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“Fennec.” Boba’s voice cracked across the comlink.
Fennec looked down the barrel of her blaster, made eye contact with the Wookiee at the end of it, and said, “I need to take this. But we’re not done here. You’re still overcharging for the bulk aromatic soaps. I’ve seen your records. Do not move.”
“We have a problem,” Boba said, sounding as close to panic as he ever got—which mostly meant sounding absolutely like he always did, but with a hint of tightness in his tone, noticeable only to those who knew him well.
“Explain,” Fennec said into the com channel, as the Wookiee stayed dutifully silent. She didn’t have time for more problems. She already had enough. Running a spa turned out to be a lot of datawork—even more complicated than a cartel, in some ways.
“I found the spider droid nest.”
Kark.
Boba had commented on their decreased numbers, in those first few days after they routed the palace. Maybe Bib, free of the yoke of his master, had decided to do away with the creepy things. Maybe they had rusted out and toppled over, unmaintained in the dusty depths of the palace’s upper levels.
A shame, Boba had said.
Fennec would wager that it was not so easy to think fondly of them when the creepy things were right in front of you.
Fennec had never gotten the whole story about the spider droids, herself. All she’d known was that they crept around Jabba’s palace on their spindly little legs. And in the clear jars… brains. Floating, endlessly suspended.
She’d never asked, in all her years working for Jabba, and she didn’t really want to know. But one of Jabba’s protocol droids had loved telling everyone who stepped foot into the palace about how the latest brain-jar-on-legs was built from the last bounty hunter that failed Jabba.
Their numbers did tend to fluctuate, but Fennec was never sure whether it was a scare-story or the truth. She’d never seriously worried about it--she conducted her work flawlessly, after all. But the looming threat had been one more reason she’d started... diversifying her client portfolio, as more legitimate businesspeople tended to put it.
The Wookiee was starting to sidle away, so Fennec resettled her grasp on her blaster.
“Hey,” she barked in Shyriiwook. He froze. She looked him over. He wasn’t exactly quivering. But he didn’t seem happy, either. And he was a local artisan, resettled from Kashyyyk after the Empire razed it. Running his own business, trying to feed a family. She sighed. “Take ten percent off the top and we’ll make you our sole soaps provider, alright?”
The Wookiee nodded, furry paws up. Fennec gestured with her blaster: a galaxywide symbol for ‘get the hell outta here.’
Over the comlink, Boba said, “I’m stuck. They’ve got me surrounded.”
“So shoot your way out.”
“I can’t just kill them!”
“Why not?”
“They’re… historic.”
“Oh, no. This isn’t about the B’omarran monks.”
Boba said nothing.
It was about the kriffing monks.
Boba seemed to think that at least some of the spider droid brains originated from centuries-old sect of monks because of something his dad had told him. Fennec had looked up the B’omarr Order out of curiosity. The weirdos believed that their minds would grow powerful if they no longer experienced physical sensation.
So they stuck their brains in jars.
Maybe that was the whole story behind the spider droids. Maybe Jabba had taken over their monastery, but just let them stick around—and even been inspired by the bottled brains to make more out of his failed bounty hunters, like the protocol droid claimed.
Fennec hated this place.
Her comlink beeped. Boba had sent a holomap pointing to one of the higher levels, a blockaded room they hadn’t looked at yet.
The spider droids’ den, apparently.
Ugh.
She burst through the door and adjusted her blaster, ready to crack a few brain jars. But—
“Seriously, don’t shoot them!” Boba yelled.
Ugh, Fennec thought again.
Boba perched on a chair, unarmored and unarmed, teetering vaguely above a horde of droids. Fennec had a moment to wonder why he’d taken such a strategically unsound position when everything went seriously, seriously south.
Fennec hadn’t thought this situation required caution.
But she immediately regretted that assumption when what felt like a million little beady-eyed droids turned to look at her.
She wasn’t sure how she knew they were looking. They didn’t actually have eyes, really. Just expressionless bubbles full of goopy-looking orange liquid and floating brains, hanging below metal, spider-like carapaces.
Their regard made the hair stand up on the back of her neck. She shuddered.
“Watch out!” Boba yelled. But it was too late.
And that moment of weakness, that squirming moment of horror, was all they needed.
Something pushed at her from behind, and she was taken just off-guard enough that she found herself herded into the same corner as Boba.
“I’m shooting them,” she said, decisively, and raised her blaster.
Boba slapped it down. “They used to be people!”
“All the more reason to put them out of their misery,” Fennec said darkly. Were they still people? Fennec didn’t want to give it too much thought.
It was unclear which spider droids were thousand-plus-year-old monks, and which were simply bounty hunters who’d failed Jabba.
Someone probably knew, once.
The spider droids surged toward them, but seemed to back away when Fennec brandished the gun.
“So they just—do this?” Fennec asked. “Why don’t you just leave?”
“They zap me when I touch the floor.”
A droid’s spindly appendage extended a crackling electric stick, in demonstration. Fennec nudged it away with her gun.
Boba seemed to physically shudder beside her, but Fennec rolled her eyes. After the brief moment of horror—which any reasonable being would feel, faced with a dozen or so brains suspended in jelly beneath spiders—she was over it.
She leveled a glare at Boba. This was stupid. She could kill them all and be done with it.
“Look,” Boba said, “they were here when I was a kid.”
“So, what, you had little kiddy nightmares about them?”
Boba’s mouth tightened into a thin line, and he didn’t say anything.
Fennec smelled blood. “Ohh,” she said. “You did. Big bad Boba Fett is afraid of some mechanical spiders.”
“Look, you’re twelve, you’re out on your own for the first time, trying to make your way in the galaxy — and one of Jabba’s bots keeps pointing out every new spider droid, saying, shit like that’s what happens to bounty hunters who fail our Great Lord? You’d have nightmares, too.”
Fennec rolled her eyes. She’d been well into her late teens when she started working for the Hutts, so the spider droids never quite got her at that impressionable age. She could acknowledge that they probably would’ve been a freaky motivator, if she’d been that young. Or cared. But tiny Boba had been a pain in her ass, always scrabbling for the highest-paid jobs. She had no sympathy for him.
“So let’s smash ‘em to pieces,” Fennec said. “Destroy your childhood terrors.”
“We can’t just—”
“Then come up with something better.”
“We could… reprogram them? They’re probably more droid than organic, now, anyway.”
“What, you want to hire them as receptionists?”
Boba raised his eyebrows.
“Wouldn’t that offend their ascetic sensibilities? How is that better than just killing them?”
Boba shrugged. “It’d be a fun project,” he said, in an offensively coaxing tone.
But the idea intrigued her. Overriding a droid’s programming was always… a puzzle, especially if it had some sort of sentience tied to it. Something like this was probably not quite cybernetic, like her, but not truly droid, either. She’d never gotten her hands on something exactly like this, before. She’d love to patch into it.
“Maybe not all of them,” Boba added. “Maybe not the monks?”
“Sure, sure,” Fennec said, already thinking about their likely neural pathways, and how those probably connected to underlying code, basic methods and more complex cascades of commands. She didn’t see how that was any different, at its core, from destroying them altogether. But when you have a stupid problem, any solution’s a solution. “But how do we get out of here without harming them?”
Boba eyed the wide beam that ran across the room’s ceiling. “I think I have an idea…”
Three days and an unexplained explosion later, Lando Calrissian lounged beside The Krayt’s Spa public pool, enjoying a nice icy glass of honeyfruit juice, two slices of cucumber laid across his eyes.
He waved his hand. “Towel please!”
Instead of the usual soft footsteps of one of the Twi’lek dancers who’d decided to stick around, trading dancing and bad working conditions for a fair wage and a union contract, he heard a strange skittering.
He sensed movement by his side and reached out for the towel. Where he’d come to expect an arm draped with heavenly, fluffy towels, top-of-the-line and handcrafted by a Mos Espan widow, he instead brushed cold steel.
Lando ripped the cucumbers off his eyes. A brain bobbed expressionlessly at him.
“You!” He yanked his hand back and shuddered.
The spider droid clicked forward, offering the towel again helpfully.
“No, thank you,” Lando said, his relaxing afternoon thoroughly ruined. He climbed to his feet, still dripping, and stuck his head into the reception hallway. The spider droid followed him, towel raised. It seemed determined to offer its dubious contribution to the spa’s rotating cast of guest services.
“Boba!” he yelled, picking up his pace. He glanced behind himself to see, with horror, that the spider droid still scurried at his heels. “What did you do to the brains!”