetry, bounty hunter.”
“You also apparently don’t have time to offer up an alternative.” Dengar leaned across the starship’s console and flicked a few switches. “But no worries there. I don’t need one anyway. Activating thermal scan.”
Don’t have time? IG-88 could have killed Dengar a dozen different ways in the time it took the Corellian to speak those words. In fact, the droid’s mastery over time was so complete that he ran internal simulations of doing exactly that and luxuriated in the internally visualized display of his power and mastery.
“See, piston-head, I’m not looking for Solo’s thermal signature.” He flicked a few more switches as IG-88 came out of his reverie. “I’m looking for the absence of Solo’s thermal signature.”
“Impossible. Even if you know the make of Solo’s ship—”
“And I do. We’re chasing a modified YT-1300 Corellian light freighter. Not as hot as its reputation might lead you to believe, I may add.” He hit another switch and then a toggle.
“Do not interrupt me, organic.” IG-88 again rotated his cylindrical head to add punctuation. Deep inside his advanced computer core, he considered that adopting such an affect might be akin to gaining his own sort of accent, and began to calculate exactly how troubling such an inefficiency was.
“Sorry, partner. You were saying?”
“I was explaining that even with the Millennium Falcon’s information, this debris field’s level of thermal pollution is so high—”
Before the droid could finish his sentence, Punishing One’s auxiliary computers lit up like pyrotechnics. A YT-1300 light freighter had been hiding in the desolate shell of a Trade Federation Lucrehulk-class battleship. Solo.
Dengar couldn’t hold back the smirk forming on his lips. In fact, he didn’t even try. “That doesn’t count as interrupting you, I hope?”
“How did you achieve such signal resolution?”
“Ah, well, you need to understand exactly how a smuggler like Solo thinks. It’s an old trick, before your time I’d guess. And the sort of thing that wouldn’t make its way into even the most rigorous of Imperial memory cores.” Dengar’s voice took on the posh tone of an Imperial admiral as he delivered the line, which only worked to make IG-88 wonder why the bounty hunter had not chosen to adopt the more socially prestigious accent. Simultaneously and elsewhere in the droid’s constantly whirring verbobrain, IG-88 took permanent note of the technique. He understood it now, and that was all that mattered.
“Give him a second.” Dengar spoke with the voice of a seasoned hunter. “He’ll see that we scanned him and—”
Just in time, the Corellian freighter burst from the wreckage and set a course for the debris field’s edge, where a hyperspace jump could safely get it away from its pursuers.
“Settle in, partner.” Dengar slid the throttle up, and the Punishing One began to charge forward through the debris. It was, of course, another joke from the Corellian. The JumpMaster 5000 was more spacious than the droid’s own ship, but it was still a machine built for one. The patrol boat was fine for an independent cargo hauler or even a bounty hunter like Dengar, but the cockpit had nowhere to “settle in” besides the cockpit chair.
Fortunately, it turned out that Dengar’s skill as a pilot was more than good enough to keep IG-88 on his feet. The bounty hunter piloted Punishing One like a Carnelion kite, dancing through the debris field and taking minimal (if any) damage as he pressed toward the Falcon’s position. Confident in his temporary ally’s skill behind the controls, IG-88 focused on preparing the ship’s shielding, combat, and auxiliary systems.
“We are now within communications range.”
With another flick of his fingers, Dengar opened a broadcast channel. “It’s over, Han! Stop where you are and maybe we’ll let a couple of your friends live, yeah?”
Dengar’s body temperature rose a third of a degree. His voice fluctuated, just so, before saying “over” and “Han.” It was a vocal structure similar to that of a liar. This meant that Dengar was not confident that it was over for Han Solo. Worse, IG-88 realized, the entire array of physiological responses had revealed that Dengar was illogically invested in the capture of Solo.
When the Corellian freighter finally responded, it wasn’t with words. A flurry of laser blasts passed just above the Punishing One. For Dengar, it was just another opportunity to taunt his prey. “You used to be a better shot than that, Solo! You’re losing your edge!”
A voice finally broke over the comm. It was feminine, maybe one of Solo’s companions, IG-88 thought. “I don’t know who you are, but you’ve got the wrong ship. Disengage now!”
“Nice try, friend. What, is Han too scared to talk for himself now? Needs his rebel friends to speak for him?”
Though the bulk of his attention was locked on their target, IG-88 dedicated a few subroutines to concern about his partner’s ability to keep a cool head. “Calm yourself, Corellian. Your irrationality is becoming dangerous.” Whatever their history, it was clear that Solo had gotten under Dengar’s skin, wedged inside the organic deeper than any cybernetic implant.
“Shut up, flutebucket.” Even his pathetic insults were getting worse, IG-88 thought.
His aim, on the other hand, seemed as steady as ever. Dengar fired a burst from his quad laser cannons as a feint, driving his target off course and into the free-floating bridge of some long-dead assault cruiser.
The Corellian freighter spun out of control and directly into the sights of Dengar’s ion cannon. A single blast was all it took. The YT-1300 floated against the starfield, lit clearly by a distant sun. Now that it was freed from the sea of ruined ships, IG-88 made a terrible discovery.
“Do you recall when you said that the ship we were following was unremarkable, Dengar?”
“And haven’t we proved it?”
“Well. You are correct. The ship we are following is unremarkable. In fact, its only external modifications seem to be the addition of a dorsal laser turret and an upgraded sublight drive.”
“Droid…”
“This is not the Millennium Falcon, Corellian.” If IG-88 had not understood that he was superior to every organic being in existence, his failure to notice the difference between this ship and the Falcon would be embarrassing. Solo’s craft was a heavily modified YT-1300f, a cargo hauler transformed into a well-armed smuggling starship. But this was a much more slightly modified YT-1300p, designed for passenger transit. “Not only are its modifications inadequate, it is also missing several key features that would identify it as Solo’s vessel.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“My programming does not allow for ‘kidding.’ You should know this by now.”
“Well.” Dengar’s grip dug into the JumpMaster’s yoke as he clearly grasped for any rationalization that would excuse the difference. “Solo knew that he was being hunted. Maybe he had the silhouette modified to keep a low profile.”
“Unlikely. There was insufficient time for such a procedure to take place between the ship’s known egress on Hoth and the present moment.” Fett was even more deceptive than IG-88’s first impression had suggested. Not only had he provided false information directly, he’d seeded his own ship’s data banks with decoy coordinates. The droid considered, for the briefest moment, not whether Fett had betrayed them—which was obvious—but whether he should share his deduction with Dengar. He decided that it would not be particularly fruitful.
“We’ve been deceived!” Dengar shouted, rendering IG-88’s internal calculus irrelevant. “That Mandalorian-impersonating son of a—”
“We still have an opportunity, Corellian.” IG-88 pressed a button, and the ship’s computer brought the freighter’s technical specifications on-screen. “A vessel outfitted as such is likely carrying contraband, intelligence, or valuable individuals.”
The starship floated awkwardly in front of the Punishing One as it drew closer, engines still knocked out by the ionized particles running through its electronics system. But the comm must’ve been hardened to such an attack, as the woman’s voice from before returned.
“I’m telling ya, fella, you’ve got the wrong ship. My boss isn’t going to like it that you’re messing with me.”
Dengar cut the connection and gave IG-88 a sidelong look. “Boss?” He pulled up the ship’s registration on the console’s computer screen. The Deadnettle. Independent pleasure vessel. No home port listed.
“ ‘Independent pleasure vessel’? All right, maybe this’ll be worth our time anyway, eh, droid?” He batted a fist against his plate armor and raised the lower cloth of his turban up around his mouth and nose. Masks, IG-88 knew, kept things from getting too personal.
“I will begin docking procedures.”
Breaching an occupied vessel—even one disabled by ion cannons—was always a risk. Even for practiced soldiers, the element of surprise gave the defender a great deal of tactical advantage. There was only one way in, which made you an easy target. And without intimate knowledge of the vessel’s interior, it was nearly impossible to predict where your foes might be. In short, this meant that defenders had a lot of options, but the boarding party normally had only one: rush in and start shooting.
The duo of IG-88 and Dengar, however, was anything but normal.
From the moment the breach began, the unconventional pair was in complete control. As the air lock opened, smoke filled the entryway of the Deadnettle, settling over plush purple carpets and blocking the sight of half a dozen guards who had taken aim. It wouldn’t stop the blasterfire from coming in, but it would give them enough time to gain the upper hand.
It was over in an instant. Dengar strode through the smoke with his fire blade, a long, branched dirk of orange flame cutting through the fog, a vision of terror second only to a Dark Lord of the Sith. It was also top-tier misdirection. Because while the guards followed the blade with their eyes, they failed to see the assassin droid boarding their ship just behind.
IG-88 was not merely well armed, he was a walking arsenal. Only accounting for the devices built into his body, the droid had access to blaster cannons in each arm, deployable antipersonnel gas canisters, a localized stun pulser, and throwing flechettes as sharp as they were small. And of course, there was his most dangerous weapon: the mechanical mind that gave him what one of his creators called “wildfire sentience.” It was this that allowed him to utterly take apart six well trained security guards in a matter of seconds.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Dengar said. “I didn’t even get to—” His eyes went wide.
There was a lot to take in. The ship’s main lounge had been extended to cover the bulk of its interior. From wall to wall, the room had been converted into a gambling hall—and a high-end one given the fancy clothes the now cowering players were wearing. And there, hanging from between a pair of overturned sabacc tables, was a banner with the symbol of the Besadii, one of the most powerful families of the Hutt Cartel.
“I told you that you wouldn’t wanna mess with my boss.” The ship’s apparent captain—a Mirialan woman with a smart braid a few shades darker than her bright-green skin—was standing, arms crossed, above four of her dead guards. “Sunnari Khall. Captain of the Deadnettle. I’d appreciate it if you two got off my ship.”
This time, IG-88 turned his head to look at Dengar not as an affect, but as a signal to take her down and clear out the rest of the ship.
Before he could spring into action, though, Dengar reached across the droid’s body.
“Hey, hey, hey! Slow down, Iggy. The captain here is right.” He leaned in close to whisper to the droid, not that proximity was necessary, given IG-88’s high-range sensor suite. “The Besadii are not enemies you want to make.”
The assassin responded at full volume. He wanted the captain to hear him. He wanted to scare her. “They are not enemies you want to make, Corellian. I quite like enemies.”
IG-88 had not done much work for the Hutts, but he understood that they were wealthy, vicious, and vengeful. They might be useful enemies to have, IG-88 thought, as enemies so often led to new opportunities. He raised his arms and prepared to fire the built-in blasters.
“Try it and see what happens, canister.” Khall had raised her hand. In her palm, a thermal detonator began to beep. By the third consecutive chirp, one of the frightened passengers screamed. “Shut up back there, I’m negotiating!”
“Ah, see, now you’ve let on too much, Miss…Khall you said it was?”
The sweat in his palms, the furrowed brow…if she had said nothing else, IG-88 could tell that Dengar would have left then and there. But now that this Captain Khall had mentioned negotiating, he clearly smelled profit.
“Solo isn’t here. There’s nothing valuable aboard. I don’t have anything you want.”
“You do not know what we want.” IG-88’s voice, too-calm and metallic, would be the only leverage Dengar needed to get something out of this.
The Corellian added just a bit more pressure.
“Well, see, it looks to me like you’re running a very exclusive sabacc tournament. And no one plays sabacc…in a ship…in the middle of a debris field…for nothing.”
“You—you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
IG-88, whose programming drew on generations of research, counted the droplets of water on her brow, the doubling of beats in her heart, a micron-sized movement in her eyes.
“You are hiding something.”
“What could I hide from you? Rip my ship apart. You’re not going to find anything more than a few thousand credits. I’m telling you, we’re just an old gambling freighter in an even older debris field.”
Ah. There it was. The debris field.
“You’re playin’ for all those wrecks!”
Dengar’s instincts had been hardened by decades of bounty hunting. He’d spent tens of thousands of hours in the grime and the muck, and it had earned him an encyclopedic knowledge of criminal enterprise in the galaxy.
He didn’t know the specifics, but he could put the pieces together well enough. All these wrecked ships should have gone to some scrapyard somewhere. Bracca maybe. But someone—probably one of these Hutts—intervened, paid off some Imperial bureaucrat, and kept this battlefield out of the records. Now they were using it as a prize for the galaxy’s most secretive card game.
Sunnari went silent. Anything she said would only worsen her position. Unfortunately, one of her passengers—an opulently dressed Twi’lek—did not understand that important point. “These ships are the property of the Besadii! Your kind has no business here.”
“Our kind?” Dengar’s brows rose playfully. “Let me tell you something, friendo. Our kind wouldn’t exist except for people like you. People like you who are either too cowardly to deal with the problems your greed creates, or else so heinous that totally decent folks decide that their only hope at making things right is our kind.”
“It is still not time for poetry, Dengar.” The droid’s scold worked only to confuse the passengers. “Regardless, you have given us something more valuable than any currency. You and the Besadii have committed high crimes against the Empire, in the form of the theft and exchange of Imperial military vessels.”
Dengar unfolded the rest of IG-88’s thoughts for Sunnari, the Twi’lek gambler, and the others aboard. “You might not have a bounty yet, but when we report all this to our contacts in the Empire, well.” A grin took over his face. “Might as well put you all down right now, let you rot in storage until we collect.”
Sunnari shook her head. “No.” Just like Dengar had hoped, she was a born survivor just like him. She would not die here, and would not spend the rest of her life fleeing from an Imperial warrant. “No. We can work this out.”
“Well.” Dengar accented the word with a bend of his waist. “That is exactly what we were hoping to hear, isn’t that right, Iggy?”
IG-88 said nothing, simply rotated his head sections to add a degree of extra intimidation.
“I have something. It’s the second prize. Beskar. You know beskar?”
Dengar was almost insulted. “Yes, we know beskar. It’s Mandalorian metal. Strong, but flexible.”
“Well, I’ve got a pouch of it in my quarters.” IG-88’s optics rotated and zoomed, tracking sweat, heat, blood pressure. She was telling the truth.
Dengar, though, was less concerned about honesty and more about value. “A pouch?”
“A big pouch.”
“A big pouch?”
“Well, a decent-sized pouch, anyway. And it’s all yours if you go on your way and give me your word that you will not report…our activities.”
“What do I want with beskar? I want Solo!” Dengar’s eyes narrowed.
The droid’s scans lit up as Sunnari reacted to Dengar’s sudden burst of anger. First, a brief moment of fear, and then recognition, and finally, a flood of worry. Sunnari had clearly heard of Han Solo, but with the way her eyes moved, the speed of her blinking, and micro-movements in her fingers, it was clear to IG-88 that she couldn’t provide intelligence on the smuggler’s whereabouts.
“Disregard my associate’s words. This is an adequate bribe.”
Dengar’s head dropped, the growing rage vented by the shocking bluntness of IG-88’s response. He’d have to correct the droid’s etiquette later.
“Is it a deal?”
“Iggy, you better explain what you’re thinking.”
“I will explain when we return to your ship. We accept this deal. Provide the beskar in the next three minutes, or I will begin executing your crew.”
“You are terrible at this, Iggy.” Dengar raised his hands as if to defuse the situation. “You need to understand. He’s an assassin droid. He doesn’t really get all this, you know? Just get us the damn beskar and we’ll be on our way.”
By the time the two bounty hunters had jumped into hyperspace, word would’ve already been sent back to Nal Hutta. But that was of no concern to IG-88 and only a receding one for Dengar, who had already begun to play the angles in his head. He could go see that Hutt on Tatooine, maybe. If he was remembering right, the two Hutt families had little love lost between them.
“You did well, Corellian.” IG-88 did not turn his head this time. “We have not captured Solo. By the terms of our agreement, our arrangement will continue. Until we catch Solo.”
“ ‘Until we catch Solo’? Droid, maybe you haven’t noticed, but Solo is in the wind. We don’t have a single lead.”
“We have the beskar.”
“The beskar is not Solo.”
“It is Mandalorian metal. Fett wears Mandalorian armor. It will have value to him.”
“So we set a trap. Or we tell him we want to negotiate!”
“Yes. We have many options. I am presently simulating three thousand potential variations on our next encounter with Fett.”
“You’re…” A sigh of relief, and a sudden query. “Listen, Iggy. I get the impression you don’t like us. ‘Organics,’ I mean. So why work with me to begin with? There were other droids on this hunt.”
“You are correct. Organics are irrational, sentimental, and dangerously optimistic.”
“Yeah, mate. I know. That’s what I mean, stuff like that. No need to rub it in.”
With a whir, the assassin droid turned to face his partner in crime. “I am not ‘rubbing it in.’ I am explaining why I made this decision. People make the most inadvisable decisions. Solo more than most.”
“So, what, it’s a you have to fight fire with fire kind of thing?”
“That is thirty-seven percent of the benefit. The remaining value rests in your ability to serve as an erratic distraction.”
A bright smile cracked across the scarred face of Dengar, Corellian bounty hunter. “That right there, that was a joke, droid.”
IG-88, with a tone so dry that only another elite assassin droid could be sure it was meant to be humorous, emitted a short reply.
“Absolutely not.”